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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
From the Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders and Wish You Were Here, his first new book of short fiction in nearly thirty years: beautifully crafted, piercingly observant stories that unite into a richly peopled vision of a country that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions.
Meet Dr. Shah who has never been to India, and Mrs. Kaminski, on her way to Poland; meet Holly and Polly, who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding, and Charlie and Don, who have seen the docks turn into Docklands; Daisy Baker, who is terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Graham Swift steers us effortlessly from the seventeenth century to the present day, from world-shaking events to the secret dramas lived out in rooms, workplaces, homes. With these open-eyed, eloquent and often comic stories, Swift charts a human geography that moves us profoundly.
Author Notes
British novelist Graham Swift was born in London on May 4, 1949. He attended Cambridge University and York University.
Swift has written five novels, including Waterland.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Man Booker-winner Swift (Last Orders) sets his eye on the mutterings and putterings of everyday English folk in his first story collection in nearly 30 years. Spanning the time of the English Civil War in the mid-17th century to the present day, each of the 25 vignettes explores a simple theme-divorce and separation, death and grief, lust and longing-in unadorned prose and in just a few pages. "Remember This" has a young man penning a love note to his new wife after a day spent signing their wills; the undelivered letter has an unintended effect on their relationship. "Fusilli" finds a father stranded in a supermarket pasta aisle, mourning his soldier son's death in Afghanistan. In "The Best Days," a man at a funeral looks back at his first sexual encounter, with a school friend's mother. Not all Swift's choices are perfect-some, such as the widow's preoccupation with washing her dead soldier husband's shirt in "Was She the Only One," or the old man's remembrance of his dead wife after receiving a terminal cancer prognosis in "I Live Alone," are heartbreakingly intimate, but others, such as the circular "Going Up in the World," are underdeveloped at best. A uniting factor throughout is Swift's strong sense of place and the idea that life can be transformed in a moment. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Swift's first story collection appeared more than 30 years ago. With nine novels to his credit (most recently, Wish You Were Here, 2012) and many prestigious awards, including the Booker Prize, he returns to the short form, presenting 25 stories of exceptional subtlety and substance, some quite concise and all featuring intriguing first-person narrators. England, as the title indicates, is his subject, albeit in the most malleable sense as both a place and a state of mind. His characters, primarily male and ranging from boys to old men, offer piquant testimony about the shock of abrupt change death, sexual initiation, divorce, galvanizing moments that affirm or explode quintessentially English mores. Swift illuminates loneliness and self-sufficiency along with the complexities of family, marriage, and friendship. Swift's ensnaring narrators a boy fascinated by the neighborhood weirdo, a newlywed, two physical education instructors fret about propriety, struggle with lust, and worry about work and age. Physicians frequently appear, worldly and wry. Swift delves into war's endless anguish in portraits of shell-shocked WWI veterans and a grieving father remembering a phone call from his son in Afghanistan. Swift's stories are impeccably crafted and traditional in style, some are wise celebrations of love and contentment, yet in every tale, emotional intricacies, steely critiques, honed compassion, and wily humor run hot with irony and protest. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Fiction lovers will be drawn to these reverberating stories of the human condition by widespread critical attention and Swift's international standing.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AH, ENGLAND. The ancestral dream. Democracy and the royals. Tea instead of coffee. Public schools actually private and vice versa. Wit trumping manners, wit trumping all. The stiff upper lip, the stuffed shirt, the punters, the twits, the prats, the genteel poverty, the bed-sits and the below stairs, the drinks parties, the pubs, the absence of a work ethic, the suspicion of all things foreign and the empire coming all the way home to roost. My grandfather was London born and bred. Every Sunday after services at the Episcopal church he closed himself in the kitchen of his Missouri home to fry up a plate of kippers. "Don't forget your English education," he wrote to my father, who did forget. He couldn't bear kippers. With these thoughts I took up Graham Swift's