The Recreation Ground

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This short story by Graham Swift originally appeared in the April/May 1976 edition of The London Magazine. This was his first publication.

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Over the turf. Round and round. There were five, perhaps six of them. The number is not important. One after the other, hands in pockets, shoulders bent, heads bowed, always the head lowered, scouring the tired grass as if in search of something lost. They wore old, out-of-fashion clothes, with here and there a length of string for a belt and here and there a hole at knee or elbow. One sported the remains of a tweed suit and a bowler hat – relics perhaps of a past life, his own, perhaps another’s. Perhaps no one’s. Round, by the railings, by the rows of ash and poplar shedding or burdened with their leaves, many times, slowly, as if lingering something out. Inmates perhaps of an asylum or prisoners exercising. Save that the grounds were free and public, they never closed. And they wandered of their own accord.

*

They were flat and featureless, the grounds. The railings and the poplars on one side, on another the railway line, on another the road and the house where my parents kept me. I say kept me. They were never pleasing, the grounds, never in the way of being sward. In summer the grass was worn and sticky, in winter threadbare and ex-posed. Cold gusts swept it, making the dead leaves scurry like frantic lemmings. There were seldom people. Odd thing for a public place. Save, of course, the five or six. Perhaps it was the lack of designation. They called them the ‘grounds’, and then again the ‘recreation ground’. I puzzled long over that word ‘recreation’. But there were none of the usual notices, white on green; no drinking fountain, no corner for the kiddies’ swings and see-saws. Not even a bench or litter-bin. An empty space, no more.

Oh true, in September they put up posts and painted white patterns on the grass, and on Saturdays and Sundays they would come, in the colours of chivalry, crimson and gold, purple and silver, and weave and kick and pierce the air with their cries and whoopings. And in the evenings too there were figures hurling stick and balls for their dogs, and in summer the recumbent couples strewn like casualties. But the games would finish; they would pack up their coloured shirts and depart. And I would notice as the shadows grew, the gloom descended, the figures shiver, turn up their collars, call their pugs and terriers sharply to heel, and the couples, as if caught where they should not be, brush down their clothes and head off. Somewhere to go. They came, they went. They did not belong. Only the five or six belonged. Walking in their cast-off clothes, walking behind the liveried players, behind the mêlée of the games, undistracted, heads lowered, looking for something lost…

They hated each other with a consistency that could have been mistaken for solidarity.

I ran out to them, out through the front gate, across the road where I risked death, the merest toddler, from the passing cars, and cried out, in my own language, to be included in their ritual. But they did not respond. What did they want with a child? I know that now. A child. Another life. And father chased me, and hauled me back and beat me and chastised me. And mother wept. For she wept, whereas father clouted …

Our house looked out on the grounds. The railway embankment blotted out further prospect so that the view from our front bay window, from my bedroom window, was filled by the inexorable grass. I studied that vista. Passed hours, my playthings rejected, nose pressed against the pane in contemplation. Children are classically pictured with noses pressed against the outside peering in – avidly into sweet-shop, into toy-shop windows. But it was my lot – my wish too – to be on the inside peering out. Without avidity. Our house had no back-garden. It might have been natural that I should play in the grounds. For children should play. But I was never encouraged. Nor would I have wanted it. I was half in dread of the grounds.

But I understood them. Is that the word? And those five or six. Though I alone, it seemed, was witness to their presence, though the eyes of my parents seemed not to regard them and though those transitory idlers who used the grounds only for their sport and pleasure looked through them as if they were not there – I never once doubted their veracity. Ghosts, outcasts, anonymities. I felt for them, sighed for them, shivered for them from behind my window. And somehow I strove to emulate them. It was because of them that I acquired at an early age the habit of bowing my head and observing the ground and searching about my feet for little holes and odours in the mournful and compulsive manner of dogs. So that whereas the sight of most children is filled with things of brighter elevation, my childhood was coloured – but that is hardly the word – by little puddles and dampnesses, patches. cracks and depressions where the dust collected, dropped wrappers, cigarette packets, canine excrement, wet splayed leaves.

That is one explanation. But there is the other. Perhaps the truer. My parents. Oh I kept my head bowed before them, seldom looked up into their overseeing faces. And it was not out of respect, nor infantile humility. But dread. Dread once more. They hated each other. They hated each other with a consistency that could have been mistaken for solidarity; with a singleness that shut me out, as a guest is shut out by intolerant hosts. It was this that made me lower my eyes, which made me retire so much from the cock-pit of our living room to my upstairs bedroom; to stare out at the grounds as if at yet a further exclusion. For there is solace in relativity. If those five or six appeared at such times I would see that I had yet to reach their extreme of dereliction.

They were not unheedful, my parents. They used me. They bandied me about, backwards and forwards between them, like a little tennis ball, like a little elastic messenger of their hate. Swipe, swipe. So that I longed to bounce into some happy hole or to roll unseen amidst the leaves and litter into some infallibly camouflaged corner. Oh there was many a tournament, many a set and match. Yet to suggest continual and untempered violence would not be fair. There were few rows, few rages, few caterwauls of malice. We had passed beyond the state of actual passion, to where both silence and blows were a matter of tactic and technique, and the indifference which ruled our house wore, to be just, a polite expression. What passion still escaped and superflowed, l mean my mother’s weepings and blubberings – for she wept silently and lengthily, as a sponge from the slightest pressure – was like the leaking of oil from an otherwise efficient machine…

It was impossible not to feel for him the affection that is felt for certain puppets. 

