by Graham Swift
But then why should she have told Sam?
That she never told him he wasn’t my father, but she told Sam she had told him he wasn’t my father, to take upon herself the full blame for his suicide and spare Sam’s incipient guilt.
Not such a murderous, and only for benign motives a lying, bitch.
That Sam in all this was a complete innocent?
That he wasn’t my father but she never told him he wasn’t my father and invented the story of telling him he wasn’t because it was (a) a way of confessing a long-suppressed and burdensome truth, and (b) it effectively masked (Major Pilkington would have been proud) the real cause of his suicide.
That …
That …
Felix qui potuit … I doubt it.
17
I was born—in the week that lovelorn King Edward renounced his throne—in the county of Berkshire, between the valleys of the Thames and the Kennet, not so far, in one direction, from the little Thames-side township of Pangbourne, and not so far, in the other, from the quaint and sleepy village of Aldermaston.
Now, Aldermaston, in those days, was wholly innocent of the sinister connotations it would later have. Its modest but ancient main street climbed up to the gates of Aldermaston Court, a Victorian pile in the mock-Tudor style, which nonetheless looked back to its real-Tudor avatar (visited by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) rather than anticipated the days when an Atomic Weapons Research Establishment would occupy its grounds. Toiling horses, not yet ousted by the automobile, would still have hauled the occasional cart up Aldermaston Hill. And below Aldermaston, a mile or so from where the road bridge crossed the old Kennet River, barges, bound for Aldermaston Wharf, would still have plied their trade on the new (meaning hundred-and-fifty-year-old) Kennet and Avon Canal.
But as I grew up, in those far-off days, I saw myself as a child of the future. I was enamoured—little thinking that the object of my passion was doomed, too, soon to become an anachronism—of that roaring, hurtling, up-to-the-minute thing, the steam engine. And, hardly appreciating that my wish was the oldest wish in the book, I wanted to be, as every little boy was supposed to want to be—ha!—an engine driver.
Since I lived not only between the converging Thames and Kennet but between the diverging arms of the Great Western Railway (northwards to Didcot, southwards to Newbury) as they emerged from Reading, it was not surprising that I should feel this call of the rails. Boys will be boys. Even my hypothetical grandsire, Sir Walter Ralegh, was once an anonymous scamp obeying the truant instincts of his kind—scurrying down, if we are to believe the legends and Millais’ famous painting, from his Devonshire home to the sea-shore, to spy the passing ships and sniff the beckoning air. There he sits, hands clasping his drawn-up velveteen knees, like some child in a Victorian nursery, while a whiskered, brawny mariner straight out of stage melodrama, flings a histrionic arm towards the horizon.
The first stirrings. The call of destiny. When you are out on …
But I was not born within scurrying distance of the sea. I was born in the soft-bellied, landlubber’s county of Berkshire. So what could I do but pedal down to the railway line (half an hour to Pangbourne, half an hour to Aldermaston Wharf) and there spy those galleons of iron and steam, sailing on their way to Oxford, Bristol and the far south-west?
But always better, it seemed to me, than to loiter in some hemmed-in station, where the great machines, in any case, slowed down to tamed, frustrated versions of their true selves, was to find some private look-out point in the peaceful yet tremulous countryside along the margins of the track—to throw your bike down in the grass and await the full, spectacular effect. The rattle of the signal wires. The whispering of the lines. The first distant, pistoned bellowing, then the full-throated fury as some mighty express—the Ocean Mail! the Cornish Riviera!—cleaved the landscape.
Between Aldermaston Wharf and Midgham, where the Reading-to-Newbury line clipped the side of the hill and entered a short cutting—a favourite spot for these enthralled vigils, so limply known as “train-spotting”—I could look out on a vista which might have formed the model for one of those contrived scenes in a children’s encyclopaedia, depicting the theme of “Old and New.” River, canal and railway line were all in view. At a single moment it would have been perfectly possible to see, in the background, the old water-mill on the Kennet, with a horse working the field before it; in the middle distance, a barge on the canal; and in the foreground, a train racing for the cutting; while no less than three road bridges provided a fair opportunity for some gleaming motor-car (complete with an inanely grinning couple in the front seats) to be brought simultaneously into the picture.
