Ever After

by Graham Swift

  Then she bit, voraciously, into the plumpest part.

  A lesson in gravity? Or in levity? Eternal levity. She couldn’t have known, any more than I, that in a far-away foreign country, where it was several hours later than us, where night had already fallen, they were about to drop a bomb. That for ever afterwards she would share her birthday with the anniversary of the last pre-atomic day.

  She took a bite, a good, lip-splaying bite, out of the pear. Juice ran—a drop, a splash or two of pearly pear juice in that baffling opening of her blouse. Her tongue made slurpy noises, her eyes wallowed.

  “Mmmm, darling—divine.”

  20

  The sun is beginning to sink. The shadow of the bean tree creeps over the lawn. Across the river, the towers and turrets, the little twinkling arched and latticed windows, take on their evening aura. These ancient walls. These hallowed groves. So ripe with the steady defiance of time, with the presumption of mind over matter. So evocative of the King of Navarre’s other-worldly schemes, of Berowne and Longaville and Dumaine: “a little academe, still and contemplative in living art …”

  “Worthies, away!…”

  It was my mother who first warned me, invoking the examples of vainglorious grandfathers and great-uncles, against the ruinous desire to outwit mortality. And, having heeded her advice so far as to rush, spontaneously, into death’s arms and having returned from its apparently escapable embrace, what can I say about this old and terrifying bugbear, mors, mortis? That it turns you (surprise, surprise) into a nobody. That my little bout with it has left me with a ghostly disconnection from myself—I am wiped clean, a tabula rasa (I could be anybody)—and a strange, concomitant yen, never felt before, to set pen to paper.

  O death-defiers of this world! O luminaries, O immortalists! To leave one’s mark! To build a bridge, christen a theory, name a pear, write a book. The struggle for existence? Ha! The struggle for remembrance.

  So I am in it too, this race for posterity? I succumb, just like Matthew, to the jotting urge. But who are they for, these ramblings? And who am I, to seek to go on record? I don’t even have Matthew’s agony of conscience (and why should I envy him that?), which is as obsolete now as that ichthyosaur he met up with on his summer hols.

  “Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, live regist’red …”

  But it was she who wanted fame, not me. I was content to be the happy stagehand; I could attend rehearsals. Yet who doesn’t want to leave behind some token, some trace, some reminder, some plea? Usually, it’s children. But we had no children. Too busy finding fame—or just happy without them? But, in any case, it’s not so simple—so it seems—this begetting of children.

  Who am I? Who am I? A nobody. An heirless nonentity. What’s more—a bastard.

  Consider, for contrast, my fabled ancestor, brave Sir Walter, born long before Providence was declared invalid, setting sail from Plymouth (him too) with never a qualm. By my time of life (is that the phrase?) what had the little lad of the sea-shore not achieved? Discovered new lands, founded a colony, won queenly favour, tackled the Spanish Armada. Been soldier, sailor, discoverer, explorer … “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare …”

  Ah, what a thing is man.

  Actually, what was he doing, aged fifty-two-and-a-half? He was cooped up in the Tower of London. I make no comparisons. These ancient walls: the storied stones of the Tower. But what does he do with this forced confinement? Makes a virtue even out of incarceration. Puts pen to paper. Writes a History of the World. No less. From Adam and Eve until— And schemes and dreams. Of Eldorado. No less. Of a land of gold, an earthly paradise in the far, far west. O brave new world!

  And ever mindful of his image, of how caged lions draw the public, takes care to show himself now and then, like Napoleon on the Bellerophon, to the awed citizenry of London. There he walks on the battlements, the old, proud sea-dog, in the years that Shakespeare’s tragedies were first staged: the “last Elizabethan,” the one-and-only Renaissance man, living proof that anybody can be anybody, since this fellow was everybody: discoverer, explorer, colonist, courtier, scientist, historian, philosopher, wit, dandy, ladies’ man, physician, chemist, botanist, tobacconist, potato merchant …

  And poet.

