by Graham Swift
Your father slept around and so, thanks to Doctor Pope, did I. Let’s not be exact about who did the most, but let’s give the edge to your father. I was the younger, if only by six months. And, just for the candid record, your father, before he met me and even in those pill-blessed times, always carried a traditional stand-by: the packet of three. You may think this is information that doesn’t particularly concern you. I said to him, “You won’t be needing these.” But your dad had always been—careful.
How it is for you I don’t know. In these mid-1990s, when sixteen is eighteen and when, from all I can tell, what once went on at university now sometimes goes on at school, you’d think you might already be beginners at least. What with all that early knowledge you seemed so glad once to advertise. The facts of life? They’ve simply been in the air you’ve breathed, the common small talk (apparently) of infants, they don’t need special elucidation.
But on the other hand, for all the all-around-you of it these days, schoolgirl pregnancies by the dozen (yes, Kate, I worry), I think there’s sometimes too a weirdly opposite reaction. Why rush into something so patently available? A sort of sex-fatigue before it’s even started, a sort of purity or just stubborn sensibleness. Abstention is the new liberation: is that the way the tide is turning? Sometimes when we refer to those oh-so-wonderful, oh-so-yawn-making 1960s, it’s not just that you make a show of boredom. Sometimes in your eyes there’s the faint hint of a tut-tut. As if you might be about to say to us, a little too late in the day, perhaps: “Oh, grow up.”
There’s a gap of quite a few years between us, as you may have noticed. You’re sixteen, your father’s fifty. But that’s another shift that’s become unremarkable these days. Thirty, thirty-five: that’s no longer a cliff-edge for a woman. Mike says—you’re familiar with his ironical and slightly professorial mode, though it’s not, I’m sure, how he’ll address you tomorrow—that the whole thing is changing, there’s no longer the pressure of brevity, we’ll all reach a hundred, one day, and procreate when we’re fifty. Well. “All other things being equal,” he adds. If there isn’t by then anyway, he says, “some completely new system.” The slightly prophetical mode as well. Once anyway, as we all know, people were lucky to get to forty and there were brides of fourteen. (If not, Kate, of eight.)
I don’t know. The world doesn’t feel to me more relaxed and better adjusted, it has this way of suddenly racing. I don’t know how it feels to you. But what I do know is that at sixteen you’re both virgins. I don’t have the proof and I don’t have your direct confirmations, just intuition. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the world around you and how there’s more time at your disposal and how you can just be cool and calm about everything. It has to do with you, with what you are: Nick and Kate, with that invisible rope straining, and sometimes catching painfully, between you. Little upsets and outbursts, not helped by recent symptoms of parental tension. Now and then a door gets slammed.
I don’t know how tomorrow will affect it. A big snapping of all our ropes? You’re sixteen, you’re eighteen, you’re grown-up and able to handle anything? We’ll find out. Right now it seems to me that you’re as changeable, as suddenly mature then as suddenly childish, as suddenly moody and tetchy then as suddenly brimming with verve and sparkle, as any teenagers. And you’re virgins. It’s a sweet thing, from the outside. Like the sweetness, from the outside, of your inescapable togetherness. And thank God, for the time being, you have each other. You’re virgins, you could say, in another way too.
3
SUSSEX IN THE SIXTIES: the very phrase like some glistening salad. And Sussex was the place to be, the best, the coolest university in the land. And of course it was the place to be: it was where I met your dad.
I was reading English with history of art. Your father was a student of biology—or biological science, as they called it there. Now I’m one of the directors at Walker and Fitch, and your father’s more than a director, he mainly owns and runs Living World Books, which includes Living World Magazine. How far we’ve come. He’s still in science, in a manner of speaking. That is, he sells it. And now and then, as you may have noticed, he’ll still come over all self-searching and conscience-stricken about having deserted “real” science to become a money-maker. As if there weren’t all those lean years before you arrived when he hardly made any money out of science at all. As if it wasn’t his own decision. And now the irony anyway is that times have changed again, there are big fish around poised to swallow up Living World and your dad’s on the verge of selling up completely. Something else he’s yet to announce.
We had you late in life—with shrewd foresight it may now seem—but the fact is we weren’t to know. Science only became lucrative, it only turned into “popular science,” in your lifetime and your father only emerged as a successful publisher when you were too young to notice.
Was it something to do with you? Quite possibly. It was arguably to do with you that he gave up true science, abandoned biology in the first place. Since that happened long before you were born, you may wonder how you can have affected it either way.
Your dad likes to maintain that his latter-day success is all down to luck, to just happening to be in the right place at the right time. To luck and to his “Uncle” Tim—I’ll come to him later. But I think it was all a little like that contraceptive pill. Which came first: the pill and the science that produced it, or the change in the air that went with it? Science might never have become popular if your dad, among others, hadn’t discovered a gift, a marketing gift, for making it so. And he didn’t just “happen” to be there. He was there for a long and dubious time (I was one of the doubters) before the time was ever right.
