A Song for Tomorrow

by Alice Peterson

  Granny owns a cottage on Exmoor and as children we’d endure long car journeys there, the boredom eased by our black box filled with tapes. Dad would always get to choose the music first as he was the eldest, insisting, despite the protest, on playing ‘Silence is Golden’, a song which had been a hit for The Tremeloes in the 1960s. ‘It’s an endurance test,’ Mum would say. As we continue to walk home, Jake and I carry on recalling our childhood, how I’d creep into his bed late at night while Mum and Dad were throwing parties, saying ‘Jakey, let’s talk!’ When he first went to boarding school, aged eight, I’d sat on his tuck box and crossed my arms in defiance, refusing to move. ‘I suppose you want one too,’ Dad had said.

  Of course I wanted one, but deep down, I wanted Jake to stay at home more than I wanted a tuck box.

  That’s how I feel now. I want to sit on that tuck box and not let him go. I feel happy for my brother that he’s getting married but there is a tiny part of me that feels as if I’m about to lose him too.

  ‘Nothing will change,’ Jake says, as if he can read my mind.

  ‘I know. I’ll still come over to your place and beat you at Scrabble.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll still win. I said nothing would change.’

  When we reach the back door we hug.

  ‘My choice next,’ I call out as he waves goodbye.

  ‘See you at the church, Leech.’

  29

  Mary’s Diary

  June 1999

  As I looked at Jake all I could see was a little boy tottering up the garden path wearing a daisy chain. How could it be that I was about to watch him get married?

  Although it’s fair to say he took his time. Alice and I were worried at one point that Jake would never get round to proposing, so we hatched a plan to talk to him one night when we were eating out in a restaurant. Nicholas was working late in court so he couldn’t join us. When Lucy nipped to the loo I leant across the table and said, ‘You and Lucy, we know how you like to take things slow . . .’

  ‘. . . but isn’t it about time,’ Alice continued, before we both added, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear:

  ‘. . . You get on with it!’

  There was this stunned silence before Jake edged away from us saying, ‘Fuck, I wish I had a brother.’

  Tom came to the wedding, looking handsome in his morning suit. Alice looked lovely too, in off-white silk trousers and a long silk navy coat that we’d bought when shopping together.

  After the service I talked to Jake’s old art teacher. He told me how he’d always see this gangly thirteen-year-old boy in the art room so one day he’d said to Jake, ‘Draw me something.’ When Jake doodled a cat sitting on a dustbin he said, ‘You know what a cat and a dustbin look like but come back tomorrow and I’ll teach you how to draw.’

  Jake and Lucy want to start a family so Lucy had a blood test to make sure she wasn’t a carrier. It took two days for the results to come back and we were all enormously relieved to discover she didn’t have the gene. Alice was so generous in her happiness for them too. Nicholas and I obviously wish more than anything things could be different, that Alice had never had to endure a life with CF, but despite everything we know and all we have been through with her, not for all the money in the world would we rewind time and do things differently.

  Nicholas and I couldn’t be prouder of them both, even if we tried.

  And even better, soon I might become a grandmother. A granny!

  Then I shall feel very important (not old).

  30

  Alice

  One year later, June 2000

  Pete is away until the autumn, touring with one of his bands, but when he returns we’re going to pitch our demo to record companies. With his encouragement, along with Cat, Jake and Tom’s support, I have performed in a few gigs in central London, which has given me a small taste of fame, even if half the audience were drunk and not listening. Susie has almost completed the first year of her wig-making course. Her dream is to make wigs for people with cancer, to honour her mother’s memory. She is still, unfortunately, going out with Ethan. Milly continues to work for her highflying businessman and remains single, swearing that that’s the way she wants it, until she meets the right man. Cat is currently dating someone at work. ‘It’s not going anywhere,’ she claims, ‘but I’ve spent far too much time recently going to bed in my pyjamas and sleep mask so it’s time to get out there again.’

  Lucy isn’t pregnant yet but she and Jake have just bought a tabby kitten. ‘It’s good practice,’ she says.

