Tomorrow

7

HE CAME CLEAN about the champagne. It hadn’t cost him a penny. I didn’t think any the less of him, nor, I think, did Linda and Judy. It even made the day go better (could it have gone better?), since it was rapidly and unanimously agreed that if it was his birthday champagne, then it must be his birthday. His birthday had been in January, but it was still his birthday or it was his birthday all over again. Or rather, if no one said this at the time, it was our birthday, it was your dad’s and my birthday, if such a thing can be, which I’ll confirm it can. You two aren’t the only ones to have had a joint inauguration. That day — March 19th, 1966—was our birthday, it was our launch party, celebrated, appropriately enough, by the edge of the sea. The ship of our future, which now includes sixteen years of your past, was launched that day and was christened, of course, with champagne.

Will you have such days in your life, will each of you have such days? I hope so. Nothing could make me happier than the knowledge that you will. It’s a stupid and a superstitious thought — a very stupid one to be having tonight — but there must be stored up for us all only so many possible happy days, and my fear is that your dad and I will have taken more than our share, we haven’t left enough for you.

“A bottle for each of you,” your father said, having sped through the streets of Brighton on his bicycle. By now, Linda, Judy and I were fully dressed, even a little over-dressed it could be said (a great deal of Biba) for a Saturday lunchtime. But what do you wear exactly for such an unexpected party? We stood in a row like prize winners while your dad unloaded his duffel bag onto the kitchen table.

“Spare some for me,” he said.

He could do no wrong. Outside, the clouds had dissolved and the sun shone approvingly. Second birthdays definitely occur, lives begin all over again. I was a little in love with Doctor Pope? I admit it. No disrespect to your father. And I was a little in love, as every female student of English was, with John Donne. The words had begun to echo in my head: “And now good morrow…” And now good morrow.

But your dad did the honourable thing. With his bag empty and those bottles on the table he looked a bit like a man who’d been stopped at customs.

“Actually,” he said, “they’re from my dad.”

From his dad? How could his dad possibly have known about or felt so generously towards the three sisters of Osborne Street?

And then your father, who’d already explained to me, in the small hours of the morning, quite a lot about his father, explained to all three of us about his twenty-first birthday back in January.

We felt like honorary daughters. That doesn’t quite work, I know — it would have been to construct the most bizarre family. But for a moment your Grandpa Pete was the talking point, as he’d soon become the toast of three girls in Brighton. If only he’d known. Each of us with our bottle. He must be quite a dad, Mike’s dad, we agreed, we would definitely drink to him.

Quite a dad, I privately thought, champagne apart, just to have produced Mike. And quite something that he’d sent a whole case. This was the 1960s, not the 1980s, champagne wasn’t like fruit juice. Most dads would have settled in those days for sending their son a single bottle, on grounds of expense, on grounds of sheer sense of proportion. Let’s not go overboard. What would your Grandpa Pete have got, after all, for his own twenty-first birthday? A food parcel?

This must all seem so far away to you. As if that “maisonette” in Brighton — but it must still be there — is as distant, in its own way, as some awful camp in Germany. Your dad told me, later, that he’d been overwhelmed to get those twelve bottles. It was like receiving an inheritance. The truth was he wouldn’t even have said he was particularly close to his father, and here was this sudden bounty. That accompanying note, apart from the joke about “Mumm” and wishing him happy birthday, had simply said, “Have fun.” Your dad showed it to me. And he still has it. Your dad and me, we’re sentimental that way. He got it out and looked at it again after Grandpa Pete died.

But he was so moved by those twelve bottles that he couldn’t simply regard them as bottles of fun, he couldn’t just knock them back at the first chance. He even had the thought, since there were twelve of them, that he should broach only one bottle a month for the whole of his year of being twenty-one — a resolution that soon got broken. But it was still a miracle that he had those three bottles left in March.

I think your father, in January 1966, underwent a moment of historical, of filial humbling. Twenty-one: it’s the real ripe age, perhaps, and you’re only sixteen. I think he paused to appreciate, not to take for granted, his own good fortune. Remember, we hadn’t even met yet. And maybe that’s why he invoked, on our first night together, his own once-captive dad. What kind of fun was there to be had then? I think your father, a scientist by vocation and therefore surely not prone to superstition, may have said to himself: but put three bottles by just in case, as safeguards. Save three bottles for a rainy day.

Tomorrow looks like being a rainy day, my darlings.

But that March day, years ago, was anything but a rainy day: a day in March that was more like a day in May.

And what I couldn’t quite tell him yet, in the circumstances, was that my dad, the very awkwardly mentioned and very nearly coitus-interruptive High Court judge, had a whole cellar in Kensington of magnificent and expensive wines, including, of course, a fine range of champagne. It had become in recent years his favourite room in the house. The fact is that in those days before Fiona and then Margaret siphoned off their share, your mother (who’s scarcely hard-up now) was something of a little rich girl. But I didn’t want to scare or prejudice your dad, and certainly not upstage him.

And anyway that champagne we drank on Brighton beach was the best I’ve ever tasted. I can still see the little dull-red chain of roses round the rim of the hastily shop-bought waxed-paper cups. Champagne glasses? You’d have had to be joking. Lunch that day — and here I can report that your dad really did pay for everything — was the standard stuff of the beach-front caffs, an emphasis on greasy chips. But it was washed down with bubbly. We had no ice bucket, but that was no problem: the English Channel in March, a pocket of pebbles at the water’s edge, and the tide was almost full. How everything came together. We agreed on ten minutes’ chilling time, then settled for five.

And there is that great advantage of champagne, that you don’t need to remember a corkscrew. But I didn’t forget to keep one of the corks. The other two, I decided, were Linda’s and Judy’s business, perhaps they just floated out to sea. But I kept my cork. It’s precious beyond reckoning. Did I say I can be sentimental? It’s in a special box I have where I’ve kept all kinds of stuff. I’m a foolish old mother in that respect. Pressed flowers from Craiginish. Your primary-school artistic triumphs, as valuable to me — and your mother knows about art — as Tintorettos. Then there’s a little collar, also now a dull red, with a small bell on it and a name tag. More of that later.

Brighton beach in the middle of March: not always inviting. But it turned as warm as summer. The sea was calm and compliant and grew bluer by the minute, and the waves, lapping gently in and breaking with a silver flash then turning to creamy foam round first three, then two and then a single bottle of champagne, might as well have been champagne themselves.

By that third bottle, if your father had told me that he’d planned that day long in advance, foreseen it and planned it in every detail — as he’d planned, all along, those special transitory roles for Linda and Judy — I would, of course, have utterly believed him. But how could he or either of us have known that day would unfold as it did, so perfectly? Some days are just gifts, some things are just gifts. He’d planned the weather? He’d planned that the tide would be so co-operatively full and then — but it’s only what tides do — slowly, respectfully creep away? That the afternoon would turn gold and dreamy, and that as the light deepened and the tide slipped further out, Linda and Judy, without any prompting but with immaculate, if drunken, timing, would get up and slip away too, guests at our feast who knew nonetheless when they ought to be going? As if they weren’t leaving us where everyone could see, on the pebbles of Brighton beach, but in some special, private, garlanded bed.

But we hardly noticed them going or heard their softly crunching, retreating footsteps, since, nestled up to each other in a sort of gauzy blanket of champagne, and not having had much sleep the night before, we’d drifted away ourselves.