Swan River (4 page)

‘Did they all call her “La Frascetti”?' She pointed to the words.

‘No, stupid. They must have called her Rose.'

‘So names in brackets aren't what people were called.'

‘Well…' This was tiresome. I was about to talk about people having two names for whatever reason, but then she giggled, knelt down and wrote the word with two ornamental brackets.

‘What was she like, Sis?'

I thought about it. Uncle George had said that she had given her husband a hard time. She had died in 1942; my mother had known her too, and despite her reluctance to criticise anyone, I knew she had found her bossy and hard to get close to. My father had been very fond of her. After Tom left, and Ernest and George moved away, she had brought him up with the help of her own father; but my father had also found her bossy, a trait he put down to her having had to look after a family from the age of fourteen. He had once told me she was ‘beautiful but tough'. Judging by the photo of her that he kept on his desk, I wouldn't have called her beautiful; Sabrina, Diana Dors and Marilyn Monroe, the blondes on my bubble-gum cards, were beautiful. ‘Bossy, elegant and tough. Dad thinks she was beautiful.'

‘Tough?' No women we knew were tough. A few were beautiful, some were elegant, plenty were bossy.

‘That's what Dad said. She took charge of her brothers and the house and the servants after her mum died, when she was fourteen. S'pose that's tough.'

‘And what was Old Tom like?'

‘Don't know, except he drank too much. My father said he was tall and handsome…and he had a long moustache.'

‘Have you seen any photographs of him?'

‘No. Don't think there are any.'

I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall – and remembered something I'd forgotten. ‘Dad took me to a film ages ago. He wanted to see it because whoever wrote it was someone he liked. It was an old film. It was called ‘Viva Sonata' or something, and it was all about Mexicans – you know, with big hats and moustaches. Anyway, halfway through, Dad whispered to me that this man, the main man, looked like his father, so on the way out I looked to see what his name was. He was called Marlon something.'

‘Marlon!' She wrinkled her nose. ‘Funny name. What did he look like?'

‘Ordinary. Couldn't see him very well; he had a huge moustache and a hat. He had long, narrow eyes and looked cross all the time, never smiled, not properly.'

‘But I bet Old Tom smiled sometimes.' She was lying on her front and staring at the family tree again. I stood up and kicked a tennis ball gently against the skirting board, back and forth.

Suddenly, she said, ‘Except for the servants, there were two non-blood relatives living in that house, Old Tom and La Frascetti.' I went on kicking, but thought about it. ‘With six blood relatives, including your dad and his sister.'

It seemed strange; it would have been like my father living with my mother's family. My father would have found that impossible. I could tell he didn't even like my grandmother and my aunt, found them snobbish and a bit stupid.

‘Two outsiders,' Deborah was leaning on her elbows looking up at me.

The tennis ball went under my bed. Thinking about Tom living with Sis's father and brothers, and even with her brother's wife, I slithered under to fetch it. ‘Maybe that's why Tom got drunk so much, got fed up with all the other people in the house?' I rolled out and brushed dust off my sweater.

4

Aristotle's View of History

A week later Deborah and I were in my room again. We were poring over my grandmother Sis's diary for 1886. My father had lent it to me; he had others, but why didn't I try this one to see if I found it interesting? It was a beige, cloth-bound book, quite worn; stiff brown cardboard showed through at the corners where the cloth had frayed. The endpapers were marbled, navy blue and wine red. The pages were stiff and very white, and crackled when I turned them.

It wasn't a diary in the sense of having dates printed in it. It had nothing printed in it. On the first page, written in large, sloping letters, in black ink, were the words ‘Amelia Thompson My Book 1886'. After that there was a page for every day, with the day of the week and the date written at the top. On most days she had written a whole page, and occasionally the day's entry spread over to a second page. The handwriting was quite large, sloped at almost forty-five degrees to the right, with curlicues and flourishes on the capital letters. After we got used to it, Deborah and I found it quite easy to read, although we would frequently get stuck on certain words; Sis's ‘e's, ‘o's and ‘i's were very similar.

The entry for 1 January 1886 described a New Year's Eve party at the house in Norfolk Road, to which more than twenty uncles, aunts and cousins had come. It sounded very jolly, with plenty of food, drink and singing around the piano. Sis seemed to like most of her relatives, but there were one or two whom she described as bores. After a whole page about this, she wrote, ‘I will be nineteen this year. It is time for something else to happen.'

Deborah and I read the first ten days of January together, helping each other with the words that were hard to read. Deborah usually finished the page first and waited for me before turning over. Except for Sunday, the days were very similar; her father and two brothers went out, while she and the two servants called Alice looked after the house. Every other morning she went to a grocer's shop in Mare Street, which sounded a bit like Mr Brown's in the High Street, to order food which would be delivered that afternoon. Monday was washing day and the basement area at the front of the house nearly always flooded. Everyone in the family would have a bath in the kitchen in a copper tub that evening. Sis seemed to find her life pleasant but dull.

