by Graham Swift
The word “gift” troubles me. Is a gift something that belongs to us or not? If it is simply something we have rather than receive, why do we use the strange word “gift”? And if a gift is a true gift, then surely my mother was right—it comes unconditionally; you can take it or leave it, cherish or renounce it. But Ruth would not have held this view. Ruth would have said, I think, though she never said it in so many words, that we must serve our gifts.
I have always thought of myself as one of the great ungifted, so who am I to judge? My mother died, of throat cancer, because she neglected her gift. Ruth died of lung cancer, because she served her gift and was rewarded for it—and fate strikes quickest at the gifted and successful. There is no consistency or justice in superstition—but you have these thoughts. Easier to say that Ruth died of lung cancer because she smoked a lot. But then, we all know, some people smoke and live to be ninety. I like a cigarette myself. (Neither my wife’s death nor my own foiled one has cured me of the habit.) A gift is a gift: to treasure or disdain, to use or abuse, keep or reject. Including our bodies? Including our lives? Including our selves?
And, truly, my mother’s gift, as I remember it, was like something that didn’t belong to her. When she sang, it was as though some other creature was born inside her. A spasm of breast and throat, an upward parturition, a songbird hatching in her bosom—and out of this woman, so unscrupulous, so indolent, so heartless, my mother, would come a sound so sweet and miraculous, it was impossible not to yield.
“Who is Sil-via? What is she-e …?”
It must have softened even the rancorous heart of Uncle Ratty, disturbed in his dusty studies by those clear notes rinsing through the house. It must have bewitched the audience at concert halls and recital rooms in Reading and Maidenhead and Windsor. Among the debris that came into my possession after her death (along with Matthew Pearce’s testament) was a yellowed newspaper cutting recording my mother’s solo début (arias by Handel, Gluck and Purcell) at a concert in Reading in March 1929, in which the reviewer, Hugo Duval, saving his barbs for the orchestra, singles out “Miss Rawlinson” for her “exceptional promise” and “exquisite charm and purity.” Charm and purity! Charm, yes. How much was Hugo’s enthusiasm elicited by my mother’s vocal talents alone?
A career lay before her (she might have thrown away that cutting; she kept it). She might—who knows?—have trod the opera stage. And yet when she married my father, she abandoned the prospect and sang thenceforth—as if simply for the pleasure of it—only those intoxicating snatches I remember. And when my father died—it took time for me to realise, time for the truth of it to sink in—she gave up even that. Her throat never quivered, the songbird never took flight again.
And it is curious that in that catalogue of family failures, in that roll-call of doomed, obscurity-dreading, honour-hunting attention-seekers, she did not mention my father. She avoided my father altogether.
How were they ever joined together? Why, with her merciless view of masculine pretension—though perhaps it was unformed then, perhaps it only came with my father—did my mother marry my father? A man over twenty years her senior and, superficially at least, of precisely the same mould as Uncle Ratty: Colonel Unwin (a full and true colonel this time), formerly of the regular army, latterly of some ill-defined, semi-civilian sphere of duty between the military and the diplomatic services. Another careerist, another star-chaser.
One answer is simple and perhaps all-sufficient. He was a good catch. He rescued her; she bagged him. In 1935, when the marriage took place, he was forty-five years old, to her twenty-four. He came of what might have been called then “good Berkshire stock”; had “distinguished himself,” with no unfortunate Rattyesque blots, in the Dardanelles and Palestine; had served in India, where—this was about all I learnt from his own lips—he “shot tigers,” and where he was married, briefly, the first time around: one of those pathetic, semi-arranged marriages involving a shipped-out bride and ending in tropical fever. My mother told me her name was Vanessa. I see a creature compounded of white tulle and pale, sacrificial skin.…
When he returned to England in ’33, he was a seasoned officer in his middle years, conditioned by matrimonial disappointment to a life of service and duty, young enough still to nurse ambitions, possessed of a patrimony he had not yet had the chance to squander—and a perfect target for my mother’s charm. I don’t blame her for fortune-hunting. Now that her father, the hapless surgeon, was dead, how long was she to go on waiting for Uncle Rupert either to die too or to make some provision for her and her younger brother? Yet Ratty, with all his dread of the Great Leveller, lived on, steadily growing more crankish and steadily exhausting what was left of the Rawlinson riches.
