Here We Are

by Graham Swift

  ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT

  Mothering Sunday

  England and Other Stories

  Wish You Were Here

  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

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Graham Swift

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britian by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., London, in 2020.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Swift, Graham, author.

  Title: Here we are / Graham Swift.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029610 | ISBN 9780525658054 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525658061 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6069.W47 H47 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019029610

  Ebook ISBN 9780525658061

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph © Darrell Gulin/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Graham Swift

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Here We Are

  A Note About the Author

  For Sonny, in memory

  It’s life’s illusions I recall

  —Joni Mitchell

  Jack paused in the wings. He knew how to delay his entrance by just the critical number of seconds. He was calm. He was twenty-eight, but he was already a veteran, twelve years on stage, not counting a year and a half in the army. Timing was in the blood, think about it and you were lost.

  He patted his bow tie, raised a hand to his mouth and politely cleared his throat, as if about to do no more than enter a room. He smoothed back his hair. Now that the house lights were down he could hear the gradually thickening murmur, like something coming to a boil.

  It did not happen very often, but now it happened. The sudden giving way of his stomach, the panic, vertigo, revulsion. He did not have to do this thing: turn into someone else. It posed the paralysing question of who he was in the first place, and the answer was simple. He was nobody. Nobody.

  And where was he? He was nowhere. He was on a flimsy structure built over swirling water. Normally he didn’t think about it. Now his own legs might have turned to useless struts of rusting iron, clamped in sand. Above all there was the concern that no one should see this, know that he suffered in this way.

  No one ever would. In fifty years no one ever would.

  He checked his flies for the fourth or fifth time, so that now it was a mere fingering of the air.

  He needed someone to push him, to give the brutal shove in his back. Only one person could ever do it: his mother. No one would ever know this either. Every night, every time, still her unseen shove. He barely noticed it and barely thought to thank her.

  Where was she tonight? As far as he knew, she was with a man called Carter, her second husband she called him, a garage owner in Croydon. And good luck to her. But it hadn’t stopped her giving him, all these years, her invisible push in the back. Sometimes even, he imagined, invisible again among the seats in the dark, her watching, approving eye.

  That’s my Jack, that’s my brilliant boy.

  A garage owner—called Carter. I ask you, folks, I ask you. There was a theatre in Croydon called The Grand. He had played there, pantomime. Buttons. Had she come, secretly, with Mr Carter—smelling of car engines and thinking: Bloody Cinderella? That’s my boy Jack.

  Now he was a boy of twenty-eight and already an old stager, wearing like a second skin this black-and-white get-up that was the outdated rig of showmen, conmen, masqueraders everywhere. These days they were wearing jeans and leather jackets, and twanging guitars. Well, that had come too late for him. For him it was the cane and the boater and the tap shoes. ‘And now, folks—don’t scream too loudly, girls—it’s the sensational Rockabye Boys!’ As if he were their fucking uncle. But he had the looks (he knew it), the grin and the lock of hair—he swept it back again—that could flop forward and knock ’em dead (on and off stage, incidentally).

  If he could just get on stage in the first place.

  As for her ‘first husband’, there was a man who was truly nobody, truly nowhere: his father. But in between—and it had been a long in-between—she had gone on stage herself, what a cruel bastard business. Think about it and you were lost. And who did she have to push her?

  No one must see this, no one must know. He could hear the rising murmur waiting to engulf him. He must breathe, breathe. ‘Don’t cry, Cinders.’ Now he had only himself to push himself, but how was he to do it? Cross the line, step over the edge.

  * * *

  —

  Jack was compere that season (his second) and Ronnie and Evie had the first spot after the interval. It was thanks to Jack that they were in the show at all, and the first spot after the interval was a good one to have. When everything changed, fell apart that August they moved up to last spot of all, not counting Jack’s own end-of-show routine.

  They’d moved by then up the billing too. People were coming specially to see them. The billboards even started to carry pasted-on fliers with such stuff as ‘Come and See with Your Own Eyes!’ Jack had said, ‘Who else’s eyes would it be then?’ But his quips weren’t so many by those days. His public quips continued. Have you heard the one about the garage owner’s wife? The show must go on.

  ‘You’re in Brighton, folks, so bloody well brighten up!’

  It went on through to early September, and the public only saw the marvel of the thing, the talked-about thing. Then the show was over and the talked-about thing was no more than that, it could only ever exist in the memories of those who’d seen it, with their own eyes, in those few summer weeks. Then those memories would themselves fade. They might wonder anyway if they really had seen it.

  Other things were over too. Ronnie and Evie, having had a remarkable debut, coming from nowhere to achieve summer fame and having secured for themselves, it would seem, future bookings, even a whole career, never appeared on stage again. Ronnie never appeared again at all.

