Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  We sip our tea, gazing at the white grandstand. The car we sit in has been scrupulously scoured for any sign or scent of a feminine presence. Jenny’s comb, long hairs in its teeth, peeping from under the passenger seat. I wouldn’t dare and couldn’t bear, on this of all days (though, God knows, she’ll have to know some time), to tell Marion that, actually, I am happy. That in spite of everything (and at my age!) I am actually –

  I swallow my tea carefully, like a guilty husband. You won’t blame me, Mrs Evans, laugh at me? Refuse to meet me again?

  On Epsom Downs people exercise dogs, and fly kites and model aeroplanes. And there are the horses. He liked horses. Picked the winners. Groomed my daughter’s horse. Chauffeur and stableman.

  Marion used to invite me to stay for dinner. But after the third or fourth time, because I always said no, she stopped asking. I drive her home. Marion is sixty-eight, but I always feel vastly her junior. Her semi-detached in Epsom is trim, immaculate, lovingly cared for. I’ve looked at many things that are difficult to look at, but when I leave and she stands at the front door, brushing hair from her forehead, upright, unsmiling, it breaks me up. My chest starts to heave.

  I go to Dad’s grave too. It’s on the way back, and I deliberately leave it till the evening, so I won’t stumble upon anyone. Upon Frank perhaps, piously making a personal visit. The Surrey churchyard, the lych-gate and yew trees always depress me. What did they put in that coffin? And I’m troubled by the litter of tributes that, even after ten years, festoons the grave itself. The biggest wreath, as always, from BMC. Another from his regiment (that was over sixty years ago). Others from the hospitals in Guildford and Chiswick (left them several grand apiece), from old colleagues and pals in the M.O.D. and the Royal Ordnance. One, with a fulsome message, from the Conservative Club. Flowers from the parish and local big-wigs. Even an offering from the primary school.

  The blast was big enough. The police concluded that Ray must have shut the passenger door, got back into the driver’s seat and shut his own door before the bomb, a crude device operated by simple pressure, was detonated by some shifting of Dad in his seat. Death instantaneous. The shut doors acted to contain but also to intensify the shock. The explosion not only totally destroyed a Daimler New Sovereign but gouged a crater in the gravel drive, shattered every window in the front of the house – in several cases damaging irreparably the Queen Anne window frames and lacerating the furniture inside – gashed the brickwork and stucco, blew in the front door, and deafened the other three occupants of the house on that Monday morning: namely Mrs Keane, Dad’s housekeeper, Sophie Beech, his grand-daughter, and Harry, his son.

  I stand for a few moments by the grave, hands in my pockets. I won’t be tricked. How do we make such decisions? How do we decide that one life matters and another doesn’t? How do we solemnize one death and ignore a thousand others?

  Usually, after leaving the churchyard, I take the minor road past Hyfield. Past the Six Bells pub, the cricket ground. I slow down where the road skirts the garden wall and the entrance. There are solid metal gates, replacing the former wrought-iron ones which used to give a glimpse of the house. The dog warnings. And perched in discreet but strategic places above the wall and the barbed wire, the cameras.

  You could say I put you there, Frank. So if you feel like a prisoner too, you can blame me. But perhaps it doesn’t feel like a prison, perhaps it just feels like a well-guarded home. And it’s where you always wanted to be. For thirty-odd years you were my alibi, my decoy. You were part of my scheme, though you probably assumed – I know you assumed – I was part of yours. No, unlike Ray Evans, I was never the innocent victim. No saint. Just your usual bastard. A bad father and, some people would say, a bad son. But I was a good husband for seven years to Anna. And if she were still alive I might be sitting where you are now. I might never have become Harry Beech the photo-journalist, the ex-photo-journalist. I might have done all that: become what you are, what Dad was. Just for her sake. Just for simple, selfish love’s old sake. So perhaps you should thank me.

