Swan River

by David Reynolds

  At the lock, leaning on one of the beams, staring down at the water, I said, ‘What I really want to know is what Uncle George thinks – thought, rather – I’ll find in Swan River.’

  ‘We. I’m coming too. I am, really.’

  ‘And when are we going to go?’

  She looked up at the sky. ‘When we’re eighteen, nineteen, something like that… When we’ve saved some money.’

  This meant seven or eight years’ time, and it seemed like for ever. But we solemnly agreed that we would go there together as soon as we had enough money after we left school. Deborah said that this seemed like a Famous Five adventure. To me ‘Two Go to Swan River’ was more real than a story in a book or our other wild schemes, because I believed that, one day, it would actually happen.

  There was a solitary motor launch waiting to enter the lock, and we helped the lock-keeper open the gates and sluices to let it through; then we walked along the towpath downstream past the bird sanctuary, an ancient wood beside the path where humans were forbidden but which I had frequently entered with Richard and Adam. We were silent most of the time, but spoke whenever one of us had an idea.

  I told her that, now that I had time to think about it, Swan River, Manitoba, was beginning to seem more of a worry than a potential adventure. She took my hand, turned to me and said that it couldn’t matter that much; Old Tom, as she called my grandfather, was dead; Uncle George had been very old when he made his odd request; it would just be something interesting, rather than worrying or important; besides, she’d come with me, she really would. She put her arm round my shoulder.

  The conversation meandered on, confused and inconclusive, as we walked back to the lock and on to my house, which was distinguished from the others in the street by its bright green window-frames and doors, the work of its previous owner. My mother had wanted to paint them white, but my father had said he liked the green – it reminded him of a cricket pavilion near Oxford that he had once slept in – but, to please her, he had painted the picket fence in front of the privet a brilliant white.

  The house was three-storey, late-Victorian, end-of-terrace. The front door and the back door, which led into the kitchen, were down a path at the side where there was more green paint. Inside it was neither spacious nor poky; the furniture was mostly old, comfortable rather than elegant. For some reason, perhaps to avoid a disagreement between themselves, my parents had given me the best bedroom, on the first floor at the front. My mother’s bedroom was across the landing from mine and my father’s was on the floor above. A curiosity that occasionally caused problems was that the bathroom, which contained the lavatory, could only be reached by walking through my mother’s room.

  Deborah and I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table reading Woman’s Realm. It was the weekend and she had a relaxed look; she was wearing a loose pink jumper, knitted for her by her mother, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, shiny red beads around her neck and no lipstick. I always thought she looked better without lipstick; it was something she put on to go to work and the carmine red clashed with the cool greys and greens in her eyes. She had an intelligent face with a strong jaw and a bony nose; she had been slim and beautiful in her late twenties when my father had first met her. Now, there were gentle wrinkles, but many people still looked at her twice.

  A warmth came into her face as she looked up from the magazine. She and Deborah were good friends, to the extent of sharing jokes about me. She asked if Deborah would like to stay for lunch and, without waiting for a reply, told us it wouldn’t be ready for a while because it included baked potatoes.

  Upstairs, in my room, Deborah asked why Tom Reynolds left his home and wife and child, and I told her what Uncle George had said, that he drank too much and upset my grandmother, and that Uncle George and the others had made him go away.

  I got out my secrets notebook and wrote out a list of the people who had lived in the house in Dalston. Remembering the conversation I had had with my father in the car, I knew there were nine, including him and two servants; the names quickly came back to me. We were lying on our stomachs on the carpet under the huge map of the British Isles, with the counties coloured in pink, orange, yellow, green and purple, which my father had framed and given to me as a Christmas present. Deborah stared at my list with her chin on one hand. She giggled. ‘Who is Rose Porter? And what’s this mean?’ She hesitated ‘La Fras…what?’

  ‘She was married to Uncle Ernest,’ I pointed to his name, ‘and could walk about on her hands while playing the violin with her feet…really!’ Deborah was laughing and shaking her head from side to side, her hair swinging and brushing the carpet.