It was just possible that the motive of which I know so much—revenge—entered my mother’s calculations. An army officer. With a clean and honourable record. And enjoying, at that time, just that rank of major to which Ratty had fallen. The mockery of it. The gall of it. Uncle Rupert could not prevent the marriage, but if he ever swore it should take place only over his dead body, he almost proved himself correct, for within a year of the wedding he at last gave up the ghost. Whether he had achieved by then, to his own satisfaction, the ultimate and redeeming goal of his life—certain proof of his kinship with Sir Walter Ralegh—no one can say.
My mother being excluded, or in any case now provided for by marriage, Uncle Ratty’s dwindled estate passed to her brother. Who did not have long to enjoy it. For, in reaction, perhaps, to the family tinge of khaki, he joined the Navy in 1939 and was killed in the earliest months of the war, not in action but in some miserable and obscure collision at sea—another instance, I suppose, of Rawlinson ignominy.
I was three years old at the time, so my Uncle Jim, perhaps in his naval togs, must once have dandled me in his arms, but I don’t remember him. Nor do I recall my mother’s being plunged into sisterly mourning. But a framed photograph of Jim was one of the few personal remnants of her past which she allowed herself to keep. It disappeared when she married Sam. I could see why Sam would never have liked it. It was only after her death—the photo is mine now—that I discovered that she hadn’t disposed of it but had simply hidden it from view.
He looks appallingly young and appallingly ignorant. Life has a thousand avenues, but he is fixed for ever—a perpetually grinning midshipman. He has my mother’s sparkle, none of her cunning. And, of course—this was Sam’s difficulty—I cannot look at that photo without seeing also the photo of Sam’s brother, which Sam first showed me, slipping it confidentially out of his wallet and giving me the facts, in those very early days in Paris. A shrewd but ill-fated piece of emotional trading. Sam’s brother (tropical whites; a lady-killer’s smile), Sam’s younger brother, Ed, who for these last forty years and more, just as Uncle Jim has been lying somewhere under the North Sea, has been lying under the South Pacific.
And what did my father—elevated now into some safer, more Olympian zone of warfare, touring the military purlieus of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey and sometimes being called to Whitehall, even to Washington—think of his new young bride? At his age, and after the first attempt, his notions of marriage must have been all to do (poor fool) with seniority, authority and self-esteem. He saw my mother as a pretty adornment to his own advancement. Or perhaps—after all those years of rigour under the Indian sun—he melted in the mild air of the Home Counties and in a wave of sweet self-delusion took this rather showy flower to be the perfect, adorable English rose.
And perhaps it was her voice, her gift, that swung it. That turned him from protector (perilous role) into worshipper (even more perilous one). His career; her career. He might have fostered, guided that career—he was prepared to be humble and generous. And the two things were not uncomplementary. A vision, a consummation: the steel-haired diplomat and his diva wife; he sits in his box, proudly and conspicuously clapping, while she, on the stage, receives an avalanche of bouquets.
(Didn’t his dream come true in
my life?)
But scarcely was he married than she gave up her career. And he was left clutching the rags of his dream, her abandoned stage robes, not knowing—so he would discover—how to deal with her naked yet somehow less graspable self.
I think I knew her, in some ways, better than he did. I think I was closer to her than he ever was. I remember, for instance, one afternoon in the autumn of what must have been either ’43 or ’44. He is away on one of his mysterious trips, and she, in defiance of the black-out regulations and with my collusion, is tending a bonfire. There is the usual pile of dead leaves and garden debris, but on top of this she is strewing—and I am helping her—so-called “rubbish”: papers, files, letters.
