Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  We called him Tony. Get it? Tony the pony.

  You see, I was spoilt. I was a spoilt little brat. I was brought up like a princess in a palace and had everything I could ask for. Save, of course, a mother – and a father.

  Palace? But you won’t quibble over a Queen Anne house with oak panelling and a gravel drive and a lawn with two cedar trees, and a walled garden with a pond and a yew-tree walk and an orchard and paddock, and a stable and stable yard, no longer used as such when Grandad became their owner, but reconverted just before my tenth birthday to accommodate a pony and, three years later, a horse. Called Hadrian. That’s palace enough when you’re ten years old and when – with the addition of a housekeeper, a chauffeur-cum-valet and the part-time presence of two gardeners – only you and your grandfather have the run of it.

  Hyfield House, built in 1709 by Nicholas Hyde, Gent. Let’s face it, Doctor K, you can’t get that sort of thing over here. The genuine, historical, English thing. You know, Joe and I used to joke that if Hyfield ever really became ours, we wouldn’t have to look any further. It would just be the start. Some glossy advertising in the right places. One- or two-week rentals to rich and impressible Americans. The real, authentic, country-house experience.

  Just a joke, of course. I said to Joe, You’re not hiring out my Hyfield, my childhood. Over my dead body.

  Over Grandad’s dead body! Ha ha! But then, I guess they’d pay more, wouldn’t they? If they knew it was the former residence of Robert Beech, V.C., hero and true British gentleman. Some gory history. A ghost. And this is the very spot where …

  Just a joke. We’d never have thought then that that was actually what Joe would be doing one day. Castles and manor houses. Up-market vacations. Be a squire or a laird. Take a break from the twentieth century.

  Yet if you want to know, that’s how I used to think of Hyfield once. I had this thing about the past. It used to be a good refuge, once, the past. I used to clop across the stable yard on Tony, and later on Hadrian, and make-believe it was the reign of Queen Anne. I used to imagine I was Mrs Hyde, wife of Nicholas Hyde. Mistress of the manor.

  Maybe that’s how I should begin. When I tell the boys. If I tell the boys. Let’s go right back to the very start, shall we? Once upon a time, in the reign of good Queen Anne … Can you picture it? The world is safe and small – it only stretches to the next hill! The sky is blue – of course it’s blue! But this is pure, clear eighteenth-century blue, and the white clouds that float across it aren’t just clouds, they are time passing very slowly, the way time once used to pass. The apples are ripening in the orchard, the stooks are standing in the field. In the yew-walk, arm in arm, Mr and Mrs Hyde (but let’s call them Beech) are strolling, she in her hooped dress and bonnet, he in his cocked hat and breeches. And all is as it should be …

  I can’t think what it’s like now. With Frank there. They’ll have patched up the frontage and the porch. All weathered in – no trace perhaps.

  The last time I saw it as it was, the last time I saw that old world, my past, was that Sunday, that very last Sunday. And I had actually come to say I didn’t want it. Chose a good time, didn’t I? I was quite sure – now the future was fixed: Joe, me, New York – that I didn’t want it. But by then it was almost understood between Grandad and me, almost expected, part of our little scheme of renunciation; and the real reason I was there that morning was to tell him something else about my future: that I was pregnant.

  I wanted him to be the first to know. Got that? After Joe, I mean. Though I happened to know full well that Harry was, for once, in London right then, and it would – it should – have been the simplest thing to pick up the phone and say, Hi Dad, it’s me. Guess what?

  Shit! The whole world got to know! In less than forty-eight hours the whole world could read – it made such good copy – that Sophie Beech was pregnant. And had only just –

  And, yes, I thought it often afterwards: What had been the point? What had been the goddam point of telling him about the baby he was never going to see? Which turned out anyway to be two not one. But now I think: No, it’s the one thing I’m glad of. That at least he knew.

  I said: ‘I’m going to make you a great-grandfather.’

