by Graham Swift
A fair exchange and a reasonable question, if I didn’t entirely welcome it and I needed to take a deep breath. One of our first conversations was about fathers. My dad—your Grandpa Dougie, whom you never knew—was sixty-six even then. He had me (and it was only me) even later, much later, than Mike and I had you. My father was forty-five when I was born: he was almost, but for a few months, as old as the century. And in 1944 he’d married a woman twenty years younger than he was, my mother, Fiona, who’s now still only seventy-five. I don’t know why I say “only.” She’s also, of course, your Grannie Fiona, whom you’ve also, for different reasons, never met. I don’t think being called “Grannie” was ever one of her chief aims in life. My father sometimes used to call her Fifi.
Family life—my family’s life, I mean—it’s all now a matter of history, but at the time I met your father it was still in the process of unravelling. It was like one of those things you gossip about at school. My parents had separated, they were getting divorced. Fiona had someone else, my future stepfather, Alex. And, not to be outdone, so did my dad. That’s to say, to be accurate, someone was hovering around him, ready to swoop: my future stepmother, Margaret, a mere thirty-six.
I was younger than you are now when I first got wind of all this. If it’s not the same thing, I can offer you my early experience, in solidarity. In 1966 I’d been living with the familiar ache of it for several years, but I wasn’t keen to unload these unappealing complications on to your dad and, as it seemed to me, his straightforward little Orpington threesome.
But that wasn’t quite the only problem on that otherwise (believe me) truly blissful night.
Come back to that bedroom in Osborne Street. The bed had a slatted wooden bedhead, of common and unbeguiling design, like a section of polished fence. There was a bedside light with a parchment shade and, across the room, a standard lamp. On the floor were three giant-sized red cushions, my three-piece suite. A lot of that room was on the floor. But on one wall, watching over your dad and me, though since both those lamps were off they may not have been able to see very much, were the faces of Manfred Mann. Five-four-three-two-one.
I won’t forget that room. I don’t know if that night you could hear, we weren’t specially listening, the sound of the not so distant sea. On the other hand we were engaged in a wonderful, slow, wave-like motion that neither of us wanted to stop. We were making love, but we were also falling, falling in love. It’s possible, I assure you, for the two things to happen at once. I’m the proof. Once it used to be the case, or it was supposed to be, that you fell in love and then, after being patient and chaste for perhaps a long and excruciating time, you got to make it. Now, I sometimes think, it may be all the other way round. You make love and then, maybe and maybe only rarely, you fall in it. But on a March night thirty years ago it happened at the same time. Though it may be a shade more honest to say to you now, since I’d never have made the mistake of saying it then, that I’d fallen in love with your father—who’d been around the house after all—just a little bit, before.
We were undulating anyway. Not just pillow talk, you might say, but billow talk, and what with this and all the sharing of our earlier years, I may even have had a fleeting picture of the long, rhythmic waves that used to roll and spill, not onto Brighton beach, but onto the sandy crescent bay at Craiginish in Scotland, where I’d spent summers as an unsuspecting girl and where one day, yes, Kate—I certainly wouldn’t have suspected this on that night in Osborne Street—your father would propose to me, actually if not exactly formally propose to me, in the dunes.
I’d already broached the Scottish thing. Yes, I was a Campbell, Paula Campbell, though in fact I came from Kensington. And here I was anyway in Sussex, on the south coast, about as far from Scotland as you could get.
But the undulating, for a moment, had its obstacle, its impending, unavoidable difficulty. There was no way I could break it gently to your father. He would form the wrong impression, he would take alarm, he might even feel he was caught (please not) in some kind of punishable act.
I didn’t want to interrupt your daddy’s sweet and gathering rhythm, so I said it as softly as I could.
“He’s a High Court judge.”