I only guessed later what she was doing. She had decided that the time had come to dispose of all that “junk” of Uncle Ratty’s that had come to her via her brother and which her brother had never had time to sort out for himself. All that research. All that evidence. All that burrowing after noble origins. And in amongst the junk there might so easily have been the disregarded notebooks of Matthew Pearce of Burlford—who knows if some other, unknown manuscript was not casually cremated that afternoon? With my own ignorant hands I might have tossed Matthew on to the pyre.
I don’t remember her showing any special emotion, only her evident pleasure in what she called a “jolly good bonfire, sweetie.” She wore for this occasion—but this was typical of her—not some sloppy gardening outfit, but an ensemble much more chic than practical: sleek, well-cut trousers, which at that time must have been a matter of fashionable novelty; a figure-hugging, collared jersey, with a Paisley silk scarf; all of which would have looked well at the best golf club. While she wielded the rake and struggled with branches, this gave her the appearance of being skittishly feminine, sillily, fetchingly out of her element, so that any male passer-by (though we were alone and at the end of the garden) would have felt compelled to say, “Here, let me,” taking the rake from her; and my mother would have stepped back in blinking, coquettish satisfaction.…
The memory of the smooth pear-shape of her waist and bottom, which her trousers calculatedly set off; the memory of our faces glowing greasily and mischievously while the sparks danced and a blackbird tink-tinked indefatigably in the beech hedge; the memory of her, on a sudden whim and without explaining, going into the house and returning, through the thickening twilight, having raided my father’s special reserves, with two glasses, one, filled only partially, for me; of her raising her glass to catch the full rubescence before the fire, then bidding me, with a wink, sip with her. My first taste of wine. “Chambertin, darling—divine.” My mother: Sylvia Unwin, née Rawlinson. I don’t believe my father ever communed with her more intimately than this.
I see her, in the gathering dark, rake the embers of Uncle Rupert’s dreams. And I hear her, as she steps back, grasping the rake like a spear, and as the blackbird in the hedge at last admits defeat, begin to sing:
“Who is Sil-via …?”
• • •
She lay in that rufous, glowing light, and the wipe-clean clipboard lay untouched beside her. I realised she was too weak to use it. If she had wanted to use it, I would have needed to guide her hand. I will never know what she might have said. But surely while she still had her voice she would have said all she meant to say. Or written one last letter … I will never know how much she felt the agony of willing words but having no means to utter them. I will never know if, to her, the words and all the resources of her voice still seemed to be there, as they say amputees still sense their absent limbs. Fish are mute when they tumble into the net. Perhaps the near-to-death (but I should know this) have already retreated a long way into themselves. They cannot waste their energies on those strange irrelevancies the living, on all those wearying transactions that happen on the surface of things. They can do without words. Perhaps my mother’s silence was golden.
I held her hand, which could only muster a faint returning grip. If I had not known this was my mother, I would scarcely have recognised her. All the cheerful plumpness she had gained in middle age had gone. She was a bag of bones. Her eyes, little trapped pools in their sunken sockets, seemed the only living things about her. They looked at me, over the wall of her speechlessness, and I could not tell what their infinitesimal glints and dilations meant. Apology? That I should have to witness her in this state? Or just apology? Defiance? Yet it seemed to me that whatever those eyes expressed, they were looking, intensely, at me, they saw me clearly; they were looking into me, assessing, questioning.
There was this sound of tennis balls. She lay with her thin arms above the covers, and her head in the peculiar, chin-jutting pose necessitated by all the scaffolding beneath her jaw. I will never know if that air of queenly serenity was a trick of that enforced posture and the drugs circulating through her, but I like to think of it as her genuine state of being. The curtains stirred, allowing a fuller beam of sunlight momentarily to penetrate the room, and she smiled, faintly but distinctly, the way a child smiles at some simple distraction. So she was not that far within herself. But as I bent towards her—it seemed to me that in order to speak to her, I had to whisper almost directly into her ear, otherwise she would not have heard—her eyelids slowly closed. I knew this was not death—she lasted almost another twelve hours. I knew her eyes would open again, for Sam. But I knew she was saying, after her last smile to me, Go. Goodbye.