‘There!’ said my mother. It was a fluffy wool pull-over, blue and pink, which she had finished knitting for me and slipped over my head; it enrapped me like the soft cocoon of the silk-worm. ‘Now go to your father,’ and she stamped my brow with a kiss. I bore them, the pull-over and the kiss, like emblems, like weapons, like gleaming banners of her power and triumph to father in his armchair stronghold. He smiled, he nodded, he appraised the gesture. Then he pulled the loose thread that hung at my arm-pit (for mother could not knit – she had care but not skill), pulled till the pink left the blue, till the chest unravelled, the sleeve rucked up. I held my ground, did not move, the ensign being stripped of his new-won rank, the denuded chrysalis. Mother blubbed, father smiled. I dreaded. Yes, he would buy me a dozen pull-overs with his account at the department store. ‘Chin up,’ he grinned, ‘Chin up’…

*

I admit I liked father. Though I had every cause to hate him. And hate him I did too. But it was impossible not to feel for him the affection that is felt for certain puppets. He was a gentleman was Dad, a squire; of the old school where it is the right style and the right pursuits that count. He was spruce, he was well-groomed – words so apt with their suggestion of horses. Appearance was all. A clipped moustache, a voice as clipped and as rasping, clean hands, blue jowls, a whiff of Cologne and Bay Rum. He was never seen without a tie. His ties were striped or bore little crests and insignia like the ties of regiments, clubs and public schools. Dad never belonged to regiment, club or public school. But that was no matter. He made a show. He had the inestimable gift of inspiring faith in his own appearance; and appearance was all. Perhaps that is why I liked him. He made life simple.

He had a job in the City, in Stocks and Shares (words as mysterious to me as that word ‘recreation’), for which he wore a bowler and pinstripes and sometimes a red carnation; but this was not Dad’s mainstay nor his true role. For there were other days, days when the City did not need him nor he the City – though the urge to speculate remained constant – when he changed out of his bowler and pin-stripes, donned his brown tweeds, his trilby, took his shooting stick, his binoculars and buff trench-coat and set off after breakfast to Sandown or Kempton or Goodwood or Epsom or Lingfield. He would not return for a night or two. And mother, who hated to be in his company would weep at being left alone.

He was devoted to racing. It was the only thing he took seriously. But it was more than seriousness. He extended the principles of the sport into all other spheres of life: so that he studied his marital form, eyed my mother and myself with the same glinting shrewdness with which, no doubt, he assessed fetlocks and starting prices in the paddock. He gambled, laid odds on our performances. He sometimes patted me on the head or chucked my mother under the chin as someone might cram a sugar-lump into a filly’s mouth or pass a tip to a stable-boy. That was the nearest he got to fondness. And observing these gestures, the perfunctory strokings and fancyings of pets, I would imagine other toyings, other coddlings, with other pets, which would have explained my father’s absences overnight.

It was ‘sport’ or ‘game’ with my father, never ‘play’. Play is mere fun and whimsy but sport has that additional virtue that it can be taken seriously. One can even make money out of it, as Dad did – hundreds – from bets. That is serious enough. But I do not mean just the urgencies, the solemn permutations of risk and reward. I mean something higher, something almost of a moral order, something where such terms as honour and nobility would not have been amiss – so that, in my father’s eyes, nothing was more deserving of damnation than to play the game badly, nothing more sweetly meriting redemption than to play it well. The game was Judgement and Judgement the game. He turned the hatred of our house into a game. He would watch us, lip curled, like players, like runners at the start, to see how we made out, shaped up under its rules. And when we sensed the pressure was on, when we slipped and strained under the test and our misery was increased ten-fold, he would regard us with a bluff, cheery, self-satisfied smile and remark, if not in so many words, ‘But it’s only a game.’ I suffered this. I learnt to jump and stretch and skip for father. For the rest, I kept my eyes to the ground. And when the blows fell, the strokes of the trainer’s whip, the dig of the sours, the penalties for slackness, I would let them fall, knowing that I thus performed the part he expected of me. And I would retire later, to cry and stare out from my bedroom window. Besides, the blows fell only seldom, and they fell more on mother than on me, and when they fell, and one picked oneself up from the other side of the room, they were delivered almost with affection. Father would laugh and look a shade displeased with you. As if he had given you no more than a hearty slap of approval and you had had the bad grace to collapse to the floor. ‘Chin up,’ he would say, ‘Chin up.’

I hung to his side; looked up, admired, hated.

But his displeasure, indeed, was deep. I did not come up to scratch. I did not play the game. In particular it was my lowering my head and looking to my feet that disappointed him. A most unsportsmanlike stoop and one quite different from his own erect, look-the-world-in-the-eye carriage. But he learnt to live with my sickliness. He looked upon it as the part of me that was mother’s. He did not blame me. He never blamed, he merely despised. I felt I was disinherited but not disowned; for father, after all, liked to own people. If I had played the prodigal (a notion not to be entertained) he would not have killed the fatted calf.

He tried with me, did not give up. Did I try too? In particular there were the Saturdays and Sundays when the grounds were daubed and traced by the coloured shirts. Unlike myself, he paid no heed to the grounds when deserted. There is logic there. But on those crisp, autumnal afternoons which so depressed me with their specious brilliance, he would put on his camel-hair coat, his leather gloves, his red and blue silk scarf – it was a different rig from the race-going one – plus a cigar between his teeth and stride across the road to pace the touch-line. I would be dragged with him – to be edified. He was a dominating spectator. He followed the game, biting his cigar, like a buyer at a cattle-market, weighing up brawn and bone, marking the quick, rejecting the slow, so that by half-time, one felt, he had bought or sold both teams. He would bellow in a voice that startled even other zealots, ‘BLOODY WELL SHOOT MAN!’ or ‘BLOODY FINE PLAY!’ He was not sparing of praise. And when a particularly admirable feat was performed he would clap together his gloved palms mightily as if striking the dust out of a pair of leather shoes. I hung to his side; looked up, admired, hated. He was at such times at his most sanguine, most judging, most unassailable. In his element amidst those blazoned shirts so remindful of the silken heraldry of jockeys, amidst that tourney of trained and lissome flesh so evocative of the gleaming flanks of horses. He could neither be accused of gravity nor of apathy. The perfect model of himself.

