by Graham Swift
What was stopping us, you may well ask. And isn’t it the point, or one of the points, of this bedtime story, you must be thinking, to underscore the proposition, never mind proposals, that this man lying here and me were always meant for each other, made for each other, as they say? We were meant to be. And would you yourselves, who have such an intimate interest in the matter, have written the story differently?
Forgive that last question, it’s unfair and foolish. Especially tonight. You hardly had any option. It’s like saying that you were meant to be born in Gemini. Forgive your foolish mother. What would have happened if your dad and I had never “found” each other? We’d have been lost souls for the rest of our lives, for ever searching for our missing other halves? By an incredible stroke of cosmic luck, we just happened to cross paths in Brighton?
Of course I know it wouldn’t have been so. I’d have found someone else. I’d have found another Mikey. He’d have found another Paulie. And what would you have cared who it was, so long as there was someone, two someones, to produce you? I married, as it happens, a biologist, but I don’t need a biologist to tell me that it’s a rough old game, the mating game, a game of chance and scramble. There’s no sweet bedtime story in biology.
But forgive me for thinking that’s unthinkable. Forgive me for thinking I’ve proved it otherwise. Another Mikey: not this one? Another me? Forgive me for thinking, even back then, at Craiginish, at the mature age of twenty: why had it taken so long? All those missed-out years. What kept you, Mikey, what kept us?
Nothing was stopping us, except that awkward fact of being children of our time, children of the Sixties, obliged to scoff at the very idea of marriage. How embarrassing. When your father “proposed” to me I was, of course, on the pill. He couldn’t have done it, in fact, or done it so passionately, if I wasn’t. It was that magic pill, principally, that had made marriage so unobligatory, or so unpressing. Otherwise, if there was just the two of you, and you were only twenty…
You see the way—the unfortunate way for you—this is heading?
When your Grandma Helen met Grandpa Pete, in the war, it was rather different. They got married quickly and went on a brief and urgent honeymoon. They had their special reasons. None of which, of course, can have been to conceive expressly for me my future husband. But forgive me.
You’ve seen the photos, like archive material, of Pete and Helen’s wedding. For all the haste, it was the full ceremony. A church, of course. It was in Dartford. Grandpa Pete in his uniform, Grandma Helen, considering it was wartime, in amazing bridal flow. Is that long train really a parachute? April 1944. Two months later Grandpa Pete was in a prison camp.
We finally got married, as you know, in Chelsea Registry Office (where else but the King’s Road?), on the twenty-fourth of June, twenty-five years ago. But that four-year gap before we made things formal can’t all be ascribed to the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun, of children. If that were so, why did we wait another nine years before having you? I’ve sometimes wondered if that nine-year gap has ever vaguely hurt you. We left it so long, till our critical thirties, because we might, in fact, have been entirely happy without you? But then it’s perfectly common these days, almost the standard thing, women happily wait till they’re past thirty. What’s the big rush? How different from Helen and Pete.
But come back to that “betrothal.” Come back to the white, bridal sand of Craiginish. Though this is one of those moments when perhaps you really shouldn’t be listening. On the other hand, I can’t believe you didn’t work it out between the two of you long ago. What were we doing in those dunes? And what a prim, archaic word I’d chosen: “proposed.” It conjures up a man on bended knee with a bunch of flowers. It conjures up an Edward.
But a principal detail you don’t know. Your father is a biologist. And, yes, we were being biological. But he’d been being biological beforehand. He’d been telling me, at some length in fact, about marram grass—that wind-blown stuff that grows exclusively on the brows of sand dunes and that right then was gently waving and whispering, conspiratorially I have to believe, just above our heads. Apparently, it has, among the grasses, unique and extraordinary properties, not least of which is its stubborn desire to cling and take root where no other plant will, on bare and barren sand. It’s the grassy equivalent of limpets.
An early and incongruous instance of one of Professor Mike’s lectures. I can’t say I was concentrating. Though I can’t say that before that day I even knew it was called marram grass. Just think, he might have been a grass expert. Soon afterwards, anyway, we were engaged in other things, and in a short while this man who I’d known then for just four months was crying out to me in a state of high but purposeful excitation, “Marry me! Marry me!”
