Waterland (45 page)

‘So what the—?’

Upon the threshold of the Ferry Inn (licensee, so the
inscribed lintel proclaims, J. M. Todd) Dad attempts the mammoth task of explanation. Attempts. Gives up. Grimacing and stuttering, he pushes me forward (tacitly acknowledging my schoolboy adroitness, my powers of intelligible exposition).

‘You tell him, Tom, you tell him for God’s sake.’

I open my mouth. I review in my mind a dozen possible starting-points; I foresee confusion and incredulity; I realize the utter impossibility of encapsulating, in the space of a moment, the causes of my brother’s (my whose?) presence, this August evening, on the
Rosa II.
I settle for succinct fabrication.

‘He’s gone barmy.’

(Forgive me, Dick.)

‘He’s gone barmy. He got himself drunk and rode off on his bike. We d-don’t know,’ (ah, truthfulness at last!) ‘what he might do.’

Stan Booth’s face darkens with a frown. Behind him the two clean-cut USAAF boys seem to puzzle over this strange English word, ‘barmy’.

Meanwhile, beside me, Dad undergoes a series of scarcely detectable yet agonizing spasms. Faced with this statement of mine, in one sense a master-stroke of quick-thinking, in another a patent evasion, a reminder of his own inability when the moment comes (that unconfiding walk on the tow-path) to speak, he can stand no more. The stretched tissue of silence and concealment gives way. He breaks down. (And so too breaks down – it won’t be patched, won’t truly be mended till Tom Crick marries Mary Metcalf – the harmonious relationship of father and son.)

All but dropping to his knees on the penitential cinders, beneath the gallows-like inn sign, he splutters:

‘And he killed Freddie Parr. You know, Freddie Parr who drowned. Killed him. Murdered him. And he’s not my son. I mean, he is my son. I mean. O God! O Jesus Christ God help me!’

His eyes moisten. A stray ghost of a breeze makes the signboard creak and lifts a strand of his thin hair.

Stan Booth draws a slow breath. The two aircraftmen (later we learn their names are Nat and Joe) adopt dumbstruck expressions, inwardly revising perhaps those guidebooks issued to US servicemen in which they are officially advised that the inhabitants of rural England are reserved and unexcitable.

No one rushes to fetch the police. No one believes him. The truth is so much stranger than—

‘You mean this guy on the boat killed a guy?’

A small roundel is stuck on the windscreen of the nearby Ford. The silhouette of a giant cactus, in blood-red, against an orange background. The legend, in turquoise: ‘Arizona: Queen of the Desert’.

Sniffing the unmistakable scent of crisis, other occupants of the Ferry Inn have emerged on to the forecourt. The pipe-sucking landlord – J. M. Todd himself. Two wizened-featured locals with the air of regular bar-haunters.

And all the time as this group-tableau forms, the noise of the dredger continues, like a tocsin. The sound which every weekday must be so familiar to the inhabitants of Staithe Ferry that they scarcely heed it – reminding them as it does that all is normal, the Ouse is undergoing its ever-needed, never-ending decongestion – now rattles out on a Sunday, when it should be absent. From which it can be inferred that all is not normal.

Stan Booth speaks.

‘Beats me. Beats me, blust it! All right, we’ll take a boat an’ go out there.’

A general movement to the landing-stage. A two-thwart rowing-boat bobs on the high water as if expressly waiting for us. Stan Booth, directing operations, takes by way of a first precaution a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights up. Camel brand: compliments of aircraftmen Nat and Joe. He puffs, eyeing the run of the tide, weighing up, perhaps, two eventualities – that a latent maniac is
about to sabotage his dredger, that he’s about to lose, because of some weird family rumpus, the best dredger’s mate he ever had – then gives orders for embarkation. Dad offers to row. Stan Booth gives him a strange, pitying look and directs him towards the stern. My intimacy with events begs a place beside him. The two Americans clamour for inclusion – something, given the circumstances and the boat’s dimensions, no wise coxswain would permit. Stan Booth forbids, then yields. Only the combination of his own state of whisky-bemusement, the favourable tide, which is still just on the flood, their persistent pleas (‘Maybe you’re gonna need some help, if this guy’s, like violent’), and – possibly most important – the implicit bribery of further packs of Camels and tots of whisky, allows a boat intended to carry with ease and safety no more than three, to leave its moorings with five.