We wondered where they went to the loo, and at lunch we asked my father. He told us that there was a proper flush lavatory inside the house on the ground floor. ‘It was very grand, with a big square mahogany seat, and the bowl was decorated in Wedgwood blue, like plates, with pictures of flowers and birds. In fact it was more comfortable and more convenient than the WC in this house. We were lucky. My grandfather had it installed at great expense; most people in the street had WCs outside in the garden.'

In the afternoon we read through the rest of January, the whole of February and some of March. Nothing much seemed to happen, except that Sis's father went away on business twice for a fortnight and her brother Ernest occasionally brought friends home after school and made a lot of noise. We read about Uncle George, who was seventeen. It seemed extraordinary that this young man – who so long ago didn't seem to do much except go to work at an office, come home, eat, read, sometimes play cards or the piano, and go to bed – was the same man, the one who had just died and whom I had always thought of as very old. On Thursday evenings, he and Sis would usually walk up to a park called Hackney Downs for ‘band night'; they would sit on seats outdoors listening to a brass band play popular tunes.

My mother had to work in the shop that afternoon and when she got back we had a late tea in the sitting room. My father toasted bread with a telescopic toasting fork, holding it against the glowing coals behind the bars of the Cosy Stove. Deborah sat between me and my mother on the sofa, my father sat in his usual armchair, and we watched
Six-Five Special
while my mother knitted and read the
Daily Telegraph.
Irritatingly, my father swivelled his chair so that he could see the television, and I knew what would follow: ‘Look at his trousers! He can't walk in trousers like that, surely!' as Joe Brown shook his brush cut into a microphone. ‘Why do they have to call women “babies”?' he loudly interrupted Adam Faith, and looked round at me and Deborah as if we would have an answer.

‘Don't know, Dad,' I shrugged.

When it was over, he switched the television off with a flourish, turned and said, ‘I'm astounded that you two have spent all day reading my mother's diary. What do you make of it?' He took out his tin and started to roll a cigarette. My mother put down her paper.

‘It's interesting…I liked reading about Uncle George when he was seventeen, but her life seems to go on the same every day.'

‘Well. Life can get like that. Most of the world's population do repetitive tasks day after day just to survive.' He glanced at my mother. ‘I think at that time she probably was a bit fed up. She had to be a housewife before her time, looking after her father and two brothers instead of a husband and children.' He lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘It was a shame, but she coped. She was a tough woman.'

Deborah was staring upwards with her hands behind her head. ‘You don't get much idea of what she thought about. It's mainly one thing happened and then something else happened.' She looked at my father. ‘She says whether she likes people, or doesn't, but she doesn't say whether she's happy or unhappy or just going along without thinking about it.'

‘Yes. It's more a record of what happened than anything else.' My father leaned forward. ‘There are about twenty of those diaries and I read them all years ago, but that's my memory of them. Even when terrible events occurred like my father's drinking and eventually being thrown out, she just records the facts... It's almost as though she's not involved.' He sat back and pulled on his cigarette again. ‘Do you think you get a good picture of what daily life was like, though?'

It was my turn to answer. ‘I can see the routine and the different things they had then and the things they didn't have – '

‘You see, the thing is,' my father interrupted, ‘she wasn't really a writer. She didn't have the imagination to express things as they really were.'

‘But she didn't need imagination. She was there,' I said.

‘Perhaps imagination is the wrong word.' He pulled on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. ‘But I think, you see, that good writers, even if they write a made-up story, tell the truth better than someone who just recounts facts…and it's probably having a good imagination that helps them to do that.' He then talked about Jane Austen, about whom I knew nothing, Charles Dickens – I had read
A Christmas Carol
at school and seen the
David Copperfield
serial on television – and Robert Louis Stevenson – I had read
Treasure Island
. He seemed to be trying to say that these people told the truth about the world around them.

I couldn't quite see it: Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Long John Silver seemed like imaginary people to me.

‘But they come alive in your mind, don't they?' my father said. ‘And does Uncle George, aged seventeen, come alive to you?'

‘No. Not really.'

Deborah shook her head in agreement.

‘That's my point. There's something truthful about Scrooge and Bob Cratchit.' He forgot about Long John Silver. ‘There were people like them. In fact, there
are
people like them.'

The clacking of my mother's knitting needles stopped and she turned to me and Deborah. ‘The best example I can think of is a man called Robert Graves. He wrote two marvellous books about a Roman Emperor called Claudius, but he wrote them as though they were actually written by Claudius.' My father was nodding enthusiastically. ‘He imagined what Claudius thought and felt and those books give a better picture of what Claudius and life in ancient Rome were like than anything else. They are better than history books because they seem so real.'

