Graham Swift - Tomorrow

And that occasion for depositing Otis was as wrenching as they’d ever been. I don’t suppose Otis knew what was going on at all. But then I’m not so sure, given his subsequent behaviour. Who knows what animals know? Does Nelson miss Grandpa Pete? I know that when we left Otis that time — his green eyes staring at us from behind the wire — I couldn’t hold back any more the flood of tears waiting inside me. My tears hadn’t really happened yet, they hadn’t found their moment. Felix Lodge was unhappily named.

But how our big feelings can get drawn out of us by small things. I don’t mean to belittle Otis at all. I’ve often wondered just how much there was in his little green piercing stare. Your Grandpa Dougie’s eyes, for the record, were a deep brown with just a touch, a hint of green. Like your eyes and mine. Your dad once looked into my eyes and called them “seaweedy eyes.” It made my spine quiver. He would say things like that from time to time. He’s not just a scientist. Or a publisher.

My eyes were pretty seaweedy that day, anyway. I cried salty tears all the way home to Herne Hill. Mike had to pull over at one point to comfort me. Poor Mikey, what times he let himself in for when he stayed that night at Osborne Street. He sat in the driver’s seat, holding a box of Kleenex, while on the back seat Otis’s empty white-wired travelling-cage was silently eloquent. I cried enough at my dad’s funeral, in that wind and rain, but I don’t believe I ever cried so wringingly as I cried once at the side of the road, somewhere between Beddington and Mitcham.

Your Grandma Fiona didn’t cry at Invercullen. She was there, at least, and all the real water was long under the bridge. Nor did my stepfather, Alex, who had no particular reason to, dripping as he was with some kind of oil-derived, Texan — Aberdonian wealth. Twenty years my father’s junior.

I suppose if my mother had cried I would have only hated her hypocrisy. Though I suppose there was another scenario: that the two of us might have cried together. Hugging and howling in some awful melting moment of reconciliation. In that freezing weather? So then you might have met her. And Mike, poor man, might have had to deal with her on an ongoing basis. He dealt with her bravely enough on that already challenging occasion.

“ The Living World ? A science journal? Well, how interesting, Michael…”

And if you ’d been there — I mean, already there, or not even literally there but parked somewhere, like Otis, in deference to your tiny status — would that have made all the difference? Softened up her act and made Alex shift uncomfortably, perhaps, on his feet? We’ll never know. It didn’t happen. Your fairy grandmother. Thank God I never said to her, “And we have a cat.”

Undoubtedly the best moment of that wretched start to the year was when we returned to Carshalton (a sunny, crocussy, even spring-like Carshalton, I’m glad to say) to collect Otis. But it was only the prelude to the worst. Some six weeks later, when I was just beginning to learn to live with the absence of my father, Otis went absent too. He went out one night, in his usual cat’s way, but he didn’t return to leap on our bed the next morning, or the next. Or the next after that.

I say “the worst.” Worse than my father’s death? I don’t mean that literally, of course. The second absence was like an ill-timed, small-scale echo of the first? Yes, but I don’t mean that exactly either. I mean that Otis’s disappearance, his mere disappearance, was in itself like a grief. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. And perhaps it would have been even if my father had still been alive. It was a separate grief and, yes — you may even begin to understand — perhaps it went a little further. When all is said, my dear, dear daddy was seventy-seven, and fathers do die at such an age.

You must judge us, my angels. You never saw him, but tomorrow you may need to borrow some of the spirit of your long dead grandfather. There’ll be a lot for you to judge in a few hours’ time.

It so happened that when Otis disappeared Walker’s were handling some recently discovered studies of rustic subjects, including several animals, attributed to no less a figure than Jacopo Bassano. The art world partly lives for such unexpected finds, only then, of course, to become enmeshed in questions of authenticity. And even when the discoveries are judged authentic, there’s the secondary, oddly unsettling thought: that they might have been lost for ever, that not so long ago, in fact, the art world, now giving these precious items its kid-glove treatment, was perfectly happy without them.

It’s a different kind of thought, perhaps, but I had it: what do these little drawings matter beside the loss of a father? It’s not a question a professional should voice, but I asked it (and I adore Bassano). It’s a question I even took an absurd stage further. What do these mere drawings, of a lamb, a rabbit, a cockerel, matter beside a living cat? Would I have protested or lamented if, in order to guarantee the return of Otis, they’d been torn up and consigned to the oblivion they’d only recently come from? Or suppose Simon had said to me, if I can cast him in such an unlikely role: Paula, I’m afraid that Walker’s temporary possession and the world’s permanent ownership of these drawings depends on one little condition — that you sacrifice your cat. Would I have said, “No problem, Simon, leave it with me. No argument, no contest?”

Of course, Simon could never have made such an outlandish demand. (Or could he?) I’d never told him, in any case, about Otis. But he certainly knew that my father had died and he often glanced at me around this time with a real (and slightly paternal) concern — a rather heavier version of his look yesterday morning — as if for once he could shelve that jokey, brittle gambit of his: now, tell me all your troubles.

It’s a question that can sometimes insidiously arise in a job that’s all about putting a price on mere inanimate objects: what price a living human being? One Titian? Ten? And what price a cat? A small if exquisite study by some less illustrious old master? But do cats even come into it?

It’s a question that gets harder if your job’s also your passion. And it’s a question that somehow wracked me after Otis vanished, even as I told myself, to no great effect, “For God’s sake, pull yourself together. ”

You yourselves may already be thinking, now you’ve been put in a certain picture, that in those years after we’d “decided against you,” I’d have had, after all, my second love to fall back on. That second love that was then blooming under Simon’s tutelage — or rather, you may even be surmising, taking needy root in the absence of you. Your mother had her pictures to console her. Or, more crudely, she had her career to think of (all the more so since your dad seemed not to have one). She was just like plenty of women, in fact, who have that blunt reason, anyway, for forgoing progeny. And how, indeed, with you around, could I have gone on those foreign art expeditions? Or found the time (or peace) to learn Italian?

Come on, Mum, you’re even thinking, don’t wrap it up in all that other stuff, you didn’t get where you are in the art business without a little hard-nosed determination.

But not “fall back on.” Or even “console.” A love is a love. Don’t turn me into half a woman. And would I swap you for twenty Titians? No. And hardly hard-nosed determination. Just imagine your mum for a moment, going into Walker’s every day while really moping for a missing pet. Scarcely a brisk or an edifying picture.

But it’s for you now to judge, to assess and to authenticate the double picture: your two parents in dismay for an absent cat. It will no doubt seem to you a very childish spectacle, one to bring out the latent, tutting, head-shaking adults in you. But don’t be harsh on your own beginnings.