That moment when the performance begins! That magic moment when the lights go down and the curtain trembles; when the pretend thing, the made-up thing becomes the real thing and the audience, in their dark rows, turn to ghosts. How can it be? Why should it be? What’s Hecuba to him? That moment when things come alive.
It doesn’t always happen. There is good acting and bad acting (I know this). We sit in our seats and think of a thousand things. But she could do it, that simple, marvellous thing: she could bring things to life.
Who was she, this sorceress? A little girl with a bee in her bonnet about becoming an actress; the only child of a doting father and a disapproving mother; a night-club dancer who in the cold-blooded gloom of the London Zoo Reptile House indulged with me in hot-blooded but as yet unconsummated passion; a woman who for nineteen years of her life inhabited the undiscovered country of my complete ignorance of her. Then loomed into my view. And the world’s. Ruth.
They say I should write her biography. It has been put to me more than once—by friends, by a publisher or two, even, on that last visit, by a well-meaning Sam (“You know the book I think you should write, pal. What’s with this Pearce guy, anyway?”). The life of Ruth Vaughan, actress. Each time, it has come with the tacit, the soft-toned hint that this might be, as it were, a cure for grief. But it seems to me it would be an impossibility, a falsehood, a sham. It’s not the life, is it, but the life? The life.
How was it done? What was the trick? I don’t know. I couldn’t act for toffee, but I know what it’s like, sitting here in this dimming garden, not to be sure who you are. They say that actors and actresses are really shadowy, half-formed, insubstantial people. Dogged by a poor sense of their own identity and a lack of personality, they make up for it by striving to become—these other people. But why not start with the other premise? That actors have an excess of personality: more to spread around. And why not start from the premise—it would be logical and fair and neat, wouldn’t it, even if it’s patently not so—that nature has given each one of us an equal, definitive and sufficient personality?
And let me be clear, in any case, of one thing: these other people that she became and at whom, with other people, I marvelled—they didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter to me whether she became them or not, so long as she was, also, herself. Herself. And it wouldn’t have mattered to me if we had never had all those things, never known all those things—the tours, the great days: the stuff of biographies—if not to have had them would have meant to have her still, here, now.
But then what I ask is this: could there have been a Ruth Vaughan who did not do all those things, who never became an actress?
Of course.
Of course not.
And could there have been a Ruth Vaughan who did or did not do all those things, who was or was not all those things, without ever entering my life or my entering hers?
Of course.
Of course not. Of course not.
And can I really believe that in all this turning into other people, in all this promiscuity of personae, up there before the lights, she never ever—?
Not the life but the life. I used to watch her pacing up and down at the end of the garden at the cottage, addressing the air. For me the most wonderful thing was always this act of rehearsal, this straining of life after life: ballet dancers, on a frosty morning, at the barre. I remember once when she was in full flow, complete with her running commentary of interjections, expletives and self-exhortations and her battery of cigarettes, a man came to fix a TV aerial to the chimney. From which, of course, he had a grandstand view. Did she stop? No. She knew he was there. Did she abate her voice or her pungent asides? No. From his perch, the aerial man would have beheld Ruth talking volubly to people who weren’t there, not to mention rattling away to herself. The classic signs. I remember his look of suppressed bewilderment as, the job done, his ladder removed, I at last enlightened him (having joined in the game): “My wife is an actress.” Which didn’t prevent him, I’m sure, from going away with the conviction that my wife was mad.
I think now of that aerial man, with his ladder and van. His faltering nonchalance. Perhaps it wasn’t just that he thought Ruth was crazy. Perhaps he might have been happy to stay up there longer by the chimney. I see Ruth turning to me, after he’d gone, to share in the joke, her eyes beating her lips to it as always, the sun on the field, a hand in her hair, the wide mock-pity of her laugh: “Poor man! Poor man!” And I think how the aerial man might have been me, how it might have been my lot only to view for half an hour in the course of my day’s work this strangely behaved, this extraordinary, this adorable creature.
You see, nothing else will do. No simulations, fabrications, biographical conjurations. Slowly, yes, slowly you abandon the wilder delusions, the ruses, subterfuges, superstitions of grief. The days of eating meals for one but set for two, of clothes still hanging untouched on hangers exactly as they were left. The moments of indescribable mental concentration when you try to summon out of some recess of reality the exact sound of her footstep, the exact way in which she would turn the key in the lock. The bouts of talking out loud and alone, but not to yourself (my rehearsal sessions), to the thin, cheating air. The days of signs, traces—dreams. Oh yes, the dreams. Now she has stepped for ever out of her own existence, doesn’t she enter, even more readily, even more lovably, the existence of your dreams?