new collection of short fiction, prepared to have my list of stereotypes confirmed. Were they? Well, not exactly. "England and Other Stories" comprises 25 stories. Some are very slight, barely sketches, bits of conversation or reflection caught in passing; they slip by as strangers do in a populous, busy world, or as doodles on the margins of a narrative. Others are more complex and deeply engaging. These stories exemplify the pastry-chef theory of realism in fiction, which holds that reality is a pie; you can slice it. In each slice is the essence of pie. Pie has no plot, but it has character, and that's what you get. And that's all you get. So in these stories we have a host of characters discovered at vulnerable moments in their lives. Most of them are men, but they are often having thoughts about women, encountering difficulties with women, talking to a mate or to themselves about women. If they are young men, the thoughts may be hostile, dismissive and anxious, if older they can be loving, tender and sad. The waning of passion is a theme reiterated bitterly. Passion is viewed by these men as irresistible, motivating, always worth the trouble though it's bound to end badly. In "The Best Days," a particularly cruel story, Sean and Andy, two young men attending a funeral, are horrified by the sight of a former high school beauty with her mother in tow, both dressed inappropriately. The beauty is a little faded, as is, naturally, the mother. "But the big difference between them was that while the daughter got away with it - it was fancy dress, but she had the looks anyway - the mother, the other side of 40, was a sight." After some dark reflections about his own sexual initiation, Sean ruefully closes the story by mentally rehearsing sage advice for his friend. "'You run after them, Andy boy' - this is what he might have said - 'you get the hots for them and you have your wicked way with them and then you end up marrying them. And then years down the road, look what you get. So - let it be a lesson to you.'" THE BEST THING about these stories, what carries the reader smoothly along with the grace and ease of a gondolier on the Grand Canal, is Swift's prose style. It's a theatrical act of balance and lightness. Revelations are sudden, and the level of narrative tension can skyrocket in a phrase, as it does in the opening lines of the story called "Ajax": "When I was a small boy we had a neighbor called Mr. Wilkinson, who was a weirdo. He must be long gone now, but I've often wondered what became of him. I was his undoing." Or, in "Knife," the arrival of the bone-chilling revelation that comes to a boy, listening to the moans from his mother's bedroom while she has sex with a man he despises, as he stands contemplating a knife in an open drawer, considering the ease with which he could pick it up: "He understood that at this moment, though he was only 12, he had about as much power in the world as he would ever have. He understood it almost painfully now. At 12 you could not be held responsible, even if you were." Another pleasure of Swift's method is the continual play in his characters' internal monologues, proceeding from some variation on a word or the unexpected turn of a phrase. Clichés often drive these characters to deeper scrutiny. In "Dog," a wealthy older man pushing a pram containing his newest daughter (he could be her grandfather) ruminates about his life and how he came to this pass. "Was putting your affairs in order the purpose of life anyway? Affairs! A poor joke of a word. It was his affairs, having them, that had got him into this mess." In "I Live Alone," a fretful lawyer receives a terminal diagnosis from his doctor. This is not entirely a surprise, but it's the first time he's had to face the reality of his condition. "He was trying to take in the fact that his life was no longer the indefinite thing of which he'd always been the subject, it was a closed thing, a finite thing, an object." In the final story, "England," a member of the coast guard, going out to his station in the early dawn, considers the nature of his work. "And it was a job, by very definition, perched on the edge and looking out. It was also, by definition too, mainly stationary. A coast guard station. ... He sat on the edge of England, supposedly guarding it, looking outwards." There's something bright and rewarding about this tendency to consider both the connotation and the denotation of words as they appear in random thoughts. And it is this that I take, though it isn't on my list, to be a prime signifier of Englishness. Shakespeare's characters engaged in it, and here they are still, in Swift's stories: rich and poor, soldiers, sailors, barbers, lawyers, doctors, all given to following a casual word to its source. This rich, lively collection reminds me of what my grandfather didn't want his son ever to forget: an English education. VALERIE MARTIN'S most recent novel is "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste." Her new story collection, "Sea Lovers," will be published in August.