Before boarding, one of the aircraftmen races back to the parked Ford. He returns with a pair of field glasses. Black bakelite. US Air Force issue. ‘Hey, fellers, we could use these.’ He slings the binoculars by their leather strap around his neck, like a camera-primed tourist about to take a trip round the bay. Clambering into the boat, he gives a flashing grin and a jerk of a salute to Dad and me. ‘Hi, I’m Nat Tucker, this is Joe Shulberg. We’re from Tucson. Tucson, Arizona.’ He gets out his own pack of Camels. Stan Booth spits on his palms. Dad slips the painter. We shove off.

It’s not like our little old Leem. It’s like a sea. It’s the Great Ouse, which flows into the Wash. Which once merged with the Rhine. It has a salty, unparochial tang. Viewed from a small boat veering into midstream, its banks seem far off, like miniature coasts.

We nose towards the dredger, impelled as much by the push of the tide as the labouring oar-beats of Stan Booth. The light, veiled all day by the clammy summer cloud, is
starting to dim. Not that we need yet strain our eyes. For, as any boatman will tell you, light lingers longest where there’s water. It’s on land that the shadows thicken fastest. And not that we have much to look upon: the approaching bulk of the dredger (from our little boat it seems so much bigger, more monstrous than it did from dry land); the receding Ferry Inn and the road bridge behind us; to either side, the blank and cryptic ramparts of the banks, cutting out the distance as if they conceal the fact that there is nothing behind them.

A low and liquid world, a scarcely substantial world. So different (even then, errant curiosity …) from the fierce sierras, the cowboy bluffs and canyons of Arizona …

The aircraftman with the field glasses (Nat? Joe?) directs them on the
Rosa.

‘Can’t see nothin’ at all.’ His face is fresh and pleased with itself.

He catches my glance.

‘Here, kid, you wanna take a look?’

Over Stan Booth’s heaving shoulders, he holds out the field glasses as if offering the eternal gum and chocolate. Grins. ‘Go ahead.’ As if I’m some goggling aborigine who’s never seen before such a marvel of the new world.

Two years from now I’ll be in uniform like him.

Stan Booth says, ‘Siddown!’ He strains at the oars.

Above the noise of the dredger – literally above it, for it issues out of the cloudy sky – comes another sound, throbbing, resonant, oppressive, but too familiar – or too little to do with present concerns – to make Dad or me or Stan Booth, sweating over the oars, raise our eyes. Only the two aircraftmen, drawn by their own choosing but with no going back (the dredger is getting close now) into this aquatic adventure, feel obliged to show their attachment to larger matters and to register their allegiance, already announced by their uniforms, to the skies.

‘Thar they go!’ (Joe? Nat?)

‘Yih-hoo! Give ’em hell, boys!’ (The other one.)

Conditions favourable, despite low cloud over the North Sea coast. An anti-cyclone, perhaps, pushing from the continent, already clearing the skies of Germany. Before the night is out, stars.

And, besides, this war doesn’t stop for Sundays. Doesn’t take a break for church-going or weekend recreation (or even for one little case of murder). There’s no let-up for the citizens of Hamburg and Berlin, who in honour of the Lord’s day are going to get hell.

They thunder past, screened by decorous cloud. Then the din of the dredger reasserts itself. Chung-gha-chung-gha! Louder now, because we’re getting near – less than a hundred yards.

And with the sound, a smell also. The smell of something hauled from primitive depths. The smell that haunts Dick’s bedroom.

He’s here. He knows his place. He knows his station. He keeps the ladder turning, the buckets scooping. The noise of the churning machinery drowns the fleeting aerial clamour of global strife. He hears no bombers, sees no bombers. And this smell of silt is the smell of sanctuary, is the smell of amnesia. He’s here, he’s now. Not there or then. No past, no future. He’s the mate of the
Rosa II.

And he’s the saviour of the world …

Fifty, forty yards. The water is rumbling, juddering. Beneath the
Rosa
the giant snout of the bucket-ladder is biting, gnawing with its rotating teeth into the soft, defenceless belly of the river-bed. Thirty yards. Dad can’t restrain himself from another bout of hailing. Cupping his
hands once more, he yells against the competition of the ladder. ‘Dick, we’re coming! We’re coming – to take you home, Dick! Home!’ Twenty yards. ‘Dick, we’ll—’

And then—

Then.

