Swan River

by David Reynolds

  Richard smiled, showing lots of teeth. ‘No. David ate yours. Martin, this is David.’ Martin smiled – creases spread outwards from the corners of his eyes – and shook my hand. ‘He’s going to help us, aren’t you, David… in your spare evenings and weekends?’ He laughed. Martin started to roll a cigarette. ‘I think we’ll call you our trainee sub-editor. How’s that sound?’

  ‘Great. OK.’ I smiled at the three of them, but somehow didn’t want to show quite how thrilled I was. ‘Thanks.’ Martin put his cigarette in his mouth and shook my hand again. And Louise smiled for the first time.

  ‘There’ll be a probationary period, of course.’ Richard laughed, and I must have looked worried; he leaned across the table and gently slapped my cheek. ‘No, nothing too formal. We’ll see how it goes.’ He said that he’d phone me when I was needed, and that it would be soon.

  * * * * *

  Months earlier, a girl in Carnaby Street had handed me a printed card: ‘Eat Delicious Food and Dance till 3 am at Fanny’s Bistro, London’s First Bistrotheque’. There was a drawing of a man and woman dancing with their knees bent and their arms in the air. In smaller lettering it said that any customer presenting the card would get a free bottle of wine. I had kept it and had the impression that the trendiest places to eat were called bistros. I showed it to Dave and Pat and they agreed that Fanny’s Bistro would be a good place to take Bonnie.

  She sounded surprised when I said my name on the telephone, but her voice softened when I reminded her that we had met at the party in Westbourne Terrace. She wanted to have lunch rather than dinner, so I kept quiet about Fanny’s Bistro and suggested an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill Gate. She didn’t know it, but said she could get there in her lunch break from Rediffusion. I didn’t know it, either – I had only mentioned it because I had passed it on my way to see Richard and could remember its name.

  It was a stupid place to meet. She had to leave after half an hour to take the Central Line back to Holborn. We talked and ate fast – and, as I paid the bill and she waved perfunctorily through the plate glass, I wasn’t sure that I still had her approval.

  * * * * *

  The next Saturday I was with my father. After lunch he fell asleep in his well-padded armchair, as he always did, with a book on his lap. Joey sat on his shoulder for a while, then on the back of my chair.

  My father snored loudly with his mouth open and there was the usual clicking sound from his dry mouth as he woke up. I looked up from my book. He hadn’t moved, but his eyes were open; he was staring at me and smiling. The shoulders of his jacket were up by his ears. He licked around the inside of his mouth, swallowed and pulled himself up in the chair. ‘Dreamed about my father.’ He yawned lengthily. ‘We were on top of a bus in the Strand, but I was older than him – about the age I am now. I had my arm round him. I liked him.’

  He yawned elaborately and looked towards the mantelpiece, at a black and white photograph of me, squinting into the sun with my hair hanging lankly over one eye. It was curling and brown with nicotine; he had taken it on the day we had climbed a hill and had sat looking over the Bristol Channel.

  He went off and came back after a few minutes with a pot of tea. As he rolled a cigarette, I went to my room and came back with my packet of Nelson. I waved it at him. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He clicked his Ronson and leaned forward to give me a light. ‘You know, Uncle George wanted me to go to Swan River in Manitoba. He never gave any good reason why, and I am pretty sure nothing much happened there. But… I think he thought it would make me feel better… to see the place, to pay some kind of homage to where my father lived…’ He sipped tea and stared at the unlit fire. ‘I never much liked the idea. Cold and remote. We ought to light the fire. Are you cold?’

  ‘No.’ I was wearing two sweaters and two pairs of socks, as I normally did at my father’s in winter. ‘I’m going to go… to Swan River.’

  He looked at me and smiled. ‘Maybe we should go together?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I smiled back, but I thought how travelling that far with him – and his stiff limbs and his deafness – would make something that already, in my imaginings, seemed difficult almost impossibly arduous. But the negative thought passed quickly. It began to seem like an exciting idea. I could see us in a big American car with a bench seat in front, driving over compacted snow on a neverending road.

