Swan River

by David Reynolds

  ‘Since Saturday.’

  He laughed affectedly and looked at me with a sagging grin, as though I was something amusing but slightly offensive. ‘I suppose you can’t think about anything else, and you don’t know what to do next.’ He slapped my thigh. ‘I know. I know, Dave. It’s happened to me.’ He took several gulps from his pint. ‘More than once.’ He started to shake his head. ‘Calm down. Treat her like a friend… well… bit more than a friend… if you can.’ He chuckled. ‘Honestly mate, I feel for you. Fucking agony.’ He put his hands on his hips, sat up straight and stared around the pub, as if that was all he had to say.

  It was, for the moment, and he soon went to talk to someone else. Dave fetched fresh pints and we drank in silence for a while before the routine began.

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yes Dave.’

  ‘I was thinking, Dave.’

  ‘What Dave?’

  ‘I was thinking, Dave, that I’m fed up with living in that dark little bed-sit, and that I should look for a flat, Dave. What do you think, Dave?’

  ‘Sounds good, Dave.’

  ‘Would you be interested in sharing, Dave?’ The routine had begun at school – probably because we were both amused by our friends calling us Dave – and had become a habit; it was supposed to be mildly satirical, but now he was frowning at me and stroking his chin.

  I had liked Dave since my first day at school when he had shown me where to go and had cycled to the river and back with me – and I liked him even more now; he was a romantic without being a drip. I quickly got excited about the idea of a flat; I had been worrying about having no room of my own where Bonnie and I could be together, and I would soon finish the shorthand and typing course and would be able to work full time, so I thought I would be able to afford it. As Dave and I discussed the merits of different parts of London, I wondered how my mother would feel. We agreed on the edge of Chelsea where it merged into the World’s End and Fulham, an area with the Goat in Boots, Finch’s and the Fulham Forum cinema at its centre – and my mother’s flat not too distant.

  * * * * *

  Two nights later Dave, Bonnie and I went to the Architectural Association’s Christmas Ball in their building in Bedford Square – Dave’s brother Martin had given us tickets. The attraction was a group called the Pink Floyd whom Pat and I had seen a few weeks earlier at a strange all-night event at the Chalk Farm Round House; they had made no records, but Bonnie knew who they were and wanted to see them. She was wearing blue jeans and a check shirt, and no ribbon – her hair fell freely around her face.

  Dave left us and we strolled around the elegant old building arm in arm for hours waiting for the Pink Floyd to appear in the open space in the basement. We ate, drank, chatted to people we didn’t know and spent time kissing at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

  Very late, with about fifty others, we stood watching shapes and colours moving and merging on the walls, and a frenetic, wiry man with a guitar making strange noises that echoed for long seconds – while the rest of the group played as if they were the Animals or Manfred Mann. I looked at Bonnie and wanted to tell her she was perfect, but I had thought about what Diane had said – that I mustn’t be ‘heavy’; I would tell her that I loved her on 18 March, three months from last Sunday.

  * * * * *

  On Friday evening, the day before Christmas Eve, I went to her flat carrying a bottle of Nuits St Georges, a wine that my mother had told me was always good, and a pair of silver earrings in a box wrapped in red paper. I had thought of buying a ring of some kind but Diane had advised earrings – a ring was too ‘heavy’ – and had suggested Kensington Market as a good place to get them.

  I arrived at eight, as Bonnie had asked; the food was almost ready to serve and Kate would be out until late. The room was lit by two candles – one on the table where we ate and one on a shelf above the bed. Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ was playing. She had cooked fish pie and bought cheesecake from somewhere in Soho.

  After supper we opened our presents. She liked the earrings and put them on. She had bought me a Penguin paperback of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  We were lying on the bed listening to a slow, breathy saxophone – a sensuous, thought-stopping sound, unlike anything I had heard before – when the phone rang. The candles had burned down and there was a whiff of burning wax; Bonnie was resting her head on my chest and pulling gently at the hairs behind my ear. She raised her head and listened; the phone went silent after the third pair of rings. She smiled and looked down at me, pushing my hair back from my forehead. ‘Kate’ll be here in fifteen minutes… Have to get up… soon.’

