Waterland (41 page)

And so, with eyes alert (yet guilty) and adopting the posture of one not shirking his bounden duty, he sets off on a rickety bicycle to see Harold Metcalf. Who, being a farmer of lofty if unrealized ambitions, will not waste the opportunity to play the high and mighty squire, not to mention the outraged father, before Dad’s humbled and suppliant serf. He’ll return red-faced and dry-voiced, like a schoolboy from a summary caning.

‘But is
she
all right, Dad?’

‘Don’t know, Tom. Can’t say. He damned my – my appurtenance – for asking. Leastways, Tom, I sees you care.’

‘Dad, Dad I – I’m afraid there’s more.’

‘More, Tom? More?’

Because Dad doesn’t know yet …

He thrusts his hand into the mouth of the pike – which being dead and stuffed, does not snap shut its jaws, as once it must have done, with fatal results, on John Badcock’s bait, but leaves them obligingly open – and pulls out a key. A brass key. A stubby, important-looking key. He gets down off the bed and holds it out to me in his palm. He says nothing, but I know this is Dick’s confession: Yes – since you know anyway. I. Freddie.

But it’s not just that. Something has got hold of him. Something as inescapable and inexplicable as the sudden grip of love. His face is aquiver with un-Dick-like importunacy. He wants releasing. He’s got a key in his hand. For the first time in his life, the forgetful flux of Dick’s experience has congealed around him into imprisoning solidity. He’s as fixed as that pike on the wall. He’s made things happen; things have happened because of him. He can’t understand. He’s stuck in the past.

‘Y-you loved?’

‘Yes, Dick. Me too.’

But this is only the first, the easier question.

‘Wh-wh-wh-? Wh-whose?’

What shall I tell him? Which version will crush him least? What does one stunned and guilt-laden brother tell another?

‘It was your baby, Dick.’

A sudden, brief spasm, a fleeting battle between pride and remorse, crosses his face.

He looks at the key, still held in his palm. He doesn’t look at me. He looks hard at the key as if it’s the key to all the riddles of life.

‘Take.’

I take.

‘We go up now and open it. D-Dick want know.’

46
About my Grandfather’s Chest

H
OW strange it becomes. How larger than life it becomes. These eighteenth-century dandies with their perukes and brocade. These whiskered Victorians with their whaleboned womenfolk. (These wild creatures – look, in the streets – with Phrygian caps and human heads on pike-staffs …) How extraordinary, how impossible, becomes the flat, mundane stuff of our lives. It needs looking into. How it gets … How it becomes … Children, the world is madder than you’d ever think.

Once I toyed, once I dabbled in history. Schoolboy stuff. Harmless stuff, textbook stuff. But it never got serious – my studies never really began – until one August afternoon, a prisoner myself of irreversibly
historical events, I unlocked the past inside a black wooden chest…

It contains eleven bottles wrapped and padded with old sacking, ten of which are stoppered and full, one of which is empty and which, in the process of losing its stopper, has journeyed surreptitiously to the Hockwell footbridge, been used first to intoxicate then to bludgeon, travelled back again by river, been plucked out, examined; secreted in one bedroom, then conspicuously placed in another; then been carried back, with ponderous stealth, to its attic resting-place by the selfsame hand which first took it thence. Thus illustrating that all sins come home to roost, and thus qualifying itself to be regarded in any inquiry into the death of Freddie Parr (but Freddie Parr – don’t we know? – died by accident) as Exhibit Number One.

It contains four thick, well dog-eared notebooks, bound in blue-marbled paste-board, evidently bundled together at one time by a canvas strap which has since been untied. It contains an envelope (from which, to judge by its crumpled state, the contents have on some previous occasion or occasions been removed and replaced) on which is written, in the same thick, sloping hand which seems to fill the notebooks: ‘To the First-Born of Mrs Henry Crick’ …

Dick breathes his hee-haw breath over my shoulder. I ignore discreetly the empty bottle (Yes, we’ve seen that before, we know all about that; it’s only a murder weapon; it’s only the reason why we come to be stooped over this derelict chest). I take up one of the dusty, stoppered bottles. Dick’s breathing quickens. For one moment I think he thinks I’m about to raise it and, in an act of poetic, if brutal justice, crash it down on his skull. (So it’s true – he
is
more afraid …)

But his agitation has a different meaning.