Guardian Review
Graham Swift is a watcher, a listener, the recorder of our days. "People are life," one of his characters suggests, but life is also the social structures that provide context for the living of it. The short stories in his third collection often focus, therefore, on occasions. Weddings and divorces, job interviews and funerals, all the puzzled collisions with the bureaucratic infrastructure, all the usual points of connection between the individual and the culture: if they aren't providing a direct context, they're never very far in the background. In "The Best Days", people attend a funeral because it's something to do when you're unemployed. Man or woman, they're all wearing their interview suits. "Everyone was freshly aware of being alive in the world," a young man called Sean observes, "and not dead in it and that they'd been involved in something dutiful but oddly animating." He remembers visiting the house of a girl he fancied when they were both still at school and being efficiently and coldly seduced by her mother. The loss of virginity is a cultural event too. "Remember This" finds a pair of newlyweds in the solicitor's office making their wills. They, too, feel dutiful yet mysteriously energised, and act a little like mice. "They both felt that certain occasions required an element of ceremony, even of celebration." Most of Swift's characters regard their relations with society in the same way. This deference - shy or sly - seems charming and old-fashioned. It also appears to constitute a major part of an Englishness of which the stories are clearly in pursuit. When he's not busy photographing your wedding, helping you plan your divorce or informing you from behind the GP's desk that your life is over - or even sometimes while he is - Swift keeps an ear out for the classic English interior monologue. "Going Up in the World" gives us the musings of Charlie the window cleaner. "Something big's coming," Charlie's friend Don tells him, as they look out across the towering financial centres that have given London window cleaners a good living since the 80s, "something big and bad." While the protagonist of "Half a Loaf" recalls, "My mother used to say, 'All good things come to an end'," then muses: "Perhaps all mothers say it. As if the harm she foresaw for me was the tragedy of good stuff not being constantly on tap." What the osteopath and the window cleaner have in common is yearning, not so much for what they've lost but for what their anxieties tell them they're about to lose. These anxieties are a kind of survival tool - honed, well-kept and generally more rational than the people who suffer them. Swift's is an England where everyone has a financial Plan B, a cautious little earner tucked away less against the possibility of collapse than the condition of constant change. None of the stories confronts that sense of change as squarely as "England" itself, in which a bucolic but practical coastguard called Kenneth Black rescues a black comedian from Yorkshire marooned at dawn in the middle of Exmoor. The comedian speaks in tongues, in the quickfire schizoid language of standup; Kenneth doesn't want to reveal his surname for fear of giving offence. Neither is sure of what the other really is, or does. But somehow, despite these confusions, they get the comedian's car out of the ditch and set him on his way to Ilfracombe and the next gig in his punishing tour of Britain. This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny; others, such as "Was She the Only One" or "Fusilli", encapsulate a huge but numbly personal crisis; some manage all three at once. Some feel old-fashioned, but as if more than one layer of time is involved - as if you're reading a 1950s story mimicked in a pastiche of a TV drama from the 1970s. There are a few duds, but Swift's practice - which is to make a world in a dozen pages, sometimes less; a world in a bottle - carries the reader quickly through and on to the next. His touch is so light and craftsmanlike, his scene shifts so subtle, his emotional logic so incontrovertible, that sometimes we hardly notice where they have taken us until too late. Every story is a carefully worked metaphor (often keyed by its title, as in "Going Up in the World"); every aspect and implication brought carefully to life. The writing is fluid and unegotistic, tuned to the undemanding lyricism of occasions: "To one side of the church, the big cedar, stirred by the breeze and with a sudden sparkle, shrugged off its burden of drops." M John Harrison's latest book is Empty Space (Gollancz). To order England & Other Stories for pounds 13.49 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - M John Harrison When he's not busy photographing your wedding, helping you plan your divorce or informing you from behind the GP's desk that your life is over - or even sometimes while he is - [Graham Swift] keeps an ear out for the classic English interior monologue. "Going Up in the World" gives us the musings of Charlie the window cleaner. "Something big's coming," Charlie's friend Don tells him, as they look out across the towering financial centres that have given London window cleaners a good living since the 80s, "something big and bad." While the protagonist of "Half a Loaf" recalls, "My mother used to say, 'All good things come to an end'," then muses: "Perhaps all mothers say it. As if the harm she foresaw for me was the tragedy of good stuff not being constantly on tap." What the osteopath and the window cleaner have in common is yearning, not so much for what they've lost but for what their anxieties tell them they're about to lose. - M John Harrison.
