Graham Swift: Shuttlecock

Sure enough, Camber, even so early in the season, had fallen prey to the paraphernalia demanded by the holidaymaker and the tripper. Martin cocked up his head at this. He would gladly, perhaps, have spent all day in the cafés and amusement arcades, learning the arts of the seaside hustler. But we tramped a long way from our parked car, till we found a relatively secluded hollow among the dunes; and even on young go-getters in the making, the sun and the sea exert their pull. In a few minutes Martin, no less than Peter, had slipped into bathing trunks; and they were off, down the slopes of the dunes, running across the corrugated sands to confront that great brooding invader.

I watched them. The tide was out at its furthest point, so they had no small distance to cover. By the time they reached the water they would be just two more of several indistinguishable, limbed dots moving in the silvery margins where sea met land. Martin was already several yards ahead of his brother and clearly set on making no allowances for Peter’s shorter pace. He was bent on getting this primal seaside ritual over with as soon as possible, on accomplishing it with the maximum of athletic ease and the minimum of childish fuss. His stride was rhythmic and arrogant. Peter’s was still the furious, labouring dash of an infant, in which was plainly visible his despair of keeping up with his brother. Half way between the dunes and the sea their bodies lost tone; I could no longer discern Peter’s maroon, Martin’s blue trunks, and they were distinguishable only by their stature and gait. Two naked, fleeing creatures. And suddenly they were no longer running towards the sea, but running, being impelled, towards the future — another sea of sorts — and their bodies travelling over the sand were mapping the course of things to come. Martin, with never a look back. Peter, doomed always to chase that flying image of his brother, who would run better than him, swim better and, in all things, act more surely than him; doomed to pant after it but never to catch it up. Peter, who will feel in later years, much more than his brother ever will, the odd stab of nostalgia for the salt air and the dunes of Camber Sands; who already possesses the harassed, irresolute looks of his father, and who already has — for I saw it for the first time, as he struggled up again, over the lip of the dunes, a full minute after his brother, breathless and tense, a thread of seaweed stuck to his leg — the hard knot which his father has between the brows, which bespeaks a kind of cruelty.

Peter: ‘What are those rusty metal things over there, Dad?’

Dad: ‘Oh, they’re something left over from the war.’

(As Dad and Peter — Martin having slunk off, to the beach cafés perhaps, or to disturb loving couples in the dunes — walk out again — walk and not run — to the water’s edge, which has now drawn considerably nearer; and Dad thinks, almost for the first time, that day, of his own Dad.)

Peter: ‘Oh.’ (Unenlightened, unwilling to display ignorance by asking further questions, but just a little bit afraid, gripping his father’s hand, that the rusty metal things might still be dangerous. And all this suddenly and literally washed away by Dad’s visible recoil and audible gasp of cowardice at the icy temperature of the water which has just licked over his foot.)

But this was later. After lunch, after trips for ice-creams, after a deadly-earnest cricket match in which Martin suddenly revealed himself for a murderous fast bowler, and after — even while that first trip to the water’s edge, that first trip to the future and back, was taking place — Marian and I made love in the sand. We had to be quick, quick as sparrows — you never know when someone might appear over the crest of the dunes. Need for haste; but none for hinting or persuasion, nor for pointless sophistication. All those laborious bedroom antics, to return at last to burrowing in the sand. The beach-grass waved; the gulls floated, white fragments in the blue above. But this would have been Marian’s view. My view was filled with sand, a miniature dune-scape, a whole shifting and rippling Sahara that was forming and reforming round our blanket. I thought, it is the landscape of the desert, bleached and smooth-contoured, that most approximates to human flesh. If any landscape can be called naked, it is a landscape of dunes; and perhaps that is the true source of my nostalgia for Camber Sands. And then these same soft-gold hues and gentle contours made me think of the pale, furred creature who was the cause of my beginning these pages, and I remembered the magical words Mr Forster had spoken when I was a boy (Peter’s age): ‘a piece of nature’.

GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock , which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland , which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After , which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders , which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow . He is also the author of Learning to Swim , a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant , a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.