Tomorrow

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?

A “happy home”: that’s another inherent misnomer perhaps, another fantasy out of which we all have to be shaken, but in which, though you’re sixteen, you’re still carefully blanketed and cradled. Though you’ll be woken abruptly enough soon.

For what it’s worth, while you sleep on these last few hours of your sixteen-year sleep, let me tell you how I woke up long ago and came out of a dream (in more senses than one, you’ll have to agree) when I was even younger than you. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about poor Otis, or your poor dad, out there in the streets looking for him, I’ll get back to them. And oh yes, your mother really was, once, if it’s hard to picture, even younger than you.

Let me tell you the story which I once told your father, and never, till now, anyone else. As a matter of fact, I told him that time we went to Craiginish, the year we met: pillow-talking in the “croft,” our skins all salty, that very first night, after he’d “proposed” to me and I’d said yes. You came from happiness, my darlings.

And this story can really be called a fairy tale, since your mother was not only younger than you at the time, but (unlike your Grandma Fiona) she was actually a fairy.

I was thirteen, though this was still, just, the nineteen-fifties when thirteen was younger than thirteen is now. But I didn’t want to be a little fairy.

My all-girls boarding school was a posh sort of place in the Thames valley, as befitted the daughter of a judge. Every year in the summer they’d put on a Shakespeare play, outdoors, in a little natural grassy arena between the hockey field and the music rooms, in front of a clump of trees. And every other year, it seemed, it would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such a good play for the time of year and that setting and, of course, for girls. All those fairies.

I wanted to be Puck. Not a fairy, not Hermia or Helena (fairly soppy parts, in my view), not even Titania. When it comes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck, if a girl may say so, is your only man: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” (the word “girdle” producing a titter in a pack of schoolgirls, for reasons that, thankfully, you don’t have to bother with). But my acting skills, I’ll be honest, were rudimentary and Puck was a part for older girls. So I got Mustardseed: one of the fairies, number two or number three, it doesn’t really matter. A couple of half-baked lines and a little flapping costume the colour of Colman’s best.

It invariably turned grey and chilly, or it blew a gale. The arc lights, evoking moonlight, in among the trees, usually failed or crashed down. It was traditional, painful fun. But that year the weather was perfect: a serene and golden June evening turning to dusky purple even as the show progressed. The scent of newly mown grass. Not even a troupe of squeaking schoolgirls murdering Shakespeare could quite spoil the effect. Even the most long-suffering among the audience of stoical parents couldn’t fail to be charmed.

As my father, I hope, was charmed. I hope it was at least some small, diverting consolation.

He was there, of course, to see me, his Mustardseed, to judge my performance. Just, as it happens, a little later that same year I’d go to see him, to judge his performance or at least just to witness it, from that secret but public gallery. He was there in the audience. I’d seen him secretly then too, from an off-stage spy-point, his bobbing, unostentatious panama visible among some fairly attention-seeking motherly hats. But the person I couldn’t see (and her hat would have made its mark) was Fiona. Beside my father there was an empty space, an unoccupied brown-canvas and tubular-steel chair. It remained unoccupied, as the twilight gathered, throughout the evening.

This wasn’t a matter of some temporary mishap or misunderstanding. My father wasn’t looking at his watch, or appearing merely incidentally worried or annoyed. He kept looking at the “stage,” at the magic transformations being enacted before him, including his daughter’s temporary fairyhood, a vague but fixed smile on his face. I understood that something serious, not minor, had occurred, or perhaps had been occurring for some time, and this was my first, world-rearranging indication of it. My knees felt weak, though the show, of course, must go on. It was just as well I had that mere wisp of a role.

Afterwards, I could have simply asked him. I was thirteen. But thirteen was a still hesitant age. And best not to ask was my instinct. And not the best of times, patches of jaundice-like make-up still on my cheeks. Best just to listen to his obvious brave fib, and nod.

“Mummy’s very sorry. She’s feeling under the weather. Such lovely weather too, such a lovely evening…But you were wonderful, Paulie. A star! They really should have given you a bigger part.”

That summer was the first year we didn’t go to Craiginish. And that confirmed it. By then I knew there was a “situation,” an ongoing situation. Ours was not any longer a happy home or a happy family, though it had been. And from now on I’d have to play a part and quite a big one, I’d have to polish and refine my acting skills, since the situation, if not carefully contained and managed, might be damaging to a judge’s reputation.

Meanwhile, a former yellow fairy, I took a bus to the law courts to see a man in red robes.

There you are, I was a fairy once, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Picture that. I had little wings. It’s midsummer now, though it’s raining, but all of you are dreaming. Your dad, when I told him, certainly tried to picture it. He said he wished he’d been there. He said he was jealous of my dad, even though my dad can’t have been so happy that night. He said he wished he could have seen your mum when she was Mustardseed.