Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Had he seen me? I still wonder now. I’ll never know. But surely, if he had seen me, he would have told me, at some time at least, when I was grown up. Before he died. Paulie, I saw you, that day.

I told your father all this — not that last part, of course — as we clacked back to Sussex through that May evening, and I told him not to tell anyone. As if he would have done, as if he was going to broadcast it. But it was a measure of my thirteen-year-old’s fear, even then. And I think I scared Mike just a bit — mellow and sedated as he still was from my dad’s wine. Yes, it had been that same man.

We’ve never even talked about it again since, though I’ve certainly thought about it, and I think so has Mike. In fact, I think he may have been thinking about it quite a lot recently. I think he may have been thinking about that smaller version of me, seeing a man I did and didn’t know.

The bottle my father brought up from the cellar was a Clos du Roi, ’55. Some bottles, some vintages you never forget. (Mumm non-vintage — but for all time.) When we moved in here to Rutherford Road, we moved in with you, of course, but also with some eight or nine cases of extremely fine wine. It was all that was left by then. My father may have had to do some selling up. On the other hand, if you want to divest yourself of liquid property, there’s a simple way of going about it.

He died aged seventy-seven, a single man with a great deal less than what he’d once had. But he died, I think, with what he wanted at the time. He died a Justice. And he died a Campbell — that was the disconcerting bit. He also had me, his only child (of three marriages), and he knew I had the man I loved. There was just one thing, which he never mentioned, that he didn’t have.

He opened that bottle in front of Mike and me in his familiarly unceremonious way and sniffed it. “Spot on — after a breathe.” Thirty seconds later, after fetching three glasses, he said, “It’s breathed.” He poured. He said to Mike, but as if specially for my ear: “I drank this wine in August1944. All kinds of wine was getting back to England then, care of Special Operations. It was the evening I proposed to Paulie’s mother. Do they still do that these days? Welcome, Michael, to my somewhat depleted home.”

I could tell that your dad was letting slip down his throat something unlike anything that had slipped down it before. Later he said it was well named, it made you feel like a king. We moved out with our glasses into the sunshine in the little walled garden, where four years later (Taittinger ’61) our wedding would be celebrated.

I wish you could have seen him. Not your dad when he was twenty-one in his cream shirt (though I wish that too): your Grandpa Dougie. I wish you still could see him — I wish I could — from some special gallery. And not, I mean, the man I once saw in the wig and robe, whom you’ve seen anyway, in a sense, in the silver-framed photo in the hall. New visitors to this house sometimes pause and say, “My God — who’s that?” And I say, a little sternly, in keeping with the photo, “It’s my father, actually, it’s Mr. Justice Campbell.”

No, I wish you could have seen that other man, that out-of-court man, my one-time daddy, pouring wine for Mikey and me at Napier Street. He’d have loved to have seen you.

I CRIED WHEN HE DIED. I was just like Mike, I cried at my dad’s funeral, at Invercullen, when there was rain, at least, to prompt me and to screen me — not like this soft, midsummer stuff falling now: an icy Caledonian onslaught. But I cried, anyway, afterwards. For weeks I was like a wet sponge, one touch would set me going, in spite of my saying to myself: come on, you’re over thirty, stop blubbing like a girl. But that’s what all my tears were really, I think, my childhood finally seeping out of me.

And I thought I’d parted with my childhood, finally and formally and even rather beautifully, that year I met your father and he met mine. I thought I’d said goodbye to it with Mike. Our childhoods aren’t so easily discarded, it seems. At thirty-plus — at forty-plus — they can still pop up and claim us. And why should we want to part with them anyway, like friends who’ve begun to embarrass us? Perhaps you’ll tell us tomorrow. Sixteen is really like eighteen now? Childhood is a smaller and smaller luxury? And I’ve seen you, my pets, trying to leap out of your childhoods, like fish onto land, long before now. It’s made my heart leap into my mouth.

I can still see Mike’s childhood in him — summers at his Uncle Eddie’s — though I was never there with him. It’s a sort of privilege I have, another special gallery. And I told him, on that train back to Brighton, about that time when I was thirteen. Was I still a child then? Dimming green fields slipped by the window, clumps of ghostly-white may blossom. It would have been one of those old, vanished, plumply upholstered train compartments. String luggage racks, wooden-framed invitations to south-coast beauty spots. Another world. Another sort of childhood too, it seems now. We had it to ourselves. Your dad had taken off his Chelsea boots, his socked feet were between my thighs. The Clos du Roi was still in our veins.

“We must go to Craiginish,” I said, “this summer. It’s our last chance.” Perhaps I really meant “my.” “Before my mum gets it.”

I could still say “mum.” She hadn’t yet become just “Fiona”—with now and then an emphasis on that first, already hissy “F.”

What a time to be talking about Scotland, while we sped back to the Sussex coast. Your dad might have thought, if he wasn’t so happily mollified by top-notch burgundy, that he was really being put through the hoops. First my father — so far, so good — now a trip to the bloody Highlands. And what a prospect: some windswept beach, as he must have seen it, in the frozen north. A “croft.” A croft ? I had to do some serious talking up.

But we went that July. The sleeper from King’s Cross, then a hire car from Fort William. My father blessed and subsidised the trip. When he handed me the keys, which he’d soon have to surrender for good, he said rather solemnly, “Say goodbye to the place for me, won’t you?” And all the way up I hoped it wouldn’t be one of those Scottish summers — grey, wet and squally, clouds charging in over the islands. That the Gulf Stream would do one of its timely tricks and bring a touch of the Caribbean to northern Argyll.

But so it was. It was actually hot. And the “Croft,” your dad could see now with his own eyes, wasn’t a croft but a substantial, if eccentric and isolated, summer house, even with an air about it of some misplaced Riviera villa. What’s more, as we opened it up, and skimpily furnished though it was, it released an impregnation, a bouquet of former occupation. Even your dad, who’d never been there before, could recognise the corky, trapped-in-a-bottle smell.

I wish we could have gone there with you. But don’t you remember — won’t you always — the smell of Gull Cottage in Cornwall?

We opened windows. They yawned and sighed. When you add fresh oxygen to that bottled-up stuff a heady chemistry occurs. And they opened up to a view below of a white crescent beach, backed by dunes and washed by long, slow, rolling breakers — on which there wasn’t a soul. My Brighton-train rhapsody, fondling your father’s feet, hadn’t all been sales talk. I didn’t have to say, “I told you so.”

And so it was there, at Craiginish — but this I really hadn’t premeditated or prefigured, it was never part of my idyll-painting — that the “proposal,” as I would later call it, took place. “Proposal” really isn’t the right word. Your dad even likes to quip that it was a slip of the tongue. But what else to call it? It was there, in the high summer of 1966, that your dad and I became — an even more exotically antique word—“betrothed.” Though having betrothed ourselves, in a decidedly impetuous and breathless way, we didn’t actually get married for another four years.