Ever After

by Graham Swift

  Meanwhile, under this enforced truce, he does not shrink from outfacing me indirectly. He pre-empts me from the vantage of his pulpit and counters me in his choice of text—I am sure these things are intended especially for me. This Sunday’s sermon: “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed; and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

  And still I go and sit in our pew and listen while he thus dares me before the unwitting congregation. And still I kneel and pray, and my heart is uplifted by the words of the Bible, which I cannot believe, no, no, are mere fancy, mere poetry, like the Rector’s Virgil. Dear God, I do not want to hurt the dear old man. And only when I put on again my Sunday hat, do my “thoughts” return. Only at the church gate does my conscience meet me once more and charge me with desertion.

  I trust—I know—he will not speak to Elizabeth. Is not that the true measure of my hypocrisy? That I keep from my own wife what I impart to her father, wishing to spare her, being her father’s daughter, the full pain of disclosure, when I daily injure and perplex her with my furtive preoccupation; and she, dear Liz, patiently supposes that periodically I must wrap myself in weighty but necessary “studies.” Surely she suspects. But surely if I were to tell her all, she would only commend me to her father’s counsel. Surely, one day, taking the matter into her own hands, she will speak to her father. And there will be the poor Rector in a fine state of contortion.

  6th July 1857:

  My dear little Lucy! Such a sweet mixture of trustingness and forwardness. I confess she has become my favourite. I endeavour to instill in her what, increasingly, is absent in me and to teach her to see what I discern less and less: an immanent Divinity in all things. As this morning, when we passed a memorable hour in the sunshine, observing the butterflies on our buddleia bush. I had thought she had no mind for her lost little brother, but today, when I explain how short is the life of the butterfly, she pierces my heart by remarking: “Poor things, like Felix.”

  “This is the Large White,” I say, “and this is the Tortoiseshell—you see, each wears its own apparel—and this the Red Admiral, who is called admiral not because he is a naval gentleman but because he is to be admired: do you not agree?” She asks: “But why should each kind be dressed the same?” A big question. I answer. “Why, so we can recognise them and tell one kind from the other and know their names.” Answers: “But that is silly, Papa, they cannot all have the same name. I would rather they had names of their own, like you and me.”

  20th August 1857:

  To the Rectory for dinner. The first such occasion for some time. I observe the Rector cannot altogether restrain the animosity formerly confined to his study, though his good wife and Elizabeth mark nothing more than an unwonted testiness, for which they chide him, and he, good soul, is duly contrite. I introduce the subject of Brunel’s bridge, the first great truss for which is to be positioned next month; whereupon he adopts the popular stance of fearful and scornful incredulity. “But surely,” he exclaims, “the thing is impossible!” I see his drift: he will not attack me, not before Emily and Liz, but he will attack the bridge, which I defend, for its unholy presumption. “You tell me,” he says, in the manner of an ipso facto denunciation, “that the distance to be spanned is nigh on a thousand feet, and each truss will weigh over a thousand tons!”

  How we human beings are so easily dismayed by effects of scale. The Saltash bridge is indeed a thing of vast proportions, but it is no less practicable, no less conformable to the laws of physics, than one of my father’s quietly ticking clocks. With a sketch or two and some mathematics, I could show—I offer to do so, but the Rector forbids such dinner-table science—how such a mighty thing is achieved. To be sure, there are many who take the immensity of I.K.B.’s schemes as a measure of his vainglory and as an omen of his ruin. But it is their calumny which inhibits his success, not the man’s own scrupulous calculations.

  I confess that I too, on first meeting I.K.B., had my qualms. I shuddered—not only at the fierce effluvia of his cigars but to encounter one so plainly marked out, so naturally prepared for exceptionality; and my awe converted itself into that unthinking and superstitious suspicion that in some way he transgressed.

