Tomorrow (5 page)

8

WE WERE BOTH
“only” children. Do “onlies” attract “onlies?” And we were both “war babies”—your fearsome parents—me in the sense that I was conceived in the war, Mike in the true and classic sense that he was born in it, and hurriedly produced, like armies of other little war babies, to be what was left of his dad should his dad soon not be there. For a little while that’s exactly how it must have looked. Your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen acted only just in the nick of time, since shortly after she became pregnant Grandpa Pete went “missing,” a word which often meant the most dreadful thing possible.

1945:
how weird it sounds now to give it as your date of birth, like saying
1789
or
1492.

When your dad was born, in January
1945,
his dad wasn’t there and wouldn’t be there for another five months. It was the son, in theory, who was waiting for his father’s arrival, not the other way round. Not that your dad would have known what was going on or had any idea how significant his own arrival was, even before it had quite occurred. It’s just as well, perhaps, that memory waits for us further down the road from our birth. But do these things somehow filter through anyway? I’ve often tried to put myself in the position of Grannie Helen in that brief period when your father would have been the unborn consolation in her womb.

I was waiting, further down the road, for your father. I know it sounds silly. I was waiting, too, for him to be born.

Was there always a little gap, a discrepancy, between your dad and his dad? You’ve noticed it too? Was it just the gap, the edgy stand-off that exists between any son and father, or was it that niggling gap of around five months? His dad had tried to close it, perhaps, with those twelve bottles of champagne. Perhaps for a while he succeeded. I think your dad may have wept a little when he read that message: “Have Fun.” What an odd reaction to such a message. And he certainly wept, as you yourselves saw, at his father’s funeral, in Birle churchyard, eighteen months ago. It was the first time you’d seen your father weeping, and they say it’s not good for children to see their father in tears. I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure your father wasn’t weeping for a different sort of gap.

As it happened, it wasn’t until the year I met your dad that Grannie Helen ever really spoke to him about that time before and just after he was born. Did that have something to do with me? Your dad told me, anyway, that he’d had this chat with his mum, at Christmas. He let me in on a private conversation with his mum.

And you told me, Kate, that he brought it all up again with you
last
Christmas—the first one without Grandpa Pete. Grannie Helen was dozing in our living room. You and Mike had volunteered to do the washing-up. Nick and I decided to take a walk round the block. I can see how all the circumstances would have primed your dad. You told me, Kate, that he told you about a Christmas years ago when Grannie Helen had told him about that time when Grandpa Pete wasn’t around.

I may have looked at you rather oddly—as I did that time at Carrack Cove—and you may have wondered why. But you just said to me, “Dad’s really missing Grandpa Pete, isn’t he?” Good, sweet, daughterly words. And true.

“Yes,” I said. “The first Christmas, it’s tough.”

I didn’t say, though I might easily have done, that I could remember the first Christmas without
my
dad. I’d had a major consolation, a double consolation: you and Nick were in my womb.

I just said—as if it needed to be said—that Grandma Helen would be missing him too. Your dad and Grandpa Pete always used to do the washing-up at Christmas. They’d roll up their sleeves and put on aprons, a ritual, two-man chore. Now, this year, for whatever reason, your dad had chosen you. It was another wobbly moment.

You may both have noticed that there’s a bit of a gap too, these days, between your Grannie Helen and me. I mean, there’s always been a bit of a gap: she’s my mother-in-law, it’s a ritual thing too. I always got on better with Grandpa Pete, I think I get on better with men all round. But now there’s an extra gap between Grannie Helen and me, just when, perhaps, there shouldn’t be. I ought to be offering her comfort and support, and I’ve done my best. But I’m afraid of her, if I’m honest, I’ve become a bit afraid of her.

Is she lying awake too right now, just like me, but by herself, listening to the rain?

It seemed just a touch romantic, I’ll admit, when I first heard it from your dad: that his dad had once been “missing,” then returned as if from the dead, to lift his son in his arms. If it never really quite squared with the man I’d get to know who ran a factory in Sidcup, or the man who’d sometimes do those strange little comic double-acts with his old pal, Charlie Dean—“Uncle Charlie” to you. Grannie Helen always said they should have gone on the stage. Charlie and Pete, “Dean and Hook”—it could have worked. Charlie the little bouncy joker and Pete, like some older brother, the tall, slightly solemn straight man. Have fun, have fun.