  It would have to have been a perfect spring morning. Warm enough to sit outside and everything suddenly in leaf. As if the whole place were saying: Are you sure? Don’t you want to think twice? In no time he had a bottle of champagne and two glasses on that little table out on the terrace. And I guess we were halfway through it before that other subject came up. I said, ‘Perhaps now’s the time –’ And he said, ‘I know.’ But I wanted to say it. I said, ‘It’s all right. I don’t want it. You know that. We know that. None of it.’ And he said, ‘Thank God.’ And let out a great rough chuckle of relief which sent the pigeons flapping off the orchard wall. ‘So Frank gets the lot. Let him have it. All of it. Let the company have it.’ He took a gulp of champagne. Then he said, ‘Now I’ve got something to tell you, Sophie. I’m getting out. Not just saying it this time. I’m actually at long last, officially, finally going to retire. Shall we drink to that too?’

  Okay, Doctor K – so we should believe in fate? That kind of fate? And what was the truth? That he was seventy-three years old and BMC had been his life anyway? Or that it was a fifty-years-and-more pretence and he was just about to be a real man again?

  I think of that photo. His face in that photo.

  He poured the last of the champagne. Using his metal arm. A trick he liked. Look at my latest toy. I make a good robot, don’t I?

  ‘Have you told Harry?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He smiled. This was how it was between us when we talked about Harry.

  ‘Well, you’ll have a chance to tell him tonight. He’ll be here. You know – just passing through. Between planes. Why don’t you stay here tonight?’

  ‘I have to get back.’

  ‘What’s Joe doing?’

  ‘He’s with the American people.’

  ‘So – all the more reason. Give him a call. Look, if you like, I’ll pretend, for Harry’s sake, that you haven’t told me either.’

  Then he said: ‘I’ll miss you in the States.’

  But he wouldn’t, would he?

  I stayed. I told Harry. I didn’t say: ‘I’m going to make you a grandfather.’ I just said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ And do you know what his very first reaction was to those words – the very first, brief look in his eyes? I’d swear it was alarm, I’d swear it was something almost like fright. He was passing through, all right. His bags and cameras with him. Catching a plane the next morning. And do you know where he was going? Belfast. Jesus Christ! Belfast!

  Grandad went through his little act. Fetched a fresh bottle of champagne – as if we hadn’t been drinking the stuff all afternoon. But I guess he was happy then, too. I guess he was as happy as he was ever likely to be.

  And there we were. All three Beeches, in the family house. Grandfather, father and daughter. Even two little unborn semi-Beeches, pretending to be one. That was the night of 23rd April, 1972. Springtime in England – St George’s day! And under the back seat of the Daimler there was a bomb, and nobody knew.

  Harry

  But he really died three times. He really had three turns with death. The second was in ’45, nearly thirty years after the first, and maybe it was the worst – and the best – of the three. The worst, because he knew, or thought he knew, what was happening: he was lying there on his back with death hovering over him and somewhere in the space he could see, too, whatever there had been of his life. And the best, because, after a certain point at least, he knew he wasn’t really going to die. It was the idea that was special. Since that first time, I think, he never cared two hoots about the fact. But he had time, now, to think of the idea. And it was the idea that gave him power. It was a trump card which he played for all it was worth.

  Compassionate leave! Isn’t that the most grotesque of notions? You are up in the night sk
y, watching cities burn, planes and men get ripped, then your father has a heart attack and you get leave for compassion. The telegram reached me at two in the afternoon and the leave followed almost immediately. All that evening on the train down to London I was working hard at the compassion.

  And he must have been working on the big death-bed scene. He was only forty-six, which was perhaps sure enough guarantee that he would pull through. But I had never thought of him as anything other than an old man, an old man who’d become an old man some time around the time of my birth. So it never occurred to me to treat the occasion as an extreme sort of hoax.

  He lay propped against the pillows, in a private room, surrounded by the apparatus that they surrounded such patients with then. He was asleep. Or at least, his eyes were closed and his chest was heaving. I remember that his metal arm lay, detached, beside him on the bedside table. Like the sword of a dying knight. Either he or the hospital had decided that he should die without his armour. But it lay there, pathetically, beside him. And I remember feeling a stab of pity for that bereft arm that I did not feel for my father.

  I said, ‘Dad?’ And he opened his eyes and recognized me, and said, ‘It’s you.’ We looked at each other. Then he said, ‘I haven’t much time.’ And when I heard those absurd words, like something out of a cheap play, I knew he wasn’t really going to die.

