by Graham Swift
“Appalling, isn’t it? And it all happened. I mean, it happened my way. The dust had to settle, she had to be sure. It all happened in August—it’s almost November now. But you can put yourself in her shoes, can’t you? A refugee here—a free citizen there. In her own country. Back where she belongs. Terrible, isn’t it?”
Gladstone’s. The corner table. I go there still of course. It’s a blow when the table’s taken. It was a blow when they changed the upholstery from red plush to smoky blue.
“Of course, it gives her the chance to look virtuous, to look as if she’s doing it for us. To look sorry. She’ll give up Bob, she’ll get out of our lives. She’ll let everything go back to what it was.” A dry little laugh. “Her sacrifice. Her concession. She can’t go on causing all this—mess. It’s a possibility. According to Bob, it’s what she says. I haven’t exactly talked it over with her. We haven’t exactly all sat down round a table. The other possibility is that she sees where her life is now, where her future is, and she’s ready to say, ‘Goodbye, Bob.’ Bob wouldn’t tell me that, would he? Maybe Bob wants her to go. For her sake, for ours. It’s his sacrifice. He’s the peacemaker. He tells me that too. It’s another possibility.”
She gave me a long steady look, the look of a woman who no longer trusts her husband, but hasn’t stopped loving him. I’d seen the look before, come to recognize it, like a symptom, in clients.
“Have you heard of the Empress Eugénie?”
I looked at her. Maybe I looked lost.
“I do translating, as well as teaching. I’ve been given this book to translate—from French. It’s a life of the Empress Eugénie. The wife of the Emperor Napoleon III.”
Maybe I looked completely foxed.
“One of the weird things about the Empress Eugénie is that she was Empress for twenty years but when the Emperor died she lived on for nearly fifty years. She died aged ninety-four. As if she had two lives really—an empress life, another life.”
“I know about the Empress Eugénie,” I said.
“Do you?”
Sometimes, maybe, fate steps in.
“She lived in Chislehurst. She and Napoleon III lived in Chislehurst. They were—”
“Rich refugees.”
Her eyes were suddenly alight. Sometimes fate steps in just for you. You’re there in the class, in the front row, and the only scrap of anything you know is just what the teacher has asked.
“Napoleon died there,” I said. “Eighteen … seventy-something. He was the Napoleon who died in Chislehurst.”
Not just a detective, not just a pretty nose.
“I lived in Chislehurst—grew up there. It’s how I know. It’s the only reason I know.”
“George, I lived in Chislehurst—well, Petts Wood—when I was a girl.”
Sometimes fate comes and gives you a pat on the back.
“They lived where the golf course is now,” I said. “Chislehurst Golf Course. Their house became the club house. My dad used to play there. They were the Emperor and Empress who lived on a golf course.”
She actually laughed. Her face all alight. A woman holding a glass of wine, laughing. For a moment it seemed there wasn’t any other agenda. We were sitting here in a wine bar in Wimbledon on a Tuesday evening to swap notes on an Emperor and Empress who’d lived over a century ago. This could be how it was with us.
For a moment, I had a picture of her and Bob, their regular life. The end of the day, the kitchen. He’s opened a bottle of wine, rolled back his shirt cuffs. The smell of something cooking. And she’s telling him about this book she’s signed up to translate. The Empress Eugénie. Did he know (he was a gynaecologist) about the Empress Eugénie?
It’s how their life should always have been.
I saw her eyes come back to the present.
“And the other possibility is … Is this just me? That it’s their way out. Their escape route, their plan. All the other stuff is a cover. That they’ll drive off together, or fly off somewhere, and he won’t ever come home again. I don’t know, I really don’t know—or I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.”
She smiled, as if she might have known me for a long time. She swallowed the last of her wine.
“So you were born in Chislehurst?”
“Brought up there. There was a plaque on the wall—at the golf club. I used to think it was the Napoleon. I never knew there was more than one.”
