Ever After by Graham Swift

question still stands: how much was Ellison Plastics my mother’s work?), and thus enjoy, in her mellower years, with a little diplomatic flexibility (the biological overdrive was an ongoing thing), both the rewards and the control.
    An image of Sam, indelible in the memory, from one of those weekends during our first months back in England. A sultry summer’s night; I get up to fetch a glass of water: Sam on the landing, stark naked, caught between bedroom and bathroom, and in a state of livid tumescence. He drops a hand in almost maidenly alarm. He says, “Oh, hi, Billy,” with a kind of strangulated nonchalance, as if we have met on some street corner. Never thereafter is the encounter mentioned by either of us.
    And he would have died, so it seems, “in action,” in mid-erection, even in mid—
    Sam, Sam. Led by his prick to his perdition. Switched off but still plugged in. Mr Plastic. Mr Plastic?
    Only when the image of my ballet girls faded did grief for my father emerge to take its place. Or rather, not grief itself (what did I know
then
about grief?), but a nagging, self-pitying, self-accusing emotion born of the guilt at not feeling grief (how could I sigh over young sylphs in tutus when my own father was dead?) and out of a mood of redundancy, which it occurred to me my father must have felt too. There were Sam and my mother testing the springs of a new double bed, and there was I, an adjunct, an accessory, a supernumerary. This had been my father’s position. I stood in his vacant place. And out of this ghostly identification I began to summon a father I had never really known: noble, virtuous, wronged.
    I’d like to think I wasn’t as slow as I was in opening my account of vengeance; that at least by that day the India photos were removed, I had taken my first vow of retribution; and that if I took such a vow, it was as authentic and spontaneous as the pang that prompted it. But I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure if our passions seek out models of behaviour or if models of behaviour are the springs of our passions. It was a while before the first blow was struck.
    When I was eleven I went to a new school. I expected to excel in French. Instead, I excelled in English; I took comfort in books. I’d like to think that the love of literature which fell into my life around this time, and which one day would embolden me to snub Sam’s patrimony of plastic, was a pure and genuine love, lighting my darkened and orphaned days. But I cannot be sure. I cannot be sure which came first: the love of literature, which ensured I would cherish the play; or the play, which guaranteed I would venerate literature. In any case, my English master, as you know, was Tubby Baxter: a thin and cadaverous man, naturally, thus having the air now and then of a haunted and death-obsessed Renaissance hero. And theplay, which you might have guessed if I hadn’t already told you, was
Hamlet
.
    So what should I have done. Drawn my poniard and stabbed his unguarded back? “Now might I do it pat …”
    What I actually did was this.…
    Sam believed in gifts. He persistently showered them on me, not merely on birthdays and special occasions—gifts that were so transparently aimed at winning my filial allegiance that it was a simple matter to rebuff him with formal gratitude and immediate neglect of the article in question. These gifts tended to have a masculine and practical as well as an American bias. So I received a
Walt Disney Super Annual
as well as a chemistry set and the inevitable trains (but here he hit a genuine soft spot and nearly weakened my resolve: before there were ballet-dancers, you see, there were trains).
    One day I was handed a gift that, even in this tiresome succession of bribes, I appreciated was special. It was a model-aircraft kit. That is, a
plastic
, scale-model aircraft kit of a type soon to flood the British market. This, however, was a kit of American origin, in a large, spectacular box. Inside the