Yes. Though, tell me, which would be crueller: not to have or to have these dreams?
And what of the other images, the undreamt images? Surely you are lucky—lucky. The films, the videotapes, the hundreds and hundreds of photographs—publicity shots, rehearsal shots. You can turn a page, push a button, press a cassette into its slot, and there will be Ruth—moving, talking, breathing—before you.
But how can I explain it? The pictures mock me. They are, they are not Ruth. I can’t bear to look at them.
And nothing is left but this impossible absence. This space at your side the size of a woman, the size of a life, the size—of the world. Ah yes, the monstrosity, the iniquity of love—that another person should be the world. What does it matter if the world (out there) is lost, doomed, if there is no sense, purpose, rhyme or reason to the schemeless scheme of things, so long as— But when she is gone, you indict the universe.
I would believe or not believe anything, swallow any old make-belief, in order to have Ruth back. Whereas Matthew— Whereas this Pearce guy—
Nothing else. Only the exact filling of the exact space. Only the actual reversal of nature. And now you see the little joke nature has played on me. She has granted me my wish—after a fashion. She has brought me back to life.
And what should I expect now: that I should live for ever?
But the lights are dimming. There is a hush in the auditorium. The curtain is lifting. It is 1957. The marchers are not yet marching, to save the world, along the road to where, once upon a time, I spotted trains, took tea with my mother and, conceivably, was conceived; and the two young people who command our attention still have a quaint, residual feeling that the world has already been saved, that the great cosmic battle for good and evil has already been fought and won—even for their sakes—when they were small. And it is only four years since a new queen rode in a fairy-tale coach to her coronation; and some bright spark has named this age the New Elizabethan Age, as if the mere name of a queen imparted some historical magic and the world were once more waiting to be discovered and explored.
What does he do, this young hero of ours, charged with the task of providing for a first night of bliss? There are no hotels in Camden, and, besides, that is too close to home. His thoughts and his steps take him to the vicinity of Paddington Station, where he eyes from outside, with an intensity of circumspection (he should have worn a hat with the brim pulled down and turned up the collar of his coat), the ranks of plausible hotels that accost the traveller hying to and from the West Country.
It was here, of course, that he first alighted in
the capital, in the classic guise of the indigent waif, scorned by his elders, come to find his future in the big city. (Now he has found his future.) And it was from Paddington Station, which still reeks of coal and steam though the Great Western Railway is no more, that the trains that once thrilled him in his younger days set forth. And it has already occurred to our young hotel-assessor that the station in his dream, so blessedly adapted to the needs of two very important travellers, was Paddington.
He selects a hotel. Are names significant? It is called the Denmark Hotel. The white stucco seems newly painted. It has stone steps, leading up to its fanlighted front entrance, and, so far as he can see through the glass-panelled door, what lies within is not outrightly forbidding (he imagines the fearsome business of signing the register) nor blatantly at odds with its outer pretensions. There are three hotels in the terrace, and it is the only one to have its front steps thoughtfully whitewashed at the edges. There is, of course, the thorny question of the price.
He doesn’t go in. Later that day he telephones, not from his Camden quarters, where Mrs Nesbitt generously allows her lodgers to make use of the phone—while stationing herself squarely within earshot—but from a call-box in the street. He thinks he has prepared a casual and credible style of inquiry. He is even ready, if needs be, to spin some yarn about how they will have travelled down—he and his wife, that is—from the north that day and will be getting a train to Somerset the next morning (he has in mind Weston Super Mare: it is August, after all, the holiday season).
But he is caught by surprise by the female voice at the other end, which is not so far removed from Mrs Nesbitt’s, though with a practised smarminess that Mrs Nesbitt cannot muster: a voice that seems to go with a certain length of earring, a certain weight of bosom and a certain adroitness at sizing people up. And he is tripped up by the perfectly feasible “For one night only?” and by the abrupt “And whom is this speaking, sir?” Up to this point he has thought: what is wrong with his own name? But, suddenly panicked, he plucks out of the air the name Nesbitt. “Nesbitt. Mr Nesbitt.”
Yet the thing is done. He establishes that the price is three pounds ten shillings. A small fortune. A room is booked for the following Sunday. And that night, at the Blue Moon Club, he tells her (she giggles; he feels a little stupid) that she will have to remember that she is Mrs Nesbitt.
