Tomorrow (18 page)

Mike was already swimming out again. When I could look, I saw that you, Kate, had hardly anything left now, but you managed to hold on to your father in a slightly more efficient way than Nick. And Mike said later that on that second journey back, even in the moments (but they seemed like hours) that had passed, the current had actually lessened. It must have been some trick of just that stage of the tide. And that was just as well. It was a longer journey this time: your dad’s strength was going. But there was a point when I
knew,
even before it had actually quite happened, like a sudden flooding current itself, fighting back a dreadful anti-current of “ifs” and “might have beens” and eternal anguish for ever after, that my wonderful and adorable family, my incomparable family, every precious member of it, was going to be restored to me. It would be there at the end of this summer’s day, just as it had been at the start.

There we were on that warm slab of firm rock, like miniature people on some giant’s dry, magic, outspread palm. Or rather, there were the three of us. Your dad was still clinging to its edge, still in the water, too exhausted yet to heave himself out, breathing furiously, his wet forearms clear, his head bowed, not even looking at us. What was he thinking?

28

YOU WERE NINE
years old. You were too young then to understand that the great wave of anger that heaved up inside me, like nausea, only moments later wasn’t what it seemed. It was its opposite. It was a venting, it wasn’t a punishing. Punish you? For being
saved
?

“What on earth were you
doing
?! Just what were you
doing
?!”

I surprised even myself, I surprised Mike, with my uncontrollable rage. And you were too young not to think that that current itself hadn’t been like some punishment prepared specially for you—never mind your mother’s fury. But you didn’t have to confess, Kate, to the extent that you did. You might just have said it had been a dare, an adventure, to swim back round the headland, and it had all gone wrong. And, yes, you should never have gone off like that out of sight in the first place.

You didn’t have the art yet of concealment. We’d been practising it for nine whole years. It all poured out of you, like water might so nearly have poured that day out of your lifeless lungs. And
you
did all the confessing. Nick was silent. So was Mike. He’d got himself out now and was sitting hunched and exhausted and (I noticed) shaking just a little. He might have been another guilty party. It had all been your idea, your fault, you said. Nick had just tagged along. Oh Kate. And I’d just seen you swimming frantically round your brother like a duck round a distressed duckling.

And it had all been
about
concealment. You’d wanted to hide. You’d found a little cave, you said, a cranny at the end of that channel between the rocks—you even pointed, as if the cave itself might have been to blame—just big enough for the two of you and just reachable by scrambling down on foot and wading through what was then just a long, safe pool. And you’d got the idea—
your
idea—of just sitting there and waiting, till you saw us coming over the rocks, looking for you and calling. When, of course, you’d burst out and surprise us. Woo-hoo! Here we are!

We hadn’t come. You’d waited. We weren’t cooperating, it seemed, in your game of hide and seek. And you hadn’t reckoned on how quickly the tide would turn and how the waves would start to run in along the pool and to fill the cave itself. You couldn’t stay where you were, but you couldn’t get back now onto the steep rocks you’d come down by. The only thing was to swim for it, to go further out along the headland where the rocks were flat (to where we were standing, and I was glowering at you, right then). But there was that unexpected current.

Then the pretend-thing had turned real. This is the bit you didn’t have to say. That it wasn’t just a game. You’d
wanted
us to think, if only for a while, you were lost, you were gone. You’d wanted to see and hear our panic—“Nick! Kate!”—to measure it. How
long
before we came? That’s why you’d stayed so long yourselves, too long, in that cave.

Right then and there on that sunny, happy, warm plate of rock I could have hit you, Kate. It was the nearest I’ve ever got, and I think you saw it, to a full-blooded, maternal, non-maternal clout. You’d wanted to
test
us, our love, how much we cared, how much you mattered to us. Suppose, you’d thought, they were suddenly without us, suppose we weren’t here any more. How would they look? How would they behave?

Well, now you knew. The results of your experiment. Look at your mother, on the point of hitting you, with all the force of her love. Look at your dad there, who’s just saved your lives, his face a strange picture of misery.

You started to splutter, the full-scale, bleating confession, though you didn’t have to say it. You could have just said you were sorry, and that you were glad, incidentally, to be alive. Suppose we’d decided to go that other way first?