He still likes to deny this and to have those moments of wistful, scientific regret. But this is at least fifty per cent tosh—trust me—or it’s really about something else altogether. Selling isn’t the same as disowning, or we’d all have nothing to our names. I buy and sell art. For many years, as I remind your father, it was our bread and butter. But I can still like it. I can still love Tintoretto. This usually shuts him up. Your dad appreciates a good picture too. Over the years he’s developed quite an eye. He’ll even admit, if you push him, that the art department at Living World is a major factor in its success. “Uncle” Tim was simply never visual.
And I certainly appreciate, as does your dad, the pictures, if they’re not Tintorettos, that we can buy now and hang on our own walls. This house, as you’ve grown older, has become full of pictures, full, as you like to call it, of “stuff.” And large enough house though it is, you might have wondered—teenagers, these days, seem wised-up on these things—why we haven’t moved yet to an even bigger house that can contain yet more stuff, on a grander scale. Especially as not so long ago we quite casually bought a farmhouse in France—your father called it a “bolt hole”—still being worked on. Selling up, and buying up. All things being equal, to use your dad’s phrase, we might be over there right now for the weekend, checking up on progress and staying at the Hôtel des Deux Églises. I think he wishes it were ready, right now, for immediate refuge.
But all things aren’t equal, though we’re all here in this house tonight, as is only proper. All your memories, just about, are in this house. All your life, just about, is within these walls. “After your sixteenth birthday,” we said. How could we possibly have moved anywhere beforehand, how could we have told you what we’ll tell you tomorrow anywhere else but here?
Once upon a time your dad and I used to share a basement in Earl’s Court. Tatty posters, reproductions only, on the walls. And in those days, yes, your dad was a real scientist, working in a lab. His special field, as you know, was molluscs, and within that special field, his special area was snails. And his special area within that special area, which he would say wasn’t at all small, was the construction and significance, the whole evolutionary and ecological import, of their shells. How is it done? Why doesn’t a snail just remain a slug? A question that you a
nd I might never think to ask. But it was one of the many instances, your dad might say in his best professorial mode, of biology’s skill in chemistry, in sub-organic ingenuity.
I’m referring now, of course, to his own article, years ago now, in Living World. (A very wishy-washy and barely scientific article, he would say, but I know it meant a lot to him, I know it was a gesture to his long since aborted PhD.) Not just chemistry, but in time and by a long, slow process far beyond the needs of molluscs, mineralogy, geology, the very composition of the world. Or, as he once put it to me when we were still at Sussex: a limpet will never know it, but without the ability of its ancient ancestor to make a shell, there simply wouldn’t be any South Downs.
Just think, he might have studied limpets. But I don’t think your father has ever really given up science. And he can still say things, still give the little lectures that almost stop you in your tracks.
Snails, not limpets. One moves, just about: the other just clings. Mike went for snails. And what a fitting choice, I’ve sometimes thought, but never, of course, ever said, for a man who’d arrive late in life. Your dad, and his snails.
They’ll be out there now, it occurs to me: a whole crop of them in this summer rain. Rain always brings them on, or brings them out. This house is being surrounded, perhaps fittingly and even with a delicate, nostalgic empathy, by snails. We treat them now like the regular garden pests they are, despatch them casually and mercilessly. But once your father was an expert on snails. And once upon a time, in Sussex, he was a genuine student of biology, though I might have said then that his special field in biology was his own.
Linda Page and Judy Morrison might have said the same. I shared an upper flat with them in Osborne Street, Brighton. They became our “bridesmaids.” You’ve met Linda some years ago. She married a nice plump lawyer in the end and now lives in Highgate. What you’ve never known is that once she slept with your dad. Judy’s become less in touch. I mustn’t let her get like Doctor Pope, like one of those people you just wonder about. We used to have our regular get-togethers, the three of us, our lunches or girls’ nights out. Sometimes these would be in Piero’s in Jermyn Street, just up the road from Walker’s (Simon, eyebrow ever cocked, wanted to be introduced). Linda and Judy: if there were ever two people to whom I might have just blabbed the whole story. When we got on to our third, unneeded bottle. But I never have.
The Three Sisters of Osborne Street. We shared most things. We may even have shared your dad. I’m still not sure if it actually happened with Judy. Your dad is good, and he’s needed to be, at being cryptic. But however far the previous sharing had gone, after I’d had my first share there was definitely no more sharing. This you should know, if only for the straightness of the record. It was Linda your dad visited first, or it would be more correct to say, it was Linda who first brought him home. And your dad and Linda didn’t last so long. It’s an unresolved question who ditched whom. I think they ditched each other, gently. Then, putatively, it was Judy. But then it was me.
Number thirty-three Osborne Street, Brighton. A stone’s throw, as they like to say ambitiously in Brighton, from the sea. But on a still night, if the tide was in, you might sometimes just hear the soft crash of waves, like far-off cymbals I always thought, and on a wild, wet night you’d have the feeling that the rain on the window might be spray.
