by Graham Swift
The old delusion, the old foible of stepfathers: that in the fullness of time, their new-found charges will come to view them as the genuine article. It was a challenge that Sam, being a man of bold and competitive spirit, could not decline: to become my father, to achieve (masterwork of substitution) that synthetic breakthrough. Somewhere along the line, Sam and my mother must have broached the question of children of their own—and shelved it. I was a barrier—I see it now—to such future issue. If Sam was ever to have “real” offspring, he had first to make me his child.
He failed, of course. That day when I refused the inestimable boon of Ellison Plastics and he cut me off, as if I were his true son and heir, set the seal on his failure—though it did not stop him trying again. How obvious it all was, how easy to confound him. The more he tried, the more I rejected him. The more he strove, not being my father, to become my father, the more I resurrected, like a shield, my real—
“You see, pal, your ma keeps a tight rein.…”
It is a summer afternoon in the late Sixties. Years have gone by. They have loosened some of the fixed positions of the past, hardened others. Every so often, under a flag of uneasy truce, I go to see my mother and stepfather in their new and opulent retreat (the Tudor mansion with all mod cons) in Berkshire. All this, I am still proddingly reminded, might have been mine. But the challenge Sam once set himself has not been met; I have not repented; and the time for real fatherhood, for growing up and begetting real children, is long past—my mother is well over fifty. So Sam has reverted to his own childish dreams, meaning, now, fooling around with secretaries, taking dubious foreign business trips and generally indulging in part-time good-time. He has the money for it and the opportunities—all around him he sees now visions of rising hemlines and lapsing morals—and he has still, let’s not be uncharitable, the looks.
There he sits on a sun-lounger by his very own swimming-pool, clearly a man who has not yet decided the time has come to make prudent arrangements with his body, since he wears only a pair of skimpy, powder-blue shorts, the waistband of which is not excessively at odds with his belly. The hair on his head, it is true, is receding, but the thicket of hair on his chest is set off by his smooth, solarium tan. A further dark pelt runs downwards from his navel into his shorts. He smokes a cigar; cradles a tall drink; sits amid the attributes of wealth.
He has everything, it seems. Except—poor man—the unqualified licence of my mother to do just as he likes. He has not yet—this will be a later phase, and anyone looking at him now might find it hard to credit—succumbed to those fantasies of old-world, pedigreed patricianship which will have their unlikely fruition in the discovery of John Elyson, once of this College. But he already sees himself as a lord of the manor with limitless droit de seigneur. The reality is that he is still subject to my mother’s infinitely subtle methods of manipulation, still the victim of her maternal sway. Still in short trousers.
He takes the cigar from his lips, then clenches it again more tightly in the corner of his mouth. The fabric of the shorts bites into his thigh. The man—he can’t help it—has an outsize, unflagging but anxious libido that requires regular attention. Moreover, though he has never enjoyed the gratifications of true fatherhood, he has not been spared its pains: even a stepson’s manhood threatens his own—even a bookish, sulky, flat-footed stepson.
“A damn tight rein.”
As if he would have me believe he never transgressed. Or as if the fact that she kept a tight rein was a justification of, a tacit testimony to his (actual and numerous) transgressions.
The blue water of the pool wobbles listlessly. The trouble was I always liked him. He resettles himself on the lounger. This is Berkshire, not Bermuda, but on this Sunday afternoon even the temperate hills and genteel lawns of the Home Counties are blessed by flagrant, sub-tropical heat. We sit by the pool, just the two of us. My mother is indoors, taking a siesta. She favours, these days, an afternoon rest. She will emerge soon, in a summer frock sensibly yet becomingly attuned to her advancing years, bearing a jingling tea tray.
Tea on the lawn. English correctness balanced by American looseness. I don’t think she had any complaints. She had struck her bargain. She had had, perhaps, the chief pleasures. Now there was the secondary but not to be underestimated pleasure of making Sam suffer for his own pleasure. To have forbidden that pleasure outright would have been to prevent hers. Ever the pragmatist. And there were, besides, the consolations of being lady of the manor. Tea consumed, she will don gardening gloves, fetch a trug and proceed to patrol the flower beds. I will still half expect her, as she does so, to burst into latter-day, long-suppressed song. (I have learnt to ration, to gauge carefully, the accounts I give of Ruth’s success.) Sam will light another cigar. She will wield the secateurs.
