England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  And suppose, he might have said, the rain continued for hours still. Suppose it continued all night.

  Which it did. In fact the rain, gushing down incessantly, was like some conspiring screen (had anyone seen him enter not his own house but number twenty?). More than that, there was something insistent about it, the very noise of it like a rush of blood.

  He’d been here before. And she knew it. She’d been here before. Though he’d never been before, like this, inside the Mitchells’ house. But he’d been in this place, or in a place like it, many times before, before Clare. He recognised it as his element.

  Many years ago he’d discovered his power—a simple power that was also so like a mere proneness, a gravitation, that he wondered why other men didn’t simply, naturally have it too. Why for other men it could sometimes seem so damn difficult. It was just weakness perhaps, other men were just plain weak. Or they just didn’t know how to pick up a scent.

  Years ago he could have said to another man, though of course it was unthinkable actually to say it, that in a little while, just a little while, he’d have that one there. That one over there. And in a little while after that, probably, he’d make her cry.

  So sure was he of this repeated cycle, so familiar, even faintly fatigued by it, that he’d wanted relief and sanctuary. He’d wanted marriage, a wife, a house and all the other things that go with them. And he was an architect by choice and qualification—he fashioned domestic spaces. But he knew there was still this stray animal inside him. And now he was locked out of it all anyway.

  There it was, just the other side of a wall: his life. It even seemed for a moment that he and Clare might actually be there. He had turned into someone else. There they were. He felt tenderly, protectively towards them. And of course if they were there, then Clare couldn’t be travelling somewhere northwards on a train to where her brother was gravely ill, perhaps even dying. And he couldn’t be here.

  It was a weird thing to be occupying the Mitchells’ house, even—as it proved—their bed. Weird and undeniably wrong, but undeniably thrilling and enveloping, like the rain, which didn’t let up. It wasn’t his house, it wasn’t hers. They had that in common. They were both displaced people, though in his case all it took was a wall. Weird and undeniably violating. It made the Mitchells seem the imposters.

  At some stage of the evening, or night, he managed to ask her where she was from and why and how she’d come to England. He couldn’t get from her much more than the hint of some gaping separation, or loss, that even in his comforting arms (or he thought they might be comforting) she didn’t want, or know how, to explain. Where was Moldova? She seemed to retreat behind her poor English. He didn’t press or insist. No more than she did about his mysteriously absent wife.

  So he just held her, as she seemed to want him to do, as if just being held was his side of a bargain that she’d secured from him.

  He thought, as he held her, of how Clare hadn’t called. It was really dark now, it might be the middle of the night. She could have arrived and had news, but she hadn’t called. And how would he have spoken to her if she had? He hadn’t switched off his mobile—as if that might have been an admission of something. But of course she would call on their home phone, the land line. He strained his ears as if to hear it ringing through the wall: an unanswered phone in an empty house. But heard nothing.

  She hadn’t called, so no problem. Or that is, according to his earlier logic, things must be bad for her brother.

  He thought of when, if at all now, but it somehow didn’t seem to matter, he’d perform that farcical act with the ladder, his legs poking from the window. He thought of himself breast-stroking on his desk. He thought of himself, earlier, driving Clare diligently to the station and saying unexpectedly ‘I love you’ and returning, truly meaning to knuckle down to work and not knowing at all then how this sudden chain of events would overtake him. He thought of his jacket, with the keys in the pocket, hanging over the chair.

  Of course Clare had her inklings.

  As he held her, she began to shudder uncontrollably, then to sob and to cry out loud. He’d somehow known this would happen, without knowing why, and knew he must hold her, it was all he could do. He held her and she cried. Then after a while, a long while it seemed, the crying and sobbing ceased and she fell asleep, but he continued to hold her, alert and alone in the dark with just the hiss of the rain.

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  I NEVER THOUGHT this would happen to me, Hettie, though I always knew it could. But I never thought I’d be lying here like this in your spare room, looking at your picture of the ‘Old Harry Rocks at Studland’ on the wall. Death’s a funny thing, Het. Can you say that?

