Free Shuttlecock by Graham Swift Page A

bank, watching them. But she isn’t really thinking of them, I know. As she stands on the bank, her eyes dim and a half-guilty, half-mystified look crosses her face. She is thinking of me.
    On, further; along the towpath, bushes and trees now on either side. The sun flickering through the willow stems. The boys walking ahead, looking for large sticks to brandish, Marian walking behind, a little abstractedly. Into the grounds of Ham House. Across the trim lawns; tulips and gravel walks (now
there
is a similarity I have never thought of – the grounds of Ham House and the grounds of Dad’s mental hospital). They say the first occupant of Ham House – a cabinet minister of Charles II – was half mad. Once we took the boys to look round the inside of the house; they were bored, and afterwards I lectured them on the importance of a sense of history (you see, I am not only cowardly, but pompous too)…. Into the gardens at the back of the house where the tea shop is. And there, while she watches the sparrows peck at crumbs, the same anxious look will cross her face.
    All of this touches me more than if I were really there to see it happen.
    Four-fifteen. Dad leaps from a Halifax bomber into the Haute-Saône.
    Have I mentioned yet how Marian and the kids behave on the subject of Dad? They are quite heartless about him. They forget about him. Marian once skipped half-heartedly through Dad’s book; but the kids have never read it. They don’t visit him; they don’t think of him asmy father so much as a peculiar object I go and see on certain Wednesdays and Sundays. (I took the boys to visit Dad once: I said, ‘Martin and Peter, Dad, your grandsons,’ but Dad didn’t move an eyelid and the boys giggled, and afterwards they started to talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’ – as opposed to Grandpa Lenny, who is Marian’s father, and, of course, perfectly
compos mentis
.) When I come back from visiting Dad, Marian never says, ‘How is he?’ or ‘Any better?’ She blames me for going in the first place. She blames me for repeatedly going on these pointless trips. She blames Dad for being a liability and she blames me for Dad’s being blameworthy. And she communicates this blame to the kids. I have even noticed that she sometimes fails to upbraid them when they talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’. I know what they are all thinking when I go off to see Dad every Wednesday or Sunday: they are thinking I go there just to get away from them.
    Four-fifteen. I don’t have much time. I return Dad’s book to the shelf. I disconnect the television, carry it out to our car, and drive to the rental shop.

[10]
    It was about three months after Dad’s breakdown that I first began to suspect that something strange was happening at work. I remember I had been to the hospital one Sunday afternoon. The doctor was there – DoctorTownsend, a tall, angular man with a breezy manner and glasses – and after my ‘chat’ with Dad he wanted to see me. He walked with me down the hospital drive to the gates, his tie flapping out of his white coat. ‘It’s been nearly two months, Mr Prentis … I have to be frank with you … We’ve made virtually no progress.…’ He held out a hand, as though to clasp my shoulder, but merely held it poised in the air. ‘There’s always a possibility – a remote one – that something you may say may succeed … Don’t give up, Mr Prentis,’ – he twisted the corner of his mouth into a smile – ‘the key might lie with you.’
    And then, on the Monday morning, Quinn handed me the first of those inquiry dossiers, which he has been handing me from time to time ever since, in which the items have scarcely anything in common and seem to lead nowhere.
    You may well ask, as this was the very first instance, why didn’t I simply take the matter up with Quinn? That is not such a simple question, and it begs the further one of my relations with Quinn. They had taken some odd turns in the weeks after Dad’s