Swan River

by David Reynolds

  Some of the adults had a few drinks before lunch, though my father didn’t – he sat in an armchair by the fire smoking and playing games with his grandchildren – and younger people like me had Coke and lemonade. Lunch was the usual thing – turkey, flaming Christmas pudding with sixpences, crackers and paper hats.

  As we sat looking at the debris, the husband of one of Ann’s aunts, who was called Uncle George, realised that we had forgotten to watch the Queen’s speech. Borrowing his wife’s shawl, hat and handbag, he made up for the omission. He was an excellent mimic. He talked about the problems of having lots of corgis, Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s peculiar lips, how to cope with an elderly mother and his encounter with the King of Tonga. Group hysteria took hold, and my father removed his false teeth – in case he swallowed them, he explained later. Uncle George ended by telling us how much he disliked his loyal subjects and his three children – especially baby Andrew.

  I had to eat turkey again in the evening at my grandmother’s flat. There were no young people. Old ladies predominated and – despite the presence of my mother, Uncle Godfrey and a spirited, eighty-four-year-old great aunt, known as Auntie Toto – the celebrations were more formal. When the crackers had been pulled and my grandmother and three other elderly women had put their paper hats on, I told them about the highlight of my Christmas – Uncle George and the Queen’s speech – and did an imitation of his imitation of the Queen, deliberately leaving out the bit about the elderly mother.

  When I had finished Uncle Godfrey said ‘Bravo’ quietly and patted me gently on the back. The old women stared at me unsmiling. My mother wiped her mouth with a white table napkin and looked at the floor. I was disappointed; obviously I wasn’t as good a mimic as Uncle George.

  Later my mother and I walked home with Uncle Godfrey. It was cold and we linked arms with my mother in the middle. They both tittered as my mother explained that she had found my performance very funny but hadn’t dared to show it; my grandmother and the other old ladies didn’t think it was proper to make fun of the Queen.

  Uncle Godfrey let go of my mother’s arm, reached behind her and patted me on the back. ‘It was a very good Queen, David, very good Queen.’ His titter grew into a laugh. ‘I particularly liked the bit about the King of Tonga. It wasn’t just you and me, Mary. Toto was in hysterics! Did you see her? She was in agony, biting her lip.’ My mother was nodding but didn’t speak. ‘I tried to catch Toto’s eye, but she wouldn’t have it.’ My mother made a series of sounds, like wrong notes on a violin, and Uncle Godfrey’s laugh boomed off the walls of Cadogan Street. ‘It was almost as funny as David… you and me and Toto pretending not to be amused.’

  Late that night I lay in bed in my grey room and thought about Uncle Godfrey and Auntie Toto and wondered why some old people could relax and enjoy themselves while others couldn’t. I decided it might depend on whether they had had happy lives or not. Auntie Toto was the one who, because she couldn’t get divorced from her husband, had lived with a man for many years without being married. As I turned off the light I looked across at my pin-ups of Jean Shrimpton and Leslie Caron and remembered that I hadn’t yet written to Deborah.

  * * * * *

  Three days later I went to meet Pat outside Peter Jones. He was leaning against the 19 and 22 bus stop smoking a black cigarette. It was Saturday morning, and late that afternoon we were taking a train to Goring for a party at Pete Connolly’s home. Pat wanted to buy some clothes to wear that night, and he thought I should too. He offered me one of his cigarettes – Sobranie Black Russian in a box with a lid, like Uncle Godfrey’s du Mauriers. As well as looking strange – rolled in black paper with a glossy gold strip around the tip – it tasted odd – mild and aromatic – but not unpleasant. Someone had given this box to his mother for Christmas and he had pinched it.

  There were three men’s clothes shops not far up the King’s Road: Sydney Smith, Cecil Gee and Smart Weston. I wasn’t sure what we were looking for. The main thing was not to wear anything we wore at school, but I already had a pair of black Chelsea boots, a black corduroy jacket, some khaki needlecord jeans and a black T-shirt with a white anchor on it, all of which I thought were pretty snazzy. Pat was talking about getting a matelot shirt – of the type worn by Frenchmen with berets and strings of garlic.