  Transgressed what? Nothing more, I would say now, than the bounds of normality. Why are some picked by fate and some not? Why are we not all Brunels? That is the conundrum out of which we construct the false charge of impious presumption. And how much more, for me, was that mystery deepened by my observing, on further acquaintance, the ordinary human limits of the man. He is no sorcerer. He has sacrificed his health for his work, which only proves he is flesh and blood; and though he is beset by a thousand obstacles and is prey to a thousand practical anxieties, I do not believe—I do not assert this out of pride—that the roots of his soul have ever been rocked as mine have been or that he could have achieved what he has without the ballast of a steady conscience.

  To build a bridge! Is not that one of the noblest of man’s endeavours? To link terra firma with terra firma; to throw a path across a void. The ignorant say it defies nature, yet it rests upon her co-operation. And I might profess to the Rector—if only I might still believe it—that such an enterprise only bespeaks the work of Him whom he serves. That our science attests a greater omniscience; that the Almighty has given to the humblest bird the gift of wings with which to perform the same feat, but only to man has He given the power of Design, which is the first principle of His universe.

  6th January 1858:

  Illogicality of nature. Lavishes attention on the individual (fall of each sparrow?) but sacrifices individual to species. Cares only for continuation of the stock. Should result in uniformity and conformity. Yet nothing more apparent in nature than diversity, differentiation, distinction. Why this?

  Answer. (a) Bounty and inexhaustible resourcefulness of the Creator. So Creation may be wonderful in the sight of man. So we may rejoice in the skill of Him who made us and know Him thereby. “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom has thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”

  Objection. We see only what we are pleased to see and are too apt to find in nature’s variety, in the infinite invention of her forms and colours, an aesthetic inspiration. We observe the butterfly but not the grub. We lament its brief, gorgeous life, but not that of the worm snatched by the bird. And what of the pretty plumage of the redbreast and the chaffinch as they go about their murder?

  Answer. (b) Diversity makes possible interdependence of creatures, i.e., one would not be without the other: e.g., the spider, the fly; the bee, the flower, etc.

  Objection. Makes of all creatures predators, plunderers or parasites—or victims of the same. Even-handedness or blindness of nature? Cares for the field vole and the buzzard?

  Further illogicality of nature: Man. Uniformity and conformity firm principles within the species. A crow is a crow is a crow—for all his lack of insignia. Why, then, does individuality and the sense of individuality so profoundly imbue the species man? When I behold a crow I see only a crow. I do not feel the loss of one crow in a score, and it makes little sense to me to speak of a crow’s “identity.” Yet when I look at my little Lucy I see a creature whose identity, I know with absolute conviction, is unique and cannot be replaced. And this would be true even for the man I may meet in the street tomorrow and never see again.

  Why in the human species should reproduction so belie its name? Why—argumentum ad absurdum—should not all human beings be the same? And why should the resemblance between offspring and parents, which we like to think of as so strong, be, in fact, so imprecise and tenuous?

  Answer. Because this is the palpable proof, registered in our innermost being, that we are elevated over the beasts, that we partake of the divine, that we possess a soul.

  Objection. But why should the divine express itself in the imperfect? Since, if the essence of speciation is trueness to type, the species man is infested with randomness. Not a useless randomness,
perhaps, since it equips us for a complex social existence in which, as we say, it “takes all sorts”; since it gives us our Brunels as well as our blacksmiths, and allows us all indeed (oh, misnomer!) to feel “special.” But would it not be the grossest piece of fabrication, to construct upon a condition so shifting and fickle—upon the chance mutations of progeniture and the lottery of identity—the notion of what is eternal, immutable and godlike in our nature?

  Hamlet’s mother says to Hamlet, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” What is the difference between belief and make-belief? What makes us give to any one belief (since it is only a matter of shifting, tuning the mind) the peculiar weight of actuality? “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Little Felix was barely two. Ruth was forty-nine. A child of two, one has hardly begun to know. And an ichthyosaur. An ichthyosaur.

