Ever After by Graham Swift Page B

is resistant to electricity; but it is not uninflammable. It burns with a spluttering, tenacious flame and a thick, black smoke reminiscent of burning oil. Thus a plastic plane can be destroyed as well as built with a good deal of verisimilitude.
    The propeller, then the engine cowling, ignited, filling my bedroom with evil fumes, of which Sam and my motherhad so far no inkling. Holding the plane with the bold patience of a grenade thrower, I waited till the flames—the propeller already a bubbling goo—began to lick the cockpit and the little trapped pilot. Then, standing before the open window and throwing back my arm, I hurled it up and out, so that it soared first high over the heads of Sam and my mother, then plummeted downwards, with a remarkably realistic smoke-trailing effect, to crash just a few feet in front of them on the lawn, one wing dislodged, but still ablaze.
    I went to the window—partly because it was my intention to be brazen, partly in order to gasp for air. I heard my mother’s startled “Good God!”; Sam’s “What the—?!” They both leapt from their seats. My mother tried to beat out the fire with a hastily folded
News of the World
, while Sam, telling her to get out the way, took the lid from the coffeepot and emptied its contents over the wreckage. Only then did they look up. My mother was a picture of exasperated accusation, as if I had simply spoilt a promising day, but Sam was already making for the house in an unprecedented rage. I sat calmly on my bed. He appeared in the doorway, and checked himself momentarily—either because my composure unnerved him or because of the fog of smoke filling the room. As he paused I had time to see—through the murk—that though his face was twisted with anger, it was also blanched with horror. It was the look of a man whose direct thoughts, whose worst fears, have been exposed.
    “You little son of a bitch!” he yelled. “You little goddam son of a bitch!”
    Through the open window my mother must have heard. And I wonder now how much Sam supposed he was uttering the truth.

7
 
    But I have not told you yet about complication number three. I have not told you the third reason why my reception here has been such a mixed affair. I am referring now to my pretensions in the field (forget, for a moment, the Pearce manuscripts) which is properly my own. Namely, English Literature.
    This is not a simple case, I should make clear, of inadequacy on the one hand and condescension on the other. I am not unequipped. I have read some books in my time, and I was for some ten years, as I may already have hinted, a lecturer in English at the University of London. Even when I abandoned that to become Ruth’s manager—a move which earned me at first as many frowns in the theatrical world as my reappearance now in the world of scholarship has done—I did not lapse. I was—you may have noticed, if you ever looked closely at your theatre programmes—a “literary consultant” (whatever that means) to certain productions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and not merely those in which Ruth appeared.
    In short, the love which Tubby Baxter fired in me has never faded. There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on—a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. Even when I left it to enter—what? the real world? the theatre?—I acted with shrewd and miserly husbandry. I made sure there was a good stock of that other world still stored in the barn (the little library I set up in our Sussexcottage—while Ruth learnt her parts). Waiting for winter. I paid the real world the solemn respect of supposing it might not be real, and I paid happiness the compliment of supposing it might not last. “Call no man happy …” Isn’t that what literature says?
    I did all these things. And, you see, I was right, I was prepared. But none of it helps you. Not one little bit.
    So when Sam came up with his