Ever After

by Graham Swift

  “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bill. I—”

  Her throat is suddenly clogged with wordless gulps. She peers helplessly through her fingers.

  “I’m truly sorry. Oh God. I wouldn’t have done it if—I mean—I mean—I wouldn’t have done it, anyway, if—if—”

  But then tears start coming in great wrenching eruptions. She leans towards me. I drop my socks (I have them both now, one in each hand). Quite possibly, the pencil is still behind my ear. I step forward, put my arms around her. I feel her palm pressing on my back, her breasts on my ribs. A wet cheek on my cheek.

  It’s strange, we are doing now, almost involuntarily, what a moment ago had been the object of intense, abortive machination. What’s more, I have this erection, a stiff, indomitable erection, and, though I try to be careful, she must feel it.

  It’s her turn to pull away. “I think—I think I need that towel you were offering.”

  And, trying to prevent me from seeing her face, she blunders first into my bedroom, then into the bathroom.

  I don’t know what to do while she’s in the bathroom. I should make tea? Pour brandy? (I haven’t any brandy.) Say soothing things through the door, like some penitent seducer? I don’t know what will happen when she emerges. She will have regained a fragile composure and wish to leave? She will be minus her dress?

  I pick up my socks, think of putting them on; then, as if putting them on would signal some sort of insensitivity, drop them again. I look at my notes strewn on the coffee table. I look at my bare, white feet. To be honest, for much of the preceding encounter, I have felt oddly like a mere manipulated dummy. Now I have the sensation (it’s not comfortable—it’s like some anaesthetic wearing off) of being dragged out of a state of suspended animation.

  And I have this obstinate, towering erection. My body seems constructed around it.

  A full minute passes. The plumbing (not medieval, but not up-to-the-minute) sings. I think: what state is my bathroom in? What horrors of male squalor? What scum in the bath?

  But I quite forget one thing. When she comes out, she is neither composed nor naked. Her eyes are dry and puffed; but, rather than softened by a look of contrite, mustered dignity, the face is alert, suspicious, vaguely vindictive. It conveys a new sort of bewilderment, as if she, now, is the victim of some trick.

  I smile imbecilically. What now?

  “Well, you’re a sly one, aren’t you, Bill? But your visitors should be more careful—leaving their perfume in the bathroom.”

  This takes me wholly by surprise. But, in the circumstances, it is absurdly proprietorial, absurdly accusatory—not to say wildly imaginative.

  I think she realises this too, for she suddenly bites her lower lip, half closes her eyes, and her face is all an ominous quiver again.

  What to say? I am bereft of inventiveness. It seems to me that the best thing to say is the truth. Perhaps it will be a way of getting me neatly, honourably out of all this.

  (How wrong can you be?)

  “Shall I tell you who that perfume belongs to? It belongs to Michael’s research student. Gabriella.”

  She gives me a fierce, astonished, even more accusatory look.

  “Her!”

  “I can explain,” I say (feeling surprisingly guilty).

  So I tell her about the events of that morning when I found myself a coerced passenger in Potter’s car. How I pocketed the perfume. Though I don’t tell her how I stalked the corridors of the Library, on a spring day, looking for a girl less than half my age (dressed in kittenish black), with ideas in my head as fantastical and concocted as the scent in my pocket.

  All of which produces another convulsion of forgiveness-seeking, another welter of tears.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And you did it because of me. You’re— But I know about Gabriella. Of course I know about her. I know about them bloody all, don’t I?”

  And then, as the tears subside, she begins to tell me, without announcing it, the full story of her life and hard times with Michael Potter (M.A., Ph.D.), beginning at the beginning, with that encounter, long ago, in a room in a university.

  I listen. I fetch Kleenex. I make tea. We switch to something stronger. Dry sherry. College reserve. The academic tipple. The rain still thrums. My sitting-room is not furnished for intimacy—commiserative or otherwise. No sofa; two huge and dumpy armchairs which engirdle and engulf their occupants. A room meant, presumably, for learned, man-to-man debate, with much puffing and waving of pipes. We sit islanded from each other, Matthew’s Notebooks, like an impotent arbitrator, between us.