A slip of the tongue? A likely story.
And what did I say? Well, the answer’s obvious. Here I am, married to your father. For twenty-five years now, nearly. And you may think, Kate—I don’t know if you’ve put it to the test, though I rather think you haven’t—that you may be the only woman who’ll never gasp out the word, but I bet you aren’t or won’t be.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh yes, yes, yes!”
12
I MARRIED A HOOK. The jokes work both ways: I was hooked, or I was the lucky girl who hooked a Hook. Twenty-five years ago, in any case, I changed my name from Campbell to Hook, a simple, then-customary procedure which, if you think about it, can seem just a little outrageous.
But what’s in a name? I’ve always liked, anyway, the simple, no-nonsense, Anglo-Saxon sound of it. And it’s your name, my two little Hooks, the name you were born with, have grown up with and, so far as I know, have never resented: your dad’s name, since that’s the custom too.
Kate Hook, Nick Hook: two neat, quick syllables for each of you. Even if you’d never met them, you’d think: “Kate Hook,” “Nick Hook,” well, they’re going to be two bright, sharp, good-to-know people, they’re not going to be a pair of drips. I suppose you might also think: “Hook?”—never trust anyone with a name like that. But I even like that little hint of crookedness.
When I started at Walker and Fitch (good names too, at least in the art world), not long after I got married, I made a decision: to be Paula Hook, at work, not Paula Campbell. It was my decision and it went against the grain again, for1970. But it really wasn’t a decision at all. I was happy to wear your dad’s name, to settle the debate permanently and openly: Okay, Mikey, you hooked me. It’s another debate whether you’d rather buy a picture from a Paula Hook than a Paula Campbell. I know, there was always a joke or two there. That’s the picture, I’m the Hook. I’m a senior director now, anyway. I can turn down lunch with my boss.
And all this made me the crooked and treacherous one, I suppose, trading-in my proud Scottish name to this family from the deepest south. Hook being a Sussex name. But that’s where we’d met—in Sussex, at Sussex. We even told you when you were small that we’d met on Brighton beach, a little myth or half-myth we had to modify later. And in those days it had just been Paulie and Mikey. What’s in a name? What’s even in a family?
But two years after we were married I found out what it really meant to have changed my name. And by then (if you’ve been wondering) we were certainly thinking, more than thinking, of starting a family. One evening your father came off the phone and said, “That was my dad. My Uncle Eddie’s died.” Then he went very silent for a while, and a little later shed some tears—something I’d never seen before then, and which you saw for the first time not so long ago when we were all standing, as it happened, not so very far from Uncle Eddie’s well-weathered grave.
Grandpa Pete was your first death. That had been ours: Uncle Eddie, when we were a good deal older than you were last year. When I saw your dad cry, I thought: it’s only an uncle, it’s not his mum or dad. What’s with the tears? Though I’d met Uncle Eddie myself, two or three times, and I had some idea of the story. And wasn’t I now a Hook?
A few days later, on a beautif
ul spring morning, I found myself standing in that churchyard at Birle, my first visit there for a funeral. It’s a picture-book country churchyard, as you know, it’s pure Gray’s Elegy. Though I’m not sure if such things mean anything to you, in 1995, plugged as you are so much of the time into one kind of electronic life-support system or another. Kids these days—this was your dad’s joke when we bought you your first computers—they don’t ask for the world, do they, they don’t even want it. For you, perhaps, it’s all the other way round. I’m not so sure you don’t think that churchyards and villages like Birle and country cottages and the country itself don’t really belong in some old-fashioned picture-book. I’m not sure you’ve read Gray’s Elegy.
Anyway, once when you were small you were taken, for the possible interest of it, to that churchyard at Birle and shown those gravestones, a century or two old some of them. Look, that’s your name: Hook. And the most recent one of them was Uncle Eddie’s: Edward Hook. Look, he was born in 1915. Which seems to have struck a little chord with you, to have made a strange, mutated impression.