Crisp autumnal afternoons. The air grew duskier, the sky more crimson, the players more etched with the long shadows of honour and nobility. The grounds waited, soon to be abandoned, the game over, left to their own, to the dark, the gloom descending, to the looming at my window. Father did not see, stalking the perimeter, the five or six…

Yes I have to give him his due. There was consistency there. He was an emblem, a mark, a fixed point amidst so much that was errant or void. Order: he radiated, as from burnished armour, that most brazen virtue. I could have borrowed his part, entered his role, hidden inside his costume if he had let me in. But it would have meant turfing Dad out and stretching myself to his upright posture. I was not so pliable. I studied the ground. I was looking for something. Not emblems, models. But – to give Dad his due – one would not have changed him. That would have been folly. One would not have deprived him of his amusements, of his sport, of his satisfaction. Oh one feared that – more than the despisal, more than the blows when they fell – more than what Dad was one feared that he should not be what he was. One learnt to trust him. After all it was he who gave to our home of misery its order and decency, who filled it – from the profits of Exchange and race-track – with the little comforts of life. The house flowed with elegance and hatred. He came home at six. Dinner was at seven. He would glance round him to make sure that all was in order – the clock on the mantelpiece (he was sedulous of time), the flowers in the vase, the pictures of duck shoots and mail coaches, the decanters on the side-board, the fruit-bowl, the little sheaf of magazines laid fan-wise on the coffee-table. Appearance was all. He would not talk to mother. He would pour himself a Scotch and soda, sit in an armchair with his feet on the footrest and stare schemingly into space. If something was not in order or if my mother spoke to him unprompted, he would take her by the upper arm, his nail digging so that tears came to her eyes. He would dare me to intervene, to defend her, twisting the arm against the joint. And I knew it was time to retire to my bedroom, to stare out at the desolate grounds…

How was I conceived by such parents? How born out of such barren charades? What stroke of unlikelihood? And in particular, if it had not been them would I have turned up any way, from another couple, or lain ever low in the slime like some life-form overlooked by evolution? Oh I cannot escape the notion I was there before. A mere solipsism perhaps – but that would have been better, to remain there, unknown, untroubled, in the ante-dark, than to have been jerked out so crassly, as a rabbit from a hat, into the actual. There would have been no sunlit hate there, no being forced to make a show of it. How does one make such ill-judged entrances? Booted into rooms with fruit-bowls and decanters, into crisp autumnal afternoons, into prison-like bedrooms. Perhaps they called me, father and mother, perhaps they said, his time is come now, perhaps they grew tired of outloathing each other and agreed, let us fetch him now, the miniature, the toy, the butt, and they smiled and put their eyes to the hiding-place, and let down their groping hands…

Oh do not think I invented, young though I was. Do not think I was ignorant of those facts so blithely called the facts of life. True, I was never told, taken aside in the classic manner. But one finds it out, one learns – do not ask me how – when one’s eyes look habitually to the ground. I knew. And at night I listened to confirm my knowledge. I heard the sounds from my parents’ room. I heard the gasps and the cries of pain, I heard the slappings and the thumpings so similar to the banging of my father’s leather gloves, and the thwackings and whackings, so remindful of jockey’s whips and the gleaming flanks of horses. I heard, and I knew where I came from and how I was made. But what was before, before the pain, before the pain was necessary, before the taking a shape and making a show, before I swelled up under mother’s navel, I do not know. Another life.

Mother. Poor Mother. She looked at me through a film of tears. All I ever gave her was the warmth in her womb. And, once given, that gift cannot be re-given. Not without controversy. But truly, if it had been possible Mother, I would have given it and popped back in again – I dreamt of doing so – to satisfy you and myself. For it would have been a better way out, surely, than stepping into father’s pin-stripes and tweeds. Such were the alternatives. I was mother’s hope. Not her forward hope, her future hope – for she cared nothing for the future nor for the present in which she functioned perfunctorily like another’s toy – but her backward hope. Her little bud of innocence, her child, her emblem of the vanished days of yore. She hugged me to her and wept, wept out the endless misery of the present, and her tears ran and oozed over me so that I felt as the stalagmite must feel beneath the eternal drip. She mourned for childhood. How could she mourn for childhood, when childhood was, in my own experience, so wretched? And yet I see her point. It is further back, nearer the beginning, closer the lying low, the being out of it. That at least can be said for it. But mother’s weeping was never pure. It was cluttered by Aunts and Uncles and remembered loved ones and innumerable faces, places, scenes, houses, streets, little curios of nostalgia, days in the country, trips to the seaside, Christmasses, weddings – not hers – the ring of convivial laughter. Another life. Perhaps her own, perhaps another’s. Perhaps no one’s.

She would tell me stories, my mother, clutching me to her, laving and rinsing me with her tears – if not of that other life then of Rumpelstiltskin, Pinocchio, Sinbad, and others. I did not care for her stories. She gave me one birthday a book, ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’, with coloured pictures of the knights, their targes and lances, their steeds and fluttering pennants. I did not care for the knights. They reminded me of jockeys and football players.

It must have been mother – who else indeed? – who took me for those pram rides, jolting and bumping over the uneven turf like a wagon crossing the arid prairies. And it was then, peering out from behind the canvas hood, while mother snivelled and murmured baby-words I forget, that I took my first close study of the grounds. Yes they were the obvious place for such maternal exercises. So unconfined, so brooding. Round and round we went, round and round. Beneath the poplars, beside the railings, beside the embankment where the trains clacked frantically, bearing the hordes. For mother too that space, so ominous then, so ominous still, had a meaning. It meant the landscape of hope and memory, the dim region where twilight descending, violet and rose, awoke inconsolable dreams, elicited the heart’s yearning, whispered, as did the roosting birds in the chill poplars, of life’s bitter-sweetness.

