The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

by Penelope Lively

  Him in the kitchen. Me out here. Oh, but here he comes.

  He asks if she would like tea.

  She indicates that she might.

  You are no longer just you, she thinks. You are you and him. Not entirely, oh no, but a whole slice of you is that. I am the me who goes to work every day, is there, working, is maybe with a friend for lunch, maybe goes out on my own of an evening. And there is the me who is doing what he does: living here, eating, talking, reading, watching the telly. Going to bed.

  She accepts a mug of tea.

  And this is the most provocative situation, is it not? It invites abuse, manipulation, tyranny, subjection. A person is supposed to accommodate herself—himself—absolutely to another person. It is unnatural. OK, but it’s nature that sets it up in the first place. Of course, of course.

  It is unnatural and provocative and precarious and challenging. It demands forbearance and stamina and abnormal powers of empathy and perception.

  It is also . . . And yes, it is also all those other things. The opposite. The converse. The place you want to be.

  She has drunk the tea. She picks up the empty mug and goes into the kitchen.

  Where he sits, also with empty mug.

  He says, “I’m sorry if you are.”

  Later, much later, in bed, they lie shoulder to shoulder, punch-drunk, played out, replete. Like those stone figures in churches, she thinks, the knight and his lady, together forever and always, and that would be just fine. The peonies were last year, he has confirmed, and he asks if she would like sunflowers this year, or orchids, or maybe a magnolia tree.

  In the darkness, at the edge of the room, a few of those might-have-been men have dared to hover, that shadowy crew.

  You’ll be lucky, she tells them. Get lost.

  Who Do You Think You Were?

  In west Somerset in 1787 a young woman who could not read or write, but knew fine how to skin a rabbit or pluck a fowl, forged her way through autumn mud from Rodhuish to Withycombe, where she would fetch the old red rooster from her aunt Mary Ann. The rooster was destined for the pot, and has no further part in this story, except that as it was handed over, squawking, both Sarah and her aunt experienced a most unusual sensation, like a mild electric shock (a concept that would have baffled them).

  Aunt Mary Ann said, “A goose walked over my grave.”

  Sarah was busy subduing the rooster, and tucking it under one arm. In her other hand she carried the basket that had contained a fresh loaf and some potatoes, fair exchange for the rooster. She shivered, though she hadn’t been feeling cold, and said she’d be off back, there was rain to come. The rooster made one final protest, Aunt Mary Ann went into her cottage, and Sarah Webber walked on into the rest of her life.

  *

  In London in 2015 another young woman stares at a screen. She scrolls through names, a cascade of names; she frowns, she taps, she pulls up a further name torrent. She makes a note on a pad beside her laptop. She scrolls again, and lo! she spots a most satisfactory connection. She pounces, makes a further note, and then she decides to call it a day. She closes the laptop. She is twenty-four years old, and is engaged in postgraduate work; she would be hard put to it to pluck a fowl, let alone skin a rabbit.

  Caroline puts the laptop into her briefcase, the laptop that knows everything, or most things, and in which the past is stored, by way of a thousand names, tens of thousands of names, hundreds of thousands. The laptop knew about the relationship between Mary Ann Crowhurst and Sarah Webber, though possibly not about the red rooster.

  It is the end of the working day, for Caroline Gladwell. She works in the Reading Room of the British Library, because she may have need of its resources, though much of the time she is making use of the omniscient laptop. She is doing an MA in Economic History, of which a component part is the dissertation on a subject of her own choice. She has chosen to research her own family history, back to the early seventeenth century, in order to demonstrate the directive force of economic circumstance on individual lives. She will show why unemployment in the shipbuilding industry impelled this ancestor to leave Portsmouth, why opportunities in domestic service brought that one to Cheltenham. At the moment she is tracing forebears of her mother’s, who appear to have been stuck generations deep in the West Country, being born, marrying, dying, within a relatively small area. Agricultural laborers for the most part, and it would seem that conditions were favorable enough to allow of staying put.