  Tom now almost lives at my place, my chest of drawers crammed with his boxers and T-shirts, my wardrobe stuffed with his trainers, work files and suits. We’re hooked on The West Wing. He draws a line under Dawson’s Creek.

  And finally, Tom is driving me to his parents’ place in Essex for the weekend. I’ve been hinting for the past few months that I’d like to get to know them, or at least meet them, but Tom hasn’t been that forthcoming with an invitation. Things have been so great between us that I haven’t wanted to push it but when he did suggest a weekend I was relieved. Now the time has actually come, I feel nervous. They must wonder who I am, this woman that their son has shacked up with. They must feel apprehensive that Tom is going out with someone who has CF. I only have to look at my parents to know how protective they can be. Why would Mum and Dad want Jake to marry someone with a terminal illness? I sense this is why Tom has delayed inviting me. I wonder how much he has told them. We don’t discuss it unless we have to. It’s an unspoken agreement between us now that it’s never a route to take. Finally Tom understands there’s little point. Nothing can change. It’s best left alone, a road untravelled. All we want is to be as normal a couple as possible.

  Tom glances at me. ‘They’re going to love you,’ he reassures me again, clearly picking up on my nerves. They are going to love me. I offer him a mint, thinking we’ve been together for well over a year now and Tom and I still haven’t said ‘I love you’ to each other.

  Until now, I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. In fact I know I haven’t, because no one comes close to the way I feel about Tom. It physically hurts to imagine a life without him.

  Tom drives down a long winding narrow lane before turning left into a gravelled drive and parking outside a pale grey painted house. He toots the horn. It’s a warm summer’s evening, still light at eight o’clock. I hear a dog barking. ‘Hello!’ says a tall slim woman wearing a light navy cardigan over a sundress, shades holding back her silvery grey hair, a Dalmatian by her side. Tom strokes the dog, saying, ‘This is Lottie, Alice.’ She jumps up, paws against his thighs, wagging her tail.

  Tom’s mother hugs me, saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind dogs. Lottie is Tom’s brother’s, we inherited her a few years ago when he moved to New York.’

  ‘I love dogs,’ I say, before handing her some flowers and a box of expensive soap.

  ‘How kind of you, Alice.’

  Tom’s father appears. He looks more like Tom with his blond hair and vivid blue eyes. He’s wearing a baggy faded jumper with jeans and sandals, less formal in appearance than my own father in his shirts and ties. He claps his son on the back before shaking my hand, insisting on carrying my suitcase inside. ‘And please,’ he says to me, ‘call me James.’

  ‘And Olivia,’ his mother adds.

  ‘You’re lucky you’re here in the summer, Alice,’ Tom says, as we head into the kitchen, a large open-plan room with a long wooden table running down the middle, a sunken sofa in one corner with a small television on a stand, a grandfather clock and ancient-looking cooker. ‘Dad doesn’t believe in central heating.’

  ‘Waste of money,’ he says. ‘If you’re freezing put on another jumper and jog on the spot.’

  ‘Or do some star jumps,’ I suggest.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You must feel the cold,’ Tom’s mother says to me.

  Self-consciously I nod, before asking if I can put my medication into the
fridge.

  ‘Of course,’ Olivia says, rushing to make space. Along with my boxes of antibiotics I place a creamy white liquid bag that contains almost two thousand calories on to the bottom shelf. Professor Taylor finally persuaded me to have an operation to insert a tube into my stomach for overnight feeds. Tom was nervous after I’d had the surgery. He was worried he’d dislodge the tube when we slept together. Now it’s normal. I can sense Olivia watching me, longing to ask what exactly is inside the bag. Instead she says, ‘I hope you like coronation chicken.’

  ‘How is George?’ Olivia asks over supper. ‘You must have met him, Alice?’

  I catch Tom’s eye. ‘Yes, yes I have.’ Since that fateful weekend in Dorset over a year ago, I make sure we get on because he’s Tom’s best friend. George doesn’t know I overheard their conversation and never will. ‘He’s great.’

  ‘A live wire, that boy,’ James continues. ‘We practically raised him, Alice. His parents once rang asking if we knew where their son was. He’d been living with us for a week.’