  Have I told you about Lawrence of Arabia?

  There’s supposed to be a family that rallies round. But it was just me and Roy, like it was just you and Dennis. We were the two Mrs Underwoods, but there was something tricky with the Underwood genes. Never mind. Carry on. Now it’s just you and me, and it feels like we’re a couple of real sisters, not sisters-in-law, and you’re the older one, though you’re not, because you went through all this ahead of me with Dennis. Not the right order, but what bloody order is there?

  And when Dennis went you had Roy and me. Or rather we both had Roy. We both had Roy being an older brother like he’d never been before, taking charge like he’d never taken charge before. Well, he stopped taking charge just over a week ago, and it was all I could do, in the time before he went, to make him understand he didn’t have to take charge any more.

  I know, Het, of course I do. Studland. It was where you and Dennis went for your honeymoon. It was a joke once, wasn’t it? In a different world. Honeymoon. Studland. And Roy and I went to the Scilly Isles. There was a joke there too.

  A couple of sisters, a couple of widows. It makes me think of a couple of crows. Or do I mean crones? Who’d have thought it, years ago, when it was Roy the Boy and Dennis the Menace, that one day we’d become like those pairs of crumple-faced women you used to see in pubs, nursing their glasses of black Guinness.

  No, all right, that’s not exactly us. Nursing our glasses of white wine.

  I’m so grateful to you for taking me in. You had other plans. You were going somewhere warm. I’ve forgotten where already. Not Studland anyhow. You said, ‘I’ve cancelled everything, Peg. You’re staying with me.’ You said, ‘It’s Christmas, but it can be whatever you want, it can be not Christmas if you like. I don’t have a bit of tinsel in the house. Don’t argue, Peg, you’re staying with me.’

  Did I say ‘taking charge’?

  And why should Roy have hung on for Christmas? So he could spend it in a hospital bed? So I could come in with a cracker for us to pull, if he had the strength? So he could wear a funny hat?

  They say however much you prepare, nothing prepares you. They say it doesn’t hit you till after the funeral. Well, that was yesterday, the day before Christmas Eve. You can’t choose your date, can you? Or the weather. A howling gale, umbrellas blowing inside-out. And you’d been going somewhere warm.

  They say—who are these they with their big mouths?—that you’re in a state of shock. I don’t know about that. Do you know what I thought, Het, when I left that hospital, after he’d gone? I thought: This can’t be happening, I can’t just be sitting here on a number nine bus. I thought: He’s with me still, of course he is, it’s up to me now to make him be with me. I felt in a state of importance, that’s what I felt. Never mind shock. Nothing so important had ever happened to me before. Except of course the importance of meeting Roy in the first place.

  The Scilly Isles, 1965. Us and Harold Wilson.

  A state of importance. Does that sound silly? I’m not an important person. Nor was Roy. All he did, before he retired, was get to the top of the Parks Department and run five public parks and nine other sites of horticultural amenity. And how he took charge of them.

  There I was on that bus, wanting only to be with him, wanting only to make him be with
me. But do you know who else was on that bus too?

  Peter O’Toole.

  Maybe I’d already heard it at the hospital. Maybe I’d heard one nurse say to another, ‘Have you heard—Peter O’Toole has died?’ And if I did hear it maybe I’d thought: No, I didn’t hear that. I don’t want to hear it anyway. Not now.

  But the bus was full of people going to work, holding newspapers with Peter O’Toole on the front. I couldn’t not know about it. And only days before it had been Nelson Mandela. Deaths don’t come much bigger, do they? And I hadn’t wanted to know about that either. But even Roy, lying there with his tubes and drips, had to be aware that Nelson Mandela had died. Nelson Mandela who took charge of South Africa. And you know what he said? ‘Well perhaps it’s all right for me then.’ And perhaps in some way it was. And you know what else he said? ‘All these black nurses, Peg. It matters for them, doesn’t it?’

