Waterland by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

assigned a lifetime of daily toil. And while this determined policy on the part of the parents might have expressed the simple recognition that their first-born was, after all, irreclaimable, this did not account for the rigour with which it was pursued: for that moment, for example, when the younger son, thinking it only right to impart to his less fortunate brother some of his, albeit frugal, learning, embarked (the future teacher in the making) on a programme of secret tuition; and, being found out, wasnot only stopped short in his scheme of enlightenment but was roundly told by the provoked father (who was not a man, it was true, easily roused to great temper or severity, especially since the sad death of his wife): ‘Don’t educate him! Don’t learn ’im to read!’
    And it was that same night that the father (composure regained) told the younger son about mother’s milk and everyone having a heart …
    Dick works at his motor-bike. It could be said that Dick’s love of machines, if love it is, springs from the fact that Dick himself is a sort of machine – in so far as a machine is something which has no mind of its own and in so far as Dick’s large, lean and surprisingly agile body will not only work indefatigably but will perform on occasion quite remarkable feats of dexterity and strength. This despite the clumsy mental faculties that go with it and its deceptive air of ineptitude. Dick wants to know why other people are not like machines. Perhaps Dick too wants not to be like a machine. Dick stumbles helplessly or blenches in a kind of puritanical horror at any event which proves that human behaviour is not to be regulated like that of a machine. Except when he descends to foolish attempts to imitate, by mechanical means, the idiosyncrasies he sees around him, Dick can give the impression that he looks down from his lofty and lucid mindlessness, half in contempt and half in pity at a world blinded by its own glut of imagination. That he knows something we don’t. And this impression – this pose – can lend Dick, in the eyes of others, a certain rugged pathos; can even invest him (for there’s no getting away from it, Dick has an ugly mug) with a perverse appeal. But it makes Dick lonely. It makes him suffer. Which is why he talks, for solace, to his motor-bike, more than he talks to any living thing. And why it has even been said (and Freddie Parr was one of the chief rumour-mongers) that Dick is so fond of his motorbike that he sometimes rides it to secluded spots, gets down with it on the grass and …
    Dick crouches by the lean-to. As well as silt, Dick smells of oil. He holds up some bit of engine to inspect. Dick has big powerful hands. But I cannot see his eyes.
    And Dad walks. And in walking, as he passes the cottage, he steps perceptibly to one side, round the spot on the concrete where …
    To and fro; up and down. His figure, on the river-bank, looms darker against the fading sky and takes on for me some of that pitiful charisma Dick too can exert. He must imagine I’m up in my room, nose buried in my books. For if he knew I wasn’t, his head would be turning and his neck craning in even greater fretfulness. He’d be searching along the river. For he’s one of those who believe that sorrows seldom come singly, and he’s already witnessed, this morning, one father and his drowned boy.
    To and fro. Perhaps he’s thinking, on this day when there’s so much else to think on, of the old conundrum of his two sons. How one pores over books, one over motor-bikes; how one is a moron, and one has brains, will be a clever man. He doesn’t guess how the brainy one is hiding from the brainless one.
    Because the brainy one’s scared.
    About-turn. Pause. Flex leg. Rub knee.
    And then something catches my eye amongst the rushes. Perhaps it has just, that very moment, drifted there, or perhaps it has been there all the while. A bottle. And since it is a habit if you live by a river to fish out the