by Graham Swift
But I saw something wonderful enough. I saw your father reach you, and I saw some commotion between you: sounds, words that I couldn’t hear. Perhaps he just barked at you too. But I saw that your father was sizing up the situation, he wasn’t just struggling. I saw—oh God, this was the vital, the crucial factor—that when he turned, the current was only of infant-threatening significance, he could make his way, with effort, against it. On the other hand, he had to make his way with the two of you.
The wonderful thing is that you acted, all of you, like a team. That is, you took decisions, you made pacts among yourselves, all of which might have been risky, but which turned out in every case to be the right ones. It was almost as if you’d practised it. He couldn’t ferry you both in, that might have been disastrous. It had to be Nick first, and that meant that you, Kate (I won’t forget it), had to put yourself at lonely, terrible risk. It stopped me being too angry later. How brave you were, how on your own. I could see there was not much more you could do than hold your own against the current, perhaps make the very tiniest headway. You were thinking of the distance your father would have to cover a second time: you were losing strength and you had to think of how it might be used or wasted.
Meanwhile your strength, Nick, as your dad towed you in, had almost vanished. I still see your white, drained face, lolling against the blue. Somehow you managed to hang on to his shoulder and kick a bit yourself, while he managed to swim, with one arm and your weight, and still outswim the current.
Please don’t let go, Nick. And please don’t drown your dad.
He got you to a low ledge of rock, where I was waiting for you. You were already like some piece of limp delivered cargo. He was thinking of Kate. He spluttered out, in that same uncontradictable voice, “Wrists! Quick! Pull!”—the last word almost lost in a watery glug. With a strength I never knew I had I got you by both wrists and pulled you out before the downward suck of the wave made you twice as heavy. But I think, even if it had, I would have made you unheavy. I would have made you eject. Up you shot anyway, like a cork from a bottle, into my arms, and I screamed at you, with your dad’s fierce force, “Breathe, Nick! Breathe!” I don’t think you needed telling.
On the way up, you scraped your knee against the rock (you complained like crazy later). Blood ran down your shin. It didn’t matter. Blood was good, it was somehow very good. On your way up too, I noticed, with another strange little intensity of mere observation, that under the lip of the ledge, just beneath the glinting waterline, there were clusters of barnacles, little clenched, packed shells, tresses and twirls of swaying seaweed, a whole world of gripping life.
Mike was already swimming out again. When I could look, I saw that you, Kate, had hardly anything left now, but you managed to hold on to your father in a slightly more efficient way than Nick. And Mike said later that on that second journey back, even in the moments (but they seemed like hours) that had passed, the current had actually lessened. It must have been some trick of just that stage of the tide. And that was just as well. It was a longer journey this time: your dad’s strength was going. But there was a point when I knew, even before it had actually quite happened, like a sudden flooding current itself, fighting back a dreadful anti-current of “ifs” and “might have beens” and eternal anguish for ever after, that my wonderful and adorable family, my incomparable family, every precious member of it, was going to be restored to me. It would be there at the end of this summer’s day, just as it had been at the start.
There we were on that warm slab of firm rock, like miniature people on some giant’s dry, magic, outspread palm. Or rather, there were the three of us. Your dad was still clinging to its edge, still in the water, too exhausted yet to heave himself out, breathing furiously, his wet forearms clear, his head bowed, not even looking at us. What was he thinking?
28
YOU WERE NINE years old. You were too young then to understand that the great wave of anger that heaved up inside me, like nausea, only moments later wasn’t what it seemed. It was its opposite. It was a venting, it wasn’t a punishing. Punish you? For being saved?
“What on earth were you doing?! Just what were you doing?!”
I surprised even myself, I surprised Mike, with my uncontrollable rage. And you were too young not to think that that current itself hadn’t been like some punishment prepared specially for you—never mind your mother’s fury. But you didn’t have to confess, Kate, to the extent that you did. You might just have said it had been a dare, an adventure, to swim back round the headland, and it had all gone wrong. And, yes, you should never have gone off like that out of sight in the first place.