  Caroline is pleased with her choice of subject for the dissertation which, she feels, lends color to the sometimes gray backcloth of economic history. Persons, people—the real people who are the drivers, the facilitators, often the victims, of economic developments. Names—she can cite them—the Johns and Georges and Alberts, the Elizas and Alices and Janes—whose toil has contributed to a climate of prosperity, or otherwise. She will pinpoint certain names, evoke their circumstances, and tether them with a detailed account of their particular occupation—the dissertation will be richly informative about bricklaying, needle making, baking, brewing and much else. It will bring the past alive—make it relevant. Caroline is intensely concerned with history—she is hoping for a career in academic life—and she sometimes feels that the past is seen simply as an object of study, that its very reality is ignored, the fact that it happened, that these people lived and died. The populace within the laptop.

  Next year Caroline will get married. Caroline Gladwell will become Caroline Fox, though of course she will not use Alan’s name, generally speaking, but will remain Caroline Gladwell. In this she is very different from the young women whose names have scrolled down in front of her, and for whom marriage meant immediate abandonment of their birth name. They became their husband’s appendage, forever after. A change that is a signifier for the times, she thinks, as she gets a number seventy-three bus to head for home. Our times. Now, which is so much not then.

  Home is a one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington, for which Caroline and Alan pay a wicked amount of rent. The flat is the ground floor of an insignificant two-story Victorian terrace house which would once have housed a lower-middle-class family of modest means, and is now worth around a million pounds. If Caroline and Alan were to buy their flat from the landlord they would have to pay half a million or so for sitting room, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, broom cupboard and minuscule entrance hall; that is of course out of the question.

  Alan is quite favorably placed in economic terms. He is on the lowest rung of the civil service ladder, at the Home Office. If he beavers away for the requisite number of years, and climbs accordingly, he will eventually be in a position to hang his hat on a pension. Caroline herself has no such certainty, not yet, but with her MA under the belt, to add polish to her First, she will be equipped for a decently paid teaching job, even if she doesn’t make academia.

  The flat feels chilly; it is November. The days are closing in. Caroline puts the heating on, draws curtains, unpacks the shopping she picked up on the way. Lemon garlic roasted chicken thighs for supper.

  Over which, presently, she and Alan exchange their days. He has had a slight run-in with a superior, and would have liked to give him a piece of his mind, but was sensible enough not to do so. Alan is pragmatic, clever, and usually cheerful; he is stockily built, has large and compelling brown eyes, and Caroline loves him inordinately.

  She tells him about today’s search. “And then suddenly everything clicked into place. I realized that a Mary Ann Crowhurst was the aunt of a Sarah Webber, and I could fit that family tree together.”

  “Your Somerset peasants?” says Alan.

  “Agricultural workers.”

  “Hodge,” says Alan. “The generic term for nineteenth-century laborers. No names, just a tribe of Hodges.” He too read history at the university, and has acquired arcane pieces of information.

  “And that’s what I’m doing,” says Caroline triumphantl
y. “Filling in the names.”

  They smile fondly at each other across the lemon garlic chicken. Alan is thinking that Caroline’s face is a perfect heart shape, and that it is quite unfair for a girl to be so pretty and also so bright. Caroline is savoring the moment; if she were a cat she would be purring.

  Caroline says, “It is almost creepy that these people are my forebears. That there’s a connection. Genes. DNA. And that nobody, so far as I know, has ever done this before. Reached back, and made the links. Touched them, as it were. I am their future.” She was silent for a moment. “It feels quite odd. You identify, almost.”

  “You can’t really identify. It’s impossible. Their circumstances are so different. The mind-set—the assumptions, the expectations. Think of it—the age before antibiotics, sanitation—people likely to be clobbered by anything and everything.”

  She stared at him. “All the same . . .”

  “And,” he went on, “most appropriately—it’s that program tonight. Do you want to see it?”