  Sophie

  But doesn’t it get to you, Doctor K? Other people’s minds. Other people’s mess. How do you feel at the end of the day? Kind of dirty? Kind of tainted? Or what do you do? Put your notes away. Stretch your arms and crack your knuckles. Cut off. Fix a drink maybe and make some calls. Look out from your window over the chasm of 59th Street.

  Do you think of me when I’m not with you? Do you have thoughts?

  Okay, so, like you tell me, I’m not so dumb. I know I’m just one of many. I’m ‘File under “C” for Carmichael’. Not ‘S’ for Sophie. This fast, promiscuous life you lead. A gigolo of the psyche. Rule number one: make each one of them feel special, make each one of them feel they’re the only one. (A subtle and mature gigolo, with silvery temples and a dry, seasoned style. Old enough to be my – )

  ‘Let’s talk about you, Doctor K.’

  ‘Oh no, Sophie.’

  A shake of the head, a wag of the finger, a patient smile. Like a gentle, kindly schoolmaster. Rule number two. ‘You do the talking, Sophie. I’ll ask the questions. Yes, it’s a tough deal, isn’t it? You have the work to do, and I’m the one who gets paid. But isn’t it nice to have someone who’ll listen, who’s there to listen? You don’t need to know about me. Just think of me as a hired listener. Just think of me as two ears and a notebook.’

  I bet you give the same patter to all the girls. Make the same wisecracks. I bet you take them all for walks in the Park, buy them tea and let them slip their hands through your own well-crooked, well-tailored arm.

  ‘If Central Park is the Garden of Eden, Sophie, it is surrounded by the Fall of Manhattan.’

  (A leather-bound notebook. And two very cute ears.)

  What do I know about you? You’re married? Have kids? You’re divorced? You like little girls? Or muscular young men?

  But maybe you’re right. If I knew only a little more about you maybe I wouldn’t think of you as Mister Calm, as Mister Wonderful, as Mister Well-adjusted and Oh-so-civilized, gazing out with your Martini, over this most anxious city on earth.

  Look at these men in their fifties, jogging, red-faced, round the Park. They look so ill, they look so desperate. They look so in need of punishment and penance. Not you, eh?

  You have it both ways. You see and you’re not seen. You take a good long peek, but you remain immune.

  (But don’t you think about me, just a bit?)

  What you never know will never hurt you. Is that it? And what you know, you can’t ever unknow. Though you can have a damn good try. But when you try to remember what it was like long, long ago, you can’t ever do it without knowing the things you were going to find out later, without seeing yourself like those people in dreams you try to call out to and warn, and who never hear you.

  Poor Tim, poor Paul. My poor dear darlings.

  We should turn round now? Stroll back? It’s nearly four o’clock. Hey, if we’re lucky we’ll catch the chimes and the dancing animals on the Delacorte Clock.

  And you know what scares me more than anything? That it won’t make any difference, that it won’t have any effect. Look at them, watching the TV, while I watch them, a bringer of bad news, poised in the doorway. Cookies and milk. My angels. They’re sipping in the pictures. Lapping up the universe. Who needs a mother any more?

  You know, when Mum died I just didn’t believe it. Can you remember what it was like (okay, so I’m asking questions) before you really knew about death? I was five years old. She went off one day and didn’t come back. But I always thought she would have to come back some day. I don’t know how long it was before I really understood she was never coming back. And, you know, when Harry started going off for months on end, when he left me and Grandad and went off to do his thing with the world, to be where it was happening, I used to think that what he was doing was looking for Mum. And I used to blame him – have you got this, are you writing this down? – because he never found her.

 
Harry

  I was born on March 27th, 1918, and I never knew my mother, because on that same day (can it have been so long ago?), at the very same hour, she died.

  They say that if there has to be a choice, it is the doctor’s duty to save the child before the mother. In certain situations life is tradeable, expendable. It is the field surgeon’s duty to repair the lightly wounded before the probable fatalities. Had the choice been my father’s, I know, without doubt, how he would have chosen. He would have wanted my mother to live. I don’t blame him. The choice would have been only natural. He would never have known or even seen me, but he would have seen my mother again. But at the time of my birth my father was not in a position to choose. He was far away, in another country and, as it happened, in another of those situations where life was expendable.