  I strolled around the room, smoking my cigarette and thinking about Swan River. I imagined it to be a cold, dark, spartan place, a valley in some wooded hills, hundreds of miles from anywhere. The nearest place on a map – Dauphin, to the south, in the direction of Winnipeg – was more than an inch away on an atlas page showing the whole of Canada. To make such a trip with my father seemed crazy – what if he became ill, or lost his temper with a mounted policeman or with a man in a bar with a gun? – but it was also appealing. We would be close and we always had good times in cars.

  I pulled a book off a high shelf. My father had shown it to me once or twice, years before. It was small and very old and he called it ‘the family Bible’. Inside the front cover was a line of beautiful copperplate writing in black ink: ‘Thomas Reynolds, Clarendon Road, Notting Hill, 20th August, 1847’. Underneath was written – in the same writing, but in lighter-coloured ink – ‘Married Eliza Phillips, 26th July, 1858, St John’s Church, Westminster’. Below that was a list of twelve children, beginning with my grandfather: ‘Thomas Clifton Reynolds, born 16th May, 1859’. The deaths of four of the children, who had died in infancy, were recorded, and against the name of another was the word ‘stillborn’.

  My father had sat down at his roll-top desk in the corner with his back to me; he was typing something. I carried the little Bible over to him. He looked up, took it from me and held it under his angle-poise light. ‘Always meant to write in my parents’ marriage, me and my sister and my children. I’ll do that.’

  I pointed to the top line. ‘I went to that street, Clarendon Road, last Monday to see that Australian editor. Nice houses. Quite posh.’

  ‘Don’t expect they were that posh then. Or maybe they were.’ He pointed to the year 1847. ‘This is back in the time of Dickens. The houses there now may not have been there then. My father’s father was a portrait painter and engraver, you know.’

  I did know. I had read about Tom Reynolds’ father in Sis’s diaries. ‘Have you ever thought that if your mother’s mother and your father’s father hadn’t died in the same year, you and me might not be here?’

  He looked puzzled and tapped his fingers on the sides of his typewriter. As I explained – that the close deaths of their parents had made a bond between his parents – he began to smile. ‘I never thought of that.’

  I looked at the deep lines on his face in the sharp light of the angle-poise. He was so old. I wanted to do something to make him happy and thought of asking my mother to give him a little more money – so he didn’t have to eat fish heads and could buy himself a car with automatic gears. But why should she? She was working and hadn’t much herself, and he would just spend it quickly on some spree or other. If I could earn more, I could save up and take him to Swan River.

  * * * * *

  That night, after we had gone upstairs and said goodnight, I took Sis’s diary for 1897 from its shelf in my room. The last entry I had read – almost two years earlier – had been for 13 February, the day my father’s sister was born. Sis wrote a lot that year. She adored her new baby, and her new baby smiled a lot. In the middle of April my eyes began to close.

  19

  Sleepless in Highgate

  Bonnie’s voice was breathy and warm. ‘Fanny’s Bistro? I’ve read about it somewhere. Sounds great.’

  ‘It’s a bistrotheque. Dancing as well as eating. Is that OK?’

  ‘I love dancing…’ She giggled. ‘You know that.’

  When I put down the telephone, I found that my palm was sweating. The last thing she had said was ‘Look after yourself’, slowly as though she mea
nt it and it mattered. I wiped my hand and the receiver on one of my mother’s cushions.

  Richard rang. ‘David. We’re doing a photo shoot. Kind of a story about a dull kind of man, a sort of Norman Normal, you know, who decides to give up his job and become a groover, go off on the hippie trail, get stoned, the whole hippie thing, you know?’

  ‘Yup. Right.’ He had used several words that I had not heard before; what was a ‘groover’ and what did ‘hippie’ and ‘get stoned’ mean?

  ‘Anyway. We need someone to hold lights and be an extra and generally help out – this is next Saturday, starting very early, about six o’clock, or whenever it gets light. Should be finished about lunchtime. Can you join us? It’ll be fun, I promise.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He told me where to go, a photographer’s studio near the King’s Road, although most of the photography would be out of doors.