  ‘And life in London?’ Olivia asks both Tom and me.

  ‘Just the same,’ Tom mutters. ‘Can’t wait to leave.’

  Really? I can’t imagine living anywhere but in the city.

  ‘What news on the work front?’ James asks his son.

  Since we’ve been together, Tom’s website company has expanded to an office in the West End and he’s now begun to design software for online games.

  His father looks dubious. ‘A mobile casino? Sounds addictive.’

  ‘I’d go for compelling gaming, Dad.’

  As Tom and his father continue to talk business I am aware of Olivia’s watchful eye. ‘I gather you’re a singer,’ she says. She has a quiet assured way of speaking.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  I tell her Pete and I have produced half a dozen songs now, and want to try and get a record label interested.

  ‘I’m in a choir but we’re all fairly amateur.’ Olivia laughs. ‘Some of us can’t sing at all. Well, I wish you good luck, but I imagine it’s a competitive world.’

  ‘She’ll get there,’ Tom says. ‘Alice has got an amazing voice, Mum.’ He squeezes my knee under the table.

  ‘Thinking of music, your father took me to see La bohème. Have you seen it, Alice?’

  ‘No, not that one.’ I daren’t tell them I’ve never been to an opera when the Opera House at Covent Garden is on my doorstep. ‘What’s it about?’ I ask before noticing Tom and his mother exchange a cagey look.

  ‘The main guy, Rodolfo, falls in love with Mimi,’ Tom says, ‘but it’s hopeless because Mimi lives this life of poverty. The end. Can you pass me the pepper?’ he asks, when it’s right in front of him.

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ James continues. ‘Rodolfo is a poet, Alice, and shares a garret in Paris with his bohemian artist and musician friends. They live a fairly hand to mouth existence but are happy, until one night a seamstress named Mimi knocks on their door. Her candle has blown out so she asks Rodolfo for a light. All it takes is one touch of Mimi’s frail hand, one look and they fall in love.’

  ‘How romantic,’ I suggest.

  ‘It is, but the tragedy is she’s ill,’ James continues. ‘She’s dying of consumption. It’s terribly sad.’

  Olivia shoots him a look.

  ‘What?’ James says. ‘That’s the story.’

  Am I imagining the awkward silence?

  ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’ Olivia asks, clearly as desperate as Tom to change the subject.

  He looks at me. ‘It’s a secret.’

  I almost choke on a lump of chicken. I hate secrets.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll love this one,’ he assures me.

  That evening Tom’s mother shows me to my bedroom, a single bed with a patterned quilt and a sink in one corner. ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable,’ she says, drawing the curtains.

  ‘Oh, I will be. Thank you for such a delicious supper.’

  ‘Not at all. See you in the morning, no rush.’

  When she leaves the room I breathe a sigh of relief that I made it through supper and coffee. They are exceptionally warm and welcoming, but it’s not the same as being back at home. And where’s Tom sleeping? It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d be in separate rooms. When the lights are out and the house is quiet, I hear the faint sound of creaking floorboards, before Tom tiptoes into my bedroom, shutting the door gently behind him. Both of us feel like naughty schoolchildren as we wriggle under the covers. It’s been years since I slept in a single bed.

  ‘What’s this secret?’ I whisper.

  ‘It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes it does.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  He places a hand over my mouth. ‘Well I do.’

  I laugh, trying to get him to release his hand. ‘Shush, Alice. We don’t want to wake the oldies. Mum and Dad, despite appearances, can be surprisingly old-fashioned about sleeping arrangements and we really don’t want another mother shining a torch in our faces.’

  What do they think of me?

  ‘Mum really likes you by the way, thinks you’re lovely.’

  ‘She’s lovely too.’

  And I love you. Why can’t I say it? Would it scare him?

  ‘Are you taking me somewhere for lunch?’

  ‘We eat out all the time in London, Alice. You pick everything on the menu, can’t eat it and then leave me to polish it off. I’m getting fat.’

  ‘Give me a tiny clue, tubby.’

  ‘All you need to do is to wrap up warm and trust me.’