5
WHEN YOUR FATHER was twenty-one, he didn’t wear prisoner-of-war clothes. He wore, just for the embarrassing record, purple trousers with huge flares and a cracked leather jacket over a rotation (turquoise, muddy orange, salmon pink) of those T-shirts with buttons at the top which used to be called, and I never thought it funny then, granddad T-shirts. He had black hair almost to his shoulders, which was a bit curly and gypsyish at the ends. (Let’s not delve into my student wardrobe.) He looked pretty good, pretty unembarrassing to me.
And to Linda and to Judy, with differing consequences, beforehand. One way or the other, they’d relinquished their claims. There was no competition. All the same, since they were both in the house and were certainly interested, it was an open question exactly how things would proceed on the morning after that night.
We must have got some sleep. After dawn, perhaps, as the light came seeping in and the Brighton gulls began their morning mewing and squawking. It was a March night, a Friday to a Saturday night—like this night. It’s permanently inscribed in my mental almanac, and I’ve mentally placed an indelible plaque on the front wall of 33 Osborne Street: “Paula Campbell and Michael Hook first slept together here.”
I suppose it was still technically possible when we finally emerged, at some time approaching midday, that that night might have proved to be just another visit. No, your dad hadn’t come to stay, to spend the rest of his life with me. But I didn’t think I had to ask the question, and Linda and Judy at least weren’t going to deny what they could see with their eyes. All students get up late, but the two of them had been loitering for some time in the kitchen, clearly not intent on going anywhere. They were waiting to check us out. I still see their slightly glassy stares. Well, well, they might have said. Well, well, what have we here? But their silences and fidgety displays of matter-of-factness were perhaps more eloquent still.
And could this all have happened—it’s an entirely theoretical question, of course—if he hadn’t slept (or had some kind of turn) with the two of them first?
It was a mild, moist morning, the sun just trying to break through pearly clouds. The kitchen window was open to let in the air, or to let out the smell of burnt toast. All four of us were grouped round the table, all of us in various states of undress—but then didn’t we all know each other, just about? Wasn’t there now a pretty thorough familiarity, in fact?
But then again, was this quite the same kitchen, quite the same Brighton even, its relaxed weekend sounds wafting through the window, as only last night?
I suppose it was still technically possible that your father might have crunched his toast, downed his coffee, smacked his lips and said, “Well, nice knowing you, girls, must be off.” Three more notches (if that’s how it really was), a full house, so to speak, to his score. The purple-trousered bastard.
But he definitely didn’t.
And let’s call it two and a half. In Osborne Street, that is. I’ve never known precisely what his overall score was. One doesn’t ask. I think it can be assumed that this is a number no man is honest about. But, take it from me, your dad did his sleeping around before he came to a halt with me. I don’t say that to boast, to claim surrogate points. Perhaps I do. With me, it was six. Honest. To some that may seem quite a few, in two years, to some not so many. It was enough for me: to be able to say I’d slept around. And to sort out the Mikeys from the rest. What are women programmed to do? Biologists will tell you, and Mike was one: to select a mate.
But take it from me too, the formal study of biology, in your father’s final year at Sussex University, was of secondary, temporarily receding interest. He’d branched out. Whatever his score was, before me, he scored. Scoring wasn’t his problem: this fifty-year-old man, comatose now at my side.
It’s possible that in that never to be forgotten kitchen in Osborne Street your father might have taken his leave of my life, of Linda’s and Judy’s. And of yours. I might have become just a sad addition to his score. But I don’t think it was ever on the cards, and what he actually did was something marvellous. I fell in love with him, if that was possible, more. And, given our nocturnal conversation, I could just about feel, too, how it must have felt for him. Sometimes a woman can feel like a man feels. I’d already begun, you see, to feel your dad’s feelings. To be twenty-one and not to be a prisoner of war. To be centre-stage of life and not to put a foot wrong.
He finished his coffee. He looked levelly at all of us, but his hand, I remember, under the table, was surely placed on my thigh. The granddad T-shirt, that weekend, was a gruesome shade of magenta, his hair could probably have done with a wash, but he spoke like a lord. These days, as you know, it’s your father’s business to command. He has to address those board meetings, give little rallying speeches at conferences, generally come up with the right message—he’ll need all his skills tomorrow. I could never have predicted it, all those years ago. But perhaps that little quorum round the kitchen table at Osborne Street was an early glimpse.
