by Graham Swift
You and me, Nick, and of course Nelson. Nelson could have been listening in, if he’d wanted to. What do dogs know? He didn’t seemed to mind much that these were the streets of Putney, not the South Downs, or even to be thinking that there was something different and strange and sad about this Christmas. But I think we both had the same thought, Nick—that we were really taking Grandpa Pete for a walk.
Anyway, you suddenly said, looking at Nelson padding on ahead, “Did you and dad ever have a dog?”
And I said, “No.” And then I took a few silent paces. Then I said, “But we used to have a cat.”
And you said, after a bit of a pause too, “Yes, I know.”
You can be a dark horse, Nick. You’re not such a wary, cagey little brother these days.
“You know? But it was before you were born. It was at Davenport Road.”
“Yes. There was a lilac tree there, wasn’t there? Kate told me once that Dad had said there was a cat under the lilac, and she’d kept looking and she’d never seen it. She’d thought Dad was playing a game. Kate can be pretty dumb, can’t she?”
“She can’t have been more than three, Nick. I’m amazed she remembered.”
“Yeah, but it was a real cat, right? It was a dead cat. You’d buried it under the lilac tree.”
“You worked that out? When you were three?”
“Later. That’s not the point. The thing is, why didn’t you ever tell us? Why didn’t you just tell us you’d had a cat?”
“I just have, Nick.”
“Yeah, after all these years.”
“Is it so important?”
I was holding your arm. The streets were deserted and curfew-quiet, as they only ever are at Christmas. Other people’s fairy lights twinkled at us in the dark. For the first time in my life I thought: I’m a mother, leaning on my son.
“What was its name?” you said.
“Otis. He was called Otis.”
Nelson padded on ahead.
“As in Otis Redding?”
“Yes, Nick. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of Otis Redding.”
“I haven’t heard of any other Otis. Till now. You and Dad had some thing about Otis Redding?”
“He was a lovely cat, Nick, a lovely black cat. He died the month before you and Kate were born. I think that’s why we’ve never told you.”
Your dad and Grandpa Pete always did the washing-up at Christmas, a tradition. They did it for the last time barely two weeks before Grandpa Pete died. It was the last father-and-son chat they ever had. You must have been thinking that, Kate, as Mike was talking to you.
I dare say Nick told you about Otis, though you’ve never brought it up. But I dare say that you remembered that thing about the lilac tree, and tomorrow—today—you’ll be thinking: well, now that cat’s finally jumped out.
But I don’t know if Mike told you the last bit of what his mum said to him all those Christmases ago. Maybe not. Or maybe the turkey carcass, sitting there amid all the wreckage on the kitchen table, would only have prompted him. She’d said that even when she knew Grandpa Pete was coming back, even when he did come back, she’d thought it might have been a mistake, to have talked up the event beforehand.
The thing is, prisoners of war didn’t just sit around in their camps cheerfully waiting to be liberated—any more than they all tried to escape. He’d been force-marched, in midwinter, along with thousands of others, a lot of whom died. Your Grandpa Pete had been at death’s door for a while, in a hospital, still in Germany. So had Charlie Dean. They never talked about it. I think they helped each other survive.
And even when he was well enough to be returned home he was hardly like the man Grannie Helen had last seen over a year before. This was in late June 1945, almost exactly fifty years ago. What a crowded month June is. Grandpa Pete was just a shadow of himself. He was home at last, but as Grannie Helen put it to your father that Christmas in Orpington, “My God, Mikey, there wasn’t much of him. He needed some feeding up. He was all skin and bone.”
31
NOW YOU’RE ABOUT to learn he was never your grandfather anyway, something he never had to learn himself. You see how far the ripples can go? Back in those days when you were about to be born we had to play a little at being god. What will the world be like in sixteen years’ time? It will be1995. Pete and Helen will have turned seventy…
Once, over sixteen years ago, your dad had to make another big announcement that you could say was the opposite of the one he’ll make today. Perhaps today you may even find yourselves wondering about it. He had to phone his mum and dad to give them a simple, happy message—and by then they must have been wondering if it was ever going to come. I was sitting listening while your dad made that call. He wanted me to be there. And Otis was there too, curled in my lap.
