Free Out of This World by Graham Swift Page B

wasn’t my grief – ‘The Grand-daughter’s Grief’. No, my grief wasn’t on show. I was just crying for the cameras.
    That was the moment, the precise moment. The end of Harry Beech, photographer.
    But it wasn’t the end of that long, dazed day. Or of our inane double act. We still had to stand staunchly together (the last of the Beeches!) at Hyfield, while the guests arrived with their rehearsed words and purified faces.
    At Hyfield. Where else? Where the débris had only just been cleared and the damage hastily covered or repaired. Fresh gravel on the drive. And where the objection that it was all in the most dubious taste was countered by the very boldness of the gesture. Defiance in the ruins. ‘Business as usual’. Echoes of former, testing times. As if the pocks in the walls and the scorch-marks on the lawn were only there to embellish the theme that had already been squeezed dry by the newpaper pieces and the TV clips. The old warrior. The one-armed hero. The true Brit.
    Frank said, Leave it all to me. To us. To BMC. And I didn’t have the voice to resist. I didn’t even whisper the word ‘private’. As new – as acting – Chairman: his duty. Robert had
been
the Company, hadn’t he? I let him gently insist that public outrage, as well as corporate solidarity, could hardly be ignored. So, yes, there would be ‘a few media people’ present. And police too. Some in plain clothes. Some of them (as if this would comfort me) armed. I let him say, on my behalf, into microphones, before flash-lights: ‘Mr Beech’s grand-daughter is too distressed to answer questions.’ (Funny, so was Harry Beech.) ‘However, we at BMC most strongly …’ I even let him feed them that tear-jerking bonus: my pregnancy. ‘Her last words to her grandfather.’
    That was the last time I thought of him as ‘Uncle Frank’.He was there, of course, circulating and officiating while Harry and I stood like dummies. You could see the exhaustion behind the attentiveness in his face. You should have been able to see fear too. Just a flicker, a shadow of fear. But it didn’t show. As if he were high on some rare potion of invincibility. As if, because they’d got Grandad, they could never get him, and this whole day were some kind of lavish propitiation of the gods for his future.
    Why not? It was a PR coup. BMC could do no wrong now, could it? And in any case, he had his prize. He must have known by then, without knowing what I knew, that Hyfield was his. On the Company. That even if Joe and I were to make a drastic change of plan, we would not want to live
here
. In this house where –
    I didn’t let him know I wasn’t really there. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t come out of the white daze. Death isn’t black, is it? It’s white. It’s the whitest, hottest, coldest, blindingest flash there is. I let him treat me as if he were still Uncle Frank, and I was little Sophie Beech who once used to perch on his shoulders. I let him take my arm and let his invincibility support me, just like Harry’s helplessness. Let him cut in like some ballroom interloper and steer me round the Board members and the company veterans called out of retirement for the day and the young high-fliers. This is Sophie. Our prize asset.
    I carried it off like an actress. Such dignity! Such courage! Such – in the circumstances – self-possession! The English are so wonderful, aren’t they, Doctor K, at Events?
    I don’t know what happened to Harry. He just disappeared, melted away. But that was always his trick, wasn’t it? The vanishing act. Grandad and I used to call him The Invisible Man. Perhaps he was wandering among the crowd, trying to be anonymous, trying to be just another one of them. Which wouldn’t stop their eyes picking him out with a sort of wary fascination.
    That’s him. That’s Harry Beech. He doesn’t put bombs in cars. He just –
    We came face to face in the drawing-room as the whole thing was winding up. People were