She put down her empty glass. I picked it up quickly, tilted it towards her. She nodded, no hesitation, but her eyes kept me in my seat. On her seat, beside her, on the red plush, the black leather shoulder-bag—the two of them inside.
“And the other possibility is that they don’t know themselves. They really don’t know what they’re doing. What they’ll do. They’ll only find out at the airport. So even if he does say goodbye to her, even if that’s where they say goodbye, I want to know how he does it, how they do it. I want to have been there—but invisible—for that. Do you understand?”
I must have nodded.
“Watch them, George. Watch over him for me.”
20
How does it happen? How do we choose? Someone enters our life, and we can’t live without them. But we lived without them before …
The Empress Eugénie. Fifty years to go.
As if we were only half ourselves and never knew it. And maybe it’s best not to know. Maybe that’s what Rachel thought, standing in the kitchen doorway, in the exit from my life. That I was only half the man she’d thought I was.
I was half myself again. Or less.
But how does it happen? “Meant for each other,” “made for each other,” we say. And my granny Nora used to say when I was small, before we moved to Chislehurst, that “there’s a girl for every boy.” Maybe it’s what grannies have to say. But didn’t her own boy—my dad—prove it? Not just in marrying my mum, but in what he did for a living. His bread and butter: wedding photos.
My grandpa Ted was long dead. I never knew him. My granny Nora’s other half. Nora and Ted. And my granny Nora never lived long enough to know what I knew about her boy, my dad.
Matrimonial work. I see it from the wrong end, the bad end.
I used to go with him to the golf course, Sunday mornings. It lasted maybe three months, my golfing phase. I wasn’t so keen but I learnt the basics. I was only thirteen. But mostly I used just to caddy for him and his golfing mates. “Caddy”: a word that till then had meant a thing for holding tea. And mostly I went to please him. Because it was his high point, his triumph, becoming a member. I knew it even then. His golf was pretty shaky—he’d learnt as a visitor, as a guest of other members—but now he’d truly arrived, the Club had let him in. And he wanted me to slap him on the back.
Now that I look back, I can see that I wasn’t a rebel, like other kids, even at thirteen, can be. Rachel, for example, in her way. Helen, of course. I wasn’t gunning for my dad.
A rebel at school, maybe. Maybe not even there. A shirker—a shirker on principle. I just hated teachers, schoolwork, homework, deskwork. A man of action, me. It was Mum who tried to keep my nose to the grindstone: “Brains, Georgie, you’ve got brains.” But my dad, I knew, was a self-made man, he’d worked up from nothing. What had school ever done for him? And my mum had fallen for him, hadn’t she? She hadn’t turned him down.
Golf—it’s not exactly action, but it isn’t sitting on your arse. And I was pleased for him, really, I was on his side.
A high-street photographer. Chislehurst High Street. Frank Webb. As much a pillar of the community by then, in his small way, as any solicitor or bank manager. And now they’d let him join the golf club.
But once, I knew, he’d been a beach photographer, before I was born. Broadstairs, 1946, after he came out the army. Living all summer in a cheap back room with an old laundry-cupboard attached which he turned into a darkroom. Working the beach by day, the cupboard by night. Round-the-clock work, but that was how he learnt his trade. How to snap and make them smile. A camera
and a bit of army know-how. And that was how he met my mum.
I used to think it was how he’d deliberately gone about it. That he’d gone down to Broadstairs just for that. She was the one he’d carefully selected. But first he’d built up his catalogue: beach girls, hundreds of snaps. They were all there with him, in the dark, in that laundry cupboard. It was how he chose.
My mum never said it was otherwise. It was her glory, after all. “I was the one,” she’d say. There were all those others, in their summer frocks and swimsuits, the first real summer after the war, but he’d picked her.
Now and then they’d both mention, with a certain look in their eye, “Mrs. Barrett’s place”—“Mrs. Barrett’s place in Broadstairs,” as if Mrs. Barrett was some guard-dog they’d more than once tiptoed by.
