by Graham Swift
This was her short marriage to Albert. Most of it was separation, most of it wasn’t a marriage at all, most of it was marriage to a shirt. He was a railway clerk from Slough, but he had his notions. One day he’d be a station master. He was fussy about his shirts. He only liked to be called Albert, never Bert.
She was Lily Hobbs from Staines. She was eighteen and didn’t mind: either Lily or Lil.
I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a shirt . . .
Months went by. Then he came home. Because his previous leave had been cancelled he now had two weeks. Was it true, two whole weeks? And he was untouched—not a scratch, or so he wrote. Was it true? Was he being brave? Still she didn’t wash the shirt. Seeing was believing. She’d heard stories of telegrams arriving before men due home on leave. She had two choices anyway: to wash it, specially, for his arrival, or not to wash it—until. She chose the latter. Her big mistake.
If she’d washed the shirt, would everything have been all right?
I’m Bert . . .
But there he was on the doorstep. So, it had been just as well. There he was. Or there he wasn’t. Albert Tanner. He said, ‘Hello, Lily. Can I come in?’ Which was just like him, but not. She rather wished he’d said ‘Lil’. She rather wished he’d clapped a hand quickly to her behind, but he hadn’t.
He’d never mentioned the shell shock. That was news to her. Did it explain everything, and what was it anyway? Shell shock. Had he invented it? He said that he had it, like something catching, like measles. Was that why he hardly touched her? He said it was why he had the two weeks. He said he’d have to report every other day to a doctor, an MO, in London, who’d assess him to see if he was fit to return. Which was like saying—was he saying this?—that his two weeks, depending, might go on indefinitely.
In which case, God bless shell shock. In which case, Albert, be as shell-shocked as you can.
Was it all lies? Was he preparing for his desertion? Did he really have two weeks? There was something about him, standing there in his uniform. He didn’t look like a soldier, or even a railway clerk. He looked like a crafty door-to-door salesman. He looked like the sort of man women left at home had to watch out for. He looked up to no good. He looked—was this really the word?—like a criminal. Albert? A criminal?
Then he saw the shirt.
He wanted to know, he demanded to know why it was hanging there like that, his best white shirt, ‘in that filthy condition’. And before she could explain to him the several reasons (but couldn’t he guess?) he was explaining to her, he was shouting in her face that the reason why it was hanging there in that filthy condition was that she’d lent it to another man, she’d been letting another man wear it. And to prove the point he thrust his nostrils into the fabric, pushing it to his face, then let out a disgusted ‘Pah!’
None of this had she imagined. None of this in her wildest anticipations had she allowed for. He wouldn’t be untouched, he’d have a bit missing. An ear or something.
I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a . . .
Now that this was happening the sheer absurdity of it couldn’t smother her terror. Was he going to hit her? Albert? Hit her? For a moment she actually looked at the shirt and saw it, perhaps as he was seeing it, like some other man skulking there in the wardrobe, just as they were supposed to do in naughty stage plays.
She knew she had to stand her ground, keep steady, be reasonable. Yes, of course, of course: over there (but she’d never thought of this before) it would be the constant talk, what their women got up to back home. They’d tease and torture each other with it, they’d tease and torture themselves.
It was June, 1918. No one knew the war had only five months to run. If he hadn’t been a railway clerk but a railwayman—a signalman say—he might have been permanently excused, but he’d joined up anyway.
Yes, of course. She was eighteen. She walked down streets on her own, her skirt swung. But.
‘It’s your smell, Albert, no one but yours.’
Which was a lie, a half-lie, because the smell by then was mostly hers. But she could explain that, and wouldn’t the explanation, surely, please him? Wouldn’t it even be the clearest sign—it seemed ridiculous to have to grope for a word—of her loyalty?
But she never did explain. She saw his rage boil over. Was he really going to hit her?
‘Wash it!’ he said. ‘Wash it, right now!’