  Our mothers’ wombes the tiring houses be

  Where we are drest for this short Comedy …

  Life after Darwin: As You Like It, or What You Will. But even those long-vanished Elizabethans, who’d never heard, poor ignoramuses, of Newton, Darwin or the splitting of the atom, and whose history books began with the Creation, were not so sure of the Life Eternal that they did not invest heavily—and profitably—in that other eternity: fame. A bumper crop of fine old worthies. The age was thick with them. And the poets! Never so rich a hoard. An Eldorado in verse. Poetry. That still other, verbal eternity. The so-called divine spark. That thing for which Darwin lost all taste.

  It is true (we know now) that we are descended from the apes. And it is true that an ape, set before a typewriter and given a time-scale of infinity and an eternal factor of randomness, might eventually bash out the sonnets of Shakespeare. But, by and large, it is just as well and a good deal neater that Shakespeare appeared when he did to do the job. Which leaves a host of questions still wide open. How Shakespeare came about in the first place (why he didn’t go into sheep farming or die, aged two, of scarlet fever), and why, though Shakespeare is all things to all people, we cannot all be Shakespeares. Why some are poets and some are not. And why not all poets are also explorers, adventurers, courtiers, etc.—all things in one. And why there should be this stuff called poetry, to begin with, which strikes our hearts at such a magic angle. And why there should be certain things in this random universe which cry out to us with their loveliness. And why it should be poetry that captures them.

  Full many a glorious morning have I seen

  Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

  Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy …

  Why is anything special? Either everything is special, which is absurd. Or nothing is special. Which is meaningless.

  10th July 1857:

  How we flatter the humble nymphalidae—and delude ourselves. The Peacock. The Painted Lady. The Red and White Admiral. The Purple Emperor. How we clothe them in splendours they cannot heed and wrap them in tender sentiments they cannot share: how sad, that they open their gorgeous wings but to die. The Purple Emperor, who seems to us such an illustrious fellow, wears (as my little Lucy unwittingly reminds me) but the common garb of his tribe, and takes no thought for the hereafter. Can there be heroes and worthies among the lepidoptera? Surely not, since it is only the knowledge of death that breeds the desire of its transcendence. Timor mortis conturbat me. So one might say our need of distinction follows from our fear of extinction and all our dreams of immortality are but the transmutation of our dread.

  It is getting cooler. I feel the coolness—being a convalescent invalid, having felt death’s chill fingers. It is always a problem: when to go in. Sometimes, despite the coolness, I have lingered out here in the garden, my upturned tray on my knee, till it is almost impossible to write.…

  And maybe it’s not posterity I seek at all. Since I have already essayed the dread bourne, whereas, for most, posterity is the goal that looms, cryptically, on its other side. Maybe this is posterity. Maybe for me it is the other way round. Maybe it’s anteriority (if such a thing exists) I’m looking for. To know who I was.

  There is still the sound from the river, as of a perpetual, festive brawl, but this will quieten as the evening draws on. The darkness will fall. And then that vengeful lout who haunts the febrile dreams of us begowned and pampered pedants will start to prowl. So you think you are special? (No, I don’t.) Well I am special too. You can put mind over matter? Well, I can put matter over mind. Turn the one into the other. Easy. With the toe of a boot, or a broken bottle. O
r a bullet. Or a bottle of pills.

  What can Darwin tell me that is new? That nothing in this world is fixed, that everything is mutable? But poets have been saying this for centuries. Isn’t that the very theme of poetry? “Even such is time …” That over millions of years by a process of infinitesimal variation an ape will turn into a man—though, as things go, that is nothing, a mere recent innovation. That Nature is a veritable graveyard littered with failed prototypes, in which Man, who is not the point of the plan, since there is no plan, will surely find his place. But he cannot tell me why what was here yesterday is gone today, or why, when so much has been brought about over so long and so much life has sprung from so much life, a person can become, in an instant, a thing.