But now, while she lingers within, and after a sombre, uncomfortable silence has encroached at the pool-side, Sam suddenly draws confidentially towards me, little slicks of sweat appearing in the creases of his belly.
“Can I ask you something? Just between ourselves. How’d you do it? How’d you swing it? With Ruthie. What’s the secret?”
He never could quite believe it. Or rather, his disbelief and his envy were always chasing each other in bemused, teasing circles. That I, a little squirt, a little studious runt, should run off with a night-club performer. Even the noble founder of Ellison Plastics (UK), who had once banished me from his sight, had to admit that this showed some gump, and was an action, furthermore, not a little after his own heart. And then the little runt goes and marries the night-club performer. Who turns out to be an actress. Who turns out to be a famous actress. And year after happy year he lives in married harmony with a star of stage and screen, and there is not a sign, not a whisper, of the thing breaking up. I don’t know which affected him more: amazement at my initiative, respect for this miracle of constancy, or jealousy at my entrée into a world (as he saw it) of fabled adulterous opportunity.
“Come on—you can tell your Uncle Sam. Things still sweet between you two?”
As if his own opportunities had been, by this time, so few or so little seized upon. You see, pal … (I summarize, I paraphrase the little heart-to-heart that followed his pool-side inquisition, in reply to which I was not able to give him much enlightenment.) You see, some of us like to put all our eggs in one basket and some of us like to hedge our bets. You see, a little adultery makes this adulterated world go round, as well as love pure and true.…
I might have told him, but I didn’t (and now, anyway, it seems it wasn’t so simple), that it can also bring the world to a pretty smart halt. Or had he forgotten that spring day in Paris?
Why did he have to tell me? He rings me up, here in my Fellow’s fastness. He wants to come and see me. There is something he wants to talk about. He won’t say what. His voice, on the telephone, is not quite the voice of the Sam I know, and I picture, accompanying it, a cloudy, untypical constriction of the features. When, finally, he climbs the staircase to my room and I open, to his knock, my impressively sturdy oak door, the countenance I see before me—somehow I am not surprised, if I am nonetheless unnerved, by this—directly recalls the countenance of Sam some eight months before, about to have his last interview with his wife. It is the face of a man about to go into battle; and just for a moment, though it has nothing to do with the proceedings of this day, I am palpably sure I have seen, in the face of the sixty-seven-year-old Sam, the face of the nineteen-year-old Ed—trying to summon up saliva, shifting in his cockpit.
His car pulls up at the college gates. He dismisses his chauffeur for several hours. There is every reason to mark the occasion in style. This, after all, is one of the college benefactors entering the College for the very first time. A welcoming party; an invitation to high table. But by some prior arrangement (and much as he might have revelled in it), he seems expressly to have vetoed such ceremony. This is a personal visit, on private business; he is travelling incognito. A correct porter, in bowler hat, leads him to
my staircase (I am watching all this from an upper window that overlooks the court). He follows, looking around him uncertainly. He is wearing, of course, his best traditional, sober English suit—which doesn’t suit him. When I hear him mount my stairs, which are of ancient, spiralling stone and have an ecclesiastical smell, I imagine his footsteps to have a penitent’s faltering heaviness.
You see, I think, astonishing as it seems, that he is coming, after all these years, to apologise; to make a clean breast of it: not bidding me go to him, but coming and knocking humbly on my door. My mother is dead. He has had time to think it over. He is here (Claudius at his prayers) to atone for his part in my father’s death.
It is a bright, smiling day in the early part of May. The sunshine frustrates him. He has envisaged, perhaps, a certain austere solemnity appropriate to his plainly serious purpose, aided by what he supposed would be the monkish atmosphere of an ancient college. He had not imagined windows flung open and sparrows chirruping under the eaves. And, there, from across the court—scarcely has he entered and had time to survey, with a mixture of respect and dismay, my scholarly chamber—comes the plain sound of a female giggle. He says, as the curtains billow and warm air sidles in: “Look—er—can we take a walk or something? Why don’t you show me around this place?”
