Out of This World Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1993

  Copyright © 1988 by Graham Swift

  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 the Penguin Group, London, in 1988. First published in the United States by Poseidon Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, in 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from the lyrics of “Summertime” by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. © 1935 (renewed 1962) George Gershwin Music and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund. All rights administered by Chappell & Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swift, Graham, 1949-

  Out of this world / Graham Swift.—Ist Vintage International ed. p. cm.

  I. Title.

  [PR6069.W4709 1993]

  823′ .94—dc20 92–56343

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82982-5

  v3.1

  FOR CANDICE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  April 1982 Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Joe

  Harry

  Anna

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Sophie

  Harry

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  What the eye sees not, the heart rues not.

  April 1982

  Harry

  I remember, in ’69, three years before he died, when I was home for a brief while in the summer, how we sat up together all night watching those first moon-men take their first, shy steps on the moon. I didn’t think he’d care. Didn’t think he’d give a toss about that old dream come true. But he watched those pictures as if it were all some solemn duty he couldn’t neglect. He’d turned seventy that previous winter. Talked about ‘three score and ten’. And some time that night he leant across to chink his whisky glass against mine and said, without sarcasm, ‘I’ve lived to see men land on the moon.’ As if he truly found the fact momentous, as if he were proud that his life spanned the full, galloping gamut of the twentieth century.

  We were close that night. We talked. We talked! He said it was time he was getting out. Getting out of Irving’s way. And he’d never said it like that before, as if it wasn’t just some tired, insincere prevarication but he really wanted his release. It wasn’t home any more, he said, it was headquarters. And it was true, he’d had barbed wire strung from angled posts all along the boundary wall, new alarms wired up. Though that was nothing to what Irving would have in three years’ time. To what Irving has now. And those jokes I used to make – the ‘Arsenal’, the ‘Fortress’ – they weren’t jokes I could make any more. Though I’d never exactly meant them to be funny.

  Not home. ‘Headquarters’. He was going in less and less to the office. Getting ‘security-conscious’. After a whisky or two more he started to drop hints about how they were moving into serious stuff. Not just the regular old range but heavy systems. The word was ‘systems’ now. Missile components. Ground-to-air. Air-to-air. I said: So was there a scale in these things?

  That year, like the one before, was all Vietnam. That spring I’d been at Dau Tieng and around Tay Ninh and in the A Shau, where the war had reached the inane pitch of being fought to prove that a war was being fought and so keep the Paris negotiators on their toes. And I was just back again, only three weeks, from Saigon, and nothing was real. The moon over English elm trees wasn’t real, and men walking on the moon was, in the language of those days, just far out, far out. But I was used to that feeling. Coming back to ‘normal’ places, ‘home’ even. Used to that feeling by then. Could bargain with it, parley with it, mollify it with whisky. That previous year, though I could scarcely believe it, I’d turned fifty. Fifty to his seventy. So we both had a big number to celebrate. A lean, stringy sort of fifty. Adrenalized and tensed. So the confused, angry kids, denimed and beaded, I photographed in Lincoln Park, Chicago, as inside the convention hall they sang ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, didn’t even think of me as another generation. They said: That’s Harry Beech – he’s been out there. Some of them actually wanted my autograph.

  And ‘out there’ I wasn’t old. (‘Hey man, did you say “fifty” – like five-o?’) Because out there everyone was old.

  A gaunt, taut face in the mirror, which didn’t look like any age. With eyes that I knew stared more and blinked less than they should. And a neat white zip of a scar above my left jaw where a piece of flying something caught me in Stanleyville. My one, negligible wound in the cause of. I didn’t feel a thing. Just the gush of blood in my mouth, and the thought: O my God, I’m coughing this up. Then the discovery I could poke my tongue through my cheek.

  All Vietnam. And, of course, the Apollo missions. Which were the other side, the shiny side of the coin. The bright side of the moon. And maybe they weren’t so different, just part of the same programme, those moon-men, mission-controlled men in their absurd outfits, and the marines I photographed out on patrol, with their helmets and flak-jackets and grenades and antennae. M-16s, M-60s, M-79s. Just walking hardware too. Lunatic zones. ‘The World’, back home. The space-suits which didn’t show if there was a real man inside. The body-bags lined up for the choppers to come in.

  We watched them clamber out of the module. There was Armstrong’s famous message to mankind. Which didn’t work, because you knew it was rehearsed and the cameras were on him, cameras that didn’t even have a human eye behind them. Then Nixon’s voice, crackling across space.

  The first rule of photography: that you must catch things unawares. That the camera doesn’t manufacture. But that night was the first time perhaps that I thought: No, times have changed since then. The camera first, then the event. The whole world is waiting just to get turned into film. And not just the world but the goddam moon as well.

  First Armstrong, then Aldrin, bobbing over the lunar dust. Just for one wild moment you thought: They are going to start jumping and bouncing for sheer joy. They are going to start leaping and cavorting, in that gravity-less freedom, in those clown suits, for sheer, delirious amazement that they are there on the surface of the moon.

