Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

He couldn’t finish his bread and jam. It was what his mother had said, almost immediately, when she came in: ‘You haven’t finished your bread and jam.’ She’d noticed very quickly the little remnant of bread with the small half-moon shape in it of his mouth. But she must have noticed too that there was an atmosphere inside the house. An atmosphere. She must have noticed it more than the piece of bread.

Let this bread and jam pass from me.

It was only a story. But he lay awake that night, listening to the wind and feeling somehow that he should stay awake the whole night, he should do this, for his father’s sake. But he’d slept too, despite the story. He’d simply fallen asleep. He was eight years old and he slept deeply and sweetly and when he woke up it was bright daylight and he knew that he didn’t have to get up to go to school. He could shut his eyes and go back to sleep if he wished. It was a delicious feeling. For a moment he hadn’t remembered his father speaking to him or anything about the previous day. Then there was a sort of shadow in his head. Then he remembered.

Outside, the sky was clear. The wind had stopped. It was Birmingham, and no cocks crowed. In a while his mother would come in to see if he was awake. She would stoop to kiss him. Sometimes, so as to enjoy her kiss, he’d pretend he was still asleep and that it was her kiss that had woken him. He wondered if she guessed this. It was a little like wishing she wouldn’t come to the school gates, but being glad, inside, that she did.

He’d surely have remembered if his mother had kissed him that morning.

Peter Wilson was a teacher at the primary school. Peter Wilson had once taught him. He’d become a friend of the family, as teachers can become, perhaps a particular friend of his mother. He’d been Mr Wilson, then he became Peter. Then he became his stepfather.

If his father had known that Peter Wilson was something more than just his mother’s friend, then he’d have known, when he became more seriously ill, that if he died it would give her her freedom. And if he’d died knowing — or even wishing — this, then that would, surely, have been not unsaintly. In any case, being a Christian, a vicar, his father would have known that he’d have to die without anguish or bitterness, accepting that it was God’s will.

When his father died — it was early December and now it was Christmas that was coming — his mother hadn’t cried, or not much, or not in front of him. But then she too had to behave with composure, like the wife of a vicar. But she cried a lot, and in front of him, when Peter Wilson, many years later, left her, just suddenly left her. It’s more uncomfortable, perhaps, for a mother to cry in front of her twenty-year-old son than in front of her eight-year-old son — setting aside which is more uncomfortable for the son. But she cried anyway, uncontrollably, as if she were crying two times over on the one occasion. He’d hesitated to embrace her.

What’s in a word? Words aren’t things. Cup, stone, rock. He didn’t really believe, even at eight, though his father must have believed it, that St Peter had a pair of keys that opened the gate to heaven. How could heaven have a gate? How could heaven have the same arrangement as his school, or even their front garden? People say of themselves, it’s the commonest excuse, and he must have said it of himself more than once in his life, ‘I’m no saint.’

He’s no saint. Or: She’s no angel.

Could he have thought it, of his own mother, as she stooped like that to kiss him in the morning? She’s no angel.

His father had said that it had all happened just as Jesus had said. Those who came to accuse and arrest him accused Peter too — of being a follower of Jesus. Three times, in fact, Peter was accused and three times he said that he had nothing to do with Jesus. Even though he’d been told by Jesus that this was just what he’d do — which should have been the severest and most unbreakable command not to do it — Peter had gone ahead three times with his denials.

His father didn’t say about this that it was because Peter was only human and he was afraid. He just said it was what happened. Peter had slept because his eyes were heavy. Now he made his denials, three times. Immediately after the third time the cock suddenly crowed. Then Peter had wept.

NEARLY EVERY WEEK now — more often if he could and if the weather was good — Terry would catch a train to the country and take a walk in one of the places where, not so long ago, he and his late wife Lynne used to walk together. They’d discovered these places and the appropriate train timetables when he’d had to give up driving because of his Parkinson’s, and because Lynne had never learnt to drive. In just an hour or so from town they’d be stepping out into quiet countryside with good walks, fine views and maybe a handy pub. It was all a lot better, in fact, more free and easy, than driving somewhere. They’d never have discovered these places in a car. It made him less miffed about not being able to drive, even about his altered state of health.

He’d always thought that, with his Parkinson’s, he would go first, but it was Lynne.

Now Terry went on these same walks, caught exactly the same trains on his own, because it was the nearest he could get to being with Lynne and enjoying it. At home, in the house they’d shared for years, the same theoretically applied, but it wasn’t enjoyable, it was the opposite. He needed the countryside, the trees, the open air, the familiar paths.

On these walks he’d sometimes say to himself: This is as good as it gets. It was something he’d never have thought of saying to himself when he was young, it would have seemed foolish, but there’d come a point in his life when he began to say it quite often, like a reminder. He used to say it to himself nearly every time he walked with Lynne. But he said it also now. It was important. It wasn’t true now, because when he’d said it to himself while walking with Lynne everything had been so much better. But it was also true now. It was true and it wasn’t.

When Terry took the trains for these walks he would look at other passengers as if he were a complete outsider, as if he might be invisible. He’d listen to their chatter. All of this wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling, in fact he sometimes felt a strange tug of warmth, of soothing fascination for these creatures he was no longer one of. He couldn’t have had these feelings driving in a car.

It might have been that on these walks he would have just felt lonely, but it was the opposite. It was only on these walks that he felt totally free to imagine that his wife was walking beside him, that he could be uninhibited about talking to her out loud, not even in his head. He couldn’t do this at home, it would seem like the first sign of madness, but on these walks he’d initiate and conduct whole conversations with his wife, and, yes, as he spoke or even as he just walked he’d sometimes really believe, turning his head quickly to check, that she was there.

It might have been, too, that, wrapped up in this process, Terry wouldn’t have been so attentive to the countryside around him, to the pleasing views, to the observation of nature. Yet it was all the more important to notice these things, to point them out to his wife, to see the butterfly, or the woodpecker, like a speck of paint, against the tree, or the kestrel quivering in mid-air. These things were alive.

So, in fact, he was all the more observant. He’d sometimes be drawn, with a surprisingly tender concentration, to just a cluster of primroses or a clump of moss. He’d notice things even at a distance.

So he noticed very quickly now, through the ferns, the patch of bright colour — bright red — up ahead.