  There I was on that bus, at seven in the morning, with the Christmas lights floating by outside, just two hours after Roy had died, looking at the face of Peter O’Toole. Except it wasn’t even Peter O’Toole. It was Lawrence of Arabia. On every newspaper. It was as if Lawrence of Arabia had died all over again. As if Lawrence of Arabia had got on the bus.

  How unfair to Peter O’Toole. How unfair to Roy.

  But the truth is I couldn’t help thinking, just like everyone else: Those blue eyes, that golden hair, that man in the white robes, striding along the roof of a train. How old were we when Peter O’Toole suddenly came along? And what girl wouldn’t? In her dreams.

  Two hours after Roy had gone and I was thinking about Peter O’Toole. Or thinking about Lawrence of Arabia. Or not thinking about either of them, since I was thinking about that man in the fluttering white robes, who only ever existed in a film, didn’t he? I’ve seen pictures of the real Lawrence of Arabia and he looks like a little squinty man you wouldn’t want to spend any time with.

  But he was important, wasn’t he? He’d done something important. So had Peter O’Toole, if only to turn into Lawrence of Arabia. And so of course had Nelson Mandela. A state of importance, don’t we all want just a bit of it?

  It must be Christmas morning already, Het, no longer Christmas Eve. I’m so grateful to you. A couple of sisters, in our separate rooms, waiting for Father Christmas, in his red robes, who never existed either.

  All those crazy Englishmen—and Peter O’Toole wasn’t even English, was he?—who went off to foreign parts, to do crazy things, wear Arab costume or whatever, to make their mark on the world, take charge. All those crazy Englishmen in the midday sun.

  There I was on that bus, riding along Fairfax Street with Lawrence of Arabia. Now here I am in your spare bedroom, with the light on because I don’t want to lie in the dark, wondering who the hell was Old Harry.

  Well, I’m a lucky girl. Most widows get a few flowers, I get five parks.

  Roy never had blue eyes or golden hair or wore white robes, like some bloody angel. He died in one of those hospital nightie things, all peek-a-boo up the back. He had brown eyes and black hair, most of which had gone anyway. His little brother went before him. So did Nelson Mandela. And now he’s gone too, Hettie, he’s gone too, like his hair.

  AJAX

  WHEN I WAS a small boy we had a neighbour called Mr Wilkinson, who was a weirdo. He must be long gone now, but I’ve often wondered what became of him. I was his undoing.

  Let me stress that I never thought he was a weirdo, it wasn’t my word. It was an opinion I was made to have of him. I was too young to have opinions of my own, or so it was thought. I was just a small boy going to primary school. But I didn’t think Mr Wilkinson was weird. I thought he was interesting, I even admired him. I was driven into taking an opposite view.

  When I was with my mother and we met him in the street he’d always be well mannered. He’d doff his hat. He’d always wear a hat and be well dressed, often in a suit, even if the suit had seen better days. He’d ask courteously after my father—‘Mr Simmonds’—and he used words with a feeling for them, as if they were things you should treat appreciatively, not just mechanically, employing standard phrases. Maybe it was his enthusiastic use of language that first made my parents think he was weird.

  He looked entirely respectable. The dearest wish of all the grown-ups in our street was to be respectable and, by being respectable, to better themselves. So you’d think they might have regarded Mr Wilkinson as a model. It was obvious even to me that he was in some ways a cut above our street, he’d come down in the world to it. It was also obvious that he was what people called ‘educated’.

  I’d had it drummed into me by my parents from the earliest age that education was the most important thing in life and the key to everything, and I believed them. ‘Education’ was one of the first long words I learnt, and learning it was—rather magically—an example of the thing it proclaimed. At school I had no problem with teachers. I revered them. They were the purveyors of this most important thing. It struck me that Mr Wilkinson had the qualities of a teacher and perhaps had been one once. He seemed, in fact, even more educated than any of the teachers at my primary school, and for this reason too I couldn’t see why the whole street didn’t look up to him, instead of thinking he was weird.