  According to Eddie Costello, one of the local ‘Arts and Entertainments’ hacks, writing only a month or so before, the couple—and they were a real couple—had ‘taken Brighton by storm’. Possibly overstated at the time, it was now only half the story and no longer a mere Arts and Entertainments one.

  Evie finally took off her engagement ring. It had been another case of the show must go on. In the days when his quips were free in coming Jack had cracked that they were engaged to do the summer season, they didn’t have to get engaged to each other too. Though clearly they had. The engagement ring, with its single sparkling gem, was even a visible complement—tiny but visible—to her silv
ery costume. How would it have looked if she’d taken it off before the show came to an end? And it was, like any such ring, a guarantee. If it all worked out, and surely it would, they would get married that September when the show closed and take a honeymoon—preferably not in Brighton.

  Or perhaps Evie had hoped that by carrying on wearing the ring the whole thing might revert to what it had been. Everything might be redeemed. She hadn’t given it back to Ronnie. Ronnie hadn’t asked for it back. He hadn’t said anything. Let the ring itself decide.

  One day that September, after the show had finished and after the police had said she was free to leave Brighton, she did the obvious thing. She went to the end of the pier, took off the ring and threw it in the sea. She never told Jack. Even then she’d thought, without knowing how her life would turn out, that doing this with the ring might somehow have brought everything back. Might even have brought Ronnie back.

  * * *

  —

  It was a regular seaside holiday show. Variety. Anything from acrobats to the up-and-coming Rockabye Boys to the no longer up-and-coming yet ample Doris Lane, sometimes known as the ‘Mistress of Melody’, sometimes (in cheeky reference to one of her rivals) as the ‘Forces Fiancée’. Anything from jugglers and plate-spinners to ‘Lord Archibald’, who came on holding a large teddy bear—‘hand up its arse’ as Jack put it—which he would talk to, and the teddy bear would talk back with a considerable gift for repartee. Throughout that season they would hold conversations on the unfolding state of the world—what Macmillan should have said to Eisenhower and so on. On occasion they might even ‘become’ Macmillan and Eisenhower, or Khrushchev and de Gaulle. It was the funniest thing, a teddy bear talking like General de Gaulle.

  But it was all held together by Jack as compere. The impression was that it was his show. They came to be taken under his wing and it wouldn’t have been the same without him. Your pal for the night, your host with the most. Off stage he’d say he was just the oil in the wheels—the oilier the better. But it was no small task.

  He was Jack Robinson in those days, as in ‘before you can say’. Some patter, some gags, some of them smutty, a bit of singing, some dancing, some tapping of his heels. He did the introductions and links, but also a few numbers of his own and always appeared at the end to wind up the show and do his farewell routine.

  The important thing was to send them all out with their holiday mood endorsed, feeling they’d had their money’s worth, they’d had a good time, making them even feel they might sing and dance a bit themselves. For many of them, an evening at the pier show was the highlight.

  ‘And so, folks, this is your old mate Jack Robinson saying goodnight and sweet dreams, whoever she is. And here’s a little song to see you on your way. I think you know which one it is. Maestro—if you please!

  When the red, red robin ...’

  If the audience felt so moved, they might sing along. Or when they went out, to the lights and the sound and smell of the sea again, they might indeed find themselves, as they strolled with happy feet along the boards, singing in their heads, or even out loud, snatches of that song.

  I’m just a kid again doing what I did again!

  It was August 1959.

  * * *

  —

  When Ronnie and Evie moved to final spot, pipping even the Rockabye Boys, Jack’s goodnight routine became, in more ways than one, a little trickier. Why had Ronnie and Evie moved to final spot? Because, while the show must go on, there was another theatrical law that said: save till last anything that might be hard to follow. But not to have had Jack’s closing number would have been unthinkable, even changed the nature of the show. So on he would come, after all the applause for Ronnie and Evie had died away, having to adapt his farewell patter. He would have his hands raised and pressed together, as if having shared the applause, or in prayerful salute. He would get out his white handkerchief to mop his brow. He would put a sly twist on his having been upstaged.

  ‘Well didn’t I tell you, boys and girls, didn’t I say? Now all you’ve got is me. Back down to earth, eh?’

  He would drape the handkerchief over his hand and shake it, as if giving it commands. He would turn to the audience and shrug.

  The note of clownish companionship was struck. They were in his palm again. It was a skill. Even in those days you could see the man was not just good looks and greasepaint.

  Eddie Costello, who was to go on to write for the News of the World, would always claim he’d seen it, even if at the time it was Ronnie and Evie he’d picked out.

  In the dressing room Ronnie and Evie, turning back into their normal selves, might hear the band striking up and the audience singing along with Jack. They would not sing along themselves. They might not even speak to each other. Or they might try to. The audience who had seen them, only moments ago, bringing about a wonder, would not guess at this off-stage inadequacy.

