Swan River by David Reynolds Page B

me two more of Sis’s diaries and over the next few weeks I skipped through them, feeling a little guilty about not reading every word. In 1888 Sis fell in love with a doctor; some of her writing about this was rather embarrassing, but for the first time there was a bit of a story and she wrote about how she felt, although it still didn’t seem very real.
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    Months later, because it caught my attention, I pulled Claudius the God off the bookshelf in my mother’s room and read the first two pages. It was hard to follow, but for a few minutes I was under the illusion that this was actually written by the Emperor Claudius.
    Later, I found my father in the sitting room and asked him how we could know that the book was true and how Robert Graves could know what Claudius thought. He started pulling out volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica and talking at the same time. ‘You see. I’ve been thinking about this for years. What is truth? It’s a question all the philosophers and poets and great writers have concerned themselves with.’ I sat down in the middle of the sofa. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, before the birth of Christ, there was a great Greek philosopher called Aristotle and he had a lot to say about truth.’ He dumped three volumes on the table and quickly turned the pages of one of them. ‘Listen to this.’
    He slowly read out passages about the thinking of this Greek from so long ago, poking the air with his forefinger and looking up at me intently from time to time. Some of what he read was very tedious but I got the idea that Aristotle, who my father thought knew what he was talking about, believed that fiction was better than truth. I’d always thought ‘fiction’ just meant the books in the library that weren’t true; but it seemed more complicated than that.
    â€˜Aristotle thought that fiction was based on probability, rather than literal truth, and that this made good fiction ultra-real. Fiction distilled the truth. That means that it contains the essence of the truth, whereas, Aristotle thought, people who try to record the literal truth, people who write history – or perhaps diaries like my mother’s – convey the truth less well.’ He sat back and looked at me. ‘Does that make sense to you?’
    â€˜I think so,’ I said. As he put the books away, I thought about Sis’s diaries and how, though she was presumably telling the truth, she somehow wasn’t telling the whole story.
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    For me the next year, 1961, was still childhood, still uncomplicated hedonism. My mother worked part-time at the shop she had once owned and my father drove off most mornings in the grey-green A35. I took the bus with Richard and Adam to school in High Wycombe, getting home every day at 4.15; homework fitted in easily, and when the evenings grew lighter, I went, nearly always with Richard, either to hang around the recreation ground behind the station or to trespass in the bird sanctuary by the river beyond the lock.
    It was the time of my father’s great lawsuit against Sketchley, the dry cleaner. They made a mess of four of his shirts and foolishly failed to admit liability, which he reckoned to be £8, the price of four new shirts. He was an old hand at this, having taken legal action against various parties over the years, although the only other one that I remembered was his action against a shop called Daniel’s in the High Street whose manager refused to sell him a football displayed in the window; he was temporarily out of stock and would have had to crawl through a thicket of tents, fishing rods and mannequins in all-weather clothing to oblige. My father won that simply by looking up the relevant acts and case law in the Law Society Library in London and writing a letter quoting sub-clauses and precedents. The manager sent an assistant round with three free footballs and a note saying, ‘All