by Graham Swift
And that only begs another, bigger question, which may simply swallow up the first. Why have children at all? Clearly, I must have asked myself that big question once, and once I must have come up with an answer which, as you now know, lasted only so long. Life was possible without them. Without you two though—now that’s a different matter.
But then I don’t remember, even to bolster my rather peculiar position, ever putting the question like this: why bring children into the world? Is it such a good, safe world to bring them into? Is it going to be? I don’t remember Mike employing that argument either, though for him it must have been an even more tempting fall-back. Was it such a sweet, safe world then, in 1972, when Doctor Chivers gave him the news? I was afraid for our future perhaps, not the world’s.
Your dad likes to joke these days, when he can afford to, that it ought to be called The Perishing World. The magazine, I mean, though the same is true of the books. More and more of its pages seem to deal with declines and depletions, not to say outright extinctions, things going wrong with nature, harm being done to it, disasters in store. There even seems to be a readership that relishes this dire-warning stuff. Though there’s also still a dependable readership that, as your dad puts it, just wants to know about frogs.
The bulk of Living World Books are still just “nature books”: lovely to look at, brightly designed, modern-day equivalents of Uncle Edward’s book of molluscs. Your dad sometimes worries about this. It’s a sort of thorn in the side that he seems to need. He worries about the “just nature” books. He worries that the “just nature” stuff is really heads-in-the-sand stuff, it’s not even good science. Those dire warnings aren’t made up, the planet’s in serious trouble. I think he worries about being a “just nature” man himself. Still running around Sussex in short trousers, not even knowing about the existence of DNA. Or me.
But look at your mother. The planet’s in serious trouble, and she’s still dealing in art. Part of her’s still in the Renaissance.
Was it a better world in 1972 when, as you now know, you were never really on the cards at all? Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought that, like your parents, you were pretty well timed, two little cold-war babies, emerging, just when you were ready to emerge, into a world that was no longer cold: a happier, sweeter climate all round. Now, just a few years on, it’s not looking so good. We’re even told the climate’s getting too warm.
Your futures? Your future? What will the world be like in just five years’ time, in the year 2000, when you’ll be twenty-one? What will it be like in another sixteen, when you’re thirty-two, the same age I was when I decided to become a mother? What will it be like when you’re fifty, your dad’s age? You won’t thank me for sometimes being prey to this sort of arithmetic (especially tonight), or for sometimes concluding that your dad and I, born neatly in 1945, may have been set down in the best slot history has ever put on offer. But maybe every generation thinks that.
The planet’s in serious trouble? It’s 1995, a millennium’s ending, we’re all about to go over the edge? I don’t know if the planet’s in serious trouble, listening to this rain doing the garden good. I think number fourteen Rutherford Road might be in serious trouble. These might be just the early hours of Doomsday. Is that what we’ll call it when we look back? “Doomsday.” “Bombshell Day?” Will it just find its regular place, one day, in our calendar, in our private annals? That day, that day in June. We’ll refer to it frankly and calmly—though, of course, just among ourselves—with a touch of respect and solidarity, even a touch of humour. “Bombshell Day,” as a joke, because no bomb, really, ever went off. “Doomsday,” because it wasn’t the end of the world, just a wet Saturday in June. Another special day, a week after your birthday, that every year will be discreetly but smilingly observed?
I see everything in this house in just a few hours’ time looking the same as it always was. I see everything—every item, every picture on the wall, every little memento, every gathered-together token of our good life and good fortune—looking hollow and false. But then none of that stuff (as you so sensitively call it) would matter anyway, believe us, not in the balance with you. I’ve told Mike so many times that, surely, I must believe it myself: that he has nothing to fear, not about the fundamental thing. “Have they had any better dad?” (Well, have you?) So many times that I must have finally convinced him. Look at him here, sound asleep. But in any case you must simply believe me that your dad, who in recent years—whatever he gets called tomorrow—has taken on the unexpected sobriquet “Mr. Living World,” would gladly give up everything, would give the living world, if you could really be his.
If it wasn’t for this rain, I think by now there’d be the first streaks of light. It’s no longer pattering and trickling. It’s started to beat down as if from some motionless, massing cloud. Centred on Putney. Just a wet Saturday in June, or time to build an ark?
Among all the possessions and artworks in this house is, still, if you don’t know it, a small and precious selection of the paintings you both did at primary school when you were six or seven. They’re in that special box of mine. But they would have been displayed once, if you remember, on our kitchen wall. For a period of your life there was a constantly changing show. You knew then, just about, that I worked with “art,” I bought and sold pictures, and when your pictures got taken down to be replaced by your latest productions, you used to think I went off and sold them. You were nobly contributing to your mother’s livelihood. You never enquired further and never seemed to mind that you weren’t getting a percentage of your own. What a grasping dealer your mother was. But I didn’t throw them all away, you’ll be pleased to know, I kept some of the best. And if I’d had to give a top prize, there’s little doubt I’d have given it to your Noah’s Arks.
