FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1993
Copyright © 1992 by Graham Swift, Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Picador, London, in 1992. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1992.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Swift, Graham, 1949–
Ever after / by Graham Swift.—1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82983-2
I. Title.
[PR6069.W47E9 1993]
823′.914—dc20 92-56344
Author photograph © Mark Douet
v3.1
For my mother and father
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Other Books by This Author
A Note About the Author
… et mentem mortalia tangunt
Aeneid, I
1
These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man.
Or they are at least—the warning stands—nothing more than the ramblings of a prematurely aged one. I have been in this place now barely a year, but I am fully aware from the inside, as I think the public is from the outside, of its effect of induced senescence. There are, these days, those sexy young studs of academe who attempt to go against the grain. But even they, it can be observed, when they reach a certain age—roughly my age, a little past fifty—begin to settle rather quickly into the lean and slippered pantaloon. They look about them at their venerable surroundings, at the privileges they possess, they take stock of their no longer galloping careers, and they decide, consciously or not, that true donhood, like the quality of fine wine, is inseparable from age.
It is something in the air here. Before they are sixty, they are emulating one of the many varieties: the crusty and cantankerous; the bald and bumbling; the silver-haired exquisite; the bespectacled and tousled distrait; the freewheeling eccentric; the wide-eyed, latter-day infant, helpless in all mundane matters but possessed of a profound understanding of Sanskrit. By seventy or eighty—and there is no reason, given the pampering they get, why they shouldn’t go on for decades—they are convinced they have reached their true flowering and that, whatever their status in their particular fields (though eminence may be assumed), they are, in themselves, rare birds, exceptional cases, worthy of living enshrinement.
(Potter, by the way, is pushing forty-eight.)
We are, of course, an endangered and thus protected species. If natural selection had had its nasty way, we should have been wiped out long ago, a fragile, etiolated experiment (I have slipped into the insidious “we”). Once, no doubt, when we stepped, blinking, out of our cloisters, the newfangled foibles of the modern city, not to say of the world beyond, would have seemed specious and temporary; our ancient walls would have seemed the true, real, permanent thing. But now it is those ancient walls which have become artificial and implausible, like a painstakingly contrived film set. It is everything beyond that is real. If hardly reliable. Out there, we are given to believe (twelve months, did I say? It feels like twelve years), the world is falling apart; its social fabric is in tatters, its eco-system is near collapse. Real: that is, flimsy, perishing, stricken, doomed. Whereas here …
But shouldn’t we dodos understand this?
The University naturally takes its own shrewd steps, as it has always done, to ensure its survival. But survival of the fittest? A few dubiously nimble brains in a few desiccated, enfeebled bodies? I had hardly been here a few weeks when I began to have a dream which I am sure all my fellow Fellows dream. Out there in the dark, in the “real world,” is a prowling, snarling lout, all tattoos and bared teeth. He too, like us, is social scrap, but without our preservation order. No privileges, no prospects, no pride, no compunction. Like many who do not have those things, he has plenty of brawn and spite, and one day, with a horde of his brethren, he is going to break through our precious, time-honoured walls and beat our estimable brains out.
But this vision does not trouble me so much now. Not now. If the Vandals are coming, the Vandals are coming. Death in such a fashion, deserved or undeserved, would of course be appalling. But death itself is another matter. The deaths of others have lately punctuated—shattered, overturned—my life. No less than three—I shall come to them all—in eighteen months. But only very recently, despite this forced familiarity, have I looked the beast itself hard in the face. Not just looked it in the face but wanted it to devour me. I am talking of that experience, given to few, of being returned to life from almost-death. I am talking, in my case, of attempted self-slaughter.
This is the real reason why I say I am prematurely decrepit. My recipe, you see, was at fault. These things (I know from example) can be well executed or hopelessly botched. I was found. They rushed me away, pumped me, thumped me, jump-started me, wired me to the latest gadgets. And the net result of all this was that I opened again these eyes which I thought to have closed for ever and began breathing and thinking for myself (though that phrase begs questions) once more.
But you can imagine the shock to the system. It is not as though my hair has turned white or I have been reduced to a haggard and wasted spectre. I recognise the face in the mirror. Or rather, I recognise that I have never truly recognised it. But I have certainly slowed down a bit. I certainly need to take it easy. I have, for the time being at least, the pitiful gait, the sad posture and the low reserves of an old man. I look more like a don. But, more to the point, I feel as though I have moved on, in some critical but indefinable way, from what I was before. I have left my former self, whatever that was, behind. I am changed.