  We drank coffee with Kate, who came in cold, red-faced and chattering. Before I left I looked at the LP cover – West Coast Jazz with Stan Getz.

  * * * * *

  The humanists were shutting their office until the new year; Bonnie and my other friends were spending time with their families. I decided to go to my father’s after Christmas and stay there until I had to go back to work. Rather than shout on the telephone, I had written to him telling him my plans and he had replied on a postcard: ‘Delighted. Come for ever, if you want.’ I looked forward to spending time with him – and perhaps some time alone, walking, or sitting in a pub.

  I wasn’t expecting him to do anything special, but there was a Christmas tree with a gold star at the top and some red baubles hanging off it. It was on the table next to the television where Joey’s cage usually was – Joey was on the floor – and there were presents in Christmas paper underneath. With a lot of grunting, my father bent down behind the television and found a switch. Coloured lights flashed all over the tree – some of them carefully buried among the needles. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Nice, don’t you think? Got it cheap on Christmas Eve. Lights came from Woolworth’s, three and six… They don’t have to flash though.’ He unscrewed one of the bulbs and the lights went out while he put in another one that made them shine without flashing.

  He held up the bulb he had removed. ‘There’s a resistor in there. Metal strips expand and contract – very clever… Now, I’ve bought half a turkey, and we’re going to have a party on New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘Half a turkey?’

  ‘We can’t eat a whole turkey, just you and me.’ He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘I got it from the pub. They’ve got thousands there. I stood the chap a lager and he split it down the middle with an axe. Paid him eight shillings. He said not to tell anyone or everyone would want half a turkey.’ He grinned and led me into the kitchen. The half-turkey was in the fridge – lying on its flat side in a rectangular metal tray. It looked plump and fresh and a little purple. ‘I’m not sure whether to roast it like that, or somehow prop it the right way up. I’ve got stuffing and sausage meat.’

  ‘How’re you going to stuff it?’

  He raised his arms in the air and made a kissing noise with his lips. ‘There’ll be a way.’

  ‘Is this for the party?’

  ‘No. This is just for you and me. I thought we’d have Christmas lunch tomorrow…Then we can eat it cold for the rest of the week. And I can casserole the leftovers, make soup from the bones – all that, like your mother used to do. I’ve got potatoes and parsnips – for roasting – and peas and carrots. But no sprouts. I hate sprouts.’

  ‘No. I don’t like them either.’

  ‘Horrible – taste like farts.’ He grinned and looked away.

  ‘Right.’ I tried not to laugh but, for no good reason, our giggles soon reached the soundless level where neither of us could speak. I went into the living room and held on to the back of a chair. It took me a minute or two to recover.

  Back in the kitchen, he was smiling at the glass in the back door. He turned. ‘You mustn’t make me laugh like that.’

  ‘You started it.’ There was a box on the floor with some bottles in it. I peered in. ‘Is this for the party?’

  ‘That’s the drink for it… except this.’ He pulled out a bot
tle of cherry brandy. ‘This isn’t for the party. It’s for us. I’ve got an Arctic Roll.’ He grinned and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Great!’ We hadn’t had Arctic Roll for two years.

  I examined the contents of the box; there were three bottles of sherry, four half-pint bottles of Carlsberg and a bottle of Quosh. ‘Who’s coming then?’

  He told me while he put the kettle on and warmed the teapot. The chemist and the newsagent were both coming with their wives, and Wing Commander Hayes would be driving over from Marlow. He had invited Old Bowen, but Mrs Bowen had said it would be too much for him; however, she might come herself if the old man was in the mood to be left on his own.

  ‘And Mrs Harris.’ He smiled, as if there were something naughty about Mrs Harris.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Runs the florist down the road.’ He waved his hand vaguely towards the east. ‘Edwina, to me. Very nice – ’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew her.’

  He was still smiling cheekily. ‘Oh, I’ve got lots of friends.’

  ‘Ooh. You and Edwina, eh?’ I nudged him.

  ‘She’s got a daughter actually – Arabella – very pretty. She’s coming too. Almost exactly your age.’

  ‘Oh God! Da-ad!’

  ‘She’s a peach – an absolute peach. You’ll like her.’

