Graham Swift - Out of This World

How long — a second? two seconds? — before I pulled the door softly to again? Should I have burst in? Action. Drama. Pieces flying everywhere. I thought: This is happening, before your eyes. Afterwards, you won’t believe it. Take the picture.

Then I turned. Then I crept down the passage. Past other doors. Past our room. Our room? Number seven. Then I walked, like a sleep-walker, down the creaking staircase, holding the banister very tightly. Along the downstairs passage, past the lounge where they were serving cream teas, out on to the terrace where the sun was starting to break through again and the breeze was rattling the rope on the flagpole. And I was thinking all the time: This wasn’t me. I’d left me behind. I had left my heart in a hotel in Cornwall. In an English seaside hotel with chintz armchairs and cream teas and dinner gongs. Locked it up and walked away. In a room in a holiday hotel where the sea air blew in and you could hear the waves at night and in the morning you could see fishing boats chugging out after lobsters, and Anna had said with a laugh, the first time we came, it was like a hotel in Agatha Christie, and our daughter slept in a little adjoining room with a party-door, so love-making had to be well timed and circumspect.

Past the flagpole. Down the zig-zagging steps. How long ago? How far away was this beach? There you were, kneeling by the rug, looking up. Stella being Mummy. I hadn’t thought what to say. How my face might look. But Stella had this repentant expression, as if she understood something.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Harry. It was here all the time. Right at the bottom of my bag.’ And she held up a book. A well-thumbed paperback. On its cover, a couple in torn safari jackets, locked in torrid embrace.

‘Did you see Frank?’

‘No.’

‘And how’s Anna?’

He said, ‘I never knew she was pregnant.’

‘Only six weeks. She was going — she told me this — to get rid of it. Then she got that telegram from Greece. There wasn’t any time. She hadn’t seen her uncle for seven years.’

‘And that was the first you knew about it?’

‘Yes. How did you know? She told you?’

He eyed his glass.

‘No. Let’s just say I knew. Saw what I saw.’ We looked at each other. ‘You were away so much, don’t forget. Taking pictures.’

I thought: You old bastard.

‘Yes, I was away. Which is how I knew it couldn’t have been me who made her pregnant.’

‘And as I recall, you were even more eager, that winter, to get as far away as possible. The further, the better. The more dangerous, the better. You never thought of telling me?’

‘That’s immaterial now. Why didn’t you tell me ?’

He lowered his eyes. Raised them again.

He said, ‘All the same, why did you never tell me?’

‘She was dead, wasn’t she?’

He held his gaze on me. I didn’t say anything. Maybe he saw my thought — or, rather, that I didn’t have the thought he was looking for. Maybe he was looking for more than one thought.

‘Frank?’ he said.

‘I could put that same point to you too, couldn’t I? I never did a thing. What do you think he thinks — that nobody ever found out?’ I laughed. ‘Oh, I wanted to kill him. That’s all. I mean, spectacularly kill him. I still have this fantasy. Like to hear it? I’m in this plane. Just me, the plane, and one bomb for Frank. One bomb. I’m coming in low over Surrey. I’m homing in on Frank’s house. It’s a Sunday morning and he’s at home. He runs out on to his lawn, and first he thinks it’s a joke, then he throws up his hands in horror. I fire my guns, just to let him know it’s business. Then I swoop down and let the bomb go smack into him.’

He wasn’t shocked by this. Nor did he smile. He said, with a poker face, ‘You know, I have to consider the security of my senior executives.’

‘Especially in your business.’

‘Especially in my business.’

‘Don’t worry. The revenge is already taken care of. He’s where I never wanted to be, isn’t he?’

He said, ‘I know.’

Then he said, ‘But there’s no logic in that, you know. He’s in his element. He knows a damn sight more about the Company now than I do. He’s a good MD. He’ll be a good chairman.’

‘But you’d rather have had me?’

‘No. I don’t feel that now. Not now.’

He looked at the silent pictures on the TV.

He said, ‘You know, if someone had said to me when I was ten years old that in my lifetime men would land on the moon — not only that, but I’d watch them do it — I’d have said they were mad.’

I said, ‘How do we know they’re really there? It could all be happening in some studio mock-up. It could all be a trick to con the Russians. To know, you’d have to go yourself.’

‘I mean it, Harry. He knows more about it than I do. It’s not simple stuff any more.’

‘You mean, not nice, clean, simple ways of killing people?’

He said nothing. As if he hadn’t heard. Perhaps he thought: This is an old routine. We’ve been through this routine before.

He said, ‘Let’s get some air.’

We opened the French windows. The garden was still. A slight rustling in the trees. The moon had disappeared and the sun was just catching the tops of the cedars. A scent of honeysuckle. I thought: Four weeks ago I was with the Marines in the A Shau, in the wake of the Hamburger Hill carnage. Fucked-up and far from home. Or, as one hollow-faced Marine lieutenant, who was at the frivolous stage, put it: Dug-in, doped-up, demoralized or dead. They were still there now, like the men on the moon who we couldn’t see, though we could stare at the sky. And I was in a Surrey garden.

We strolled to the end of the terrace. As we turned, I wanted to do that simple but rare thing and take his arm. He had been on my right, so now was on my left. But just for a moment I forgot and my hand felt the hard metal beneath his sleeve. I suppose he felt nothing. But perhaps in that ever-replaced arm, over the years, he had developed some obscure sense of touch.

He said, ‘I’ve never told you, have I?’

Dear Harry. Dear husband Harry …

I was born in Drama. But I was brought up in Paradise. Though they say that it’s all spoilt now. Even Thassos. The tourists have come and invaded, each one of them wanting their piece of paradise, and you wouldn’t recognize now, as you wouldn’t recognize a thousand places in Greece, the little bay and the hollow in the hillside amongst the pines where, when my uncle first saw it there was only a solitary summer-house with its weathered stucco and balcony, its terraced garden, its well under a canopy of vines, and the name above the lintel, chosen back in Turkish times by my Aunt Panayiota’s first husband, who must have been a happy, uninventive man: ‘The Villa Paradise’.

But paradise is never where you think. It’s always somewhere you once were and never knew at the time, or somewhere you never guessed you might find it. And Uncle Spiro never thought that his villa was paradise, even before the war. He thought paradise was England.

Paradise was once a shabby apartment off a street called Küfergasse in the middle of a ruined city. And yet you never knew how often, in that room where we found so much joy, I had wept. Not for the fate of mankind. Though I suppose people must have wept for that, in Nuremberg. But for the fate of Anna Vouatsis, orphan and virgin of one-and-twenty, who had made her way all alone — clutching the credentials of an official translator to the International Military Tribunal, afraid of bandits, afraid of her own conscience — from the country of her birth, where (but this was her secret) she never intended to return.