‘D-don’t open. D-don’t drink—’

(But we know that too: a certain wintry scene, an ice-fringed river – six years ago. Yes, Dick – so you remember? There’s potent, there’s fiery stuff inside.)

I put back the bottle. I pick up the envelope. The notebooks will come later (midnight porings … the start of a quest … a bedtime story to cap them all …).

A questioning, almost deferential glance: ‘It’s for you, Dick. It’s addressed to you. Shall I—?’

Lash-fluttering consent: It’s all right, go ahead. You see, I can’t— Never could—

I take out the letter. There are three well-crammed pages. I read. Dick breathes. I don’t read aloud. There are words, whole sentences Dick couldn’t— I read while Dick watches. The attic timbers murmur. Even on a still and windless August morning something stirs their old, creaking bones. It takes perhaps ten minutes to read (much, much longer to digest) the letter. You can hear the slightest sounds – you can almost hear, from the direction of Polt Fen Farm, the distant tirades of Farmer Metcalf before the hapless supplications of Henry Crick. And when I’ve finished reading the letter the first thing I say is: ‘It’s from your grandfather, Dick.’

Though it’s not as simple as that.

‘It’s from your mother’s father.’

And the second thing I say – it spills out almost before I have decided to say it – is: ‘Dick, I’m sorry. I lied to you. It wasn’t your baby. It was my baby.’

He stares at me. Because it’s Dick’s stare it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. But a sticky dew starts to collect in the corners of his eyes. Though it’s not like tears. It’s like some strange, unknown secretion that has nothing to do with Dick. When it overflows on to his cheek he almost flinches in surprise.

‘Listen, Dick, listen very carefully. It was my baby.
Mine and Mary’s.’ More of the strange liquid spills from his eyes. ‘But it’s nobody’s baby now, is it? Nobody’s.’

Attic-murmurs. Creaking assents.

‘Listen – it was a good thing it wasn’t your baby. Yes, a good thing. Because it says here – your, I mean, our grandfather says – he says that you shouldn’t have any babies. Because – you won’t need to. Dick, you know how babies get born?’

‘Lu-lu-lu—’

The tears have reached the corners of his mouth.

‘You know every baby has to have a Mummy and Daddy. Nobody gets born without a Mummy and Daddy. We both have – both had – a Mummy and Daddy. And they had Mummies and Daddies too. But – sometimes it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes when a person wants to be a Mummy or Daddy and they want someone to be a Mummy or Daddy with, they choose someone who’s already their own Mummy or Daddy. Or their own Mummy or Daddy chooses them. It’s not supposed to happen, Dick. It’s not – usual. Do you see?’

He doesn’t see. I’m talking gibberish.

‘It’s as though you, Dick, wanted to make a baby – with your own Mummy.’

His lashes start their humming-bird act.

‘Lu—’

‘It’s not supposed to happen. Not – natural. But if it does and if a baby gets born, then that baby might be – unusual. And any babies that baby has when it grows up to be a Mummy or Daddy might be – unusual too. Dick, you’re a baby – I mean, you were a baby – like that. Your grandfather – my grandfather – was also your father.’

He stares.

‘My father isn’t your father.’

His chest starts to heave, to wheeze.

‘Though your mother was my mother.’

The wheeze grows hoarser.

‘You and your mother had the same father.’

And hoarser still.

‘Before your mother and my father …’

But I’ve run out of variations. And Dick seems to be running out of air. In the dim light of the attic he is gasping for breath, as if suddenly finding himself in some element not his own.

So he understands? Or understands, at least, what he’s already half-guessed. That he’s a bungle. Something that shouldn’t be. There’s been a mix-up somewhere and he’s the result.

Suddenly he blurts out, as if it’s all his fault, as if he, being the effect, is to blame for the cause:

‘S-s-sorry, Tom. S-s-sorry.’

‘Listen. Calm down, Dick. Wait. This is what your gran – your father – wanted to say to you. You’re not to have babies. Because – because of what I just said. But it’s all right that you won’t have babies. You’re an – unusual person, Dick. You’re a special sort of person. It doesn’t matter that you can’t have babies. Because you’re going to be—’

How can I put this into any other words? How can I preface, interpret, explain (your father was not only your grandfather, he must have been quite mad—):

‘Because, Dick, you’re going to be – you’re going to be – the Saviour of the World.’

