Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Grandpa Pete was your first death. That had been ours: Uncle Eddie, when we were a good deal older than you were last year. When I saw your dad cry, I thought: it’s only an uncle, it’s not his mum or dad. What’s with the tears? Though I’d met Uncle Eddie myself, two or three times, and I had some idea of the story. And wasn’t I now a Hook?

A few days later, on a beautiful spring morning, I found myself standing in that churchyard at Birle, my first visit there for a funeral. It’s a picture-book country churchyard, as you know, it’s pure Gray’s Elegy. Though I’m not sure if such things mean anything to you, in 1995, plugged as you are so much of the time into one kind of electronic life-support system or another. Kids these days — this was your dad’s joke when we bought you your first computers — they don’t ask for the world, do they, they don’t even want it. For you, perhaps, it’s all the other way round. I’m not so sure you don’t think that churchyards and villages like Birle and country cottages and the country itself don’t really belong in some old-fashioned picture-book. I’m not sure you’ve read Gray’s Elegy.

Anyway, once when you were small you were taken, for the possible interest of it, to that churchyard at Birle and shown those gravestones, a century or two old some of them. Look, that’s your name: Hook. And the most recent one of them was Uncle Eddie’s: Edward Hook. Look, he was born in 1915. Which seems to have struck a little chord with you, to have made a strange, mutated impression.

And there you were again, early last year, for Grandpa Pete. Your first taste of death. Dank January weather to go with it. I was quietly proud of your fourteen-year-old dignity, so was Grannie Helen. You both seemed so calm. Perhaps you were just numbed and dazed, it was all just washing over you. Then, of course, the memory suddenly flooded over me, making my heart thump in the middle of that funeral: this wasn’t your first dealing with death, was it?

But perhaps you were just aching to get back to your CD players, your teenage agendas, whatever they were at the time. Sometimes it’s as though there’s a wall of plate glass between us and you. We haven’t noticed it, we think we can just walk through. Can I really remember any more how it actually feels —to be fourteen, to be sixteen?

Back in 1972, in that churchyard, when I was twenty-six, my range of emotions was rather different. I thought: well, who wouldn’t want to be buried in such a place, if they could choose? Death tasted, that day, of April sunshine and new, juicy grass. Lucky Hooks. Who wouldn’t want to be a Hook? Then, of course, it hit me: I was one. And then that other thought hit me: that I might, one day, be one of these stones.

It hit me like some almost-actual bolt from that blue and fluffy-white April sky. It travelled right through me. There’s that expression which I fully understood that day: to be “rooted to the spot, to the ground.” And then, I can’t explain it, but perhaps it had to do with being rooted, I felt — well, sappy and juicy. I’d never known quite such rampant sappiness.

I suddenly felt, I have to confess it, a great lust for your father, for your father’s body — definitely not a new thing, as I must have made plain, but never before in a graveyard. For the body of this man I’d known then for six years. For the body of this man, lying sleeping here, with whom, as it happens, I made the tenderest of sweetest love just two hours ago.

Lust in a churchyard, at a funeral : that’s worse than mere randiness in church. Even as your father stood, in his dark suit, mourning his Uncle Eddie. Red-bedspread lust. But lust with a will, a determination, it wouldn’t leave me. Don’t be ashamed of your mother. All through the gathering that followed at Coombe Cottage, in that home of Hooks, while sherries were served on the lawn by Mrs. Sinden, Uncle Eddie’s bravely smiling old housekeeper, I was really thinking: couldn’t there be some magic time-warp in these proceedings so that, without anyone noticing, I could take Mikey off and satisfy my lust with him, then return with him, not a stitch out of place, as if we’d never gone anywhere?

It was April all around, greenly lusting anyway. If only it had been — perhaps I shouldn’t have had the thought — January. From the end of that garden, as you know, you can see, beyond a field or two, the South Downs suddenly swelling up to their bosomy skyline. I’d never felt so much the truth of what your dad had once said about them (Sussex University, after all, was plonked down right in their midst), that they were the most libidinous landscape he knew. All those curves and dips, those little pubic clumps of trees. When you saw them, you wanted, he said, to run your hand over them, like you wanted to run your hand…

Well, Mikey, I thought, let me be your South Downs.

It’s usually men, we’re given to believe, who go through these torments of disguised, of intolerably postponed rapacity. When they do they try to think, apparently, of chastening and chilly things, like funerals and coffins.

At least by the time we got home to Herne Hill that evening the lust had become plainly mutual. I’d infected your father, despite his April grief? Or it’s just how death can work anyway, even on the grieving? Biology talking. Lust, but with a will and a purpose to it. No guesses what it was. I really believed — does this sound strange to you? It sounds now even a little strange to me — that on that April night we would conceive you.

Uncle Eddie died when he was only fifty-seven. That gravestone would have told you. For his twenty-first birthday, Grandpa Pete sent your dad that case of champagne, but his Uncle Eddie sent him a beautiful, leather-bound Victorian book, with some lovely, hand-tinted illustrations: on molluscs. At that point in his life, I think your dad appreciated the champagne more than the book, and he was more interested in girls than snails. But the champagne got drunk and the book got kept. It’s still here, right now, in this house, with Uncle Eddie’s austerely calligraphic inscription inside. “To M.H. from E.H.…” Wilkinson’s British Terrestrialand Freshwater Molluscs : what a mouthful, what a present. Four years later we got married, two years after that, Uncle Eddie died.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it’s so slow and sweet and everlasting. How soon you start to count the numbers. I was twenty-six— already ? — nearer twenty-seven. One moment it’s just life, life, nothing but life, and though you’re in a state of higher education, you know nothing really, you’re just kids really, still at play. Then along come the announcements and reckonings and understandings. You know a bit about death. Even about birth.

When my father died, just a few years later, it turned out that, though he’d lived in Kensington most of his life, he wanted to be buried at Invercullen, in Argyllshire, among his ancestors: gravestones with the name “Campbell.” It meant a long and rather ghastly journey north for your dad and me — not at all like our earlier journey to Craiginish. It meant rather a lot of things. I said to your dad, “I think you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”

But one of the things it meant to me, amid a great inundation of grief, was that little prickle of treachery: that I was a Hook now, not a Campbell. It might even have occurred to the two of you, last year, that though Grandpa Pete had lived most of his life in Orpington, there he was now in that churchyard at Birle, just yards from his brother Eddie. It seemed he’d reserved the plot even before he and Grannie Helen retired permanently to Coombe Cottage. More significantly still, he’d booked a double plot. So Grannie Helen must have agreed, though her maiden name was Kingsley, and the Kingsleys came from Dartford.