  We sauntered into Sydney Smith and peered down into the glass cases of shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. An assistant asked if he could help us and Pat mentioned matelot shirts. The man led us across the shop, produced a pile of them in Pat’s size and laid them out on a glass counter; all were dark blue and white, but there were different materials, different sleeves, stripes of different widths; some had anchors stitched or printed on and some didn’t. Pat scrutinised them for about ten minutes, feeling them and holding them against himself, and decided that none of them was quite right.

  In the window of Cecil Gee there was a bronze male mannequin wearing a matelot shirt identical to one we had just seen. Pat glanced at it and said, ‘Cecil bloody Gee. Let’s go to the Picasso. Have a coffee.’ The Picasso was further up the King’s Road, further than I had ever been. We passed the Chelsea Potter and Pat said it was a good pub, but that they probably wouldn’t let us in.

  Inside the Picasso a man in a beret was playing draughts with a young blonde woman. Pat ordered hot chocolate and I asked for a cappuccino – I had never had one before, but I had seen my mother drink them in the Kenco Coffee House and heard my grandmother describe them as ‘a lot of froth’. We sat against the wall and looked at the blonde woman. ‘Good legs,’ Pat said quietly. She was wearing a short tight skirt and socks instead of stockings. Her legs were bare and we could see the tops of her knees. She looked at us and smiled. I looked away quickly and wondered if she’d seen me looking at her knees. She seemed Bohemian and exciting.

  My cappuccino came and I sipped it right away, covering my lip with froth and burning my tongue. Pat nudged me and whispered, ‘I think she fancies you,’ and chuckled loudly.

  I glanced up at her again. She had lit a cigarette and was talking intently to the man in the beret. ‘Get stuffed.’

  I thought about Pete Connolly’s party that evening and began to feel nervous. I hadn’t been to a teenagers’ party before. I knew from Pat and from talk at school that there would be lots of girls and dancing – and that I was expected to find a girl and snog later in the evening when the lights would be turned down. I had never kissed a girl except Deborah when we were very young, and I hadn’t danced since my mother sent me to a dancing class in Marlow where I had done waltzes and quicksteps – also with Deborah.

  * * * * *

  I woke on Pete Connolly’s floor with a headache and another pain which Pat condescendingly explained in detail, and called ‘ball-ache’. But the pains didn’t matter; nothing mattered because my skin was glowing and warm and my brain was idling with a sensation that one day I would call euphoria. I had danced for several hours, but the catalyst had been snogging in the dark, unaware of time or place, with a girl who, Pat, Pete and others confirmed, was ‘a complete bombshell’.

  14

  A Hot Proposal

  On a night in January I sat close to the two-bar fire back in my room at my father’s home, and wrote a long letter to Deborah. I told her that I missed her, gave her both my new addresses and described all that had happened in the six months since I had last written. Before going to bed, I smoked a cigarette and scanned the bookshelves. An old green cardboard folder was sticking out from the bottom shelf against the upright next to my grandmother’s diaries; it hadn’t been there on my previous visit. I opened it, although I knew what was there – the chapters my father had written for me two years before, about his childhood in the 1890s. I had read them then and given them back to him.

  That week my father seemed calm and content – he had bought another bottle of cherry brandy – and I wondered whether he enjoyed living alone, without my mother who had always seemed to irritate him. Most nights I sat up late reading
my father’s chapters again and my grandmother’s diaries. Sometimes I flipped from his text to hers to see if she wrote at the time about an event that he had remembered sixty years later. The many mentions of my grandfather Tom reminded me of Swan River, Manitoba. I hadn’t thought about the place or the old man who had told me to go there for a long time. Would I go, one day? I decided I would, and hoped that it would be with Deborah.

  * * * * *

  Tom brought Sis a bowl of fuchsias and seemed to enjoy his second visit.