You didn’t have the art yet of concealment. We’d been practising it for nine whole years. It all poured out of you, like water might so nearly have poured that day out of your lifeless lungs. And you did all the confessing. Nick was silent. So was Mike. He’d got himself out now and was sitting hunched and exhausted and (I noticed) shaking just a little. He might have been another guilty party. It had all been your idea, your fault, you said. Nick had just tagged along. Oh Kate. And I’d just seen you swimming frantically round your brother like a duck round a distressed duckling.
And it had all been about concealment. You’d wanted to hide. You’d found a little cave, you said, a cranny at the end of that channel between the rocks—you even pointed, as if the cave itself might have been to blame—just big enough for the two of you and just reachable by scrambling down on foot and wading through what was then just a long, safe pool. And you’d got the idea—your idea—of just sitting there and waiting, till you saw us coming over the rocks, looking for you and calling. When, of course, you’d burst out and surprise us. Woo-hoo! Here we are!
We hadn’t come. You’d waited. We weren’t cooperating, it seemed, in your game of hide and seek. And you hadn’t reckoned on how quickly the tide would turn and how the waves would start to run in along the pool and to fill the cave itself. You couldn’t stay where you were, but you couldn’t get back now onto the steep rocks you’d come down by. The only thing was to swim for it, to go further out along the headland where the rocks were flat (to where we were standing, and I was glowering at you, right then). But there was that unexpected current.
Then the pretend-thing had turned real. This is the bit you didn’t have to say. That it wasn’t just a game. You’d wanted us to think, if only for a while, you were lost, you were gone. You’d wanted to see and hear our panic—“Nick! Kate!”—to measure it. How long before we came? That’s why you’d stayed so long yourselves, too long, in that cave.
Right then and there on that sunny, happy, warm plate of rock I could have hit you, Kate. It was the nearest I’ve ever got, and I think you saw it, to a full-blooded, maternal, non-maternal clout. You’d wanted to test us, our love, how much we cared, how much you mattered to us. Suppose, you’d thought, they were suddenly without us, suppose we weren’t here any more. How would they look? How would they behave?
Well, now you knew. The results of your experiment. Look at your mother, on the point of hitting you, with all the force of her love. Look at your dad there, who’s just saved your lives, his face a strange picture of misery.
You started to splutter, the full-scale, bleating confession, though you didn’t have to say it. You could have just said you were sorry, and that you were glad, incidentally, to be alive. Suppose we’d decided to go that other way first?
And yet I admired you, Kate. I was even in awe of you, even as you blubbed and I wanted to hit you. There was so much else that you didn’t say. Am I wrong? That it would have been you, whether it was your fault or not, who would have made that last-minute decision, while the water gushed in and Nick panicked or just froze. “Come on! Let’s go!” Your little wriggling bodies launching out, breasting the waves, yours just that fraction ahead.
And just a few moments later—am I wrong?—it would have been you who made another, terrifying decision: that you weren’t going to leave your brother, even t
hough it might still have been in your power. Even as we came over the crest of the rocks and saw your two bobbing heads (They’re there! It’s all right! No, it’s not!), that had already become the most important thing. I saw it, Mike saw it, though it’s never been spoken of between us. You already knew that you wouldn’t make it, not the two of you. Your only task now was to make Nick believe that you would and, when the moment came, to go down with him.
And I know for certain too, Nick, that if it had turned out the other way round, if you’d suddenly found a boy’s strength that your sister didn’t have, it would have been just the same, you’d have gone down with her. She’d have led, you’d have followed.
I didn’t hit you, Kate, I hugged you. You must have seen my anger drop from me like something dropping through water. I hugged you so tightly that you must have thought, after nearly being drowned, that now your mum was going to smother you.
Among all the “what-ifs” of that day, there’s one that’s even more unthinkable than all the others, that’s even more unthinkable—can it even be said?—than the thought that we might have lost you both. That we might have lost, Mike might have saved, just one of you. That there might have been, even now, even on this night, Nick without Kate, or Kate without Nick.