There was a strict kitchen-gallery policy of not favouring one of you over the other, and I’d never have let on anyway, even with my professional eye, which one of you I thought was the better watercolourist (though, actually, I think it was you, Nick, one way in which you could pip your sister). But since you both went to the same primary school and were in the same class, you both very often painted the same subject. There was equality, at least, in that.
Noah’s Ark must be a sure winner, anyway, the all-time favourite for primary-school painting sessions. Is there a child who’s never been asked? A rainy afternoon in the classroom, the lights are on, out come the paints. The teacher tells the story first, then the brushes get to work. For both of you, of course, it was that memorable phrase “two by two” that struck an inspirational chord. The animals went in two by two and they did so, you were given to understand, so that the world would be saved. Whether or not you knew what that really meant, you clearly thought that being what you were meant your own salvation was guaranteed. In those days you used to get called “the Hook twins,” something you’d loathe now.
But there was clearly also some confusion in your minds as to whether the Ark and the Flood were things that had happened or that might or would. This was shown by the fact that both of you, with connivance or not, included yourselves among the elephants, camels, inevitable towering giraffes and, in your case, Nick, a couple of surprising (since they can swim) but really rather charming polar bears.
But there, in both cases, are both of you. You’re not readily recognisable, but Kate’s the one with the longer hair and the stiffly triangular skirt. Your place on Noah’s Ark has been emphatically reserved. In fact, in both cases again, neither Noah or his wife are visible at all and it rather looks as though the two of you have assumed those venerable roles and are not just among the lucky passengers, but have taken charge of the ship.
We didn’t flummox you by asking if there was a chance your dad and I might be saved too and be given our place on board, and you were too young for the joke that it was your dad, surely, who ought to be Noah, being in command as he already was of The Living World. But those pictures certainly got saved. They’re in this house now, in my box. R
emarkable thick blue ribbons of rain fall down in each of them, though in your case, Nick, out of a convincing enough thundery-black sky. And that box, you’ll now understand, with its hoard of items, a surprising number of which are in sets of two, has come to seem itself like a miniature ark, waiting for some particularly rainy day.
30
BUT I THINK I can really see it now, round the edges of the curtains, the first grey hint of light. It’s today now, not tomorrow, I can’t pretend any more: the first day of your second life.
Your dad told me once about a time when Grannie Helen told him about the time before he was born. Here I am, doing the same for the two of you. But I know, Kate, that only last Christmas he told you about that very same thing, about another Christmas long ago when his mother had talked to him. And you must have worked out that he was talking about the year he and I first met, that year when, as far as I’m concerned, my second life began. It was another little piece, perhaps, in that jigsaw you’d tried to put together ever since I told you about the word “propose.” Though perhaps you’d long stopped caring about seeing the whole picture, and you no longer had a little girl’s notion that something similar (even with Nick) ought to happen to you.
But you would have worked out that he was talking about Christmas 1966. Maybe he just told you anyway, made a thing of it, even: “It was the year your mother and I first met.”
He was at home for Christmas, in Orpington. I was in Kensington. By then, I would have met your dad’s parents only a couple of times and that business of the sand dune was definitely just a secret between Mike and me. But I think his mum knew. Not about the sand dune, I mean. I think she knew that Mike and I weren’t a temporary thing. Mothers can tell things. She’d have known too, without needing to know any details, that the way Mike and I had got together was a lot different from the way she and Grandpa Pete had once set out to share their lives. It was 1966, it was a different world. She probably even thought: kids, these days, they have it on a plate. But anyway she decided to tell Mike—and he decided to tell you, Kate, all those Christmases later—about that time when his dad wasn’t around.
And, of course, he wasn’t around then, last Christmas. The first Christmas without him and the first anniversary coming up, in January, not to mention your dad’s fiftieth barely a week later. A tricky time of year all round. Your dad said to you, “Come on, Katesy, let’s do the washing-up.” Or rather he whispered it. Grannie Helen had fallen asleep. Perhaps she was dreaming of Grandpa Pete. But there was something in his voice, in that whisper, I don’t know if you felt it too, that was the same as if he might have said, “Let’s have a private word, Kate, let’s have a heart-to-heart.”
And I had one of those wobbly moments. You know what I mean now. I thought he might be going to tell you, to jump the gun, so to speak, and, for some reason, over the washing-up and, for some reason, just you and not Nick. It was a sign of how edgy things were (it was “next year” now, after all, and next year was close) that I could actually have thought this. It would have been a strange way of going about it. The truth is, ever since Grandpa Pete’s death, part of me had been on alert. I thought your dad might just blurt it now, any time.
It turned out he just wanted to remember that other Christmas with you. Though, come tomorrow, Kate, you may think, looking back, that he’d been nudging pretty close to the other thing. It was a little preparation.
Back in 1966, it had been Grandpa Pete who’d fallen asleep, full of Christmas dinner, by the fire. And it was Grannie Helen, as you know, Kate, who’d said to him then, not let’s do the washing-up, but let’s go for a walk, while your dad sleeps it off. The strange thing is that last Christmas I said almost exactly the same to you, Nick. I said, “Well, if they’re going to do the washing-up, let’s take a walk round the block.” It didn’t occur to me I was echoing Grannie Helen. I was trying to put aside that feeling that Mike was about to do some blurting—surely not—but I was also simply thinking of Nelson.