But memory can’t keep fixed and clear those final moments. Memory can’t even be sure whether what I saw, I saw first in anticipation before I actually saw it, as if I had witnessed it somewhere already – a memory before it occurred. Dick’s head and shoulders (for we’re close enough now to have to crane our necks to view the
Rosa
’s deck) appear above the dredger’s rail about three yards forward of the steadily spewing sludge-chute. For a second he stares at the approaching boat. For the same second I see what he must see: an overladen dinghy, three familiar faces and two inexplicable (inexplicable?) attendants in uniform. In uniform. He scurries forward of our intended point of contact with the dredger’s hull just downstream of the sludge-barge, so that we pass wide and abeam of him. Above the uproar comes the distinct chink of glass against metal.

Was it Nat, or Joe who spoke first? ‘Hey feller, take it easy!’ Or Stan Booth (wrenching head over shoulder): ‘Dick, Dick bor, blust you! Turn off the blusted ladder!’ Or was it Dad who shouted before either of these (to the further astonishment of our American visitors, not to say Stan Booth): ‘Dick, it’s all right! Dick. I’ll be your father …’

Was it really the case (but how could I have been sure, in that fading light, at that bobbing distance?) that his eyelids were quite motionless and that his gaze, luminous and intent, ceased at a certain point to be aimed at us, but turned to contemplate the rippling, furling, vibrant surface of the Ouse? Did he move first or did I shout first? And did I really shout aloud, or did the words only ring in my brain (and echo ever after)?

‘Dick – don’t do it!’

But we all saw, we all agreed – whisky-fuddled or sober – what happened next.

He turns. He lurches to the fo’c’sle, to the very prow of the
Rosa
(which is not, like many a prow, sharp and nobly arched, designed to cleave and affright the waves, but stubby, rounded and dented, and crowned by a derrick for hoisting the sling-lines of the bucket-ladder). He clambers on to the rail; stands, shoeless, upon it, disdaining the hand-hold of the adjacent derrick stanchions. Stretches to full height.

For a moment he perches, poises, teeters on the rail, the dull glow of the western sky behind him. And then he plunges. In a long, reaching, powerful arc. Sufficiently long and reaching to quite discount the later theory that he must have become entangled in the anchor-chain or the sling-lines; sufficiently reaching and powerful for us to observe his body, in its flight through the air, form a single, taut and seemingly limbless continuum, so that an expert on diving might have judged that here indeed was a natural, here indeed was a fish of a man.

And punctures the water, with scarcely a splash. And is gone.

Gone. Stan Booth digs in an oar to bring the dinghy around. We watch, wait for the up-bobbing head. Watch and start to distrust our eyes. Watch and drift down on the current (yes, the tide has turned, the ebb has begun); cross and recross an imaginary line projecting downstream from the
Rosa
’s bows. Shout into the watery gloom (even the aircraftmen from far-off Arizona give vent to repeated and strangely impassioned ‘Dick!’s, as if beseeching some old buddy). Shout; shout again. All, that is, except a sixteen-year-old boy who, sitting crammed beside his father in the stern of the dinghy, goes implacably silent. Because he knows (though he doesn’t say; he’ll never say: a secret he and Mary will share for ever): there’ll be no bobbing top-knot. There’ll come no answering, gurgling, rescue-me cry. He’s on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the sea …

Dad takes the oars from a fatigued Stan Booth. The dredger, unmanned, still determinedly dredges. We scan and scour the water (later, by the light of dawn, the laid-bare banks, the slimy piers of the road bridge). We row back against the current, tie up to the
Rosa
and climb aboard. No wet and shivering Dick (our last, thin hope) who has tricked us all and, swimming in a circle, clambered back on deck. Stan Booth shuts off at last the bucket-ladder engine. The sudden, dripping quiet strikes like a knell. ‘Someone best explain.’ We trip over empty bottles. Peer from the rails. Ribbons of mist. Obscurity. On the bank in the thickening dusk, in the will-o’-the-wisp dusk, abandoned but vigilant, a motor-cycle.

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.