He’d just disappeared. He was never seen again. It’s a magician’s prerogative and ultimate recourse perhaps.
‘And you really can’t think, Miss White, you’re absolutely sure, of any reason why . . .?’
No, she couldn’t. No. Didn’t know or just wasn’t telling? And to Jack she had to say the same thing, though in a different and more agonised way, ‘Don’t ask me, don’t ask me. How should I know?’
Which is just what she might have said to Ronnie when he came back that day from seeing his dead mother, when he’d looked into her eyes and she’d known what he’d seen there. ‘Don’t ask me, Ronnie, don’t ask me.’
He was never found, he’d just disappeared. Which meant of course that no one actually knew. Or ever would. He was like his own poor father who was only ever officially listed as missing. So, in theory . . .
Soon enough the police lost interest. There was no corpse, no crime. There was scarcely any evidence of anything at all. He was a grown man, not a lost child (and Brighton every summer had its fair share of those). To vanish was not illegal.
And it was not for the police, even while their investigations were intense, to note the simultaneous cooling off—though it was more like a jolt, a shakenness—in the relations of Evie White, Ronnie Dean’s distressed assistant and fiancée, and Jack Robbins, compere of the show.
When Jack went up to London Evie knew it was as much to enable a contrite separation as anything else. They spoke on the phone, when they might have spoken in his bed, in his digs where once the lightning flashes had lit the curtains. When he phoned she thought of Ronnie’s call from London barely a month before. Under police restriction, if not exactly under detention, she kept to her own digs, to the bed that had been hers and Ronnie’s but was now just hers. How dreadful was that time. How dreadfully, decades later, it would loom in her memory.
Yet when the police wound up their inquiry and said she was free to travel, there she was again, and thankfully, in Jack’s bed. Two final nights in Brighton, their fortnight’s mutual avoidance like the quaint agreement of couples not to see each other on the eve of a wedding.
• • •
He would be seventy-eight now, Ronnie Deane. Or the Great Pablo. He might at any time just walk through the door.
But then she has had that same thought too, and too many times to count, about Jack. It’s one of the temptations, the tortures of grief. Any moment now . . . But how could you bear it, live with it, without that teasing, rescuing illusion?
‘You know, Evie,’ George had said, ‘I think he could just walk into this restaurant right now and sit right here at this table.’
Her eyes had sprung with tears. He saw at once it had been a big mistake to say it. He put a gentle hand on her wrist. Out from his breast pocket came the silk handkerchief.
‘No, George, it’s all right. I think it myself. All the bloody time.’ She’d given a brave little laugh. ‘Sometimes I think I can hear him say, “I fooled you all, didn’t I?” ’
And sometimes, she might have said to George, she’d thought he really had walked back into the house. Or someone had. She might have called out—perhaps she really had—quite simply and naturally and unalarmed, as if time had simply somersaulted backwards, ‘Jack, is that you?’
And if Jack, then why not Ronnie? Would it be so extraordinary, given what he’d given his life to?
‘Hello, Evie. It’s been a while. Here I am. Here we are.’
She is feeling very tired. The evening is fading outside. The leaves on the crab-apple are losing their colour. She hasn’t put on any lights and even her own face in the mirror seems ghostly. And was that really him she’d seen behind her? She might just take a nap, a little nap. Such a demanding day. She takes off her blouse and skirt and leaves them in a puddle on the chair. She slips under the duvet as if under a receiving wave. She drifts off to sleep very quickly, but before she does—or perhaps it’s a dream—she puts out an arm and feels the warm familiar weight. So it’s all right, everything is all right, he’s still there.
About the Author
© Janus van den Eijnden
Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.
Also by Graham Swift
The Sweet Shop Owner
Shuttlecock
Learning to Swim
Waterland
Out of This World
Ever After
Last Orders
The Light of Day
Tomorrow
Making an Elephant
Wish You Were Here
England and Other Stories
Mothering Sunday
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