He’d barely got home. It was like an order, a bellowed military order. ‘Wash it!’ He was a corporal now, with a stripe on his shoulder. He’d gone away a private and come back a corporal. What had he done to become a corporal so quickly? She didn’t like the word corporal, she liked the word private. He’d gone away Albert too.
‘Wash it!’
She couldn’t disobey. He would have struck her. She washed it while he stood over her and watched her wash it. She put it through the mangle. Then later she ironed it while he stood over her too and watched her. She hadn’t imagined this. But she foolishly supposed that when this task was finished all might be restored. This was her punishment—her penalty, her humiliation—all thoroughly undeserved, but so be it, she would undergo it, if it would bring Albert back again. Perhaps, when the shirt was fully laundered, he’d break down, see the obvious truth, beg her forgiveness.
But it was she who had to face the less obvious truth that, yes, she really was washing away another man’s smell, and that other man was Albert.
‘There’s your shirt, Albert. All clean. Now, wear it. Please. Wear it for me.’
She foolishly imagined, only extending her delusions, that once he wore it, that would do the trick. It would mean, of course, having to remove his uniform. He didn’t seem to want to remove it, it was like his skin. It would mean having to have a good scrub in the tub. And among her many anticipations had been seeing herself assist him in doing just that.
What she really meant by ‘wear your shirt’ was make love. She didn’t have the way to say it directly, but might he not see that it was what she meant? Might he not see that ‘wear your shirt for me, Albert’ actually meant don’t wear it—yet. She would have gladly washed it for him anyway, having explained to him first those reasons—as if they were needed—and having, first of all . . .
If she could only get round now to saying that she’d gone to bed with it, she’d worn it in bed—wasn’t it obvious?—then wouldn’t the other thing follow? And she didn’t really mind, now, how it was done—gently, roughly, fumblingly, slowly, all too rushed and quickly. So long as.
But he stared at the clean shirt she held out to him and all that happened (though it was something) was that his anger seemed to leave him, even turn for a while into something like its opposite, into complete bewilderment, even panic, as if she were offering him something terrible. A white shirt, he was staring at a white shirt.
‘Please, Albert.’ What could she do that wasn’t wrong?
If he were to wear it, if they were to be to each other like man and wife. It was all ifs. It took nearly a week before he wore the shirt. As for the other thing, as for her own desires, she understood that what Duncan, her second husband, would one day call her ‘appetites’ had not only been thwarted, but neutralised, chilled.
How could she do it with Albert if Albert wasn’t Albert?
‘You have appetites, Lily.’ So Duncan had said, barely a fortnight before the Armistice. She couldn’t tell if he was confused or impressed. For all his fine words, he was just a boy, like Albert.
It took nearly a week before he wore the shirt, including the days when he had to report to the MO. If that’s what he did. Need it have taken so much time? Had he invented the MO just so, when he’d hardly got home, he could disappear every other day? How absurd, how humiliating—and somehow just as agonising—having waited for him all those months, to have to wait for him now to come home on a train from Paddington. Or wherever. Would he come home at all?
‘Hello, Albert.’
‘Hello, Lily. Can I come in?’
What w
as happening? He’d be in his uniform again, for the MO presumably. She had the first flicker of the thought that she wanted him back where he’d come from. Not Paddington, or wherever. Where he’d come from. Did he see it in her face?
‘I want you to wear your shirt, Albert.’
She didn’t give up. She had a plan. If he’d made her do what she’d done, then she’d make him do this, if it was the last thing she’d ask of him.
‘Listen, Albert, listen. I want you to wear your shirt. I want you to wear your shirt and to go with me this Sunday to Marlow. The weather will be fine. I want you to take me out on a boat on the river. Remember?’
To her surprise (she was ready for more coaxing) he said, ‘All right, Lil.’
‘Lil’. Was it something the MO had said?