  ‘Impossible. How could she?’

  ‘I don’t know, but she did. It was her job. She did it in the music halls they had then; you know, an act, like an acrobat but with music.’ I found this funny too. ‘That’s what they say, Uncle George and Dad.’

  Still giggling, Deborah stood up, pushed off her shoes and did a handstand against the wall. I sat cross-legged watching her. She moved one hand away from the wall and then, more tentatively, the other. She took another step, bent her knees to bring her feet closer together and collapsed on to her back with her feet up the wall. ‘See. It’s completely impossible.’

  I took my shoes off and tried, starting off against the opposite wall. I staggered on my hands and fell in a twisted heap. Deborah picked up my notebook and biro, found my ruler and lay on her front on the carpet again. Very carefully, with her nose an inch or two from the paper, she drew a family tree on the page opposite my list, asking me questions to make sure she got it right. It had three generations – my father’s grandfather, George Thompson, was alone at the top; there was a long middle line with five people; before she drew the bottom line, I told her my father had had a sister, Gladys, who had died a long time ago.

  ‘So she lived there too. There were ten people living there, then.’ I nodded. She muttered to herself, ‘Ten people, and two of them were called George and two of them were called Alice.’ She used the ruler to draw a horizontal line across the end of the vertical one which led from the ‘x’ between ‘Tom Reynolds’ and ‘Amelia’, and in small, neat writing wrote ‘Clifton’ and ‘Gladys’ at the bottom.

  ‘There. Done.’ She turned the book round and pushed it over to me. I studied the page carefully. It was all neat and, as far as I knew, accurate. On the middle line, underneath ‘Rose Porter’, Deborah had written ‘La Frascetti’ and had framed these words with ornate brackets. She had drawn a box in the bottom right corner containing the heading ‘Servants’, and had written ‘Big Alice’ and ‘Little Alice’ underneath.

  My mother’s voice wafted up from the hall. Lunch was ready.

  We ate at the old mahogany table in the dining room which led on to the kitchen at the back of the house. My mother had put the Nutcracker Suite, a pile of 78s which dropped on top of each other with a click and a clatter every few minutes, on the huge walnut-veneer radiogram. Deborah sat opposite me. My father sat with his back to our old upright piano at the end away from the kitchen facing my mother. In front of each of us was a white plate with a purple rim containing sliced ham and corned beef and a baked potato. In the middle of the table were a bowl of lettuce, tomato and cucumber salad, a circular, blue-and-white striped butter dish, a contraption made up of two small bottles with curved necks stuck together which dispensed oil and vinegar, bottles of Heinz salad cream and Colman’s mustard, jugs containing orange squash and water, a small wooden pepper-grinder and a glass salt cellar with a silver screw-on top.

  We all helped ourselves, passing items around politely; my father poured orange squash for me and Deborah and water for himself and my mother, and made great play of grinding a huge quantity of pepper over everything on his plate. My mother, bright and chirpy whenever my friends were around, talked about summer holidays; we were going to Ilfracombe again, and Deborah was going to Saundersfoot. The merits of different types of caravan were discussed and how
both caravan sites had games rooms with ping-pong. My father mentioned the fly fishing in north Devon, and told us he preferred chess to ping-pong as a rainy-day activity.

  When the first course was over, everyone ignored my mother’s instruction to stay seated while she fetched the pudding; instead we all stood up and carried everything into the kitchen. The next course was tinned peaches with raspberry-ripple ice-cream. While my mother was dishing this out, Deborah asked my father about La Frascetti; was it really true what I had told her, that she could walk about on her hands while playing the violin with her feet?

  He smiled and leant across the table towards her. ‘I saw her do it many times. She used to practise in our house, in the front room, in the hall, on the stairs. The high point of her act was walking on her hands downstairs while playing a popular tune with her feet. Later I saw her performing at the Hackney Empire, the Britannia in Hoxton and …’ He paused and stared at the floor, trying hard to remember. At last it came to him, ‘Collins’s Music Hall in Islington. But she went all over the world, America, Russia, Europe. She was a big act and earned lots of money. My uncle Ernest was her manager for a while, and then became part of the act. I remember seeing him on stage at Collins’s, dressed in a top hat and cloak, while she did her acrobatics wearing spangly short dresses and tights like the Television Toppers.’