  Ernest and Rose were there, music predominated and he showed that he could sing – in a mellow baritone that Sis admired. Twice, while the others were grouped around the piano, Sis and Tom spoke to each other for several minutes almost in private, much as they had over dinner at the Johnsons’. She noticed his eyes again and the lines that came from them when he smiled, and she saw that he had bad teeth under his huge moustache – but she was reminded of the warmth beneath his shyness and of how easily she could talk to him.

  When he visited a third time, her brothers and Rose went out for the evening, and Old George gave Tom permission to be alone with Sis – then and in the future if they wished – a clear sign that he approved of him. Tom gave Sis a brooch, a small gold fox with tiny rubies for eyes, and told her that as soon as he saw it he knew it would suit her. He was right; she thought it beautiful – and she realised how expensive it was.

  They sat on the red velvet sofa where she had sat many times with Stanley and, with some prompting, he talked about his childhood and youth and how his father had died twelve years before. As the eldest of seven children, he had felt responsible for his mother and his younger brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom had been a baby. He had worked hard to keep the family together and to gain qualifications at night school and had joined the Welsbach Incandescent Light Company as a junior accountant. There he had been promoted several times; he said this modestly, but Sis could sense his pride. By working hard, he and his brother Bill and his sister Emily, who worked as a housemaid, had enabled his mother to raise the younger children; otherwise he feared they would have ended in the workhouse.

  Sis was surprised to learn that his family home had been nearby at the further end of Greenwood Street near London Fields; he told her diffidently that a few years earlier he had played in the same rugby team as her brother George – George hadn’t recognised him so he hadn’t mentioned it. Now, they had left Greenwood Street, and he and Bill had found his mother a larger house in Bournemouth where she could take lodgers and live with her younger children.

  Sis told him about her mother’s death and how she, too, had felt responsible for a parent and younger siblings. They talked about duty and the satisfactions and frustrations that came from it – and about their fathers. Tom’s had been artistic and had worked as an engraver; Sis thought he sounded not unlike her father – creative and kind, but forceful. That night she recorded that she liked Tom ‘a great deal’ and she thought it significant that his father had died in the same year as her mother. She noted again that he was handsome, and she thought that his pipe might account for his bad teeth.

  For a few weeks Sis and Tom met frequently at Norfolk Road, and he took her to theatres and the smarter music halls, for strolls on Hackney Downs and long walks across Hackney Marshes; they visited Kate in Braintree and Tom’s mother – whom Sis found ‘warm and quiet, like her son’ – in Bournemouth. From small things Tom said and from questions he asked, Sis began to realise that he would soon propose marriage. She was unsure how she would answer. He had become ‘a great friend and companion’, but she didn’t think that she loved him.

  She remembered the passion she had felt for Stanley and told Kate that she didn’t feel at all the same about Tom. Kate said that a marriage without love couldn’t work. She shouldn’t accept a proposal from Tom – not yet anyway. If she didn’t want to turn him away, she should tell him the truth about what she felt and then a long, unofficial engagement might be appropriate. She might grow to love him; Kate told her how she had come to love Uncle Gibson more and more as time had passed and that their child had made them even closer than before.

  * * * * *

  Tom perspired in the heat of a hot August evening in the drawing room at Norfolk Road, and waited until Sis had sat down. ‘I have never done this before. I hope I do it properly.’ He knelt on one knee, took her hand and frowned with formality. ‘Will you marry me?’

  She hugged him around the neck. ‘Yes.’

  She hadn’t known what she would say; she had decided in an instant. They stood up and kissed for the first time – a brief kiss. He drew away and handed her a small leather box. He had chosen it – a gold ring with a single ruby – because it matched the brooch that she liked; she could change it if she would prefer silver or a diamond. She told him sincerely not to be silly – it was beautiful. She put it on her finger. It was a little big, but she didn’t say so. She kissed him again – for longer this time – and held him for a moment when he tried to move away.