It follows, of course, that you were present too, if not exactly listening, though that call was very much about you. And Otis may already have known what else was in my lap, because though I was stroking him, he wasn’t purring. There’d come a time soon when Otis would get very poorly and wouldn’t sit in my lap at all. But you should know that though you never saw him, you were sometimes very close to Otis, very close indeed, close enough to have heard—if he’d been so inclined—his muffled purr.
But perhaps he wasn’t purring that day because he was listening, like me, to what your dad was saying into the phone.
“Paula’s pregnant” is what he said, the formula he chose. It wasn’t a lie, and why not give all credit to the mother? But what your dad never said, to his own parents, as someone making such a call might very understandably have said, was: “I’m going to be a dad.” Or: “You’re going to be grandparents.” He was very careful not to use—though he’d get to use them later, even without thinking—the words “grandparents” or “grandchildren.”
This would have been in the autumn of 1978. It was a false call he was making, you could say, a fraudulent call, though not in fact, in any word I heard uttered, untruthful. And what you should certainly know is that when your dad was making it he was genuinely, plainly excited. No one at the other end would have had cause for doubt or suspicion, and why on earth should they? Does anyone say or even think after such an opening statement: “Oh—and who is the father?”
Your dad put on a remarkably convincing act, but at the same time it wasn’t an act at all. It was like that moment when we first “saw” you. He didn’t act then. The truth is that though I’d worried about how he would handle that phone call, when it came to it, I actually felt jealous. I mean I felt jealous that I’d never be able to make one like it myself.
Since it was Grandpa Pete who answered (and your Grannie Fiona was already lost in fairyland). The first words your dad said were, “Hello Dad.” Your Grandpa Pete got the news first. Of course, sitting close by though I was, I couldn’t hear his side of the conversation, let alone see how he reacted—my situation was a bit like yours with Otis—but I can definitely vouch that he was very excited too. He was not only taken by surprise by what his son had to say, he was also rather overcome. There was quite a long pause, in fact, in which I think I could detect, just as surely as Mike could with his ear pressed to the receiver, the sound of a man being changed into a grandfather. It’s a distinctive sound, perhaps. It was as if Grandpa Pete, at the other end, had had to put down his receiver, turn around, take a few deep breaths, then come back as that transformed figure.
And that only made me doubly jealous. Although what I also felt was: well, that’s really done it now, Mikey, no going back. That’s the seal on it. You can hardly say now, “Actually—there’s something you should know.”
But the jealousy bit didn’t stop there. Because some while later your dad had to make another call and then, too, it was Grandpa Pete who answered.
“I’ve got something else to tell you, Dad. Even better. Twins.”
Then too he avoided the word “grandchildren.” But I was doubly-doubly jealous.
When Grannie Helen firs
t knew she was pregnant, neither she nor Grandpa Pete would have had any special reason to think: what will the world be like when our child’s sixteen? What sort of world will it grow up into? Their world was pressing enough at the time—and could it get any worse? And when, just a little later, Grandpa Pete was shot down over Germany and taken prisoner, it must have been a comfort for him to know he had a child now on its way. It must have been quite something. And it must have meant a lot to him, if he had no idea when or if he’d see his home again, when the message at last got through to him in his prisoner-of-war camp, that his child had safely arrived and it was a son.
Perhaps during, or very soon after, that first phone call Mike made, Grandpa Pete would have shed a tear or two. Perhaps some pretty terrible memories would have flashed through his head. When he jumped from that burning plane he can’t possibly have supposed that one day he’d send that unborn son of his, when he’d be twenty-one, a case of champagne, let alone that one day that same son would phone him to inform him, if not in so many words, that he was a grandfather. Biology’s a strange thing (but ask your father), it squanders millions of sperm as if the numbers don’t matter, but now and then, it seems, it can seize any single one of us and shake us to the core.