Neither mother nor father understood the grounds.

Rosemary. Enough of mother. Rosemary. I strove to get inside her womb. Not to mince matters, I succeeded, many a time. But the problem here was that the success was never permanent. Nor, given the nature of things, could it ever have been. Rosemary let me in, as into a treasure house to which only the briefest visits, for reasons of security, be blamed, dutiful keeper, for publicity being so arranged. Small mercies…

Things are the same, ever the same, or in all but the inessentials the same.

Rosemary. You led me down so welcomingly, so receivingly down the flight of cracked steps into your basement flat, and down, past the disarray of your living-room, your bathroom and your kitchen, those few more steps, into your bedroom. And I would have stayed, if you had let me, if events had allowed, a prisoner in your burrow, a fugitive in your hidey-hole, a babe in your nest, and never poked my head again into the empty air. Beyond your bedroom window was neither sky nor street, only the three walls of a tiny yard, overgrown with ivy, green with damp, enclosing a concrete space, strewn with rotten wood, broken glass, china, paper, cigarette packets, and split itself into cracks and crevices where the earth showed through at its dankest, rankest. I knew I belonged there. And inside, in your room, it was not your form that captured me, nor the soft music you played on your gramophone, nor the perfumes you applied, nor the cunning underwear you wore in order, so you said (how I resented the words and how I hid my resentment) to better enjoy ‘our games’. It was the scattering of such speciousness; the tangle of soiled sheets, the little heaps of cast off clothes, the carelessness of your sitting-room where newspapers lay on the floor, and your kitchen where the milk went sour in left bottles and mice – yes I heard them – scurried behind the woodwork and entered through secret crevices; the cracks and corners, the patternless odours and secret folds of your body into which I sank and sighed as I sighed nowhere else – including that most secret and olfactory of crevices, between your thighs. And do not think, darling Rosemary, that I ever wanted conquest, possession. When I entered you it was to be taken, not to take, to lie low, to be immersed, to make no shows. Your moans and your groans reached me as from afar, like distant and rhythmic surf, so that I felt as the cleaving mollusc must feel beneath the ocean wave.

Darling Rosemary. So welcoming, so receptive…

But I omit. I jump. I have skipped over many a year since those days being sluiced by mother’s tears and clipped by father’s backhand. Of no account perhaps. For if it were of account, that would be to assume the passage of events, the occurrence of changes, the fullness of years – matters of which I cannot be certain. That is to say, things are the same, ever the same, or in all but the inessentials the same. The grounds, for instance. have not changed, nor the five or six, who I first saw, perhaps, on those lonesome pram rides. Perhaps they are not the same five or six but another – who are in fact just the same; and perhaps they were not five or six but another number. But they wander, as their predecessors, and who, anyway, were the first? That is what I mean by the inessential points. No, of time and its emptiness I do not speak.

Mother is dead, that is true. Perhaps that was how Rosemary made her first appearance. Perhaps. Father killed her. Not with the knife, no, nor with the pistol, nor even with the blunt instrument. It was the old weapon – hatred. True, the hatred, I have explained, was mutual, so it was not a slaughter of the unarmed. But nor was it a duel, ten paces, at dawn, with seconds, the rules made fixed and honourable, the chances even – which no doubt would have pleased my father’s sporting code. Father won because he hated and smiled and mother lost because she hated and sobbed. That is how murder takes place. We buried her in the cemetery and no one came except Dad and I. No one. So much for the Aunts and Uncles and the days of yore. And Dad gave me a smile and a man-sized cigar – I was sixteen – because at the funeral I did not cry and kept my chin up. And the next day he went to Ascot races and I smashed up the decanters and the fruit-bowl and tore apart the coffee table and lacerated the flowers. A useless act, for on his return Father beat me and said, with a razor of a smile, ‘You know, that fruit-bowl belonged to mother.’

No tears rolled down father’s cheeks, no lapses occurred over breakfast or in the middle of our orderly dinners for two, to make him pause, sigh, forget his food and stare lamenting into space. Emotion was out. I took it as another example of bearing up, making a show and playing the game. In this case the game of grief and death. And I accepted, biting my lip, the inevitable disciplining for my infringements of the rules. Father ate with gusto, dressed with gusto and applied the Cologne and Bay Rum with gusto. Evidently mother’s death had eased him of a burden, but evidently too it had deprived him of a sport. For the little amusements that had been previously reserved largely for her now fell upon me, and whereas before I had been bounced between the two with the resilience, at least, of a tiny ball, I was now kicked and scorned and made to cringe and grovel as a cur for scraps. But then, I had long been accustomed to the ways of dogs.

I padded and rooted over the grounds – yes I roamed there now, no longer a child whose field of play was confined. My head lowered, my eyes searching the inscrutable turf. Mother beset me – not in the form of persistence, not in the form of her own hungering dreams, but in the form of cessation, annulment, of things which were but which perhaps had never been. Those pram rides, those story-books, those tears which cleansed me and caressed me like the waters of the amnion. Another life. Perhaps ours, perhaps another’s. Perhaps no one’s. What is given, Mother (forgive me for the fruit-bowl), cannot be regiven.

And was it to be found by sniffing in the grass, by scouring the earth as for a lost entrance to Hades? The way back, the way out, the way down, to where nothing is lost, one loses nothing, and what is given is always regiven? On the far side they wandered, ghosts, anonymities, heads bowed, in their clothes which did not belong to them, the five or six. And sometimes they looked up, rare thing for them, as if they believed I might join them, and sometimes I believed that that was my intention. But I kept my distance. Not yet. Not yet.

