Graham Swift: Ever After

It is strange that I never told Ruth about this secret affinity. After all, she more than once played Ophelia — the last time, you might say, for real. I don’t like to think I had secrets from Ruth. But perhaps it was because she was an actress that I never confessed: she would have taken my fixation as the pretension of a would-be actor. And it was she, in any case, who made the image absurd. It was she who made me happy.

I shouldn’t blame Tubby Baxter. Rather, I owe him infinite thanks for introducing me to Literature, which despite its failure to save lives, including, I suppose I must say, my own, and despite its being, in a place like this, for ever chopped up and flung into preservatives as if it were a subject for an autopsy, I still believe in. I still believe it is the speech, the voice of the heart. (Say things like that round here and see what happens.) Tubby Baxter was not to blame for the doleful but charismatic Renaissance protagonist who has somehow got under all our skins. Nor was he to blame for the circumstances which induced in me a particularly acute rapport.

Hamlet is actuated, or immobilized, by two questions: (1) is there or is there not any point to it all? (2) Shall I kill Claudius? Or to put it another way: shall I kill Claudius or shall I kill myself? It was the vengeance theme that grabbed me from the start, just as much as the distraught meditations on the meaning of life, though I understood, even aged thirteen-and-a-half, that the two questions were not inseparable.

For Claudius, read Sam Ellison. “Uncle Sam,” as he was inevitably known, since he hailed from Cleveland, Ohio. Otherwise my stepfather, and founding father of Ellison Plastics (UK). For forty years of my life I have conducted a theoretical vendetta against Sam, though I do not think real killing was ever on the cards. And the odd thing is I have always liked him. I have never been able to help liking him.

Now he is dead; and revenge is pre-empted, or has been satisfied. Or, if revenge is a two-sided game, it is Sam who in a posthumous but canny fashion has got his revenge on me. I rather think, in fact, that Sam’s death, which occurred only six weeks ago, may not have been unconnected with my own averted one. It is not the huge, primary things that push you over (I suppose I can speak now as an authority) but the odd, secondary things. He died, and I always really liked him. Furthermore, Ruth being already dead, his death removed — I have to admit it, absurd as it seems — one of the main shaping factors, one of the plots of my life.

What was left? Potter? Katherine? The strange, stray notebooks of an unknown man — another latter-day fixation — who lived over a century ago? But I will come to all this.

The manner of his death — death number three, chronologically speaking — was also significant, though to me it was neither as surprising nor as scandalous as it might be to a number of people who do not know about it or as it is to a number of people who are conspiring to hush it up. (I could get my posthumous revenge that way, but it would be cheap, low-down revenge.) He died of a heart attack in a Frankfurt hotel room, aged sixty-seven. His death was reported by the call-girl he was with at the time, who, to give her her due, might simply have fled the scene. At the fatal moment, either Sam was on top of her or she was on top of Sam. At any rate, it seems they were intimately connected when death occurred. An unsavoury business. But then if we could choose our deaths — and I tried to choose mine — I am not so sure that this wasn’t exactly the kind of death Sam might have preferred. (You see what this new me is like.)

Under certain circumstances, generosity is one of the most effective and perhaps one of the sweetest means of revenge. If it were not for Sam, I would not be enjoying the mixed blessings of my present situation — I mean the sanctuary of these ancient walls, not my recent resurrection. I will come to this too in a moment. There is the more immediate question of Sam’s will and my prominent inclusion in it. I must reveal that I find myself a rich man, and that had my attempted demise been successful, I would have immediately made the taxman the chief beneficiary of my short-lived wealth. I am a plastics heir, you might say, in the way that people talk of cocoa heirs, or rubber barons.

But it is not just a question of the money. Is a plastic cup less real than a china one? Nylon stockings less real than silk? More to the point, is plastic any more fraudulent than a stage performance? Or a poem? Yet long ago when my former self refused my stepfather’s offer of a future in plastic, it did so in the conviction that the real stuff of life lay elsewhere. And I am not alone, perhaps, in regarding plastic as the epitome of the false. Sam never saw it that way. In those days when it seemed to me that his goal was nothing less than the polymerization of the world (this is when the spirit of Hamlet breathed newly and fiercely in me), his argument would have been roughly thus: “You gotta accept it, pal” (he called me pal, when he did not call me “kid” or, scathingly, “professor”), “the real stuff is running out, it’s used up, it’s blown away, or it costs too much. You gotta have substitoots .”

Yet, as Ellison Plastics went from strength to strength (without my assistance), it would have been clear to anyone that Sam’s appetite for the “real stuff” developed in proportion to his capacity, with the money he made from substitutes, to purchase it: the new mansion in Berkshire— real Tudor (with a swimming-pool), as opposed to the mock Tudor in which I was raised; the affectation of fine tailoring and choice antiques; in its ultimate form, the apotheosis of Sam, a New World clone, into a Real English Gentleman. A plan preposterously conceived, doomed from the start by his indelible Cleveland accent, but earnestly and perseveringly undertaken: the genealogical investigations (why should these things have mattered to him ?); the wondrous discovery, not that he had come over with the Normans or was of Mayflower stock, but that a former Ellison, John Elyson (d. 1623), had been a senior Fellow of this College, this place where I am now myself an inmate. Which gave him an hereditary stake in the hallowed ancient walls; and gave him the nerve, in his sixty-seventh year, to boost the college finances by a handsome endowment, the one (secret) condition of this munificent gesture being that it should provide for a new college fellowship, the Ellison Fellowship, whose first incumbent, whatever the outward form of selection, should be me.

And this is the Sam who once mocked and refused to fund my former yen to be a scholar.

Without knowing the full story — give me time — you may sniff here the bitter scent of retaliation. It was his way of coming to my rescue after Ruth’s death. There was the question of my income. One way or another, as he tenderly reminded me, I had lived off Ruth’s earnings. And there was the question of my seemingly incurable paralysis in the face of Ruth’s absence. Better to be somewhere where paralysis was generally accommodated. In other words, it was his way also of humiliating me and, after lifelong resistance, rendering me entirely dependent upon him. The cloister was my real home all along, wasn’t it? So much for my fugitive dream of a life with performers, show people. Back to your books, professor.

The trouble was I really liked him, and the trouble was I was desolate and he was being kind. In the event, anxious not to forgo its windfall, the College did not raise a squeak at the dubiousness of my candidature (a ten-year career, abandoned some fifteen years ago, as an unillustrious university lecturer). The embarrassments and resentments came later. Nor did the College seem to mind its revered fabric being underpinned by plastic.