Graham Swift - Tomorrow

But, look, he’s still here. Fast asleep.

Just us? But enough of that “just.” We came out of this period of quarantine. Let’s not be so feeble — or so ungrateful. Not the end of the world: this world that had been so kind to us and that can be a lot more terrible. We started to make love again, and with a new — I don’t think it’s the wrong word — potency. And that’s just what it was now, making love, since it wouldn’t be making anything else. Love without any dues to pay to reproduction. And I think we became better at it and more ardent. Just love. But enough of that “just.”

This was the time when we started to appreciate, since it was to be just the two of us, going away for weekends. The era of hotel rooms. A time when we were not exactly rolling in it, but we could afford, not having other commitments, these occasional gifts to ourselves, which sometimes came, anyway, courtesy of Walker and Fitch: art-dealing assignments to which we’d attach our private pleasure trips. Venice, Rome, Paris…We made just love in some fine places.

Art and sex, there’s never been a clash for me or (though I’ll never ultimately know how it works with Simon Fitch) any question of an either-or. Paint’s sexy stuff, and isn’t so much of painting to do with the rendering of flesh? Doesn’t paint sometimes ache to be flesh? Art’s not so artificial.

And these were weekends, in case you’re now feeling a little left out, that, with or without the help of art, weren’t just consumingly sexual. I think we both felt it: as if in our brave undertaking to be just us we’d left a small corner for magic. This was our last thin unscientific but fervent hope. How silly, but how sustaining. If we just made love keenly, resourcefully enough. If we just made it enough. As if Doctor Chivers had offered it as his final unofficial nose-tapping advice. Try going away for the weekend — if you know what I mean. A change of scene, a special room, a special bed…

And as if we’d only followed his recommendation. Let’s see if that room in Florence, with the shutters closed, bright-slitted, against the hot afternoon, won’t swing it. Or if that place in the crisp, autumnal English countryside, with the oak panels and the log fires — October swelling the rose hips outside — won’t just do the trick.

You see, you were never entirely out of our secret thoughts.

Reactions and repercussions. Doctor Chivers might have warned, but it was hardly his province, that this little thing, this mere trifle of a million here, a million there, can have its extraordinary behavioural consequences, its delayed and long-term side effects — and not really side effects at all.

Tim Harvey would never know just how perfect his timing was. If your dad hadn’t been so — indisposed. Or do I really mean disposed? If Tim, with Uncle Eddie newly in his grave, hadn’t made his approach rather like some dispossessed parent himself. Your dad took the job at The Living World, in any case. And I let him, God help me. A dead-end job as it seemed at the time, with more than a touch about it of the self-destructive. Not to mention the destruction of those snails. He said “twenty-seven,” didn’t he? He didn’t hesitate in giving that answer. He’d just stuck, inside, at twenty-seven. There’s part of me that’s still twenty-seven too.

A dead-end job, that might have turned, in the fullness of time, into merely our embarrassing consolation. Merely! Look, we have no kids, but we have the Living World. And yet — isn’t the story almost too good? — we’ve shared the treasure with you. The gift and the consolation too. There was a time when you were small, you’ll perhaps remember, when we told you we have “two houses now.” Meaning this one here and your dad’s “other one” in town. Since that attic in Bloomsbury had expanded downwards, Living World Publishing suddenly being on the up and up. The firm of architects who occupied the lower floors moved out — expanding, themselves — and your dad opportunely moved in. 12 Ormond Square. A very fine house too, a lovely fan-light over the front door, though we weren’t suggesting, I hope, that your dad actually owned it and we certainly didn’t want to give the impression that he might be going to live there.

But I’m jumping ahead again, years ahead, to when we were already taking those holidays in Cornwall. Gull Cottage, a third temporary little house. Come back — if you can do it — to life without you.

It was possible. It went on for several years. Don’t be offended. Looking back now, it can even seem to me like some sweet and not unsunny and perfectly legitimate plateau. Just your dad and me. Don’t hold it against us. Mike in his attic in Bloomsbury: at least it was a Georgian attic in a beautiful Georgian square, and not so far from me in St. James’s. Lunches in Soho. I’d invariably pay. But we weren’t so hard up, thanks to Walker’s, even if these were the parsimonious Seventies. Your dad would sometimes say, as if in self-defence, that there simply wasn’t the money around these days, even at Imperial, for pure research. I didn’t argue.

Uncle Tim, breaking his own parsimonious habits (for a supposedly wealthy man), would sometimes treat us, like a forgetful guardian, to liberal lunches. I’d have the weird feeling, as he poured the Sancerre, that some legacy was under review, some announcement might be made over coffee. Or your Grandpa Dougie (without Margaret) would regale us at the Connaught, asking nothing in return, I sometimes felt, than that I should make it the occasion of a little announcement, which was never forthcoming.

He would be seventy-five soon. Perhaps I might make that little announcement, and how it would make his day, at his birthday party. He would divorce Margaret soon. Marry Georgina. Oh Daddy.

Our Brighton, our Sussex, our London — its gravity shifted from Earl’s Court and the King’s Road to the West End. And to unglamorous, unassuming, unexpectant Herne Hill. Count your blessings in life. Good, time-honoured counsel. Count your ample blessings. Stop counting sperm, that’s been done. No one knew our little secret. We could even manage to ignore it, to forget it, ourselves — leaving just that space we never mentioned for miracles. What you never had, you can’t miss, or fear to lose. More sound, homespun, reassuring advice.

And, anyway, one day, for no particular reason, we got a cat.

IT WAS MRS. LAMBERT at number twenty-three who put us up to it, or rather, who nobbled your father. In those days every quiet inner-suburban street had its complement of kindly, plucky old ladies, living all alone in their three-bedroomed houses as if they’d never done otherwise, but taking a beady-eyed interest in young couples like Mike and me. I wonder where they’ve gone.

Mrs. Lambert didn’t live all alone, exactly. She had two cats, Toby and Nancy, and one day she cornered your father by her front gate and said that Mr. Nokes, the vet in Wells Road, had a lovely black cat going right now, a rescued stray, just a handsome black moggy. Who would want to abandon such a thing? She was just passing it on, but there’d be no harm, would there, in our going to have a look?

I don’t think Mrs. Lambert’s neighbourly wheedling would have worked so well on me. But there you are, when your dad was in his twenties he was a soft touch for little old ladies. And your dad might have ignored it, but he mentioned it to me, as if he had a duty to please Mrs. Lambert. He said that Mrs. Lambert had said that if it didn’t find an owner soon, well, you know…And, put like that, it made us seem like callous murderers if we didn’t go and take a look.