And there you were again, early last year, for Grandpa Pete. Your first taste of death. Dank January weather to go with it. I was quietly proud of your fourteen-year-old dignity, so was Grannie Helen. You both seemed so calm. Perhaps you were just numbed and dazed, it was all just washing over you. Then, of course, the memory suddenly flooded over me, making my heart thump in the middle of that funeral: this wasn’t your first dealing with death, was it?
But perhaps you were just aching to get back to your CD players, your teenage agendas, whatever they were at the time. Sometimes it’s as though there’s a wall of plate glass between us and you. We haven’t noticed it, we think we can just walk through. Can I really remember any more how it actually feels—to be fourteen, to be sixteen?
Back in 1972, in that churchyard, when I was twenty-six, my range of emotions was rather different. I thought: well, who wouldn’t want to be buried in such a place, if they could choose? Death tasted, that day, of April sunshine and new, juicy grass. Lucky Hooks. Who wouldn’t want to be a Hook? Then, of course, it hit me: I was one. And then that other thought hit me: that I might, one day, be one of these stones.
It hit me like some almost-actual bolt from that blue and fluffy-white April sky. It travelled right through me. There’s that expression which I fully understood that day: to be “rooted to the spot, to the ground.” And then, I can’t explain it, but perhaps it had to do with being rooted, I felt—well, sappy and juicy. I’d never known quite such rampant sappiness.
I suddenly felt, I have to confess it, a great lust for your father, for your father’s body—definitely not a new thing, as I must have made plain, but never before in a graveyard. For the body of this man I’d known then for six years. For the body of this man, lying sleeping here, with whom, as it happens, I made the tenderest of sweetest love just two hours ago.
Lust in a churchyard, at a funeral: that’s worse than mere randiness in church. Even as your father stood, in his dark suit, mourning his Uncle Eddie. Red-bedspread lust. But lust with a will, a determination, it wouldn’t leave me. Don’t be ashamed of your mother. All through the gathering that followed at Coombe Cottage, in that home of Hooks, while sherries were served on the lawn by Mrs. Sinden, Uncle Eddie’s bravely smiling old housekeeper, I was really thinking: couldn’t there be some magic time-warp in these proceedings so that, without anyone noticing, I could take Mikey off and satisfy my lust with him, then return with him, not a stitch out of place, as if we’d never gone anywhere?
It was April all around, greenly lusting anyway. If only it had been—perhaps I shouldn’t have had the thought—January. From the end of that garden, as you know, you can see, beyond a field or two, the South Downs suddenly swelling up to their bosomy skyline. I’d never felt so much the truth of what your dad had once said about them (Sussex University, after all, was plonked down right in their midst), that they were the most libidinous landscape he knew. All those curves and dips, those little pubic clumps of trees. When you saw them, you wanted, he said, to run your hand over them, like you wanted to run your hand…
Well, Mikey, I thought, let me be your South Downs.
It’s usually men, we’re given to believe, who go through these torments of disguised, of intolerably postponed rapacity. When they do they try to think, apparently, of chastening and chilly things, like funerals and coffins.
At least by the time we got home to Herne Hill that evening the lust had become plainly mutual. I’d infected your father, despite his April grief? Or it’s just how death can work anyway, even on the grieving? Biology talking. Lust, but with a will and a purpose to it. No guesses what it was. I really believed—does this sound strange to you? It sounds now even a little strange to me—that on that April night we would conceive you.
Uncle Eddie died when he was only fifty-seven. That gravestone would have told you. For his twenty-first birthday, Grandpa Pete sent your dad that case of champagne, but his Uncle Eddie sent him a beautiful, leather-bound Victorian book, with some lovely, hand-tinted illustrations: on molluscs. At that point in his life, I think your dad appreciated the champagne more than the book, and he was more interested in girls than snails. But the champagne got drunk and the book got kept. It’s still here, right now, in this house, with Uncle Eddie’s austerely calligraphic inscription inside. “To M.H. from E.H.…” Wilkinson’s British Terrestrialand Freshwater Molluscs: what a mouthful, what a present. Four years later we got married, two years after that, Uncle Eddie died.