He wore the shirt. He submitted. He became so woodenly docile that this, too, alarmed her. It was tit for tat, it was his punishment? But it was hardly that, an outing on the river. He was preparing to say he was sorry? I’m sorry, Lil, I’m so sorry for everything—his eyes, Albert’s pale brown eyes, trying to express the measure of what he was sorry for.
Or it was nothing of the sort, and he knew better? Yes, if she wanted, yes, if it meant so much to her. Yes, he’d fit into this foolish picture of hers. At least he didn’t explode and say: So this is what she’d done all this while, gone to Marlow, on the river, with other men.
They went to Marlow. They took the train. They changed at Maidenhead. She didn’t know if he still kept in his head the timetables he’d once so diligently kept there. Cookham, Bourne End . . . She didn’t know any more what he had in his head. He was wearing the shirt. She was wearing her long narrow skirt and carrying the little parasol that had once been her grandmother’s.
When one day she was a grandmother herself she’d find it impossible to explain to her teenage granddaughters, who wore next to nothing, that she’d once thought it the height of sexiness (though the word hadn’t existed) to loll back in a creaking boat, water lapping at its undersides, in a long white skirt, twirling a parasol, while a man—but the man was Albert—removed his jacket, rolled up his white sleeves and rowed you rhythmically upriver.
As impossible as to explain to them about Albert anyway, though that was her firm decision. Just the name and that he’d died in the war—the first one that is. She’d had this other husband once, before Grandpa Duncan. But what should they care? He hadn’t been their grandfather. Even her own daughters, Joyce and Margaret: he hadn’t been their father. No logic in saying that he might have been.
‘Albert,’ she would say, with a fragile smile. ‘He never liked to be called Bert.’
They took a boat. The water sparkled. Willows and swans. But she saw at once (if she didn’t know already), from the put-upon way he shoved off from the little jetty, that this journey by river was going nowhere, certainly not back into the past. He took it out on the oars, whatever it was he had in his head. He worked it out on the oars. She could loll and twiddle her parasol as much as she liked.
When they returned to the jetty she suddenly pictured Channel steamers, packed with reeking men. She hadn’t thought of it: a train, a boat. What could she do that wasn’t wrong? It was as if this brief Sunday excursion was like the whole brief non-event of his leave. An hour, two weeks, what was the difference? He wanted to go back. She saw this. Did he see her tears? He wanted to go back and be really dead.
His leave was actually truncated. Was it all his invention again, the invention of an invention? The doctor had said now, apparently, that his shell shock was all an act, he should snap out of it and return. But which was the act? He said, in a flat voice more appalling than rage, that there was nothing he could do about it. He’d been ‘found out’. Found out?
I’m Bert, Bert . . .
And—this was the worst part—she was actually glad. Had it shown in her face, like that other flicker? Would it have mattered? They were both glad.
And there was another level to her gladness. His too? She was glad—no chance of it in those last few days—that they’d never conceived a child.
‘Goodbye then, Lily. I’ll be seeing you.’
‘Goodbye, Albert.’
There was only the shirt again, hanging in the wardrobe, smelling now of a sweat worked up on the River Thames. But it wasn’t Albert’s sweat. It had no magic. It was a general dreadful now commonly manufactured sweat and, yes, it was like an infectious disease, it was like the measles, she seemed to feel it spreading from the wardrobe all through the house. She couldn’t stand the thing hanging there like that. On the other hand, she wasn’t going to wash it. Not now.
It took a week, a week of contending with the shirt. It was like a miniature war. Then she could bear it no longer. She lit a fire—in June—and flung it on. She knew what she was doing. She didn’t thrust it into the kitchen stove. She wanted to watch it burn.
It was the 25th of June. Two days later she got the telegram. ‘25th June. Of wounds.’ But it came as no surprise.
So she was a widow now. Was she the only one?
Three months later she met Duncan. Duncan Ross. Of all places, it was on Slough station. The train was late. They exchanged shy words. Then he actually paid for her to travel first class, as if it was his sudden flustered duty. He had to, you see, in his uniform. They sat together to Reading, where he had to change for Aldershot, and where she was going for an interview, as a maid.
