Authors: Graham Swift
She used to drop by, of course, once. Sometimes with the boys. When she went on shopping sprees. She used to try and embarrass me by doing this imitation, in front of everybody, of the spendthrift wife, taking things out of bags from Macy’s and Gimbels. And I used to go through this act of madly feeling my pockets, as if I couldn’t find my wallet or my charge cards. No one was to know she has her own income from the money her Grandad left her. We’re still cushioned by that money: what she started to call some while back her ‘stock-pile’. But I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I’d have let her
burn hundreds, thousands. When she came in like that, all mischievous and breathless, and only a little too shrill, I used to think: It’s all right. It’ll be all right.
I go to Mario’s most evenings. Sometimes with some of the others, sometimes alone. More often alone these days. Just for a beer before I head home. Mario pours the beer without my asking, brings over the dish of pretzels, and always comes out with a line. ‘Mr Carmichael, I see you’re offering tours to the Falkland Islands now.’ ‘Yes, Mario, you want the
Canberra
or the
QE2
?’ Always ‘Mr Carmichael’. He loves it. So English upper class. And that accent! (My accent, Mario, what part of it hasn’t turned American, is North London: Tottenham. That’s a cheap accent.)
If I sit in Mario’s and there’s a group near me at a table or the bar, and they’re laughing, their talk is warm and flowing, that makes me feel good too. True. It’s enough isn’t it? Voices. Laughter. The chink of glasses, smell of food. The cars and people passing on 38th. Sometimes it reminds me of Greece. That’s what I loved about it out there. The life on the streets. The brightness and colour and chatter of it all. It’s true, I never cared much about ruins and temples and statues. Or even cypress trees and olive groves. Until I met Sophie I was always embarrassed by the word ‘beautiful’. She taught me about all that. The twelve gods of Olympus, the nine muses. Let me see now, Mario, if I can remember the nine muses …
I’m a surface person. I like it to sparkle and ripple. ‘Buoyant’ is the word they use. I float easy. And you can go on floating even when you’re way out of your depth.
I used to love it when I first started coming here. On hot evenings. With my tie loosened and my copy of the
Post
. Just like a real New Yorker. Give me the settings, give me the props. Joe Chameleon, that’s me. Spelt: Carmichael. Joseph of the rainbow-coloured coat. I think I could have been an actor once. Easy. When I was a kid in the boy scouts, we did this
Christmas Show, in the Church Hall, Stapleton Road. Our troop and another. There was this spot where I had to step out to the front and do this monologue (written by the assistant scout-master). Real corny jokes. I thought: I won’t make it. They’ll stare right through me. They’ll think: This kid’s a flop. But I was a hit. They laughed. I loved it. Even added a line or two of my own. I can still see those laughing faces behind the dazzle of the lights. I’m making them laugh! Me! And I can still hear the scout-master saying to my parents, ‘It seems young Joe has quite a talent for the stage.’ And Dad saying, ‘My son’s name is Joseph.’
It’s changed, Mario. It’s changing. Is this how it is for everybody? I used to think that happiness was
out there
. All around. All I had to do was get to it. Now – I know, I can feel it – I’m becoming this sort of sentry on duty. Like happiness is
inside
, hidden away, and I’m trying to keep out all the bad things. Those letters I write to Harry. Like a loyal, clandestine son-in-law. Sophie’s fine. She’s fine. Meaning: Stay out of it, Harry. She’s safe with me. I know what you thought of me I know the only person you wanted to marry Sophie was someone just like yourself. But she belongs to me now.
She’s not fine. Not fine at all.
Jesus, Mario, I wanted to see the world, but there was always part of me that wanted to be this cliché, this jerk: this guy who gets out his wallet with the photos of his smiling wife and smiling kids, and says: There, that’s my ticket! That’s my little stake in humanity, my little bundle of joy!
Make her safe, make her happy again. Please, Doctor Klein.
‘Hey, but those are two big guys, Mr Carmichael. Now, don’t tell me, this is Paul and this is Tim. No? I got it wrong again?’
Nearly ten years now, but when I look out of my office window I still get that feeling I got when we first came here. New York! Wow! Is this real? It’s just like in all those films. But now I’m going to step through the screen.
The strange thing is, after all this time, I still haven’t stepped through the screen. There’s still this – gap. But maybe that’s how I like it now. A dream city. Step through the screen and you lose the picture.
