Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

It had surprised her, the fierceness and quickness of her answer. She hadn’t been lost for words exactly, or for a way to say them. She’d spoken in a certain voice and with a certain look. She knew she had a certain look, because Addy had actually stepped back. She’d flinched — for all her being unflinching. And whatever else that look was saying, it was saying, ‘I’m not your mother any more, my girl. I’ve just become your deadly enemy.’

And whatever Addy had thought that talking to her mum would achieve — she’d wanted comforting? To be told she had guts? — she knew now she’d been seriously mistaken. And anyway she’d crossed a line for ever and there was no going back. But she must have thought of that — she should have thought of that — long before she opened her mouth.

Then her own mouth had opened again and she’d said to her own daughter, her own child of forty-eight years, ‘You lying evil bitch.’

He was stationed in Yorkshire. Flight Sergeant Baker, wireless-op Baker. As it turned out they were from barely a mile apart, he was from Streatham, but he was stationed in Yorkshire. It might as well have been another country. He said on the phone, ‘I’m safer here than where you are, I have it cushy here.’ But she knew it was a lie, or a daytime truth and a night-time lie, since any night he could be killed. That was the truth, that was the deal now. It wasn’t hanky-panky any more in the back of the stalls, though there was some of that, it began with that, but it went beyond.

Night-time, bedtime. How everything was turned round. How could she sleep when he might be over Hamburg or Berlin? But she never knew where, or even if, he’d be flying that night — so she might be scaring herself stiff for nothing. She’d actually preferred it when she had to be in the shelter. At least she could think: Well he’s dropping bombs on them. She didn’t care about Germans at all. That was their hell.

But the nights when she just lay in bed were terrible. They were like this night now. She didn’t even know where in Yorkshire, just Yorkshire. ‘Believe me, Flighty, you wouldn’t know where, even if I told you.’ But because she didn’t know anything, which nights or where, Yorkshire itself became like the place, the word for all things terrible. Yorkshire terriers. Like the word for terror itself.

That’s where he was now. Or she was.

And that’s where you came from, my girl.

He never talked either. He shut up and got on with it too. The fact is he came back, he always came back, but she never knew, nor did he, that that was how it would be, till it was all over. He came back and he never talked. ‘I’d rather talk about this, Flighty.’ His hand you know where. In the Air Force they called it Lack of Moral Fibre if you didn’t shut up and get on with it. Larry never had Lack of Moral Fibre.

He had nightmares, of course, for a long time afterwards — so yes he talked, even screamed a bit, in his sleep. But that was something she could deal with simply, easily, gladly. ‘You were dreaming, Larry, only dreaming. Look, you’re here beside me, you’re alive, these are my breasts. Put your head in my breasts.’

If only she could say that now. ‘You’re here, Larry, you’re not in Yorkshire.’

And then, in 1947, Adele was born. Little sweet Adele. And wasn’t that the universal cure? Everyone was doing it. Little babies galore. And didn’t that help to wipe things away?

And if Addy had been waiting all this time to talk — if there were any reason to — then she might have waited till the two of them were dead. If she’d waited anyway till she was forty-eight . Or she might have waited till they’d lost their marbles, gone doolally, so they wouldn’t know a thing anyway. Same difference.

But to say it now when they were seventy-two and seventy-one, though still going strong, in their ‘sunset years’ and trying to make the most of them. Having passed their Golden and hoping to make it to their Diamond (what was flighty about that?). Not to mention to the year 2000, to a new millennium. Think of that, Larry, we’ve lived through a millennium.

But Addy had actually given that as her reason. If she’d waited till they were dead, till he was dead, then there wouldn’t have been any justice, would there?

Justice?

She actually said it was the thought of them reaching the end of their lives that had ‘forced her’ to it, the thought of them being dead and the thing just disappearing into the past, then her having no ‘redress’ and just having to carry on living with it till she was dead herself.

She actually said that. All her life she’d protected them, but enough was enough.

Protected them?

Well, she’d made the sun set now sure enough. There was only this night, which she wished would go on for ever.

No matter how tightly she closed her eyes, she couldn’t make it black enough. To want night, to want blackness! Yet to be made to feel at the same time that you had to shine some nasty poking torch into it, like a policeman at a murky window. And there could be no stopping it, could there, no end to it, once you got into that area where memory itself stopped and no one could say what was true or false? Beneath everything a great web of — disfigurement. It must be there because no one talked about it.

How she’d dreaded it, once, sunset — the thought of the sun setting over Yorkshire. Now she wanted only darkness. She couldn’t say what Larry wanted.

She saw herself on a bicycle, arms outspread. She saw again her little room in Camberwell, bands of light from the street. Her daisy curtains. Her father’s cough across the landing.

Though she’d never felt it before and never imagined she might feel it, she felt it now like some black swelling creature inside her. The wish not to have been born. Or was it the wish not to have given birth? She felt it, decades on, but as if it were happening all over again, the exact, insistent, living feeling of carrying Adele inside her. Though was this Adele? At four months, at six months, at eight, at—

Then she woke up and felt sure she’d been screaming, screaming out loud. She felt sure she’d screamed — so loud that Larry, in the next room, must have heard, even if he’d been sleeping. Yes, he was in the next room, but it was only the next room, so he must have heard, a scream like that. And she wanted this to end it, she wanted it to be the thing that would make him snap out of it and leap up and come back to her and hold her and soothe her and crush her against his chest and say, ‘It’s all right, Flighty, you were only dreaming.’

HOLLY LIKES TO say — and Holly likes to say everything — that we’re in the introduction business. We can’t make anything happen, but we can bring the parties together. She’ll say this to men in bars when they home in on us. It’s a wonderful thing to watch a pair of them edge our way and to see the light in their eyes before they get the full picture.

‘So, don’t tell us,’ one of them says, ‘the two of you work in a dating agency?’

‘No, but you’re close,’ Holly says. ‘Sure, getting the date right can be an important part of it.’

‘You wouldn’t be Irish by any chance?’

‘By every chance. But that’s not what you’re guessing.’

Isn’t it a wonderful thing — isn’t it the most wonderful thing — how things come together in this world, how they can even be meant for each other? But you can’t tell, you can’t guess it in advance.

‘So — you’ve got one more guess. Yes, we work together. It’s not an office. And it’s not a dating agency. You two wouldn’t be after a date now, would you? Without the agency?’