Tomorrow (16 page)

25

AND, OF COURSE,
I can see him in
you.
I don’t have to look for him randomly in the street, on trains. He’s there before my eyes, invisibly, every time I look at you. And from tomorrow, I’m sure, that mirror-gazing of yours will suddenly get rather serious.

You don’t have grey-blue eyes. You have, as has often been innocently observed, your mother’s dark brown, green-shot eyes, her nose, her cheekbones: but your father’s mobile mouth, your father’s expressions. Despite those specifications we made, it would seem that it was my genes, predominantly, that kicked in. Your dad has clear-blue eyes. We ordered
them
certainly, the same again, please. So you should know that Mr. Sperm, or whatever you choose to call him, has blue eyes too. But it didn’t work out that way, you got my eyes. Which didn’t stop people from saying, as if the other fifty per cent must be glowingly apparent somewhere else: Ah, but that’s their dad’s smile.

This is the strangest thing—how you’ve conspired, yourselves, in the conspiracy. People see what they expect to see, so why should they not have believed they were seeing Mike in you? Then again, from the start, you saw two faces looming over you that you took to be your parents, and why should you not have taken them as your model? And we did a lot of smiling over you, believe me. But perhaps it was Mike’s smile that got imprinted, perhaps it was his you felt the greater obligation to.

If we’ve performed a part for sixteen years, then, without knowing it, so have you—and even more convincingly. There have definitely been times—whole lengths of time—when we ourselves have fallen totally for the illusion, when we’ve completely forgotten. You’ve been unwittingly such consummate actors, such consummate accomplices, that now it’s like an extra cruelty that you’ll have to undo it all.

And yet I’ve noticed already that it’s started to slip, it’s already started to look less plausible. You’re sixteen, you want to be yourselves. The last thing you want to look like is your half-century-old parents. The last thing you want to do—it’s perfectly natural at your age—is catch yourselves mimicking some fossilised gesture of ours. Will this help matters or just confuse them tomorrow?

These days, you don’t even want to look like
each other.
But wasn’t that, from the start, the little unexpected marvel that helped fool everyone? We couldn’t have bargained for it, and certainly couldn’t have specified it when we put in our request list. But people simply, perhaps, mistook the one thing for the other, or the one thing distracted from the other. Of course there was consistency and resemblance here, of course you must look like us, because you looked so much like each other.

When we took those holidays down in Cornwall, you were perhaps at the very peak of your symbiosis, your two-peas-in-a-podness: a little team of two acting as one, wanting no other company. It’s what everyone else would notice, your happy, frolicking duality. And so, by a simple process of completing the square, they’d acknowledge our immaculateness as a family.

But I would notice your differences, your imbalances. A mother sees things. I would often see how you
were
like your father (Mike, of course, I mean), or I would see how the illusion was achieved. Nick, you were always that fraction behind your sister, you waited on her initiative, her shelter. When the two of you ran across the beach, your feet making little sand-puffs, her shoulder was always just ahead of yours, you were tucked in her slipstream, like birds in formation. She learnt to swim first, but as soon as she did, so did you. The same with bicycles.

It seemed to me, Nick, though it’s a big thing to say, I know, that you always relied on Kate to hold your world together. And that while Kate was simply happy and though you might be happy too, a small voice inside you was always saying: please, Kate, don’t let this stop, please don’t let this come to an end. The world was always a question for you, and a possible disaster, hingeing on your sister. Was this my imagination?

But this all had more than one source, I could see that too. You had a special frown, just a tiny knot, a question mark in the middle of your brow, which could appear sometimes, oddly, just when everything else was sunny. But then it wasn’t your frown. It was your father’s. I mean Mike’s. It was the special frown he’d have, and had never had before you were born, whenever he’d remind himself of the
fact,
whenever he’d stop forgetting and say to himself: but this isn’t what it seems, this can’t go on for ever.

Which way round did it work, Nick? You borrowed it from him? He took it from you? But there it was, on both of you, a father-and-son resemblance: both of you disturbed by happiness. Not your father’s smile, actually, but his frown. I’d see Mike sometimes reach out and for no apparent reason, Nick, put his hand on your brow, as if feeling for a fever. How
my
pulse would rush. But you must surely remember this yourself. I could see him wanting to smooth away that little obstinate pucker, to take it away in his palm. How could he not be your father when he wanted to touch and reclaim that little mark of himself in you?