“Ladies,” he said. Ladies! The three maisonettes. “Ladies, thank you for breakfast. Lunch will be on me. On the beach, with champagne. You’re all invited.”
Undoubtedly one of your father’s finest moments—not counting the whole of that preceding night. I was amazed at his chivalrous presence of mind. Even I could see that Linda and Judy couldn’t have been expected just to clear off. They were part of this unique occasion, they had to be honoured—thanked. In any case, they weren’t going to decline such an offer. I was amazed by how your father masterminded that day. As he spoke the sun came peeping through those pale clouds. It would be starting to dry and warm the pebbles already. And what do people do on a warm, sunny Saturday in Brighton, the first such Saturday of the spring?
But champagne. That was really impressive, in a student kitchen, in 1966. Champagne for four. Even when I found out that your father already had that champagne, it hadn’t cost him anything, I was still impressed by his ingenuity, his quick thinking. I was impressed, in a different way, by the fact that he still had three bottles left.
He said, could we give him twenty minutes, while he went to “fetch” some champagne? We had no reason to suppose he didn’t mean “buy.” My first thought, in any case, was that I didn’t want to be separated from your father even for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was suddenly like a chasm. I would have offered to go with him, foolishly insisting, perhaps, on sharing the bill, but something in his eyes was telling me, gently, not to. Linda and Judy, meanwhile, for their own reasons, were clearly determined I should stay right where I was. Twenty minutes! They couldn’t wait: to round on me as soon as your father was gone and say: “Well?”
Your dad had a bicycle, chained to the railings between us and next door. The Mike-bike, which came to be there quite a lot. He used to ride it in a crazy, splayed-kneed way to stop his flares getting caught in the chain. He disdained cycle clips, like a true man. That Saturday he rode it not to the nearest off-licence, but, as fast as he could, to his room across town, where there were still, remarkably, three bottles left from the whole case his dad had sent him for his twenty-first birthday in January, two months before. Dean and Hook must have been doing well. With those three bottles dangling dangerously in a duffel bag from his handlebars, he came whizzing back—I still picture his furious purple legs—true to his word.
That day on Brighton beach we drank champagne provided by your father. Though it had really come from his dad, your Grandpa Pete. I’ve often wondered if he ever knew. Did Mike tell him? For some delicate reason, I’ve never asked. It would have been a bit tricky, perhaps, for Mike to have given the full and complete details, but he might have glossed a bit, just given the gist.
I even thought once of telling your Grandpa Pete myself—or of checking if he knew. This was at our wedding, or at the little reception afterwards in the back garden in Kensington: another occasion when champagne flowed. My dad had assured me that it would be “nothing too grand, just like you want.” But the champagne was vintage Taittinger. Mike’s dad’s champagne had been Mumm, Cordon Rouge. Though it had been a whole case and it had meant he could make a neat little joke—Mike kept the card: “And Love from Mumm.”
I’m sure that wasn’t what stopped me: some fastidiousness that your Grandpa Pete might feel outclassed in his choice of champagne. He was looking mellow and tipsy enough, as I was, on my father’s stuff, and this might have been the perfect moment for some slightly daring daughter-in-law and father-in-law bonding. I was the blushing bride and I might have made your Grandpa Pete blush. For whatever reason, the moment passed. And I think he never did know. A minor secret.
Grandpa Pete would have been not yet fifty then—at our wedding. How weird. You’ll remember how back in January, on your dad’s fiftieth, we all felt a bit sorry for him. Just a year on from his dad’s death, which had been so badly, and suddenly, timed: less than two weeks before Mike turned forty-nine. No birthday for him that year, though not a big number at least. But now with every successive birthday, he’d have to cross that sad ditch first, the anniversary of his father’s death. And this year was his fiftieth, and his dad wouldn’t be around to see it.
