Graham Swift: Shuttlecock

I continue gazing at Eric, sipping my tea, knowing what my next move will shortly be. When my tea is finished I will open the rear door of my office and call out, like some captain on the quarter-deck, ‘Eric — can you spare a moment?’ (For, unlike Quinn, I cannot run — not with Eric, at least — to the barking of full-blown orders. But my words are a command — and a provocation — nonetheless.) And Eric will step up, and I will see the apprehension on his face, for he knows what is coming. ‘Isn’t it about time you were finished with that file?’ I will sink back in my chair. And Eric will offer up some vague excuse about the fragmentariness of the evidence, the difficulty of establishing connexions — all of which I will cut short by saying, with a faint sigh, ‘All right — leave it with me.’ And it’s then that I will see, beneath his confusion, a look of aggression enter Eric’s face; and it’s then, as he betrays himself by a momentary glance round my office, that I shall see the substance of that aggression. Envy; envy and hate. For I was once a junior like Eric; he and I were virtual equals. We stood each other drinks at lunch-time and swopped each other’s jokes. And now I sit behind a big desk, with a salary to match, promoted by an extraordinary stroke of luck (or, some say, secret machination) to a senior rank in my early thirties; and why shouldn’t Eric, who is no different from me, and only a year younger, have and deserve these things too?

I stand by the partition with this scene already scripted and rehearsed, as it were, ahead of me. But it is not really Eric I am looking at. And all that I’ve said so far about how I treat Eric — how do you know that I haven’t made it up, it’s not all in my imagination? It’s not really Eric I’m looking at. For, after all, Eric sits in my place, just as I sit in Quinn’s, and what I see are only the reproduced symptoms of a year ago. It is my life I see through the partition. My life. For this new role that has been mine for six months is not my life. I go through its motions, I wear its mask, but inside is a man just like Eric. And I like to think that it was just the same for Quinn as he stood in this same spot looking at me. Perhaps that is why he had the partition built — in order to see better, to get a clearer view.

So how little Eric knows what I am really looking at as he bends over his work. And how little he knows if he thinks in his bewilderment, beset by all those misleading files, those gaps in the shelves — for perhaps, after all, I was not making it up — by my ever increasing strangeness (has Prentis really gone loopy like his Dad?), that the confusions cease, the mysteries stop, when promotion lifts you up into the rarefied air.

The mysteries don’t stop.…

Marian and the kids look at me each night when I return home, with the thankful expression of people who no longer have to doubt or disbelieve what they see. Perhaps my transformation is a mystery to them, too. Or perhaps their explanation — the explanation which relaxes the looks in their faces — is simple. All Daddy needed was a little power. When he didn’t have it, he tried to make up for it by acting the tyrant with us. But now that he has it, we go free. Contentment is just a fortuitous apportioning of power. And they don’t ask — any more than they did before — what I do in the office. And that is just as well. For I don’t tell them, either. They don’t ask if I am tormenting some poor underling in their stead. Why should they, if that is the price of their comfort?

But I don’t believe this explanation alone will ever satisfy Marian, for whom I am not so much a transformed as a reformed man: the man I was, years ago, before Mum’s death and Dad’s breakdown, before the kids grew up. I don’t believe she thinks it is power. And perhaps she even has some inkling — sometimes I feel it on those evenings when I work particularly late — of what I’m really doing at the office; that what I am doing is not just what I’m required to do. And what I’m doing isn’t just another, idiosyncratic version of power, whatever Quinn may have said — for he could afford the luxury of a little self-reproach, the rescue-launch of retirement standing by. It is only the sort of furtive, underhand and not even original daring of a man who isn’t really powerful or daring at all. The sort of daring that knows sooner or later — does Marian know this too? — it will be found out. For one day Eric may say: ‘Look, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but …’

And I don’t believe that Martin is satisfied by the power theory either. For when he looks at me, though I am a more sufferable father than I was, there is still the same disrespect, the same edge of contempt, the same undeluded penetration in his eyes. He doesn’t see a man with power; he sees the same old weakling. The only difference is that I no longer conceal it. And this brings into Martin’s eyes — even into Martin’s eyes — the slightest hint of perplexity. For this is something he cannot understand. But I don’t attempt to enlighten him, or to iron out the differences which exist between us, which seem to me less and less a matter of attitude than of simple physiology.

About a fortnight or so after the official notice of my promotion I had the television reinstated in the living room. Call it an act of atonement towards my family. I didn’t want it back myself. I feared, for the sake of a gesture, a return to those days of non-communication with my sons and the spectacle of their young minds sopping up trivia. But this didn’t happen. The Bionic Man was still running, leaping, focusing his telescopic eyes on distant targets, overcoming all kinds of insuperable difficulties with effortless ease, just as he must have been, unwatched by us, all through the summer — and as he must do, for ever, electronically proofed against mortality. But I noticed Martin was no longer watching his hero’s antics with total enthralment. More than once, instead of gasping, he laughed — not a sympathetic laugh but a scoffing laugh, the sort of laugh which, if you interpret it carefully, means: I don’t need the tricks of this synthetic hero, I have my own hero — me .

And then one day — miracle of miracles — Martin was not watching the Bionic Man. He was out on the common — and not spying on his father coming home from the station, either. He was simply out there to mooch about, the way kids do when they reach a certain age, to look for what might turn up, and to advertise his ever more assertive presence. Now that he has moved to secondary school, an upheaval which hasn’t perturbed him in the least, he has gone in for this cult of self-promotion in a big way. He is constantly pushing himself to the fore (so Marian tells me, who seems to have a secret intuition for such things) amongst his fellow pupils; he has actually taken earnestly to the sports field; he is caught admiring himself in the bathroom mirror. In fact, he is undergoing — and coping blithely with — all those changes which normally occur to a boy two or three years older than himself.

And so when I think of Martin as he will be in only a few years’ — who knows, only a year’s — time, I think of a creature almost wholly alien to me and therefore beyond contention or ill-feeling. I see him as one of those cocksure, invincible, infallible youths, who will not have to swot to be bright at school, for whom puberty will be a doddle, for whom life will hold no traps, no fears.

But Peter — Peter who is still addicted to the Bionic Man — is another story.

No, if they think it is power, they are wrong. It is not power at all.

And if their new-found contentment somehow depends on their ignorance of what I am really up to in my job — doesn’t that prove the main point? Doesn’t that encourage me along the path Quinn opened up to me? All these little bits of poisoned paper I am slowly dropping into oblivion. What people don’t know, can’t hurt them.…