Tomorrow

25

AND, OF COURSE, I can see him in you. I don’t have to look for him randomly in the street, on trains. He’s there before my eyes, invisibly, every time I look at you. And from tomorrow, I’m sure, that mirror-gazing of yours will suddenly get rather serious.

You don’t have grey-blue eyes. You have, as has often been innocently observed, your mother’s dark brown, green-shot eyes, her nose, her cheekbones: but your father’s mobile mouth, your father’s expressions. Despite those specifications we made, it would seem that it was my genes, predominantly, that kicked in. Your dad has clear-blue eyes. We ordered them certainly, the same again, please. So you should know that Mr. Sperm, or whatever you choose to call him, has blue eyes too. But it didn’t work out that way, you got my eyes. Which didn’t stop people from saying, as if the other fifty per cent must be glowingly apparent somewhere else: Ah, but that’s their dad’s smile.

This is the strangest thing — how you’ve conspired, yourselves, in the conspiracy. People see what they expect to see, so why should they not have believed they were seeing Mike in you? Then again, from the start, you saw two faces looming over you that you took to be your parents, and why should you not have taken them as your model? And we did a lot of smiling over you, believe me. But perhaps it was Mike’s smile that got imprinted, perhaps it was his you felt the greater obligation to.

If we’ve performed a part for sixteen years, then, without knowing it, so have you — and even more convincingly. There have definitely been times — whole lengths of time — when we ourselves have fallen totally for the illusion, when we’ve completely forgotten. You’ve been unwittingly such consummate actors, such consummate accomplices, that now it’s like an extra cruelty that you’ll have to undo it all.

And yet I’ve noticed already that it’s started to slip, it’s already started to look less plausible. You’re sixteen, you want to be yourselves. The last thing you want to look like is your half-century-old parents. The last thing you want to do — it’s perfectly natural at your age — is catch yourselves mimicking some fossilised gesture of ours. Will this help matters or just confuse them tomorrow?

These days, you don’t even want to look like each other. But wasn’t that, from the start, the little unexpected marvel that helped fool everyone? We couldn’t have bargained for it, and certainly couldn’t have specified it when we put in our request list. But people simply, perhaps, mistook the one thing for the other, or the one thing distracted from the other. Of course there was consistency and resemblance here, of course you must look like us, because you looked so much like each other.

When we took those holidays down in Cornwall, you were perhaps at the very peak of your symbiosis, your two-peas-in-a-podness: a little team of two acting as one, wanting no other company. It’s what everyone else would notice, your happy, frolicking duality. And so, by a simple process of completing the square, they’d acknowledge our immaculateness as a family.

But I would notice your differences, your imbalances. A mother sees things. I would often see how you were like your father (Mike, of course, I mean), or I would see how the illusion was achieved. Nick, you were always that fraction behind your sister, you waited on her initiative, her shelter. When the two of you ran across the beach, your feet making little sand-puffs, her shoulder was always just ahead of yours, you were tucked in her slipstream, like birds in formation. She learnt to swim first, but as soon as she did, so did you. The same with bicycles.

It seemed to me, Nick, though it’s a big thing to say, I know, that you always relied on Kate to hold your world together. And that while Kate was simply happy and though you might be happy too, a small voice inside you was always saying: please, Kate, don’t let this stop, please don’t let this come to an end. The world was always a question for you, and a possible disaster, hingeing on your sister. Was this my imagination?

But this all had more than one source, I could see that too. You had a special frown, just a tiny knot, a question mark in the middle of your brow, which could appear sometimes, oddly, just when everything else was sunny. But then it wasn’t your frown. It was your father’s. I mean Mike’s. It was the special frown he’d have, and had never had before you were born, whenever he’d remind himself of the fact, whenever he’d stop forgetting and say to himself: but this isn’t what it seems, this can’t go on for ever.

Which way round did it work, Nick? You borrowed it from him? He took it from you? But there it was, on both of you, a father-and-son resemblance: both of you disturbed by happiness. Not your father’s smile, actually, but his frown. I’d see Mike sometimes reach out and for no apparent reason, Nick, put his hand on your brow, as if feeling for a fever. How my pulse would rush. But you must surely remember this yourself. I could see him wanting to smooth away that little obstinate pucker, to take it away in his palm. How could he not be your father when he wanted to touch and reclaim that little mark of himself in you?

