Shuttlecock

by Graham Swift

  When I play chess with Des I think: a sane man, a man labelled insane cheerfully engrossed in the same activity when there should exist between us an uncrossable boundary line. Sanity? Insanity? Terrible problems? No, their problems are over. And when Des starts to ramble (for occasionally he starts to ramble, like a true hospital inmate), when he starts to speak of that other man, the master of the merchant vessel Eucalyptus, I think, no, it is not madness which is locked up and concealed like a crime, but something concealed behind madness. It was Des himself who, one day when Dad had been not long in his ward, came up to me and said, tapping his nose, ‘You know the meaning of “Eucalyptus”? – “Well-hidden”.’

  But all these observations and reflections (you are wrong if you think I am normally a thoughtful man – it is just something brought on by this urge to write things down) I do not make at all about Dad. I only make them about the hospital at large, as if about some abstract proposition. With Dad, despite the regularity of my visits and the continual silence in which we sit, there seems no time for thought or detachment. It is true, with every visit the more likely it becomes that nothing will change, that that silence will be never-ending. And yet each time I cannot help feeling, this time he will speak, and each time is special and urgent. Very often, when I come home afterwards, rather than that strange, lingering calm of the hospital, it is tension I feel; I tremble as if I have been involved in some immense struggle. For perhaps that is what they are, my meetings with Dad. His silence against my wish to hear him speak. We face each other like antagonists across a table (a different sort of chess, this), and one of us must crack first.

  Do you recognize me? Answer me.

  Is he doing it all to punish me?

  I don’t believe it can go on for ever. I don’t believe they will send Dad on to ‘Fuchsia’ and then to ‘Gladiolus’. If he endured the Château Martine (you were tortured, weren’t you Dad? but you came through it) surely he will not yield to this. But only today I thought: perhaps it is by the self-same method he held out then as now: by keeping silent. And who can say that that is not the reason for Dad’s present plight. Maybe what happened long ago at the Château Martine was so terrible as to have delayed effect thirty years later; and maybe while he sits on the wooden bench or on the wicker chair, amidst these innocent, therapeutic surroundings, he is really reliving endlessly – is it possible? – the torture of another time and place.

  Sunday. The cedar tree. It was on my lips today to say, ‘You knew X, didn’t you? Who was he?’ What stops me? Is it the fear of seeing Dad’s face suddenly split with real pain? The fear of not being able to bear that?

  The fountain was playing on the ornamental pond. We walked back to where the others sat like infinitely sagacious spectators on the terrace. All I said was: ‘I shan’t be here on Wednesday, Dad. I am going to see Mr Quinn.’ (Now I know why I fixed on Wednesday. So Marian won’t know. She’ll believe I’ve gone to see Dad as usual. I’m not going to tell Marian I’m going to Quinn’s.) ‘He’s invited me to his home.’ As if Dad should answer, ‘Ah yes, Mr Quinn, how kind of him.’ ‘He’s going to tell me everything.’ (Or rather, I didn’t say that – only in my head. And nor did I say: ‘Unless you tell me first.’)

  ‘So till next Sunday then.’

  The bell was going for visitors to leave.

  ‘Don’t expect me on Wednesday.’

  I left Dad on the terrace, with Des, Simpson and the others, and as I looked back, his still figure – that strong, intrepid, noble figure – seemed suddenly quite forlorn, as if I were leaving him for good.

  [25]

  And when I got home I took out Dad’s book and dipped straight into it (those final chapters), with scarcely a word, not even an ill-tempered one, to Marian and the kids.…

  Marian is sulky and smouldering with silent resentment. Another Sunday has passed by – another beautiful sunny Sunday – and once again we haven’t gone out, because I have taken the car and spent the afternoon with Dad. Yes, I know what she would say, if she had half the chance, about our ‘wasted’ Sundays. That I am the one who has this thing – or used to have – about going out into the open, about the countryside. I am the one who wants fresh air and hates skulking indoors. Yes, yes. As I turn the pages of Dad’s book I have to brush aside a momentary vision of the weekends we used to have. Marian and I stripping hurriedly in the ferns. Wasps in the picnic basket.

