Authors: Graham Swift
‘It’s hot in here,’ I say, wiping my brow. Another stupid and pointless remark. Marian must see that I’m as bewildered as her. The room is full of vapour. Condensation streams off the bathroom tiles. We look at each other through a mist.
And later, in the bedroom, when I’m already in bed, with Dad’s book propped before me, Marian comes in and there is a moment when once again she must be, fleetingly, naked. She has a bath-towel wrapped round her, tucked under her arms and coming down just over her hips. She bends down to dump some clothes on a chair and her bottom shows. I look, but it’s not desire I feel. We haven’t made love for weeks but it’s not desire I feel, even though I felt it only an hour ago when she stood in the hall. She unwraps the towel. She doesn’t wear a night-dress. It’s hot. Outside, it’s the sort of velvet mid-summer night in which no creature sleeps. She slips into her side of the bed. How tender, how pitiful. We used to get up to all those erotic games, now we are like a shy couple, starting over again. She is dusted with talc. Her skin smells like a baby. She says, ‘When are you going to stop reading that book?’ And I say, ‘Soon. Quite soon.’
Before I went to sleep I thought: I was born in August 1945. I must have been conceived when Dad came home, after his escape, from France. Mum and Dad together in the autumn of ‘44. A honeymoon hotel amidst tangy, woody air. I am a product of those times and of all that happened in the Château Martine.
This Monday I didn’t see Quinn at all at the office. He didn’t even appear at his glass panel. Perhaps this was appropriate. Why should we make a point of bumping into each other when in a couple of days’ time we are going to meet, so to speak, more strictly face to face? Or perhaps Quinn is unwilling to see me because he knows that very soon he has some confession to make. At any rate, Monday was a better day than usual. I didn’t have to work late and I didn’t come home with my customary headache and bad temper. The kids had been out all day on their school trip and were tired and amenable and
because they had not come home at their normal time I did not have to suffer Martin’s surveillance on my walk from the Tube.
Chessington Zoo, if you do not know it, is a sort of zoo with a funfair thrown in. There are whirligigs and a ghost-train. It makes no bones about what is implicit in most zoos – that they are places of entertainment rather than science, and that the dividing line between zoos and circuses is usually a thin one. Personally, I don’t care much for this circus element, but I am very fond of zoos as such. You can learn a lot from animals. About people, I mean, not just about animals. You can sometimes learn more about people from looking at animals than you can from looking at people. Take my advice: spend a few hours attentively in a zoo, then go and sit in a crowded pub. Or take a ride on the Tube. And there is something gratifying – something calming and reassuring, I can’t explain it – simply about being amongst animals. One of my favourite places – let me recommend it – is the Small Mammal House at Regent’s Park.
Yes, I know there is a falseness, a contradiction about the very concept of these animal playgrounds. Like golf courses and public commons: natural and artificial at the same time, wild-but-tame. But perhaps this is the way things must be now.
We were having a discussion along these lines at breakfast before the kids left. Or, rather, I was delivering a lecture to Martin and Peter. Parents had been asked by the teachers to provide their children not only with a packed lunch but with ‘a little pocket-money’ for the day. I doled them out a generous two pounds each. It was a way of securing their compliance. I could see all this money being spent on candy-floss and rides on dodgem-cars, and so I said: ‘You won’t forget to look at some
animals too.’ They looked puzzled – weren’t they going to a zoo? But I could imagine them looking for a while at the leopards and antelopes, getting bored and then heading for the ghost-train. They wouldn’t linger, contemplate the warm fur, think of the rustle in the undergrowth … And then I launched into this monologue about the function of zoos. ‘You know, zoos aren’t just places to go and have fun,’ I began, ‘they have a serious purpose too.’ Phrases like ‘serious purpose’ were all right for Martin, but they go straight over Peter’s head. I forgot about eating my breakfast. ‘Zoos were originally set up, you see, as places to
study
animals.…’ And then I explained how in the nineteenth century when people started to live in big cities they also started to get interested in nature, as if it were something foreign, and zoos were an expression of this. This may all have been sheer bunk. I know nothing about the history of zoos or when the first zoos were founded. But I elaborated the point at length. I thought: how strangely you spend your time. Last night I was reading about my Dad’s experiences at the hands of the Gestapo and sniffing Marian’s talcumed body. Now I am propounding for my sons the growth of zoology in the nineteenth century. Half way through, I remembered that they no longer teach Nature Study as a subject in schools. ‘So you see,’ I concluded, ‘animals are really kept in zoos so we can understand them scientifically.’