  Alan is referring to the television program Who Do You Think You Are?, in which some celebrity is confronted with their family history, usually to be startled by the revelation of an ancestral convict, or slave owner. Reality genealogy.

  And so, later, they watch with amusement as a well-known actor learns that his great-great-great-grandfather was imprisoned for body snatching. As compensation, there is another distant grandparent who died in the workhouse. Penury is always a badge of honor.

  “They didn’t get that from the parish records,” says Alan. “The body snatcher.”

  “No, of course not. They have to investigate further if someone looks interesting. As do I.”

  Indeed. When Caroline can identify a name that invites inquiry—on account perhaps of their trade, or their sudden movement from one place to another, or even an early death—she tries to acquire further information. This is where she may have to leave her comfort zone in the British Library Reading Room, and hive off in pursuit of unfamiliar archives. She may try to find a particular street, even a house, a gravestone. Actually, all this is quite good fun—heading off to places she has never been to before, engaging with helpful people in some archive, taking to unfamiliar streets and spotting survivals. Oh—here’s the terrace in which so-and-so lived, still standing, no longer a slum, all gentrified now. And yes, here is the gravestone I’m after, giving substance to a name on a list. She really did live and die.

  At the moment Caroline is in pursuit of a descendant of those West Country Hodges/peasants/agricultural workers, a man who seems to have broken out and headed off to Bath. Why? What was he doing there? Did he marry, have children?

  *

  In Bath in 1840 a young man worked on a building site. A railway station was being built, though the young man was barely aware of the ultimate purpose of his labors. Suffice it that he had daily work, and daily pay—superior to the circumstances he had known where he was born and grew up, where there might be work, and a meal on the table, but very well might not. Today, he would be called an economic migrant, though he has migrated merely across a county.

  He is in fine fettle, on this spring morning, heaving barrow loads of golden Bath stone, and thinking of his Eliza, to whom he was married only yesterday. He thinks of the moment when the priest declared them man and wife, when he experienced what felt like a great surge of being—an affirmation of his very existence. And he thought of what Eliza said, after: “I came over all funny, Tom, when he said that—‘man and wife.’” And he had known that she must have shared this momentary euphoria. Eliza is Bath born and bred; her father is an innkeeper, and Tom and Eliza have rooms over the inn, where, in due course, they too will breed.

  *

  In London in 2015 Caroline Gladwell spots a marriage entry that homes in on her wandering Hodge and most satisfactorily establishes that, in 1840, he was married in Bath to Eliza Fulbrook. She places Tom and Eliza at the head of a new family tree, in expectation of the births for which she will search in due course. Caroline suspects that Tom had been drawn to Bath by the work opportunities offered in the construction industry—Brunel’s new railway station for instance—and she will now do some research on that. She thinks of this as coloring in—giving background, substance, to the stark recital of names. A name can then bloom a little—it can conjure up the image of a person: Tom Webber can become a robust young man laboring amid the dust and clamor of a nineteenth-century building enterprise.

  Caroline thinks a lot about age—ages—as she pursues one name and another. Infant mortality, early deaths, the relative rarity of those who make it into their eighties. Death hovered, two hundred years ago, even one hundred years ago. Caroline has four octogenarian grandparents, doing quite nicely, bar various hip or knee problems.

  Caroline herself is young, in today’s terms. But would have been seen, more, as mature, a couple of hundred years ago—a hundred, even. Perceptions of age shift, as expectation of life lengthens. One third of the children born today will live to be a hundred.

  My own, perhaps, she thinks. Goodness! Disappearing off into the twenty-second century. She and Alan plan to start a baby in a year or so, after their spring wedding. Another signifier for the times, she reflects (scrolling through some Bath births of the 1840s, in search of Tom Webber’s progeny)—child born untypically in wedlock, when actually, nowadays, most are not. And born according to schedule (all being well . . . ) instead of arbitrary, possibly unwelcome.