I kissed her brow. Whispered my own goodbye. I left the room like a tiptoeing parent at bedtime. I felt perfectly calm, as if I were doing something familiar and routine. Immunized? Perhaps. Along the corridor, I found Sam, all alone, in the waiting room. The look of terror on his face focused for a moment into a sort of searching expression that was an echo of hers, then dissolved into bewilderment. He might have been going to his own death. I squeezed his arm. But our little change of sentry duty was conducted, fittingly perhaps, without any exchange of words.
I went out immediately into the park. Into this Indian-summer balm, this land of the living. The air was almost completely still; only an occasional breeze stirred the trees, as it had stirred my mother’s curtains. The sun was low and rich and everything under its touch—the midges whirling under the trees, the veins of leaves, the mica in the path—appeared specially illuminated. People’s voices sounded slow and hushed.
It seemed important that I should track down the tennis game, and I followed the sound of the balls, which, strange to say, was harder to make out at ground level. There were only two courts beside each other, in their tall, wire cage, and only one of them was occupied. A young couple were playing. As I approached they stopped, and I thought for an anxious moment they had finished and were about to leave. But they were only changing ends. The girl’s legs were slender and tanned. As they passed at the net, they paused to fondle and kiss, and it seemed again to hang in doubt whether they would continue their game or not. But then they walked to their respective ends—the whole court was bathed in the rays of the sinking sun—and then the reassuring, inconsequential sound of the balls began once more.
4
There are three things which have complicated my presence in this place and made me the subject of prying attention as well as recrimination among my fellow collegiates—setting aside, that is, the principal fact that my presence here is a joke. I am speaking now of the period before my recent botched brush with death. It is too early to say, except in practical terms, how this will have affected my general status. The business of Sam’s death, which should, I suppose, be called complication number four, has not helped. I sense outrage modified by pity. Not a sweet combination. But then they do not know that I have changed.…
There was first the fact that I had been Ruth’s husband. This, along with Sam’s money, was, I soon realised, my chief asset and counted for a good deal of initial unction—no, let me say genuine cordiality. Even envy. However much the academic world likes to maintain its persona of high-minded aloofness, it is not insusceptible to a little g
lamour—even the vicarious, refracted glamour that belongs to the husband of an actress cut off at the peak of her success. The contemplative life secretly yearns for the active life—or, in this case, the acting life. I know this, having once been, myself, the dowdy moth, meant for some inconspicuous cranny of scholarship, yet drawn to flutter helplessly round the flame of a show girl (which is what Ruth then could legitimately have been called). I was lucky. My wings did not get burnt. They even acquired, in the fullness of time, a sort of borrowed iridescence, which seemed to linger on (I suppose it is all gone now) after her death.
Glamour, I know, having lived with Ruth, is only a kind of dressing, a trick, a concoction, the promise of something else. (Beauty, love, happiness …) It is as desirable and as meaningless as money. Yet these grave and erudite dons, these seekers after knowledge, they would trade not a little of their learning and wisdom for just a touch of glamour.
(Look at Potter. He does these absurd radio programmes. His big moment came when at last he progressed to TV. He offers watered-down or souped-up scholarship for the masses. Potter’s potted history. Talks any old bilge. Even I can tell this. We will see him soon hosting a quiz show. He is, by all accounts, a genuinely accomplished historian. Yet he feels obliged to prostitute himself, for the sake of a little dubious limelight, by turning himself into something he is not.)
I was thus regarded when I first came here, not least by Potter, as something of an intriguing novelty. Something that might add a little pep and lustre to the otherwise sober atmosphere of academic life. Fellows’ wives—and Fellows too, with a touch of resentment—itched for the moment when they could ask me what was it like, what was it really like, to be married to her? What was she really like? No one was interested in my (admittedly unsensational) thoughts on Renaissance prosody.