Kirkus Review
The British author of Waterland crams enough life into these vignettes and full-blown stories to be justified in slyly giving his third collection a country's name. The opening story sets the recurring theme of postwar changes and displays Swift's (Wish You Were Here, 2012, etc.) skill in compression, low-key humor, and keen glimpses into the marrow of lives. A roofer born in 1951 does well in the building boom after World War II and even better when he shifts to window cleaning for all those glass-clad high rises. The end of the Raj gets a twist with a second-generation Indian doctor recalling how his Anglophilic father was glad the war had brought him to a land he'd come to love in books, with its "thatched cottages, primroses, bluebells." Many stories deal with the pain of love and loss. After a young couple sees a lawyer to make their wills, the husband tries to document his love for his wife in a letter never shared as the story moves inexorably to divorce and lawyers, "in duplicate." One story harks back to World War I, quietly building to a wife's torn feelings at learning her husband of more than five decades may have abused their daughter years ago and hating her grown child for making such claims so late in her parents' lives. It's one of the collection's rare showcases for a woman. The book ends with the title story, an encounter between a comedian and a coast guard officer who might well speak for Swift in his bemusement about how little he knows of the island he watches over. The stories recall different eras stylistically as well, bearing echoes of Cheever, touches of O. Henry, and, in one chilling case, of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." With few weak spots and more than a few killers, it's a potent gathering. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Many of the stories in this absorbing and well-written collection from Booker Prize winner Swift (Last Orders) touch upon bittersweet memories of older men, and even young men, looking back on past actions and emotions. In "Saint Peter," for instance, a man recalls the passing of his father, a vicar, and his mother's subsequent remarriage. In "Ajax," the narrator looks back on a neighbor who lived alone and was the subject of gossip, finally leaving the area under mysterious circumstances, and realizes how he himself might be perceived in this way. The title story relates the intersection of two disparate lives as a Coast Guard serviceman helps a Jamaican comedian whose car is disabled on a deserted stretch of road. Several stories are set in the 1600s and 1700s, as characters reflect on historic events in England and America, while others are more impressionistic, for example, one about a senile woman seeking medical help. VERDICT Few stories are longer than ten pages, and some are only four or five pages, but within the confines of brevity Swift manages to create lives and invest them with drama and import. Although war and death are sometimes featured, the impact and dramatic force is usually focused on the personal, the emotional, and the slighter nuances of character, memory, and regret, which is what makes them memorable. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Going Up in the World Charlie Yates is a small compact man with the look such men can have of inhabiting well their own modest proportions. He'd been less at ease, once, with his name. Charles Yates, the proper version, the name he had to write on forms, was a toff's name, a joke name. What had his parents been thinking? But Charlie was a joke name too, a joker's name. A right Charlie. Still, he couldn't wriggle out of it. Charlie Yates. No one else seemed to mind. He's fifty-seven now. He's not quite sure how it's happened. He was born in Wapping in 1951. The Wapping he can remember from back then was still pretty much the Wapping that Hitler had flattened. Look at it now. He can look at it now because more than twenty years ago he and Brenda moved to Blackheath. Not very far as the crow flies, but in other ways a different country. They'd made the move because they could. They'd gone up in the world. And Don Abbot and Marion had made the same move at the same time. Don and Charlie were old pals and business partners. Bren and Marion got on with each other too. Now at fifty-seven Charlie likes to keep himself in shape. He likes on crisp bright still-early Sunday mornings to take a jog. Not such a short one either: across the heath itself and into Greenwich Park, then through the trees to the brow of the hill where you get the view. Then he likes to sit for a bit on one of the benches and take it all in. My city, my London. He's sitting there now. Jogging isn't his friend Don's idea of how to spend the early part, or any part, of a Sunday morning, even a brilliant crisp one like this, so Charlie has never jogged with Don. He jogs alone. But every other Sunday, even after Charlie has already gone for a jog, Don and Charlie meet up and go and play nine holes. At Shooters Hill or Eltham, even sometimes, if someone asks them, at Blackheath itself--"Royal Blackheath." There, perhaps, he