So we wander through the adjacent colleges: around cobbled courts and vivid lawns, through shadowed archways and sun-pierced passages. He waits—and waits—for his moment, while I play the part of the patient guide. He is duly impressed, even awed (this is the latter-day Sam) by the air of treasured antiquity, of sacred space. So this is where he has put me. This is where—out of spite or charity—he has had me interred. “They treat you okay here?” he says, as if we are in some grand hotel and, depending on my answer, he will have words with the manager. About his whole bearing there is something parodically suggestive of the munificent father coming to see his son at some high-class boarding school. And yet it is Sam who, for all his years, has the look of a timorous boy.
We walk, skirting carpets of greensward, by the willow-hung, punt-cluttered river. The scene is a vernal idyll. This is the time of year when academic cussedness dictates that the youth of the university should shut itself away to swot for exams, just when its young blood should be pulsing to the joys of spring; and when the youth of the university naturally defies the injunction. There is a general sprawling on grass; couples fondling; flimsy attire; river-borne frivolity. Sam takes this in too. No, he hadn’t expected these—distractions. It seems to make it so much harder for him to get to his point.
Then, in a flash, I revise my theory of his unspoken purpose and chide myself for being so obtuse. Of course! Everything around us is spelling it out. These ancient confines; these young limbs. This other-worldliness; this earthly delight …
He is going to tell me he is going to remarry. It doesn’t surprise me. I wonder who. But does it matter? Some creature less than half his age who has her hooks firmly into him and whom Sam doesn’t mind, not in the least, being hooked into by.
January—and May.
And, of course, he would feel guilty about it, doubly guilty—my mother barely eight months dead: “the funeral baked meats …” He would feel that announcing as much to me would be like putting his head right on the block.
“Sam—,” I say, to try to shorten his misery.
He registers my tone. He looks me suddenly straight and pityingly in the eye. Then he says a most un-Samlike thing.
“Can I ask you a question? A serious question. Do you think people kill themselves for love?”
A volley of laughter from a passing punt greets this inquiry. We are on one of the bridges, leaning against the balustrade. The river beneath us is a rippling ribbon of mirth.
“Sam, why are you asking me this?” I have a strange, cold feeling in my legs.
He looks at the water. “I’m talking about your pa, kid.” An American tourist, about to take a photograph at the centre of the bridge, turns and smiles heartily in our direction, no doubt having heard Sam’s Ohio tones. “But why don’t you answer the question?”
We move off the bridge.
“How should I know the answer?”
He looks at me. “If you don’t, pal, who does? Who the hell does?”
We are not far from the Fellows’ Garden. I remember that I have the key in my pocket. Without telling him, I guide him (needing guidance myself) towards the little ironwork gate. (“You got your own garden too?”) And it’s there—it’s here—that, in a fever of clenched-faced, uninterruptible disclosure, it all comes out. It’s here, under the bean tree, that he spills all the beans.
“I mean they don’t do it, do they, pal? Not in real life. Why do you think your pa did it? Because he found out about Sylvie and me, and it was all too much for him, and he couldn’t bear to go on living? If he cared that much, why didn’t he take me aside and kick the shit out of me? Why didn’t he point that goddam gun at me? And let me tell you, if he had, I’d’ve run, I’d’ve got the hell out of there fast. You wouldn’t have seen me for dust. You wouldn’t be talking to me now. It was just a fling—Sylvie and me. If it wasn’t for— You think your Ma and me were made for each other? You think I wanted the old guy out of the way so I could pick up the winnings? That’s what you’ve always thought, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. It was just a fling. It just happened to end up lasting forty years. You see, pal, some people are just flingers. Just flingers. You see, I don’t believe in this there’s-a-girl-for-every-boy-and-a-boy-for-every-girl stuff. It’s just who you get thrown against in the trolley-car, and there’s more than one trolley-car and more than one ride. Hell—I haven’t even got to the main item. You haven’t heard anything yet.”