He was in intelligence, which meant he couldn’t talk about it. So, how did she know? She didn’t say that, of course. She looked at him, at his brown moustache, perfectly demurely. She didn’t say, ‘So, it was a bit like shell shock then.’
And her own private joke to herself—something else she’d never say—was that he was in intelligence, but the intelligence was all hers. In intelligence, and based at home. Neither of them knew the war had just two months left. An officer, a newly made lieutenant, an educated child. And clearly—but never mind that, she’d cope with that—above her station.
But my people are well off, you know . . .
Dear Duncan. In thirty years’ time they’d have lived through another war and he’d have been safely in intelligence again—rising to major. And they’d have had Joyce and Margaret, their darling girls, who not only lived through that war too, but cut a fine swathe through it, having a high old time. Girls! You could have said this was part of her intelligence too. Though she could hardly have insisted on it from Duncan. Only girls, please. But perhaps because she wanted it so much, it was what she got. Duncan obliged. And girls for grandchildren too.
It was agreed, on the platform at Reading, that they’d meet again. Going for the interview, she’d thought, was a little like Albert going to see the MO. Duncan and Lily . . . It had a ring, like the name of a superior grocer’s. They managed in due course to scrape a whole day together, in Maidenhead, by the river. It was meeting halfway.
Maidenhead! Well, it was where her new life began, her second one, her real one.
‘You have appetites, Lily.’
But she’d never tell even Duncan, who had the good sense—the intelligence—not to probe for details. Not even the date. Often there wasn’t any date. Often there wasn’t anything.
The 25th of June: she’d have to live through it every year.
Just the bare facts: she’d been married before, then widowed. She wasn’t the only one. It had all taken less than a year. His name was Albert. Just the little extra morsel, the gently smiling decoy: ‘Always Albert. He never liked to be called Bert.’
KNIFE
HE STOOD BY the opened kitchen drawer. It was a warm April afternoon. He’d come home from school meaning to take the knife at some point before the following morning and hadn’t thought that his best chance might be straight away. The clock on the microwave said 4.25. His mother was in her bedroom with her boyfriend Wes. He could hear them, they were loud enough. Boyfriend wasn’t really the right word, but it was a word that would do. Either they hadn’t heard him and didn
’t know he was there, or they’d heard him and didn’t care. By the sink were the scattered cartons they’d been eating from. They’d been eating KFCs and fries with ketchup, just like kids who’d come home from school themselves.
They could do it without making a noise, possibly. But he understood that the noises went with doing it. He’d been in this situation before, of having to be around and just listen, but not in the situation of taking the knife.
The brothers had told him that he should get a knife. He knew what they were saying. If you want to move on to the next stage, if you want to stay with us. So he’d thought at once of the kitchen drawer. It was the easiest way, the simplest way. ‘Here is a knife.’ He wasn’t going to say that it was really his mum’s knife. It didn’t matter, it was a knife.
But perhaps it did matter. Perhaps it mattered very much that it was his mum’s knife.
The noises from the other room only made it easier to take it. They were almost like a permission. So why should he hesitate? Why shouldn’t he just go ahead? He understood that at this moment, though he was only twelve, he had about as much power in the world as he would ever have. He understood it almost painfully now. At twelve you could not be held responsible, even if you were. To everything you could say: So? So what are you going to do about it? And at twelve you were still small enough not to be picked on. People would think twice.
The brothers knew this. That’s why it was worth their while to take on twelve-year-olds, to string them along and train them up, like dogs. But then there’d come the moment when they’d say, ‘Do you really want to be one of us?’
He knew—he knew it especially now—that this place wasn’t his home. If he belonged anywhere now it was with the brothers. Only with them could he have any respect. If you had nothing else, then you had to have respect.
His mother might have said to Wes, ‘No, not now. Danny will be back from school any second.’ But then just caved in and not cared.