  Tonight we are unusually quiet and by ourselves. The kids are having a special treat tomorrow: they are going on a school outing to Chessington Zoo. They have to be away sharply, and this has given us the excuse for sending them early to bed. It’s nearly ten now, and we ourselves could have an early night. But you know those Sunday evenings, when the weekend has been a failure and you’re conscious that tomorrow is Monday, and you just try to mark time. The evenings are long and light; and there’s just a hint of something magic in the sky which only now, when it’s too late, do you notice, and which says: Fools! What do you want to go to sleep for, only to wake up for work? Marian has been pottering in the garden, and now she’s going round with her plastic watering-can, watering her house-plants. I can hear her muttering to the peperomias and the sweetheart vine: ‘Here you are then – I expect you’re thirsty. There, that’s better. We want to make you grow up big and strong, don’t we?’ I think she kisses them goodnight. It makes me jealous. I watch her through the open door of the living-room, bending over the rack of plants in the hall. She wears a pair of faded jeans and a thin, short-sleeved top that stops inches from her waist. I think: if she put down the watering-can and I put down my book we could lock up the house and go to bed and make love, hotly and deliberately, and lie awake for a while afterwards. Then everything would be clear and resolved between us. But we haven’t made love of any sort for weeks. Instead, Marian makes love to the house-plants. ‘… we want to keep those nice green glossy leaves.…’ I watch her through the doorway. There is something less provocative than disturbing about that chink of bare flesh above her jeans.

  … The Gestapo officers, despite their air of icy efficiency, were all nervous. They knew they were conducting operations which at any moment might be cut short by the arrival of the Americans or by the command to withdraw. Every so often in these last few days, when the wind was right, we had heard the distant sound of shell-fire. This was a factor in my favour. But it worked both ways. The nervousness of the Germans might make them act with ruthless haste.

  As we drove, we had to pass, some of the way, along the Belfort road where bedraggled sections of German divisions were already retreating. There was irony here (not greatly felt at the time): an army in retreat and one, self-important staff-car determinedly conveying a single prisoner. The driver sounded his horn to clear a way through the lines of battered trucks, field-kitchens, commandeered wagons and lumbering men. The two officers in the front seat visibly stiffened and, doubtless for my benefit, put on an air of not acknowledging what was happening. I sat between two guards. I had been handcuffed but my feet were free. At every halt, junction and slow section of road, I had wild thoughts of knocking one of the guards aside, crashing through the locked car door and running for it. But I knew that even if I got free of the car, in twenty yards I would have as many bullets in my back.

  I did not need to be told we were heading for the Château Martine. I thought to myself: when we get within a certain distance they will blindfold me. But I already had a mental picture (how well it was to serve me later) of the roads and the lie of the land around the Château and Combe-les-Dames. I had got to know the area with Mathieu at the time when that ambitious plan had been formed, then shelved, to organize a mass-escape of the Château’s prisoners. The Château Martine was where the SS now held ‘priority’ captives. Not ordinary Maquisards who had little to impart before being shot, but operators with special information and ‘intelligence value’. A British agent was for them a real prize. Before me lay the fate that every agent knows may await him and which he tries to push
to the back of his mind. Capture, interrogation … execution.

  I had nothing to give away which, in German hands, could possibly alter the course of the war. But I knew enough about the overall pattern of resistance activities, about resistance cooperation with the Allies and even about the specific tactical objectives of the British and Americans to lend a possible sting to the German retreat and claim unnecessary extra lives. I also knew the whereabouts of four other British agents. I could not make mathematical calculations on the importance of my information. I was unlike the general in the field who consciously estimates and anticipates so much loss of life, so much damage to equipment for the sake of an overall victory, and therefore wittingly yields so much to his enemy. The spy’s duty is to tell nothing, no matter how slight the strategic value of what he knows.

