Graham Swift - Tomorrow

All the same, I’d wait for the vacant stare or the bluffing, knowing nod — keeping up a sort of bluff myself. Or I’d prepare for the embarrassed and embarrassing, “I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard…”

But once, at least, it made a big, even a startlingly strong impression. It was with our vet — who would, of course, have been a scientific man. He actually said, “I’m impressed.” It turned out he was a regular subscriber, one of the very few I’d ever knowingly met.

“Your husband’s editor of The Living World ? Well, I’m impressed.”

And, naturally, I told your dad. I said, “I had this interesting chat with our new vet.”

But you’ll be thinking: vet? What vet? How does a vet come into the story?

I’M JUMPING AHEAD. Come back to Davenport Road in the year that Uncle Eddie died. I need to explain now some difficult and delicate things. I need to explain in my own words what your father will explain in his tomorrow. It’s one thing we’ve agreed on: your father will do the talking. Who else, in the circumstances? But he’s asleep now, amazingly, before the biggest speech of his life. And I want him to sleep. Sleep on, Mikey, as long as you can. And what is your mother supposed to do, while these last vigilant hours slip away? Simply keep silent?

This bedroom, in the dark, with the rain outside, feels like some temporary refuge.

I need to explain that there might never have been you. There was Mike and me, the two of us, but there might never have been you. The world, our lives, this house might never have contained you. Big stuff. But then not so remarkable, you’re already thinking. We all have the flicker of the thought, then brush it aside as superfluous: I might never have been born. Gosh, but here I am.

Some people can wish — I hope you never will, I sincerely hope you never will — that they’d never been born. But it’s not as though any of us could ever have asked, chosen. We always have that little retort to throw back at our parents. Though, speaking for myself — but I think I speak for Mike too — I can’t suppress the quite illogical but painful thought that if you weren’t there, if we hadn’t allowed you into the world, we’d have committed a crime, we’d have done something terrible to you.

Have I ever told you? Have we ever told you? How beautiful you are.

Professor Mike here will point out that nature is colossally wasteful. For every life that makes it, a staggering number of potential lives are lost. There may be millions of us walking around, but we are all extraordinary little exceptions. The same is true of ants or centipedes — think of all those never-to-wriggle legs — or, I’m sure, snails.

But then, if we didn’t ask or choose, but we just arrived against all the odds, how many of us can say that we were really meant ? Another thing to throw at our long-suffering parents who’ve done so much to make a home for us. Though even that, of course, isn’t always true. Sometimes there isn’t much of a home to speak of. Sometimes our parents aren’t there or have parted. Sometimes we don’t even know who they are.

It’s another notion we all have, perhaps, then dismiss it, leaving it surprisingly unpursued, considering how totally relevant it is: the notion of tracing ourselves back to our actual moment of conception. It involves a taboo, an intrusion, like entering unasked the parental bedroom. Or it just involves a risk. Who knows in what chancy and sordid circumstances we might have first come about? Perhaps best not to find out. And were our parents, anyway, at the time actually thinking of us ?

How wonderful, though, if in following that route back, we were to come to some marvellous chamber, to be guided to it even by our smiling parents themselves — to some glorious bed, a tapestried four-poster, say. There you are, you see, for you we wanted only the very best. Though how many of us might arrive at the back seat of a Ford?

I honestly don’t know where my dad and Fiona…Or if they were particularly intending. I just think, I hope, they were happy at the time. It would have been in the autumn of 1944. And how terribly far off that sounds. Your dad strikes me as exceptional not just in being able to pinpoint the circumstances, but in being pretty confident of the hundred-per-cent intention. Helen and Pete married, then honeymooned — in the Cotswolds — in the limited time that was granted, on special leave. Your dad might even have been conceived precisely on his parents’ wedding night, like a perfect little old-fashioned, recipe-book procedure. The act and the intention were perfectly joined.

But I can honestly say that you were truly and wholly intended. You could not have been more deliberately meant, both at the time and before. You’re doubly exceptional in that respect. You’re double, anyway. You were born, as it happens, in Gemini, but there was nothing fluky about your being born. As for that Gemini thing — which I know rather bugs you — don’t blame us, at least, for that. We used to say to you, when you were smaller, that you’d have been two stars anyway.

I can honestly say too that I’d never intended you more, never wanted to conceive you more — if, hot with lust for your father, I’d never have quite put it to myself in such cool terms — as on the evening after Uncle Eddie was buried. I really thought it was going to happen. In which case, it would have been our bedroom in Herne Hill. Or, very nearly, the upstairs landing. Did your father have the same sense of propitiousness too? He was grieving for his Uncle Eddie. On the other hand, he was definitely up for it.

But, obviously, it didn’t work. Just think, if it had, you’d have been born in 1973. You’d have been January babies, just like your dad. A tough month, on the purse, for me. By now (just think) you’d be twenty-two. Though why am I assuming — it’s simply a habit I can’t ever get out of — that you would always have been two ?

It plainly didn’t work, then or for another six years: things you must surely have considered. Four years until we married, starting from that fabled meeting on Brighton beach, then another period, twice as long, before we got round to having you. But we didn’t leave it too late, clearly, and parents like to have a little time before they enslave themselves to the next generation. All the same, you must know — which puts a very different colour on it — that we were very much meaning and intending and trying, at least as long ago as that spring of 1972.

We were definitely trying. I wouldn’t like to say for exactly how long. I would have kept a note, at least a mental one, of when exactly we went “ex-contraception,” but it’s gone. It had been a long while anyway. You don’t expect that it will be bingo, first time, you try again, but how long is a trial period? Or periods?

What was significant about that year of Uncle Eddie’s death, even for your lives, even right back then, was that it was the year, the summer, in which we made a solemn, slightly shamefaced, but apparently necessary agreement that we would each go to the appropriate clinical facility, to have ourselves tested. We looked sadly and sympathetically at each other, as if one of us might have to choose, heads or tails, and one of us might have to lose. At this stage we still hoped.

But I have to say — and you must both be starting to muster an intense interest — that this was, in all we’d known so far, the worst moment of our lives. Little war babies to whom nothing especially dreadful, let alone warlike, had happened. The divorce of your parents, the death of an uncle — these things, for God’s sake, aren’t the end of the world. But this little crisis, even before we knew it was insuperable, was like a not so small end of the world. In one, strictly procreative sense, it might be exactly that.