should be known as Charles. There were never many golf courses in Wapping. When he jogs Charlie wears a pale grey tracksuit, with a blue stripe, and neat trainers, nothing sloppy or cheap. The simple thin gold chain that it seems he's worn all his life flips up and down at the base of his neck. He has trim close-cropped hair that's now more white than grey, but it's soft and fine and his wife still likes to stroke it sometimes as if she might be stroking the head of a dog. As he sits for a while he's hardly puffed at all. At fifty-seven Charlie's father, Frank Yates, had been pretty much past it. But then he was a docker--or he had been--just like Don's father. Look at the docks now. Francis Yates. You could say that was a toff's name too. One fine morning in Wapping over fifty years ago Charlie Yates and Don Abbot had met in the playground at Lea Road Infants' School and for some strange reason--a big chunky kid and a little nipper--they'd known it would be a lifelong thing. Lea Road Infants' had later got flattened too, though not by bombs. For his size, Charlie has quite broad shoulders. When he pushes up the sleeves of his tracksuit (or of his red cashmere golf sweater) you notice the tattoos on his forearms and that, for his size, he has large wrists and hands. He also has, for the size of his face, quite a big prominent but well-shaped nose. With his deep-set eyes this can give him, especially when he grins, a slightly wolfish expression which once used to help him with a certain kind of girl. But Charlie would say--and the jogging, which is sometimes more of a gentle floating run, would back this up--that the most important item is the feet. The balance and the feet. Once, for three or four years, Charlie was a boxer. Big hands, but it was really the feet. A bantamweight. He won a few fights and is still proud of the fact that he never got his finely shaped nose smashed out of true. Once he worked on an oil rig, which was when, more fool him, he got the tattoos. But tattoos had come back again now--so he's in fashion. Once he was a roofer. That was his main thing. He was never going to be a docker at any rate. Just as well. A roofer. He could climb like a monkey. He had the physique. Then it seemed that the roofs just got higher and higher and he became something more than a roofer, without really reckoning on it and without knowing if there was any limit to how high he could go. He went up in the world. He discovered that he had no fear of heights. Once, if he'd been born earlier, Charlie might have been a steeplejack, but that was a trade, even a word--like docker--that was becoming out of date. Where were the steeples? Where were the tall chimneys? But suddenly, instead, there were the towers, springing up as if it were a race, and Charlie could work at the very top of them on the exposed girders, without a moment's giddiness or fear. A head for heights is what they say, but Charlie would say it was all in the feet. Where you are standing is just where you are standing. He earned good money and there was no shortage of work. Some people called it danger money. Charlie didn't like to call it danger money because that implied it was dangerous, but he accepted the basic principle: no risk, no gain. Do something special--like boxing--so you might make a bit extra and put something away, not just scrape along till Friday. Don't be a docker. Some people--quite a lot of the people Charlie has known--like to place bets, to put their hopes in dogs and horses. Charlie has never placed a bet in his life. He became a birdman, helping to build towers. And there they are now, glinting in the early-September sunshine, the towers that Charlie Yates helped to build. There, beyond the hidden twists of the river, is Wapping. There's Stepney, there's Limehouse. There's Docklands. -- One night, when it was still only starting with him and Brenda, when it was still a bit touch and go, Brenda had said, "Charlie, you have lovely feet." It was the clincher. No one had said this to him before. It went straight, not to his feet, but to his heart, not just because it had never been said before, but because it was true. He said, "Brenda, you have lovely everything." And that was that. Now Brenda and Marion go on shopping sprees together. Now, twice a year, all four of them go on holidays, to faraway places. Last March it was the Maldives. Charlie couldn't say precisely where the Maldives are, but he's been there. You get out of a plane. The others were all for going again this winter, but Charlie wasn't so sure. He'd heard somewhere that the Maldives could be one of the first places in the world to be submerged by rising sea levels. It was hardly likely to happen while they were there. But he wasn't sure. Funny, the feelings you could get. He had no fear of heights, but he'd never got on with the sea. He'd known it, working on that oil rig. Once was enough. The same perhaps was true of the Maldives, different proposition though they were. And if he was honest, Charlie would say that he'd be just as happy knocking a ball around the local course with Don as