  Years, even decades later, when Jack had long since ceased to be Jack Robinson—who could even remember that fleeting figure?—when he was just Jack Robbins again, though some spoke of his one day being Sir Jack Robbins, he was apt to say in interviews, with lordly modesty, ‘Actor? Oh, just an old song-and-dance man me.’ And he could still sing to himself, playing the part, his one-time song. Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head! And he could still give, if he wished, his end-of-the-pier wink and flashing grin, both fully visible and almost catchable from the back row.

  * * *

  —

  Jack, Ronnie and Evie could often have been seen that summer in the Walpole Arms. They would form a lopsided trio, Jack and the couple, or, more often, a lopsided group of four—Ronnie and Evie, the engaged couple, and Jack with whatever compliant but temporary girl, name soon to be forgotten, might happen at that point to be hanging on his arm.

  Now, as August moved towards September, neither the threesome nor foursome was in evidence. If Ronnie and Evie were finding conversation hard, then Jack and Ronnie were not speaking much either. Yet all this was while Ronnie and Evie had shot up the billing and Ronnie, thanks again to Jack, had even acquired a theatrical title that Jack himself (who would never be Sir Jack either) would never acquire.

  And Lord Archibald and his teddy bear had no difficulty in talking to each other at all.

  Jack and Ronnie went back some years. They’d met when doing their time in the army. Both had, quite separately, challenged the military authorities by putting down as their civilian occupations in Jack’s case not ‘song-and-dance man’ but ‘comedian’ and in Ronnie’s ‘magician’. In neither case were they dishonest or—even in Jack’s—joking.

  The army might have found all kinds of ways to punish them for their facetiousness, or alternatively attached them to one of their troop-entertainment units. It did something in between. It didn’t send them on endless muddy exercises, but, taking them to be delicate artistic creatures, consigned them to quasi-civilian drudgery. It became their duty, as Jack would put it later, to guard and defend at all costs the Royal Corps of Signals’ filing system.

  It was not so cruel of the army, which might, after all, have dispatched them to somewhere where they could have got shot. They actually had most weekends off. As Jack would describe it in the Walpole, embellishing for Evie some of the stages in Ronnie’s life that Ronnie seemed not to have fleshed out himself, it was every weekday in Blandford—‘in the green bosom of Dorset’—and every weekend up to town, to maintain, in one form or another, their show-business links.

  ‘Never mind the Signals, Evie. We were the BEF. Back every Friday.’

  During this period Jack became known for his ability to entertain the whole hut, before lights out, with vivid impersonations (he might have become a Lord Archibald) of almost any officer who’d come their way, and Ronnie became known as a man you played cards with at your peril. He might not only win, but suddenly turn the game into something
else altogether.

  After the army they’d kept up their connection and even become for a while an ill-fated double act. A comedian-cum-song-and-dance man and a magician? It was never going to work. But it was Jack who, some time after the amicable split and when he’d advanced considerably as a solo performer, had come to the aid of his friend’s still-struggling career. When he’d signed up to compere the Brighton show for a second season (quite a coup) and thus to have some influence with the management, he’d said to Ronnie, ‘Get yourself an assistant and I could fix you up with a spot next summer.’

  It was not necessary for Jack to say that by assistant he meant female assistant. It was not necessary for him to spell out that magic was a fine thing—what else was magic but magical?—but magic and glamour, now you were talking.

  Ronnie hadn’t disagreed. This was 1958. He was a magician, but he’d learnt some of the unenchanting truths of the entertainment business. This was a chance to jump at. But his other response was also realistic. Hire an assistant, let alone a glamorous assistant? What with? He was close to penniless.

  But all this was not long before Eric Lawrence, formerly known as ‘Lorenzo’ (and often in Ronnie’s mind as simply ‘The Wizard’), suddenly died.

  * * *

  —

  Jack and Evie had not crossed paths before, but they were two of a kind and might quickly have spotted this in each other. The three soon became pals. It was natural. Ronnie and Evie owed to Jack that they were there at all—even, it could be said, that they had become engaged. Thus Jack himself had woven a kind of magic.

  He put it differently to Ronnie: ‘I only said get an assistant.’

  Jack was not the getting-engaged type, though if he didn’t join Ronnie and Evie in the Walpole it would usually be because he was otherwise engaged with some girl. Sometimes the girl would join them. The girl would be only too aware of being up against the regular core of three and thus of her own incidental status, but as Evie put it once to Ronnie, ‘At least she was having her turn.’ These passing girls, since they all blended into one, began to be known by Ronnie and Evie as ‘Flora’. Who is Flora this week? Their real names didn’t seem much to signify.