The Light of Day: A Novel by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

bed.
    He’d have looked at the garden, at the trees, beyond, in other gardens, screening other houses all around. The first berries. Spiders’ webs glinting. But even out there he might have heard the sobs, somehow tugging at his own chest, and as he paced he might even have peered through the kitchen window and met his wife’s eyes (Kristina’s head buried under her chin) staring steadily back at him.
    I know what he’d have thought: a thought that had never occurred to him before then. The nape of Kristina’s turned, shuddering neck. That he couldn’t do it, could he? It wouldn’t be permitted, would it? That simple, obvious and healing thing Sarah was doing. Put his arms around her.

11
    She brought in the photos the following Tuesday. It’s true, it’s better that way. The file in my head. The less such things have to pass in the mail between me and my clients the better. Suppose everything turned out just as she wished—but then he discovered that all along he’d been watched.
    They cross a line, it’s not a simple line. They’re the injured party, but they’re spying on their husband. Up to something too.
    They enter a little web of deceit.
    It’s true, I didn’t really need the photos. I had to follow a man and a woman in a car. It made me seem scrupulous. It meant she might call by my office again.
    She knows all this by now: the days when I got her to visit me.
    She came late in the afternoon, direct from her classes again. A Tuesday—Tuesday and Friday afternoons: English classes. And was this another afternoon when, right then, at the Fulham flat . . . ?
    Almost five-thirty. Dark outside. The way people change on a second, a third meeting, as if the air around them changes as well. She must have been carrying those photos with her all day—her husband and her husband’s lover tucked up inside that shoulder-bag.
    If I’d been a fool I might have said to Rita: “It’s okay, off you go . . .”
    She had something more than the photos: the date and the flight. (So I had the job.) There was a light in her eyes when she told me, a small brief flush. I saw how she might look—must have looked once often enough—when real happiness washed over her face. Her glance by the Fine Foods section: What’s it tonight?
    Maybe I had the thought: she looks like she’s about to be released.
    It was to be a Monday evening, in three weeks’ time, Monday 20th of November. The girl was to fly to Geneva to be officially cleared as a returning refugee. Then on to Zagreb.
    How did this work? “Officially cleared”? It had all been openly arranged? Her husband had shown her the ticket—as proof, as pledge? Or just said? It wasn’t his ticket, of course. But then there might have been two—or none.
    Geneva. That might mean anywhere.
    But all these things she must have thought through herself. Why was she sitting there, why had she come again, if anything was sure?
    I said, “You’ve seen the ticket?”
    “She’s got it.”
    I looked at her. There are ways of checking if someone’s on a passenger list.
    “The flight exists. Seven-thirty—in the evening. And I’ve checked—she’s on it. Just her.”
    So, a detective too—a detective glow in her face. But he might always book a ticket for himself meanwhile. And if you wanted—what’s the word?—to abscond, elope, disappear, you might go to some pains to cover your tracks. Even buy an air ticket you never intended to use.
    She’d thought of it all, all the possibilities. All the same, there was this brightness about her. This was really happening. A release? A verdict at any rate. The look of a bright, hard-working student waiting for a result. I felt for a moment as if I was her teacher now.
    I thought of Helen, when she was young. How she hated me.
    “And you’ve brought the photos?”
    “Yes.” She unzipped the shoulder-bag. Her homework, ready for handing in.
    She took out a stiff-backed envelope, pulled out the photos and put them on my desk,