Friendship and a Book

It became a thrill for her to know that Joseph Conrad . . . was actually alive then, somewhere not so far away, in the folds of England.

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday: A Romance

The novelist Graham Swift and I first met at a literary gathering on the outskirts of Norwich in June 2005. The university backdrop to our meeting seems strangely extra-territorial in retrospect, as though the campus’s concrete ziggurats had been dropped from Minsk on to a Mediterranean version of East Anglia. The memory is coloured not only by the exotic Babel of writers and languages around us, but also by one of those brief English heatwaves which descends just as the school exams are about to start, a false promise of summer followed by weeks of rain. Thereafter we often met for lunch at an Italian restaurant by the Thames in Putney, halfway between our London homes. Our lunches started early and finished as the waiters were laying the tables for dinner. There would have been a hundred or so, one every couple of months for over fifteen years. We called them the Putney Debates. The tower of St Mary’s, the site of the original seventeenth-century debates conducted by the officers of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, loomed across a busy road. The Italian restaurant would have appealed to Cromwell no more than the debates did. Despite the half-hearted minimalism of its design, it contained too many un-Protestant fripperies: metal curlicues on every handle, displays of white orchids, rows of sunset-coloured bottles at the bar and inch-thick wine lists which spoke of cellars hidden from view. Although our conversations were lively, wide-ranging and often very funny, there was in them a dose of decorum which suggested a residue of puritanism, a distance perhaps inevitable in a late friendship between a man and a woman. I see a high-mindedness on my side and something forever withheld on Graham’s. However you define the reserve, it evaporated when we spoke about books, and those were always the best exchanges. I do not mean our own books. We hardly ever spoke of those unless they were about to go out into the world. I mean other people’s. Graham read as he pleased. He knew so little about social media that I was shocked when I first found out he had an email address. I am not sure he owned a mobile phone. Although I had his house number, we arranged our meetings by letter. These arrangements now form what must be one of the more repetitive folders among his papers in the British Library.

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I am not sure how to frame the rest of the story. We are still friends, in some ways almost family, but we meet rarely and our bookish conversations are no more. First the Italian place moved to an affluent square north of the river. Its new, expensive self-awareness took away the spontaneity of habit: a Chelsea Debate was never quite the same thing. Then the lockdown opened another fissure. Graham took to it as though he had been looking forward to isolation and in a way which, although I never said it, seemed overcautious to me. I am sure I appeared imprudent to him. Though I am immunocompromised, I tended to behave as though I was immune to Covid. Without breaking the rules, I gadded about and, I admit, felt a resigned regret about lost continuity. What I missed most were not our bookish conversations but stories of Graham’s father’s youth, Al Swift’s wartime flying with the Fleet Air Arm, protecting the Arctic convoys on their icy sea route to Archangel. I love boys’ adventures and I found ways to make Graham tell these stories again and again. I now think of those Putney Debates as one of my universities, to borrow the phrase from Maxim Gorky. I would cycle east along the towpath, dodging the low branches and the long dog-leads, remembering the books I had read since our last meeting, rehearsing arguments, looking forward. I am not sure to what extent Graham followed my recommendations but I often read or reread books in his footsteps: Montaigne, Isaac Babel, Conrad. I might not have read Conrad’s Youth without Graham, and it was one of the greatest reading pleasures I have had as an adult. We did not agree on everything. He failed to enjoy Danilo Kiš. I have only tried Arnold Bennett as an omelette, not as a writer. I often bored Graham with my predilection for lyrical evocations of the English landscape, particularly in books set around the time of the First World War. I read as though the land of lost content was mine, feeling homesick for a time and place to which I never belonged. I am haunted by the meadows that are an inanimate character in J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. I remember Adlestrop as though my own train had stopped there. Every now and then, I become possessed by an urge to move out of London, to disappear ‘in the folds of England’, although I know that most of the folds, certainly those I could afford, have long been sullied with concrete. A Londoner born and bred, Graham was always amused by my attempts at escape, pretending to take them seriously, knowing they would come to nothing. I spent a summer planning a move to Norfolk, rereading The Go-Between as my train moved out of Liverpool Street and through Constable country, even as I knew that I was too foreign to disappear anywhere but in London. I remember encouraging him to write his own response to The Go-Between. He had either listened or, much more likely, was already at work, coming to it by way of Joseph Conrad. (I liked to joke that there were often three Slavs at our table in Putney: Chekhov, Conrad and myself. Conrad was usually summoned by Graham.) ‘I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more,’ Conrad writes in Youth: A Narrative, ‘the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth and all men . . . the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust.’ Few writers capture the youthful combination of fragility and resilience as memorably as Conrad. But in Mothering Sunday (2016), Graham comes close. Mothering Sunday is a girl’s landlocked adventure, to match Conrad’s boy’s seafaring. It calls itself a romance and is prefaced by a quote from ‘Cinderella’, promising a ball, where Conrad has a darker motto from ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. It opens with ‘once upon a time’ and there is a happily-ever-after ending of sorts. Graham’s Cinderella, a foundling called Jane Fairchild, undergoes a series of transformations. She begins as a servant and a child prostitute (if taking a sixpence for sex with her 16-year-old neighbour amounts to that) and ends as a bestselling, prize-winning author, fêted into her nineties for teasingly autobiographical novels. All in 32,000 words. Mothering Sunday is remarkably uncluttered. Like a Vermeer painting, it catches the stillness of an interior moment while the world outside is reflected in mirrors and open windows. The story pivots around two midday hours on 30 March 1924, the titular Mothering Sunday. The day is as hot as a day in June, and all the servant girls are visiting their mothers. Motherless Jane is enjoying a last tryst with Paul, her lover of seven years and the only survivor of three Sheringham sons. We are in an imaginary corner of Berkshire, inside a house which, without being grand, is nonetheless full of fine furniture, books and silver trinkets, dusted and polished by a reduced retinue of maids. Jane will briefly inspect all this, alone and naked, while Paul drives off, supposedly to meet his fiancée. To reveal Paul’s wilful death in a car crash is not to spoil the plot. The burden of being a sole surviving heir is never fully obscured by his studied insouciance. You are not called an orphan when you lose your siblings, but in some deeper sense Paul is more of an orphan than Jane. As he leaves, dressed like a peacock in his formal finery, while birdsong fills the countryside with echoes from Adlestrop, he emits a peacock scream. It is, we know although we are not told, an ugly sound. The idyll which it shatters had been – like a June day in March – an illusion all along, a collective attempt of a ‘sunbathed, lamb-dotted England’ to put on a brave face. Published in 2016 and written around the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, Mothering Sunday is also, obliquely, a war novel. Paul Sheringham is, like his brothers, a lost boy, a collateral victim with war wounds that cannot heal. His scream is, for me, the punctum of the novel, that point which Roland Barthes describes as having the most intensely bruising, yet wholly subjective effect. Another reader might have missed it, but I come from Serbia, another country which scored a Pyrrhic victory in the same war, having had no choice but to fight it. I have grown up with the spectres of its lost boys. When I imagine looking back and remembering our friendship at some moment in the future – if I live long enough for such a moment – I hear myself explaining that it was the time when Graham Swift wrote Mothering Sunday. I am not saying that he wrote it because of me, but that I was part of the music of its time.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Vesna Goldsworthy 2024