He looks around at the sun-filled garden, as if it’s in his power to bring a shutter down on all that he sees. He gulps for air.
“I don’t have to tell you this. I know that’s what you’re going to say: ‘You didn’t have to tell me this.’ But I’m going to tell you this. You see, I figured it was up to her. And I figured if she told you, I’d soon know about it. Then, after she died, I figured I’d give it time, in case you found something among the stuff she left you. Yeah, yeah, you found those notebooks you told me about. I’m glad you found those notebooks.” He gives me a soft, solicitous look. “Well, I’ve given it time. You see, I figured she might have meant to tell you. But she couldn’t speak, could she? She couldn’t damn well speak. So I figured it was up to me. It was damn well up to me. And don’t think I haven’t thought, over and over: I don’t have to tell him this, the kid need never know. But I’m going to tell you, because it’s the truth. The truth. And you have to tell the truth, don’t you, pal? You see, he found out. Your pa found out. Of course he found out. Were we careful? And there was this helluva bust-up between him and Sylvie, and in the middle of it Sylvie tells him—and afterwards she tells me she’s told him—that you weren’t—that you weren’t his son. She tells him that to his face. And two days later your pa—who isn’t your pa, who never was your pa—well, you know this, pal—he goes and shoots himself.”
I stare hard at Sam, whose face has the dissolved, transparent look that people have when they wish they had the power of disappearance, or when they would be very grateful if, for a few minutes at least, they could be someone other than they are. I suppose, in a different way, this is my look too.
The first thought I register on receiving Sam’s words is a perfectly empirical observation of the state of the world around me. It hasn’t altered. Spring sunshine, with a little flutter of a breeze, caresses the flower beds. A pigeon waddles nonchalantly on the lawn.
The second is the sudden, headlong, insane thought that the blenching, familiar but transmogrified face I see before me is the face—of my father. But this, of course, is impossible; this would be entirely irrational.
So I say, in a voice that surprises me with its rationality, its steadiness, its cool, unpanicking pertinence: “So, if my father wasn’t— Who—?
”
“It’s okay. It’s all right. He’s dead. He was dead when Sylvie told him. He was killed in the war. He’s dead.”
I stare at him, not comprehending his propitiating tone. He can’t refuse me more information.
“I think she said he came from Aldermaston. But I guess he was always on the move.… He was an engine-driver, pal. Would you believe it? She had this thing going, back in the Thirties, with an engine-driver. On the main line west.”
13
The word “innocence” lodges in my mind. A teasing, a fugitive notion, easiest to gauge by its loss. In this metamorphosed condition in which I find myself, in this state of stunned divorce from my former self, it sometimes seems to me that innocence is the very quality of which I have been entirely drained. Self-slaughter, even bungled self-slaughter, is, I believe, a sin. A mortal sin. And yet, as I sit in these paradisiacal surroundings, it seems to me, equally, that innocence is precisely what has been rendered unto me, as if my return to life—if I can call it that—has restored me, but without expunging my memories, to a condition prior to experience.
Innocence. So insidiously close, in sound and sense, to “ignorance.” Not knowing something, we are “innocent of it”—so we say. Yet, from another point of view, only the truth is, truly, innocent. So when Matthew determined to know the truth, was it Matthew who was the foolish innocent, or was it the rest of the world, happy in its worldly credulity? And what of this place right here—this hub, this Mecca of knowledge? Are we innocent other-worldlings, cut off in our cloistered confines from mundane erroneousness, or are we really the arch-villains of the piece? A proper little gang of Fausts? Are we the ones to blame?
I told myself, of course: it doesn’t matter. What should I do? Nothing. What should I say? Nothing. How am I changed? In no way. The fiction of my life (if that is what it is) may as well serve as the fact. I am my father’s son, meaning my father-whom-I-once-knew-as-my-father’s son, by whose death my life has been so irreversibly moulded. I am who I am. I am Bill Unwin (there, I declare myself!). I am Hamlet the Dane.