  * * * * *

  I met Pat at the Chelsea Drug Store. The building had been coated in scaffolding and its opening trumpeted for months; the press had told us that it would follow the American tradition of combining a bar with a chemist’s shop. But it wasn’t like the drug stores in James Stewart movies; it was brass, chrome, mirrors and loud music, with the paracetamol downstairs and the beer upstairs. The drugs were on sale all night, but the drinking had to stop at eleven.

  Pat had enrolled at a drama school, and always seemed to wear the same shirt – black with little pink roses. He was the first man I saw wearing anything floral and for a while, with his long hair, I thought it made him look like a girl, but in time I liked it enough to borrow it. With the shirt and his Jackie Kennedy dark glasses, Pat got stared at a lot, especially in the Chelsea Drug Store where everyone seemed to stare anyway. I eclipsed him in only one respect; my sideburns were long and thick while his pale face seemed to grow almost no hair.

  He explained some of what Richard had said and, a little patronisingly, told me to read the American magazines that Richard had shown me and to listen to Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane instead of the Stones and the Animals. But I liked what he said about the hippies; peace and love, especially free love, were obvious ideals that had somehow escaped the politicians, and to campaign for them by growing one’s hair, wearing beads and strange clothes and attending rock concerts sounded like a lot more fun than the Labour Party or the Young Humanists.

  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get stoned, though Pat had tried it with some of his drama-school friends and was going to do it again. There was nothing to be frightened of, he said; he had felt peaceful and dreamy, although at the same time what he called his ‘awareness’ had been heightened. He told me about Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. I was surprised; if Aldous Huxley, whose books I had had to read at school and whose brother used to be on The Brains Trust, got stoned, there must be something worthwhile about it – and maybe whatever that was had caused Dylan to sing ‘Everybody must get stoned’.

  * * * * *

  At 6 am on Saturday I walked quickly through empty side streets towards the King’s Road. There was frost on the grass in the squares and plants killed by the cold stood out limp and blackened. A damp mist blew around in the trees and the sky was light grey. There was no sign of dawn or of the day warming up.

  Richard, Louise, Martin and a man in a short leather jacket were standing in the street outside a tall house drinking coffee. Martin smiled and offered me his coffee mug; he was wearing gloves and clapped his hands together. The coffee steamed; I gulped at it and handed it back.

  Louise was visibly shivering inside a long coat; she went into the house as a man wearing dark glasses and a long and very obvious wig came out. He spread his arms wide and said, ‘Hey! What do you think?’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘Groovy.’ Everyone laughed.

  Richard turned to me. ‘Now this is Bob.’ He pointed to the man in the leather jacket. ‘Bob, David. David, Bob’s in charge… well, except for me, that is.’ He tittered softly. ‘Do what he asks, hold lights, light-meters, whatever. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Bob had long hair and waxy skin. He led me into an alleyway beside the house where a mound of empty cans, eggshells, tea leaves, cigarette butts, bottles and old newspapers lay beside some overturned dustbins which seemed to have been attacked by a starving animal in the night; two dish-like lights, set on spindly stands, towered above this detritus. Bob flicked a switch and the drab tableau was suddenly sharp and colourful and filled with shadows. He studied the scene approvingly, with his hand on his chin. ‘Been up since four arranging that.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  He glanced at me curiously for a second. Then he flicked off the lights, climbed a ladder and showed me how to adjust their direction by swivelling them around. ‘There’s only one ladder. You’ll have to keep coming down, moving it and going up again.’ He shrugged apologetically, and shouted to the others. ‘If we’ve got Louise, we’re ready.’

  The lights came back on. Louise walked in front of them and squinted towards us. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bob picked up a camera and looked through the viewfinder. ‘Just for a minute at first. Lie against that dustbin.’

  ‘Coat off?’

  ‘Please.’

