Graham Swift - Tomorrow

By tradition, we’d groan and sigh, annoyed, half-awake. Must he? So early? Not again…

Of course, it was all an act, we loved it. The simple and undisguisable fact is that he got us going. It was an undeniable erotic addition, to have him sometimes furrily getting in the way, sometimes simply watching, sphinx-like and voyeuristically — neutered as he was. Don’t neutered cats still have their inklings? It was as if his little gravelly purr, chugging into life like a miniature cement mixer, was actually saying: Come on, you two, do your stuff.

A catalyst. The untold story of cat ownership, perhaps. Dogs, they’re about duty and service and the nobler virtues, but cats…No need, perhaps, to go into the nuances of fur, black and glossy in Otis’s case, against naked skin. And take a look at Titian’s Uffizi Venus, that most gloriously flagrant of nudes. Curled up on the bed, on the ruffled sheets, is a little lapdog, but it should have been a cat, it even looks more like a cat, and Titian must have put it there for a reason.

I think your father was a cat person even when he was principally a snail person. Close your ears if you wish, but once upon a time, when I was still working at Christie’s, your dad used to phone me sometimes, from Imperial, just to say that he was thinking about me, he was thinking about me intensely. His mind wasn’t on his snails. He was thinking about me so much, in fact, that would it be all right if he came round straight away, on the Mike-bike? And could Christie’s meanwhile quickly find us some little niche, some cupboard somewhere, a space in one of the store rooms, among the artworks, where we could have immediate and urgent sexual congress?

I shan’t tell you how these conversations continued, I’ve said too much already. But while I’m on this general theme, let me tell you that the early mornings have always been our favourite time for it. I mean, at home, in bed, not in store rooms, in the properly appointed parental or, as it once was, non-parental bedroom. Any time can be good, and once it used to be pretty well any place, including, as you now know, sand dunes. But, certainly since those days of Otis, we’ve always specially favoured — as if his ghost gets active around that time — the first pale hour of dawn when the light creeps in and the birds, even with a cat around, start to sing.

The very hour which is approaching now. But this rain perhaps (as if it knows) will hold it off a little longer, and delay and dampen all those little songs. It will eke out this fragile summer darkness. And I don’t suppose we’ll be making love this morning.

Life at Davenport Road. The two of us and a cat. Was it quite what Mrs. Lambert had intended? “You’re looking well, you two, this morning.” Had we been looking unwell? “You’re looking full of the joys.” Once we’d been students at Sussex University in the heady and joyous 1960s. Now look at us, this steady, settled married couple in their thirties, in their terraced house in Herne Hill. They even have a cat…

But all houses, perhaps, all couples, all families have a life you never see.

Sometimes, during or after our grey-lit lovemaking, we’d hear outside, a little like Otis’s purr, the whirr of a milk float and that oddly satisfying and calming sound, the chink of a milk bottle being placed on the porch. How strange — and mystifying for you — to consider that the peace of those early mornings would one day be shattered (I’m not in the least complaining, I’m not in the least reproaching you) by your squallings and clamourings. You used to make me think, though you were several decibels louder, of those seagulls in Brighton. That was when you let me have a moment to think.

Or we’d hear, around the same time, that brisker, rougher but also pacifying sound, of the morning paper being thrust through the letter box. All’s well with the world really, those two sounds seem to say, no matter what that newspaper actually has to tell you. Just count your blessings, just be thankful.

And all this went on for several years, until one black day Otis disappeared.

IT NEVER RAINS but it pours, they say. My father died in February, 1978. I call him your Grandpa Dougie, but he wasn’t your grandfather when he died and I sometimes wonder, if he had been, if he’d ever have formed that ceremonious and masochistic notion of being buried at Invercullen. The dead, I suppose, can’t be masochists. They can make it hard on the living.

I never saw my father in a kilt, the very idea would have made me giggle. But then I saw him that time in his red robes and wig, which was no laughing matter, and it seems that what counted for him at the end was the green, black and blue tartan of the Campbells. Black and blue, certainly. You never knew your Grandpa Dougie, but at least you were spared his funeral. Grandpa Pete’s last year was an easy ride, in some ways, in comparison.

“There’ll be a piper,” I said to Mike, “be prepared. Someone’s bound to arrange it, they have to.” And so they did. And if you’re going to have to hear that wailing sound, there’s an argument that says let it be at a funeral, at a burial, when its keening and skirling will get to you. (It did.) And if the weather’s wild and wet to go with it, then so much the better. Though there’s a degree of wet, wild weather, you might think, that will defeat even the efforts of a bagpipe. Never mind the poor little birds, trying to sing in the rain.

My own deluge of grief couldn’t quite drown out the suspicion that this was some last sly joke of my father’s. He was smirking, somewhere, at the whole scene, he’d even whisked up the weather. And it was all my fault, perhaps. If, short of making him a grandfather, I’d at least levelled with him and told him the score — Dad, you’re never going to be a grandfather — then my conscience would have been squared with him. But how would that have cheered him in his last remaining years? He cheered himself up, instead, with a third young wife, called Georgina York, who wasn’t, as her name suggests, in the least bit Scottish.

I said to your dad, “You’re going to have to meet a few Campbells. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”

But perhaps it was all just, simply, ancestral. All just the urging (is there any real basis for it in biology?) of the blood in his veins. My dad, the lambswool laird. Take me back, please, to where I came from. I felt, in any case, that little twist of treachery, mixed with a strange twist of pride: me, the daughter and only true child, the star, in one sense, of the show, alongside those three — let’s use this word if I can’t use the other one — witches.

In any case, I felt bereft.

My father travelled up in his coffin, in an undertaker’s vehicle, before we did. We resisted all thoughts of travelling with him (he surely wouldn’t have expected that ) in grotesque, five-hundred-mile convoy. We drove up separately, deciding, in the painful circumstances, not to attempt the whole trip in one day, but overnighting en route — in a hotel overlooking Lake Windermere. Not one of our happiest hotel experiences. In the night the windows began to rattle. The bed felt like a raft. It was February, but until then greyly mild. The next day the choppy waters of the lake signalled worse to come, further north.

But before all this we’d had to arrange other, temporary, away-from-home accommodation. It’s one of the guilty drawbacks of cat ownership and it’s worst, the pang is sharpest, if you happen to be travelling, yourself, for sheer pleasure. But then again, if the reason is your father’s funeral…

We used to take Otis to a place we’d found, in Carshalton, called, ridiculously, Felix Lodge, which traded on the notion that your cat too might really be enjoying a high-class, country-club-style break from it all. It was really just some rows of large wire cages set among trees, a few potted plants thrown in. Your dad told me — after Otis died — that it had always made him think of his father’s wartime captivity.