Graham Swift - Out of This World

‘You bury a body. There were only little bits of Grandad.’

‘Sophie, I’d like you to tell me something. When you think of your father what’s the first word that comes into your head?’

‘Oh good, so we’re going to play games! So shrinks really ask those questions? Let me see now. How about: “Stranger”? No? Too neat? Did I have too much time to think? How about: “Cunt”?’

‘And when you think of your grandfather?’

‘ “Home”. “Little bits”. Ask me another.’

‘Can you picture him?’

‘Grandad?’

‘Your father.’

‘Harry.’

‘Okay — Harry.’

‘This couch is really comfy. Do you get your men clients to lie on it, or just the women?’

‘Can you picture him?’

‘You mean, what he looks like? I don’t know. I guess he’s much the same. He was always — what’s the word? — well-preserved.’

‘But you don’t think of him much?’

‘Out of sight, out of mind. Isn’t that the way?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie, you tell me. Do you know what he’s doing now?’

‘Nope. He’s not a news photographer, that’s for sure.’

‘Do you love your father, Sophie?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘So, how come he stopped being a photographer?’

Michael comes to pick us up at six. It’s the light. Long shadows. You need the morning or the evening light. When he arrives he still gives his policeman’s rat-a-tat knock and when he ducks through the cottage door he does so with the slightly guarded air of the solidly married man entering a newly built love-nest. He winks at Jenny as he might at the comely girl-friend of one of his teenage sons. Six weeks ago I phoned him and said, Can we take four in the plane? — Jenny wants to come too. He said, Okay, no problem, no extra charge. He said, Would she meet us there? And I said, No, she’d be here at the cottage, with me. There was a pause. Then he said, Okay.

We are dressed and waiting, Jenny in her blue sweater and jeans. She sits at the table while I make toast. She holds her mug in both hands, elbows on the table, and dips her face towards it, eyes peering at me over the rim. We haven’t told anyone. Not yet.

We drive to the airfield. The hills of Wiltshire, smoky and silvery in the early light, roll by. Rabbits sprint for cover as we pass. And I know it’s absurd, a descent into second schoolboyhood — in a man of my age and (should I say it?) experience — but I relish this feeling of the dawn mission: the ride to the airfield, the nip in the air, the mugs of hot tea.

Jenny sits in the front with Michael. I sit in the back with the cameras. Michael is humanized, vitalized by machines. Seated at the controls of an aircraft, a car, he becomes natural, buoyant, fluent. Jenny and he are talking, chuckling, almost as if I am not there, and I don’t listen to what they are saying. The back of Jenny’s head, the curve of her cheek as she looks towards Michael, enthral me. When she turns fully to catch my glance and smile, secret pods of joy burst inside me.

There were jokes, of the usual kind, I suppose, between Michael and Peter about me and my ‘assistant’. It went, perhaps, with my supposedly adventurous past. Unspoken estimations. So how many girls, Harry, in foreign cities, foreign beds? But I know and Michael knows it’s not really like that. Both he and Peter are half in love with her themselves. And quite right too. She’s beautiful. She’s incredible. She’s out of this world.

Peter is there before us, parking his yellow 2CV. Peter has the dignified title of Archaeological Consultant to the Southern Counties Commission on Ancient Monuments, and looks like an out-of-work actor. He himself admits that, as a financial proposition, there is not much difference between the aspiring actor and the aspiring archaeologist. But he is stage-struck on the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, on the hidden spectacle of the past. He is convinced that between ST880390 and ST960370 there is a whole network of undiscovered field systems. It depends on the light, the rainfall and the vegetation factor. But one day, from the air, they’ll show.

This is the fourth of these flights. There will be others through the summer. Jenny doesn’t come up in the plane any more. She was sick that first time she joined us, never having flown in a light aircraft before. But she insists on coming, nonetheless, to the airfield.

Michael goes to check over the Cessna. We go into the low building under the control tower where there is a small office that Derek, the ground control deputy, lets Jenny use while we are in the air. Derek’s stock response to Jenny’s presence is also a semi-paternal wink. While we circle over England, he will offer her further chapters from his life’s story. Flying Dakotas in Malaya. His grown-up children in Australia. I don’t know what Jenny tells him.

Jenny unpacks the cameras. Under the table I stroke her thigh. Peter looks studiously at his maps. He is shy and deferential with Jenny. I don’t know if he’d rather she didn’t appear at all for our morning sorties. I am sorry to have brought this disturbance, this distraction into his pure and devoted passion for the Bronze Age.

Peter pushes the map across and briefs me on our ‘targets’. Under the table Jenny’s hand finds my roaming hand and squeezes it.

I surfaced again — or rather, took to the air. And didn’t entirely jettison my camera. In the autumn of ’72 I sold a house and photographic studio (unused for six months) in Fulham and, having been used to travelling, as Dad would put it, ‘to the ends of the earth’, bought a cottage in a village, a few miles from Marlborough, with the ludicrously parochial name of Little Stover. (There is no Great Stover. Look on the map, you won’t find it.) A retreat? An escape? An attack of rustic regression? Maybe. But Little Stover, which has no big brother, happens to be only five miles from one of the most centrally placed civil airfields in southern England. In 1973 I converted an attic into a dark-room and office, and (being not without some previous experience) set up shop as an aerial photographer.

We walk towards the Cessna. Large, still puddles in the tarmac reflect the lightening sky. The air is chilly and Jenny clutches my arm. I told her about Anna. How — So I know one reason why she comes to the airfield. I tell her Michael’s been flying for twenty-five years — five years with me — and never — And I’ve been in more planes and helicopters than I can remember, many of them military aircraft in the middle of war zones, and never — (Save once, out of Pleiku — though I didn’t tell her this — when something like an airborne shunt engine hit our Huey, two, three times, unbelievably and maliciously, and I got the pilot’s expression as he spewed blue language and took what he later called ‘some evasive’ (‘Helicopter Pilot under Ground Fire, Central Highlands, 1966’), and it occurred to me that not for one moment, though my heart was bursting and my stomach was nowhere and my brain was saying, This time, this time — not for one moment was I actually scared.)

And I have always loved flying. Never (despite such moments) lost the magic of it. That release from the ground. Those cloud-oceans. Those light-shows, coming down at night into strange, spangled cities. If I had not been a photographer, I would have been a pilot. Would have put my name down for the moon.

And yet in sixty-four years I have never learnt to fly. Sometimes in our airborne jaunts over England — perhaps my present occupation is only an excuse for indulging my love of flying — Michael, against all the rules of common sense and civil aviation, offers me the controls. As if in some kind of challenge (that first time we went up together: suddenly puts me through a stomach-churning show of unannounced aerobatics. To prove what?). Or so he can say afterwards, like some stern father to a feckless son: When are you going to take some proper lessons?