Out of This World (4 page)
Authors: Graham Swift
‘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?
We clamber into the cockpit. Jenny passes up the cameras. Gives me a brief, knowing look. Peter has a last-minute word with Michael. He is feeling good today about 880390 and 960370. The engine roars and Jenny steps back and throws a quick and generalized kiss, trying to make the gesture more casual than she means. We taxi down to the runway, turn, and
Michael opens the throttle. We speed back in the direction we have come and as we ascend over the apron and the tower, we see her wave, in that stubborn, clumsy way in which people wave when they cannot see if their wave is acknowledged. She is still holding a hand aloft as we bank to head south. And I could almost believe it, could almost be guilty of believing it: the rest of the world doesn’t matter. The world revolves round that tinier and tinier figure, as it revolves round a cottage in a tiny village in Wiltshire, where she has taken up residence. That I am home, home.
‘It’s the wrong name, isn’t it? “Harry”. “Harry” sounds like the reliable sort. An uncle, a best man, a loyal old flame.’
‘And he’s never written you in ten years?’
‘No.’
‘If you wrote him, would he write you? Is that how it is?’
‘Don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘I wish I could, Sophie. I wish he were right here now, so we could both ask him some questions. Do you wish that?’
‘You’ve got nice hands. Neat. Has anyone ever told you that?’
‘Supposing he were right here. Right now.’
‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘You never miss him?’
‘I miss Grandad.’
‘But your grandfather’s dead, and Harry’s alive.’
‘Spot on. You really have a way of cutting through the crap.’
‘And Harry wasn’t to blame for your grandfather’s death.’
‘No. Not to blame, no.’
‘What do you mean, “not to blame”?’
‘I mean it wasn’t a case of blame.’
‘What then?’
‘Like I say, ask him.’
‘You think it should have been your father who died somehow, not your grandfather?’
‘Fuck.’
‘Do you say “fuck” a lot at home, with Joe and the boys? Supposing I did ask him, what would he say?’
‘He’d say, What is this, a fucking inquisition?’
‘Okay, relax, Sophie. Relax. Touché. Truce. Let’s take our time.’
‘At eighty dollars an hour?’
‘You want my economy deal? It’s cheap, but there aren’t any guarantees.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’ll stick with deluxe. Joe pays.’
‘What does Joe think of Harry?’
‘I don’t know if Joe thinks of Harry at all. Joe is good at forgetting.’
‘He doesn’t forget to pay.’
‘Good.’
‘Shall we have some coffee? Coffee time is free. So is the coffee.’
‘Do you know, when you talk sometimes, you tug your ear?’
‘It’s a defence reflex, Sophie. According to the books, tugging your ear, scratching the back of your head, is a disguised defence reflex. You lift your arm to strike your enemy. What do you say?’
‘I like it when you smile like that.’
‘If he wrote you, would you write him?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘But you’ve never written him?’
‘No. I mean, yes. No.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I write him letters sometimes. In my head. I mean I don’t put them on paper. I don’t send them.’
‘What sort of letters?’
‘Just letters. Thoughts. You know.’
‘Do you think he misses you?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘But do you think he ever writes letters in his head, too – to you?’
‘Don’t know.’
I still believe he fixed it. Some cunning string-pulling with his contacts in the Air Ministry. Though he never confessed it (so many unconfessed confessions! So many things buried away!). I still believe it was his doing that had me assigned, a fit, young, would-be flier, to a desk in Intelligence.
And yet he could have acted more ruthlessly, and with less trouble, if he’d wished. Could have foreclosed on my future. Insisted, since, undoubtedly, there was a busy time ahead, that I was needed at his side, and, since armaments were the reserved occupation
par excellence
, had me exempted from military service.
Though it’s easy to see now that, in his position, he could hardly have put the duties of a son before those of a citizen. Amongst those heaps of papers he (involuntarily) left me (I never thought he would be the one for such careful documentation, for preserving the evidence) were the typescripts – annotated and underlined with red ink – of the speeches he made when he stood for Parliament in the Thirties. Now, when I read them, fifty years later, those heavy-handed phrases, those chastising and belligerent slogans prick at my eyes: ‘manning the defences’, ‘the sleeping lion’, ‘moral re-armament’
– by which he meant, precisely, material re-armament. That was ’35. The timing was just out. But the stance, the rhetoric (my God, I never went to hear him on the hustings) would be remembered later. Not least in those panegyrics after his death.