  ‘Dad! It’ll be incredibly embarrassing.’

  ‘No, it won’t. She’s a nice girl. Intelligent, makes jokes… Just left convent school, Our Lady of… Misery and Dolours… or whatever it’s called… You know? Up towards Amersham.’ He looked as if he might giggle again; we both knew that it was called Our Lady of the Assumption.

  ‘Dolours…? What are they?’

  ‘Sorrow… lamentation, tears… suffering, privation, pain, agony and absolute bloody misery… all that sort of – ’ He was silent for a moment, then made a spluttering noise, followed by a series of full-throated guffaws, during which he held on to the kitchen cabinet and bobbed his head up and down.

  I was catching his hysteria again, but managed to say, ‘So you thought coming to our party might cheer her up?’

  ‘She doesn’t – ’ His laugh became a cough. He gulped and the coughing got worse, deep and bronchial. His face turned red and he hurried to the lavatory, hoicked and spat, and came back wiping his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘Oh dear. That’s terrible. Mustn’t laugh so much… I was going to say that Arabella is very cheerful. Takes the Pope with a pinch of salt. I asked her.’

  I could imagine her; I knew the kind of girl he liked – she was not far from the kind of girl I liked. Despite his coughing fit, I wanted him to laugh again. I looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  He was smiling and shaking his head and filling a glass from the tap. He drank it quickly. ‘Don’t get me going again, Sunny Jim.’

  He filled another glass with water and I gave up trying to be funny. ‘So we have to stay up most of the night with these people?’

  ‘No. No. They’re coming at six. Otherwise we’d have to do proper food. They’ll go at about eight… I hope.’ He’d bought some crisps and planned to spread Gentleman’s Relish on triangular pieces of toast – Old Bowen had given him a large jar of it for Christmas.

  We drank tea and opened presents, and he seemed very lively and energetic. I had bought him a scarf and a paperback by Bertrand Russell called Roads to Freedom – about anarchism, syndicalism and socialism – which I was keen to read myself. He had got me a Concise Oxford Dictionary, some socks from Woolworth’s, a record token, and a book called Purity and Danger by someone called Mary Douglas. It was a hardback, recently published, which he had bought because he had read about it in New Society. He took it back from me and told me in detail what it was about, thumbing through it and reading bits out; it was obvious that he had read it before wrapping it for me.

  It seemed to be a study of social groupings and of how taboos and rituals reflect power structures. My father kept talking about people who lived in the margins – sometimes he used the word interstices – of formally ordered groups and who through no fault of their own were blamed for things that went wrong. Apparently Mary Douglas mentioned Joan of Arc and the Jews, but also the fathers of families in the Trobriand Islands, where inheritance passed through women; she called these people outcasts and likened them to beetles and spiders living innocently in the cracks of walls. Primitive – and some supposedly civilised – groups cast such people as witches and oppressed them unfairly.

  He talked about this for almost an hour before handing me the book back and telling me I must read it, and, if I couldn’t read it all right away, I must read chapter six, at least. I wanted to read it, but I had another book to read first, Tender Is the Night, and I had thought that I might get round to the rest of my grandmother’s diaries.

  There were five quiet days before New Year’s Eve and his party. On one of them the morning was bright and clear; we drove across the Thames at Cookham and on to Winter Hill, where there was a view back across the river to the Chilterns. As I knew he would, he pointed to a patch of terracotta, buried in trees, on a hill five miles away – the farm where he had lived with my mother during the war and about which he had written the books that had earned him his Rolls-Royce and his yacht. We walked a hundred yards or so along the ridge and went back to the car; he had decided that he didn’t want to climb hills any more – he could climb them, but he didn’t want to.

  On the other days we stayed at home, throwing logs on the fire, watching television, playing cards and chess, reading and eating turkey. During his afternoon naps I sat across from him, deep in Tender Is the Night. He snored with his mouth open and a book or a journal on his lap; I looked at him from time to time, pondering his age, the achievements – and the follies and the petty cruelties.

  Some nights I sat up late reading Sis’s diaries, and opened the green folder to leaf through the hundred or so pages of my father’s recollections to find his accounts of the same events. I began where I had left off, soon after Gladys’s birth in 1897.

