by Graham Swift
It’s a different kind of thought, perhaps, but I had it: what do these little drawings matter beside the loss of a father? It’s not a question a professional should voice, but I asked it (and I adore Bassano). It’s a question I even took an absurd stage further. What do these mere drawings, of a lamb, a rabbit, a cockerel, matter beside a living cat? Would I have protested or lamented if, in order to guarantee the return of Otis, they’d been torn up and consigned to the oblivion they’d only recently come from? Or suppose Simon had said to me, if I can cast him in such an unlikely role: Paula, I’m afraid that Walker’s temporary possession and the world’s permanent ownership of these drawings depends on one little condition—that you sacrifice your cat. Would I have said, “No problem, Simon, leave it with me. No argument, no contest?”
Of course, Simon could never have made such an outlandish demand. (Or could he?) I’d never told him, in any case, about Otis. But he certainly knew that my father had died and he often glanced at me around this time with a real (and slightly paternal) concern—a rather heavier version of his look yesterday morning—as if for once he could shelve that jokey, brittle gambit of his: now, tell me all your troubles.
It’s a question that can sometimes insidiously arise in a job that’s all about putting a price on mere inanimate objects: what price a living human being? One Titian? Ten? And what price a cat? A small if exquisite study by some less illustrious old master? But do cats even come into it?
It’s a question that gets harder if your job’s also your passion. And it’s a question that somehow wracked me after Otis vanished, even as I told myself, to no great effect, “For God’s sake, pull yourself together.”
You yourselves may already be thinking, now you’ve been put in a certain picture, that in those years after we’d “decided against you,” I’d have had, after all, my second love to fall back on. That second love that was then blooming under Simon’s tutelage—or rather, you may even be surmising, taking needy root in the absence of you. Your mother had her pictures to console her. Or, more crudely, she had her career to think of (all the more so since your dad seemed not to have one). She was just like plenty of women, in fact, who have that blunt reason, anyway, for forgoing progeny. And how, indeed, with you around, could I have gone on those foreign art expeditions? Or found the time (or peace) to learn Italian?
Come on, Mum, you’re even thinking, don’t wrap it up in all that other stuff, you didn’t get where you are in the art business without a little hard-nosed determination.
But not “fall back on.” Or even “console.” A love is a love. Don’t turn me into half a woman. And would I swap you for twenty Titians? No. And hardly hard-nosed determination. Just imagine your mum for a moment, going into Walker’s every day while really moping for a missing pet. Scarcely a brisk or an edifying picture.
But it’s for you now to judge, to assess and to authenticate the double picture: your two parents in dismay for an absent cat. It will no doubt seem to you a very childish spectacle, one to bring out the latent, tutting, head-shaking adults in you. But don’t be harsh on your own beginnings.
“He’ll be back,” Mike said. “Cats do these things. Lives of their own, he’ll be back.” Your dad, the biologist, the wise expert on animal behaviour. But the days passed, and your dad, I know, was thinking, praying, just as much as I was: please don’t let him be dead, please don’t let Otis be flattened somewhere, a gritty, bloody mess at the side of the road.
Reactions and repercussions. Nearly six years had passed since those bad enough days of the visits to Doctor Chivers, but now we found ourselves only re-enacting that earlier time—lying once more, I’m afraid, with even less evident psychosomatic cause, with our backs turned coldly on each other, our very bed yearning for that soft early morning thud. Not just dismay, but abstinence, and not just abstinence but blame. This must be someone’s fault. If we’d never gone and got Otis in the first place…And wasn’t that Mike’s fault? (Mike, who’d been such a pillar when my dad died.) Mike, and that cat-woman, Mrs. Lambert.
Judge us, strictly if you must. What a pair of babies we must have been. But think it through. There’s still a lot of explaining to do. Take it, perhaps, if you can, as a sobering piece of instruction. You’re sixteen and now and then you must still feel the clutches of childhood pulling you back and making you feel, just when you don’t want to, like mushy infants again. But your parents were twice-sixteen and more when a cat succeeded in turning their lives upside down.