Now you’ll know that those tears you saw your father shed at his father’s funeral weren’t the simple tears you thought they were, if tears for a father are ever that simple. Now you’ll know that this man lying here is really the last of the Hooks, the very end of the line, the last of the Hooks of Sussex. Just as your Grandpa Dougie—your real grandfather—turned out to be, despite his three marriages, the last of the Campbells, or of his particular strand of them, a point he seemed eager to drive home at his funeral.
The last of the Hooks, the last of the Campbells. Does it really matter? The last of the Mohicans…It sounds all rather grand and heroic—and just a bit masculine, don’t you think, Kate? The last dodo…The last coelacanth…When everything’s done by cloning-to-order and genetic engineering, will it be the men who’ll miss more keenly the old torch-passing stuff of fatherhood or women who’ll miss the authentic taste of maternity?
It’s light, it’s really getting light.
“Uncle” Charlie and “Auntie” Grace were also at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. You always knew, of course, they were never a real aunt or uncle. All the same, they had to be there. They’d flown in from Spain as soon as they’d got the news and, standing there with their tanned faces in that January churchyard, they looked like some holiday couple who’d somehow boarded the wrong flight.
When Charlie jumped out of that same burning plane in 1944 he can’t have supposed, either, that one day, after a profitable career in light industry, he’d retire to a villa with a swimming pool near Málaga—the “Villa Sidcup” as he’d waggishly name it. But he must surely have been thinking as he stood there among those gravestones that he was the last one left now, the very last one of that old crew, the crew that must have been, if only briefly—if just for the space of a night—a bit like some specially put together family.
You both know the story. Grandpa Pete the navigator and Charlie (“What else, with my name?”) the tail gunner, the only two out of seven who’d survived, and then met up again in the same prison camp. It would form a bond, a lasting bond, and so it did. “Dean and Hook.” Now it was just “Dean.” The frost had melted, but his head had its own frosting of close-cropped, almost white hair.
Charlie, of course, had Grace standing beside him, holding his arm: a whole other partnership. But, however it comes about, to be the last one left, the only one left of just two, isn’t that the worst thing ever? Worse than being the end of any line?
But Charlie didn’t just have Grace, you’ll remember, he had Nelson. Given the circumstances of Grandpa Pete’s death, Nelson absolutely had to be there too. And, given those circumstances and Nelson’s manifest capacity for loyalty, you might have thought he would have attached himself now to Grannie Helen, or to Mike. But he attached himself, to everyone’s surprise and vague embarrassment, to Charlie. Charlie stood by his old pal’s grave with Grace on one side and on the other a dog devotedly squatting on its haunches.
Did you miss your grandfather, were you grieving for him? Will you grieve for him now? You didn’t weep. You were fourteen. Nor did Charlie weep, even with Nelson there to induce him, he just stood very still. Only your father wept. Even Grannie Helen controlled her tears, as you would have noticed, though she had most cause to weep, and her son was weeping beside her. A tougher generation? And she’d had all that early training.
Would I like to be a grandmother? Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question. Though it’s a legitimate one, as legitimate as for a woman to ask, at thirty-two: am I going to be a mother? Though, for goodness’ sake, I’m only forty-nine—I still have a whole decade on your father. And “Grannie Paulie,” that’s just plain ghastly.
And the short answer, anyway, is that even the word sends a chill through me, the word itself scares me. As if the next word can only be “widow.” I’ll settle for being a mother. Mike’s wife and a mother: my complete and exact position in life.
But does Grannie Helen, now in her second year of widowhood, draw comfort and strength from being a grandmother, and from knowing that Grandpa Pete died a grandfather? You see what confronts you? You’ll understand now how, despite our sixteen-year rule, both Mike and I, after his dad’s funeral, went through a fever of feeling that this might be the right time, the best time even, never mind empty embargoes. You’d behaved in such a grown-up way, after all, and what could be more appropriate: after the death of one father?