Those holidays in Cornwall, midway through this sixteen-year period, when for whole days, weeks long we’d all be so close, were like some almost believable high point for me, the very sun and sea and air colluding, like some annual process of kindly weathering, to mould and fuse us together. By the same token, I think Mike always thought they threatened to expose us. All of us there in just our swimming things. It will be on one of these holidays, I think he thought, in the middle of our August happiness, that the whole thing will somehow come apart, get dashed to bits, like a Cornish shipwreck. That cottage where we regularly stayed, Gull Cottage, with its hollyhocks and lavender bushes and its ship’s-steering-wheel mirror and sand getting everywhere, reminded him, too, of Craiginish Croft (that trapped essence inside): another paradise waiting to be lost.

And on that terrible day when something even
worse
(there could be) than those fears of his nearly happened, perhaps you noticed, if you were able to notice, that his relief, his joy, his sheer emotion when it was over, was even greater than mine. If we were both of us off the scale.

I don’t mean that I didn’t feel exactly the same: the worst thing that could ever happen and it
hadn’t
. Oh, my angels. But I didn’t, I couldn’t have the second thought that he was having, even as he struggled to get back his breath. That you were saved, you were still there and it was beyond words, but—one day—he was going to lose you anyway.

Perhaps tomorrow in fact.

Perhaps tomorrow you’ll simply relive that day again. It will come back to you—has it ever gone away?—and it will be your answer. The worst day, until this one that’s coming, of your lives. You’ll see him again swimming towards you. I wasn’t able to see his face then as it would have looked to you, as it came towards you. I wasn’t able to see the expression on it. But how could that man not have been your father?

Or perhaps you’ll remember how that day began: with
your
pretence, your foolish meddling with our terror and joy. And you didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps tomorrow, on top of that cold returning memory, you’ll have the sudden freezing thought that if the very worst had happened that day and you’d disappeared for ever, then, of course, you’d never have known what you must know now. The lie would have had no end.

I don’t want to think about it either.

Mike’s going to be the outcast tomorrow? Or simply the one, now, you’ll have to rescue?

But spare a thought for your mother. Why do people have children? Why did Grannie Helen get herself pregnant in all that haste? In one sense the haste wasn’t necessary. After the war Grandpa Pete was still there, and there too, luckily for me, was Mike. But now, of course—there has to come a time
some
time—Grandpa Pete isn’t there.

If Grandma Helen still wants to see Grandpa Pete, or see a living bit of him, there’s only one thing she can do. She can look (not now, of course) at this man lying next to me. I can’t hold that against her, but it’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of her, and it’s one of the reasons, but not the main one—a secondary worry sprouting from a secondary worry—why I’m afraid of the Gifford Park. If your dad should really get it into his head to go traipsing off those few miles to see her, for Sunday morning coffee, to take her to lunch, even, at the Star in Birle, it will be the first time we see her since we’ll have told you. Are you with me?

But this is something that never occurred to your dad and me—though, God knows, we tried to think of everything—when we went along to discuss it all at the clinic. We were simply younger then. When you look at yourselves in the mirror tomorrow you’ll be doing for the first time something that I’ve done, over and over again, when I’ve looked at you. That is, there’ll be someone, when you look, who you
won’t
see, and now you’ll know it. When I look at you, I don’t see, I can’t see your father. What does that matter? I can just look at
him
. But think again, though you’re only sixteen. Think of that day in Cornwall.

When your dad looks at you, it’s a simple, patent fact: he can see
me
. In you, Kate, of course, especially. I’m not trying to flatter myself. He can even see me when I was younger than I am now, though your dad never knew me when I was sixteen.

I’m the one who’s alone in this respect. I ask you to consider it, and I won’t skirt around it any longer. If Mike were suddenly not to be here, I wouldn’t have anywhere to look. I wouldn’t be like Grannie Helen. I wouldn’t have that age-old shred of consolation of looking at you and knowing that you were his too.

Think of it: as a couple gets older there’s only one, unspoken question. But perhaps the two of you, being what you are, have known this all your lives and from the very start. Who will go first? Who will it be? And how
can
it be?

Don’t worry, we’ve no intention. We’re only forty-nine and fifty. These days, that’s still young, isn’t it? We’re spring chickens. But I can’t see him in you. I want you to remember it: all I have and ever will have of this man here I call your father—and it’s more than I can ever say—is bound up in this sleeping body next to me now. Understand that tomorrow.

