Graham Swift - Shuttlecock

I met Quinn’s eyes. I felt like a criminal.

‘What about other people? People still alive — ’

‘There’s always that risk of course. But then all this has slept for thirty years. Why shouldn’t it go on sleeping? Your only real danger is Z’s wife and Z’s son. But Z’s wife is hardly likely to want to publicize matters further, and Z’s son — well, Z’s son’s primary concern was his father’s reputation. Now his father has been cleared of any professional slur, he is hardly likely to want to make known — that’s if my theory about Z’s son is correct — that his father committed suicide because he had found out his best friend was carrying on with his wife. All these skeletons, Prentis, hidden away in cupboards. As a matter of fact, your position and Z’s son’s are peculiarly alike. You both want to protect your fathers. You are both under your father’s shadows. Am I right? You never know, perhaps one day you should meet.’

Z’s son. So, somewhere else in the world, there was someone like me.

‘Shall I get the file?’

‘All right.’

He went in once more. I sat with my drink, looking at Quinn’s trim, new-mown lawn. I thought: this is just another terrace where you sit and play games with the truth.

He emerged with the file in his hand. It was a standard, pale-blue office file with the letters C9/E on it and ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamped in purple ink on one corner. He placed it on the table in front of me. I felt like a witness in the dock confronted with some incriminating exhibit.

‘Now — first question. Down at the end of the garden is a little incinerator I use for burning garden rubbish. I suggest we have a bonfire. Do you agree?’

I looked at the file. For a while I didn’t think of Dad at all; only of the implications of destroying official information.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good. If we don’t decide now we might dither for ever. Second question: do you want to look at it first, before you even answer question one?’

I stared again at the file. I thought of the number of times I’d opened the cover of Shuttlecock hoping Dad would come out; hoping to hear his voice. Was I afraid that the allegations might be true — or that they might be false? And supposing, in some extraordinary way, that everything Quinn told me was concocted, was an elaborate hoax — if I never looked in the file, I would never know. I read the code letters over and over again. C9/E … And then suddenly I knew I wanted to be uncertain, I wanted to be in the dark.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Right. Come on.’

Quinn got hastily out of his seat and took the file. He was like a boy engineering some mischievous prank. Was he doing all this simply to pass the responsibility on to me? I followed him across the lawn. I thought of him running in the fields of Normandy. We reached an unkempt corner of the garden, beyond the screen of the apple trees. Ivy cloaked the walls, and some neglected trees in a neighbour’s garden arched overhead. Bits of garden debris and cinders strewed the ground, in amongst patches of weeds and nettles. It wasn’t the safest place to have a fire.

The incinerator stood in the corner — a shaky, wire-mesh construction, rusty and scorched. Quinn stooped over it. He did not pause. He took a cigarette lighter from his trouser pocket and then dropped the file into the wire frame, lifting his arm, ritualistically, high. He turned to me for final confirmation.

‘I’ve done all this for you, Prentis, but also to put my own mind at rest. If you think I was wrong, tell me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, resolutely. It seemed to me this was an answer I would give, boldly, over and over again for the rest of my life.

Quinn looked at me, surprised, approving.

‘Are we ready then?’

He flicked alight the cigarette lighter. Before setting the flame to the file he pulled out some of the documents and spread them loosely to help them burn. The papers blackened, curled and flared up. I thought of funeral pyres. I thought: they can arrest us for this.

I’m not superstitious, but I wondered if at this moment, as the flames licked at File E, Dad would be feeling, at the hospital, a glow of relief; whether others there would see his face brighten — his lips flutter. The smoke curled up through the overhanging leaves. The evening shadows had lengthened and the branches and foliage seemed to press round us in complicity.

… the woods and the trees are always on the side of the fugitive.…

Quinn crouched by the incinerator, poking the fire with a stick. The flames lit his face. He might have been an outlaw in some forest hideout.

‘There,’ he said, lifting the last fragments of paper to make them catch. ‘Now it’s done.’

‘And all this was for me?’ I asked. ‘All those mixed-up files; your — behaviour — at the office? And you might never have told me about it?’

‘Not exactly, old chap. There are others like you.’ He smiled rather sourly. ‘My little flock. I just happened to know you.’

I thought: do I really understand Quinn any better? You penetrate one mystery only to find another. I wondered if at work tomorrow he would behave just as before, as if this evening hadn’t happened. Speak to me gruffly; look down at me from his glass panel; treat me like dirt. I looked at him as he crouched. His eyes were hidden by the reflected flames in his glasses. I remembered my arrival when he stood at the foot of the basement steps and everything was different. I felt vaguely as if I were under hypnosis.

‘Well, shall we finish those drinks?’

He got up and tossed away the stick he was holding. As he did so he struck his hand — the hand with the bandaged finger — against the rim of the incinerator. He winced and clutched the injured finger. ‘The cats,’ he explained. ‘Little beasts. They quite often bite me. Do you like Siamese, Prentis? Just a little bit on the wild side, a little bit devious — you won’t ever show them you’re the boss. I think that’s why I’ve got them.’ A sly look entered his eye. ‘You see, I like animals, but I’m not sure I believe in keeping pets. Don’t you think if you keep pets they should be free to rebel whenever they like?’ He waved the bandaged finger. ‘Come to think of it, they’ll be wanting their supper now.’

We walked back across the lawn. I watched Quinn’s limp. The cats were prowling round the door of the conservatory. When Quinn went in they followed him.

He reappeared after a minute or so with a large bowl of cat-food and another of milk which he put down on the edge of the lawn. The cats began lapping and nibbling at once. Quinn squatted amongst them and stroked the neck of one of them as it ate. It twisted and rubbed its head against Quinn’s hand, but whether out of pleasure or annoyance I could not say.

‘By the way, you’ll be getting official notice of your promotion tomorrow. Starting from when I leave, of course.’

He said this as if it were something merely minor and incidental but at the same time logical and expected. And, at first at least — until I had left Quinn’s and was returning home — this was just how I received it. I nodded, smiled. So much else had happened.

I stayed only another five or ten minutes. We finished our drinks, the cats licking and preening themselves at our feet. Most of the time we talked about animals and pets, and, almost as a natural course, about children.

He walked with me to the front of the house to see me off. At the foot of the basement steps he said — and not at all in a voice that carried any of the double meanings and undertones the words might have had in the context — ‘I do hope your father’s condition improves’; and he extended his hand, to grip my own or perhaps to grasp my shoulder. But I had already begun to mount the steps, and when I turned at the top I saw him standing at the bottom, his right hand dropping awkwardly to his side. This was the last image I took away of Quinn. I say ‘last’ as if I never saw him again — which isn’t true. But I have never seen again the figure in sandals and baggy, opened shirt, the figure with his watering-can and Siamese cats, or the figure who ran, to save his skin, in Normandy. For most of the time, you never know the real person. And then there was something about the sight of Quinn, standing, alone, on the front path as I started the car and waved to him from the window, that made me think: he looks like a man you will never see again.