Читать онлайн «England and Other Stories»

Graham Swift

England and Other Stories

For Candice

L — d! said my mother, what is all this story about?

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

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.