And yet I
admired
you, Kate. I was even in awe of you, even as you blubbed and I wanted to hit you. There was so much else that you
didn’t
say. Am I wrong? That it would have been you, whether it was your fault or not, who would have made that last-minute decision, while the water gushed in and Nick panicked or just froze. “Come on! Let’s go!” Your little wriggling bodies launching out, breasting the waves, yours just that fraction ahead.

And just a few moments later—am I wrong?—it would have been you who made another, terrifying decision: that you weren’t going to leave your brother, even though it might still have been in your power. Even as we came over the crest of the rocks and saw your two bobbing heads (They’re there! It’s all right! No, it’s not!),
that
had already become the most important thing. I saw it, Mike saw it, though it’s never been spoken of between us. You already knew that you wouldn’t make it, not the
two
of you. Your only task now was to make Nick believe that you would and, when the moment came, to go down with him.

And I know for certain too, Nick, that if it had turned out the other way round, if you’d suddenly found a boy’s strength that your sister didn’t have, it would have been just the same, you’d have gone down with her. She’d have led, you’d have followed.

I didn’t hit you, Kate, I hugged you. You must have seen my anger drop from me like something dropping through water. I hugged you so tightly that you must have thought, after nearly being drowned, that now your mum was going to smother you.

Among all the “what-ifs” of that day, there’s one that’s even more unthinkable than all the others, that’s even more unthinkable—can it even be said?—than the thought that we might have lost you both. That we might have lost, Mike might have saved, just one of you. That there might have been, even now, even on this night, Nick without Kate, or Kate without Nick.

This family would have had its irretrievable history.

I’m only your mother. What do I know about how it really works between you? You’re a mystery, you’re a joy, you’re an anguish. Is it a blessing or a curse being what you are: wedded, if that’s how it is, from birth? You have it easy, you have it made? You won’t ever need to find, either of you, that other one in life who’ll make you complete? Or being what you are will just make it harder? You’re a little afraid, even now, of beginning? None of those
other
ones will ever be good enough or come as close. You’ll never have your Brighton beach.

You’ve known from the start the cruel rule of coupledom: one day there has to be only one. But
that
day, at least, you would have defied it.

I’m afraid that tomorrow’s only going to pull you back to that day. Not that you will ever get away from it. I’m afraid that tomorrow’s only going to be like that invisible rope already being stretched and strained between you (who’s going to cut it first?) but which then might have pulled you swiftly, surely, one after the other, under those waves.

At Grandpa Pete’s funeral you must have had your teenage pangs, so far as it’s possible, for Grannie Helen. Poor Grannie Helen. And then, perhaps, a premonitory pang for Mike and me: one day, one of them too. And then, perhaps, with that day in Cornwall behind you, a pang, a double pang, for yourselves.

Your first taste of death? Of course it wasn’t. You carried yourselves with such dignity, such seeming seasonedness and wisdom. Look, Dad’s trying not to cry, Mum’s holding his arm. A cold clamminess hung over the churchyard. Every tree dripped. An early frost had melted to a sticky dew, the grass under our feet was wet and chewed. A day like cattle’s breath. The tops of the Downs, where Grandpa Pete had died, were hidden in a sort of steam.

I gripped your father’s arm, remembering his hand on my arm at Invercullen. If Grannie Helen had broken down and wept then I’d have had to yield, to step aside, to be the tactful, deferring daughter-in-law. But it was your dad who wept. Grannie Helen stood dry-eyed on that sopping grass. And I’d had the sudden thought (since
that
secret was out now): she’s standing where one day she’ll
be.
And then I’d had the extra thought, coming from nowhere: are there graveyards, are there instances (I suppose there must be) where twins get laid side by side?

With twins it’s somehow insupportable, as if the second heart must simply stop beating too.

I fear for you sometimes. I fear for your future. Your future? Your futures? I don’t even know which is best to say. I want each one of you to have, to know something at least as good as Mike and I have known. And still know. Is your mother just becoming a heavy mother—a clinging, burdensome, smothering mother? Well, your dad, you’ll soon discover, could hardly be lighter, or more disengaged.