Father hired a housekeeper, a Mrs Fludge, who came in the mornings and again in the late afternoons to clean and darn and cook. No, he showed no signs of remarrying. But the house was to be kept in order. And whether Mrs Fludge, mother of two, ample of bosom and buttock and tongue and fond of pendulous earrings which jingled as she brushed the stairs, was picked for nubile qualities is a matter of speculation. I had a job by this time – a miserable business concerned with finding a place for scraps of paper – which brought me home at seven, an hour after father’s normal return and I would wonder whether in the interval Mrs Fludge’s services extended beyond cleaning and cooking, as far indeed as the thwacking and whacking. I would not have put it past them. One gets a nose for such things with one’s eyes to the ground. Father showed nothing: appearance was all. And the flush and the droplets on Mrs Fludge’s brow were perhaps only the heat and toil of the kitchen, no more.

Father took his pleasures. Of that there is no doubt. It was not only horses he fancied. His absences overnight, the complement of days at the races, grew more frequent. And I suspect that his appetites, in keeping with his equine interests, were bound to take this roving and hunting form. He was a great hunter was Dad. Had we lived in the country he would have ridden through fields of crops and run little foxes into the earth and blasted partridges from their nests with glee. That would have been noble sport. But whether this had its domestic side, whether he yearned for another wife to bait and goad, whether Mrs Fludge, as I was the house dog, was the stable mare, I could not tell.

Wine. Flowers. One is compelled, willy-nilly, to shows, gestures.

Oh but then, it was I – I, I confess it, who took the advantage, who tried the hypothesis. Was I to be blamed for only following the probability at least of father’s footsteps? Wasn’t it all only a game? Mornings and evenings with Mrs Fludge. She bore in the dinner tray holding it close to her ribs, as though her bosom were part of the meal. Her pendulous earrings jangled on the stairs, and she caught me looking at her round and upturned rump on the landing. It was a Saturday afternoon. Father was at the races. Drizzle shrouded the grounds. I was just a miserable seventeen-year-old, snivelling after a dead mother, emulative of dogs, ignorant of the proprieties of sex. She took me by the hand with a look of mock admonition, and I slipped like a puppy, like a little blind piglet, without so much as a thwack of a whack, into her accommodating mounds of flesh. ‘Oh my sweet thing,’ she said. She wore crimson lipstick that extended over the borders of her lips; her earrings tinkled, like tiny cow-bells over the undulant and languorous Tyrol.

‘Oh my sweet thing,’ she said, ‘Oh you are not like your father.’ So l knew. ‘Oh my sweet boy, oh my poppet, oh my rose-bud, oh my plum, oh my pet. Call me your sweetness, call me your flower, call me your darling girl, your pearl, your little one—’

And I would have done, would have called you those things Mrs Fludge – mother of two, darner of socks, wielder of brooms, scourer of pans – would have called you all those things, for it seemed they were necessary – had we not heard the key in the lock and the front door slam and heard father’s tread, recriminative, on the stair. Why was he back? I should have known. The drizzle. Racing cancelled at Sandown. There was no hiding. He found us, conjoined on the landing. He was not put out. His buff trench-coat was blotched with rain, his brown brogues were sodden. He prodded us with the wet point of his shooting-stick as though we were a carcass at his feet.

‘Mrs Fludge’ – jab of the shooting-stick – your employment is terminated forthwith’; while Mrs Fludge writhed and blubbered darling-girl little-one tears which furrowed her face powder.

‘And as for you my boy,’ – another jab of the shooting-stick; his eyes turning from me to Mrs Fludge flashed between ridicule and irrefutable judgement, ‘If your mother were alive today.’

But she was not alive.

I was out, out with Mrs Fludge, flung out without quarter, without compunction. For although father was terse and contained on the stair-landing, he fumed and stormed that night, made free with the blows, curled his lip in unmistakable distaste – not, I suspect, at my misdeed itself, but at its rank ingenuousness, at its wanton publicity, at its bad form. ‘You must go,’ he said. And next morning as he rose, shaved, with a whistle in the bathroom, patted his cheeks with Cologne, tightened one of his crested ties, glanced heartily out the window at the Sunday sun (yes, it always waxed crisp and bright for the footballers) falling on the grounds – I knew I had broken the rules, been barred irretrievably from the game, considered unfit. ‘And I,’ he paused to give a twinkle to his eye, ‘shall get a new housekeeper.’ So sanguine, so judging, so unassailable. He smiled at me from behind the toast and the coffee he had made for his breakfast. He was turfing me out of house and home and he scoffed at my not being a sport about it. ‘Chin up,’ he said. Yes, I have to admit I liked him, I admired him.

Oh Mrs Fludge, who will you find now to call you all those names? Those sweet names. For I would have said them. Though I did not care for them, though I could not have meant them, though I could not have said what I meant, could not have known what I meant. Yet who will you find? Another.

I got myself a place to live. A scruffy hole. A place to hide. I did not mind. No coffee table, no sheaf of magazines. No, not even a fruit-bowl. I was through with all that. Relinquished as for a legacy by a dead mother, banished by a living father – abandoned by two parents who when they possessed me riddled me with their hatred; and left, left in the very lurch, a mere virgo interruptus, by Mrs Fludge, who taught me that casualness is not the answer. What is never really given, Mrs Fludge, that cannot be regiven either. I was through. But if I was through, why did I moan so and toss and repine, in my scruffy hole, why did my mind, and my steps too, return so often to that house across the grounds, and why, when I knew I was through, did I not leave before of my own accord before waiting for the exile? Because I was not through. Because one is never through. And they are the only connection after all, mother and father. With the way back, the way out, to where one comes from. Out of it.