  But Mr Wilkinson lived alone. That was one mark against him. And though he’d always be respectably dressed when you met him in the street, he was in the habit of engaging in physical exercises in his back garden in just his underpants. In all weathers, even in mid-January. Just his underpants.

  It wasn’t only exercising. There seemed to be a whole ritual medley of things that sometimes involved simply breathing—a vigorous expanding and deflating of his lungs—and sometimes involved not doing anything in particular except chanting. Chanting was the best word for it. You might sometimes have called it humming or even singing, but chanting was the word that got used. In his underpants.

  Anyone can do what they like in the privacy of their own home. This was something my parents would have firmly and fairly asserted. But they also said, about many things, that there were limits.

  Our street was like thousands of others built in the outer suburbs on vacant land just after the war, but for some reason it had been decided to erect a pair of semis, then a bungalow, then another pair of semis and so on. If you had a bungalow you only had the one floor, but you had the privilege of being detached. There wasn’t a great deal of space, but you could walk all the way round your own home. Even in your underpants.

  On the other side of us, in the adjoining semi, were the Hislops. They’d been there, as had my parents, since the houses were built, but were a slightly older generation. Their two boys—I never thought of them as ‘boys’—were old enough for one of them to have done National Service. I remember him in a beret, with an unexpected moustache and a kit bag. Their father ran a small printer’s. The boys had girlfriends, tinkered around with cars and got married. There was nothing particularly educated about the Hislops, they were even slightly rough-edged, but they were a family and normal.

  On the other side was Mr Wilkinson.

  There was a high wooden fence, with a bit of trellis on top, between ourselves and Mr Wilkinson, so the only way you could see him in his underpants was from our spare bedroom or my parents’ bedroom, both at the back upstairs. This put us in the position of spies, while all Mr Wilkinson was doing was—minding his own business. Nonetheless, my parents and particularly my mother didn’t want to live next door to someone who was even known to stand around in his underpants and chant. And you could hear the chanting sometimes without needing to look.

  Mr Wilkinson, I should say, was quite old. By that I mean that he seemed old to me. He must have been in his fifties. He had thinning, whitish hair, but had none of the stoopingness or vulnerability of old people. He was well built, even quite muscular (as could be seen) and, plainly, he kept himself fit. He was a good advert for physical education too.

  I only remember him as ‘Mr Wilkinson’. I can’t r
ecall ever knowing his first name, perhaps it was considered wrong to know it. Mr Hislop was also Tony. My parents christened me James, and gradually gave up the battle against ‘Jimmy’. When I was first introduced to Mr Wilkinson (before we knew anything of his habits) it was as James, but he immediately and perhaps only in a spirit of friendship called me Jimmy. I saw that this set my mother against him.

  Not only was there the fence and the trellis, but because the street was on a hill and Mr Wilkinson was above us, it was virtually impossible at ground level to see the back of his bungalow or into his garden. In the months when the trellis wasn’t overgrown you might just glimpse his white-haired but imposing head moving past, or even a pale pink shoulder. Which could make you wonder if he was wearing underpants this time or nothing at all.

  On warm days I used to like playing by the flower bed at the foot of the fence, near the back of the house. Playing really meant re-landscaping the flower bed according to my infant purposes, which naturally displeased my parents. But I remained so set upon this activity that they eventually allowed a (strictly limited) part of the bed to be used for it. Perhaps they thought it was good for my development and that I might one day become a civil engineer. In fact, though they didn’t know it, I was rearranging, in miniature, our street. I was in charge of every household in it.

  Imagine a region of pebble-dashing and occasional bursts of mock-Tudor, of rowans, laburnums, trim hedges, trim lawns and clumps of purple aubrietia. You have the picture. I think of it now with an odd fondness, but with an abiding, far-off sense of its own weirdness.

  One day, engaged in my flower-bed projects, I caught Mr Wilkinson watching me intently through the trellis and the tendrils of clematis. He must have been doing it for some time before I looked up, but, if I was surprised, I wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t spying on me (as we spied on him) so much as waiting to speak to me.