he would be sitting in the Maldives. Or wherever. He's just as happy sitting here. It's all the same place, it's sitting in your own body. He'd said to Brenda, "You don't have to worry, Bren, with these feet." As if his feet had little wings. But there he'd be anyway, safe and sound every night, cuddling up with her again. A thirty-floor tower in the Isle of Dogs wasn't, in that respect as well as others, like being stuck out in the North Sea. He said, "Aren't you glad, Bren?" "Glad what?" "Glad I'm not on an oil rig." But it wasn't fair to her, he knew, the prospect of his going off every day indefinitely to walk in the sky. He said that when he'd stashed enough away he'd fix something else up. He hadn't a clue what. He'd come back down to earth. At some point he twigged that those towers weren't just built with risk, they were built for it. It was risk inside and out. They were built, most of them, to be full of people dealing in their own mysterious kind of danger money. Well, that was their business. He took his money and took the risk that one day, though he never did, he might step off into space. But one day he took another kind of risk. He followed another lifetime hunch. It was obvious too, once you saw it, like all the big things perhaps are. It was so obvious that his immediate second thought was: If it was so obvious, how many others might already be in on the act? But it was still early days. More and more towers. And what were those towers made of--or what did it look as though they were made of? What was it that sometimes you didn't see even when it was staring you in the face? He went to see Don, who was then--well, what was Don Abbot in those days? He was a wheeler-dealer, he was a bit of this and that. You might say he was going places, you might say he was all talk. They had a drink in the Queen Victoria. Don listened. He looked his little friend up and down. Then he spoke as if he hadn't really been listening, but that was Don's way. "So what are you suggesting, Charlie? That you and me should become a pair of window cleaners?" "No, Don. Don't muck me about." Then they'd talked some more. It became the standard story anyway, the standard line. In golf club bars. In hotel bars, by the blue pools, all around the world. "I'm Don, this is Charlie. We're window cleaners." -- He looks at the towers. He'd helped to build them. And then for twenty years or so he and Don had helped to keep them sparkling. Don had said, "One thing you have to understand, Charlie, I'm never getting in one of those--contraptions, I'm never even going up there. I'm not the kind of guvnor who likes to show everybody he can actually do the job." "Well you can leave that to me. I'll be the one who won't have to bullshit. But don't get me wrong, Don. I'm planning on the same as you. And I've promised Brenda." Abbot and Yates. No arguing about the alphabetical order. We clean windows, not just any old windows. It took a while to get it off the ground, so to speak, but then...All that glittering glass. Now they live with the gentry in Blackheath. And now it isn't just him and Bren and Don and Marion, but their kids, a boy and a girl each. Who aren't even kids any more. They'd grown up in Blackheath and gone to school there, and then they'd all gone, with one exception, to university. University! It had been a good move, to cross the river. The one exception was Don and Marion's Sebastian. Sebastian! How did Don and Marion come up with a name like that? Thank God he was known as Seb. Seb had gone straight from being sixteen, or so it seemed, to working in one of those towers. For a New York bank. At twenty-three Seb was making serious money, or crazy money--take your pick--money that made Don and him look pretty silly. That made getting A levels and going to university look pretty silly too. Or as Don put it, and Charlie was never quite sure how Don meant it, Seb was one of the barrow boys, wasn't he? One of the barrow boys who'd moved on and moved in. Moved on and moved up. -- Charlie looks at the towers. His own son Ian is studying in Southampton to be a marine biologist, which makes Charlie feel--in a different way from how Don must feel about Seb--out of his depth. Ha. There was a joke there. And when Charlie had first told Don about Ian's leanings in life Don had said, "My Uncle Eddy was in the marines in the war. I never knew they had their own biologists." Charlie and Don could say, "My old man was a docker." What else could they say? What would their kids say? "My old man was a window cleaner?" They wouldn't even say "my old man." Except maybe Seb. Seb might say it, and laugh. Down in Southampton, Ian wouldn't be able to think: My city, my London. He wouldn't be able to point and say, "See--over there." When Charlie and Brenda drive down to Southampton Charlie humbles himself and listens while his son talks. Maybe that thing about the Maldives came from Ian. Of course it did. But it's not difficult to be humble. Perhaps it isn't even humility. Sometimes while Ian talks Charlie feels a little quick whoosh inside. It's like the whoosh he feels when with Don on