I think you’re still a virgin, Kate, and I think your brother won’t make a move before you do. What’s new in that? But then, for all I really know, each of you may already have had your string of episodes, you may even compare notes frankly with each other. I’m seldom around at what must be the witching hour, immediately after school, and perhaps you find it inconvenient these days that your dad sometimes is—working at home in his study. But then again, perhaps for each of you it’s the other one’s presence that’s the real, inhibiting factor. Compare notes? Hardly.

In any case, I’ve been looking for the telltale signs and I don’t think either of you yet has some special friend, some really special friend, to whom you might just go and blab everything you’re about to learn. Or find it hard not to. Perhaps Mike and I should be grateful. You’re late and cautious beginners, it seems, for whatever reason. Though tomorrow, for all we know, may deliver you a pretty hefty kick-start. If your mum could do it with a test tube—what’s keeping you?

I fear for both of you. Mothers fret and wonder and lie awake at three in the morning. Tell me I’m foolish. I fear for you in ways that have nothing to do with tomorrow. As if tomorrow won’t be enough for you, anyway, to be getting on with.

29

YOUR DAD’S TURNING
in his sleep. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, not yet. For a little while yet he can still be that: “your dad.” He’s snuffling softly like some rooting animal. How I want to hold him tight, but I’m afraid to wake him. In a few hours he’ll be in your hands. I’ll have to hand him over to you.

And it’ll be up to you then what you call him. It seems to me that he’s going to speak to you, one last time, more like a father than he’s ever done, a big, stern, serious daddy. Listen to your father, he’s got something important to say. And then he’ll be nobody, he’ll be what you make of him. If you want, you can even tell him to leave.

But I hope you know that if he goes, I go too. That’s how it is. I’m your mother, he’s not your father, but we go together anyway, just as surely as the two of you. Have I made that clear? When push comes to shove, that’s how it is. I’m your mother, but you’re sixteen now, and how much longer will you even need me around? That indefatigable maternal instinct eventually found its way from me to you, but I’m not sure if biology rules. Is that heresy? Your dad was never your biological father. That disqualifies him? How many real fathers are qualified biologists?

Tomorrow—if you decide in his favour—you’ll agree to
make
him, artificially, your father, as we once agreed to make you artificially (according to that ugly phrase) our children. But then, you’ll quickly discover, the artifice doesn’t stop there. It’s not just the truth you’ll be getting tomorrow, it’s that whole issue of pretence.

That little side-question of
next
weekend, of the Gifford Park Hotel, to let us go or not, will seem small stuff in comparison. Though I’ve already imagined how it might be—should it work this way—your neat means of revenge. Forgive me. I see you,
next
Saturday morning, after a remarkably calm and uncatastrophic week (but one in which you’ve had time to plan), standing at the front door to wave us off on our silver weekend—with all the ceremonial good grace, in fact, that you displayed at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. I even imagine Mike and I feeling for a moment like the spoilt (but humbled) children, while you stand there like the magnanimous householders of
14
Rutherford Road.

Except that when we come back next Sunday evening, you’ll have gone. The house will be ransacked, wrecked. Could you be so cunning? Pretence and dissimulation all round. My little pretence with your father in a five-star hotel, in a four-poster bed in Sussex will have been the least of my worries.

But that larger dissimulation—assuming we
are
all here, one way or another, under this roof after next weekend—where does it stop? Think about it. Your dad’s right, you might need next weekend just to think. We might have told Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen, years ago—think about it—and, of course, that would have been honest. But it would have robbed them, if you see what I mean, of two little grandchildren and burdened them with a share in our dishonesty. Now you’ll have to decide whether to be honest or not.

Children are brought up not to tell lies. Were we ever so big on that with you? Consider one little mitigating factor, at least. Everyone else’s ignorance—and surprising credulity—only made it easier to perpetrate the lie. Everyone else’s unwitting collusion only made it easier for us to feel (have a little mercy) that the lie might be the truth.

The rain’s getting harder, I think. You’ll have the option—the perfect right—if you wish, to tell the whole world. Starting on Monday, with all your friends at school. Though why wait till then? A few phone calls tomorrow afternoon. Pass it around. We’re in no position to stop you. Think what ripples you could set in motion in just a few moments, after sixteen years. But at least consider how far those ripples could spread, and that you won’t be able, should you feel like it later, to turn them around.