I did not see father. Our paths did not cross. My train on the way to work passed along the line beside the grounds and I would look out and catch a glimpse of the house, like a model, as we sped by. Sometimes it was lit, sometimes not. The grounds did not change, they never changed, and sometimes they could be seen, from the carriage window, heads bowed, caught as if in frozen poses by the rush of the train. But the house: another life. No, I did not visit, did not call. No moves of reconciliation. They would not have been in father’s code. I did not see him. But he haunted me, he dogged me. In my mind I saw him, the eternal cheer in his bearing, the eternal cigar between his teeth, eternally frequenting race-tracks and the domains of horses, eternally passing nights in nefarious hotels and houses, eternally gambling, eternally winning, eternally sticking the sharp end of his shooting-stick into the flesh of his prey, eternally grinning at the whines of those who did not play the game. Was he indeed my father, this man? Had mother found another, as I Mrs Fludge and Rosemary, and was that the cause of her tears? This other life; without which I could not have been and which now could do without me. Did I belong to him or he to me? If not, whence, where? And was he indeed one, this man whom I could neither greet nor escape, or many, many in his eternal gestures, every roving, model of them all? Sometimes I thought I saw him, in crowds, in saloon bars, in his camel or his tweed, slipping from doorways, paying taxis at discreet addresses. But it was not he. Another life. Perhaps no one’s. Ghosts, anonymities. Appearance is all.

Whence? Where? I was lost. I was looking for something. I kept my eyes to the ground. Chin down.

Rosemary. How did I find you? By keeping my eyes lowered, to be sure. But was it I who discovered – amidst the stains, the cigarette packets, the crushed potato crisps – the glove, your black leather glove which had fallen to the pub floor, or was it you who had dropped it hoping that I would find it? An old trick, an old game, worthy of story-books. Better done in parks and public gardens with scented handkerchiefs. You had your games, Rosemary, your ploys and your gestures drawn from story-books. But from the start it was not they that lured me, nor your accessories of seduction, crimson finger-nails, black, batting lashes over your port and lemon. And you saw that. Dare I hope you saw it? When the shout went for drinking up you asked, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Nowhere,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’ you said. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Well you had better come with me.’ We left and caught the number 34. I knew that bus. Mother used to get it, snivelling to the shops, the post-office, the hairdresser’s. It stopped at the foot of our road at one corner of the grounds. And it was there we alighted. ‘It’s quicker to go across,’ you said. And so we trod, the ineluctable turf. I did not tell, did not explain. I looked to the house. The lights were not lit. Father must have been out, hunting somewhere. And it was then that you put one hand to my shoulder and the other to another place; and I employed my hands likewise, touching here and there, playing the game, but not, never, for the game’s sake, wary of casualness, wary of the ponderous shade of Mrs Fludge. I wondered how it was that if you lived across the grounds, if you walked across them by way of a short cut, I had never seen you. Not from my bedroom window, not on bankment, to see if they too were there. Hoping to see them. But I could not see them. It was dark, dark.

Your basement smelt of dust and linoleum and the residue of male visitors. Empty bottles stood in the hallway, the ash-trays were choked. There was a coffee-table, but it was used as a foot-rest; magazines, lying on the floor; a fruit-bowl, but it was empty, unburdened by specious fruit; a clock, but it had stopped, quitting the sedulous seconds. And it was these things, as you sat, removed your gloves and drew compulsively on a cigarette, that made me wonder – was it vain, was it folly to wonder? – if you knew too that the game was only on the surface and never for its own sake.

And so you let me in – not, I mean, into your home, nor into your room, nor into your sheets. It was a deeper recession I plumbed. And there the problem was permanence – or the lack of it. But even that, I think I would have accepted; given that what is given cannot be always given, given the nature of things…

Rosemary. So welcoming, so receptive. I do not have to describe her particular properties, such things as lips, and the texture of skin and hair, for they were of small account in comparison to that inestimable gift of invitation and inclusion, a place to go, to hide. Nor to utter that word which, in the confine of her bed, sometimes stirred in my breast, a word which if meant perhaps is not to be said, if said perhaps not meant. For I knew not how the word was to be used: I had been bred on its opposite. Was it the right word? Nor do I have to enumerate the arts and methods which she used to entice and to please me, for I looked on it as an honour (and was that the right word?) that these arts were calculated more for the others – yes the others – and with me were only in the manner of a formality, an indelible habit. No, I did not care when she put on her paint and her high heels and her coat trimmed with fur and walked out on Saturday mornings to be seen in the streets. I watched her go, in the crisp sunlight, heels clicking on the pavement, smiling, her head poised like a model’s. So serene, so unassailable. Watched with my nose pressed to the window. For she kept me like a pet, like a little secret consolation for the privatest of use, in her house; and when the others were being entertained I had to hide in the lumber cupboard next to the kitchen which was full of grocery boxes and rags and stiffened mops and wait till the visit had finished. But I did nor mind. There was favour in such subterfuge, and the dark of that cupboard was like the dark of a sanctuary, and, besides, I had long been used to the furtiveness and cowering of dogs.

Where do the stories stop and the games end, and the sobs and laughter cease?

Only one thing disturbed me, and that was her love of children. An inordinate love. She stopped in the street, in her finery, to prattle and fondle, an incongruous sight, with babies left in prams outside shops. She collected dolls. And she spoke at length, under the influence of port and lemon, of that infant band, that little skipping troop, they even had names – Randolph, Lucille and Thomasine – the progeny of her fantasy, of those cyclical hungerings of uterus and ovary (I was versed in such things having kept my eyes to the ground), of something deeper perhaps, more brooding more inconsolable still. It was at such moments that her eyes, in the midst of gaiety, would be crossed by the look of weariness and stress; at such moments that the nameless word strove inside me. How could such fruitfulness be joined to such futility? Would she have mothered a tribe, a clan of little ones, lost ones – she who took such pains in the cause of her trade to stop her fecundity, to sacrifice the function for the fun? Is that the word? It disturbed me, puzzled me. And was that the reason? Why she chose me? I had always viewed myself – it was the work of my parents who quite determined me against adulthood – as an eternal child. Even my habit of looking to my feet gave me the sense of being a perpetual child, overtopped by my peers. And was that why she chose me, why she hid me, like an Innocent from the wrath of Herod in her lumber cupboard, and why she secured me that first night, dropped her black glove on the floor so, like a dog, I would retrieve it?