  And it was her fault, you see. She thinks it was all her fault. (She has this way of being at fault.) It was even her job, at the BBC, that gave Potter his eventual entrée into real-live mediadom. But it would never have happened the way it did—she is sure of it—if they’d had a kid. Or two kids. She used to see famous names pass through the studio doors—more than once, it seems, she saw Ruth Vaughan passing through the studio doors—but what she wanted most then was a child. It wasn’t his fault. His machinery wasn’t faulty. (Or underused.) It was something wrong with her. Several tries. Several tests. Then, at last, by a fluke, it happens. She gives up her job to be a mother. But the thing is born prematurely and dies within hours, and it seems there won’t be a second chance. And within months Potter is messing around with a former colleague of hers, a TV producer called Lena (“Legs-up Lena”)—his new career is about to begin.

  And she is left only with years of pretend marriage; of feeling that if she hadn’t walked through Potter’s door all that time ago with her notes for her long essay (chivalric nostalgia!), her life would have been a different thing; and of feeling, all the same, that it’s her fault, she is the one to blame—so much so that she even submits to this mad and self-recriminatory degree of ignominy, this exorcistic climbing of my staircase, as if she is returning full circle, to walk through the door again, to try to put it right.

  The gas fire fizzes. John Pearce’s clock chimes—five, six o’clock. Her face is a smudged, reddened mess—she has first sobbed, then leaked tears. It makes a pitiable contrast with her dressed-to-kill outfit, as if one part of her is a discarded doll, the other an unmasked human being.

  But something is happening as she speaks. Her face seems slowly to reassemble. Or rather, a new face, a face I have never seen before, seems to appear, as if something, some layer, some sad accretion, has been rinsed away. It is an extraordinary thing this, like watching some rare natural event, to see another person loom out of themselves.

  She folds her legs beneath her on the chair (I’m not sure now that they don’t have verve), one hand clasping her ankles. She has abandoned her shoes. Her high heels, my grey socks, lie like the litter from some previous intimate encounter on the worn carpet. We are like young people. Provisional people. These college rooms. These conversations that have no end. As if we have gone back in time and this is us now, beginning.

  It could have been her. It could have been us.

  And now she has stopped. Now she wants to know about me, how it was with me. She wants to know about Ruth.

  But how do you begin? I can’t find words. Something is happening. Something is stuck, struggling inside me. Something is turning completely around, inside-out—and she, now, is the calm, re-embodied one, watching me dissolve.

  She gets up. She comes and stands by my chair and takes my hand. I don’t know if her intention is to lead me, there and then, into my bedroom or merely to kiss me sweetly, briefly, and say something sad, wise and conclusive. But I resist the tug of her hand. I don’t know if this hurts her, but she draws her hand away as quickly as I draw mine, as if it’s her mistake—all her fault again—then she moves away to the window, her back towards me. She says nothing, but her back—her whole person—is eloquent.

  I get up. I go to the window. I stand beside her. It is possible, by an effort, not to touch. There flashes through my mind a whole course of events—a whole fairy-tale
prognosis—that I will only institute later (though, tell me, was it necessary to have been jerked back from the gates of death first? Do only ghosts have initiative?). I will give her the Notebooks. I will send her back to her husband. Oh, the true, chaste knight, a true Sir Galahad! She is Potter’s wife; Potter is her husband. Potter, with the Notebooks, will become the happy scholar again (happy researching other people’s spiritual crises). And when Potter becomes the happy scholar again, the man she once married will be given back to her. Hey presto! The wizard Merlin—ha!

  The rain still teems down, but there is a faint gleam in one corner of the sky. The cobbles in the court and the tiles on the rooftops opposite have a pewtery glaze.

  And children? Children can be adopted. Substitutes can be arranged. What is so important about this flesh-and-blood thing? This damn flesh-and-blood thing?

  “It’s going to stop,” she says. The air from the open window is cool on our hot faces. “Then I won’t have any excuse, will I?”

  I try not to look at her. I still have this mutinous erection.