We had that reason to take a walk too. The first Christmas after Grandpa Pete’s death: it could hardly be at Coombe Cottage. Grannie Helen came to us, and that meant Nelson came too. And she was the one fast asleep now, in our living room. And, being fast asleep, she can’t have known anything of what your dad was telling you, Kate, in the kitchen. But then I’m not so sure. She’s a canny woman. She must have felt, when she walked round the block with Mike, all those years ago, that it was the right time to speak.
Anyway, she told him about yet another Christmas—Christmas 1944—when his dad hadn’t been there because he was having Christmas in a prisoner-of-war camp. At least he wasn’t just “missing” any more. Grannie Helen was spending Christmas at home in Dartford. And your dad wasn’t there either—not quite. Or perhaps you could say that, in a way, he was. She was in her last month and he was keeping her company.
But what your grandmother really wanted to offer your father was a sort of apology. She’d kept it to herself long enough and she might have just gone on doing so, but Mike was twenty-one and that was another thing, perhaps, that had prodded her. He was the same age as his dad had been, back then. What she wanted to make clear was that when Mike was born and Grandpa Pete was still a prisoner, she’d never mentioned him to Mike. She’d never mentioned his own dad.
Of course, Mike was just a tiny baby, so what would he have understood? But then most mothers with a father missing like that who’d one day be coming home would have talked about him, perhaps quite a lot, to make up for his absence. They’d have talked him up. They’d have prattled on about him to this new little pair of ears, if only to keep their own spirits up. And who knows what even a tiny baby, by some instinctual process, might not have picked up?
But then what do I know about such a situation? Nobody could have known when Mike was born that the war would be over inside six months. Grandma Helen had taken another, tougher view of things. She didn’t want to say anything to your dad that she might just find foolish and regrettable later. She didn’t want to spin him some fairy-tale yarn—even if he didn’t understand a word—that she’d only have to unspin. I’m a mother too, I can understand that. There’s a way in which Grannie Helen and I see eye to eye. Though it doesn’t stop me being afraid of her.
The fact is, though Grannie Helen knew that Grandpa Pete was alive and a prisoner, there was no guarantee that she’d see him again. I suppose that was only realistic, and I suppose you could say she’d been well trained in that way of thinking. The only training I’ve ever had in that sort of thing is when your dad gets up early in the morning (but not this morning, I think) and, just for a while, leaves that bit of empty, cooling sheet beside me.
But Grannie Helen would have got into a much sterner habit of guarding her feelings against the worst. When she’d first heard that Grandpa Pete had gone missing, she’d worked on the assumption that he was dead. That’s what she told your dad. She wanted to say that too. She hadn’t nursed fragile hopes. It sounded harsh, but there’d seemed less pain that way, she’d told him, in the long run.
If she hadn’t had a child inside her, it might have been different. But this was one of the reasons, after all, why she—why they—had wanted that child inside her. It’s just your mother’s hunch, but I think it may have been one reason too why Mike remained an only child. Anyway, given that she had a child inside her, she had to be pretty practical and hard-headed.
All this she told your dad. She even told him that when she’d been pregnant and his dad was missing, she’d seriously considered finding someone else—to be Mike’s daddy. It was only how a lot of women in such situations had had to think then, let alone the ones who actually knew their husbands were dead. In any case, now, after all these years, she wanted to say she was sorry. Sorry that she’d had to take that attitude and that she’d kept him in the dark, so to speak, even after he was born. Even if he was in the dark anyway.
Your dad told me that when his mum told him all this he’d had the fleeting thought that
she’d actually had some other man lined up, as it were, or more than lined up, and this was what it was all building up to. But she’d read that thought and put him straight. She’d said, “Don’t worry, Mikey, I wasn’t planning on marrying your Uncle Eddie.”
She just needed to apologise, it seemed, after all that time, just for the thoughts she’d had, as if even they had been a form of betrayal. Perhaps she was just glad—a little jealous, maybe—that things were so easy for Mike and me, lucky little war babies. Perhaps she just wanted to tell her son, in some sentimental Christmassy way, brought on by the fact that he seemed to have had this “steady girlfriend” now for most of a year (I don’t know what she knew about all the other girlfriends), how much she loved his father, how much she’d once missed him and feared for him—the man who was sleeping right then, safe and sound in Orpington, his belly full, by a Christmas fire.
Perhaps, if you turn it round, it was all a kind of early training itself, if she didn’t know it then—for when she’d be sleeping by a Christmas fire and Grandpa Pete would really have gone missing for good. Maybe that’s what occurred to your dad, Kate, last Christmas.
Anyway, she told your dad that it wasn’t until the war was over and even a little while after that, that she dared to begin to tell him—and he may or may not have got the message—that, yes, he had a daddy, and, yes, he’d be coming home soon. Very soon now he was going to see him.
I don’t know quite how much of this he actually passed on to you, Kate, what slant he might have put on it. He told me too, later, that he’d told you over the washing-up about that time with his mum, and I thought it best not to probe. But while he was talking to you, Nick and I were having our own little Christmas heart-to-heart.