  They say that afterwards, after they got back to earth, some of those astronauts, some of those Apollo pioneers got religion. Those robot-men, clones of NASA technology, became crew-cut mystics, speaking at meetings about the View from Up There. The irony of it. That we should have spent centuries shedding superstition and actually evolving the means that would get us up into Heaven. Only to discover that, all along, He was there first.

  That was not part of the programme. Played down in the post-mission publicity. But the moon-dust, the rocks, the samples: people queued up for hours just to look at some dust and some rocks. And the pictures. The earth from the moon. The ultimate photo. All of it, the whole of it, everything. Hanging in the black velvet of space. I wish I could have ta
ken that photo. Stopped there.

  For some reason we were closer than we’d ever been. It was our closeness that mattered, more than the men on the distant moon. We stopped watching the TV. It gets boring after a while – moon-walking, rock collecting, puppets bouncing on dust. We opened the French windows and went out on to the terrace. I suppose all over the world people must have done that that night: left their TV sets and gone to stare at the sky. We stood on the terrace in the gathering light. There was an expression on his face as if he, too, didn’t know what was real or what wasn’t. I remember I took his arm. I mean, I was standing on his right side, his wrong side, and I put my hand on the arm that wasn’t his arm. On his artificial arm. And just a little while after that – it had taken him till he was seventy and I was fifty – he told me how it had happened.

  Sophie

  I guess I belong to the new world now, Doctor K. You see – I even say, ‘I guess’. Save that it isn’t the new world. That old idea was always just a dream, wasn’t it, a come-on, a sales pitch? The land of escape, the land of sanctuary. New worlds for old. And I’m not blind to the fact that what Joe sells every day in his Sixth Avenue office – what keeps us here in the land of the free – is just the same dream only in reverse: golden memories of the Old World. Thatched cottages and stately homes. Patchwork scenery. Sweet, green visions. Oh to be in England now that – (Now, so it seems, they are off to fight the Argentines.)

  Yet it was he who brought us here, refugees of a kind, to the new world. Though it was not exactly, then, in ’72, the Promised Land, and we were not exactly huddled in steerage with our bundled belongings. There was Grandad’s money, for a start. Though Joe would still maintain that it was his own gallant, provident decision. As if he’d known. To take us ‘away from it all’. But away-from-it-all is such a shifting, strange, elusive place. There isn’t a point in the world where you can get away from the world, not any more, is there?

  And it was really my decision. I could have said, that day, to Grandad: Yes, I want it. I really do. Yes. And Joe will take the job, a job he doesn’t even understand. For my sake. The weather-cocks, the yew trees, the orchard walls. The whole damn fragile illusion.

  But now he keeps the illusion that he brought us here. Away from it all. And I know what he would answer if someone were to say to him that he’s in the business of dreams. ‘Sure. But better to sell dreams than – Better, any time, to sell pleasure, even pre-packaged, glossy-brochured pleasure, than – ’

  You know what first struck me about New York? (I mean, after that first impression that lasts about two days, that it is all some vast hallucination.) That all these clean, hard, soaring, futuristic lines were mixed up with something crumbling, blighted, decomposed. As if the skyscrapers had to sprout out of some fertile rot. But sweetness and innocence were never really the ticket, were they? If you want them, go walk in some English meadow. And now that’s just what they’re paying, a thousand bucks a time, to do.

  The land of cancelled memories. The land without a past. For you too, Doctor K? Some mishap in middle Europe, somewhere along the line? Refugee makes good? But – I forget – you don’t talk. You just listen. I’m the one who has to do the talking.

  The land of amnesty. And the land of the gun. Do you remember (our little affair had only just started), we were walking in the Park, you in your tweed coat and hundred-and-fifty-dollar shoes, and me with a winter flush in my cheeks? And I said, just like a smart-ass student to her sugar-daddy professor, no, just like a pert little daughter to her daddy, no, just like a precocious young belle to her old-fashioned gentlemanly beau: This much-debated violence of American life, it was hardly surprising, was it? Since America was made out of bottled-up bad memories, by people on the run. And you narrowed your eyes and, with a little touch of mimic-Bronx, said, ‘Say, who’s the analyst round here?’ And then, straightening your gloves: ‘And spare me the collective unconscious, please. One mind at a time is plenty.’ You bought me tea at the Tavern. I thought: If you want to propose something – something strictly unprofessional – now is your chance.

  Not away from it all. Joe wouldn’t have understood how I felt safe, here in this unsafe country, immune in this perilous city. Me, a sweet English (half-Greek) rose in wicked, wild New York. There’s a sort of comfort, a sort of security, isn’t there, in the absence of disguise, in knowing the way things really are? The land of violence, the land of the gun. You know, the ever-so-gentle and peaceable English have this far-fetched notion of America as the place where to settle their differences – to eliminate red indians, outlaws, negroes, presidents, protesting citizens, rival mobsters and business competitors – they pull out a gun and shoot.