It is 1957. All this stealthiness is not unwarranted, if perhaps overdone. But what true lovers were they who never learnt to speak in whispers or tread on tiptoe? They arrange to meet in a café on Camden High Street, from where they will take a taxi to Paddington. He tells Mrs Nesbitt (this is getting confusing) that he is going to his mother’s and stepfather’s for the night, and packs a medium-sized suitcase with redundant clothing. No doubt Mrs Nesbitt will think this excessive for a journey of one night and that a Sunday evening is a strange time to be beginning a journey home. But there is nothing he can do about this: on Sunday nights the Blue Moon is closed; and his baggage has to fit more than one alibi. He takes to the street, suitcase in hand, anxiously eyeing his watch, and it occurs to him, again, that he is re-enacting his dream.
It is a wet evening, shot with interludes of silky, brassy light. She is first at their meeting place, carrying a small travelling bag and wearing a borrowed ring. He is, by this time, in a fair fever of nerves, but her presence calms him, rallies him, instructs him. He realises that what this is is simply an exercise in acting (one of the few of his life). Tonight they will have to pretend—and not pretend—to be other people. Her smile imparts a spirit of mischief and audacity he has quite overlooked. Let us give this night its due.
“So—Mr Nesbitt.”
They dine on cod and chips and strong tea, by a steamed-up window that seems, in its veiled opacity, somehow appropriate. Beneath her raincoat, she wears a blue, white-dotted summer frock that buttons down the front. He realises that in just a little while— It is strange to think that only the night before, in the Blue Moon Club, she was all satin and egrets’ feathers, but this dress, with its polka-dots and buttons, which is neither too modest nor too flaunting—the sort of dress a young wife might wear when setting out with her husband on her holiday—excites him more than he can say.
They linger in the fish and chip parlour. Though neither of them utters the thought, it is understood they are waiting for darkness to descend. This too seems appropriate. When you are out on an adventure …
When they can see their faces in the misty window, they leave.
Nothing is meant to be. Everything is meant to be.
They hail a taxi. They are used to taxis. (There are no problems: it doesn’t break down.)
“The Denmark Hotel, Norfolk Square.” Can the taxi-driver guess?
The woman at the desk has neither pendulous earrings nor ramparts of bosom. She is thin, toothy and angular and has an air of veiled boredom. He signs the register. A good, a commendable performance. There are no trick questions. Only the momentarily disarming “Will you be wanting a call in the morning?”
“No, that’s all right—we’ll manage.”
“Only we don’t like our guests”—a piano-key smile—“to miss any trains.”
She holds out, dangling from a wooden bobble, the key to number thirty-two (ever afterwards a magic number). And before any smirking porter can intervene (but there is no porter, it’s not that sort of place), they turn with their bogus bags to mount the stairs—where with each flight, the carpet and paintwork get progressively dingier, while, as if to compensate, excitement flares between them.
You have to picture the scene. How it was then, on a wet August night in 1957, in the days before she was famous. The room looks over the street. The backcloth, beyond the window, is the inky shimmer of London under rain. But the curtains are soon drawn, and almost as soon, it seems, clothes are removed, plucked, pulled, yanked from impatient flesh. He had not expected it quite, this frenzy and breathlessness to be unclad, as if some off-stage voice, some prompter’s whisper, should have gently enjoined: take your time, you have all night. Nor was he prepared for the arresting candour, the simplicity and amazement, of nakedness. And this, you see, is me. And this is me.
He was not prepared, either, for the tender and inspired fluency (as if to complete the candour) with which each one of them offers the other on this indelible night the complete and unabridged story of their lives up until this point. His is a strangely dramatic tale (though he doesn’t know the half of it yet), full of comedy and tragedy in the romantic streets of Paris, and hers is a tale of the obscure London suburbs. But it is she who will be the actress, who will be the Queen of the Nile.
And so it is that he tells her, what he has never told anyone before, about his—father. That he took his life.
Rain patters on the window (tomorrow will be bright and new). There is faded, flowery wallpaper, a rickety wardrobe, a wash-stand that gurgles shamelessly in the dark.
How strange, how incomprehensible, that whispered phrase. How unreal, even as he speaks it. How impossible that either of these young people, whose lives, this night, have never been so richly possessed, so richly embraced, will ever come to such a pass. He took his life, he took his life.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which
was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
THE LIGHT OF DAY
On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.
Fiction/Literature
LAST ORDERS
Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
Fiction/Literature
THE SWEET-SHOP OWNER
This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.