When I was twelve years old, in ’53, my parents bought a television so we could watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I never understood this, since, living in Tottenham, there was nothing to stop us catching a bus to Westminster and watching the real thing. But I think I knew even then that the real reason for getting that TV was to fill the gap between them and me. Even today, Mario, I can’t look at a TV without feeling a twinge of rivalry. You know, like the TV was a favoured brother. Like it was this perfectly charming, perfectly obliging lodger. But I have to be thankful too. Because to me it was also like a little chink in the cell wall, showing me what lay beyond. And if to them the pictures were just pictures – it didn’t matter what they were, so long as they kept coming, filling the vacuum of our living-room – I knew that one day I would show them you could make the pictures real.
If they could see me now. In New York! In America! If they could have seen me in Greece. Driving a white Merc by the blue Med! If they could have seen my wedding. Hyfield. Chauffeurs! Silverware! Champagne!
I was even on TV myself once, wasn’t I? Sophie Carmichael, with her husband, leaving Dorking General Hospital … Though I wasn’t in a position – in fact it was terrible, bloody terrible, being the wrong side of the screen – to wave. Hi Mum! Hi Dad! This is me!
Remember me?
What the TV said was that a good time was coming. There was our new Queen, in a gilt coach, riding to be crowned. And there was Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing looking like spacemen, standing on the top of the world with a Union Jack stuck between them. What the TV said was that there were
people who weren’t like Mum and Dad. That you could tune in and latch on to things the way I latched on to Terry Gray. His sister was the second big love of my life. (Who was the first? You want to know, Mario? Queen Elizabeth, of course. Black and white and blurred though she was.) Not that I got anywhere with Gillian Gray. Never even ruffled her six – or was it eight? Or twelve? – stiff petticoats. But this chaste and honourable behaviour put me in with her brother. And Terry Gray’s father ran this tidy little business called Riviera Travel. And Gillian Gray had friends.
Dad said the Army would beat it out of me. The Army would teach me a thing or two. And so it did. It taught me to drive. And it taught me to wait. And even month after month at Catterick Camp was preferable to being eighteen and still living with Mum and Dad at number thirty, Davenport Road. When Terry and I were both back in civvy street we celebrated, on his father’s money and his father’s business card, by motoring to the South of France in an Austin Healey 3000. Paris! Nice! Monte Carlo!
Bonjour Mesdemoiselles! Mais oui! C’est bon! Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
But by then it was all starting to happen with a Whoosh. Right through to the magic mid-Sixties. By which time there was money and clothes and sex and travel and being English suddenly meant you were swinging, and I was old enough not just to be enjoying it all but to be making a fair whack out of it and helping it along, a canny step or two ahead of the tide, in the direction of sunny Spain, Italy and Greece.
Argosy Tours. The new child of Riviera Travel, about to swallow its parent. Terry divided the map like a general. I got sent to Greece.
You know, Mario, I still find it hard to say the word ‘vacation’. ‘Holiday’ sounds to me like fun. ‘Vacation’ sounds like a bowel movement. If you say the word ‘holiday’, what I still see is a table. Some wine. Raffia-backed chairs. A table outside,
under an awning or a sun umbrella, or just under the warm stars, in some place where there are palm trees and cicadas and vines, things that will always seem exotic to someone born in England.
And yet for ten years now I have been busily sending people to the country I once so wanted to leave. Where it can rain all summer and where they have never discovered the café. But people want to go there. Americans above all. They have dreams of sweet old England. Oh yes, I don’t deny it, I sell dreams.
But I still think that it’s a good business, a happy business. It ought to work that way, oughtn’t it? The trade rubbing off on the trader. No dirt, just people’s holidays. We watch them come through the doors and we show them the pictures. And then we send them off, through the screen, and who knows if the pictures aren’t going to come real?
‘Why, Mr Carmichael, working in this office is almost like a vacation in itself.’
As if I could have taken that job Frank Irving offered me.
But here’s a picture for you, Mario. Another photo from the wallet. Mum and Dad. Margate, Kent. August ’61. A beach photographer must have ambushed them, because I wasn’t there at the time. I was in the South of France. You can tell they’re on holiday by the way they’re gritting their teeth. No, they don’t exactly look like a load of laughs. But then, you wouldn’t believe that within two years of that photo they would both be dead. Shall I tell you the sad story of those two strangers, my parents?