  * * * * *

  The new baby was loved by all the inhabitants of 59 Norfolk Road, and their affection for her grew as she did. At first her presence had small, practical repercussions. Cliffie’s narrow bed was moved from its place beside his mother and put under the window, and Gladys slept next to Sis in Cliffie’s old cot. Cliffie didn’t mind about this – he was five years old and liked to kneel on his bed and stare down at the people and the horses in the street – and he soon became attached to his little sister: he was not so much older than her as to make him indifferent or disdainful, but he was old enough to feel responsible and loving.

  The room that for so long had been Sis’s own was now shared by four people. Sis, who had often said that there was plenty of space in the house, found it cramped, but she didn’t think of moving elsewhere: she was as devoted to her father as ever and the memory of Tom’s drunken behaviour was very recent; she wanted her father’s and brothers’ protection.

  And, anyway, soon after Gladys’s birth Tom told her how happy he was, with their situation as well as their children. While Gladys was a small baby, he kept up the habit he had resumed while Sis was pregnant of buying flowers in the evenings as he passed through Liverpool Street Station – and he got out his camera again and took photographs of his newly expanded family. For several months his drinking seemed to be controlled, and the number of whiskies tossed down on his Sunday morning walks with Cliffie stayed at the two that he had set himself before Gladys was born.

  Sometimes he took Cliffie on longer outings, while Sis stayed at home with the baby. In April they went on the top of an open horse-drawn bus from Liverpool Street to Charing Cross to see the decorations for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. It was the first time Cliffie had seen the grander and busier parts of London. There were horses everywhere and the air was filled with their smell; he was intrigued by the small boys with dustpans and brushes who ran about in the street collecting dung an
d flinging it into iron bins on the kerb. He asked his father if they ever got run over and couldn’t wait to tell Toppy about them. St Paul’s Cathedral overwhelmed him and he nearly cried when Tom asked him what he thought of it, and his amazement grew as they walked around Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

  Everywhere Cliffie saw flags and coloured glass globes, lit with nightlights and etched with the legend ‘V Crown R’, but the decoration that caused him to point with wonder was a sequence of letters which lit up one at a time before revealing the whole word, after which the sequence was repeated in a different colour. It was opposite Broad Street Station and the word was ‘Bovril’. He asked his father if this was part of the jubilee decorations and was disappointed to hear about beef-tea, the marvels of electricity and the resistors that made the lights flash. The Queen’s glass globes seemed dreary by comparison. In the late afternoon they went to Hyde Park and saw the Queen herself being driven in a carriage. Again Cliffie was disappointed. The famous and important Queen Victoria had no crown; she looked like Aunt Suey, just a little old lady in black wearing a bonnet.

  Later in the year Tom took him to see his office. Cliffie was fascinated, both by the grandeur of the district – the Welsbach Incandescent Gas Light Company had offices off Victoria Street near St James’s Park underground station – and by the gadgets that his father used. Cliffie saw a telephone and a typewriter for the first time, and was allowed to listen to someone’s voice coming from miles away and to take away a piece of paper on which he had typed his name.

  Tom introduced him to a dignified man with white hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, and the man felt in his pocket and handed him a shilling. Cliffie was awestruck; he wasn’t sure what it was for and whispered was it for him to spend? The man smiled and said, ‘Yes, but don’t get tight on it.’ Cliffie asked what ‘tight’ was. The man went on smiling and said, ‘Ask your father. He should know.’

  The next year, at the beginning of May, Cliffie became a pupil at the Birkbeck School. It was a short walk from Norfolk Road and Tom went with him on the first morning. Cliffie was six and a little anxious because the Birkbeck, a vast red-brick building with several playgrounds, was very different from the dame’s schools he had been to; it had five hundred pupils, half of whom were girls. His father kept squeezing his hand and saying, ‘Don’t you worry, old chap.’ And he reminded him that his uncles, George and Ernest, had gone to the school when they were six and stayed until they were fifteen; they had both liked it and had told Cliffie that he would be all right. For the first two terms he was able to go home for lunch. Little Alice collected him and, on that first day, unexpectedly and to Cliffie’s delight, Toppy, who had not yet been to any school, came with her.