What I do not feel is pain—I mean spiritual pain. I do not groan and weep to be restored again to the consciousness I had hoped to forfeit, I do not regard the failure of my attempt as a twist of ineffable cruelty. I simply feel as though I have become someone else. And I am not sure if I accept or resent the process. One part of me seems to have occupied a place of serene detachment. I feel like the ghost of Troilus at the end of Chaucer’s poem, which, ascending through the spheres of heaven (no, I did not have that famed experience of rising out of my own body and surveying it from the ceiling), looked down with dispassionate equanimity on the former scene of all his joy and sorrow. While another part of me—hence these ramblings—feels the forlorn urge to find and meet my former self again, secretly wondering, as it does so, whether the meeting will be happy or disastrous.
I am not me. Therefore was I ever me? That is the gist of it. A proof of all this lies before your very eyes. Or at least before mine, since you have no means of comparison and only my word to go on. But that is the point: these words, or rather the tone, the pitch, the style of them and consequently of the thoughts that underly them, are not mine. I have penned in my time—long ago—a thesis and an academic paper or two, but I have never begun to write anything as—personal—as this. Yet this way in which I write is surely not me. What would
you call it? A little crabbed and sardonic? A little wry? A tendency to the flippant and cynical? Underneath it all, something careless, heartless? Is this how I am?
But these are minor matters, you say. What is important, what you are dying (excuse the phrase) to know, is what brought me to the pitch of staging my own death in the first place. I could get out of this by saying that since I am a different person now from what I was then (only three weeks ago), how can I possibly tell you? But it is not as simple as that. Perhaps these pages will eventually explain. Perhaps they will give me an explanation. I will only say, for the time being, that for a large part of my life, ever since my old English master, Tubby Baxter, made us read the play, I have imagined myself—surreptitiously, presumptuously, appropriately, perversely—as Hamlet. And you all know one of his tendencies.
Fifty-two, you will say, is a little old to be playing Hamlet, but the fads of adolescence die hard. If you knew me better, you might suppose that for much of my time, despite being for some years (things have come full circle) a professional exponent of English literature and having also a privileged link with the theatre, I would have had no use for this skulking, brooding figure. This is a roundabout way of saying that if happy men exist, I was for many years, for the best years of my life, a happy man. Yes, a happy man. But perhaps the pensive prince was always there, lurking in some morbid toy-box, a foil to the brightness of my days. And when the lights suddenly went out, less than two years ago, he popped up again with a vengeance—vengeance being another of his preoccupations.
It is strange that I never told Ruth about this secret affinity. After all, she more than once played Ophelia—the last time, you might say, for real. I don’t like to think I had secrets from Ruth. But perhaps it was because she was an actress that I never confessed: she would have taken my fixation as the pretension of a would-be actor. And it was she, in any case, who made the image absurd. It was she who made me happy.
I shouldn’t blame Tubby Baxter. Rather, I owe him infinite thanks for introducing me to Literature, which despite its failure to save lives, including, I suppose I must say, my own, and despite its being, in a place like this, for ever chopped up and flung into preservatives as if it were a subject for an autopsy, I still believe in. I still believe it is the speech, the voice of the heart. (Say things like that round here and see what happens.) Tubby Baxter was not to blame for the doleful but charismatic Renaissance protagonist who has somehow got under all our skins. Nor was he to blame for the circumstances which induced in me a particularly acute rapport.
Hamlet is actuated, or immobilized, by two questions: (1) is there or is there not any point to it all? (2) Shall I kill Claudius? Or to put it another way: shall I kill Claudius or shall I kill myself? It was the vengeance theme that grabbed me from the start, just as much as the distraught meditations on the meaning of life, though I understood, even aged thirteen-and-a-half, that the two questions were not inseparable.
For Claudius, read Sam Ellison. “Uncle Sam,” as he was inevitably known, since he hailed from Cleveland, Ohio. Otherwise my stepfather, and founding father of Ellison Plastics (UK). For forty years of my life I have conducted a theoretical vendetta against Sam, though I do not think real killing was ever on the cards. And the odd thing is I have always liked him. I have never been able to help liking him.
Now he is dead; and revenge is pre-empted, or has been satisfied. Or, if revenge is a two-sided game, it is Sam who in a posthumous but canny fashion has got his revenge on me. I rather think, in fact, that Sam’s death, which occurred only six weeks ago, may not have been unconnected with my own averted one. It is not the huge, primary things that push you over (I suppose I can speak now as an authority) but the odd, secondary things. He died, and I always really liked him. Furthermore, Ruth being already dead, his death removed—I have to admit it, absurd as it seems—one of the main shaping factors, one of the plots of my life.
What was left? Potter? Katherine? The strange, stray notebooks of an unknown man—another latter-day fixation—who lived over a century ago? But I will come to all this.
The manner of his death—death number three, chronologically speaking—was also significant, though to me it was neither as surprising nor as scandalous as it might be to a number of people who do not know about it or as it is to a number of people who are conspiring to hush it up. (I could get my posthumous revenge that way, but it would be cheap, low-down revenge.) He died of a heart attack in a Frankfurt hotel room, aged sixty-seven. His death was reported by the call-girl he was with at the time, who, to give her her due, might simply have fled the scene. At the fatal moment, either Sam was on top of her or she was on top of Sam. At any rate, it seems they were intimately connected when death occurred. An unsavoury business. But then if we could choose our deaths—and I tried to choose mine—I am not so sure that this wasn’t exactly the kind of death Sam might have preferred. (You see what this new me is like.)