  It is beyond belief. Beyond belief. In the greyness of that winter morning (the glib punctuality of daylight), I wanted, a grown man in the full maturity of some fifty years, to ask that other, naïvest of questions: and if, in an instant, a person can become a thing, why cannot a thing become a person? I wanted her body to know I was there. I wanted her body to hear me speak. To answer. I wanted to say, just like people do in cheap dramas: “Don’t! Please! Come back!” I wanted to say—as if it really were some (convincing) death scene—“Ruth, stop acting! Please. Stop acting.”

  21

  So let me tell you (with special benefit of hindsight) about what might have been, what very nearly was, my last day on this earth.

  The scene: a June afternoon; this college; my venerable Fellow’s chambers. Outside, rain is sluicing down—one of those vertical, seemingly immovable midsummer downpours which fall from a swollen sky and fill even covered spaces with a damp, sticky breath. The light is leaden. The lamps of study are lit. I sit reading (Darwin: the chapter on Instinct) by my venerable Fellow’s fireplace. Beside me, on the coffee table, my working copy of the Notebooks and scattered notes thereon. The gas fire is on, not because its warmth is needed, but to dry a pair of socks that dangle, pinned by a glass ashtray, from the mantelpiece, just to one side of John Pearce’s implacably ticking clock. I have just been out (my last mortal errand—cigarettes and coffee) and been caught, in leaky shoes, in the onset of the deluge. To counteract the heat of the fire, a window is half open, so that the room is full of the not unpleasing orchestration of the rain.

  A quarter to four by John Pearce’s clock. When you are sitting at home by the fire … A knock on the door. I open it, in bare feet, a cigarette in one hand, a pencil behind one ear: the perfect picture of incommoded scholarship.

  “I was just passing. Shelter from the storm?”

  Now I think of it (this hindsight), that climb up my spiral staircase (ah yes, the stealthy chatelaine) cannot have failed to remind her of that earlier foray, years ago, to Potter’s office. Why else, on this wet and lethal afternoon, should she have described to me that very episode—given me the full, sorry saga of her and Potter? So the whole exercise (if that is the word) was a sort of re-rehearsal of that former, ostensibly scholarly assignation—with me in the role of the plausible tutor.

  Ah—Katherine, isn’t it? Do come in. Now, what was it? Of course—Arthurianism in Tennyson. Well, you have come to the right place, my dear. Spiral staircases and genuine Gothic features. And the fireplace, you notice, a genuine piece of neo-Gothic pastiche, dating from Tennyson’s own time. Who shall we pretend to be? Lancelot and Guinevere? Perhaps not. Merlin and Vivien? Yes, I fancy myself as a beguiled wizard.…

  Seduction by a female agent. The thing is obvious. No one “just passes” my corner of the College: there are gateways, courts, medieval intricacy. And, beneath her rain-spattered raincoat, there is a dress that no one casually wears at four o’clock on a wet afternoon: downy-soft, charcoal cashmere; well above the knee, figure-hugging; a row of winking buttons from nape to small of back. The legs are black and sheer (this is Gabriella’s sable costume upgraded). There is a single, thin silver chain round her neck. There are high-heeled shoes—damp and flecked with grit (should I suggest she kick them off?). The legs (I notice) are good legs, but without verve, as if she is not used to showing them. But this gives them a certain—appeal.

  “You’re working—I can see. I’m disturbing you.”

  “No, no. Please …”

  I take her coat. She has left an umbrella weeping on the stone landing, but strands of her hair are wet; there is a drop or two on one cheek (it might have been arranged, this rain). She enters my room with an air of simultaneous premeditation and precipitateness, as if someone, perhaps, has gently pushed her, as if she is stepping on to the stage of some bizarre and potentially disastrous initiative test. And I am meant to guess, perhaps, that it’s all a performance, that it isn’t her idea; and therefore—out of sympathy—co-operate? But perhaps she is intent on not failing this—audition. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening if Ruth hadn’t been an actress.

  “Katherine— I wasn’t expecting— I— What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Hot soup? A towel?”