Peter looked lost. Martin frowned and introduced into his expression a sardonic cast which he has been cultivating ever since his coup with Dad’s book. I could see that he thought what I was saying was so much grown-up claptrap. Worse – that he was actually going to take issue with me.
‘But how can you,’ he demanded, ‘– when they’re not
the real thing?’ And then he said something pithy and aphoristic which made me inwardly panic at the speed of his mental development and, more than this (there was a sharp gleam in his eye), at his psychological penetration.
‘A lion in a cage isn’t a real lion.’
‘But it’s not
practical
,’ I blustered, ‘to study – er – monkeys, when they’re leaping about in the jungle.’
‘So why not leave them alone?’
Do other fathers have this terror over the breakfast table, when they realize their sons are growing up to be smarter than them?
‘But then you wouldn’t be able to go out for days at the zoo, would you?’ A weak argument. ‘And you’d never know about lots of interesting animals.’
‘Why should we have to know about them?’
All this was too clever by half. I thought, he will be saying next that keeping lions and monkeys in cages is cruel.
‘Keeping animals in cages is cruel, Dad.’
I looked at him. So, it’s cruel, eh? But I’d bet he’d still like a pet of his own.
‘But if you didn’t put them in cages you’d never get to see them.’
(For what else can you do these days, if you want to be close to nature, but put it in a cage?)
He paused for a moment.
‘Yes you would. There are plenty of good programmes about animals – on
television
.’
I was outwitted, nonplussed. I looked helplessly round the room for inspiration. Marian had left the table and was in the kitchen. She was preparing packs of sandwiches, slices of swiss roll and chocolate biscuits for the boys to take with them. Martin’s eyes were pinned on me. Peter was sitting, blinking and frowning, glancing
now at me, now at his brother, daunted, once again, by Martin’s audacity, and by this clash of words which he did not really understand. He looked, himself, like a little caged animal. Might he be on my side? And then, in desperation, an answer came – an answer which in fact I thought rather a neat one and too subtle for Martin, so I delivered it in a loud voice, for Marian to hear:
‘But don’t you think television is just another sort of cage?’
Martin stared at me blankly for a while. I thought: now I have silenced him. And then he said, as if this conversation about zoos were merely by the by; ‘Dad – why do you walk in that funny way on your way home from the station?’
But in spite of this ignominious start Monday wasn’t such a bad day. I had woken up with the thought: On Wednesday I will see Quinn; on Wednesday I will know; I can be patient till then. And it was this thought that restrained me, just as I was about to let fly at Martin. And then something Marian said to me as we saw the boys off on their trip jolted me out of my sulks and made me forget almost completely this breakfast episode. The boys had to be early at school, where a coach was coming for the zoo party, and since this coincided with the time of my departure for work we all got into the car and Marian drove us first to the school, then took me on to the station. At the school two coaches were parked already outside the gates. There were all these gabbling children with picnic bags and satchels and plastic water-bottles on straps slung over their shoulders. Teachers trying to make counts; mothers fussing and petting. I thought of evacuees in war-time. I thought of the anguish of parents frightened of bombs. Coach-crashes,
Marian got out of the car with the boys and kissed them both on the top of the head. She gave Peter an extra kiss and a little pat on the bottom for good measure. She didn’t walk across to the coach with them or wait to see them off. They had already spotted their friends and didn’t want us around. She’s a shrewd mother. I waved dutifully to one of the teachers, Mrs Thurleigh, who is always saying, as if it’s her phrase for all occasions, that we have ‘two bright boys’. (I never have the nerve to say to her, ‘But there’s something unnatural about them, isn’t there?’) Marian got back into the car and we waved through the window. And then, as we drove to the station, she said: ‘Did you know you yelled out in your sleep last night? You said: “Is there anyone there?” ’
… At night (but by ‘night’ I mean any period when I was shut up in the dark) I tried to identify the smell that pervaded my cell. It is strange how imprisonment affects the memory: the mind is confined as much as the body. I knew
what
the smell was: it was the smell of damp, partly rotten wood. But I did not know what kind of wood or where it was that I had smelt it, so distinctly, before. Another thing puzzled me. The air in my cell, though odorous and fully enclosed, was never fetid.