26

TO COME BACK
to that time when he was sitting in the car park and I was inside having congress with—Mr. S. Your father must have wondered how many more times he might have to do this, to go through this weird, supportive but extraneous ritual, waiting for me to emerge through the glass doors. But I was lucky second time around, which is lucky indeed. The frozen and preserved stuff, they rather tactlessly tell you, simply isn’t as reliable as the fresh. But I only needed two goes—two goes, I’ve sometimes thought, for the two of you, but, of course, it doesn’t work like that.

I learnt I was pregnant that October. But even before that Otis had entered his slow and final decline. Perhaps he’d never truly recovered, though under Alan Fraser’s care it had seemed that he had and one explanation (though it was mainly your father’s) for his eventual deterioration was that when Fraser moved to his new practice, Otis was simply left without proper veterinary care. The new incumbent, Myers, according to your dad at least, was frankly not up to much.

All this pains me, of course. Your dad genuinely got on with Fraser. He would vie with me to be the one to take Otis along for his check-ups and injections—and for the friendly chats. I admit that after my night at the Gifford Park I was quite happy for your dad to take on that role exclusively. It was hardly likely that Fraser (I’ll call him that now) was going to own up to your father. On the other hand, I can see that he might constantly have feared that your dad, having had
my
confession, might one day turn up, with or without Otis, and deliver some unpleasant comeuppance. So he made his exit that July.

That’s all rather far-fetched, I know. It puts me at the root of it all—the sly bitch pitting one man’s ignorance against another man’s guesswork. That was hardly my position. I’m not even sure if I cared that much. Remember, I was now concentrating on becoming your mother. That was my position. I’d put myself, with all the guesswork that can entail, in the hands of a fertility clinic.

It’s entirely possible that Fraser’s sudden departure had nothing to do with Mr. and Mrs. Hook. Though I wasn’t sorry, by then, to see him go. The plain truth is he’d served his non-veterinary purpose. Am I now sounding even a little vicious? But I was clearing the path towards your birth. And so far as Otis’s relapse and decline went, I’ll always believe that something similar was going on. I mean that Otis knew he’d served
his
purpose too. Even Fraser, if he’d stuck around, wouldn’t have been able to save him.

He understood, even before there was any physical sign, that our house was being prepared for a presence other than his. His mysterious disappearance—who knows?—might even have been some clairvoyant protest at the prospect, which didn’t work, which even redounded against him. He imagined, purring under Alan Fraser’s hands, that all might be as it was again, we’d learnt a lesson. Then, when we went to Venice perhaps and he was interned once more in Carshalton, he realised he was wrong.

Call me unscientific. There’s a feline logic. Your father never subscribed to this theory, he was even rather rattled by its fantasticality. How could Otis
know
he was being sidelined? In any case, Otis gradually declined. If there was a scientific explanation, Myers couldn’t come up with it or provide an antidote. It wasn’t for want of trying. Unlike your father, I don’t think Myers was such a bad vet—if he lacked the bedside manner. Perhaps I’d developed a general charity towards vets. Otis wasn’t a young cat any more. Since we’d acquired him as a kind of orphan, we’d never known exactly how old he might be. Anyway, cats, it seems, for all their nine lives, sometimes simply fade away.

And the plain truth is that, meanwhile, something wonderful was happening. Otis dwindled while I got bigger.

By the later stages of my pregnancy—by the spring of
1979
—it was clear that Otis’s condition was mortal: it was only a matter of time. But I couldn’t share your father’s heaviness of heart, his grief-in-readiness, yet again, for a cat. Nor his remarkable ability, even if I was the mother-in-readiness, to nurse Otis, tenderly and patiently, through all his last frailties. If anyone could have saved Otis, I think it was your father. I was inside some immune and happy bubble—a bit like you. I was eight months gone when, in early May, Otis died. It will sound heartless of me to say I accepted his death dry-eyed, that I barely mourned, I who’d once been abject at his mere absence, who’d wept just to leave him at a cattery. I couldn’t weep for his death.

I can think of him now, and my eyes go watery. I can picture him now, as if
he
might be out there, too, his fur getting saturated in this rain. I can recall with an extra thud of my heart that little thud on our bed. But when he died there were no tears. I was full of
you.
How could I weep? It even seemed like a small forfeit to have paid to fortune. A cat.

It was your dad who wept—and you’ll know he’s capable of that. I’m not so sure that when he shed those tears at his father’s funeral he wasn’t remembering another ceremony at which he did the burying himself. Tears can work like that.

Will it help you at all, tomorrow, to imagine your father weeping for a cat?