We had the top two floors: three bedrooms and a kitchen. It all had its own front door and separate stairs: not so much a flat as a “maisonette.” A word of its time. As well as the Three Sisters we were the Three Maisonettes. Linda had the front bedroom, I had the one next to hers, Judy had the room at the top. And we all had our visitors.
Mike has maintained ever since, which may be complete tosh too, but I’ve never not gone along with it since it would hardly behove me to disagree, that he had to sleep with Linda and Judy first in order to get to me. Fair’s fair: all of us right there under the same roof. As if he were some knight in armour and Linda and Judy were just challenges, obstacles who popped up to waylay him on his otherwise unswerving quest.
In any case, the result was the same, and I have my own simple summary of it all, from which I’ve never wavered. I can’t really remember if at the time I was actually jealous or impatient, or just desperate, as he worked his way, according to him, to me. Or if I actually thought—or hoped—that contriving to be third in line might give me some precarious advantage. But what I’ve always simply told your father and now I’ll tell you is that I was lucky, oh so lucky, third-time lucky.
Luck which stayed. The incontestable and lasting truth is he never went on to anyone else. Our auditioning days, so to speak, were over. We’d each found the one. Your father got into bed with me one night in Brighton nearly thirty years ago and, though the place and the room and the bed have changed from time to time, he’s never got out.
4
“SLEEPING WITH”: it’s a funny expression. It doesn’t mean what it says, though sometimes it just does. As if the closest you can ever get to another human being is to lie beside them, unconscious that they’re even there. I’ve slept with your father for nearly thirty years. That’s nearly ten years, if you think about it, of mutual oblivion. Though look at me here, wide awake. I’m not sleeping with him tonight.
And we didn’t do that much sleeping that night, thirty years ago. Though it’s not the sleeping (of either kind) that counts, right at the start, take your mother’s word for it. It’s the pillow talk. You’ll find that out one day, I hope, though you haven’t even begun the process, so far as I can tell, of finding someone to sleep with. It’s hardly for me, your own mother, to say: time to get going, it’s 1995, time to start sleeping around, time to follow your mother’s hardly commendable example. You’ve only ever slept with each other, long ago when you were babies and again, rather subversively, when you were toddlers, which you won’t want reminding of anyway.
But listen to your mother, pillow-talking to herself.
I knew it wasn’t the same with Linda at least: no pillow talk there. Her room was next to mine, the wall wasn’t discreet. Plenty of noise, plenty of bed sound. And I heard—it’s a very strange thing to remember now—Linda’s rather high-pitched, hurrying gasps. But I didn’t hear many words, I didn’t hear much conversation. And after not so very long I didn’t hear anything: just the sound of two people asleep while I lay awake, the sound of two people sleeping together and doing, really, just that.
But Linda, if she were awake, when it was the other way round, if she were listening with some special device, a glass to the wall perhaps, would have heard us whispering and murmuring away long into the night. Heard our thrustings and thrashings-about certainly, and later on heard something softer, slower, just a lovely, steady undulation, I recall, the merest gentle creaking of my bed. But, in between and afterwards again, she’d have heard, if she listened hard, the sound of us swapping the stories of our lives. Though I’m not so sure, if I’m honest, and knowing Linda, if she’d have cared that much or been so free to listen, having moved on from your dad, a thing I find hard to comprehend, though I have to thank her for it utterly.
Pillow talk. It’s how you know, it’s how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day—some night—I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not just to merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven’t already guessed that your future, too, will be shared?
I was twenty, he was twenty-one. At some point, deep in the middle of that night, he told me that when his dad had been twenty-one, he’d been a prisoner of war, somewhere in Germany. Why did he say that then? I didn’t really want to know about his dad, not quite yet. He was talking, of course, about your Grandpa Pete. But I suppose it only made me want to squeeze him a bit more—your dad, I mean. Should I be telling you this? I suppose, on that very fi
rst night, I was squeezing your dad’s dad in him. I imagined your dad as a prisoner of war, who’d just made it back. Thank God! As if my legs were wrapped round your Grandpa Pete. Who’s dead now. What a thought.
We’d both been born in 1945—Mike in January, me in August—and each of us, we discovered, was an only child. In January 1945, when Mike was born, his dad had been in some freezing prison camp. Now here we were, by the seaside, with the run of a fashionable campus on the South Downs, having the time—having the night—of our lives.
It’s all in the luck of your birth.
I hate to think how remote and historical that year 1945 must seem to you. It starts to look pretty remote and historical to me. You never think your own life is going to include the feeling “that was another age, another time, another world.” But it does, it will for you. Even sooner, perhaps, than you think. And I suppose it’s a feeling we’re all going to have more of, if we all start living to a hundred.
He said his parents lived in Orpington. His dad had a small factory in Sidcup—“Dean and Hook Laminates,” as you know. But these were things I hardly wished to dwell on as we lay there together at Osborne Street. So: he lived in Orpington and I lived in Kensington. Did it matter? We both lived in Sussex now—we would soon be living, not just sleeping, together. And Mike, it turned out, was a sort of Sussex boy anyway.
“And your dad?” your father said to me.