Here’s a thought for you that you may not even have this weekend or for some time to come, but I’ve certainly thought it for you. Suppose, one day,
you
have children. I mean (enough of that old childhood joke) that
each
of you or either of you one day has children. Will you be happy for them to think that this man lying here is their grandfather? If he isn’t, who is? Will that be a simple decision for you, hardly needing a moment’s thought, or will you think that one day, when
they’ve
grown up, they’ll need to know? That they’ll have to be told a story too, like the one I’m telling you now, involving, of course, a rainy weekend in June, once upon a time when you were sixteen?

Grandpa Mikey! Spare us, the poor man’s only fifty. He doesn’t look like a grandpa to me. But that’s not the point. It goes off into the future, you see. And it begs the simple question:
will
you, one day, have children—each of you, either of you—of your own? I don’t suppose that’s even a flicker of a question in your heads yet. But it’s one of the things you may suddenly find yourselves, as from tomorrow, having to think about intently: that line going off into the future, with more little Hooks on it, perhaps.

And that only begs another, bigger question, which may simply swallow up the first. Why have children at all? Clearly, I must have asked myself that big question once, and once I must have come up with an answer which, as you now know, lasted only so long. Life was possible without them. Without
you
two though—now that’s a different matter.

But then I don’t remember, even to bolster my rather peculiar position, ever putting the question like this: why bring children into the world? Is it such a good, safe world to bring them into? Is it going to be? I don’t remember Mike employing that argument either, though for him it must have been an even more tempting fall-back. Was it such a sweet, safe world then, in
1972,
when Doctor Chivers gave him the news? I was afraid for
our
future perhaps, not the world’s.

Your dad likes to joke these days, when he can afford to, that it ought to be called
The Perishing World.
The magazine, I mean, though the same is true of the books. More and more of its pages seem to deal with declines and depletions, not to say outright extinctions, things going wrong with nature, harm being done to it, disasters in store. There even seems to be a readership that relishes this dire-warning stuff. Though there’s also still a dependable readership that, as your dad puts it, just wants to know about frogs.

The bulk of Living World Books are still just “nature books”: lovely to look at, brightly designed, modern-day equivalents of Uncle Edward’s book of molluscs. Your dad sometimes worries about this. It’s a sort of thorn in the side that he seems to need. He worries about the “just nature” books. He worries that the “just nature” stuff is really heads-in-the-sand stuff, it’s not even good science. Those dire warnings aren’t made up, the planet’s in serious trouble. I think he worries about being a “just nature” man himself. Still running around Sussex in short trousers, not even knowing about the existence of DNA. Or me.

But look at your mother. The planet’s in serious trouble, and she’s still dealing in art. Part of her’s still in the Renaissance.

Was it a better world in
1972
when, as you now know, you were never really on the cards at all? Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought that, like your parents, you were pretty well timed, two little cold-war babies, emerging, just when you were ready to emerge, into a world that was no longer cold: a happier, sweeter climate all round. Now, just a few years on, it’s not looking so good. We’re even told the climate’s getting too warm.

Your futures? Your future? What will the world be like in just five years’ time, in the year
2000,
when you’ll be twenty-one? What will it be like in another sixteen, when you’re thirty-two, the same age I was when I decided to become a mother? What will it be like when
you’re
fifty, your dad’s age? You won’t thank me for sometimes being prey to this sort of arithmetic (especially tonight), or for sometimes concluding that your dad and I, born neatly in
1945,
may have been set down in the
best slot history has ever put on offer.
But maybe every generation thinks that.

The planet’s in serious trouble? It’s
1995,
a millennium’s ending, we’re all about to go over the edge? I don’t know if the planet’s in serious trouble, listening to this rain doing the garden good. I think number fourteen Rutherford Road might be in serious trouble. These might be just the early hours of Doomsday. Is that what we’ll call it when we look back? “Doomsday.” “Bombshell Day?” Will it just find its regular place, one day, in our calendar, in our private annals?
That
day, that day in June. We’ll refer to it frankly and calmly—though, of course, just among ourselves—with a touch of respect and solidarity, even a touch of humour. “Bombshell Day,” as a joke, because no bomb, really, ever went off. “Doomsday,” because it wasn’t the end of the world, just a wet Saturday in June. Another special day, a week after your birthday, that every year will be discreetly but smilingly observed?