  He didn’t want compassion and he didn’t want forgiveness. What he wanted was sworn promises. He wanted me to swear that I would take over at BMC. That when he was gone and the Air Force released me, I would fill his place. I said, as quietly as I could, that we had been through all this before. Besides, I knew now what I did want to do – the last few weeks had confirmed it: I wanted to be a photographer. I didn’t say witness, observer, neutral party, floating pair of eyes. He almost screamed at me: Photographer! And then he switched, as I knew he would, on to the loyalty and ingratitude tack. How it had been a family firm, a Beech firm, for seventy years etc., how he’d put his all into it etc. etc., and why did I think he was lying there stricken by a heart attack, if it wasn’t from overwork, from sheer damn hard work, six relentless years of wartime production. Breaking all records.

  I watched his lips working, his jaw held up, his Adam’s apple moving up and down, knowing he knew that I knew that to cross him, to provoke him, under these circumstances, was effectively forbidden. I kept my voice as low as possible and said that whatever else there might be between us, there was a matter now of principle. I had seen a little of what bombs did, I didn’t think I wanted to spend my life making them. And he laughed at that, laughed out loud at that, and said how did I imagine we had won the war except by dropping bombs? Or did I think we shouldn’t have won it! And he called that kind of thinking ‘gutless’. Gutless.

  The word seemed to leave him without breath. He just lay there, exhausted and helpless, only his eyes burning ferociously. Then he said those extraordinary words, so extraordinary that if they hadn’t been spoken so softly, so deliberately, I would have laughed out loud too. He said, ‘I love my country.’ And again: ‘I love my country.’

  I don’t know if he really did believe at that moment that his time was up. Or whether it was all part of the tableau he was staging. The old campaigner’s fighting farewell. But just for an instant I thought his eyes were no longer fierce. They were saying: Harry, get me out of this, get me out of this person. As if his lips had been trying to utter something else, but what came out, with such perverse, measured sincerity, was ‘I love my country’.

  I edged closer. I felt I should take his hand. I said quietly, ‘It’s all right.’ And as soon as he heard this, the fierceness came back, quick as lightning. ‘So do you promise?’ he said. ‘Do you promise?’

  I said, ‘Don’t force me, Dad. Don’t blackmail me.’

  He didn’t die, of course. The old bastard lived on, with occasional maintenance work on his heart, till he was seventy-three. And even then –

  He said, ‘If you walk out of this room it’ll be the last time you see me. And if you walk out of this room without giving me your promise, you won’t get a thing. Not a damn thing. Do you hear? How much do you think a photographer makes? Eh? Eh?’

  And I thought: He can’t actually change it. He can’t come out of it, cast it aside. Not even now. Not even when – He’s got to go through with it, sound off like some demented Victorian Papa. He’s played the part so long he doesn’t know any more if it’s him or not. I knew I was going to walk out of that room.

  My God! My God, Jenny! My God, Sophie! How terrible to die, how terrible to be dying and not to know, at the end of it all, what is true or false.

  Sophie

  A toy gun in a Brooklyn yard. A toy gun in the land of guns. They won’t ever forget that day, will they, Doctor K? One of them brings home a toy gun – and it’s only a borrowed toy gun – and they’re playing shoot-outs in the backyard, and their mother who’s watching through the kitchen window suddenly flips, she goes right off her head.

  Two things I’ve never allowed in the house. Toy guns (six-shooters, rifles, machine-guns or any form of toy weaponry). And cameras.

  Joe said we shouldn’t have a thing about it. Maybe having a thing about it was worse. Because it was only natural for kids to play fight-games, and maybe it was actually better, getting it all out in a game, in harmless fun. And in any case, what was to stop them simply putting two fingers together and pointing – ‘using their imagination’ he called it! – and making those Krrrsh! Kpow! noises? And I said, well that was all very well and, yes, if every man who’d ever played with a toy gun actually progressed to the real thing, then the world would be a far sight bloodier than it is. But it didn’t mean every kid should have one. And if people say, well a toy is a toy, pretend is pretend and real is real, then what about those kids you see on the news with little old hard faces, only eleven or twelve but they’re dressed up in combat gear and they’re toting real machine-guns around the way other kids tote baseball bats. And what about this story – have you heard it? – it’s a true story. A man goes into a store and points a gun at the store-keeper and the store-keeper hands over all the cash he has. Then, befor he makes off, the man squirts water from the gun into the store-keeper’s face. Ha ha! he says, Not real, you see! But the store-keeper dies from a real enough heart attack.