  Sure enough, after we turned off the Belfort road, the blindfold came out. One of the officers said, in German and in English, ‘Can you see?’ And, to test the point, a pistol barrel struck me hard under the chin without warning.

  I could tell we were climbing up into the hills, away from the river. The Château was only a matter of four kilometres away. It got cooler. I had dried out a good deal after my night in the water tank, but my clothes were still damp and I began to shiver. At the same time, with the blindfold on, the movement of the car round the hillside bends was making me nauseous. At length we took a turn and drove along a straight level stretch of road – the Château drive (between, as I remembered it, an avenue of chestnut trees). There was a crunching of gravel; the car wheeled and stopped. Barked orders and the noise of stamping boots. The officers in front and the guard on my left got out. Then the remaining guard, grasping me by my handcuffed arms and my collar, pulled me roughly through the right-hand door. I guessed we were in the courtyard of the Château.

  There was a clipped ‘Nehmen Sie ihn heraus!’ And I was dragged by the pair of guards across a few yards of gravel and through a door which I heard closed and locked behind us. Then to the left along a short, flagged passage, through another door, apparently manned by a guard with keys; along a corridor, wooden-floored and narrow (I felt myself squeezed between my two guards and heard their tunics brushing against the walls); sharply to the right (all these details I was making a conscious effort to remember), perhaps through a hundred and eighty degrees; through another door, heavy and narrow, and, again, unlocked, opened and relocked by a separate guard, and down a flight of stone steps. The steps took me completely by surprise. The two guards, who could no longer walk abreast of me, half let me tumble by my own weight and half dragged me, my legs tripping against the stone. All the time they had said nothing, except to the guard at the top of the steps, who merely replied, ‘Drei – auf der linken Seite.’

  At the foot of the steps I heard the click of a switch and, even behind my blindfold, sensed an electric light come on. We moved on several yards down another flagged, musty-smelling passage. A third guard seemed to come from somewhere. Then a door was opened to my left – a door with a slow, ominous creak, like every true cell door – and I was thrust inside. I fell against a rough brick wall. My guards began to beat me up at once; not, it is true, a severe beating-up, but bad enough. Then my blindfold, which had already slipped, was pulled away. I had time to take in that I was in a windowless cellar with mould-covered walls, empty of furniture and with a heavy, metal-barred door, and that the only light came from the electric light in the corridor. Then the door was slammed in my face, a lock turned, bolts drawn. I heard the guards’ boots down the corridor, watched the band of light under the door disappear. Then there was nothing – absolute darkness (I might as well have still been blindfolded), and a moist, permeating smell that was strangely familiar.

  I thought to myself (it is strange how I scarcely felt the injuries of my beating-up – my one instinct was to think fast): they do not have much time themselves – they won’t lose any with me. At any moment I will be hauled out for interrogation. But it was a long while before anything happened. I say ‘a long while’, but I had no real way of measuring time. My wrist-watch had been taken from me (not that I would have been able to see it) along with everything else save my clothes. Someone should make a study one day of the effects of a completely darkened room on one’s ability to estimate and make judgements. I sat with my bruises. There were no sounds. The walls of an old French Château must be very thick. Sometimes I seemed to hear muffled voices and shouts and the sound of car motors from the direction I supposed the courtyard to be. I tapped the walls. No answering tap. They were indeed thick; or I had no neighbours. There was only one other way of putting this to the test. I groped till I felt the door, stood up and shouted at the top of my voice (stupidly, as I afterwards realized), ‘Il n’y a personne?’ No reply; but almost immediately, to my surprise, light appeared beneath the door and someone came along the corridor from the left. My door was opened. A round-faced, small-eyed German like an outsize schoolboy stood in front of me. He held a long stick. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’ he said in an atrocious accent and, before I could answer, struck me hard across the chest with the stick (it was actually a polished truncheon, made for the purpose). I crumpled against the wall. ‘Vous avez faim?’ he added (words which I did not understand till later), then locked the door on me. The electric light went out. I did not attempt to utter another sound after this.