I knew I was not alone. I knew I was shared with the others. From the lumber cupboard I heard their muffled, avid voices, and her own, amidst them, while she put on her shows, went through her little tricks for them. That lumber cupboard was like a cave round which the voices of the outer world, craving and quirkish, flitted like ghosts. I knew each one of them. They had their parts, their scenes to be played, their whims to be satisfied, masters, slaves, lords, vagabonds, for which she took her cue and performed accordingly. And I did not mind. For it was always to me she came in the end, opening with a grin the cupboard door. Nor did she ever deny me that more spelaean and mystic refuse into which I entered and sojourned, requiring no scenes, no gestures, neither master nor slave, nor hunter, nor prey, nor gentleman, nor rogue, nor Pinocchio, nor Sir Galahad, nor Rumpelstiltskin, but only, let us say, like a little blind homunculus – while her voice grew faint and the clicking of her heels down the sunlit pavement remote and spectral. Another life. Besides, the others paid. It was her livelihood. They opened their wallets, but she never once asked me to put down money.

I used to go sometimes to her flat after work and, knowing she was engaged, busy with the others, sit in the cafe across the street and watch them come and depart. I knew their faces. There were five or six. But did I count them all? I should have counted them all. I missed one. How do they recruit their numbers? They arrived, carrying packages, gifts, stepping slowly, like knights to the lists, down the pavement. Some in mackintoshes, some in thick overcoats, some with newspapers, hats, umbrellas, faces impatient or determined. From all walks, you might say, all walks of lite. But their expressions all looked the same, and their clothes all looked equally borrowed as they left, like tired actors from the stage-door – mournful, roleless, heads bowed to the ground. The evening descended. The reddening sun and the gathering dusk did not touch their forms with the hues of honour and nobility. And over the railway bridge, carrying the hordes, flecked with crimson, clacked the trains frenetically to and fro, along the line that ran past the grounds.

Was it them? Their shadows?

Rosemary greeted me, took off my jacket. Fed me with bacon and fish-cakes and liver and onions. She had long satiny wraps to wear about the flat, pale blue and pink. I did not care for them. She would sit with her dinner plate in her lap, her feet on the coffee table, and tell me, with a laugh about each of her visitors, their foibles, their antics. They sounded like the denizens of story-books. She even had nick-names for them – Jasper and Coco and Biffo and Sam. Were they any different, I wonder, from Randolph, Lucille and Thomasine? But I did not laugh, not as readily as she, at her tales. And she too would sometimes pause, as if embittered by her merriment, and getting up from her seat come to cradle me in her arms like an infant. No, she did not weep – not then – like mother did, but her flesh enwrapt me, warm as mother’s tears were cold, and crushed to her bosom I would feel something move and scrape inside me and begin to strain for release, like the chick inside the egg. Does it have a choice, I wonder, the egg, when it feels the incubating heat? But she would break off, vexed by this latter ploy as by the first, and giving me a bottle of wine to open (for her visitors brought her besides their cash little presents to show their interest was not wholly mercenary – and I for my part felt a pang at gulping down their fondness), laugh and bat her eyelids over the rim of her glass.

And all this time I boarded the number 34 in the evenings and got off at the corner where mother got off with her shopping and her misery. But I did not pass my father’s house, did not see father. Another life. Nor did I take the cut across the grounds, but walked the long way, by the streets. Was I afraid? Of the grounds? Did I feel – was that possible? – I had scorned them. That I no longer belonged?

Rosemary. One day I bought you a bottle of wine and a bunch of spring tulips – crimson and gold and silver, like the hues of chivalry. Out of the florist’s window I chose them, amongst the bouquets and ribbons and greeting cards with their flavour of story-books. Why did I make such a trite gesture? I, who had no dealings with gestures, who kept my head to the ground, and who had seen besides how you treated their presents – pitched their flowers, almost in spite, into the sink, flung their rings and bracelets into drawers, guzzled their wine and their chocolates, with my help, almost as if with a will to choke on them. And yet you put on your own bracelets and beads, clip-clopped down the pavement in your clothes that were meant to be admired and wore about your skin perfume made from flowers.

That is the consequence of small gestures – the posing of large questions.

Why? Because I feared your capricious, precarious laughter. But even more so my inability to laugh when you laughed. For which is more suspect, I wonder, the light or the leaden heart? And besides, was it not ungallant, dishonourable (but how did I fetch out those words?), to repair to you as a mole to its burrow, to sink beneath the camouflage of your charms, to think of you as a place to go, to lie low, without so much as a gesture?

Wine. Flowers. One is compelled, willy-nilly, to shows, gestures.

Or was it that I feared the other thing; the deep inconsolable thing, time and its emptiness, whence, where, and clung, as they say the drowning cling, to the lightest flotsam?

It was an April evening. Hyacinths glimmered and tumesced, pink and blue, in front gardens, and in the trees, pricked with blossom, so one trusts, birds built, eggs split. The last rays of the sun cast an aura as in paintings with nymphs and swains. On such an evening, were I still in my pram, mother would have wept, wept profusely. And father – but perhaps he was doing just that – would have strolled from the race-track, winnings in pocket, smile on lips, colour in cheek, over the turf, amonst the discarded programmes, the cigarette packets, the torn up betting slips, tie fluttering in the breeze, and sipped in a lounge bar latticed with sunset a wistful whisky and soda. You opened your basement door. The last rays did not penetrate down there. I gave you my gifts. I laughed. There was the look of cheer enfixed on my face – I had had to model it, it is not formed by looking at the ground. You frowned. Tears of vexation welled in your eyes. A blunder. So much for gestures, for spring, for gaiety. The light faded in your living room. You held the tulips, your mascara ran. I thought of Mrs Fludge. All the women I had known had cried on my account.