  Ah! She has found it—a son born to Tom and Eliza in 1841. Within wedlock, by a comfortable few months.

  Caroline now accelerates the nineteenth century. She whisks through time, disposing of decade after decade, until in due course she has nailed down the descendants of Tom and Eliza Webber, unto the fourth and fifth generation, forging ahead into a new century. Not her mother’s direct ancestors, but a branch line and interesting in itself for economic flexibility; male Webbers abandon the building trade and become grocers, brewers, and in one instance a funeral director.

  But at lunchtime Caroline closes her laptop, consigns the past to another day, and steps out into the present, away from the British Library and in the direction of Oxford Street. She’s taking an afternoon off; she has a date with a friend, to consider wedding dresses. Rosie is also getting married next year. Weddings are almost a cult, for their generation. People marry with a flourish, in their late twenties or so, often having been together for several years.

  Caroline remarks on this to Rosie, as they inspect an acreage of white and ivory silk, tulle, organza, in the bridal department.

  “Why do we do it? My mum says in her day most of her friends just sneaked into a registry office, and then had a family lunch somewhere. She and my father didn’t bother till I was nearly two.”

  “My parents never have.” Rosie works in a bookshop, would like to get into publishing. She is short and dark, a foil to tall fair Caroline. “What about this one? Too frothy for me.”

  “I don’t want froth either. So why do we?”

  “Because each other does, I suppose. I’ve been to five this year already. You’ve got to retaliate. This one?”

  “No—I don’t want to look half naked. My parents were still in recovery, I imagine—my mum had nearly died.”

  “Having you?”

  “Yes. Everything went horribly wrong. First I was stuck, and then she had a hemorrhage. And infection too—she was very ill after.”

  “Scary . . . Mostly it seems to be a doddle, nowadays. Sue Parker—remember Sue?—she went shopping in Brent Cross the next day. This?” Rosie brandishes a beaded confection.

  “You’re joking . . . Utterly bling.”

  They are getting tired of wedding dresses, and retreat to the coffee shop.

  “I’m saturated in marriages,” says Caroline. “Researching. Marriage after marriage. But it’s just names and dates. You want to know more. W
hat did she wear? I had a great-great-great-someone or other yesterday in Bath. Eliza. You find yourself imagining them.”

  “Write a historical novel. Be the next Hilary Mantel. Cutting-edge stuff nowadays.”

  Caroline shrugs. “I can’t think like that.” She wants to explain that what she reads in lists, entries, bare references, has come to reflect some alternative reality. Nothing to do with fiction. But it would be hard to put into words without sounding fey, and in any case Rosie has moved on to other matters: a flat she and her partner covet but cannot afford, a job interview next week, the person they caught nicking books in the shop. “Actually, in a way, I couldn’t help feeling—good on him. More high-minded than your run-of-the-mill shoplifter.”

  They consider this ethical point over another coffee, and part company. Having got nowhere with the matter of wedding dresses, as Rosie observes.

  “Perhaps we don’t take marriage seriously enough,” says Caroline. “An excuse for an event, rather than a rite of passage.”

  They agree to pillage the wedding department at Selfridges, on some other occasion.

  Somewhere in London, in 1821, a young woman is giving birth. She is in the final stages of labor, but the child is awkwardly placed. It (she, as it happens) is presenting feet first; the labor has been arrested, hour by hour, the woman is weakening, dying. Eventually the midwife decides to risk manual extraction, plunging her hand into the uterus to grasp the child by the feet and pull—a procedure potentially harmful to both mother and child, but needs must, in this instance.

  The child is dragged forth. Wonderfully, she cries. The mother is beyond speech or crying. And the placenta has not been delivered. The doctor, summoned earlier, now arrives, late, hurrying in from the busy street, and at once rummages for the placenta.

  Two days later, Maria Gladwell dies.

  *

  Elsewhere in London, in 2015, Caroline arrives back at the flat later than usual, and voluble about her day’s work.