Unless I’m wrong about you. Unless you really do live in that cool and shrugging, impervious world where tomorrow will be just a passing, absorbable jolt to you. And why should I be just as afraid of that? A tougher world, in some way I don’t understand. Surely the argument should run that, in places like Putney at least—Putney, of all places—the living should only get softer and softer. Surely it has. But maybe you’re part of some new steely generation whose future is going to require stern stuff of you, in ways that even you don’t know yet. Though that waiting fact, I sometimes sense it, is already being instilled into your little frames (I still think they’re little). You’re being geared and primed, even as you sleep right now.
Enough, it seems to me, that you have to face tomorrow. The future, right now, is simply tomorrow. By which, of course—I keep forgetting—I really mean today. We’ll find out soon just what you’re made of. And that’s the very phrase, I think. Our ludicrous distress over a cat: what was that really made of? I need to tell you more about Otis. But don’t, at least, imagine that we’ve ever thought about you, as we once found ourselves thinking about him: that if you’d never come into our home, we’d never have suffered all the agonies of fearing we might lose you.
18
PICTURE US, ANYWAY—and mock us, if you will—in our bedroom in Herne Hill, in the first weak light of dawn, our backs grimly turned on each other, waiting, hoping for a little duvet-denting pounce. After the fifth or sixth day, even this pathetic scene would have looked more pitiful still. The fact is, Otis wouldn’t have been there, but nor would your dad. You’d have seen your mother lying by herself with just a dip in the sheet where your dad had been.
I never urged him to it. On the other hand, I never told him not to. I never said: don’t be a fool. Your dad, who could hardly blame himself for Otis’s disappearance, nevertheless, after a certain while, saw it as his duty, his vaguely penitential mission to get Otis back. The days of his dawn patrols.
I’d pretend still to be asleep or at least I’d never acknowledge his slipping from the bed. I’d give the impression, perhaps, that this was behaviour I only expected and would even have demanded. There’s a word, perhaps, for my behaviour. I’d be aware of him getting up and stepping carefully across the room. A little later, I’d hear the click of the front door being gently shut behind him. I wouldn’t move.
It may be hard for you to imagine your father—though it may become tomorrow’s presiding image—like some vagrant without a home. When these days he drives a top-of-the-range Saab, and in any case has the occasional services of a driver, in a dove-grey jacket and peaked cap, to pick him up, often me as well, and drive him hither and thither (I’m talking, of course, about Tony, in his black Mercedes, who’s stopped threatening—I know it wouldn’t look cool—also to drop you off at school). It may be hard to picture your father wandering like a lost soul round the streets of Herne Hill. But I still see him doing it and never without a pang.
I’m seeing him doing it now, though he’s here beside me, as if the whole sorry phenomenon could be weirdly transposed, even now, to Putney. And I think Mike still dreams of it—those dreams we all have of impossible searches, unendable tasks. He may be dreaming of it this very minute. He’s back there, tonight, in those dawn streets, looking for Otis again.
I didn’t force him to do it, but once the pattern was established, it couldn’t be abandoned. It became a kind of ritual, a superstition. Your scientific father, your hard-hearted mum. Our cat might already ha
ve perished, but if your father missed one of these sorties, then Otis was surely doomed.
I don’t know what he actually did. But I suppose he did what anyone committed to such a desperate exercise would have done. He kept his eyes open, he scoured the gutters and kerbs. He looked under parked cars, among putout dustbins. He stood listening intently, perhaps, beside plastic-sheeted skips. And, of course, he would have called out. Perhaps reluctantly and softly at first, feeling an idiot, not wishing neighbours stirring in their beds to hear what might sound like the cry of some lunatic, but then loudly, unashamedly: “Otis! Otis!” A cry we’d both got used to uttering, sometimes to the accompaniment of a rattled box of cat-crunchies, and to hearing fall, bleakly, on empty air.
The theory was that at dawn errant cats—or returning, limping-home cats—would be conspicuous, a reasonable enough theory. In the hour or so before human traffic starts, cats own the streets. And your dad must have seen them. He must have seen black cats and since, at a distance, one black cat can look much like another, your father’s heart must sometimes have raced…But no, it wasn’t Otis.