  He took a spoonful of peaches and ice-cream. Deborah and I both spoke at once. ‘But how did she do it? Hold the violin…’ ‘Could everybody see her bottom?’

  My mother laughed. My father ignored me and continued speaking to Deborah. ‘She held the bow between her big toe and the next one, and the violin was fastened to her other foot with a strap.’

  Deborah put her fingers in her hair and frowned. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘Well, she stood on her hands with her knees bent and her feet above her bottom, which you could see, incidentally, although she wore silk knickers with sequins all over them,’ he turned quickly to me with a smile and back to Deborah again, ‘and somehow managed to push the bow across the strings. It was remarkable to watch.’ He took another spoonful. ‘Although, when I first saw her at home, I was small and thought nothing of it. I grew up with Rose walking about on her hands in the house, and it didn’t seem odd until I got older and my friends started wanting to come round and have a look.’

  My mother turned the pile of 78s over and Tchaikovsky came quietly from the corner of the room again. Deborah and I had second helpings of ice-cream.

  ‘How did she actually play the notes?’ Deborah wrinkled her nose and looked at my father.

  This provoked a long discussion involving my mother as well, because my father didn’t really know the answer and my mother was the musical one. They decided between them that La Frascetti’s violin must have been tuned to four particular notes and that she had probably played the key notes in a popular tune or chorus; even my father admitted that it was unlikely that she could actually hold down the strings with her toes while standing on her hands. As far as my father could remember from the four or so times that he had seen her perform in public, she had always had musical accompaniment; certainly drum rolls and clashing cymbals at the climactic moments; on some occasions he had seen Uncle Ernest playing a xylophone and there had usually been a small orchestra in the pit at the music hall.

  My mother had a theory about black notes. She switched off Tchaikovsky and tried various old tunes on the piano to see if any contained just four of them. My father kept whistling something which he said was called ‘The Belle of New York’; my mother found this hard to play but got it eventually. It did indeed contain four black notes, and they both got very excited, convinced that these were the very notes that La Frascetti had played all those years ago. My mother played it over and over, hitting the black notes higher up the piano to simulate our long-forgotten ancestor bowing her violin with her feet, while my father drummed on a table mat with two bendy knives.

  Eventually my mother went to the kitchen, saying that she didn’t need any help with the washing-up. Deborah and I followed her, grabbed dishcloths and dried up, and my father came in to put the plates and cutlery away, before going off to the sitting room for his afternoon nap.

  Deborah and I went back up to my room. We stood up for a while, staring down at the family tree on the floor. I said, ‘You ought to put “Sis” in brackets underneath “Amelia”. That’s what they all called her.’

  ‘Did they all call her “La Frascetti”?’ She pointed to the words.

  ‘No, stupid. They must have called her Rose.’

  ‘So names in brackets aren’t what people were called.’

  ‘Well…’ This was tiresome. I was about to talk about people having two names for whatever reason, but then she giggled, knelt down and wrote the word with two ornamental brackets.

  ‘What was she like, Sis?’

  I thought about it. Uncle George had said that she had given her husband a hard time. She had died in 1942; my mother had known her too, and despite her reluctance to criticise anyone, I knew she had found her bossy and hard to get close to. My father had been very fond of her. After Tom left, and Ernest and George moved away, she had brought him up with the help of her own father; but my father had also found her bossy, a trait he put down to her having had to look after a family from the age of fourteen. He had once told me she was ‘beautiful but tough’. Judging by the photo of her that he kept on his desk, I wouldn’t have called her beautiful; Sabrina, Diana Dors and Marilyn Monroe, the blondes on my bubble-gum cards, were beautiful. ‘Bossy, elegant and tough. Dad thinks she was beautiful.’