  He made, all the same, another choice. (He made two choices, though half a century went by before I knew about that other, big choice, that failed.) He might have loved me with a double, a compound love. He chose instead to blame me, to see me as the instrument of his wife’s death. And had I known this as a small boy, had I known it even as an ignorant baby, I think I would have gladly affirmed that I wished I could have made that very first choice in my mother’s favour, and so restored her to him. A great many things would then have been different (though I would have known nothing about them). But I was not in a position of choice.

  On my birthday he would hand over some present and I would receive it like an emblem of guilt. In this way he once gave me a camera. Then he would disappear for the rest of the day.

  It took me years to work all this out. But I never worked off the blame. I never thought, though I learned to scorn him just as he scorned me, that I deserved anything other than a father who, if he inspired esteem and even ondness in others, was as tender to me as a statue. Even when he held Sophie for the very first time – we had been father and son then for thirty years – and I saw him smile and his eyes moisten, I didn’t think: You old bastard, so now you can afford to relent, to be reconciled, to let it all come out. I thought: Thank God, I have made Dad melt. I have paid my debt.

  And I truly believe he was glad when Anna died. Because it was only then that we started, really, to be friends. As if I hadn’t paid the debt, not till then. Oh no, not in full.

  You too, Harry. Now you know what it’s like.

  I can see them now, sitting on the wicker chairs on the lawn at Hyfield. He is making her laugh and she is making him laugh. She used to call him the ‘perfect gentleman’. She used to call him in Greek her ‘palikári’. It is, let’s say, August ’53, and she has only three months to live. I am walking across the lawn from the house and seeing all this as if I have just chanced, inadvertently, on the scene. When I appear she checks her laughter momentarily, as if I am intruding. Sophie is lying, stomach down, on the grass, looking at a book. She is five years old. Anna is wearing a sky-blue summer dress with thin shoulder-straps. She carries on laughing and Sophie looks up and smiles, and I can tell that she knows her mother is beautiful.

  When Sophie was born a strange thing happened. Though it’s not really strange at all. It must be one of the commonest experiences. But I had never imagined what it was like to be a parent. I became afraid. I had never reckoned on this fear. In the most easy and safe domains of playtime, bathtime and bedtime, I became afraid. I was always thinking that at any moment, because of some slight inattention, she might die – fall, suffocate, be knocked down, her little body smashed. And once indeed it very nearly happened, she nearly drowned.

  I still maintain she was drowning.

  I never expected such fear and such terrible, crushing love. When I held her in my arms I never wanted to let go, because of the risks. It was as though only my arms were protecting Sophie from the world. Or rather that I was making a separate world within the circle of my arms. When I pressed my face against the white blankets she was wrapped in I would remember the valley in Switzerland where Anna and I spent our hasty honeymoon, the pure air, the white drapery of the mountains which only two years before had been a real curtain against the world. ‘Meine Frau ist Griechin.’ ‘Ja, eine Göttin, nein?’ And I would think, on our weekend visits to Hyfield: What does it matter? What does it matter? I will say the word to Dad, and get the slap on the back that has been thwarted for thirty years, the stiff drink thrust into my hand. And who, anyway, can say they have a choice over their life?

  Okay, Dad, count me in.

  To protect Sophie. For Sophie’s sake. And Anna’s.

  It was absurd, that terror that Sophie might die. In Nuremberg, where I met Anna, they were itemizing the deaths of millions. As if she were especially prone, as if she alone were up on some thin high-wire of mortality. But how often did I utter that familiar, silent prayer: If someone must die, let it be somebody else, let it be some other little girl, not Sophie. Or even: If someone must die, let it be me, not her.

  Life is tradeable, expendable.

  And the irony was that it wasn’t Sophie who died. It was Anna. She died on Mount Olympus. Ridiculous or sublime? And in her case there was never a choice between mother and child. Because when she died she was six weeks pregnant.