  Richard stepped forward to take Louise’s coat. Underneath she was naked except for a pair of black knickers. I stared for a second before looking away. When I looked again she was lying among the rubbish with her back against a dustbin, smiling tiredly. ‘OK. You don’t all have to stare.’ Someone laughed. I turned away again. If I didn’t count a visit to a strip club with Pete Connolly, this was the first time I had seen a woman nearly naked.

  ‘Right light David. Move it slightly left.’ I started to climb the ladder. ‘No, the whole thing. Move the stand.’ Martin helped me. ‘OK. Up the ladder. Down an inch.’

  To keep her warm Louise was covered with her coat while I moved the lights around, but soon she was exposed again and Bob told me to hold a sheet of silvered cardboard low down about three feet from her right side. The light reflected from it and her left side was thrown into shadow. He told me to alter the angle several times, moving the line where light turned to shade across her torso.

  With a thick felt-tip, Martin drew a gap-toothed pair of lips on Louise’s stomach and arrows on her breasts pointing to her nipples. The man with the wig, whose name was Chester, lay on his back with his head between her knees pointing a home-movie camera at her over his shoulder.

  My arms ached. Bob moved around, crouching, clicking the shutter

  and changing cameras. No one was paying any attention to me. Almost idly, I studied Louise’s breasts. They seemed cold and unthreatening – rounded, practical pouches with nothing frivolous or entertaining about them. I looked at her slender arms, her neck and her torso, and noticed a small roll of flesh above her navel where her body was bent against the dustbin. With her clothes on, she was striking and beautiful. Naked in the cold morning air, artificially lit and surrounded by rubbish and people telling her where to put her limbs, she seemed ordinary – even her solemn, pretty face was unremarkable.

  Without Louise – her day’s work was over – we moved around London in two cars, setting up and taking other bizarre photographs – outside the pet shop in the King’s Road, in the Brompton cemetery, by a traffic island on a dual carriageway in Chiswick.

  We went to a bookshop called Indica in Southampton Row; it stocked the American magazines that Richard had shown me and Pat had told me to read, and upstairs were the offices of the new underground newspaper, International Times. Richard said it was London’s most radical bookshop; I had been passing it every day, unaware, on my way to my shorthand and typing classes.

  Chester was photographed without his wig, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and plain tie. I saw that the real Chester had short hair and black-rimmed glasses and looked like a conventional office worker – the kind of man whom Richard called Norman Normal – and I discovered, belatedly, that the stor
y we were telling was a satire on the hippie lifestyle, about someone from ‘straight society’ who got ‘turned on’ after a chance visit to a radical bookshop. It was the last shot of the day. I had to be an extra and smoke a large roll-up prepared by Martin. Bob told me to point it towards the ceiling, suck hard and inhale very deeply; it was supposed to be a ‘joint’.

  Afterwards, I travelled home alone on the tube. It was three o’clock and I was tired and hungry. I felt satisfied but unsure of myself – I had played my small part in something new and revolutionary and I seemed to get on with Richard and Martin, but I wondered whether I would ever catch up with them; they were already satirising a lifestyle that I had first heard about – from Pat – the previous evening.

  * * * * *

  At five to eight I was at Oxford Circus, leaning against the wall watching the crowds coming off the Central Line escalator – mostly hopeful, excited people, on their way to a night out. At eight o’clock Bonnie’s head rose above the moving banister; she had a black ribbon in her hair. I glimpsed her knees through the gap in her long coat as she came towards me smiling. She pressed her cheek against mine.

  We walked down Regent Street and she took my arm and pointed at things in shop windows. She wore a white fluffy scarf which brushed against my face. We turned into Maddox Street and up the steps to Fanny’s Bistro; I had booked a table and had walked past one lunchtime so that I would know where it was.

  The walls seemed to be black, the lighting was dim and every table had a small light with a red shade; ours was on the edge of the dance floor. Bonnie gave her coat to a waitress and I saw that she was wearing a loose and very short pink dress; it was shiny with a subtle pattern and the sleeves fell back to her elbows when she rested them on the table.