Out of This World by Graham Swift

Author:Graham Swift [Swift, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82982-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Sophie

How are your classics, Doctor K? Have you brushed up on your Homer lately? It’s strange, I might never have been interested. All those books up there in the study. Fifty years old, the spines faded; but so many of them, inside, scarcely used, the relics of a career that never happened. And the plaster busts. Let me see if I can remember: Homer, Pericles, Virgil, Cicero. Two with beards and two without. And all with blind, white eyes. I might never have been interested, I might have thought of that room just as it always seemed, a place somehow you didn’t go, if it wasn’t that one day – don’t ask me how old I was, eleven, twelve – I had suddenly thought: Greek! Greece! Maybe it was a way back to her.

He never touched the books. Just went up there sometimes to write letters at the desk, which was always kept locked. I remember asking him, and he said, ‘Oh, Greek and Latin. Gods and heroes, all that rot.’ I remember him saying that. ‘All that rot’. So I don’t know why he kept them there, for Mrs Keane to dust. Unless it was just to preserve the sense of a life that might have been. As if, had Uncle Edward, in some fantastic way, suddenly shown up, Grandad would have said, ‘Here you are, old boy. All waiting. Haven’t touched a thing.’

I used to go up there sometimes and pick out a book and look at the name on the flyleaf – Edward Beech, Oxford, 1913, 1914 – and think how it was written by a man not yet twenty, who didn’t know when he wrote his name that he had only a year or two to live. Like Mum, when she left for Greece. And later when Grandad told me a bit more, I figured it all out. Edward, the second son. First Richard, then Edward. They could have afforded, in every sense, to indulge a brilliant scholar-in-the-making. Not knowing that both of them would soon be dead. One in March and one in September, 1915. It would even have looked good to have had some other-worldly and learned element in the family. So: a whole library, bought almost at one go and by the yard by a bountiful if ignorant father (Richard Beech the elder, my great-grandfather, whose strengths were ballistics and business). A whole range of classical texts in the best editions of the day, meant to last a lifetime.

And it was strange to think that if he hadn’t been killed he might have been by then some distinguished Oxford professor, with a bow-tie and half-rimmed gold specs. And Grandad and I might have visited him for tea – can you imagine that, tea in a don’s rooms, overlooking some ivy-encrusted court? – and I would have watched them get jealous and tetchy with each other over me.

So I became this swot. While there was rock-and-roll and Elvis and the Beatles, I became this student of the Ancients.

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