I must have seen it once—many times—that living palimpsest. And no doubt I should have been struck by some prescient, elegiac pang at the sight of those great expresses steaming only to their own oblivion, and taking with them a whole lost age. O West Country world! O creamy, bucket-and-spade summers! O thatched cottages and smugglers’ coves! O nestling market towns! O green dreams! O Mendips! O Quantocks! O England!
But I didn’t have such thoughts. Any more than I gave thought, as it shadowed my infancy, to the Second World War, whose historic rumblings occurred, so far as I was concerned, off-stage, and whose ending I recall, not for any joyous feelings of deliverance, but because it was in that summer of ’45, while the trains of the GWR reverted to their regular schedules and peacetime colours, that I was first allowed to cycle off alone on train-spying missions—a considerable and perhaps ill-advised privilege for a boy not yet turned nine, which owed much to my mother’s blithe libertarianism (“Don’t get knocked down, there’s a good darling”) and her husband’s absence. But thus my passion—and vocation—bloomed.
What a manly, mettlesome, rugged little imp I must have been. No poetry or ballet-dancers in those days, only engine drivers. And the great thing, of course, as the mighty engines sped by, was to catch a blurred and exalting glimpse of those heroes of the rails. To leap up in a frenzy of adulatory, emulatory waving, hoping for the magic return wave.
And one of those knights of steam, though I never knew it, one of those lords of the footplate (might we have waved, all unwittingly, to each other?) was—my father.
I should track him down, shouldn’t I? This mystery man, this nameless entity. My flesh and blood. I cannot picture him. I see only this generic, child’s-eye caricature: an engine-driver, for God’s sake! Worn blue jacket, twisted neckcloth and greasy cap with a flint-black peak. His eyes are screwed up against the slipstream, the obligatory pipe is clamped in the corner of his mouth—and he is mounted, appropriately enough for my surreptitious begetter, on a giant phallic symbol. I see him careering round the countryside, siring bastard after bastard. Sometimes I think he is grinning at me, leering at me—oh yes, he is waving, all right—as he rushes unrecognisably by.
But he was “killed in the war”—so how could I have waved to him in the summer of ’45? Dead even then. My very own father. Dead and beyond recall. But Matthew is dead. Matthew is even deader.…
And how far away, how beyond recall, seems even that train-mad infant, perched in his grassy observation post beside the railway line. He is nearer—though he doesn’t know it—to Matthew’s world than he is to me. When he grows up and comes of engine-driving age, there will be precious few steam-engines left for him to drive. And in just three years’ time that Great Western Railway, with all its heraldry of chocolate and cream and its hundred years and more of service, will be nationalized into extinction. But under the blue skies of the first months of peace, it is still, in fact and name, the same Great Western Railway that, a century before, Matthew helped to forge. And that other line, the Didcot line, snaking out along the Thames to Pangbourne, is still, though it no longer favours his famous broad-gauge track, the original, pioneer line west, built by Brunel, whom Matthew once knew.
18th August 1854:
To Torquay, where I call upon I.K.B. He is much changed since his days on the South Devon.
But the eyes sparkle and he is as high-spirited and chaffing as ever—though he does not omit to commiserate upon poor Felix.
The usual clouds of cigar smoke. I do not think that during the whole afternoon a cigar was ever out of his mouth, and I recalled Brereton’s remark that he could perfectly well sleep and smoke at the same time. Naturally, I am offered one, and I decline, observing that I have refused such offers before. “Ah yes,” says he, “but I never lose hope of converts.”
He is inclined to make light of our little problem beneath the Tamar—the extraction of the impacted oyster beds. I remind him—an unwarranted digression—of the inveteracy of the molluscs and the crustacea, how they have formed whole strata, whole landscapes, where no trace will be found of a creature with bones.
“I had forgot,” says he, “your taste in palaeontology. I will own, at least, to a taste for oysters.”
