Tomorrow

29

YOUR DAD’S TURNING in his sleep. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, not yet. For a little while yet he can still be that: “your dad.” He’s snuffling softly like some rooting animal. How I want to hold him tight, but I’m afraid to wake him. In a few hours he’ll be in your hands. I’ll have to hand him over to you.

And it’ll be up to you then what you call him. It seems to me that he’s going to speak to you, one last time, more like a father than he’s ever done, a big, stern, serious daddy. Listen to your father, he’s got something important to say. And then he’ll be nobody, he’ll be what you make of him. If you want, you can even tell him to leave.

But I hope you know that if he goes, I go too. That’s how it is. I’m your mother, he’s not your father, but we go together anyway, just as surely as the two of you. Have I made that clear? When push comes to shove, that’s how it is. I’m your mother, but you’re sixteen now, and how much longer will you even need me around? That indefatigable maternal instinct eventually found its way from me to you, but I’m not sure if biology rules. Is that heresy? Your dad was never your biological father. That disqualifies him? How many real fathers are qualified biologists?

Tomorrow — if you decide in his favour — you’ll agree to make him, artificially, your father, as we once agreed to make you artificially (according to that ugly phrase) our children. But then, you’ll quickly discover, the artifice doesn’t stop there. It’s not just the truth you’ll be getting tomorrow, it’s that whole issue of pretence.

That little side-question of next weekend, of the Gifford Park Hotel, to let us go or not, will seem small stuff in comparison. Though I’ve already imagined how it might be — should it work this way — your neat means of revenge. Forgive me. I see you, next Saturday morning, after a remarkably calm and uncatastrophic week (but one in which you’ve had time to plan), standing at the front door to wave us off on our silver weekend — with all the ceremonial good grace, in fact, that you displayed at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. I even imagine Mike and I feeling for a moment like the spoilt (but humbled) children, while you stand there like the magnanimous householders of 14 Rutherford Road.

Except that when we come back next Sunday evening, you’ll have gone. The house will be ransacked, wrecked. Could you be so cunning? Pretence and dissimulation all round. My little pretence with your father in a five-star hotel, in a four-poster bed in Sussex will have been the least of my worries.

But that larger dissimulation — assuming we are all here, one way or another, under this roof after next weekend — where does it stop? Think about it. Your dad’s right, you might need next weekend just to think. We might have told Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen, years ago — think about it — and, of course, that would have been honest. But it would have robbed them, if you see what I mean, of two little grandchildren and burdened them with a share in our dishonesty. Now you’ll have to decide whether to be honest or not.

Children are brought up not to tell lies. Were we ever so big on that with you? Consider one little mitigating factor, at least. Everyone else’s ignorance — and surprising credulity — only made it easier to perpetrate the lie. Everyone else’s unwitting collusion only made it easier for us to feel (have a little mercy) that the lie might be the truth.

The rain’s getting harder, I think. You’ll have the option — the perfect right — if you wish, to tell the whole world. Starting on Monday, with all your friends at school. Though why wait till then? A few phone calls tomorrow afternoon. Pass it around. We’re in no position to stop you. Think what ripples you could set in motion in just a few moments, after sixteen years. But at least consider how far those ripples could spread, and that you won’t be able, should you feel like it later, to turn them around.

Here’s a thought for you that you may not even have this weekend or for some time to come, but I’ve certainly thought it for you. Suppose, one day, you have children. I mean (enough of that old childhood joke) that each of you or either of you one day has children. Will you be happy for them to think that this man lying here is their grandfather? If he isn’t, who is? Will that be a simple decision for you, hardly needing a moment’s thought, or will you think that one day, when they’ve grown up, they’ll need to know? That they’ll have to be told a story too, like the one I’m telling you now, involving, of course, a rainy weekend in June, once upon a time when you were sixteen?

Grandpa Mikey! Spare us, the poor man’s only fifty. He doesn’t look like a grandpa to me. But that’s not the point. It goes off into the future, you see. And it begs the simple question: will you, one day, have children — each of you, either of you — of your own? I don’t suppose that’s even a flicker of a question in your heads yet. But it’s one of the things you may suddenly find yourselves, as from tomorrow, having to think about intently: that line going off into the future, with more little Hooks on it, perhaps.

And that only begs another, bigger question, which may simply swallow up the first. Why have children at all? Clearly, I must have asked myself that big question once, and once I must have come up with an answer which, as you now know, lasted only so long. Life was possible without them. Without you two though — now that’s a different matter.

But then I don’t remember, even to bolster my rather peculiar position, ever putting the question like this: why bring children into the world? Is it such a good, safe world to bring them into? Is it going to be? I don’t remember Mike employing that argument either, though for him it must have been an even more tempting fall-back. Was it such a sweet, safe world then, in 1972, when Doctor Chivers gave him the news? I was afraid for our future perhaps, not the world’s.

Your dad likes to joke these days, when he can afford to, that it ought to be called The Perishing World. The magazine, I mean, though the same is true of the books. More and more of its pages seem to deal with declines and depletions, not to say outright extinctions, things going wrong with nature, harm being done to it, disasters in store. There even seems to be a readership that relishes this dire-warning stuff. Though there’s also still a dependable readership that, as your dad puts it, just wants to know about frogs.

The bulk of Living World Books are still just “nature books”: lovely to look at, brightly designed, modern-day equivalents of Uncle Edward’s book of molluscs. Your dad sometimes worries about this. It’s a sort of thorn in the side that he seems to need. He worries about the “just nature” books. He worries that the “just nature” stuff is really heads-in-the-sand stuff, it’s not even good science. Those dire warnings aren’t made up, the planet’s in serious trouble. I think he worries about being a “just nature” man himself. Still running around Sussex in short trousers, not even knowing about the existence of DNA. Or me.