  A few minutes later Tom asked Old George’s permission to marry his daughter. Old George was in his shirt sleeves and told him to take his jacket off – he looked hot – and, of course, he could marry his daughter.

  That night Sis wrote that in that moment, as he knelt down, she knew that she wanted to be married to him. She liked him, almost loved him; in time she would love him – especially when they had children. Kate was too cautious and, before long, would see that she, Sis, had done the right thing.

  Sis wanted to be married as soon as sensibly possible. Tom’s only concern was that they needed to find a home – his lodgings were too small for them both – but it was quickly agreed that he could live at Norfolk Road while they took their time to find the right place. Old George would give them a bed as a wedding present and it would be put in Sis’s room.

  * * * * *

  They were married at noon on 11 October, 1890, at St Mark’s Church around the corner from Norfolk Road. Sis enjoyed herself. Her cream satin dress from Gamages in Holborn was much admired; the three bridesmaids, among them her little cousin Kathleen, looked exquisite; at the reception, at a smart hotel near Highbury Corner, her father made an affectionate and amusing speech; and everyone behaved properly – except Aunt Sue, but that was to be expected. All that is known about the honeymoon is that they stayed in a hotel in Hastings and that Sis discovered that Tom ground his teeth while he slept.

  When they returned to Norfolk Road, Tom was anxious to find them a home. Before they were married Sis had shared his vision of life together in a house with a garden in Islington, Highbury, Hackney or Dalston. But she had been preoccupied by her wedding, and now she found that she wasn’t quite ready to move away from her home and her family.

  She hid her feelings from Tom, but discussed them with her father. He reminded her that Tom was eight years older than her, had worked his way up to a well-paid position in an internationally famous firm and earned more than he did. Though it was commonplace for married couples to live with their parents – some of the houses in Norfolk Road and all over East London were crammed with people of all ages – it was natural for a man of Tom’s age and income to want his own house.

  But Sis felt, privately, that 59 Norfolk Road had room for everyone and that, before long, when her brothers had their own homes – as she was sure they would – it would be the perfect place for her and Tom and the children she hoped to have, and she could continue to live with and care for her father. What would happen to him if she and her brothers all moved away?

  On a Saturday in November Tom took her to see a terrace of ten new houses in a street south of Dalston Lane, and timed how long it took them to walk there – six minutes. The houses were two-storey, built of yellow brick, with angled bays, slate roofs and white-painted mouldings and windows. There were two rooms downstairs with a kitchen and scullery at the back, and three rooms upstairs. The small garden was dug and ready for planting, and there was a flush lavatory in a lean-t
o just outside the kitchen door. The asking price was £275 which could be paid in instalments; Tom had the first instalment waiting in the bank and money to buy furniture, carpets, curtains, everything that was necessary.

  Sis wandered around with her arm through Tom’s. She liked the house but found it a little small; she’d like to think about it. The builder suggested that they should make up their minds soon; six of the ten had been sold already.

  On the walk back to Norfolk Road Tom explained that the house might be small but it was big enough for the time being and that it was as large as he could sensibly afford – given that she wanted to be close to her father and brothers. Apologetically, Sis confessed, for the first time, that she was finding it hard to think about leaving her father, but that she would try. Tom let go of her arm and walked faster. It was a minute or two before he replied. He told her that when her father got old, which would be a long time yet, of course he could live with them; he, Tom, would be rich and they would have moved to a larger house by then.

  What began as a discussion, while they walked, became an argument on the corner outside the church where they had been married, and then a row in the breakfast room when they reached home. Sis argued that they would be better off staying at Norfolk Road; it was large and spacious and filled with beautiful furniture – while the new house was small and depressing – and one day they might have number 59 all to themselves. Tom asked if she expected him to wait for ever to get his own home – her father was blooming with health and in his early fifties – and said he hadn’t realised he had married him as well as her. Sis told him he was lucky to have married anyone. He retorted that he wouldn’t have bothered if he had known she was such a nag and a Daddy’s girl.