Tomorrow

2

I MET YOUR FATHER when I was twenty and he was twenty-one, in Brighton, in 1966, when we were both at Sussex University. When I say “met” I really mean “went to bed with,” “slept with,” if there wasn’t, that night, that much sleeping. I should be as frank at the start as I mean to carry on. I’d met him, merely met him already, and when I met him in the full sense, he’d already met in the full or nearly full sense my two flat-mates, Linda Page and Judy Morrison.

This is your dad, this man fast asleep beside me now, I’m talking about. And that was how things could be in 1966. They couldn’t have been like it in 1956, but they could ten years later, particularly at a new university like Sussex. They weren’t like it all the time, maybe, but for your dad and me, in the early months of 1966, they were. Whenever we mention “the Sixties” both of you yawn or glaze over as if things are so much more nonchalantly free-for-all and uninhibited now. But I’m not so sure they really are. What are you actually up to, my darlings, at the advanced age of sixteen? You tell me. At least we had the excitement of the new — the “liberated” as we sometimes called it. And it wasn’t so amateurish, or so aimless. Your father slept around. He slept with Linda and (possibly) Judy in fairly quick succession, then he slept with me. Then he never slept with anyone else. He’s sleeping with me now. These are the simple and basic facts which I’ve never doubted and I hope, so far as the last part goes, nor have you. And they add up to something that I hope will count for a lot when he speaks to you tomorrow.

At Sussex there was a university doctor who had the happy name, in the circumstances, of Doctor Pope. Every so often, along with a regular queue of other girls, I’d go along to get my dispensation. I remember another, less eager queue when I was small, to get a polio vaccination. What made that age so new, so different from previous ages, was a little pill: once a day for twenty-one days, then a week off. A bit of science, a bit of social sorcery. It was called the permissive age, but was it the pill that produced the age or the age the pill? Sex must always have been around, our parents must have known how to get it. But had there ever been such a rush of it, a glut of it — as if it had just been discovered specially for us, like gold in the Klondike, in the South Downs? Of course, it hadn’t just been discovered. But we were children of our time, as you are of yours. Though we only understand afterwards, perhaps, what time it is we’re children of.

Doctor Pope was one of those young, fresh doctors, not so long out of medical school, who was only too happy, I think, to have this flow of largely healthy patients, not so much younger than himself and predominantly female, passing through his door. I still see his unpapal, even mock-priestly face. Dark hair, dark eyes, a taste in brightly coloured, unphysicianly ties. Half the girls who went along to him fancied him just a little. He’s one of those minor and incidental figures from the past — one day you’ll find this too — who suddenly float into your head, so that you wonder, where are they now, what are they doing right now? Do they still have that dark hair? Though this same thing can happen, this same sudden looming out of nowhere, with people who can’t be called incidental at all.

Your father slept around and so, thanks to Doctor Pope, did I. Let’s not be exact about who did the most, but let’s give the edge to your father. I was the younger, if only by six months. And, just for the candid record, your father, before he met me and even in those pill-blessed times, always carried a traditional stand-by: the packet of three. You may think this is information that doesn’t particularly concern you. I said to him, “You won’t be needing these.” But your dad had always been — careful.

How it is for you I don’t know. In these mid-1990s, when sixteen is eighteen and when, from all I can tell, what once went on at university now sometimes goes on at school, you’d think you might already be beginners at least. What with all that early knowledge you seemed so glad once to advertise. The facts of life? They’ve simply been in the air you’ve breathed, the common small talk (apparently) of infants, they don’t need special elucidation.

But on the other hand, for all the all-around-you of it these days, schoolgirl pregnancies by the dozen (yes, Kate, I worry), I think there’s sometimes too a weirdly opposite reaction. Why rush into something so patently available? A sort of sex-fatigue before it’s even started, a sort of purity or just stubborn sensibleness. Abstention is the new liberation: is that the way the tide is turning? Sometimes when we refer to those oh-so-wonderful, oh-so-yawn-making 1960s, it’s not just that you make a show of boredom. Sometimes in your eyes there’s the faint hint of a tut-tut. As if you might be about to say to us, a little too late in the day, perhaps: “Oh, grow up.”

There’s a gap of quite a few years between us, as you may have noticed. You’re sixteen, your father’s fifty. But that’s another shift that’s become unremarkable these days. Thirty, thirty-five: that’s no longer a cliff-edge for a woman. Mike says — you’re familiar with his ironical and slightly professorial mode, though it’s not, I’m sure, how he’ll address you tomorrow — that the whole thing is changing, there’s no longer the pressure of brevity, we’ll all reach a hundred, one day, and procreate when we’re fifty. Well. “All other things being equal,” he adds. If there isn’t by then anyway, he says, “some completely new system.” The slightly prophetical mode as well. Once anyway, as we all know, people were lucky to get to forty and there were brides of fourteen. (If not, Kate, of eight.)

I don’t know. The world doesn’t feel to me more relaxed and better adjusted, it has this way of suddenly racing. I don’t know how it feels to you. But what I do know is that at sixteen you’re both virgins. I don’t have the proof and I don’t have your direct confirmations, just intuition. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the world around you and how there’s more time at your disposal and how you can just be cool and calm about everything. It has to do with you, with what you are: Nick and Kate, with that invisible rope straining, and sometimes catching painfully, between you. Little upsets and outbursts, not helped by recent symptoms of parental tension. Now and then a door gets slammed.

I don’t know how tomorrow will affect it. A big snapping of all our ropes? You’re sixteen, you’re eighteen, you’re grown-up and able to handle anything? We’ll find out. Right now it seems to me that you’re as changeable, as suddenly mature then as suddenly childish, as suddenly moody and tetchy then as suddenly brimming with verve and sparkle, as any teenagers. And you’re virgins. It’s a sweet thing, from the outside. Like the sweetness, from the outside, of your inescapable togetherness. And thank God, for the time being, you have each other. You’re virgins, you could say, in another way too.