My dad had never had to fly off to his highly possible death, he’d had a rather different war. He’d spent it cracking codes in the safe and cosy depths of the English countryside, pleasantly surrounded, so far as I can glean, by lots of young female clerks, typists and telephonists, some of whom came from far from lowly backgrounds, but were doing their humble bit.

And among them was my mother, Fiona McKay. The Scottish thing may have been entirely coincidental or it may have been the clincher. Do Scots attract Scots?

How do our parents get together? Do we need to know? You once seemed pretty keen, Kate. Here are
my
speculations, anyway. I think my father’s war was, in fact, a bit of a holiday from his earnest and industrious dedication, up till then, to the law. I think it was his version of Sussex in
1966
—if he was a good deal older than twenty-one. He would have been over forty. Life hits you at different times.

It had been a rather monkish dedication, perhaps. He’d never before been thrown so strategically among the girls. He’d never before discovered his own seductive talents. That is, in my father’s untall, unhandsome, but short and cuddly yet high-powered case, his talent for being ever so seducible. It amounts to the same thing, perhaps, if you can generally keep an eye on what’s going on. And a man who’d become a High Court judge ought to have been able to do that. A big “ought” as it proved.

It’s a lasting sadness to me, and it will have its extra stab tomorrow, that you never knew your Grandpa Dougie. But, of course, I never knew him
then.
Those days before we were born.

When I was in a state of less than imminence I think, or I hope, my father was having the time of his life. I think he was having fun. All because of the war. I wouldn’t dare to estimate
his
score, and perhaps it was never like that. But I know that it was Fiona McKay who in
1944
became his young war bride—twenty years his junior. Some fifteen or so years later, when I was a schoolgirl and she was approaching forty, she’d show the first undisguised signs of wanting to move on (was it so unpredictable?), but not without taking a good deal of what had really been his with her. War bride and future mercenary. And this, I’d realise, would make him vulnerable, even amenable, to the same process happening all over again.

Your Grandpa Dougie died in
1978,
over a year before you were born. His funeral, unlike your Grandpa Pete’s, was attended by three ex-wives. Fiona was number one. You’ve never met her and, for the record, Mike’s only met her once—at that funeral. You know I don’t see my own mother: these things happen. When you were very small we used to call her, expediently, your “fairy grandmother,” as if this gave her an ethereal status beyond mere ordinary grandmotherness. She’s one of the never fully explained mysteries of your lives, though, believe me, not the only one.

9

YOUR DAD HASN’T
lost his looks. I think he’s even gained some. I’m biased, of course. Under that tree in St. James’s Park, at least, the summer light did him proud. Or is it that his midlife success has given him a new lift, a new lease? Where do you separate handsomeness and success in men, handsomeness and achievement? Any thoughts, Kate? How the passing of time can be kind to them anyway. But perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking that right now.

It wasn’t always so. I mean, he was just handsome once, he was just Mike. The success wasn’t there. And should you demand it? Isn’t love more than enough? Professor Mike—I mean, a real true accredited Professor Mike—was waiting a long way down the road (it has to be said he’ll go on waiting) while your dad toiled away, a third, a fourth year, at his PhD. Those snails of his were supposed to be his stepping stones—an unfortunate phrase—to his brilliant future in science.

It may be hard for you to imagine that your dad and mum, who now own this house and do all that we do, once shared a rented basement in Earl’s Court. Your dad was “researching” at Imperial, I was a trainee at Christie’s in the Old Brompton Road. Our bed then (compare this barge of a bed we’re in right now) was a mattress on the floor. Not so much an economy, though that was needed, as a gesture to sprawling decadence. We never invested in a real bed, though we did invest, one impulsive and salacious day in the Portobello Road, in a vast, crimson, slinky-thin bedspread beneath which, immersed in its ruby glow, we’d often flail and tussle, like people caught in a happy ballooning accident.