Picture your father in tracksuit and trainers. A rare sight now, though remember he was thirty-three then, and what else, at that time of the morning, should he have worn? At that hour, apart from cats, a sparse turn-out of dedicated joggers would have been the only other life around.
And I confess that your dad and I, as we passed thirty, had been seized by one of those keep-fit fevers that can strike couples at about that age, and nowadays even seem the norm. Don’t assume, my shrimps, that you will be immune. Not that either of us, if I say it myself, was in poor shape. But in our case you might say it was something more than the regular malaise. I think our unspoken argument may have gone like this: if it’s to be just us, then let us be a specimen pair, let us be trim and exemplary—adverts for non-issue. Forgive us. Though in your dad’s case it wasn’t so simple and even worked in reverse. I think your father (the qualified biologist) may actually have thought that if he exercised and sweated and generally pumped up the virility, then perhaps—who knows?—that slovenly sperm count of his…
When all’s said, I started going to a gym—and, as you know, I still do. Your father, only getting what Tim Harvey paid him, started to jog (or to use his word, “run”). And his exertions lasted about a month. But he kept the tracksuit and trainers, still in almost-new condition, and now, for these Otis-searching forays, out they came again. A perfect alibi, in fact. He wasn’t a suspicious and possibly demented loiterer, he was just an early-morning jogger. He just happened to be peering under a Volkswagen.
And, needless to say, he’d steal back home after these vain quests, a little like a cat himself, hoping, every time, that Otis would have beaten him to it and slipped in, in his old way, by the back door. That when he returned to the bedroom, unzipping his tracksuit, I’d be awake and smiling and saying: “Look who’s here.”
That was my wish too, believe me. But the truth is that when he crept back I’d be awake, but still rigorously pretending to sleep, as if unaware he’d ever gone. He’d take off the tracksuit and get back in beside me, I’d sense his cool skin appreciating the warmth, and I’d almost hear him contemplating the wisdom or total folly of sidling up to me and whispering in my ear some sweet lie: It’s okay, I saw him, in Winterbourne Road. I couldn’t catch him, but I saw him, he’s okay. He’ll be back in his own good time.
I still see him out there—your poor dad, I mean. In my vision the streets are mockingly peaceful, as they would be at that time. The houses are still slumbering, their curtains drawn. The sky is a rosy grey. Not such a bad time of day to be up and about in, once in a while. And it was spring. A green haze on the trees, a tingle in the air, even in Herne Hill. The birds would have been chirping. Not so peaceful in fact, and only more mocking: it was the mating season. Quite. And among the many, groping theories for Otis’s decampment was precisely that. That he’d been searching for—he’d found—a mate. Though, in his sad anatomical condition, how could that have possibly worked?
Picture us both lying in bed again, back to back, like two curled-away-from-each-other foetuses, as if no strange expedition had just occurred.
But the truth is your dad used to do that little disappearing act anyway. He even still does it now and then. You may have noticed and you may have wondered—I hope not too much—what exactly is going on. On the other hand, both of you are usually far beyond consciousness in the early hours of the morning. I hope you are now.
Your dad would get up, I mean, and leave the bed—not to roam the streets, just to leave it and come back. Just for twenty minutes or so. He’d slip on his dressing gown. He’d pad around the house or sit quietly somewhere communing with it, listening to the little creaks and clicks and murmurs houses make when everything else is hushed. I suppose you’d have said, Kate, a few years back, that he was communing with Edward. At Davenport Road, who would it have been? Dave?
These days, of course, he has that expensively kitted-out study to retreat to—almost, I sometimes think, a kind of house within a house. He often goes there in the early hours (but not this morning, I fancy) to do a dawn stint of Living-World work, which you may think is as odd as his roaming the streets. It’s the pressure of success, it’s valuable time that has to be found. Except he still finds time (I’m glad to say) to come back a while to bed.