  “But I’ll go now if you want me to.”

  Someone, hooded by a raincoat, dashes, feet slapping, across the court.

  “Life goes on, Bill,” she says. That old trite truism.

  “Go when it stops,” I say.

  But maybe it won’t stop. Maybe the gleam is a false gleam, and the rain will go on all night. All night! Yet, even as I think this, the gleam spreads and brightens, the rooftops glisten and, as if someone has closed a tap, the full pelt of the skies becomes a sprinkle.

  “Bill—?”

  It’s a full, hard embrace with nothing restrained or disguised about it. It lasts maybe fifteen seconds, and it’s she who breaks off first.

  She walks across the room. She retrieves her shoes. She doesn’t glance at the papers on the coffee table. She looks so different from the woman who walked in. She takes her coat from the hook on the door, opens the door. She pauses, her mouth half open as if to say something, but the door is already shut when I say, “It hasn’t stopped yet.”

  I hear the cautious click of her high heels descending the worn and uneven spiral stairs—it’s not easy, you have to be careful. I think of her dressing, preparing for this. I look down on to the court. It seems amazing that these buildings have been here for centuries. It seems amazing they should be here at all. I watch her cross to the main gate, but she is all but hidden by her umbrella. A black, man’s umbrella. She doesn’t look up.

  I stand by the window, waiting for the rain to stop. It takes longer than I expected. There is a moment when the sky seems partially to darken again and the deluge makes a temporary come-back. But after a while—I’m not paying attention, and it’s as if I awake to the fact rather than observe it—a weak, lemony light floods the court and there is a sudden assertion of routine, incidental noise: footsteps, drips, birdsong.

  I go to the bathroom. I need to have a prodigious pee. Tea, followed by sherry, and all this rain—and only now does my erection yield to my bladder. I feel as if I am emptying out my being. I feel as if I am pissing out my soul. The sun shines on the tiles. On one of the glass shelves is Gabriella’s unclaimed perfume. On another is an old bottle of pills that a doctor gave me to “help” after Ruth died. Doctors must be short-sighted people.

  I take it down, shake it to see how many pills are left. (Apparently, not enough.)

  Then I go back into my sitting-room, and with the aid of what’s left in the sherry bottle, swallow the lot.

  22

  It’s not the end of the world. It is. Life goes on. It doesn’t.

  Why seems it so particular with thee?

  When the first Aldermaston marchers set out in the late 1950s on their pilgrimage of protest, what were Ruth and I doing? We were sharing our new-found love-nest (having slipped the clutches of despotic landladies), a top-floor flat at number twenty-seven, Mayflower Road, Camden. And she was enamoured of the stage, and I was enamoured of poetry, and we were both enamoured of each other. Too happy, too busy being happy, to worry about the Bomb.

  But what sort of a plea, what sort of an excuse, is happiness? Perhaps it’s the only plea. Why march with banners of protest unless to save a world in which happiness can exist? It is a rare and endangered enough creature, after all, happiness, worthy of special protection. True, among the denizens of this world it has no privileged place (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all …?”). But who, sitting on the Grand Jury of Extinction, would not suffer the eclipse of a thousand drab species (such is nature’s way) but wish to spare the birds of paradise?

  And what are these things: the theatre, poetry? Bubbles, toys. It doesn’t take a bomb to shatter them. They only tell us what is in our hearts. They are only mirrors for our lost, discredited souls.

  O Mayflower Road! O garrets under the stars! O vie Bohème! O Mimi! O Rodolfo!

  How many taxi rides? How many shillings on the meter? How many journeys, all too quick, through the emptied streets, through the small, shy hours of love, before we even dared to speak the magic words? Perhaps love is more than the sum of two people. Perhaps love is a third thing, mysteriously bestowed, precious and fragile, like some rare, warm egg. We wished and feared to hasten it. We took it into our care like diligent trustees, waiting our charge’s coming of age.