a Sunday morning he hits a really good drive. "That one's shifting, Charlie." It's like the whoosh he once felt years ago, after a fight, when the ref's arm would go up, lifting his. My son Ian. A marine biologist. He sits on the bench in his tracksuit, feeling the circulation in his veins, feeling, as he's always done, good in his own skin. Charlie is a businessman (a word he can find strange) and a successful one, yet he would still say that the most important thing is your own body. It's what you have, what you come with, and to be glad of it and trust in it is simply life's greatest gift. So it was funny how it was the urge and aim of most people--almost a sort of law of the world--to go up into their heads, into the topmost part of themselves and live there, live in and by their heads, when most people (he was the exception proving the rule) were afraid of heights. He looks at the towers, a hand screening his eyes from the dazzle, and smiles. Or it looks like a smile. Only Brenda would know that it's not a smile. Only Brenda would see the two little extra pinches at the corners of Charlie's mouth and understand this contradiction in his face. He has no repertoire of frowns. When Charlie's worried or puzzled he smiles, but smiles differently. He's worried, and has been now for some time, about his friend Don, about how he's putting on weight. Don has always been a big man, but big of frame, not flabby or cumbersome or slow. Now he's spreading, he's simply expanding. It's a sort of joke--that he's putting on pounds--a joke that even Don likes to tell against himself, but it isn't really a joke at all, and when Charlie plays golf with Don now he knows it's not just for fun, but it's important for keeping Don moving. They should play every Sunday. They should play the other nine holes, not just spend them in the bar. He knows there's no point, there's never been, in asking Don to come jogging with him. And how would it look now, how could it possibly work: Don lumbering and sweating beside him while he, Charlie, just hovered on his toes? It has even come to seem a little wrong to Charlie that he should go jogging by himself while Don has this weight problem--which is completely illogical, even vaguely superstitious. Like thinking you shouldn't go to the Maldives because the Maldives might one day disappear. But Charlie worries about Don. It's as if all the money is at last turning to fat. Fifty years ago and more, Charlie had thought that he was just a little scrap of nothing and this bigger kid might take him under his wing. And so it was. Though now you could also say it was Don who should be for ever grateful to Charlie. But Charlie feels the strange worrying need, like some unpaid debt, to take his ever bulkier friend under his wing. How? -- And now he has the other worry too, this new worry that could knock the first one aside. He's going to talk to Don about it soon. Don will tell him what else he knows, when they play their round in just a couple of hours. By the sound of it, there won't be much concentrating on Don's weight problem or even on the golf. Crisp bright morning though it is. Charlie is a businessman, yes that's what he can legitimately be called, but, even though he likes to sit and look at them, he doesn't keep his ear close to what goes on inside those towers. That's their business, he just cleans the windows, so to speak. But Don keeps an ear, it's even an inside ear, because of Seb. Charlie has sometimes had the bizarre vision of Don actually cleaning a window, on the twenty-fifth floor say, something Don could never do (though Charlie could, easy-peasy), and looking in and waving at his son. Don had called and said, "Seb's in trouble, deep trouble." Trouble? Wasn't Seb making telephone numbers? Wasn't Seb making them all look silly? Don said, "They're going to pull the rug from under him. Him and everyone else. Something big's coming, Charlie, something big and bad. If you ask me, from what Seb's heard--it's not just Seb who's in trouble, it's the whole fucking world." Did Don have drink in his voice? No. Charlie didn't say anything to Brenda, only that it was Don calling about tomorrow, though Brenda would have thought: Why did Don need to call? It was a Saturday night. Charlie didn't hear anything on the late-night news. Later, cuddling up, he said, "Aren't you glad, Bren?" "Glad what?" "Glad I was never a marine biologist." "What are you on about?" He didn't really know, himself. There was something about Don's voice, there was something about that "whole fucking world." His instinct the next morning was to get up and do the usual jog, to be on his feet, to prepare--to prepare his mind by preparing his body. And it was such a beautiful morning, early September, the tingle of autumn in the air. Now he gets up from the bench and takes a last look at the towers. They gleam back. Then he turns and jogs again through the glistening trees, feeling at fifty-seven as light on his feet as he did when he was seventeen. Excerpted from England and Other Stories by Graham Swift All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
