Free Ever After by Graham Swift Page A

involvement in a new and militarily useful industry (“Perspex, pal—you heard about perspex?”) from armed service. But your younger brother, your little kid brother, Ed, joins up, learns to fly and is killed. It might have been you, you think: it should have been you. Whatever you do now will be over your brother’s dead, sea-shrouded body. You have to live for Ed now; to take on all Ed’s lost chances (and Ed was great with the girls; they just fell over him). To become a perpetual nineteen-year-old …
    “Sure—it’s tough. I know. It hits you hard,” was the extent of his attempts to sound out the measure of my sorrow and show his willingness, if necessary, to console. I have to admit he handled with a degree of delicacy the problem of disguising his relief that I didn’t appear to be hopelessly distraught, while preparing for the onset of a possibly vicious delayed reaction. And there was, in any case, that air of frank confidingness (so unlike my father), that bluff disavowal—I’m sorry if I have no conscience, if I have no shame, but it’s not my fault—that thick-skinned, businessman’s charm.
    But I knew just how thick-skinned he really was. I had seen him with his hand trembling—I would see him, twice again in my life, with his face as drained of vigour as it was on that day. I knew his weakness. His tactical strengthwas his strategic disadvantage. Even I could see that, with all its fraught implications, with all its dangerous blend of the expedient and the needful, Sam saw in me a bizarre substitute for Ed. (And you gotta have substitutes.) That he side-stepped the dread question of his surrogate paternity—not to say his entire adult responsibilities—by this appeal to the chummily fraternal.
    And he was right to prepare for a delayed reaction. He underestimated, that’s all, the extent of the delay and the persistence of the reaction. It seems that I’m a slow burner, a long-term investor of emotions.
    We returned, briefly, to Berkshire in April ’46, to follow my father’s coffin, then permanently in June to settle in his home. I had a strong sense now of its being “my father’s house” rather than “home,” though my mother rapidly began asserting her proprietorial rights. Furniture was replaced. Decorators appeared. There was plainly money on tap. The little gallery of framed photographs from above the sideboard, recording the “India days” (cane chairs; verandahs; turbans; polo sticks) disappeared one morning in the van of a man collecting for a jumble sale. I did not believe, any more than my mother, that the place should become a shrine to her husband’s memory, but I felt the injustice. And I felt, as the physical remnants of my father were whittled away, the accretion, as it were, of his ghostly stock. It was
his
house. He may not have earned his plot in the ethereal fields of fame, but he had left this solid enough memorial. It was the husk of his life.
    I should have protested. I should have said, at least, about those photographs: take them from the dining-room, if you will, but let me keep them in my bedroom. But the hypocrite and the coward in me stopped my tongue.
    They got married the following March. There was a decent interval in which she practised being a widow andSam, to give him his credit, kept his relative distance, turning up only for plainly licentious weekends. It’s true, he had much to occupy him. He was sowing (also) the seeds of his little empire—spreading the bright new gospel of polymers. I still have a vision of him offering his New World marvels to a depressed and war-wrecked England. The picture merges with all those smiling GIs, in their jaunty jeeps, handing out gum and being kissed and garlanded in the ruins of liberated villages. This was not Sam’s experience, but he was built in the appropriate mould, and perhaps even imagined himself in the same blithely triumphal role.
    Unlike many of his countrymen hustling their way round Europe