They were so far away from me. You could have fitted a whole generation between them and me. She was almost forty when they married, and he was forty-two, and they must never have expected to produce me. Two last-chancers, signing on with each other. He was a big man, as you can see, but with a weak chest since childhood and a dry, grating cough that always used to proclaim: This is my cough, this is my affliction. But I
don’t complain, no, I never complain, because, though life is no picnic, I have A Secure Job and I will one day reap the reward of A Good Pension.
She was like a parrot sitting on his shoulder. A dull, cabbage-coloured parrot. What he said, she said. Except that now, when I think of how quickly he went downhill after she died, it seems it was really she who kept him together.
They – we – used to go every year to Margate. Always Margate. Always the first two weeks in August. And always the Thanet Hotel, which was a posh name for a seaside boarding house run by a Mrs Goff, who would have had no trouble running Catterick barracks.
In the photo it’s their last holiday together, though not in the sense either of them would have imagined. The next year was going to be their last holiday, because after that there was only the Big Holiday. Retirement. He’d be sixty-five. But a week before that last holiday, in July ’62, she died. Collapsed in the grocer’s in Bruce Grove. Hospital. Dead. What – or who – you never really knew, you never really miss, do you? I had to phone Mrs Goff to cancel for him, because he was terrified of ‘letting her down’. Please don’t be angry with me, Mrs Goff, but you see, unfortunately, my wife has died. But the following summer, as the first independent act of his fully pensioned status, he was there again, all by himself. First two weeks in August. And that really was the last holiday, because, come Christmas, he was in St George’s Hospital near Epping, all tucked away in its own discreet and leafy grounds.
Margate! The Thanet Hotel! Jugs of tea for the beach! I suppose I should remember happy days, making sandcastles, the sun on my back. But what I remember most about Margate is the smell of tar. Sticky tar and seaweed. The suspicious trickles that ran across the beach out of holes beneath the promenade. Brown rust streaks on the concrete and rust clogging the struts under the pier, which always reminded me
of shit. As if there were some unwritten English law that pleasure couldn’t be pleasure without a good tang of disgust. I used to say to him: Go somewhere else, do something different. Go
abroad
. For Christ’s sake, get it into your thick skull, I’m loaded, I’m offering. I’ll arrange it all. But I’d see his big frame starting to judder and I’d back off fast. And when I said, ‘abroad’, he’d give me this boggle-eyed, disbelieving stare, as if I’d said, ‘Moon’.
The polite phrase used to be ‘in an institution’. But he was always in an institution. The institution of virtuous drudgery. The institution of married life, the institution of the Thanet Hotel. The institution of his own prehistoric upbringing – it was when we were getting ready for that televised Coronation, setting up the aerial and adjusting the curtains, that he announced with a voice like a knell, just in case we should get too festive and too carried away by these modern inventions, that he could remember the funeral of Queen Victoria. Think of that, Mario! He could remember the funeral of Queen Victoria. He couldn’t
not
be in an institution. And the worst of those few visits I made before he died, to St George’s Hospital, Epping, was that he never said : I want to get out of here.
Because I sure as hell did. After only five minutes. Quick! Out! Fresh air, normality! Quick! Quick! Thank God he went so soon. Thank God his lungs beat his mind to it, by a long chalk. Because I couldn’t have gone on going to see him in that place. Those corridors! That smell. Like some evil intensification of the smell of Mrs Goff’s hallway. I couldn’t have borne watching him become like some of those
things
in there.
There was this grand entrance hall, which utterly belied what you were going to see inside, with a marble plaque telling you that the place had been built – in eighteen sixty-something – to house orphans. Of the
Crimean War
! And above the plaque was this huge picture, which wouldn’t let you go by without looking at it, of St George and the Dragon. That was
the first time it ever struck me, Mario: the patron saint of my country wasn’t a saint like you think of a saint – you know, holy, gentle,
saintly
. He was this chain-mailed thug, jamming a spear down the throat of a writhing beast. And dragons never existed, did they? They’re supposed to be mythical, aren’t they? But in this picture the dragon was much more
alive
, much more realistically painted than St George. It must have scared the pants off all those little orphans.