But this habit of your father’s began long ago, before there was any pressure of success, when we first moved to Herne Hill and first acquired that novel but slightly sobering possession, a house. A habit or a game? He’d get up anyway, very early, just for “the sheer pleasure,” he’d say, of coming back. Married life, how grown-up people behave. The game involved, if I was awake, my pretending to sleep while he tiptoed away. On the other hand, if I was asleep, his very absence, soundlessly accomplished though it was, would often be the cause of waking me, as if I knew something was wrong. I’d reach out a hand and find an empty space. I was alone! And if I wanted to, I could indulge the frisson of a panic, a terror, a desolation I knew wasn’t real.
Easy enough in those days, not so easy now. A game, or not such a game? There are all those apparent “games” of animals which, as Professor Mike will tell you, look like play but are really serious training and preparation underneath. Was Otis playing a game with us?
A little benign dissembling, like the joy of finding a bad dream was only a dream. A little delicious feigned absence and desertion. It became our favourite time anyway, even before Otis was there to egg things along. Your dad would simply return from his bogus disappearance, somewhere in the far reaches of the house. I’d pretend sometimes to be just waking up. Or I’d be staring at that indentation in the sheet.
He’d get in and nuzzle up. Here I am after all, I hadn’t vanished, I hadn’t gone. Here I am, it’s me, all present and correct.
And it still happens, in the first light, to the first sound of birds. How wonderful life is.
19
IT’S GONE THREE A.M. It’s getting closer. Not “tomorrow,” I can’t play that trick on myself for much longer. Today, today: the soft drumming of the rain seems to be saying it over and over.
Whatever else you’re about to discover, I hope there’s one thing you don’t need to be told: that you came from happiness. Wherever else you came from, that’s surely the main thing. I’m telling you about one of our worst times, but that’s only to throw up the other thing, the truer thing. So—we had our patch of rough weather. Who doesn’t? And in the grand scale, how does it rate? Our cat went missing. Hardly an earthquake.
And in the grand scale, how will this impending day rate, if you know that, underneath, you came from happiness? Happiness breeds happiness: it’s as simple as that? It’s not biology, but it’s the best and the soundest system of reproduction. It’s the best beginning and the best upbringing, all other circumstances aside, that anyone could ask for.
Though arguably, of course, it’s also the worst, the very worst, and
parents can never win, nor children. It only leaves you unprepared and unarmed for all the knocks and frights. Like tomorrow. Let’s still call it that.
Look at Mike dreaming away here, as innocent as you are, right now, of what’s to come. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, sleep on. I swore to myself last night that I wouldn’t let him wake up first, alone. He can still play that waking-first game—but he’s here now already, and if I wasn’t afraid of waking him, I’d be holding him tight. I have the shivery feeling that he won’t be here any more, not after tomorrow.
There used to be a game, I suppose there still is though I don’t think there’s so much call for it now, called Happy Families. A simple, popular and platitudinous card game. Shuffle the pack, then put the families together: the smiling Mr. Baker with the smiling Mrs. Baker, and the two of them with the smiling little Bakers, so they all match up and beam. Not a popular game any more, and “happy families” these days, maybe, is a glaring misnomer, a contradiction in terms. Perhaps it always has been. Happiness, yes, families, yes—but the two together, forget it. The very idea is a fantasy from which we all have to wake up sooner or later. Would this Hook family, with its crooked name, have been a happy family anyway?
You got the one thing and not the other, and the rarer and the more important by far. Is that how you’ll take it? A minor point, what we do with the fantasy. Family-shamilies, what do they really matter?
I’ve never had the Edward-fantasy, Kate. I’ve never thought any house I’ve lived in was like a person. Though I’m intrigued. Was this Edward (is he still?) like a friend? A father? A live-in lover? But I’ve often thought about the houses I’ve lived in, including this one, and wondered if the people who lived in it before were happy. Is there happiness in the fabric, in the bricks and walls, or is there still unevaporated sadness, a mildew of sorrow? That’s just as daft, I’m sure, as dreaming up an Edward. How many here, before us—since this house was built? The people we bought Davenport Road from were called the Mallinsons, the people who sold us this place were called the Sutcliffes. Were they happy?