Tomorrow

11

I CRIED WHEN HE DIED. I was just like Mike, I cried at my dad’s funeral, at Invercullen, when there was rain, at least, to prompt me and to screen me — not like this soft, midsummer stuff falling now: an icy Caledonian onslaught. But I cried, anyway, afterwards. For weeks I was like a wet sponge, one touch would set me going, in spite of my saying to myself: come on, you’re over thirty, stop blubbing like a girl. But that’s what all my tears were really, I think, my childhood finally seeping out of me.

And I thought I’d parted with my childhood, finally and formally and even rather beautifully, that year I met your father and he met mine. I thought I’d said goodbye to it with Mike. Our childhoods aren’t so easily discarded, it seems. At thirty-plus — at forty-plus — they can still pop up and claim us. And why should we want to part with them anyway, like friends who’ve begun to embarrass us? Perhaps you’ll tell us tomorrow. Sixteen is really like eighteen now? Childhood is a smaller and smaller luxury? And I’ve seen you, my pets, trying to leap out of your childhoods, like fish onto land, long before now. It’s made my heart leap into my mouth.

I can still see Mike’s childhood in him — summers at his Uncle Eddie’s — though I was never there with him. It’s a sort of privilege I have, another special gallery. And I told him, on that train back to Brighton, about that time when I was thirteen. Was I still a child then? Dimming green fields slipped by the window, clumps of ghostly-white may blossom. It would have been one of those old, vanished, plumply upholstered train compartments. String luggage racks, wooden-framed invitations to south-coast beauty spots. Another world. Another sort of childhood too, it seems now. We had it to ourselves. Your dad had taken off his Chelsea boots, his socked feet were between my thighs. The Clos du Roi was still in our veins.

“We must go to Craiginish,” I said, “this summer. It’s our last chance.” Perhaps I really meant “my.” “Before my mum gets it.”

I could still say “mum.” She hadn’t yet become just “Fiona”—with now and then an emphasis on that first, already hissy “F.”

What a time to be talking about Scotland, while we sped back to the Sussex coast. Your dad might have thought, if he wasn’t so happily mollified by top-notch burgundy, that he was really being put through the hoops. First my father — so far, so good — now a trip to the bloody Highlands. And what a prospect: some windswept beach, as he must have seen it, in the frozen north. A “croft.” A croft? I had to do some serious talking up.

But we went that July. The sleeper from King’s Cross, then a hire car from Fort William. My father blessed and subsidised the trip. When he handed me the keys, which he’d soon have to surrender for good, he said rather solemnly, “Say goodbye to the place for me, won’t you?” And all the way up I hoped it wouldn’t be one of those Scottish summers — grey, wet and squally, clouds charging in over the islands. That the Gulf Stream would do one of its timely tricks and bring a touch of the Caribbean to northern Argyll.

But so it was. It was actually hot. And the “Croft,” your dad could see now with his own eyes, wasn’t a croft but a substantial, if eccentric and isolated, summer house, even with an air about it of some misplaced Riviera villa. What’s more, as we opened it up, and skimpily furnished though it was, it released an impregnation, a bouquet of former occupation. Even your dad, who’d never been there before, could recognise the corky, trapped-in-a-bottle smell.

I wish we could have gone there with you. But don’t you remember — won’t you always — the smell of Gull Cottage in Cornwall?

We opened windows. They yawned and sighed. When you add fresh oxygen to that bottled-up stuff a heady chemistry occurs. And they opened up to a view below of a white crescent beach, backed by dunes and washed by long, slow, rolling breakers — on which there wasn’t a soul. My Brighton-train rhapsody, fondling your father’s feet, hadn’t all been sales talk. I didn’t have to say, “I told you so.”

And so it was there, at Craiginish — but this I really hadn’t premeditated or prefigured, it was never part of my idyll-painting — that the “proposal,” as I would later call it, took place. “Proposal” really isn’t the right word. Your dad even likes to quip that it was a slip of the tongue. But what else to call it? It was there, in the high summer of 1966, that your dad and I became — an even more exotically antique word—“betrothed.” Though having betrothed ourselves, in a decidedly impetuous and breathless way, we didn’t actually get married for another four years.

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!”