Your Grandpa Pete: your first death. You thought, quite reasonably, that on his fiftieth birthday your dad was a little subdued, not so much because of the growing-old factor (is fifty old?), but because he was thinking of his dad. True. But I know he was thinking of something else too, something still to come. It was a quiet fiftieth, anyway. And your dad rather likes to celebrate, I’ll say that for him, he’s good at celebrating. He loves nothing better than to pop the champagne, and in these last few years, courtesy of Living World, he’s been able to do it quite a lot. That day in Brighton was a precedent, perhaps.
But here’s a complication. There’s a cause for celebration coming up, as you know, very soon, in just a week’s time. It’s our wedding anniversary. Not just that, it’s our twenty-fifth. We’re about to turn silver. You may already have bought us (it troubles me to think about it) some special silvery present, and you may also have been wondering why nothing’s been said on the subject so far, and surmised that your dad has been keeping some surprise up his sleeve.
Well, he has, but not for me. It’s just how it’s come about: it’s a year of big numbers, and of bad timings. And you’ll understand in a little while why it’s been a thorny question between us: our anniversary, I mean. What to do?
Your dad’s all for celebrating it, that’s his natural instinct. It’s about us, he says, there’s us anyway. He wants us to go away for the weekend, as couples often do on these occasions, to celebrate us. That, of course, would mean leaving you here by yourselves. No problem, you may think, what would be the big deal? Except, this year, you might not actually agree.
Your dad says it would be a good thing nonetheless. It would give you time to think, to talk things through, to be by yourselves. I’m not so sure. To me it feels like absconding, it feels like deserting my babies. And I know, I know: you’re sixteen.
But not so long ago Mike told me he’d booked us into a hotel anyway. He actually did it months ago—it’s that kind of place, a five-star country hotel. The Gifford Park. We had a bit of a row. I suppose it was mean of me, it was pretty foul of me, arguing with my husband about his generous arrangement for our special wedding anniversary. But it could be mean to you, you’ll realise—our just waltzing off.
He said, well, we could always cancel, any time. A little soft touch of blackmail. And, oh, I could see where he was coming from: an escape plan, a safety net—not having that bolt hole ready in France. He said, well, let’s just see, let’s leave the booking standi
ng and let’s see.
I’m not sure he should even have made that booking without telling me first. It could never have been, this year, like some straightforward, happy surprise. But that’s how he is, he likes the big and generous gesture. You’ll understand.
6
HE MADE A GESTURE even about today—by which now I mean yesterday, Friday. He called me at work to say we should meet for lunch in town. We hadn’t made any prior plans, but he called me to say we couldn’t just let it pass unmarked: our “last day.” His last day, your last day, I’m not sure what to call it. And I’m not sure it was a case of “marking,” more of nerves and solidarity, but I had to allow him his prerogative. The condemned man’s choice of supper. I think my notion of our “last day” had been of something entirely indistinguishable from any other: a Friday, a working day, the more workaday and busier, perhaps, the better.
But the truth is I was glad of your dad’s last-minute call. I can’t say my own nerves have been steady. And I too had begun to feel there should be some—gesture. Though I didn’t think it should come from me, like an offering of pity.
But I was glad of your dad’s call in another way. You’ll think this absurd of me, I’m not your age, after all. It was like that call you get when you think you may not get a call, when you even think that something may be ending. That simple word in my ear: “Paulie?”
The only small problem was that I had to cancel, abruptly, my lunch with Simon. I had to stand up my boss. And all week long, I think, Simon, who notices things, had been noticing my nervousness, my not quite sparkling form. Everything okay, Paula?
Every month or so Simon likes to have a one-to-one lunch with one of his directors, and this was my turn. All part, as he sees it, of his caring and counselling and not merely boss-like role. He nearly always begins, after the first sip of wine, with a: “Now—tell me all your troubles.” A wry joke by now, since I never seem to have any to tell him. Though I have a hunch that nothing would do more for Simon’s sense of his own worth than if I were to grasp his wrist across the table and pour out some tale of woe, even show signs of wanting to cry on his shoulder. And perhaps this week he’d been scenting the possibility.