My father lent me two more of Sis's diaries and over the next few weeks I skipped through them, feeling a little guilty about not reading every word. In 1888 Sis fell in love with a doctor; some of her writing about this was rather embarrassing, but for the first time there was a bit of a story and she wrote about how she felt, although it still didn't seem very real.

* * * * *

Months later, because it caught my attention, I pulled
Claudius the God
off the bookshelf in my mother's room and read the first two pages. It was hard to follow, but for a few minutes I was under the illusion that this was actually written by the Emperor Claudius.

Later, I found my father in the sitting room and asked him how we could know that the book was true and how Robert Graves could know what Claudius thought. He started pulling out volumes of
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
and talking at the same time. ‘You see. I've been thinking about this for years. What is truth? It's a question all the philosophers and poets and great writers have concerned themselves with.' I sat down in the middle of the sofa. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, before the birth of Christ, there was a great Greek philosopher called Aristotle and he had a lot to say about truth.' He dumped three volumes on the table and quickly turned the pages of one of them. ‘Listen to this.'

He slowly read out passages about the thinking of this Greek from so long ago, poking the air with his forefinger and looking up at me intently from time to time. Some of what he read was very tedious but I got the idea that Aristotle, who my father thought knew what he was talking about, believed that fiction was better than truth. I'd always thought ‘fiction' just meant the books in the library that weren't true; but it seemed more complicated than that.

‘Aristotle thought that fiction was based on probability, rather than literal truth, and that this made good fiction ultra-real. Fiction distilled the truth. That means that it contains the essence of the truth, whereas, Aristotle thought, people who try to record the literal truth, people who write history – or perhaps diaries like my mother's – convey the truth less well.' He sat back and looked at me. ‘Does that make sense to you?'

‘I think so,' I said. As he put the books away, I thought about Sis's diaries and how, though she was presumably telling the truth, she somehow wasn't telling the whole story.

* * * * *

For me the next year, 1961, was still childhood, still uncomplicated hedonism. My mother worked part-time at the shop she had once owned and my father drove off most mornings in the grey-green A35. I took the bus with Richard and Adam to school in High Wycombe, getting home every day at 4.15; homework fitted in easily, and when the evenings grew lighter, I went, nearly always with Richard, either to hang around the recreation ground behind the station or to trespass in the bird sanctuary by the river beyond the lock.

It was the time of my father's great lawsuit against Sketchley, the dry cleaner. They made a mess of four of his shirts and foolishly failed to admit liability, which he reckoned to be £8, the price of four new shirts. He was an old hand at this, having taken legal action against various parties over the years, although the only other one that I remembered was his action against a shop called Daniel's in the High Street whose manager refused to sell him a football displayed in the window; he was temporarily out of stock and would have had to crawl through a thicket of tents, fishing rods and mannequins in all-weather clothing to oblige. My father won that simply by looking up the relevant acts and case law in the Law Society Library in London and writing a letter quoting sub-clauses and precedents. The manager sent an assistant round with three free footballs and a note saying, ‘All right, you win and I hope we will continue to receive your custom.'

When the Sketchley case looked like actually going to court, my mother encouraged him to drop it, not because she thought he wouldn't win, but because she knew that it would raise his already high emotional temperature. ‘Is it really worth it?'

‘They tore my shirts. You've seen them, Exhibits A, B, C and D. It's a matter of principle. Why should this greedy chain of capitalists get away with that?' He lowered his voice. ‘You may have to be a witness, you know, to prove they weren't torn already.'

She sighed and carried on mashing potatoes. He sauntered out into the garden to look at the budgerigars. I followed.

Reynolds versus Sketchley eventually came up at the County Court in Aylesbury. My mother declined to take a day off work to attend and I had to be at school. My father left wearing his dark suit, which only looked its age from close to, and his Savage Club tie. He returned that evening carrying red roses for my mother and a small transistor radio for me, the thing I wanted more than anything. He had not just won the case, presenting it himself against a fancy London barrister, but had been awarded an astonishing amount of costs. The judge had found in his favour and then enquired what work he did and how much he was paid for it; he must surely have lost some time at work preparing his case. My father told him that he was partly paid in commission. Forty pounds was added to the eight pounds' worth of shirts for that, and then the judge revealed that he knew my father was a writer of some repute.

‘When do you fit your writing in, Mr Reynolds?'

Truthfully he answered, ‘In the early mornings, milud. I get up at 5 am.'

‘And how much of your early-morning-writing time has been wasted on this case?'

‘Probably four or five days milud.'

‘And how much did you earn from your last book?'

Again truthfully, ‘My advance was one thousand pounds, but it sold rather well. I netted six thousand, four hundred pounds milud.' Eyebrows were raised – this was more than twice the judge's own salary – but the Sketchley barrister, presumably accepting that he had lost thoroughly, stayed silent and my father had no need to mention that, despite writing almost every day, he hadn't had a book published since 1949.