Tomorrow

9

YOUR DAD HASN’T lost his looks. I think he’s even gained some. I’m biased, of course. Under that tree in St. James’s Park, at least, the summer light did him proud. Or is it that his midlife success has given him a new lift, a new lease? Where do you separate handsomeness and success in men, handsomeness and achievement? Any thoughts, Kate? How the passing of time can be kind to them anyway. But perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking that right now.

It wasn’t always so. I mean, he was just handsome once, he was just Mike. The success wasn’t there. And should you demand it? Isn’t love more than enough? Professor Mike — I mean, a real true accredited Professor Mike — was waiting a long way down the road (it has to be said he’ll go on waiting) while your dad toiled away, a third, a fourth year, at his PhD. Those snails of his were supposed to be his stepping stones — an unfortunate phrase — to his brilliant future in science.

It may be hard for you to imagine that your dad and mum, who now own this house and do all that we do, once shared a rented basement in Earl’s Court. Your dad was “researching” at Imperial, I was a trainee at Christie’s in the Old Brompton Road. Our bed then (compare this barge of a bed we’re in right now) was a mattress on the floor. Not so much an economy, though that was needed, as a gesture to sprawling decadence. We never invested in a real bed, though we did invest, one impulsive and salacious day in the Portobello Road, in a vast, crimson, slinky-thin bedspread beneath which, immersed in its ruby glow, we’d often flail and tussle, like people caught in a happy ballooning accident.

In those days — forgive me — you were very far from our thoughts, you weren’t even on our radar.

My lunch with your dad in the park today didn’t just make me think of Brighton. It made me think of those trainee days and of a happy month I once spent as a menial at the Dulwich Gallery, a place I’m still very fond of. Some lovely Poussins, a gorgeous Watteau. I’d mooch about in my lunch break in the park just across the road — it had a lake with ducks — and think about Mike, across town, at Imperial, and think how sweet and treasurable even the most unambitious moments of life can be. Our “careers” were in place anyway, in reassuring embryo, Mike’s perhaps a little more latently than mine. But there was no rush, there was even the argument that the slower the incubation, the more glorious the outcome. I’m sounding like some biologist myself.

But I was even, in those days, still a little enchanted, a little seduced by your dad’s devotion to snails. I was devoted to his devotion. Who cares about snails? Some people find them repellent. But if Mike cared about them…That’s how it worked. Under our red bedspread I willingly learnt a good deal about snails, about their natural history and life cycle, not least about their extraordinary reproductive system and method of performing the sexual act (you’d think those shells would be a major encumbrance), though now’s not the time to be going into that.

Your dad used to say that the simple joy of biology was the sheer peculiarity of things. What makes anything special? And I used to think that for me the question “What made Mikey special?” was a question that required no answer, let alone a scientific one. Nor did it occur to me especially to ask: what makes anyone, who might, after all, do all sorts of things, become a specialist in snails?

In the park with your dad today I saw myself in that other park in Dulwich. It was spring. The rhododendrons were out, the ducks clucked. There were little scudding flotillas of chicks. I didn’t imagine then that one day I’d ever want to say to this man here, this special specialist: “Perhaps there’s been enough of snails now, Mikey. Where are their silvery trails leading us?” I didn’t imagine that one day I’d want to make this man — my husband as he’d then become — reconsider his own sticky trail in life.

His work involved breeding the things, long-term, patient cycles of experiment. It didn’t seem to involve sudden, life-changing discoveries.

I’ve never been a fan of Seurat, but in the park today I thought of those lounging, sprinkled figures, made up of dots themselves, as if people are really just clouds of atoms, which your dad would no doubt say is exactly what they are. I had that strange feeling that I was meeting him all over again, as though, if I’d never known him and had gone down to St. James’s Park to choose from the crowds, I’d still have picked him out. I should have told him perhaps. I should have said, “It would have been the same even now, Mikey, no question. Even at fifty.”

Except I had the sudden, panicky opposite feeling: that I was meeting him for the last time. I’d got it all wrong. “I just needed to see you,” he said. It wasn’t a meeting, it was a last look. People do that too, they meet one last honourable time, just in order to part. Your dad was already staging his disappearance.

How stupid of me. When we climbed up the Duke of York’s Steps again all the breath went out of me. He said, standing in that old place, “I’m glad we did this. I won’t forget that we did this.” Two sandwiches in the park! I didn’t dare say anything foolish. He hailed a cab at the corner of Pall Mall and kissed me before stepping into it. I watched it weave its way, its black roof glinting, up Lower Regent Street. And fifteen minutes later Simon, who I think was vaguely on the lookout, would have seen me return and shut my office door behind me in the way that people shut even office doors when they want to cry.

But, look, he’s still here, isn’t he? How absurd of me. Your dad’s still here.

And he can still talk, as you know, in a special way about snails. As he can talk about all kinds of creepy-crawlies and barely considered life forms, as if passing on some marvellous secret. His business these days may be, so to speak, the whole range of available products, but he can still do a good pitch on the little individual item.

You know not to yawn when your dad talks about snails. A look comes into his eye. You know not to push the mollusc jokes. What you don’t know is that there came a time, after we’d moved to Davenport Road, when your dad announced to me that he had to go one last time to the labs at Imperial. He had to make one last visit. He didn’t elaborate, and I should have guessed perhaps. But he told me afterwards. He said he’d gone there personally to exterminate his remaining working stock of snails. He said he wanted to do it himself, efficiently and “humanely”—a strange word to use about snails. He hadn’t wanted to leave it to “some technician.”