  Dressed in hundreds of layers, Tom leads me across a blustery deserted airfield, still maintaining I’m going to be thrilled by my surprise. ‘You’ll love Paddington,’ he says.

  ‘Who’s Paddington?’ I fear I know. In the distance I can see a small red plane parked under a hangar. ‘You’re taking me out in that, aren’t you,’ I say, hair blowing in the wind. I flick it away from my eyes as he puts an arm around my shoulder, telling me, ‘Paddington is my special Piper cub built after the Second World War, 1951 to be precise.’

  I recall Tom telling me on one of our first dates that when he was little he dreamt of being a pilot, so his father encouraged him to experience flying when he was in his teens. His father’s side of the family have always been in the Air Force; it’s in his blood, just as music is in mine. Tom had loved his first flying lesson so much that he’d gone on to pass his flying exams when he was seventeen.

  Come on, Alice. You’re going to love this. I’m not scared, not at all. How hard can it be sitting in a plane and admiring the view?

  It’ll be like a scene from The English Patient.

  ‘Put your leg over!’ Tom shouts.

  ‘I’m trying!’ Never mind flying. I need to be an Olympian gymnast to get into the backseat of this tiny little thing.

  ‘Higher! Come on, Alice. Lift.’ He gives my bottom a shunt. I’m sure Ralph Fiennes didn’t do that to Kristen Scott Thomas. With Tom’s shove somehow I am lowering myself into the seat before landing with a thud, already breathless and still cold. I feel claustrophobic, as if I am sitting in a red tin can. ‘I told you to wrap up warm,’ Tom scolds me, before taking off his jacket and placing it over my shoulders. ‘Put it on. Your mother will kill me.’

  ‘You sound like my mother.’

  He then straps me into my seat like a toddler, and tells me that I’ll need to wear a headset to hear what he’s saying. ‘It gets noisy up there.’ He hands me a pair of black padded headphones, similar to the ones in Pete’s studio. Except in Pete’s studio it’s warm and cosy, the microwave heating up our Danish pastries and sausage rolls. I can hear the sound of that comforting ping.

  ‘What are all those control thingies?’ I ask when Tom is sitting in front of me, pressing various buttons and switches. ‘The rev counter, control speed, outer meter, magnetic compass so we know where we’re going . . .
’

  As I listen, I’m not that interested in what he is saying. I don’t really mind what button does what so long as Tom can fly Paddington safely. But I love watching him look this excited. For a brief moment I see him as a seventeen-year-old about to have his first flying lesson.

  ‘This is the artificial horizon,’ he describes, ‘if it was foggy I’d use this to measure how straight we’re going. The control stick, to steer us, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘On my course I had to learn about the physical parts of the plane, the fuel, the weather, the laws of the skies; it’s helpful to be good at geography.’

  ‘How long was your course?’

  ‘Four weeks.’

  I wriggle in my seat. I thought it would be at least a year.

  ‘After only nine hours I was left alone in the cockpit, solo, to land the plane. It was the most amazing and terrifying experience,’ he says, turning to me. ‘You can’t panic. I think it taught me many lessons about managing my fear and staying in control. You ready?’

  I stick my headphones on and give him the thumbs up.

  As Paddington leaves his station, bouncing us along the grassy field, the propeller spinning, I can’t help thinking that the plane doesn’t appear that sturdy. It looks as if it’s held together by a couple of steel poles, cables and rusty old screws. And it smells of diesel in here, it feels oily. I squeeze my eyes shut and say a quiet prayer as the wheels lift off from the ground and we ascend into the sky.

  When I open them I let out a nervous laugh. Soon I can’t stop laughing. I don’t know what it is; just seeing the back of Tom’s head and watching him steer us is enough to make me smile. ‘You OK?’ he shouts above the noise.

  ‘Great!’

  ‘Paddington’s such a nosy parker.’

  ‘What?’ I shout back.

  ‘He loves to hover over people’s property. Oh look, he’s just seen a naked man!’

  I look down, can’t see anyone, anything, just fields, houses . . . a sheer drop . . .