  She gives the room a long, prying, but distinctly hesitant glance. I have ushered her in, my initiative: she is the inveigled innocent—play it that way round. I think what she takes in first are the notes and the photocopy on the coffee table. Then that there are no obvious mementos, photographs (they are all in my bedroom). Then what she takes in are my socks.

  “Ah—I’m sorry—”

  But the socks seem to rescue her from incipient loss of nerve. The socks—limp, grey flags of discouragement though they must be to anyone bent on erotic manoeuvring—are in fact the unenvisaged trigger to the afternoon’s proceedings. It occurs to me now that if I had not removed my socks and hung them to dry on the mantelpiece, I might not be sitting here, in this quasi-afterlife, trying to recognise my former self.

  “It’s all right,” she says, moving towards the fire. “I need to dry off myself.” She gives the skirt of her dress a little pluck and shake, though it doesn’t look wet to me. “Besides—I like a man with bare feet.”

  She reaches out and fingers the socks—a strange combination of the sensual and the housewifely.

  “They’re dry, you know.”

  And it’s at this point, as she turns (catching me, perhaps, eyeing her from behind), that our eyes truly meet for the first time. And I can see in hers that she suddenly realises that the chemistry she is trying to induce might just, after all, be there. The gaze sharpens, brightens. Perhaps she won’t have to force it, feign it; perhaps she isn’t beyond it, past it. And certain things are on her side: this gushing veil of rain; the little orange hint of the gas fire; this innocuous man, all by himself, caught drying his socks.

  Ah, yes, my dear—the Idylls of the King. Published, as you no doubt know, in the year that Darwin published his Origin of Species. At one and the same time these hapless Victorians had flung before them the spectre of their derivation from monkeys and Tennyson’s misty and moated chivalric nostalgia. But the latter, as you doubtless also know, was only a wistful cloak for a study of the perils of sexual freedom.…

  She takes the socks from beneath the ashtray and toys with them, running a hand inside one and spreading her fingers.

  “This is awful of me, isn’t it, butting in like this?”

  She smiles. Then makes her move.

  “Are those your notes on the Pearce manuscripts?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s a copy of the original?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I—?”

  She picks up the photocopy, my socks still twined round her fingers. This is the first time I’ve allowed anyone—excluding Potter—to look at the Notebooks. I don’t know what portion of Matthew’s agony she briefly alights on.

  “Michael is pretty upset that you won’t let him help you. You know that, don’t you?”

  I say nothing.

  “Pretty upset. You know what he’s like.”

  There’s a sort of plea for corroboration in her eyes.

  “I know what he’s like.”

  “But you’re determine
d, aren’t you? You’ve made up your mind.”

  She flicks through the photocopy as if riffling through a magazine. It seems somehow sacrilegious. I experience a passing urge to grasp it back—as if she means simply to appropriate it and make off with it. I have a sudden, bleak vision of what my life might be like without these—distracting—notebooks.

  “I have,” I say.

  She puts the photocopy back on the coffee table.

  “And there’s nothing that would persuade you?” She seems to take a deep breath.

  She holds up the socks fastidiously, one dangling from each thumb and forefinger, like incriminating articles.

  “Nothing?”

  I go to take them. I know it’s the wrong move.

  “Nothing?” she repeats as I grasp them, and she doesn’t let go. Her face is transformed by a strange, unlovely effort. It’s as though, out of sudden, reckless confidence or out of sheer nervous impatience, she has decided to dispense with whatever further preliminary manoeuvres she may have planned and go full-tilt at the thing.

  She pulls me, by the socks, towards her. I am not going to play tug-of-war. But before I can disengage, she lets go of one sock, grabs my free hand with her free hand and jams it against her left breast. My crumpled sock is inadvertently trapped between my palm and her dress. Beneath both, I can feel something lacy, scratchy. The breast is soft and warm.

  “You know why I came here, don’t you? It’s not the manuscripts, it’s—”

  I pull my hand away. Perhaps I even take a virtuous step backwards. Her face seems about to undergo some further extraordinary transformation. To fall apart, perhaps. She spreads a hand (no longer possessed of a sock) across it, as if to hold it together.