Ever After (33 page)

“No, that’s all right—we’ll manage.”

“Only we don’t like our guests”—a piano-key smile—“to miss any trains.”

She holds out, dangling from a wooden bobble, the key to number thirty-two (ever afterwards a magic number). And before any smirking porter can intervene (but there is no porter, it’s not that sort of place), they turn with their bogus bags to mount the stairs—where with each flight, the carpet and paintwork get progressively dingier, while, as if to compensate, excitement flares between them.

You have to picture the scene. How it was then, on a wet August night in 1957, in the days before she was famous. The room looks over the street. The backcloth, beyond the window, is the inky shimmer of London under rain. But the curtains are soon drawn, and almost as soon, it seems, clothes are removed, plucked, pulled, yanked from impatient flesh. He had not expected it quite, this frenzy and breathlessness to be unclad, as if some off-stage voice, some prompter’s whisper, should have gently enjoined: take your time, you have all night. Nor was he prepared for the arresting candour, the simplicity and amazement, of nakedness. And this, you see, is me. And this is me.

He was not prepared, either, for the tender and inspired fluency (as if to complete the candour) with which each one of them offers the other on this indelible night the complete and unabridged story of their lives up until this point. His is a strangely dramatic tale (though he doesn’t know the half of it yet), full of comedy and tragedy in the
romantic streets of Paris, and hers is a tale of the obscure London suburbs. But it is she who will be the actress, who will be the Queen of the Nile.

And so it is that he tells her, what he has never told anyone before, about his—father. That he took his life.

Rain patters on the window (tomorrow will be bright and new). There is faded, flowery wallpaper, a rickety wardrobe, a wash-stand that gurgles shamelessly in the dark.

How strange, how incomprehensible, that whispered phrase. How unreal, even as he speaks it. How impossible that either of these young people, whose lives, this night, have never been so richly possessed, so richly embraced, will ever come to such a pass. He took his life, he took his life.

Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner

G
RAHAM
S
WIFT
was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels:
The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock
, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize;
Waterland
, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour;
Out of This World; Ever After
, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger;
Last Orders
, which was awarded the Booker Prize;
The Light of Day;
and, most recently,
Tomorrow
. He is also the author of
Learning to Swim
, a collection of short stories, and
Making an Elephant
, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other,
The Light of Day
is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.

Fiction/Literature

Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.

Fiction/Literature

This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.

Fiction/Literature

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force,
Ever After
spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of
Ever After
is nothing less than the eternal question, “Why should things matter?” as pondered by both Bill Unwin and his Victorian ancestor, whose private notebooks reveal a quest for truth that bears eerie—and ultimately heartbreaking—parallels to Unwin’s own.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74026-1

Out of This World
interweaves the history of a blighted family with the tragic and ludicrous history of the twentieth century. Its alternating narrators are a father and daughter—each obsessed with the other and irrevocably estranged—surveying their losses and grievances on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their voices are unforgettable, their hurts terribly moving, and their vision of our era, like Swift’s itself, shocking and terribly persuasive.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74032-2

Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish masterpiece, catalogs “dead crimes” for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic taunts. His family despises him. And as Prentis desperately tries to hold on to the scraps of his sanity, he uncovers a conspiracy of blackmail and betrayal that extends from his department and into the buried past of his father, a war hero codenamed “Shuttlecock”—and, lately, a resident of a hospital for the insane. At once a fiendishly devious mystery and a profound reckoning of the debts that bind sons to fathers,
Shuttlecock
is a brilliantly accomplished work of fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73933-3

The men and women in these spare, almost Kafkaesque stories are engaged in struggles that are no less brutal because they are fought by proxy. The mismatched couple in the title story wages a covert, sexually charged battle for the allegiance of their hapless son. An aging doctor punishes a hypochondriacal patient for his wife’s adultery. A teenage refugee is swept up in the conflict between an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son. In Graham Swift’s taut prose, these quietly combative relationships become a microcosm for all human cruelty and need.

Fiction/Short Stories

Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some two hundred and forty years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors,
Waterland
is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history, and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

Fiction/Literature

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