Well, he could have pity, if that’s what he wanted—if that’s what he didn’t mind having. I’ll give him pity … He might have had something else.
A sad case—a case all right. But you can’t stay on a case for ever.
I could stay here all night. As if to prevent it, as if to make it unhappen. A different turn of events this time. Look, they’re in there together, right now: Bob and Sarah. They’re home, they’re happy.
The house looks calm, calm and safe. Can houses be acquitted, let off? It wasn’t their fault. Someone looking out from one of those lit windows might see it all the other way round: I’m the sinister element round here. There’s a man out there, in a car, just sitting there, a suspicious-looking character …
I should be home in the warm. No job for a man my age, but it gets in the blood. A night watchman.
It’s okay—I was just passing, keeping an eye, seeing all’s well.
I start the engine. Almost twenty past five. Over three hours to go yet. And I have to see Mrs. Lucas at a quarter to six—to show her the photos. Rita will be looking at her watch, waiting for my key in the street door. My God!—but no, Rita isn’t the murdering type.
None of us is.
I turn the car and drive away. I came. I know I’ll come back in another year. I’ll go to his grave in another year. And another …
I turn left out of Beecham Close, down the hill. Inside me is a glow. As if I’m the black shell of a house at night, lit up inside.
65
It’s hard to think of an emperor in Chislehurst … Of course, he wasn’t an emperor then. An ex-emperor, a fallen emperor, just the husk of an emperor with less than two years left to live.
“Napoleon III, Empereur des Français y mourut …”
The emperor of a golf course. Eighteen greens, each with a flag fluttering over it like a little conquest—except it wasn’t a golf course then, it was a private estate. And Chislehurst then, like Wimbledon, would have been more or less a village in the country, not yet conquered by the suburbs. London on the march. The empire of the suburbs.
All the same, I couldn’t help imagining him looking out from a window of that club house, that home for fallen emperors, to where we trailed back, that Sunday morning—one golf ball less between us.
As if he should have been interested in us. As if he should have been keeping an eye on us.
Nearly forty years ago now.
Of course he wasn’t looking out. It’s me who’s looking out, at my memory. Dad, me, my dad’s loose-talking pal—Donald? Dots in the distance …
But then Napoleon III, when he looked out, would have looked out, mostly, at his memory—since he was only what was left of an emperor, most of his life was done. So that in that green space before him, which he didn’t know would become a golf course, he might have pictured everything that had come before. Through the smoke of a cigar, maybe, the smoke and carnage of all those battles: Magenta, Solferino, Sedan.
Big statements weren’t ever my dad’s thing, but once I heard him say—I think he got it from someone else, someone at that club—that where there were golf courses there was civilization and where there was civilization there were golf courses. A shaky statement anyway—though one most senior-ranking police officers would back up.
What would my mum have thought? Where there were department stores? Park benches?
And Helen? Where there was art? Interior design?
And Napoleon himself? A green space. Blue smoke.
He used to play around, apparently—Sarah’s told me all about him. Other women. He called them his “distractions.” It wasn’t a rock-solid marriage, him and Eugénie. There would have been imperial tiffs. But she played around too—in the other direction—with politics, affairs of state: his department. So people would say it was the Empress who was really in charge. And she led him up some pretty unfortunate paths.
She was Spanish by birth. Strong-minded, ambitious, beautiful. But devoted. He was always a bit of a ditherer—a bit distracted—and, for a leader of armies, a bit short on command.
But she staked her life on his. After the disaster of Sedan she fled in a coach from Paris to the coast—no longer an empress, just a woman on the run. At any point she might have been stopped, hauled out and killed. Then, when she was safe on an English boat—it’s a good story—she almost died when a terrible storm blew up in the Channel.
All to reach Chislehurst.
She got there first. He had a trickier escape—being at the mercy of the Prussians. She waited for him. He might never have turned up.
And then when they were both safe in Chislehurst, all hell broke loose, apparently, back in France.
I suppose Sarah’s been my history teacher too.
How would they have pronounced it? “Cheez-le-’urst”?
She had her health. He was already a seriously sick man. Gallstones. At Sedan, maddened by the pain of gallstones as well as by approaching defeat, he’d spurred his horse toward the thickest enemy fire.
But no such luck. He died in bed in Chislehurst.
“… le 9 Janvier 1873.”
So she outlived him by those nearly fifty years. Till 1920. And so she might actually have seen, for all I know, the grounds of their home, their place of exile, turned into a golf course.
Those nearly fifty years. That’s the strangest part. The part that draws Sarah, I know. Twenty years of marriage. Seventeen years of empire. Nearly fifty years of afterwards.
Half her life still left. She still liked to play around—in different ways now. A plucky, feisty, not-so-old bird, ready to have a go. Motor cars—those weird new things. Yachting in the Med. It must have seemed like a dream, having once been an empress. Going back to Paris—staying in a hotel.