  Cameras, though. That’s more complicated, isn’t it? When every true American child, brought up within a certain income bracket, is directing their first home movie at least by the age of fourteen. Watch them in front of the TV. Lifting the cookies to their mouths without even moving their eyes. You got something to tell us, Mom? To explain? What, now? While we’re watching –

  Dear Doctor K, you say such wise, such clever things. I wish I could say such things. Like: ‘Life is a tug of war between memory and forgetting.’ Like: ‘What you are afraid of, Sophie, is to leave the cocoon of surrogate amnesia provided by your children’s ignorance.’ Wow! And fuck you too. You used to put your cool, papery palm on my hot forehead, as if you could draw out the trouble with just a lift of your hand …

  To remember – that can be bad, Sophie. And to forget – that can be bad too. Isn’t that the problem? Either way, you’re in a mess. But the answer to the problem is to learn how to tell. It’s telling that reconciles memory and forgetting. Sophie, let us try a little experiment. Let us suppose that I am that part of you which wants to forget: yet which, deep down, would really like to hear what another part of you is longing to tell. Or – one step further – let us suppose that I am your two twin boys, Tim and Paul, your two dear boys who are waiting to hear the story that you know one day you must tell them. You have been putting it off and putting it off, and so long as they ask no questions, so long as they remain in happy ignorance, it is as though you too can believe that certain things never happened.

  Dear Doctor Klein, I would happily lie back on that couch of yours, in that cocoon of yours above 59th Street, and let you tell me a story. Hush little baby. A bedti
me story …

  Once upon a time in the reign …

  My darling Tim and Paul. I want to thank you for nine years of Safety. That’s what I gave myself – eight, nine, maybe ten years. When you grow up, my darlings, you’ll find out that at the beginning there were the years without any memory at all. And then even when memory began, there were the years without wanting or caring specially to know. Your gift to your mother. She needed a rest from memory.

  I knew one day my time would be up. I thought one day you must just say: Tell us about England, tell us about where we come from. (Like: Tell us about the facts of life.) Or one day you’d find somewhere a copy of Aftermaths or Photos of a Decade (you won’t find a copy in the house). And you’d say: Did Harry really take these pictures? Hey, tell us about Harry. (Harry is your grandfather, my angels.) Faces frightened? Agog? Or just mildly curious? Pictures like that are just two-a-penny now, aren’t they?

  I never thought my time would come up like it did. A toy gun.

  And a letter.

  Dear boys. I don’t allow cameras in the house, but your mother still takes her mental photographs, still puts on mental film her aides-mémoire of your ignorant, growing years. As now, through the kitchen window, where in the fading Brooklyn evening you are playing with your father (no gun this time) in the yard. A rough and ready game of soccer (in deference to Joe who still follows the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur). Tim and Paul. Dark shocks of hair, dark eyes. Like your mother’s, and her mother’s. It was a kind of recompense perhaps, nature’s double peace-offering for the agonies of that spring and summer: twins. Twins! And it was only because you were twins that I didn’t, in the end, call either of you what I would certainly have called you if you’d only been one: Robert.

  Joe, gallantly defending the apple-tree goal-mouth. Fair hair, touched with grey. Paler skinned than his sons and reddening more quickly. Handsome about the eyes still, and still sometimes, as now when he’s locked in this boys’ game, boyish and mobile around the mouth. It used to please me once, to excite me, that combination. It was so good to meet a man who simply didn’t have the knack of setting his mouth and jaw in that grave, grim, piously masculine way. Who could actually say and mean it, with never an inch of tongue in his cheek: This is a good time to be born in, this is the age of Fun! As if he would always be young. As if despite all his efforts to be the slick, shrewd man-of-the-world, innocence would perversely win and he would never lose the conviction that he had been set down in some vast playground.