Under certain circumstances, generosity is one of the most effective and perhaps one of the sweetest means of revenge. If it were not for Sam, I would not be enjoying the mixed blessings of my present situation—I mean the sanctuary of these ancient walls, not my recent resurrection. I will come to this too in a moment. There is the more immediate question of Sam’s will and my prominent inclusion in it. I must reveal that I find myself a rich man, and that had my attempted demise been successful, I would have immediately made the taxman the chief beneficiary of my short-lived wealth. I am a plastics heir, you might say, in the way that people talk of cocoa heirs, or rubber barons.
But it is not just a question of the money. Is a plastic cup less real than a china one? Nylon stockings less real than silk? More to the point, is plastic any more fraudulent than a stage performance? Or a poem? Yet long ago when my former self refused my stepfather’s offer of a future in plastic, it did so in the conviction that the real stuff of life lay elsewhere. And I am not alone, perhaps, in regarding plastic as the epitome of the false. Sam never saw it that way. In those days when it seemed to me that his goal was nothing less than the polymerization of the world (this is when the spirit of Hamlet breathed newly and fiercely in me), his argument would have been roughly thus: “You gotta accept it, pal” (he called me pal, when he did not call me “kid” or, scathingly, “professor”), “the real stuff is running out, it’s used up, it’s blown away, or it costs too much. You gotta have substitoots.”
Yet, as Ellison Plastics went from strength to strength (without my assistance), it would have been clear to anyone that Sam’s appetite for the “real stuff” developed in proportion to his capacity, with the money he made from substitutes, to purchase it: the new mansion in Berkshire—real Tudor (with a swimming-pool), as opposed to the mock Tudor in which I was raised; the affectation of fine tailoring and choice antiques; in its ultimate form, the apotheosis of Sam, a New World clone, into a Real English Gentleman. A plan preposterously conceived, doomed from the start by his indelible Cleveland accent, but earnestly and perseveringly undertaken: the genealogical investigations (why should these things have mattered to him?); the wondrous discovery, not that he had come over with the Normans or was of Mayflower stock, but that a former Ellison, John Elyson (d. 1623), had been a senior Fellow of this College, this place where I am now myself an inmate. Which gave him an hereditary stake in the hallowed ancient walls; and gave him the nerve, in his sixty-seventh year, to boost the college finances by a handsome endowment, the one (secret) condition of this munificent gesture being that it should provide for a new college fellowship, the Ellison Fellowship, whose first incumbent, whatever the outward form of selection, should be me.
And this is the Sam who once mocked and refused to fund my former yen to be a scholar.
Without knowing the full story—give me time—you may sniff here the bitter scent of retaliation. It was his way of coming to my rescue after Ruth’s death. There was the question of my income. One way or another, as he tenderly reminded me, I had lived off Ruth’s earnings.
And there was the question of my seemingly incurable paralysis in the face of Ruth’s absence. Better to be somewhere where paralysis was generally accommodated. In other words, it was his way also of humiliating me and, after lifelong resistance, rendering me entirely dependent upon him. The cloister was my real home all along, wasn’t it? So much for my fugitive dream of a life with performers, show people. Back to your books, professor.
The trouble was I really liked him, and the trouble was I was desolate and he was being kind. In the event, anxious not to forgo its windfall, the College did not raise a squeak at the dubiousness of my candidature (a ten-year career, abandoned some fifteen years ago, as an unillustrious university lecturer). The embarrassments and resentments came later. Nor did the College seem to mind its revered fabric being underpinned by plastic.
Sam’s death, leaving me in this utterly bogus position, with the duty of being a living testimony to his noble public gesture, was like the closing of a trap. “One day, pal, you’ll get the money, I’ll see that you get the money!” This was how he threatened me when I went my own proud, penniless way, years ago—as if money were a penalty, an inescapable second-best.
You see, I think I found the real stuff, the true, real stuff. Now it seems, in this new life, I am turned to plastic. I am born again in plastic.
Four o’clock. Chimes float gently over the soft, historic air. What benign incarceration! What beguiling obsolescence! What agreeable trappings in which not to know who you are. The contemplative life! Sometimes even the most disgruntled inmate or sceptical visitor will be touched by a sentiment that is more than just picturesque nostalgia. Twilights full of bells and the pad of feet on old stones. Lights in study windows. Arches and towers. The whole absurd but cherished edifice rising like some fantastical lantern out of the miasmal Fens and out of the darkness of dark ages. The illusion of the illusion. It is civilization that we are talking about, that we are saving, we dotty dons.