Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Mike and I have never really talked about it (I’m not that much of a Hook, perhaps), but it always seemed to me that in his last years at Birle, at Coombe Cottage, Grandpa Pete got more and more like his brother — or like his brother as I’d remembered him, or like his brother might have been if he’d lived beyond sixty. Grandpa Pete must have always thought that Eddie was the main item, destined to be, but for a little glitch of family planning, an only child like me and your dad. Could that even be why your dad was so fond of him? Eddie was nine when Grandpa Pete was just a baby, the same age your dad was when he spent his first summer at Birle. These things count maybe.

Anyway, it seemed to me that your Grandpa Pete in his later years got more like Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete never smoked a pipe or rode a bicycle and Uncle Eddie never had a dog, but the differences got less and the similarities got more. Grandpa Pete even died of a heart attack too, if not at fifty-seven. It could be just a coincidence or it could be one of those things that runs in the family. Ever since your Grandpa Pete died, I’ve wanted your dad to go and have his heart checked.

I think his heart might come under a bit of strain tomorrow.

But at Uncle Eddie’s funeral, years before you were born, there was another “uncle,” called Tim. Tim Harvey. He was pretty upset too. He wasn’t your dad’s real uncle. He was another of those pretend uncles, like your “Uncle” Charlie. “Uncle Tim” was Uncle Eddie’s oldest friend, they’d been at college together, and he used sometimes to come and stay at Coombe Cottage when your dad was there as a boy. You would never have met him, though he was still alive when you were small. If we could call Fiona your “fairy grandmother,” then we might have called Tim Harvey your “fairy godfather” or your “fairy great-uncle,” though it might have given the wrong impression.

I asked your father when he first mentioned “Uncle Tim” to me: had there been anything — you know — between him and Uncle Eddie? Two bachelors in a country cottage…But your dad said not a bachelor, actually, in Uncle Tim’s case, a widower, a confirmed widower. His wife had been killed in a flying-bomb raid at the end of the war. Which rather stopped me doing any more teasing.

He’d lost his wife all those years ago, but he was devotedly married now, you could say, to a science journal called The Living World, which he’d kept going all through the war and which had become his life. Your dad said the dead wife’s name had been Eleanor. She’d been wealthy, a sort of patroness, and when she’d died she’d left Uncle Tim a lot of money. Though more to the point, perhaps, when she’d died she’d been pregnant.

A struggling science journal — I’d certainly never heard of it — and when I met him it was clearly Uncle Tim’s standard joke, a little awkward at a funeral, that he’d kept the living world alive.

He scared me just a bit. He scared me like Grannie Helen scares me now. He looked as if he was very familiar with being at a funeral. But I liked him, I felt sorry for him — saying goodbye now to his oldest friend. He was a bit like some struggling, persevering science journal himself: tall, silvery-haired, abstracted — professorial. I was nice to him. In fact, I think I even flirted with him just a little, if that’s possible at a funeral, and only in the way that you can flirt with silvery-haired men you’re both scared of and sorry for. Though I’ve flirted with quite a few silvery-haired men, of all kinds, at Walker’s. It can sometimes help to make a sale.

Perhaps I just mean that while I was being nice to Uncle Tim, I was smouldering for your father. It was a sort of over-spill, perhaps. I was being particularly attentive to Uncle Tim in order to curb my lust for your father. I don’t know quite how he took it or if, in his grief for his friend, it even registered, but he didn’t discourage me: “So, you’re Mike’s lovely young wife. I remember him in short trousers, you know.” Perhaps he was flirting with me or just accidentally pressing buttons.

We got on, anyway. We warmed to each other, in that April sunshine. So when he offered your dad a job a few months later, I could hardly object. Not, that is, to Uncle Tim himself, if I could object on just about every other score. I could even blame myself for having been, perhaps, a little instrumental.

But on the other hand, Tim Harvey could hardly have known how uncannily perfect his timing was — in just what a vulnerable condition your dad would be, setting aside his Uncle Eddie’s death, by the time he made his offer. Setting aside, too, that question I’d begun now to ask: how much longer, with those snails?

But then this was surely crazy. A struggling science periodical that hardly anyone seemed to read — run from an attic in Bloomsbury? And only its deputy editor? It was just as well, I said to Mike, they seemed to like me at Walker’s. It was just as well we had just the two of us to feed. I might have been a little crueller, if I hadn’t also had to consider your dad’s “condition,” and if it wasn’t for my own complicity, so far as it went, on that back lawn at Coombe Cottage.

In a nutshell, Tim wanted your dad to be not just his deputy but his heir, if I don’t think he ever quite used the word. It was as if your dad had been earmarked, even from those short-trousered days perhaps, and now Tim was thinking of the future. He wanted your dad, in the fullness of time, to take over his baby. Though, again, that’s my word not his.

And, in a nutshell, I yielded. Partly for those back-lawn reasons, and partly for intimate and sensitive reasons I’ve yet to come to. A temporary phase, I thought. Be flexible. A passing aberration. A year or two…

It’s lasted over twenty.

Now, of course, I’m not sorry. Now, of course, I even shamelessly like to make out that I knew all along, I kept the faith. Our ship (no more, in those days, than a rather leaky boat) would one day come in. Your dad likes to say it was all Uncle Tim’s doing, really. That right-place and right-time theory. And Tim had always told him (he says now) that one day there’d be a bonanza. In science ? I think that’s just your dad being modest. It doesn’t sound like Tim Harvey. The “fairy godfather” factor only goes so far. Tim may have had the money and even his wishful thinking, but he had his limitations. And your dad had his hidden talents. I think they were even rather hidden from your dad.

But you’re familiar with the story now, you’re part of it — its real heirs. Things began to come good for us in the end, not so long after you arrived. Tim stepped aside when I was on maternity leave, dealing with the insomniac havoc you wreaked on Davenport Road (forgive me) and wondering if I ever really had worked in art dealing. Meanwhile, your dad’s talents had begun to blossom. Don’t ask me where he got the energy. Then Tim died, in 1981, leaving most of what was left of his private wealth to what he liked to call “ LW. ” Then it was the Eighties and there was a publishing boom.

You know the rest: Living World Magazine, Living World Publishing, Living World Books. A whole new image. That now familiar logo, the little button-sized, blue and green Yin-and-Yang biosphere. It more or less just got better and better. But, most importantly — and who can say if you didn’t actually bring out that other entrepreneurial man in your father and give him all that drive? — there was the bonanza of you.

I remember how in what I’ll call now the “in-between” years — I mean, before there was you, in the mid-Seventies — when I was starting to do well (and just as well) at Walker’s, I’d sometimes find myself saying, at art-gatherings I had to go to: “My husband? He’s deputy editor of The Living World. ” Or, later: “My husband? He’s editor of The Living World. ” It sounded good, of course, it sounded important: what could be bigger than the living world? People in the art world aren’t necessarily clued up on science. And it was certainly better than saying, however confidently and breezily, “My husband works on snails.”