Graham Swift - Ever After

But by the time that these confidences occurred, I had done what Sam would never have believed of me. Gangling, sulky, flat-footed, ungrateful bookworm, I had married an actress. I was all set — or this was how Sam pictured it — to become a playboy myself.

She was seventy-eight. He was sixty-six. There would always have come a time when that age gap between them would tell. In the early days there was of course that element of expedient confusion in Sam which enabled him to adopt with me a brotherly stance while craving from his own wife a maternal indulgence. But he would discover that you cannot expect maternal indulgence without reckoning also on maternal authority, and you cannot expect maternal anything if you yourself aspire to (pseudo-) paternity.

The old delusion, the old foible of stepfathers: that in the fullness of time, their new-found charges will come to view them as the genuine article. It was a challenge that Sam, being a man of bold and competitive spirit, could not decline: to become my father, to achieve (masterwork of substitution) that synthetic breakthrough. Somewhere along the line, Sam and my mother must have broached the question of children of their own — and shelved it. I was a barrier — I see it now — to such future issue. If Sam was ever to have “real” offspring, he had first to make me his child.

He failed, of course. That day when I refused the inestimable boon of Ellison Plastics and he cut me off, as if I were his true son and heir, set the seal on his failure — though it did not stop him trying again. How obvious it all was, how easy to confound him. The more he tried, the more I rejected him. The more he strove, not being my father, to become my father, the more I resurrected, like a shield, my real—

“You see, pal, your ma keeps a tight rein.…”

It is a summer afternoon in the late Sixties. Years have gone by. They have loosened some of the fixed positions of the past, hardened others. Every so often, under a flag of uneasy truce, I go to see my mother and stepfather in their new and opulent retreat (the Tudor mansion with all mod cons) in Berkshire. All this, I am still proddingly reminded, might have been mine. But the challenge Sam once set himself has not been met; I have not repented; and the time for real fatherhood, for growing up and begetting real children, is long past — my mother is well over fifty. So Sam has reverted to his own childish dreams, meaning, now, fooling around with secretaries, taking dubious foreign business trips and generally indulging in part-time good-time. He has the money for it and the opportunities — all around him he sees now visions of rising hemlines and lapsing morals — and he has still, let’s not be uncharitable, the looks.

There he sits on a sun-lounger by his very own swimming-pool, clearly a man who has not yet decided the time has come to make prudent arrangements with his body, since he wears only a pair of skimpy, powder-blue shorts, the waistband of which is not excessively at odds with his belly. The hair on his head, it is true, is receding, but the thicket of hair on his chest is set off by his smooth, solarium tan. A further dark pelt runs downwards from his navel into his shorts. He smokes a cigar; cradles a tall drink; sits amid the attributes of wealth.

He has everything, it seems. Except — poor man — the unqualified licence of my mother to do just as he likes. He has not yet — this will be a later phase, and anyone looking at him now might find it hard to credit — succumbed to those fantasies of old-world, pedigreed patricianship which will have their unlikely fruition in the discovery of John Elyson, once of this College. But he already sees himself as a lord of the manor with limitless droit de seigneur . The reality is that he is still subject to my mother’s infinitely subtle methods of manipulation, still the victim of her maternal sway. Still in short trousers.

He takes the cigar from his lips, then clenches it again more tightly in the corner of his mouth. The fabric of the shorts bites into his thigh. The man — he can’t help it — has an outsize, unflagging but anxious libido that requires regular attention. Moreover, though he has never enjoyed the gratifications of true fatherhood, he has not been spared its pains: even a stepson’s manhood threatens his own — even a bookish, sulky, flat-footed stepson.

“A damn tight rein.”

As if he would have me believe he never transgressed. Or as if the fact that she kept a tight rein was a justification of, a tacit testimony to his (actual and numerous) transgressions.

The blue water of the pool wobbles listlessly. The trouble was I always liked him. He resettles himself on the lounger. This is Berkshire, not Bermuda, but on this Sunday afternoon even the temperate hills and genteel lawns of the Home Counties are blessed by flagrant, sub-tropical heat. We sit by the pool, just the two of us. My mother is indoors, taking a siesta. She favours, these days, an afternoon rest. She will emerge soon, in a summer frock sensibly yet becomingly attuned to her advancing years, bearing a jingling tea tray.

Tea on the lawn. English correctness balanced by American looseness. I don’t think she had any complaints. She had struck her bargain. She had had, perhaps, the chief pleasures. Now there was the secondary but not to be underestimated pleasure of making Sam suffer for his own pleasure. To have forbidden that pleasure outright would have been to prevent hers. Ever the pragmatist. And there were, besides, the consolations of being lady of the manor. Tea consumed, she will don gardening gloves, fetch a trug and proceed to patrol the flower beds. I will still half expect her, as she does so, to burst into latter-day, long-suppressed song. (I have learnt to ration, to gauge carefully, the accounts I give of Ruth’s success.) Sam will light another cigar. She will wield the secateurs.

But now, while she lingers within, and after a sombre, uncomfortable silence has encroached at the pool-side, Sam suddenly draws confidentially towards me, little slicks of sweat appearing in the creases of his belly.

“Can I ask you something? Just between ourselves. How’d you do it? How’d you swing it? With Ruthie. What’s the secret?”

He never could quite believe it. Or rather, his disbelief and his envy were always chasing each other in bemused, teasing circles. That I, a little squirt, a little studious runt, should run off with a night-club performer. Even the noble founder of Ellison Plastics (UK), who had once banished me from his sight, had to admit that this showed some gump, and was an action, furthermore, not a little after his own heart. And then the little runt goes and marries the night-club performer. Who turns out to be an actress. Who turns out to be a famous actress. And year after happy year he lives in married harmony with a star of stage and screen, and there is not a sign, not a whisper, of the thing breaking up. I don’t know which affected him more: amazement at my initiative, respect for this miracle of constancy, or jealousy at my entrée into a world (as he saw it) of fabled adulterous opportunity.

“Come on — you can tell your Uncle Sam. Things still sweet between you two?”

As if his own opportunities had been, by this time, so few or so little seized upon. You see, pal … (I summarize, I paraphrase the little heart-to-heart that followed his pool-side inquisition, in reply to which I was not able to give him much enlightenment.) You see, some of us like to put all our eggs in one basket and some of us like to hedge our bets. You see, a little adultery makes this adulterated world go round, as well as love pure and true.…

I might have told him, but I didn’t (and now, anyway, it seems it wasn’t so simple), that it can also bring the world to a pretty smart halt. Or had he forgotten that spring day in Paris?