Graham Swift: Out of This World

Poor Tim, poor Paul. My poor dear darlings.

We should turn round now? Stroll back? It’s nearly four o’clock. Hey, if we’re lucky we’ll catch the chimes and the dancing animals on the Delacorte Clock.

And you know what scares me more than anything? That it won’t make any difference, that it won’t have any effect. Look at them, watching the TV, while I watch them, a bringer of bad news, poised in the doorway. Cookies and milk. My angels. They’re sipping in the pictures. Lapping up the universe. Who needs a mother any more?

You know, when Mum died I just didn’t believe it. Can you remember what it was like (okay, so I’m asking questions) before you really knew about death? I was five years old. She went off one day and didn’t come back. But I always thought she would have to come back some day. I don’t know how long it was before I really understood she was never coming back. And, you know, when Harry started going off for months on end, when he left me and Grandad and went off to do his thing with the world, to be where it was happening, I used to think that what he was doing was looking for Mum. And I used to blame him — have you got this, are you writing this down? — because he never found her.

I was born on March 27th, 1918, and I never knew my mother, because on that same day (can it have been so long ago?), at the very same hour, she died.

They say that if there has to be a choice, it is the doctor’s duty to save the child before the mother. In certain situations life is tradeable, expendable. It is the field surgeon’s duty to repair the lightly wounded before the probable fatalities. Had the choice been my father’s, I know, without doubt, how he would have chosen. He would have wanted my mother to live. I don’t blame him. The choice would have been only natural. He would never have known or even seen me, but he would have seen my mother again. But at the time of my birth my father was not in a position to choose. He was far away, in another country and, as it happened, in another of those situations where life was expendable.

He made, all the same, another choice. (He made two choices, though half a century went by before I knew about that other, big choice, that failed.) He might have loved me with a double, a compound love. He chose instead to blame me, to see me as the instrument of his wife’s death. And had I known this as a small boy, had I known it even as an ignorant baby, I think I would have gladly affirmed that I wished I could have made that very first choice in my mother’s favour, and so restored her to him. A great many things would then have been different (though I would have known nothing about them). But I was not in a position of choice.

On my birthday he would hand over some present and I would receive it like an emblem of guilt. In this way he once gave me a camera. Then he would disappear for the rest of the day.

It took me years to work all this out. But I never worked off the blame. I never thought, though I learned to scorn him just as he scorned me, that I deserved anything other than a father who, if he inspired esteem and even ondness in others, was as tender to me as a statue. Even when he held Sophie for the very first time — we had been father and son then for thirty years — and I saw him smile and his eyes moisten, I didn’t think: You old bastard, so now you can afford to relent, to be reconciled, to let it all come out. I thought: Thank God, I have made Dad melt. I have paid my debt.

And I truly believe he was glad when Anna died. Because it was only then that we started, really, to be friends. As if I hadn’t paid the debt, not till then. Oh no, not in full.

You too, Harry. Now you know what it’s like.

I can see them now, sitting on the wicker chairs on the lawn at Hyfield. He is making her laugh and she is making him laugh. She used to call him the ‘perfect gentleman’. She used to call him in Greek her ‘ palikári ’. It is, let’s say, August ’53, and she has only three months to live. I am walking across the lawn from the house and seeing all this as if I have just chanced, inadvertently, on the scene. When I appear she checks her laughter momentarily, as if I am intruding. Sophie is lying, stomach down, on the grass, looking at a book. She is five years old. Anna is wearing a sky-blue summer dress with thin shoulder-straps. She carries on laughing and Sophie looks up and smiles, and I can tell that she knows her mother is beautiful.

When Sophie was born a strange thing happened. Though it’s not really strange at all. It must be one of the commonest experiences. But I had never imagined what it was like to be a parent. I became afraid. I had never reckoned on this fear. In the most easy and safe domains of playtime, bathtime and bedtime, I became afraid. I was always thinking that at any moment, because of some slight inattention, she might die — fall, suffocate, be knocked down, her little body smashed. And once indeed it very nearly happened, she nearly drowned.

I still maintain she was drowning.

I never expected such fear and such terrible, crushing love. When I held her in my arms I never wanted to let go, because of the risks. It was as though only my arms were protecting Sophie from the world. Or rather that I was making a separate world within the circle of my arms. When I pressed my face against the white blankets she was wrapped in I would remember the valley in Switzerland where Anna and I spent our hasty honeymoon, the pure air, the white drapery of the mountains which only two years before had been a real curtain against the world. ‘ Meine Frau ist Griechin .’ ‘ Ja, eine Göttin, nein? ’ And I would think, on our weekend visits to Hyfield: What does it matter? What does it matter? I will say the word to Dad, and get the slap on the back that has been thwarted for thirty years, the stiff drink thrust into my hand. And who, anyway, can say they have a choice over their life?

Okay, Dad, count me in.

To protect Sophie. For Sophie’s sake. And Anna’s.

It was absurd, that terror that Sophie might die. In Nuremberg, where I met Anna, they were itemizing the deaths of millions. As if she were especially prone, as if she alone were up on some thin high-wire of mortality. But how often did I utter that familiar, silent prayer: If someone must die, let it be somebody else, let it be some other little girl, not Sophie. Or even: If someone must die, let it be me, not her.

Life is tradeable, expendable.

And the irony was that it wasn’t Sophie who died. It was Anna. She died on Mount Olympus. Ridiculous or sublime? And in her case there was never a choice between mother and child. Because when she died she was six weeks pregnant.

She was going to see her Uncle Spiro, whom she hadn’t seen for seven years and who was dying in a hospital in Salonika. But she died before he did, because her plane hit a thunderstorm, and then a mountain.

And I never wished — So help me, I never, not for one moment, wished –

‘Why do you call him “Harry”?’

‘Because that’s his name. Harry Beech. Haven’t you heard of Harry Beech? The famous Harry Beech? Because I stopped calling him “Dad”. Because the last time I saw him I called him “Harry” for the first time to his face. Now when I think of him, it’s “Harry”.’

‘You think of him much?’

‘No. And I don’t think much of him! Ha ha!’

‘When was that — the last time you saw him?’

‘May 3rd, 1972. About six o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘How so exact?’

‘Because that was the day they put Grandad in the ground.’

‘Put him in the ground?’