  It had been perhaps four in the afternoon when I was deposited in my cell. After what seemed at least three hours, I heard the noise of opening doors and then of footsteps descending the steps down which I had been previously dragged. The light was switched on and showed through the crack under my door. I was already learning to make use of that thin, fleeting beam as a means, however feeble, of discerning something of my cell. The footsteps stopped; a door some ten yards away on the other side of the corridor was unlocked and opened, and, to judge by the sounds, someone dragged out. There was much ‘rausing’ and ‘schnelling’, then footsteps and scuffling going away; the outer door being shut and locked; then silence again.

  This silence seemed more set to last than the first. I guessed it was now night. I sat propped against one of the walls. The sheer pressure on the nerves of waiting for something to happen was beginning to tell. I was cold and nearly every bone in my body seemed to have taken a sharp knock. I took consolation by reminding myself that I had spent the previous night in a water tank. I reflected that they were deliberately letting me stew before they questioned me, and therefore I should stop myself from stewing. I began to combat negative thoughts by methodically exploring my cell with my handcuffed hands. I started at a corner near the door and worked round in a clockwise direction, beginning at floor level, working up as far as my hands would reach, then down again, and so on. Then I began on the floor, working from the wall furthest from the door.

  My hands confirmed what my eyes had briefly seen when the blindfold had been removed: a brick room about eight feet square, containing nothing and with no outlet save the door. The floor was strewn with a thick mixture of what I took to be dust, grit and sawdust. The smell of the sawdust, and of damp wood generally, was what pervaded the room, but why this smell was so peculiarly familiar I could not tell. The brickwork of the walls was rough and coated with dust and cobwebs. Here and there, there were sections where the mortar had crumbled between the courses. My fingers groped, in vain, in the gaps. But they found something that, in due course, was to prove invaluable. Sticking into one of the walls, high up, was a single, long, straight-sided, rust-covered nail. I made a note of the position of this nail. By persistent efforts, I managed to pull it free, and placed it, lengthwise, in one of the mortarless gaps in the brick courses, for safe keeping.

  I must have fallen into a deep sleep. I was woken by my door being unbolted, by shouts and the entry of two guards (not those of the day before) into my cell. I suffered the exquisite pain of believing for a moment I was not where in fact I was. The guards pulled me on to my feet and I was shoved along the corridor. I tho
ught to myself: the moment has come. But I also considered: better for it to happen like this, suddenly and even after having slept than to sit and wait for it. My body was stiff and ached cruelly. We took the same route, in reverse, as the day before: along the corridor, where now, with my eyes uncovered, I noticed, on either side, other doors, doubtless to cells like my own; up the stone steps, and through the outer door, on the other side of which a guard was posted. Here, for the first time, daylight, subdued and indirect though it was, stabbed my eyes. I was marched round a corner to the left and then, not left again, which would have accorded with my route of entry the day before, but right – and face to face, all at once, with a magical vision. We were in a narrow hallway, painted in delicate duck-egg blue, with gilt cornices and hung with two or three gilt-framed pictures. At the end of this hallway – about eight yards ahead – was a tall, stately, deep-casemented window opening on to a view of a classical French garden bathed in the light of a September dawn: terraces, urns, statuary, long ornamental ponds between lawns silvered with dew; a low sun looming over misty trees. As unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude.

  We walked towards this mirage, the sun streaming through the glass on to our faces, and I had a brief, preposterous notion that I was going to be flung into it. But I was jerked abruptly to the right, round a corner. During the second or two in which we passed the window I had rime to notice that the ground sloped away quite steeply from the back of the Château, that the window was several feet above ground level and that below it was a long, balustraded terrace which at least one sentry was patrolling.