How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it’s so slow and sweet and everlasting. How soon you start to count the numbers. I was twenty-six—already?—nearer twenty-seven. One moment it’s just life, life, nothing but life, and though you’re in a state of higher education, you know nothing really, you’re just kids really, still at play. Then along come the announcements and reckonings and understandings. You know a bit about death. Even about birth.
When my father died, just a few years later, it turned out that, though he’d lived in Kensington most of his life, he wanted to be buried at Invercullen, in Argyllshire, among his ancestors: gravestones with the name “Campbell.” It meant a long and rather ghastly journey north for your dad and me—not at all like our earlier journey to Craiginish. It meant rather a lot of things. I said to your dad, “I think you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”
But one of the things it meant to me, amid a great inundation of grief, was that little prickle of treachery: that I was a Hook now, not a Campbell. It might even have occurred to the two of you, last year, that though Grandpa Pete had lived most of his life in Orpington, there he was now in that churchyard at Birle, just yards from his brother Eddie. It seemed he’d reserved the plot even before he and Grannie Helen retired permanently to Coombe Cottage. More significantly still, he’d booked a double plot. So Grannie Helen must have agreed, though her maiden name was Kingsley, and the Kingsleys came from Dartford.
What weird things families are. How weird that we all sit somewhere in the branches of a family tree.
When I stood with your father at your Great-uncle Eddie’s funeral, I’d been off the pill for a while, if nothing yet had happened. But that sudden, highly awkward surge of lust was like some extra confirmation, an endorsement. I “wanted his children.” And what a strange phrase that is, “his children,” another dubious bow to custom. I wanted my children too. (I wanted that dark suit off him.)
Quite clearly it wasn’t that night you were conceived, though it had everything going for it, even the time of the month. All the same, perhaps you could say it was where you really “began,” seven years before you were actually born: at Uncle Eddie’s funeral. How canny you were, Kate, when you secretly christened this house.
I was twenty-six, Mike was twenty-seven. We were in that seven-month period of every year—we’re in it now—when your dad has the edge on me. I haven’t finished yet with that crucial year of 1972. Thi
s year, on his fiftieth birthday, Nick, you needled your father—I suppose every son has to—about what it felt like to be an old man of half a century. As if being forty or even thirty isn’t already ancient to you.
You did it jokingly and gently enough, and your dad took it in the same spirit. It didn’t seem to rattle him, I think he was prepared for something like it. And you’ll both of you remember what he said. He said that fifty was nothing these days, it was the prime of life. I was glad to hear it. But in any case, he said, he wasn’t bothered, because after a certain point in his life he’d always really felt the same age inside, the age at which he’d sort of stopped. Remember? And you said, Nick, still a tender fifteen yourself, “Oh yeah, and what age was that then?” And he said, “Twenty-seven.”
13
YOU NEVER KNEW your Grandpa Dougie. You’ve never even seen his grave, on a hillside in Argyll. And you’ve never met your Grannie Fiona, last locatable even further north, amid the oil and twinkling granite of Aberdeen.
The Campbell side of things, disappearing into Scottish mist, was always the remote and fairy-tale side of things, not to mention those complicating and never-seen step-parents of mine, somewhere in between. But the truth is it was the Hook side, with which you’ve had close and familiar dealings, which was really the fairy-tale side. And it’s time you were told—you’re sixteen now, after all—the full, unexpurgated fairy tale.
Which includes the fairy tale of how your father’s legendary snails, which you also never met but with which he once worked very closely, eventually turned into this thing which, along with some lucrative art dealing, has kept us now very comfortably indeed for years. I mean, of course, Living World Publishing. You can’t complain that you’ve ever gone without. In fact, you’ve even been a little spoilt. But I hope you’ll agree that, contrary to another kind of moralising fairy tale, this has been at no cost to happiness. This has been a happy home. And nothing has made it happier, for us, than that you’re in it.