  The time would come when, by much discreet investigation and counting of pennies, our homeward journeys would take us to a shared address. When the vexed geography of our lives would contract into the ecstatic geography of a shared bed (to be exact, a mattress on the floor). The time would come—O Mayflower Road! O my America, my new-found-land!—when behind the drawn curtains of number twenty-seven, which otherwise gave on to a sea of slates and chimney-pots with, beyond, the fairy-tale pinnacles of St. Pancras Station, Ruth would perform for me what she called her snake-charmer’s dance, a sort of dance that Mr Silvester would never have allowed his good girls at the Blue Moon Club to perform. Not that my snake needed charming—it stood up, rigid and ready as a tent pole beneath the sheets.…

  But meanwhile it is still 1957. When the official language of love was still the language of engagement rings and kisses at front doors, when university-registered landladies exercised their censorious regimes, and sex and sin were still conveniently alliterative synonyms. The taxi would drop her first at Pickford Street—our good-night clinches behind the cabbie’s back would be swift and muddled—then take me on to Winterton Road, where in my solitary bed I would think of Ruth in her solitary bed, thinking of me in mine.

  And I didn’t know I loved her till I’d dreamt of her. I didn’t know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it. Until she’d stepped out of her real existence into this other existence of which only I knew …

  I still remember that dream: its simple but panic-ridden formula, its tides of anguish and relief. How there was this train to catch. How we were going on this long, momentous journey (oh yes, I know—the symbolism of trains). How we had arranged to meet at the station, a big London terminus. And how, despite careful planning, everything—London Transport, my own flustered brain, the perils of the street, a bulging suitcase—conspired to stop me arriving on time. A taxi broke down. There were crowds that wouldn’t part. I was late, irrevocably late. The train would be gone and so would she.

  But as I crossed the station concourse, there she was, waiting, waving, by the barrier. And there, still, was the train. It was all right, you see: she had spoken to the driver (she had spoken to the driver!). Didn’t I know this was a special train: it couldn’t possibly leave without us?

  We fell into an embrace, an intimate and swooning embrace, there and then on the crowded concourse. And when I woke up, the embrace, the whole dream, still clung to me, I still existed within it, as in some warm envelope. What’s more, I was convinced that she must know she had been in my dream—that she too must have had a dream, a parallel dream, in which she had waited for me at the station, strick
en by the fear (but she had this obliging engine driver) that I might never turn up.

  So I never dared tell her—never in thirty years—for fear of breaking some beautiful, tacit conspiracy: “I had this dream …”

  But the dream gave me the courage (that very day) to say the words I had not uttered before. You see, it was I who said them first, though she echoed them soon afterwards, as if to prove my (our) dream had been mutual. And all that afternoon, of course (they are truly magic words), was like a dream. A dream.

  Where did this happen? It happened in, of all places, the Reptile House of the London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Where do you go, what do you do, on a cool, grey Sunday afternoon in August, when the pubs have closed and everywhere else is shut? We clanked through turnstiles. We drifted into the sheltering darkness of this home for exiled toads and vipers. It was not the first time, I suppose, that lovers had availed themselves of its dim-lit sanctuary. And there, under the unimpressed gaze of comatose pythons, disgruntled alligators and forlorn tortoises, we whispered into each other’s ears the words that my (our) dream had endorsed, and nuzzled and pressed against each other and behaved as the human species will behave under such circumstances as ours. And, of course, now the words had been spoken, there was no denying that further question, asked by our bodies if not our lips (hadn’t our souls already eloped—by special train?): When? Where? How?

  How strange the contrast between the dazzle, the display of the Blue Moon Club and these furtive but intrepid creatures, plotting with reptilian stealth their happiness. Love makes of its initiates bold undercover agents in the hostile territory of mundanity and propriety. We resolved, that same afternoon, that nothing less was our due than a whole night in each other’s arms. Which meant, given the rigours of our situation, the expedient of some cheap hotel. I was to make the arrangements. Next Sunday. Could we afford it? We’d have to. Could we wait that long? Just about. We walked over Primrose Hill. Sweet Primrose Hill. A primrose sun, hiding behind grey, watery clouds. We parted, to go our separate ways in Camden, my flat feet floating on air.…