But it had all turned strange. Their son—the son who might have been an emperor—was killed in the British army, fighting the Zulus. The second big blow of her life: she still had over forty years to go.
But the strangest thing maybe is that, all that time, there was no one else. She never remarried. No one to take the Emperor’s place.
He was our claim to fame. Our bit of suburban importance. He put Chislehurst on the map. Like tennis has put Wimbledon on the map. Though if everyone knows about Agassi and Sampras, not so many people know about Napoleon III.
And the truth is Chislehurst had another, prior claim to fame—and when I was a kid I thought about it more than I thought about Napoleon III.
The caves. The Chislehurst Caves.
First there’d been a village among the fields, then a suburb, with a high street and a golf course, but before all that there’d been the caves: a whole network of them, miles of them, just a tiny part of which—the rest was sealed off—you could go and visit.
No one knew how they’d first got there. An unsolved mystery, disappearing into the dark. I remember being taken there by Mum and Dad, after we moved from Lewisham. Maybe I was five. Listening to the guide. The echoes, the maze of tunnels, the stories of ghosts. The feeling that you might never get back into the light.
The caves ran everywhere. They must have run under our house. Under the golf course. They were supposed to be prehistoric—the earliest people had taken refuge in them. They were supposed to have been lived in by druids. Or they were just underground quarries, ancient mines for chalk and flint.
But one undisputed fact was that they’d been used as a natural shelter only years before. In the air raids in the war. The guide explained—but people could remember. Mum and Dad must have remembered. The sealed parts had been opened up. People had huddled where once primitive tribes had huddled. Thousands of people, apparently, more than ten thousand people. It’s hard to imagine. Chislehurst had gone underground.
66
The Tanning Centre is doing good trade. As I turn the corner into the Broadway and walk towards my office I see a girl going in almost collide with another coming out. The place stays open till well into the evening (those naked bodies, below me, even if
I’m working late), and now it’s November and the nights have drawn in, its business seems to pick up, as if there’s a reverse effect. Tans in winter, sunshine in the dark. Anything is possible these days.
The shop windows gleam. The lights of Broadway. It’s an old joke which people in Wimbledon must have made a thousand times, but it doesn’t stop me making it again (to ease things along with clients). I have an office on Broadway. I look out on the lights of Broadway.
The two girls laugh as they step round each other.
Sometimes I see it as I think Sarah must see it, in her mind’s eye. Another world, like a dream, weird in its goings-on.
Through the Tanning Centre window, as I reach my street door, I see the rattan chairs, the tomato-red cushions, the potted palm. As if you’ve already arrived in Marrakesh. The girl who’s just entered looking all wrong in her coat.
I fish out my key and open the street door. It’s just a plain black door, slightly set back, between the Tanning Centre and a chemist’s—and it looks vaguely unlikely, like a trick door, as if it will lead to just a gap between two walls or to some secret unsuspected passage.
Sarah would have stood here once, wondering. One crisp, bright morning.
There’s a brass letter box, a key-hole plate, a brass doorknob that doesn’t turn and is just for show. In the recess to the side there’s a bell-push and entry-phone and a little discreet sign that says “GW Investigations.”
I open the door. The narrow stairs go straight up with just the briefest strip of floor—you can’t call it a hall, a lobby or anything—before the first step. It’s not appealing, it can’t encourage clients. But then it must be also what they expect: the feeling of something behind-the-scenes and sly, the feeling of being squeezed.
Not the broad way, the narrow way.
I look up. Rita’s standing at the top of the stairs. That’s not usual for her, to get up and stand there when I arrive, and I have the sudden feeling that in my absence everything’s changed places. There’s been a revolution. It’s Rita’s office now. She’s about to kick me downstairs.
Or: I’m not the boss any more, the man who works here, just some visiting client (business unknown) and Rita’s there to greet me—I know she does it with clients—to soften the effect of these uninviting stairs.
She looks like an air hostess up there, at the door of the plane.
It’s almost twenty to six. I’ve been a while but I’m not too late for Mrs. Lucas. And Rita knows where I’ve been (not counting Beecham Close). Is she in a mood? Relieved? Glad to see me? Or did she just want to catch my face, read my expression, before I had time to prepare it for her?
I climb. I think of my dreams of Dyson. But it’s suddenly obvious why she’s standing there. A series of little signals, a tap of her watch, a jerk of her head towards my office. I get the picture. Mrs. Lucas has already arrived, early, and Rita’s shown her in to my desk—all smiles, no doubt, offering tea and saying I’ll be along in just a moment.
And now she says in a crisp and all-explaining voice, “Mrs. Lucas is waiting for you, Mr. Webb.”
All the same, she looks at me closely as I take off my coat. Do I look strange? I’ve no idea how my face reads.
“The file, the photos?” I whisper.
“Right here.” She points.
She takes my coat, my scarf. I straighten my tie. It’s like something going on hurriedly in a cupboard. I take the file and envelope. She reaches out suddenly and, lightly, quickly, smoothes my hair. I can’t remember her doing that before. Do I look a mess? She smiles oddly—as if a smile was the last thing she’d meant. Her pink-wool bosom juts.