“I was the one,” she’d say.
They got married late in 1946. I came along the next year. So my dad began his steady progress, with my mum beside him, from beach photographer to high-street photographer, and so we moved, in ’52, from Lewisham to Chislehurst. A notch or two up and a better class of customer. Once again—like Broadstairs—he picked his patch well.
A pillar of the community. More than that: its record keeper, its curator. Weddings, christenings, sports teams, annual dinners, whole schools stacked up three-deep. Not to mention the countless studio portraits, commissioned for countless proud and loving reasons. “We’ll get Webb’s to do it.”
But more than that. There was that other thing he could bring about—even when the mood might be dead against it, even when the kid had been dragged in screaming, or the couple who’d made the appointment had had a bust-up that very day. Different ways of doing it, but in the end it was something in him, in his face, his eye, as if he only had to say the word and the result would follow. As if he was still standing there on a holiday beach where everyone knew how to do it anyhow.
“Smile!”
Each photo with his name on it—stamped on the back or embossed on fine-grade card, depending on the presentation required. “Webb’s, Chislehurst.” His name on all those memory lanes.
Strange, how those photos would find their way into other places. In the Force, when you needed a photo—“Is there a photo?”—what you’d often get would be the studio portrait, high on quality if not exactly up-to-date, handed over with a little proud echo of its former purpose: “It’s a good photo, isn’t it?”
(I’d look on the back. If it was one of my dad’s I never said.)
Missing persons … Copies would go out—the person would be missing but the photo would multiply. And whatever the result—a body, an arrest, a blank—the photo would still be smiling and unharmed.
Or the local papers. Reporters must do the same: Is there a photo? The same odd pride. The child killed in the accident: posed in a new school uniform with an angel’s smile (though in fact, on the day, there’d been a hell of a tantrum). The rapist who’d once gone to college …
Bob’s photo, next to the headline.
It’s still the same now—in my high-street trade. Is there a photo …?
Sometimes there seems to be only the one. The one that shows the two of them together, beaming and never to be parted.
We’d load the clubs into the car. Sunday mornings in Chislehurst. I knew what it meant to him: the Golf Club. I didn’t want to mock and sneer. I even thought, in a small way, he was Mr. Magic, coming from nowhere with a camera instead of a wand. Finding my mum.
Caddying, dogging him from hole to hole. There were his chums, of course, his golfing pals. And I’d listen to their chit-chat. Ears pricked, even then. There was a bench about half way round, by a clump of pines, a place to pause, the brown needles at your feet peppered with cigarette ends like cartridges round a gun post.
I can’t remember his name—Donald someone maybe—though I can still see him, crinkly-haired and confident-looking. Someone else who was someone in the High Street, or who ran some business, maybe, out on the factory estate by the Sidcup bypass.
I can’t remember his name, but I remember the name he spoke—Carol Freeman—and I knew it could only be one Carol Freeman.
I’d been at school with Pauline Freeman. If the truth be known, I’d fancied her—an eleven-year-old’s fancying: this was still primary school—and I’d thought it was mutual, just for a bit, but she’d gone off me all of a sudden. Girls for you. (Though maybe now I knew why.) And it had been long enough while it lasted for me to know that her mum’s name was Carol and her dad’s name was Roy. I’d even seen Pauline’s mum outside the school gates. She’d looked like a woman—a mum but a woman. She’d given me a smile, a wave. I even knew where Pauline lived: Gifford Road.
I think they thought I was out of earshot. A breeze stirring the pines. I was looking for a ball this Donald Someone had whacked into the rough.
He said, “Are you still seeing Carol Freeman? Are you still taking her pic?” I know that Dad looked up to see if I’d heard—he shouldn’t have done that—and I know that I made a good pretence of carrying on what I was doing, combing the long grass. I know that he changed the subject pretty fast. And then everything was as it was, but not. A bright blue day in May, when golfers need to shield their eyes. But now there was a cloud.
