Graham Swift - Tomorrow

What was stopping us, you may well ask. And isn’t it the point, or one of the points, of this bedtime story, you must be thinking, to underscore the proposition, never mind proposals, that this man lying here and me were always meant for each other, made for each other, as they say? We were meant to be. And would you yourselves, who have such an intimate interest in the matter, have written the story differently?

Forgive that last question, it’s unfair and foolish. Especially tonight. You hardly had any option. It’s like saying that you were meant to be born in Gemini. Forgive your foolish mother. What would have happened if your dad and I had never “found” each other? We’d have been lost souls for the rest of our lives, for ever searching for our missing other halves? By an incredible stroke of cosmic luck, we just happened to cross paths in Brighton?

Of course I know it wouldn’t have been so. I’d have found someone else. I’d have found another Mikey. He’d have found another Paulie. And what would you have cared who it was, so long as there was someone, two someones, to produce you? I married, as it happens, a biologist, but I don’t need a biologist to tell me that it’s a rough old game, the mating game, a game of chance and scramble. There’s no sweet bedtime story in biology.

But forgive me for thinking that’s unthinkable. Forgive me for thinking I’ve proved it otherwise. Another Mikey: not this one? Another me? Forgive me for thinking, even back then, at Craiginish, at the mature age of twenty: why had it taken so long ? All those missed-out years. What kept you, Mikey, what kept us?

Nothing was stopping us, except that awkward fact of being children of our time, children of the Sixties, obliged to scoff at the very idea of marriage. How embarrassing. When your father “proposed” to me I was, of course, on the pill. He couldn’t have done it, in fact, or done it so passionately, if I wasn’t. It was that magic pill, principally, that had made marriage so unobligatory, or so unpressing. Otherwise, if there was just the two of you, and you were only twenty…

You see the way — the unfortunate way for you — this is heading?

When your Grandma Helen met Grandpa Pete, in the war, it was rather different. They got married quickly and went on a brief and urgent honeymoon. They had their special reasons. None of which, of course, can have been to conceive expressly for me my future husband. But forgive me.

You’ve seen the photos, like archive material, of Pete and Helen’s wedding. For all the haste, it was the full ceremony. A church, of course. It was in Dartford. Grandpa Pete in his uniform, Grandma Helen, considering it was wartime, in amazing bridal flow. Is that long train really a parachute? April 1944. Two months later Grandpa Pete was in a prison camp.

We finally got married, as you know, in Chelsea Registry Office (where else but the King’s Road?), on the twenty-fourth of June, twenty-five years ago. But that four-year gap before we made things formal can’t all be ascribed to the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun, of children. If that were so, why did we wait another nine years before having you? I’ve sometimes wondered if that nine-year gap has ever vaguely hurt you. We left it so long, till our critical thirties, because we might, in fact, have been entirely happy without you? But then it’s perfectly common these days, almost the standard thing, women happily wait till they’re past thirty. What’s the big rush? How different from Helen and Pete.

But come back to that “betrothal.” Come back to the white, bridal sand of Craiginish. Though this is one of those moments when perhaps you really shouldn’t be listening. On the other hand, I can’t believe you didn’t work it out between the two of you long ago. What were we doing in those dunes? And what a prim, archaic word I’d chosen: “proposed.” It conjures up a man on bended knee with a bunch of flowers. It conjures up an Edward.

But a principal detail you don’t know. Your father is a biologist. And, yes, we were being biological. But he’d been being biological beforehand. He’d been telling me, at some length in fact, about marram grass — that wind-blown stuff that grows exclusively on the brows of sand dunes and that right then was gently waving and whispering, conspiratorially I have to believe, just above our heads. Apparently, it has, among the grasses, unique and extraordinary properties, not least of which is its stubborn desire to cling and take root where no other plant will, on bare and barren sand. It’s the grassy equivalent of limpets.

An early and incongruous instance of one of Professor Mike’s lectures. I can’t say I was concentrating. Though I can’t say that before that day I even knew it was called marram grass. Just think, he might have been a grass expert. Soon afterwards, anyway, we were engaged in other things, and in a short while this man who I’d known then for just four months was crying out to me in a state of high but purposeful excitation, “Marry me! Marry me!”

A slip of the tongue? A likely story.

And what did I say? Well, the answer’s obvious. Here I am, married to your father. For twenty-five years now, nearly. And you may think, Kate — I don’t know if you’ve put it to the test, though I rather think you haven’t — that you may be the only woman who’ll never gasp out the word, but I bet you aren’t or won’t be.

“Yes,” I said. “Oh yes, yes, yes!”

I MARRIED A HOOK. The jokes work both ways: I was hooked, or I was the lucky girl who hooked a Hook. Twenty-five years ago, in any case, I changed my name from Campbell to Hook, a simple, then-customary procedure which, if you think about it, can seem just a little outrageous.

But what’s in a name? I’ve always liked, anyway, the simple, no-nonsense, Anglo-Saxon sound of it. And it’s your name, my two little Hooks, the name you were born with, have grown up with and, so far as I know, have never resented: your dad’s name, since that’s the custom too.

Kate Hook, Nick Hook: two neat, quick syllables for each of you. Even if you’d never met them, you’d think: “Kate Hook,” “Nick Hook,” well, they’re going to be two bright, sharp, good-to-know people, they’re not going to be a pair of drips. I suppose you might also think: “Hook?”—never trust anyone with a name like that. But I even like that little hint of crookedness.

When I started at Walker and Fitch (good names too, at least in the art world), not long after I got married, I made a decision: to be Paula Hook, at work, not Paula Campbell. It was my decision and it went against the grain again, for1970. But it really wasn’t a decision at all. I was happy to wear your dad’s name, to settle the debate permanently and openly: Okay, Mikey, you hooked me. It’s another debate whether you’d rather buy a picture from a Paula Hook than a Paula Campbell. I know, there was always a joke or two there. That’s the picture, I’m the Hook. I’m a senior director now, anyway. I can turn down lunch with my boss.

And all this made me the crooked and treacherous one, I suppose, trading-in my proud Scottish name to this family from the deepest south. Hook being a Sussex name. But that’s where we’d met — in Sussex, at Sussex. We even told you when you were small that we’d met on Brighton beach, a little myth or half-myth we had to modify later. And in those days it had just been Paulie and Mikey. What’s in a name? What’s even in a family?

But two years after we were married I found out what it really meant to have changed my name. And by then (if you’ve been wondering) we were certainly thinking, more than thinking, of starting a family. One evening your father came off the phone and said, “That was my dad. My Uncle Eddie’s died.” Then he went very silent for a while, and a little later shed some tears — something I’d never seen before then, and which you saw for the first time not so long ago when we were all standing, as it happened, not so very far from Uncle Eddie’s well-weathered grave.