‘Then what is it you want?’

That is the consequence of small gestures – the posing of large questions.

And yet I already knew the answer, had already divined it, feared it, failed to escape it.

‘A child.’

A child. Another. A little one. Another miniature to be fetched up from the dark to shift and make a show of it, to be the sport of its father and grief of its mother, to be cuffed and kicked and sighed and slobbered over (weren’t the sobs already there in you?). To be the old sop. Another, another life.

‘What of Jasper and Coco and Biffo and Sam?’

‘A living.’

‘There are other ways.’

‘All right. A game, a diversion.’

‘Sport.’

‘But they will go if I have a child.’

‘An exchange.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘You are jealous of them.’

‘Sorry for them. Diversion from what?’

She dried her eyes. Patted them with a pink paper handkerchief. ‘From—’ She stroked my brow, as if it were I who had cried and needed soothing. ‘Thank you for the flowers. They’re lovely.’ And she fetched a vase and began to put in the tulips, one by one, slowly, weak-handedly, taking care over the arrangement, as if it were a task of mindless consolation, as if it were all consolation. Diversion. She laughed. I did not laugh. Then she placed the flowers, crimson and gold and silver, on the coffee table in the space where normally she rested her feet, beside the empty fruit-bowl. As she stooped her thighs beneath her wrap trembled like the flanks of a foal.

Out I went, into the dark, into the descending gloom. The sun had sunk, the lovers departed, the rooting dogs been brought to heel. Places to go. The grounds were vacuous and silent. My mission was to buy chicken and chips to soak up the bottle of wine. Chips and Pouilly Fuissé, there is frisson in such combinations. But my legs took me to the grounds, along the public footpath, by the railway track, to the outspread turf, to the rows of rigid poplars itching with new buds, and to the house (oh not to it but within a distance). The lights were lit, the curtains drawn. Forsythia bloomed in the garden. It looked like father – the square bright windows, the brass door knocker, the paint, the smug facade. Was he there? A child, a child. He did not appear. I wandered back. The way back. The smell of bruised grass, spring soil rose from underfoot. Darkness. But there were signs of life. Cigarette packets, sweet wrappers, a torn evening paper, a lost trinket. Diversion. And there, in the corner beside the railway embankment, huddled like errant sheep – ghosts, anonymities.

No they would not go. It was not as simple as that. They would not go, Coco and Biffo and Sam. They had nowhere to go.

Rosemary. I tried. I brought the chicken and chips wrapped in an evening paper. You were weeping. You said, I thought you had gone. I said, where would I go? There is nowhere to go. I tried. Is that the word? Is that what it comes to? Trying.

I tried to bring to utterance, like the seed to germination, that word that mouthed and mimed inside my breast; to free from its shell the little thing that pecked and strained. Perhaps some eggs are addled from the start. I tried. And how was it that the closer the utterance grew the more distant you became, the more remote your extremities, voice, gestures, sighs, half-heard surf to my clam’s senses, so that we were lost, dissolved or swallowed, like the salt of the earth, and if that word were ever uttered there would have been no distinctions for its communication. I have always suspected that. Silence then? Yet one is born with a voice. And could it ever have taken shape, taken flesh, that unformed utterance – in a child; without even, in the beginning, the word? Oh not if my experience was anything to go by. Was I begotten that way? Breathed out of their wordlessness by mother and father? And so nurtured? Swipe, swipe.

I went to hide in the lumber cupboard. The dark, the smell of mildewed rags, they are least were knowable. You turned your head and touched my arm supplicatingly when I retired so, but I went of my own accord. I was right. They did not go, Jasper and Coco and Biffo and Sam. Their voices, specious, disembodied, reached me down the hallway. And yours, your laugh among them, able mistress of ceremonies. That was why I withdrew so willingly. To hear them. I tried most in the lumber cupboard, there in the darkness, to say that I would, Yes, chin up, to hatch the helpless nestling, to know what I meant, to mean, while the voices flitted, what I said. Where do the stories stop and the games end, and the sobs and laughter cease? In order to know that nameless thing – what is before, before the pain, what is not in the games – to listen to the games; in order to express it to resort to games. You opened the cupboard door, but it was not easy to step forth.

Rosemary. So welcoming. I knew their voices, like puppets, like emblems. Or so I thought I did. I should have counted them. Jasper, Coco, Biffo, Sam… You said they would go. But they don’t go. They persist. They wax, they multiply. Whence, where? Your progeny, your children. I felt sorry for them. Ghosts. I got the 34, early home from work. The summer leaves were drying on the trees. Yes, I crossed by the grounds, walked up your street, climbed down your basement steps. And in your womb at that time was a child. A child, another life. And was I the one without whom it would not have been? It would start to swell under your navel. Was it Thomasine perhaps, or Lucille or Randolph? I tried. I opened your basement door and heard the sounds along the hallway, the voice, the cry of pain. Whack, thwack. Entered your room. Father was sitting astride your back dressed only in a pair of spurred riding boots, smoking a cigar, and bearing a jockey’s whip. Oh I should have listened more carefully in the cupboard. He did not start or recoil. He saw me, he knew me. On his face was the look of judgement, of vindication. So sanguine, so unassailable. Eternal cheer. A whiff of Bay Rum and Eau de Cologne. You cried, underneath him, red marks on your thighs, your flanks, cried as Mrs Fludge cried, as though for some lost infancy. And in your womb…

Over the turf, the unremitting, unreceiving turf. Round and round, head lowered. A sweet wrapper, a lost trinket, a cigarette packet. Now I know they do not go. There is nowhere to go. No thing to do. It is a matter solely of recreation.

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Graham Swift is a British writer. His novel, Waterland, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983, and his novel, Last Orders, won the Booker Prize in 1996.

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