  Who lets a Big Question upset his small, safe world? When matters reached their head, Rector Hunt, who still clung, perhaps, to the belief that that “inner man” in him, that former would-be missionary, might save the day, must have cursed Charles Darwin, not for his assault on religion—that could have been dismissed, he could have consigned the man to the realms of irrelevance so far as his congregation was concerned—but for timing the publication of his outrageous work so as to clinch his son-in-law’s apostasy, bring scandal on his family and parish, and smash for ever that image of himself as a spiritual champion. What was Darwin to him? What is Matthew to me? “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”

  “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ ”

  And, for contrast and to go back to where it all seems to have begun (what was an ichthyosaur to anybody?), consider the life of Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis, who was only twelve years old when she stumbled on that first thirty-foot fossil skeleton.

  Was she horrified? Was she shaken? No. Was her universe turned upside down? No. True, she was only a child. But she was a shrewd enough twelve-year-old. She sold that first skeleton for twenty pounds. She went on to discover not only more ichthyosaurs but the first specimens of plesiosaur and pterodactyl, and she made a living and a name for herself out of her flair for fossils. Lyme Regis enjoyed a tourist boom. Renowned and learned men came to call. These included, one day, no less a person than the King of Saxony, to whom Mary is supposed to have remarked, pertly but without falsehood: “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.…”

  Perhaps all her life Mary only saw herself as a successful purveyor of wonders, a dealer in Mesozoic freaks. Leave others to ponder the meaning of her treasure trove. Was she happy, this daughter of a humble carpenter (she buried him when she was eleven and dug up a monster when she was twelve), who lived her life and found fame among bones? It was not a long life. When Matthew came to Lyme and, quite possibly, met her, she was forty-five. She would die two years later, of breast cancer. Would she have wanted (silly question) some other kind of life? Did it please her to know that posterity would not forget her? Did she ever reflect that her fate was little different from that of that unsuspecting ichthyosaur, that particular ichthyosaur, that expired long ago in some embalming lagoon, little knowing that after millions of years it would be resurrected by the touch of a twelve-year-old girl into the amazed consciousness of another race of animals, and be placed on show in one of their great museums?

  Alas, poor ichthyosaur …

  And everyone has this saving counter-logic, this belief in make-belief. Yes, that may be so, but—it’s not the end of the world.

  I see a graveyard scene. Not Hamlet juggling a jester’s skull. A family group. Two are no more than infants, and there is a third child, not present, who is too young even to know what has happened. There is Elizabeth and there is Matthew. And there is the Rector, performing manfully one of the more testing duties of his clerical career. Pale spring sunlight on the hummocked turf, the tiny coffin.

  What do I know of Matthew? I conjure him up, I invent him. I make him the protagonist (a touch of Potter’s TV temerity) of this “dramatized version.” I drag him into the light. He might have been no more than the bland words on a mossy gravestone. Sleeping inscrutably beside his wife and little son. Instead of which.

  If he hadn’t married a rector’s daughter. There might have been no terrible rupture, he might have spoken without destroying, without being condemned. The day might never have come, fifteen years later, when he stormed out of the Rectory, leaving the Rector, head in hands, in his study and still in that ridiculous bee-keeping garb, and walked back to confront Elizabeth—who might, on that June evening, have picked up the clock, the clock of their union, and smashed it against the wall: there! If all creation was at fault, who cared about a little clock? But she didn’t. Plainly she didn’t.

  The rescue of his marriage becoming a trap. But what was the trap? He loved her and she loved him: the world was good again. And wasn’t that the case, wouldn’t that be just as true—a question even a rector’s daughter might have put to him—whether it was God’s world or not?

  12

  He didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t damn well have to say a thing. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He’d kept it shut for forty years. And if he’d bided his time just a little bit more, prolonged the dilemma just a little bit further, the matter would have been settled in any case by that fatal rendezvous in a Frankfurt hotel.

  And I might never have found myself, in this den of learned inquiry, compelled to pursue yet another line of research—one with nothing of the academic about it, and one, you may judge, rather more germane to me than the notebooks of Matthew Pearce.