There is a demon in him, for all the easy gaiety: it is as certain that this man will consume and destroy himself as that he will erect monuments to his undying memory. I have grasped the meaning of I.K.B.’s perpetual cigars: he must have them, as furnaces must have chimneys—they are lit from within.
The Great Western. An iron tentacle stretching from the capital to Cornwall, in which the bridge over the Tamar would be the last and most prodigious link. But more than that. More than just a railway. The very name suggests an idea, an aspiration, an epic, insatiable yearning. London, Bristol, Plymouth and— Why stop at Land’s End? Even before the railway had reached the Thames valley, and while Matthew was still a student at Oxford, the steamship Great Western (designer, I. K. Brunel) had docked for the first time in Manhattan. As if, stepping off the platform at Paddington, one could be propelled, in one continuous movement and by the same stupendous force of burning coal and hissing steam, from the old world to the new. As if all those expresses that hurtled by me, while I watched from the embankment, really brought with them, after all, the tang, the ozone-tug, of the ocean.
Perhaps Brunel, like old Sir Walter before him (another tobacco man), was irresistibly drawn by the siren call of the West. The inexorable direction of destiny. The sunset way. The realms of gold.
Fuel, fire, ash. The famous photo of Brunel taken in Napier’s Yard in Millwall in 1857. He stands before coils of colossal chains. Top hat; rumpled frock-coat; muddied boots; jaunty pose; hands in pockets; cigar in mouth. He looks like anything but a serious engineer. He looks like an impostor, a charlatan—a circus-owner, the proprietor of a gambling saloon. As if the trick of fame is to be something other than you really are, to know that you have come into the world only to play a part.
He has two years left to live.
Local legend has it (I read up on Brunel) that Brunel died by jumping in despair from his Tamar Bridge. But this was not so. The bridge was opened, after ten years in the building, by the Prince Consort in May 1859. Broken in health by overwork (Matthew was right), Brunel was not there. But Matthew and his in-laws were there—and so was Matthew’s father. And Brunel himself was not, in the end, denied one last look at his masterpiece. With no cheering crowds or waving flags or royal guests, and lying on a specially prepared truck, he was pulled slowly, as if on a hearse, by one of the GWR’s original broad-gauge locomotives, under the massive piers and ironwork, over the glittering river.
Si monumentum requiris … It still stands, it is still there, still bearing its designer’s name, and still bearing the (diesel-powered, narrow-gauge) expresses into Cornwall. To build a bridge! To span a void! And what voids, what voids there were. He would never know. Need never know. These happy bridge-builders, these men of the solid world (these level-minded surveyors). He was safe. Safe in his sunset glory. Safe within the limits of an old, safe world. Only seven months after his bridge was opened and only two months after his death, Darwin would publish (some come to fame by building, some by—) his Origin of Species.
2nd May 1859:
… The occasion a strangely subdued one, compared with the triumph two years ago (I.K.B. then in splendid command) of the positioning of the first truss. Adorned by royalty and all the pomp of celebration, but marred by the sad absence of the presiding genius; and marred, quite spoilt—I must say it—so far as our little family outing was concerned, by the unhappy presence of my father.
Inexcusable! Unforgivable! And yet I forgive him, I forgive him. He had as much right as any of us to be there, to be lending his voice to the public applause—and, to be sure, he was not alone in finding the occasion worthy of a bumper or two. But it was inexcusable of him so to have sought us out, quite purposefully, among the crowd, in such a flagrant state of inebriation as must have offended grossly my whole family and the Rector and Mrs Hunt, not to say have humiliated me utterly before them all. And if his intention had been to humiliate me (though I do not think it truly was), then he might have been more consistent than to proclaim to the whole company that, but for my want of ambition and excess of circumspection, I might surely have been as famous a man as Brunel—when circumspection and a sense of proportion were once, so I recall, the very watchwords of his paternal counsel.