He dug a large hole under the lilac tree. Apparently you remember that lilac at Davenport Road, or you do, Nick. It was a true, cat-sized grave. Your father expended great labour and care over it, a once-only job. He made sure it was deep enough so that Otis’s bones would never be disturbed. For a while, as he dug, I thought his mood was simply work-manlike and practical: how to dispose efficiently of a cat. I remembered his snails.

Even your dad could see, if he didn’t accept it as an explanation, that a death was being exchanged for a birth. It was May, the air was warm, the soil was yeasty, our little garden was bursting. On the other hand, it was your dad who, almost exactly a year before, had gone out on those mad patrols in the spring dawns, fearing then that Otis might already be a corpse.

There’s no better way, perhaps, of absorbing and deflecting emotion—perhaps it’s been so arranged—than to dig, to attack the earth with a spade. The lilac was in bloom. It seemed the right, the obvious spot. In my condition, of course, there was no way I was going to assist your dad with his excavating, but I stood there with him after he’d carried out Otis very gently, in some sacking, as if he still might be alive, and put him in his place. He shovelled earth back on top and patted it firmly down. It was only then, with nothing else to do except say, “Goodbye, Otis,” that he leant on his spade and wept.

Your father, who is a scientist by training and has shown himself in recent years to have quite a canny head for business, is an emotional man. When we walked back from our lunch in St. James’s Park, before he took that taxi, I half expected him to clasp me like some soldier leaving for the front. Perhaps he’ll weep tomorrow and get very emotional indeed. Perhaps he’ll go for scientific rigour. Perhaps he’ll try to be businesslike. My father was a perpetual soft touch, soft as they come, at least to me—but he was that iron judge. We all have more than one creature inside us perhaps. And there are some moments in our lives that make us ripe for metamorphosis. Tomorrow you’ll start a new life. And you’ll have to choose between your fathers, if you see what I mean. You’ll have to give judgement on who that man is.

I won’t be the one on trial, but in any case I’m giving you now my testimony in advance. What would your judgement be of me? A bit of a vixen when it comes to it, a touch of my own mother, the seldom-sighted Fiona McKay? I think if your dad knew the truth, had all the facts of
my
behaviour before him, the twists and turns and mood-swings of that pivotal year before you were born, he might, in the end, just stoically shrug and say that it was all just biology working through me, it was just the old, eternal, ever-crafty maternal instinct, using me as its tool. What a good excuse.

But, anyway, what he’d also say, I know it, is: don’t we have two beautiful kids?

We decided on no marker, no silly, cat-proportioned memorial. Just the lilac itself. In both our heads, perhaps, was the unavoidable funeral music, incongruous as the sound of waves in Herne Hill: “
Sit-ting on the dock of the bay
…”

We planted lily-of-the-valley and grape hyacinth over the grave. We were already thinking, perhaps, that
you
should never know. Otis belonged, firmly, to a world before you. But it seems, Nick, that you might have guessed. In any case, it occurs to me that, as a matter of simple, incontestable fact, you were
there,
both of you were there, even as we buried Otis. You were there, inside me. You couldn’t see a thing, but both of you were undoubtedly present and in attendance at Otis’s funeral.

Both
of you. And that was simply the most wonderful, crowning fact of all, that had made me impervious to sorrow and tears, and would make even your father very soon forget his grief for Otis—as they say, if I wasn’t quite ready yet to put it to the test, a mother’s birth-pains are instantly forgotten once birth occurs.

If we’d ever doubted this thing that we’d done—I mean, that I’d done, with your father’s assent and cooperation—if we’d ever questioned, even after the point of no return, the strange bypassing path we’d taken, then didn’t nature, in the end, simply reward and approve and exonerate and congratulate us? Nature—and science. Including that wonderful and still young then science of sonography, which enabled us to
see you,
even before you were “there,” even before that day by the lilac tree.

If we’d had no doubts at all, there still might have been an awkward follow-up. Suppose all went well and, yes, we acquired a child. Then suppose we wanted
another one.
What exactly would have been the procedure then? To go back and ask for the same “Mr. S.,” to ask him to oblige once again? But that delicate question would never require an answer, and all doubts, quandaries and compunctions were resolved. One November day we both looked at a strange, blurry, magical screen and saw two little pulsating blobs. Forgive me, but the image stuck: two little floating shrimps. The whole complete and entrancing set all in one go and, as it proved, a boy and a girl. A nuclear family. Twins.