by Graham Swift
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 “research
ing” 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.”
10
BUT COME BACK to when he was twenty-one, and to another visit. To one day in May when I stood with your father outside the front door of number seven Napier Street, Kensington, waiting for my father to open it.
I’d never seen your dad look so scared. He was quaking in his Chelsea boots. Ever since I’d told him, in that unfortunately timed way, that my father was a High Court judge, your dad was convinced that his moment of judgement must come. On that May afternoon he was about to be condemned.
No amount of soft-pedalling on my part would reassure him: it’s a wonder I got him to that doorstep. In the Queen’s Bench Division they didn’t sentence criminals—not that your dad was one—or send anyone to the gallows. Not that, by 1966, anyone was sent to the gallows. Though it’s a rather chilly historical fact that not so long before, they still were. And an even chillier fact which I don’t like to dwell on and didn’t like to dwell on then, that if my father had chosen criminal law he might, for a brief period at least of his judge’s career, have been one of those who sent them there. How far we’ve come since before you were born.
In any case, as I tried to persuade your father, my father was a complete sweetie, a lamb. He wore lambs-wool cardigans from Harrods. He was not Judge Jeffreys. You’d never even guess he was a judge. But none of this washed with your dad, it even gave him more cause to quake. A sweetie—yes, of course he’d be, with his own daughter. Your dad knew the situation well enough by then: that my father was about to divorce his wayward wife. Which left this mutually devoted and clinging household of two, father and daughter. The more fondly I spoke of my father, the more Mike was sure he was going to be Mr. Interloper, Mr. Rival. My dad was going to cut him dead.
Pity your poor father, if it makes sense to pity retrospectively, standing outside my father’s front door. Picture him then, when you look at him tomorrow. He really had nothing to fear. And if only he’d known his real moment of judgement was to come much later in life.
It was useless to explain to him that the Kensington situation was not as simple as it seemed. My father was not quite the wronged and wounded party, taking his only comfort in me, meanwhile seething with unvented spite. He was magnanimously—or soft-headedly—anxious that the divorce shouldn’t be punitively framed. Fiona was still the mother of his only child (and knew how to milk his better nature). There’d still been the good years. I remember them. The three of us outside “Craiginish Croft” waiting idiotically for the time-release shutter (the photo’s in that box): Dougie, Fifi and Paulie, as we called ourselves then, like a litter of puppies. My mother stood to get a good deal more than most lawyers—not acting for a judge—would have advised. She’d get Craiginish, for a start. If I hadn’t, that spring, been busy tumbling into b
ed and into love with your father, I might have argued more fiercely with my poor daddy about that.
Then again, there was the potentially ruinous factor of Margaret Gould, my stepmother-to-be, already staking her place. He had to be very careful this didn’t give Fiona grounds for extracting even more. I’d already begun to hate Margaret—that interloper. So couldn’t I understand your dad’s qualms? I’d already begun the unbecoming process of outlawing my own mother. Perhaps it’s me you should really be judging tomorrow.
It would have been better, in some ways, if my father had actually gone out and, in a spirit of reckless and conspicuous revenge, “picked up” Margaret. But he was sixty-six and it might have wrecked his judge’s career. Judges don’t “go out,” they don’t “pick up.” And judges, perhaps by definition, should be fair to all parties and free from all vindictiveness. In any case, that wouldn’t have been him. He had “picked up” Margaret, but in his normal, helpless, passive-but-effective way, like a burr that had stuck insistently to one of his cardigans. A sweetie and a softie: though I couldn’t convince your father, going through agonies, outside his front door.
The door was a glossy, implacable, judgemental black, the standard livery of Kensington, but that didn’t help your dad. It stood at the top of steps inside a porch supported by two glossy white pillars. On one of them would have been a large, finely serifed black “7.”
Adding to your dad’s unease, I can’t deny it, was the sudden palpable tang of wealth in his nostrils. At Sussex there was the general levelling of student existence. Now he was the boy from Orpington, about to be put in his place by a Kensington your-lordship. Not that he’d minded, I’d noticed, having a “bird” (don’t laugh, it was the word then) from just up from the King’s Road. Those Chelsea boots he was quaking in were the genuine article, in the sense that we’d bought them, in the King’s Road, not so very long before.