But look at your mother. The planet’s in serious trouble, and she’s still dealing in art. Part of her’s still in the Renaissance.

Was it a better world in 1972 when, as you now know, you were never really on the cards at all? Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought that, like your parents, you were pretty well timed, two little cold-war babies, emerging, just when you were ready to emerge, into a world that was no longer cold: a happier, sweeter climate all round. Now, just a few years on, it’s not looking so good. We’re even told the climate’s getting too warm.

Your futures? Your future? What will the world be like in just five years’ time, in the year 2000, when you’ll be twenty-one? What will it be like in another sixteen, when you’re thirty-two, the same age I was when I decided to become a mother? What will it be like when you’re fifty, your dad’s age? You won’t thank me for sometimes being prey to this sort of arithmetic (especially tonight), or for sometimes concluding that your dad and I, born neatly in 1945, may have been set down in the best slot history has ever put on offer. But maybe every generation thinks that.

The planet’s in serious trouble? It’s 1995, a millennium’s ending, we’re all about to go over the edge? I don’t know if the planet’s in serious trouble, listening to this rain doing the garden good. I think number fourteen Rutherford Road might be in serious trouble. These might be just the early hours of Doomsday. Is that what we’ll call it when we look back? “Doomsday.” “Bombshell Day?” Will it just find its regular place, one day, in our calendar, in our private annals? That day, that day in June. We’ll refer to it frankly and calmly — though, of course, just among ourselves — with a touch of respect and solidarity, even a touch of humour. “Bombshell Day,” as a joke, because no bomb, really, ever went off. “Doomsday,” because it wasn’t the end of the world, just a wet Saturday in June. Another special day, a week after your birthday, that every year will be discreetly but smilingly observed?

I see everything in this house in just a few hours’ time looking the same as it always was. I see everything — every item, every picture on the wall, every little memento, every gathered-together token of our good life and good fortune — looking hollow and false. But then none of that stuff (as you so sensitively call it) would matter anyway, believe us, not in the balance with you. I’ve told Mike so many times that, surely, I must believe it myself: that he has nothing to fear, not about the fundamental thing. “Have they had any better dad?” (Well, have you?) So many times that I must have finally convinced him. Look at him here, sound asleep. But in any case you must simply believe me that your dad, who in recent years — whatever he gets called tomorrow — has taken on the unexpected sobriquet “Mr. Living World,” would gladly give up everything, would give the living world, if you could really be his.

If it wasn’t for this rain, I think by now there’d be the first streaks of light. It’s no longer pattering and trickling. It’s started to beat down as if from some motionless, massing cloud. Centred on Putney. Just a wet Saturday in June, or time to build an ark?

Among all the possessions and artworks in this house is, still, if you don’t know it, a small and precious selection of the paintings you both did at primary school when you were six or seven. They’re in that special box of mine. But they would have been displayed once, if you remember, on our kitchen wall. For a period of your life there was a constantly changing show. You knew then, just about, that I worked with “art,” I bought and sold pictures, and when your pictures got taken down to be replaced by your latest productions, you used to think I went off and sold them. You were nobly contributing to your mother’s livelihood. You never enquired further and never seemed to mind that you weren’t getting a percentage of your own. What a grasping dealer your mother was. But I didn’t throw them all away, you’ll be pleased to know, I kept some of the best. And if I’d had to give a top prize, there’s little doubt I’d have given it to your Noah’s Arks.

There was a strict kitchen-gallery policy of not favouring one of you over the other, and I’d never have let on anyway, even with my professional eye, which one of you I thought was the better watercolourist (though, actually, I think it was you, Nick, one way in which you could pip your sister). But since you both went to the same primary school and were in the same class, you both very often painted the same subject. There was equality, at least, in that.

Noah’s Ark must be a sure winner, anyway, the all-time favourite for primary-school painting sessions. Is there a child who’s never been asked? A rainy afternoon in the classroom, the lights are on, out come the paints. The teacher tells the story first, then the brushes get to work. For both of you, of course, it was that memorable phrase “two by two” that struck an inspirational chord. The animals went in two by two and they did so, you were given to understand, so that the world would be saved. Whether or not you knew what that really meant, you clearly thought that being what you were meant your own salvation was guaranteed. In those days you used to get called “the Hook twins,” something you’d loathe now.

But there was clearly also some confusion in your minds as to whether the Ark and the Flood were things that had happened or that might or would. This was shown by the fact that both of you, with connivance or not, included yourselves among the elephants, camels, inevitable towering giraffes and, in your case, Nick, a couple of surprising (since they can swim) but really rather charming polar bears.

But there, in both cases, are both of you. You’re not readily recognisable, but Kate’s the one with the longer hair and the stiffly triangular skirt. Your place on Noah’s Ark has been emphatically reserved. In fact, in both cases again, neither Noah or his wife are visible at all and it rather looks as though the two of you have assumed those venerable roles and are not just among the lucky passengers, but have taken charge of the ship.

We didn’t flummox you by asking if there was a chance your dad and I might be saved too and be given our place on board, and you were too young for the joke that it was your dad, surely, who ought to be Noah, being in command as he already was of The Living World. But those pictures certainly got saved. They’re in this house now, in my box. Remarkable thick blue ribbons of rain fall down in each of them, though in your case, Nick, out of a convincing enough thundery-black sky. And that box, you’ll now understand, with its hoard of items, a surprising number of which are in sets of two, has come to seem itself like a miniature ark, waiting for some particularly rainy day.