I see everything in this house in just a few hours’ time looking the same as it always was. I see everything—every item, every picture on the wall, every little memento, every gathered-together token of our good life and good fortune—looking hollow and false. But then none of that stuff (as you so sensitively call it) would matter anyway, believe us, not in the balance with you. I’ve told Mike so many times that, surely, I must believe it myself: that he has nothing to fear, not about the fundamental thing. “Have they had any better dad?” (Well,
have
you?) So many times that I must have finally convinced him. Look at him here, sound asleep. But in any case you must simply believe me that your dad, who in recent years—whatever he gets called tomorrow—has taken on the unexpected sobriquet “Mr. Living World,” would gladly give up everything, would give the living world, if you could
really
be his.

If it wasn’t for this rain, I think by now there’d be the first streaks of light. It’s no longer pattering and trickling. It’s started to beat down as if from some motionless, massing cloud. Centred on Putney. Just a wet Saturday in June, or time to build an ark?

Among all the possessions and artworks in this house is, still, if you don’t know it, a small and precious selection of the paintings you both did at primary school when you were six or seven. They’re in that special box of mine. But they would have been displayed once, if you remember, on our kitchen wall. For a period of your life there was a constantly changing show. You knew then, just about, that I worked with “art,” I bought and sold pictures, and when your pictures got taken down to be replaced by your latest productions, you used to think I went off and sold them. You were nobly contributing to your mother’s livelihood. You never enquired further and never seemed to mind that you weren’t getting a percentage of your own. What a grasping dealer your mother was. But I didn’t throw them all away, you’ll be pleased to know, I kept some of the best. And if I’d had to give a top prize, there’s little doubt I’d have given it to your Noah’s Arks.

There was a strict kitchen-gallery policy of not favouring one of you over the other, and I’d never have let on anyway, even with my professional eye, which one of you I thought was the better watercolourist (though, actually, I think it was you, Nick, one way in which you could pip your sister). But since you both went to the same primary school and were in the same class, you both very often painted the same subject. There was equality, at least, in that.

Noah’s Ark must be a sure winner, anyway, the all-time favourite for primary-school painting sessions. Is there a child who’s never been asked? A rainy afternoon in the classroom, the lights are on, out come the paints. The teacher tells the story first, then the brushes get to work. For both of
you,
of course, it was that memorable phrase “two by two” that struck an inspirational chord. The animals went in two by two and they did so, you were given to understand, so that the world would be saved. Whether or not you knew what that really meant, you clearly thought that being what you were meant your own salvation was guaranteed. In those days you used to get called “the Hook twins,” something you’d loathe now.

But there was clearly also some confusion in your minds as to whether the Ark and the Flood were things that
had
happened or that might or would. This was shown by the fact that both of you, with connivance or not, included yourselves among the elephants, camels, inevitable towering giraffes and, in your case, Nick, a couple of surprising (since they can swim) but really rather charming polar bears.

But there, in both cases, are both of you. You’re not readily recognisable, but Kate’s the one with the longer hair and the stiffly triangular skirt. Your place on Noah’s Ark has been emphatically reserved. In fact, in both cases again, neither Noah or his wife are visible at all and it rather looks as though the two of you have assumed those venerable roles and are not just among the lucky passengers, but have taken charge of the ship.

We didn’t flummox you by asking if there was a chance your dad and I might be saved too and be given our place on board, and you were too young for the joke that it was your dad, surely, who ought to be Noah, being in command as he already was of
The Living World.
But those pictures certainly got saved. They’re in this house now, in my box. Remarkable thick blue ribbons of rain fall down in each of them, though in your case, Nick, out of a convincing enough thundery-black sky. And that box, you’ll now understand, with its hoard of items, a surprising number of which are in sets of two, has come to seem itself like a miniature ark, waiting for some particularly rainy day.