Yet who am I to admonish, let alone disown, my own father, when his plight is perhaps not so far, not so very far, from my own? Dear God, along the road of life we are destined to lose so much, the absence of which we can never make good! “Is not Brunel,” he ranted, “one of our greatest men?” “A great man,” I answered, as pointedly as I was able amidst the embarrassment, “and also a very forlorn one. They say he is dying.” Whereupon I noticed a visible flutter pass over his expression before he continued, for all to hear, pretending not to have marked my words, and actually clapping my back, “And yet I’m proud of the boy! Proud of the boy!”
The boy! Yet I do believe he meant it. I do believe that in his mockery he was expressing his pride.
And so our day was clouded—ruined. And henceforth, no doubt, I shall have to withstand ever more vinegared inquiries from the Rector as to my father’s “health.” A neat means he shall have for deflecting the usual direction of our conversations. What a trifling matter is a great and triumphant feat of engineering (not to say the question of ultimate causes), that it can be overshadowed by a family quarrel. And poor I.K.B., not long for this world. And yet his bridge will remain, surely, long after he and I are gone (and I am quite forgotten), a lasting memorial.…
I read up on Brunel; but I do not research my own father. I summon up Matthew, but I do not try to know my own father. My nameless, engine-driving, killed-in-the-war father. And why should I, when I never got to know the living, breathing man whom I took to be—? What difference does it make? The true or the false. This one or that one. The world will not shatter because of a single—misconception.… There I sit on the embankment above the canal and the railway line, and I do not spare a thought for him. He is far away, as it happens, on the far side of the Atlantic, and if he were at home, he would soon put an end to these bicycle rides. I am thinking of the roving, heroic lives of engine drivers. And I am so ignorant of how the world is changing, will change. Of how already like clumsy dinosaurs are these quaint, cacophonous steam trains, which, as they split the summer peace, fill me with such a sense of unsurpassed power.
He did it because of me. Because of me. Because there I was; and I wasn’t— I was the last straw. He did this thing: I know it can be done. He wanted—I see it now—to be something other than he was. He wanted all the deathly, death-defying magic of recognition, renown. This road to fame; these valleys of death. But he couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t turn the blind eye. It makes a difference. Oh it makes a difference! If I had known.
Look. The age of steam trains is already over—devoured by the ruthless age of ballerinas. I sit in the little école, mouthing some rigmarole from La Fontaine, with the April sun dancing at the window, and only streets away—if I had known—he is coming to his decision. This cancelling of the self by the self. To be or— Pull the trigger, then it won’t matter any more. April in Paris: sur
ely this isn’t the end of the world? The patter of typewriters, the smell of coffee. But he really does it, he isn’t pretending or playing Hamlet. Little pieces of his hot, bright skull scattered across the floor. My father! My father!
18
He left Burlford in 1860. He never wrote another word in the Notebooks. But he didn’t throw them away, didn’t destroy them. Why? What were they for? Who was supposed to read them?
These notebook-keepers. This jotting urge. This need to set it down.
Is it possible that in the midst of his torment of soul (his what?) one tiny corner of Matthew’s eye was aimed at posterity? Some reader hereafter. Some unknown accreditor. “… and I am quite forgotten …” A small plea, after all, for non-extinction. A life, after all, beyond life.
Is it possible, in other words, that he was thinking of me?
And what did he suppose that I should think of him? Did he consider, being a one-time fossil-collector, that he might turn into just another fossil himself? That his spiritual torment might become just another thing of the past, and future generations would shrug at the meaninglessness that once so appalled him?
(Shrug! All the pills in the bottle.)
And Elizabeth? And Elizabeth. It must have seemed to her such a simple and terrible thing. It must have seemed to her that nothing, least of all the mere thoughts in a man’s head—albeit her own husband’s head—could counterweigh that undeniable, years-old possession of love, that palpable access to happiness. And did he suppose that the death of Felix was something she hadn’t felt too? That she didn’t nurse too that aching, child-sized absence, which only made more precious, nonetheless, the treasure they kept? What did it matter what he had or hadn’t faith in (though she wouldn’t have put it this way to her father), so long as he had such still-remaining happiness (was the whole stock ruined?) before him? And if it mattered so much that he rejected it, then it must mean that he’d never truly valued it. That he was pretending. That he didn’t really love her.