And up to then I’d thought he had it all made, he knew how it was done. There was Mum and him and me—and only me because that had been enough. A perfect happy triangle.
Caddying. And being taught a little. Golfing lessons. Now I knew—I carried on scouring the grass—I’d have to go on pretending.
Golfing lessons. Eye on the ball, swing from the hips. But on the very first visit, weeks before, there’d been a little history lesson and even a French lesson as well. The plaque on the club-house wall. It was written in French. So Dad could pretend he was translating. A hidden talent. “Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, died here.”
Napoleon? Hadn’t he died on some island in the middle of the ocean?
“Not that Napoleon, George.” (So there was more than one?)
It all came back to me, in a rush, in Gladstone’s.
Not just any old golf course, not just any old step up in the world. I could almost see it running crazily through his mind: now that would have been a photo! If only he’d been around then—to have had such clients.
A photo—and a hell of a challenge, a hell of a test. The Emperor and the Empress exiled in Chislehurst. Him with his empire gone and soon to die, her (though she didn’t know it) with fifty years still to come.
“Ready. Look at the camera. Smile!”
• • •
How do we choose? Napoleon and Eugénie. She was a frisky Spanish beauty—Sarah’s told me—and he could be a bit of a glum old stick.
Nora and Ted.
And Mum used to say, even after he was dead, “Never mind all of them, never mind all those pictures he took—he knew how to make me smile. My God, he could make me smile.”
21
The leaves on the trees lining the cemetery paths are yellow as lemon peel. They don’t move, as if they cling by a miracle. The next breeze, the next shift in the air will free them all.
I don’t know what will free me here. I stand, I look. My feet are cold. How long do you give it? A minute? Five? I said to myself: Just do it, lay the flowers—go. But it’s not that simple. How long is right, how long is fair, when you only come once a year?
Put down the flowers. Now beat it before the hate, or anything else, rises up. The seethe in your throat. But it’s not up to me anyway. I’m here for her, for her sake. Her agent. How long would she give it, if she were here? For ever? Before she turned her back, closed her eyes, walked away. Suppose they let her out, just for this purpose, just for this one day. The taste of freedom. Lemon light. Cold air in the mouth. The freedom of a graveyard, where they never let you out at all.
But I have to do it for her, taste it for her. This life we cling to. As if she might be right here beside me, clutching my arm. Both of us looking down. The gall,
the nerve of it.
I have to be here for her. To receive any messages. And that might need waiting—that might take ages—coming from the cold hard ground.
No word. Not today.
It’s not up to me. And now that I’m standing here, not knowing how, when to go, I have the same feeling I had last time. It’s up to him. He’s got me now, in his grip. It’s his one chance, I’ve walked into his trap.
You’re glad, aren’t you? Glad to be alive. He’s smiling at me coldly down there. Nice flowers. Beautiful day.
He’s not going to let me go in a hurry, not going to make it easy for me: this stranger he never knew, who turns up now like some phoney friend, some fake well-wisher. This stranger who followed him, shadowed him, though he never knew, when he was alive. Spied on him—in his pain, in his misery. And now comes to spy on him even in death.
22
Rachel chose me, that’s what I think now. Chose me—and unchose me. Though I thought I was doing all the choosing, making the move, sizing up the situation and stepping in, just like the well-trained cop I was.
Though I was something more than that by then: CID, if only just. A detective constable. Plain clothes. So she didn’t know, the disguise must have worked. And it was the first and the best time I’d ever used it like that, to my own advantage, like some magic mask, like some suit of invisible armour.
I said, “What’s the trouble here …?”
Police training. A little bit of presence and authority. You can break up fights (book them if they hit you back), you can stop traffic, you can act like a little god—if you’re in uniform.
But she didn’t guess, she thought it was just me.
• • •