Those holidays in Cornwall, midway through this sixteen-year period, when for whole days, weeks long we’d all be so close, were like some almost believable high point for me, the very sun and sea and air colluding, like some annual process of kindly weathering, to mould and fuse us together. By the same token, I think Mike always thought they threatened to expose us. All of us there in just our swimming things. It will be on one of these holidays, I think he thought, in the middle of our August happiness, that the whole thing will somehow come apart, get dashed to bits, like a Cornish shipwreck. That cottage where we regularly stayed, Gull Cottage, with its hollyhocks and lavender bushes and its ship’s-steering-wheel mirror and sand getting everywhere, reminded him, too, of Craiginish Croft (that trapped essence inside): another paradise waiting to be lost.

And on that terrible day when something even worse (there could be) than those fears of his nearly happened, perhaps you noticed, if you were able to notice, that his relief, his joy, his sheer emotion when it was over, was even greater than mine. If we were both of us off the scale.

I don’t mean that I didn’t feel exactly the same: the worst thing that could ever happen and it hadn’t. Oh, my angels. But I didn’t, I couldn’t have the second thought that he was having, even as he struggled to get back his breath. That you were saved, you were still there and it was beyond words, but — one day — he was going to lose you anyway.

Perhaps tomorrow in fact.

Perhaps tomorrow you’ll simply relive that day again. It will come back to you — has it ever gone away? — and it will be your answer. The worst day, until this one that’s coming, of your lives. You’ll see him again swimming towards you. I wasn’t able to see his face then as it would have looked to you, as it came towards you. I wasn’t able to see the expression on it. But how could that man not have been your father?

Or perhaps you’ll remember how that day began: with your pretence, your foolish meddling with our terror and joy. And you didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps tomorrow, on top of that cold returning memory, you’ll have the sudden freezing thought that if the very worst had happened that day and you’d disappeared for ever, then, of course, you’d never have known what you must know now. The lie would have had no end.

I don’t want to think about it either.

Mike’s going to be the outcast tomorrow? Or simply the one, now, you’ll have to rescue?

But spare a thought for your mother. Why do people have children? Why did Grannie Helen get herself pregnant in all that haste? In one sense the haste wasn’t necessary. After the war Grandpa Pete was still there, and there too, luckily for me, was Mike. But now, of course — there has to come a time some time — Grandpa Pete isn’t there.

If Grandma Helen still wants to see Grandpa Pete, or see a living bit of him, there’s only one thing she can do. She can look (not now, of course) at this man lying next to me. I can’t hold that against her, but it’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of her, and it’s one of the reasons, but not the main one — a secondary worry sprouting from a secondary worry — why I’m afraid of the Gifford Park. If your dad should really get it into his head to go traipsing off those few miles to see her, for Sunday morning coffee, to take her to lunch, even, at the Star in Birle, it will be the first time we see her since we’ll have told you. Are you with me?

But this is something that never occurred to your dad and me — though, God knows, we tried to think of everything — when we went along to discuss it all at the clinic. We were simply younger then. When you look at yourselves in the mirror tomorrow you’ll be doing for the first time something that I’ve done, over and over again, when I’ve looked at you. That is, there’ll be someone, when you look, who you won’t see, and now you’ll know it. When I look at you, I don’t see, I can’t see your father. What does that matter? I can just look at him. But think again, though you’re only sixteen. Think of that day in Cornwall.

When your dad looks at you, it’s a simple, patent fact: he can see me. In you, Kate, of course, especially. I’m not trying to flatter myself. He can even see me when I was younger than I am now, though your dad never knew me when I was sixteen.

I’m the one who’s alone in this respect. I ask you to consider it, and I won’t skirt around it any longer. If Mike were suddenly not to be here, I wouldn’t have anywhere to look. I wouldn’t be like Grannie Helen. I wouldn’t have that age-old shred of consolation of looking at you and knowing that you were his too.

Think of it: as a couple gets older there’s only one, unspoken question. But perhaps the two of you, being what you are, have known this all your lives and from the very start. Who will go first? Who will it be? And how can it be?

Don’t worry, we’ve no intention. We’re only forty-nine and fifty. These days, that’s still young, isn’t it? We’re spring chickens. But I can’t see him in you. I want you to remember it: all I have and ever will have of this man here I call your father — and it’s more than I can ever say — is bound up in this sleeping body next to me now. Understand that tomorrow.