  She was going to see her Uncle Spiro, whom she hadn’t seen for seven years and who was dying in a hospital in Salonika. But she died before he did, because her plane hit a thunderstorm, and then a mountain.

  And I never wished – So help me, I never, not for one moment, wished –

  Sophie

  ‘Why do you call him “Harry”?’

  ‘Because that’s his name. Harry Beech. Haven’t you heard of Harry Beech? The famous Harry Beech? Because I stopped calling him “Dad”. Because the last time I saw him I called him “Harry” for the first time to his face. Now when I think of him, it’s “Harry”.’

  ‘You think of him much?’

  ‘No. And I don’t think much of him! Ha ha!’

  ‘When was that – the last time you saw him?’

  ‘May 3rd, 1972. About six o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘How so exact?’

  ‘Because that was the day they put Grandad in the ground.’

  ‘Put him in the ground?’

  ‘You bury a body. There were only little bits of Grandad.’

  ‘Sophie, I’d like you to tell me something. When you think of your father what’s the first word that comes into your head?’

  ‘Oh good, so we’re going to play games! So shrinks really ask those questions? Let me see now. How about: “Stranger”? No? Too neat? Did I have too much time to think? How about: “Cunt”?’

  ‘And when you think of your grandfather?’

  ‘ “Home”. “Little bits”. Ask me another.’

  ‘Can you picture him?’

  ‘Grandad?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Okay – Harry.’

  ‘This couch is really comfy. Do you get your men clients to lie on it, or just the women?’

  ‘Can you picture him?’

  ‘You mean, what he looks like? I don’t know. I guess he’s much the same. He was always – what’s the word? – well-preserved.’

  ‘But you don’t think of him much?’

  ‘Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that the way?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sophie, you tell me. Do you know what he’s doing now?’

  ‘Nope. He’s not a news photographer, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Do you love your father, Sophie?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘So, how come he stopped being a photographer?’

  Harry

  Michael comes to pick us up at six. It’s the light. Long shadows. You need the morning or the evening light. When he arrives he still gives his policeman’s rat-a-tat knock and when he ducks through the cottage door he does so with the slightly guarded air of the solidly married man entering a newly built love-nest. He winks at Jenny as he might at the comely girl-friend of one of his teenage sons. Six
weeks ago I phoned him and said, Can we take four in the plane? – Jenny wants to come too. He said, Okay, no problem, no extra charge. He said, Would she meet us there? And I said, No, she’d be here at the cottage, with me. There was a pause. Then he said, Okay.

  We are dressed and waiting, Jenny in her blue sweater and jeans. She sits at the table while I make toast. She holds her mug in both hands, elbows on the table, and dips her face towards it, eyes peering at me over the rim. We haven’t told anyone. Not yet.

  We drive to the airfield. The hills of Wiltshire, smoky and silvery in the early light, roll by. Rabbits sprint for cover as we pass. And I know it’s absurd, a descent into second schoolboyhood – in a man of my age and (should I say it?) experience – but I relish this feeling of the dawn mission: the ride to the airfield, the nip in the air, the mugs of hot tea.

  Jenny sits in the front with Michael. I sit in the back with the cameras. Michael is humanized, vitalized by machines. Seated at the controls of an aircraft, a car, he becomes natural, buoyant, fluent. Jenny and he are talking, chuckling, almost as if I am not there, and I don’t listen to what they are saying. The back of Jenny’s head, the curve of her cheek as she looks towards Michael, enthral me. When she turns fully to catch my glance and smile, secret pods of joy burst inside me.

  There were jokes, of the usual kind, I suppose, between Michael and Peter about me and my ‘assistant’. It went, perhaps, with my supposedly adventurous past. Unspoken estimations. So how many girls, Harry, in foreign cities, foreign beds? But I know and Michael knows it’s not really like that. Both he and Peter are half in love with her themselves. And quite right too. She’s beautiful. She’s incredible. She’s out of this world.