Then I made an important discovery.
In those snatches of exhausted sleep I would lie huddled at the foot of one of the walls. Once, lying against the wall opposite the door, I felt about my face a tiny but distinct trickle of air.
Not only this, but borne on this faint draught was another, incredible but unmistakable smell: the smell of lavender.
I put my hand to the brickwork and began exploring the mortar joints. It was then that the identity of the first smell – the wood smell – came to me – and along with it a series of inferences which made my imagination and my heart race.
My grandfather on my mother’s side had lived in a handsome eighteenth-century house not far from Winchester. It was equipped with cellars, accessible from within the house but with openings, covered with heavy cast-iron plates, at the foot of the outer walls, through which materials for storing could be passed. My grandfather still used one of the cellars for what was perhaps its original purpose – the storing of fire-wood. Nearby, there were extensive fruit orchards and my grandfather had a standing arrangement for supplies of logs. It was the smell of apple logs in my grandfather’s cellar in Hampshire that I was smelling again in the Château Martine. As a child, staying with my grandparents during the summer, the cellars had always intrigued me. I liked to explore them and I regarded them as places of refuge whenever I had incurred adult displeasure. I was never frightened of them. Perhaps, in a remote way, I owe my ability to endure the Château to my boyhood experience. To have existed in those cells and to have suffered at the same time from claustrophobic fear of the dark would have been too much to bear. To me, the smell of apple wood in the dark (and this perhaps was why I could not place it, in such hostile surroundings) was the smell of sanctuary.
But this was not the time for nostalgia. My returning memory had highly practical implications. If my grandfather’s Hampshire home had had openings in the exterior wall which connected to the cellars by a brick chute through which logs could be tipped, was it not possible that the same system applied in a Château in eastern France? Was it not possible that at some time the purpose of the cellar had been changed – or the cellar had become disused – and that the opening to the chute had been sealed up, inexpertly – by a wall of only single bricks perhaps? – from the inside? And the Germans, in converting it
again to to a cell, had overlooked this? One begins to believe in strange, benevolent miracles of fate.
I set to work with the rusty nail I had extracted from the wall. It is perfectly true, not a mere adage, that hope gives you strength. By testing with the nail I ascertained that there was indeed an irregular section of brickwork, perhaps two feet across, slightly different in texture from the rest of the wall, and for which a different, weaker mortar had been used. Tapped with a knuckle, this section gave a more resonant sound.
I began immediately to scratch away at the mortar with the nail, close to where the air, through some unseen crack, was periodically infiltrating. Even as I did so I was hastily working out possibilities and precautions. When next my cell door was opened I must look quickly at this part of the wall to make a visual note of what I could only, so far, feebly gauge by touch. But if I did this I would draw the attention of the guards. I must therefore hide my work. But how? The latrine-can. This was about eighteen inches tall. Placed against the wall, it would hide some of the patch in question; as for the rest, I must make do. To conceal my chipping and scraping I must rub and scuff the area worked on with dirt from the cell floor. This would still show, but I could only hope the guards would not notice. To darken the mortar-dust made by my chipping I must use the only means available to me: my own urine. They would not think twice about a leaking latrine-can. I must hide the nail in between two bricks where it can be readily placed in a hurry but remain invisible to someone standing in the doorway. I must work in short, concentrated stints so as to be able to conceal my activities before visits by the guards. I must chip away not individual bricks but a complete section of brickwork so that even when I am able to remove it, it will stand in position. Will I possibly have the time? And the luck?