Waterland by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

debris it brings down, I reach out, hook one finger into its neck and retrieve it. A bottle. A beer bottle. A bottle of thick dark brown glass, but not a sort of bottle that is seen any more around the Fens – or has been seen for over thirty years. Label-less, undirtied, with a slender neck and an upright, slim rather than squat appearance.
    All this I observe before, as darkness gathers, I take the bottle and carry it along the river-bank, to below the sluice, from where it will float down to the Ouse, andeven, perhaps, in time, to the sea. An old-fashioned, but quite unmuddied, beer bottle, with round the base, embossed in the glass, the words: ATKINSON GILDSEY.

6
An Empty Vessel
    B UT there’s another theory of reality, quite different from that which found its way into my fraught after-school meeting with Lewis. Reality’s not strange, not unexpected. Reality doesn’t reside in the sudden hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History, and its near relative, Histrionics …
    And did I not bid you remember that for each protagonist who once stepped on to the stage of so-called historical events, there were thousands, millions, who never entered the theatre – who never knew that the show was running – who got on with the donkey-work of coping with reality?
    True, true. But it doesn’t stop there. Because each one of those numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsungexistence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery – for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic. So there’s no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for purpose, for content.
    And there’s no saying what consequences we won’t risk, what reactions to our actions, what repercussions, what brick towers built to be knocked down, what chasings of our own tails, what chaos we won’t assent to in order to assure ourselves that, none the less, things are happening. And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.
    Once upon a time the future Mrs Crick – who was then called Metcalf – as a result of certain events which took place while she was still, like some of you, a schoolgirl, decided to withdraw from the world and devote herself to a life of solitude, atonement and (which was only making a virtue of necessity) celibacy. Not even she has ever said how far God came into this lonely vigil. But three and a half years later she emerged from these self-imposed cloisters to marry a prospective history teacher (an old and once intimate acquaintance), Tom Crick. She put aside her sackcloth and sanctity and revealed in their stead what this now ex-history teacher (who is no longer sure what’s real and what isn’t) would have called then a capacity for realism. For she never spoke again, at least not for many years, of that temporary communing with On High.
    But it must have been always there, lurking, latent, ripening like some dormant, forgotten seed. Because in the year 1979, a woman of fifty-two, she suddenly began looking again for Salvation. She began this love-affair, this liaison – much to the perplexity of her husband (from whom she could not keep it a secret) – with God. And it was when this liaison reached a critical – in the usual run ofliaisons not unfamiliar, but in this case quite incredible – pitch, that your astounded and forsaken history teacher, prompted as