  ‘Tough?’ No women we knew were tough. A few were beautiful, some were elegant, plenty were bossy.

  ‘That’s what Dad said. She took charge of her brothers and the house and the servants after her mum died, when she was fourteen. S’pose that’s tough.’

  ‘And what was Old Tom like?’

  ‘Don’t know, except he drank too much. My father said he was tall and handsome…and he had a long moustache.’

  ‘Have you seen any photographs of him?’

  ‘No. Don’t think there are any.’

  I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall – and remembered something I’d forgotten. ‘Dad took me to a film ages ago. He wanted to see it because whoever wrote it was someone he liked. It was an old film. It was called ‘Viva Sonata’ or something, and it was all about Mexicans – you know, with big hats and moustaches. Anyway, halfway through, Dad whispered to me that this man, the main man, looked like his father, so on the way out I looked to see what his name was. He was called Marlon something.’

  ‘Marlon!’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Funny name. What did he look like?’

  ‘Ordinary. Couldn’t see him very well; he had a huge moustache and a hat. He had long, narrow eyes and looked cross all the time, never smiled, not properly.’

  ‘But I bet Old Tom smiled sometimes.’ She was lying on her front and staring at the family tree again. I stood up and kicked a tennis ball gently against the skirting board, back and forth.

  Suddenly, she said, ‘Except for the servants, there were two non-blood relatives living in that house, Old Tom and La Frascetti.’ I went on kicking, but thought about it. ‘With six blood relatives, including your dad and his sister.’

  It seemed strange; it would have been like my father living with my mother’s family. My father would have found that impossible. I could tell he didn’t even like my grandmother and my aunt, found them snobbish and a bit stupid.

  ‘Two outsiders,’ Deborah was leaning on her elbows looking up at me.

  The tennis ball went under my bed. Thinking about Tom living with Sis’s father and brothers, and even with her brother’s wife, I slithered under to fetch it. ‘Maybe that’s why Tom got drunk so much, got fed up with all the other people in the house?’ I rolled out and brushed dust off my sweater.

  4

  Aristotle’s View of History

  A week later Deborah and
I were in my room again. We were poring over my grandmother Sis’s diary for 1886. My father had lent it to me; he had others, but why didn’t I try this one to see if I found it interesting? It was a beige, cloth-bound book, quite worn; stiff brown cardboard showed through at the corners where the cloth had frayed. The endpapers were marbled, navy blue and wine red. The pages were stiff and very white, and crackled when I turned them.

  It wasn’t a diary in the sense of having dates printed in it. It had nothing printed in it. On the first page, written in large, sloping letters, in black ink, were the words ‘Amelia Thompson My Book 1886’. After that there was a page for every day, with the day of the week and the date written at the top. On most days she had written a whole page, and occasionally the day’s entry spread over to a second page. The handwriting was quite large, sloped at almost forty-five degrees to the right, with curlicues and flourishes on the capital letters. After we got used to it, Deborah and I found it quite easy to read, although we would frequently get stuck on certain words; Sis’s ‘e’s, ‘o’s and ‘i’s were very similar.

  The entry for 1 January 1886 described a New Year’s Eve party at the house in Norfolk Road, to which more than twenty uncles, aunts and cousins had come. It sounded very jolly, with plenty of food, drink and singing around the piano. Sis seemed to like most of her relatives, but there were one or two whom she described as bores. After a whole page about this, she wrote, ‘I will be nineteen this year. It is time for something else to happen.’

  Deborah and I read the first ten days of January together, helping each other with the words that were hard to read. Deborah usually finished the page first and waited for me before turning over. Except for Sunday, the days were very similar; her father and two brothers went out, while she and the two servants called Alice looked after the house. Every other morning she went to a grocer’s shop in Mare Street, which sounded a bit like Mr Brown’s in the High Street, to order food which would be delivered that afternoon. Monday was washing day and the basement area at the front of the house nearly always flooded. Everyone in the family would have a bath in the kitchen in a copper tub that evening. Sis seemed to find her life pleasant but dull.