But it would have been too sudden, too cruel, at such a time. And Mike simply wanted to keep you—can I put it like that, and will you blame him?—that year and a half longer. He wanted to “keep you.” And, anyway, suppose that at that already trying time, and through whatever chain of unfortunate reactions, it should have found its way to his mother? What a further blow. And what an injustice: that Mike’s father would have gone to his grave a self-believing grandparent and his mother would have the whole double burden of knowledge. You see what faces you? There was still that official margin of another eighteen months.
And that’s passed now anyway, or has only hours left to run. It’s dawn on the seventeenth of June, a wet and murky dawn, a reluctant sort of dawn. So it should be. And this man lying here, snoring gently, his familiar features reassembling out of the dark, is still sound asleep—how amazing—as if he’s determined to remain so. “This man”: is he no more than that now? I was once Mustardseed, my darlings, Titania’s little helper. O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!
And—how amazing: that’s a bird out there, singing clearly, despite the falling rain, doing what birds must do at dawn in June. It’s not a blackbird, I think. A thrush? A robin? Mike would know, he knows these things. I could wake him, ask him.
I’m afraid of Grannie Helen. I was afraid of her at that funeral. Were you a bit afraid, too, to look her closely in the eye? I didn’t know how to comfort her. My own mother’s example didn’t help me. But Grannie Helen certainly looked, intently and often, at you. Did you notice that? As if perhaps you were really her best comfort on that day, or she was just, perhaps, full of admiration for you. How big you were now, how you’d shot up, not those two infants any more. And it’s one of the features of these sixteen years, which may seem to you to have been immeasurably long—they’re your whole life, after all—that they’ve sometimes seemed to us to rush you along, as if every month has produced some new version of you. There’s been a sort of wild comfort in it, even as it’s frightened us: all that amazing room for change.
But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen, who at seventy-two, we can fairly say, has stopped growing and changing and is just who she is. I’m afraid of that word “widow.” I think she’s probably awake now too, at Coombe Cottage—I feel sure she is—watching the grey light loom and listening to the thrum of the rain. I’m so simply afraid of
Mike here no longer being here, it’s the fear of my life. And I know this isn’t the time for me to think of myself and I know it’s up to you, but please don’t take him from me today.
But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen in another way. I have to say this to you too. I’ve seen her look at you intently before. Fair enough, she’s your grandmother—or she doesn’t know she isn’t. I’ve seen her look at you and then at Mike, then back again at you. Fair enough, she’s a mother too. But mothers know things, they can just tell.
I think at that funeral, at which she didn’t cry, she might have been thinking of how successfully she’d protected your Grandpa Pete. Now it might be her own son she’s protecting, if not quite in the same way. Mothers only want the best for their children. It could be that as from today she’ll be protecting you too, from the lie that you’ll think you’ll be keeping from her. If that’s how it’s to be, if that’s how you choose.
Mike wants us to go to the Gifford Park, just those few miles from Birle. A coincidence? A coincidence on top of another coincidence, known only to me. There’ll have to be some first time, anyway, when Mike and I see Grannie Helen, knowing that, now, you know. There’ll have to be a first time for you. And when that time comes for me I’ll have to look at her, knowing that you know, but thinking also that she might have guessed all along. Are you with me? And what kind of double-double dissimulation and treading on eggs is that going to entail? I could do without that, too, next weekend.
Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it’s all just the stress of this situation and all in my overstretched imagination. It’s dawn, one week after your sixteenth birthday. It’s raining, it’s teeming. Some little bedraggled bird I can’t identify, which no doubt has a nest somewhere which is getting drenched too, is singing its heart out. Perhaps I’m wrong, but sometimes mothers can just tell things. In any case, they only want the best for their children.