  So why this terror of a toy gun, Sophie?

  I’m trying to tell you, for JESUS CHRISSAKE!

  Dear Doctor Klein. The things I haven’t told you. The things I never told you. When we first came here in ’72, I didn’t know anything about anything. I was just a dumb young wife (‘Not dumb, Sophie, never dumb’), pregnant for the first – and I guess the only – time, not even suspecting she was going to have twins, waking up in a new world. I don’t know if I felt at once, this is where I belong now, or whether it was years before anything touched me. I thought: It’s ugly – so it’s beautiful. It’s threatening, that’s okay. I’d rather danger jumped out at you when you half expect it, than suddenly explode from green lawns and mellow brick walls.

  Then the boys were born and Joe started to make good and we got this place here in Brooklyn. For a while there was this succession of men coming to fix the plumbing, the heating, to fit the kitchen. I did the proper things then – kept the chain on the door, asked to see their cards. If you put up barriers, you show you are vulnerable. One of them – his name was Georgiades, Nick Georgiades – said, ‘You new to New York?’ So I must have still looked like some dazed outsider. I said yes. He looked at me. ‘From Europe?’ I love the way Americans say ‘Europe’, as if little countries like England or Germany don’t count. ‘I bin to Europe,’ he said. I thought: He’s big and ugly. ‘They got a lot of pretty things over there. But I prefer New York. You know what I think?’ He was fixing some pipe under the sink, half lying on the floor, but looking at me as he tugged with a spanner. ‘Europe is like a broad all dressed up. You don’t know what’s underneath. But New York is like a broad without any clothes. She may not be a princess, but she’s naked and she sure as hell is real.’

  I can tell you anything, can’t I, I can tell you everything – isn’t that the idea? Like the doctor I’d let peer up my vagina, I let you peer into my mind. You could be having a voyeur’s field-day, but it’s okay, because it’s your job, you’ve got qualifications.

  I said, ‘So you’re not Greek then?’ He thought this was funny. ‘Just a name – one of my fathers was Greek.’ He laughed. I said my mother was Greek, and stood nearer so he could look at my legs. He said, ‘Uhuh. Uhuh. Old man at work?’

  He got up, put the spanner down, and I can’t remember making up my mind to do it, but I put my hand on his cock, hard as a pistol, and he hitched up my skirt, right here in this kitchen, with his hands greasy, with the twins upstairs sleeping, and I said, ‘C’mon! C’mon fuck me, fuck me good, you great hog!’ And after that I was no longer a new-world virgin.

  Harry

  Every year I still go to see Marion Evans. She doesn’t lose her memory. We drive up to Epsom Downs usually, if the weather is fine. She brings a thermos. She’s never told me and I’ve never asked what she did with Ray’s ashes, but I have a hunch she just scattered them up there, early one Sunday morning. And I have a hunch too that what crossed my mind must surely have crossed hers: that there must have been some of Dad’s ashes mixed up with Ray’s. So it’s a kind of double observance when we drive up there.

  We park the car, wind the windows down, look out over the race-course. She pours tea from the thermos. I ask after her married son and daughter and her grandchildren, and she gives me matter-of-fact accounts. She asks do I
hear from Sophie? And I say, Yes, she’s fine. And the twins? Fine. Which is a lie on at least two counts. Because according to Joe’s latest bulletin (no, Mrs Evans, Sophie doesn’t write and I don’t write to her, and I’ve never seen my grandchildren), Sophie isn’t exactly fine at all.

  I can tell from her voice and the look in her eye that neither she nor any of her family has ever got over that explosion ten years ago. There’s still this feeling that Ray was to blame somehow. He failed in his duty, should have looked under the back seat as well as the bonnet and in the boot and underneath. Just because he was a victim, he must be implicated in some way. And so must they. They will never get back again into that safe, simple, well-defined world in which the head of the family was a trusted chauffeur, seventeen years with Dad, and a shrewd follower of horses.

  She always says I should take up ‘the photography’ again. People ought to know about ‘those things’. They ought to know. I say, Someone else can take the pictures now. And maybe, these days, people have seen it all anyway. I look away as I say this. Because eleven, twelve years ago I know she’d have thought differently. She’d have thought what Ray thought of me. Which, though he always gave me the respectful salute and the time of day, was that I was an oddball, a black sheep. Even when I’d made a name for myself. He took Dad’s side. Naturally.

  ‘Besides, I’m getting too old for running around any more.’ (As if it were a sport.)

  ‘You’re the youngest sixty-four-year-old I know.’

  And how is the cottage? she asks. And I feel embarrassed again, because this would be the fifth or sixth year of Ray’s retirement. It’s fine, I say. It must be nice that, she says, a cottage in the country. And do I still go up in the planes? Yes, I still go up in the planes.

  ‘There you are, you see, at your age.’

  And never once, in nine visits, has she voiced any outrage, any fury, that Dad got the hero’s treatment, the front-page funeral, and Ray was just the poignant sub-plot. ‘The loyalty that inspired loyalty …’