In those days—forgive me—you were very far from our thoughts, you weren’t even on our radar.

My lunch with your dad in the park today didn’t just make me think of Brighton. It made me think of those trainee days and of a happy month I once spent as a menial at the Dulwich Gallery, a place I’m still very fond of. Some lovely Poussins, a gorgeous Watteau. I’d mooch about in my lunch break in the park just across the road—it had a lake with ducks—and think about Mike, across town, at Imperial, and think how sweet and treasurable even the most unambitious moments of life can be. Our “careers” were in place anyway, in reassuring embryo, Mike’s perhaps a little more latently than mine. But there was no rush, there was even the argument that the slower the incubation, the more glorious the outcome. I’m sounding like some biologist myself.

But I was even, in those days, still a little enchanted, a little seduced by your dad’s devotion to snails. I was devoted to his devotion. Who cares about snails? Some people find them repellent. But if Mike cared about them…That’s how it worked. Under our red bedspread I willingly learnt a good deal about snails, about their natural history and life cycle, not least about their extraordinary reproductive system and method of performing the sexual act (you’d think those shells would be a major encumbrance), though now’s not the time to be going into that.

Your dad used to say that the simple joy of biology was the sheer peculiarity of things. What makes anything special? And I used to think that for me the question “What made Mikey special?” was a question that required no answer, let alone a scientific one. Nor did it occur to me especially to ask: what makes anyone, who might, after all, do all sorts of things, become a specialist in snails?

In the park with your dad today I saw myself in that other park in Dulwich. It was spring. The rhododendrons were out, the ducks clucked. There were little scudding flotillas of chicks. I didn’t imagine then that one day I’d ever want to say to this man here, this special specialist: “Perhaps there’s been enough of snails now, Mikey. Where are their silvery trails leading us?” I didn’t imagine that one day I’d want to make this man—my husband as he’d then become—reconsider his own sticky trail in life.

His work involved breeding the things, long-term, patient cycles of experiment. It didn’t seem to involve sudden, life-changing discoveries.

I’ve never been a fan of Seurat, but in the park today I thought of those lounging, sprinkled figures, made up of dots themselves, as if people are really just clouds of atoms, which your dad would no doubt say is exactly what they are. I had that strange feeling that I was meeting him all over again, as though, if I’d never known him and had gone down to St. James’s Park to choose from the crowds, I’d still have picked him out. I should have told him perhaps. I should have said, “It would have been the same even now, Mikey, no question. Even at fifty.”

Except I had the sudden, panicky
opposite
feeling: that I was meeting him for the
last
time. I’d got it all wrong. “I just needed to see you,” he said. It wasn’t a meeting, it was a last look. People do that too, they meet one last honourable time, just in order to part. Your dad was already staging his
disappearance.

How stupid of me. When we climbed up the Duke of York’s Steps again all the breath went out of me. He said, standing in that old place, “I’m glad we did this. I won’t forget that we did this.” Two sandwiches in the park! I didn’t dare say anything foolish. He hailed a cab at the corner of Pall Mall and kissed me before stepping into it. I watched it weave its way, its black roof glinting, up Lower Regent Street. And fifteen minutes later Simon, who I think was vaguely on the lookout, would have seen me return and shut my office door behind me in the way that people shut even office doors when they want to cry.

But, look, he’s still here, isn’t he? How absurd of me. Your dad’s still here.

And he can still talk, as you know, in a special way about snails. As he can talk about all kinds of creepy-crawlies and barely considered life forms, as if passing on some marvellous secret. His business these days may be, so to speak, the whole range of available products, but he can still do a good pitch on the little individual item.

You know not to yawn when your dad talks about snails. A look comes into his eye. You know not to push the mollusc jokes. What you don’t know is that there came a time, after we’d moved to Davenport Road, when your dad announced to me that he had to go one last time to the labs at Imperial. He had to make one last visit. He didn’t elaborate, and I should have guessed perhaps. But he told me afterwards. He said he’d gone there personally to exterminate his remaining working stock of snails. He said he wanted to do it himself, efficiently and “humanely”—a strange word to use about snails. He hadn’t wanted to leave it to “some technician.”