This family would have had its irretrievable history.
I’m only your mother. What do I know about how it really works between you? You’re a mystery, you’re a joy, you’re an anguish. Is it a blessing or a curse being what you are: wedded, if that’s how it is, from birth? You have it easy, you have it made? You won’t ever need to find, either of you, that other one in life who’ll make you complete? Or being what you are will just make it harder? You’re a little afraid, even now, of beginning? None of those other ones will ever be good enough or come as close. You’ll never have your Brighton beach.
You’ve known from the start the cruel rule of coupledom: one day there has to be only one. But that day, at least, you would have defied it.
I’m afraid that tomorrow’s only going to pull you back to that day. Not that you will ever get away from it. I’m afraid that tomorrow’s only going to be like that invisible rope already being stretched and strained between you (who’s going to cut it first?) but which then might have pulled you swiftly, surely, one after the other, under those waves.
At Grandpa Pete’s funeral you must have had your teenage pangs, so far as it’s possible, for Grannie Helen. Poor Grannie Helen. And then, perhaps, a premonitory pang for Mike and me: one day, one of them too. And then, perhaps, with that day in Cornwall behind you, a pang, a double pang, for yourselves.
Your first taste of death? Of course it wasn’t. You carried yourselves with such dignity, such seeming seasonedness and wisdom. Look, Dad’s trying not to cry, Mum’s holding his arm. A cold clamminess hung over the churchyard. Every tree dripped. An early frost had melted to a sticky dew, the grass under our feet was wet and chewed. A day like cattle’s breath. The tops of the Downs, where Grandpa Pete had died, were hidden in a sort of steam.
I gripped your father’s arm, remembering his hand on my arm at Invercullen. If Grannie Helen had broken down and wept then I’d have had to yield, to step aside, to be the tactful, deferring daughter-in-law. But it was your dad who wept. Grannie Helen stood dry-eyed on that sopping grass. And I’d had the sudden thought (since that secret was out now): she’s standing where one day she’ll be. And then I’d had the extra thought, coming from nowhere: are there graveyards, are there instances (I suppose there must be) where twins get laid side by side?
With twins it’s somehow insupportable, as if the second heart must simply stop beating too.
I fear for you sometimes. I fear for your future. Your future? Your futures? I don’t even know which is best to say. I want each one of you to have, to know something at least as good as Mike and I have known. And still know. Is your mother just becoming a heavy mother—a clinging, burdensome, smothering mother? Well, your dad, you’ll soon discover, could hardly be lighter, or more disengaged.
I think you’re still a virgin, Kate, and I think your brother won’t make a move before you do. What’s new in that? But then, for all I really know, each of you may already have had your string of episodes, you may even compare notes frankly with each other. I’m seldom around at what must be the witching hour, immediately after school, and perhaps you find it inconvenient these days that your dad sometimes is—working at home in his study. But then again, perhaps for each of you it’s the other one’s presence that’s the real, inhibiting factor. Compare notes? Hardly.
In any case, I’ve been looking for the telltale signs and I don’t think either of you yet has some special friend, some really special friend, to whom you might just go and blab everything you’re about to learn. Or find it hard not to. Perhaps Mike and I should be grateful. You’re late and cautious beginners, it seems, for whatever reason. Though tomorrow, for all we know, may deliver you a pretty hefty kick-start. If your mum could do it with a test tube—what’s keeping you?
I fear for both of you. Mothers fret and wonder and lie awake at three in the morning. Tell me I’m foolish. I fear for you in ways that have nothing to do with tomorrow. As if tomorrow won’t be enough for you, anyway, to be getting on with.
29
YOUR DAD’S TURNING in his sleep. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, not yet. For a little while yet he can still be that: “your dad.” He’s snuffling softly like some rooting animal. How I want to hold him tight, but I’m afraid to wake him. In a few hours he’ll be in your hands. I’ll have to hand him over to you.