  You might have supposed that my mother’s death—the equity of mutual widowerhood—would have settled all scores between my late stepfather (and dearly remembered benefactor) and me. What stored-up venom of guilt and blame, what recriminations that remained from those far-off days in Paris, might have been annulled by the amnesty of bereavement. The fact is that, following my mother’s death, Sam became afflicted with an attack of conscience, an agony of duty, a positive seizure of moral responsibility. Hardly the Sam of yore. Hardly Mr Plastic. Hardly, either, the Sam of a Frankfurt hotel. But you never know, it seems, the people you thought you knew.

  A not so uncommon symptom of grief? But I don’t think Sam was so sorely stricken. You have to remember that my mother was seventy-eight. People do die at that age. I would have said (though I know now there was more to it) that it was simply the fact of death—how to deal with it, how to get away from it as quickly as possible—that implanted that look of terror on Sam’s face when I emerged, that glowing evening, from my last meeting with my mother. Fear, yes; grief, I’m not so sure. As to the hole that his wife’s death left in his life, Sam had a simple and well-tried expedient for this, one that he had been applying, in fact, for a considerable time before my mother breathed her last: substitoots. It was in the embrace of one such substitoot (not to say prostitoot) that Sam himself breathed his last, some nine months after his wife’s funeral. And if I were asked to describe in a word the bereft husband’s demeanour and behaviour at that sad ceremony, I would have to say: shifty.

  On the question of grief in general—but with particular reference to mine—Sam was obliged to adopt a cool and unsentimental line, in keeping with the realities of stepfatherhood, with the circumstances of his entry into my life all those years ago in Paris, not to mention with the role he had unwittingly been playing, of Claudius to my Hamlet—“Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead …” Thus his ability to bury my mother and carry on with life with a minimum of morbid fuss merely proved his consistency and demonstrated, moreover, how I should have behaved with Ruth.

  But, in fairness to Sam, his world was neither as regular nor as callous as this. My grief undoubtedly troubled him. It gnawed at him; isn’t that why, to take the kinder view of the deed, he had me moved in here? My picture of things is—fuller—now, but it seemed that that shiftiness at my mother’s funeral carried an element of apolog
y. As if he were saying, comparing his scant powers of mourning to mine: I’m sorry—it’s the best I can do.

  And along with the hint of apology there was a measure of genuine, vaguely envious incomprehension. No, he didn’t understand it, this—romantic love. It was some other sort of glue, a durable, serviceable and remarkably flexible glue, that had held him and my mother together for so long. But if pressed on the point—I never did press him on the point; I should have tried that last day I saw him—Sam might have admitted that this marriage to my mother was itself a kind of long-term, plausible “substitoot”: Ruth and I were the real thing.

  You never know the people you think you know. How could I have foreseen that my arch-enemy Sam, the man who had pronounced such merciless judgement on my future, would one day take me to one side and, with a halting attempt at a wink and a nudge, want to know what my “secret” was? He should have spoken about secrets. How could I have known, during those rampant days in Paris, that this man who had the run, to say no more, of our apartment, would one day complain to me, as if I were some chafing fellow, free spirit, about this woman (my mother) who seemed so unfairly and stubbornly unwilling to let him go out to play. (Not that she actually stopped him.)

  But by the time that these confidences occurred, I had done what Sam would never have believed of me. Gangling, sulky, flat-footed, ungrateful bookworm, I had married an actress. I was all set—or this was how Sam pictured it—to become a playboy myself.

  She was seventy-eight. He was sixty-six. There would always have come a time when that age gap between them would tell. In the early days there was of course that element of expedient confusion in Sam which enabled him to adopt with me a brotherly stance while craving from his own wife a maternal indulgence. But he would discover that you cannot expect maternal indulgence without reckoning also on maternal authority, and you cannot expect maternal anything if you yourself aspire to (pseudo-) paternity.