Free England and Other Stories by Graham Swift

staircase. There was no sign or sound of anyone else.
    But Karen’s mother was undoubtedly Karen’s mother. She was like a bigger version of Karen. She was wearing a smoky-coloured dress of a close-fitting but fluffy material. It went somehow with the red nails. The dress wasn’t very long, and what he mostly noticed, as he tried to look beyond her, was her hip. As she stood holding the door one hip was hidden, but the other was pushed out. It was oddly alert. The idea of a hip, even the word hip, seemed new to him. Strangely, it had never entered his mind when he thought of Karen.
    ‘She’s not here,’ Mrs Shield said, still looking at him sternly. ‘Karen’s not here.’ She said it so deliberately it almost sounded like a lie, but he felt sure himself now that Mrs Shield was alone.
    Karen had got off the bus less than half an hour ago, to go home. It was a mystery. And he was somehow now under suspicion, for his good deed.
    ‘She goes round to Cheryl Hudson’s most afternoons before she comes home,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘God knows what they do there.’
    She looked at him as if this were something he should have known already, as if he should have gone himself to Cheryl Hudson’s. (What went on there?) He felt put on the spot. It was like being called out to the front by a teacher. But Mrs Shield didn’t look like a teacher. And, though she was Karen’s mother, she didn’t really look like a mother.
    ‘Have you got a name?’
    ‘Sean.’
    ‘Sean who?’
    ‘Sean Wheatley.’
    ‘And that’s Karen’s bag?’
    It seemed a strange question, and even before he could answer she said, ‘I can see it’s Karen’s bag.’
    She looked at him searchingly. Her hands were still holding or rather fingering the edge of the door.
    ‘Tell me something, Sean Wheatley. Did you come round here now to hand over Karen’s bag, or did you come round here because you were really hoping to see Karen?’
    It was a big question and he knew there was no ducking it. He knew that Mrs Shield would have spotted a false answer better than any teacher.
    ‘Both, Mrs Shield. Mainly to see Karen.’
    She looked at him again for a long while.
    ‘Well, you’d better come in and wait for her.’
    This was confusing. If Karen was round at Cheryl Hudson’s, then how long was he going to have to wait? Did he want to wait? But he also somehow knew that just to have handed over the bag and left would have been a big mistake.
    She shut the door behind him. There was the vague smell of what he thought of as ‘other people’s house’. It was different in every house and you could never work out exactly what it was made of. Part of it must be Mrs Shield. Part of it must be Karen.
    But, now the door was shut, Karen seemed suddenly far away, even though he was for the first time inside her home and he was holding her leopard-skin bag.
    ‘Through here,’ Mrs Shield said.
    There was a small cluttered living room, like any living room, with a glass coffee table. He knew that quite often in other people’s houses (sometimes in his own) there’d be a bottle of something, opened, on the coffee table, even in the afternoon. But he couldn’t see any bottle. The telly was on with the sound down. She must have turned it down when she answered the door. The picture on the telly was weak because of the sunshine now streaming through the window. Outside, the clouds had completely dispersed.
    He stood by the coffee table, politeness enveloping him, along with dazzling sunshine. He knew that you weren’t supposed to sit in other people’s houses till they asked you to.
    ‘So, Sean—’ she said, taking a breath. Then she stopped. ‘God, it’s blinding in here, isn’t it?’
    She turned. It was the first time she’d moved suddenly and spontaneously, almost girlishly. She drew the curtains. They were a pale yellow and still let through a buttery glow. To close them, she put one knee on the sofa and reached up behind it. He saw an exposed heel and