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t utter a word all through that Sunday lunch-time (no one’s thought of food, no one’s got an appetite). When his Dad – when the man he used to call his Dad – returns, he avoids his eye, keeps a wary distance; beats a sudden retreat to the lean-to and a companionable motor-cycle.

But his Dad (that is, the man who—) scarcely notices. Preoccupied: face still stinging from the verbal slaps of the Master of Polt Fen.

And in any case, he’s not given to talking, is he, this son
who isn’t a—? A dumb-dumb, isn’t he? A sieve-brain. And he’s had enough of pretending otherwise. Enough of having lessons.

Better not to learn. Better never to know. But once you’ve…

(A saviour, Dick? A saviour is someone who … The world? The world is – everything. An emergency? An emergency is – when things get—)

But don’t shun
him
, Dick. Don’t shun your own— I mean— He’s the one who never wanted you to be educated. Your protector, your guardian. I’m the one who had to ask questions, who had to dig up the truth (my recipe for emergencies: explain your way out). He would have kept you, happily, in the dark. Must have hunted for that key too … Never thought that a dead fish …

‘Dad, there’s more …’

Much more. How to begin?

‘Freddie Parr …’

And supposing I’d followed his own example? Guarded his ignorance just as he’d guarded Dick’s. This trusting and forbearing man who though not the real father of his older son, is sometimes not unlike him (bovine in deed, slow in speech); who stares, open-mouthed, at this, his true and younger son – his brainy, gifted son – as if in non-recognition.

‘He knows, Dad. Dick knows …’

A turn on the tow-path suggested. A turn on the tow-path urgently enjoined. (A turn! Twenty, thirty turns. But who’s counting?) On that old fretful yet therapeutic
tow-path, on that old agitatory-placatory tow-path. Up, down. Up, down.

So this is the day that he always knew would come. That he always hoped might never. (He’s prepared it perhaps a hundred times, taken the imaginary initiative: Tom, take a turn with me on the tow-path … But that was without unforeseen complications.) So this is how it turns out to be. Well, well then: let it rain, let it pour trouble …

Smoothly sliding Leem. Late-summer level (sluice well-lowered). Colour: glaucous-green. Motionless willows. Cracks of milky light break the warm lead-roofing of the sky.

Up and down. Father and son – father and only son – in close confabulation. What are they saying? When the son completes his ravelled résumé – in which he omits to mention four blue-bound notebooks safely stowed amongst his school-work in his bedroom, but freely offers to hand over a certain letter (response: ‘I don’t wanna see no letter, Tom. I never wanted to see inside that chest …’) – does the father fill the gaps (gaps! Chasms!) in the narrative with a tale of his own? How he and Helen Atkinson—? How he and the brewer’s daughter—? No. He seems to have lost his story-telling knack. He seems to remember nothing.

Up and down. Now away from the cottage, now towards it, as if perpetually torn between setting out on a journey and returning home. Up and down, as if stalking some runaway decision. At each about-face the father flexes his knee. At each outward sortie the son cannot help looking across the glaucous-green Leem in the direction of Polt Fen. Even now, she’s there. And
her
recipe for emergencies …?

Up and down. And as they walk, the other son – the son who’s not a son – skulks, listening, in the lean-to.

Listening? Not wanting to listen? Spying? Not wanting to look? Thinking? (Thinking?) It’s all up. I’m denounced; they’ll turn me over.

And they know he’s in there. Because just as this son-who’s-not-a-son takes advantage of the lean-to in order to hide from his non-father, so the non-father, escorted by his true-son, in dictating the turning-points of these tow-path promenades, studiously keeps his distance from the lean-to …

Yet observe more closely. For with each successive ambulation, that critical turning-point at the cottage end of this two-way beat, though at first occurring some several yards from the lean-to, draws, slowly, warily, agonizingly nearer to it. The very process of turning becomes more laboured, more vexed, as if the subject of some dreadful test. Until the father, almost overbalancing under the sway of contrary efforts, allowing his face at the same time to become a mass of watery convulsions, leaves his true-son standing and rushes, hobbles, towards his non-son’s temporary refuge, crying all the while: ‘Dick – my poor Dick’ (yes,
my
Dick) ‘—Dick!’

But Dick isn’t there.

He’s in the kitchen. Or – so we deduce later – that’s where he must have been.