“Ready?” she says. And that’s odd too, as if I’m about to go on stage.
I walk into my office as if I’ve been gently pushed.
“Mrs. Lucas, I’m sorry to have kept you.” Not the best opening line.
I’ve met her before, of course: the preliminary meeting. Good-looking, late thirties, well dressed. Well heeled. She’s sitting, legs crossed, cradling a cup of tea. No nervousness. If anything, pleased to have the edge on me by being there first, taking a peek at what’s on my desk.
“I was early,” she says. A briskish smile.
The hard, I-mean-business type. Information, confirmation … But you never know how they’ll react when you show them—the proof.
I move round to my seat. She looks at the bundle under my arm.
The room smells of furniture polish. Rita’s been tidying up, I can see, while I’ve been out. But she hasn’t drawn the blind on my window. Black glass—Wimbledon might not be there—like unexposed film.
I put the file to one side, put the envelope in front of me and plant my clasped hands firmly on top of it. A little polite cough into my knuckles before I begin.
She leans forward—alert, even a little eager—puts down her cup and saucer. Brown eyes. I see the ring on her finger. How do we choose?
Why should she react to the photos? They’re not photos of horrors, atrocities. Just of two people being—nice to each other. They’re not like the things you see in the police, the things that have to be noted and photographed. The things juries sometimes have thrust under their noses.
But you have to be ready for anything (Rita will be standing by outside). I keep my hands clasped on the envelope, clear my throat again, and before I say them I hear the words I’ve said so many times.
“Mrs. Lucas, I always say to my clients at this point that it’s still possible—should they wish, should they have reconsidered—to go no further. This—evidence—can be destroyed. A simple matter. We’re not in court. No one need know.”
It’s like reading them their rights.
67
Rita said, “It’ll fade.”
Her final shot, a year ago—standing there in front of my desk, her eyes with that shine in them that might have gone either way. Showers, frost. A cold trail, it’ll fade.
A final shot which, when it came to it, was more like an offer of mercy, a reprieve. She only wanted to spare me—didn’t I see? Future pain and regret. Future looking-a-fool. Even more than I looked now.
Didn’t I see what was ahead—and didn’t I see what was standing in front of me right now?
She should have turned, walked out on me, but she seemed to dig her heels deeper into the carpet.
And no, she wasn’t going to melt, spill over, use that last cheap trick. (Though it often happens, it’s well known, it’s often how it begins, the tearful assistant in the boss’s office: ask a divorce lawyer, ask a private detective.)
The shine in her eyes was simply Rita’s shine, Rita’s aura.
Look at me, George. The goods may be past their best, but at least you’ve seen what you’re getting. Think about it, George. A cold trail, a cold bed. You haven’t even seen her naked.
(The things you can read in the shine of an eye.)
No? Not seen her naked? Not when they took her away—dressed for something different—in a police car. Not when I first went to see her where she is now?
Not seen her naked?
“Think about it, George. It’ll fade.”
But it doesn’t fade. It’s not true what they say, that it fades, it cools with the years. It grows, it blooms, the less time that’s left. Eight, nine years … How long do we have? Things get more precious, not less. That’s one thing I’ve learnt. And what we have here inside us we might never know, there’s no detecting it. That’s another thing I’ve learnt.
It might never happen, we might never know. A spring coiled inside us waiting for release.
Eight, nine years … But one day I’ll go for the last time, one day I won’t be just a visitor or come back alone.
Rita might have left me a year ago. I know she’s going to leave me now.
One day it won’t be years but months, not months but weeks. Not weeks but days. One day it will be just a case of a simple small step, across a line that can’t even be seen. A simple, huge step. It might even seem like another e
dge, like going over another edge.
But I’ll be there, I’ll be there, sweetheart, to catch you.
• • •
How will it be? How many times have I pictured it, dreamt it, rehearsed it? I know it’s foolish. A November day? Though why should it be November? A foggy, murky November day. Sometimes, I don’t know why, I’ve pictured it like that. I’ve dreamt I’m held up, fog-bound, trapped in nightmare traffic jams. My God, I’ll be late—on this day.
(I know I’ll be hours early.)
Fog. Everything hidden and lost. Would that be right? To slip back into the world when it’s only half there. Secretly and undercover at first—the full thing might be too much. Like prisoners who step the other way under a blanket, as if they’re naked, through the last stab of light.
A blanket of fog. Here, have this blanket. All the blankets.
A foggy day, everything wrapped in grey.
No. I want it to be like this day, that’s already slipped into night. A hard night coming, you can tell already, another hard frost. But tomorrow will be like today, brilliant, blue and still.
I want it to be like today. When I’m there, when I’m waiting, heart thudding, my breath billowing before my eyes, when she comes back, steps out at last into the clear light of day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham Swift was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. His six previous novels include 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; and Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.