And it’ll be up to you then what you call him. It seems to me that he’s going to speak to you, one last time, more like a father than he’s ever done, a big, stern, serious daddy. Listen to your father, he’s got something important to say. And then he’ll be nobody, he’ll be what you make of him. If you want, you can even tell him to leave.
But I hope you know that if he goes, I go too. That’s how it is. I’m your mother, he’s not your father, but we go together anyway, just as surely as the two of you. Have I made that clear? When push comes to shove, that’s how it is. I’m your mother, but you’re sixteen now, and how much longer will you even need me around? That indefatigable maternal instinct eventually found its way from me to you, but I’m not sure if biology rules. Is that heresy? Your dad was never your biological father. That disqualifies him? How many real fathers are qualified biologists?
Tomorrow—if you decide in his favour—you’ll agree to make him, artificially, your father, as we once agreed to make you artificially (according to that ugly phrase) our children. But then, you’ll quickly discover, the artifice doesn’t stop there. It’s not just the truth you’ll be getting tomorrow, it’s that whole issue of pretence.
That little side-question of next weekend, of the Gifford Park Hotel, to let us go or not, will seem small stuff in comparison. Though I’ve already imagined how it might be—should it work this way—your neat means of revenge. Forgive me. I see you, next Saturday morning, after a remarkably calm and uncatastrophic week (but one in which you’ve had time to plan), standing at the front door to wave us off on our silver weekend—with all the ceremonial good grace, in fact, that you displayed at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. I even imagine Mike and I feeling for a moment like the spoilt (but humbled) children, while you stand there like the magnanimous householders of 14 Rutherford Road.
Except that when we come back next Sunday evening, you’ll have gone. The house will be ransacked, wrecked. Could you be so cunning? Pretence and dissimulation all round. My little pretence with your father in a five-star hotel, in a four-poster bed in Sussex will have been the least of my worries.
But that larger dissimulation—assuming we are all here, one way or another, under this roof after next weekend—where does it stop? Think about it. Your dad’s right, you might need next weekend just to think. We might have told Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen, years ago—think about it—and, of course, that would have been
honest. But it would have robbed them, if you see what I mean, of two little grandchildren and burdened them with a share in our dishonesty. Now you’ll have to decide whether to be honest or not.
Children are brought up not to tell lies. Were we ever so big on that with you? Consider one little mitigating factor, at least. Everyone else’s ignorance—and surprising credulity—only made it easier to perpetrate the lie. Everyone else’s unwitting collusion only made it easier for us to feel (have a little mercy) that the lie might be the truth.
The rain’s getting harder, I think. You’ll have the option—the perfect right—if you wish, to tell the whole world. Starting on Monday, with all your friends at school. Though why wait till then? A few phone calls tomorrow afternoon. Pass it around. We’re in no position to stop you. Think what ripples you could set in motion in just a few moments, after sixteen years. But at least consider how far those ripples could spread, and that you won’t be able, should you feel like it later, to turn them around.
Here’s a thought for you that you may not even have this weekend or for some time to come, but I’ve certainly thought it for you. Suppose, one day, you have children. I mean (enough of that old childhood joke) that each of you or either of you one day has children. Will you be happy for them to think that this man lying here is their grandfather? If he isn’t, who is? Will that be a simple decision for you, hardly needing a moment’s thought, or will you think that one day, when they’ve grown up, they’ll need to know? That they’ll have to be told a story too, like the one I’m telling you now, involving, of course, a rainy weekend in June, once upon a time when you were sixteen?
Grandpa Mikey! Spare us, the poor man’s only fifty. He doesn’t look like a grandpa to me. But that’s not the point. It goes off into the future, you see. And it begs the simple question: will you, one day, have children—each of you, either of you—of your own? I don’t suppose that’s even a flicker of a question in your heads yet. But it’s one of the things you may suddenly find yourselves, as from tomorrow, having to think about intently: that line going off into the future, with more little Hooks on it, perhaps.