Graham Swift - Tomorrow

But of the options we rejected (I really am telling you now only what your dad will elaborate tomorrow) the first to go was adoption. We both felt that that would be too much like theft. We wouldn’t be there at the beginning. It would be too much — though we didn’t have the comparison to assist us then — like going along to Mr. Nokes after a hint from Mrs. Lambert.

But a second option we gave more room to. For a while it actually dangled, if “dangled” is really the word I want. I mean artificial insemination. An ugly and chilling expression, even more upsetting, perhaps, than “child substitute,” but a viable, and not so complicated alternative. Are you still listening?

In these days of IVF they speak more of “donor insemination,” it makes it sound more personal perhaps. Back then, in the early Seventies, it was known officially as “artificial insemination by donor,” though it was hastily switched around in the Eighties, after the arrival of AIDS, to “artificial donor insemination.” But your dad and I once freely, if not exactly blithely, used the seemingly supportive acronym A.I.D.

But rejected it. For reasons which had more to do, perhaps, with your father than me, but which had to be respected. There are all sorts of things we can speculate about in comfortable theory. Certain primal sensitivities come into play in the actual situation, even for a rational scientist.

But I have to say that the reasons that mattered to your father certainly mattered to me too. The choice, as I boiled it down, was really between “How much did I want your father’s child?” and “How much did I want a child?” It was the first question that counted more. Can I ask you to understand that? I wanted this man’s child, for reasons that I hope are obvious. And neither of us could have it. Which left only one way of proceeding.

But six years later our vet, to whom I found I could talk in sympathetic confidence, to whom I found myself mentioning things I hadn’t mentioned to my own mother who I no longer talked to, or to my own father who was dead, mentioned to me that very phrase, that acronym, that Mike and I had used, but only to each other, and then dispensed with, years before.

I had to go back several times with Otis, more times, in fact, than expected, and if he’d broached that “child substitute” at that very first meeting, you could say that certain other things could hardly remain undiscussed. Do vets take oaths of professional secrecy? Otis kept purring away. Perhaps his ears were buzzing too.

He said, had we considered artificial insemination? On a vet’s lips it didn’t sound so unseemly. I said yes — and no. We’d rejected it, the whole matter was closed. It had always sounded, I said as a joke, like something that happened in a farmyard. He smiled and said he’d decided long ago against being an agricultural vet. He was more a domestic-animals man. But he said they’d made great strides in artificial insemination, the human kind, even in the last four or five years. “Strides,” I remember thinking, was an unhappy choice of word.

“Maybe,” I said, “but — no.”

I’d already told him, and it was an immense thing to have said, that the “difficulty”—the reproductive difficulty — was with your dad. But, again, once the subject had been broached, how could these further levels of honesty be avoided? It wasn’t like letting it slip over a dinner table and a glass too many to some mutual friend. But the fact is I’d never, in six years, said it to anyone else.

What else did I tell our trusty vet? My honest age: thirty-two, nearer thirty-three now. Married for eight years. That I was an only child. That my father had just died. That I hardly saw my mother. And he told me, as if reciprocation was only fair, that he had two kids, a boy and a girl, teenagers already, amazingly, but he saw them these days “by appointment only” (a little fragile smile), since last year he’d got divorced. “Family planning — in reverse,” he said. Perhaps he wasn’t, himself, he said, such a perfect domestic animal.

And, of course, he’d asked me what my husband did for a living. And I’d told him, with the usual circumspection I had with that information, and he’d sat back, truly impressed.

I have to say that after Otis’s return I’d stopped my crying. Or I thought I had. I mean my seemingly incurable capacity to be sabotaged by tears at odd and inconvenient moments, at least to have to fight them back. Tears for my dead father, or for Otis who might be dead too. Tears for my father and for Otis hopelessly mixed. But when Otis came back, I went dry-eyed. I reset my sights.

What normally compensates for the loss of a parent? Not, really, a cat. To Mike’s parents, to your Grandpa Pete and Grandma Helen, it must have looked, later that year, as if a perfectly understandable and not uncommon reaction had taken place. If, all the same, we’d left it a bit late.

I said to your dad, “I told him that you edit The Living World. He was bloody impressed, you know.” And your dad looked pretty pleased, if he batted it off. “Well, that’s someone who reads it,” he said.

At that stage I didn’t mention anything else.

“Well, there you are. You should meet him. You should take Otis in yourself one day and have a chat with him. He’d be pleased, I’m sure.”

It was a little later that spring that I said, “Mikey, listen to me. I want us to think about it again. A.I.D. I want us to reconsider.”

It wasn’t an edict or an insistence or, certainly, a foregone conclusion. I wanted to reopen the debate. But I didn’t get the impression, either, that it had struck your father like a bolt from the blue. He didn’t say yes straight away, but it was different now, we both knew it. He looked sympathetic. Things had happened. And I was thirty-two.

And things, after that, actually happened quite fast. 1978 was quite a year. By midsummer, seventeen years ago this month, I was booked in for my first “procedure.” As it turned out, it was the first of only two — which, I can tell you, is very good going. By mid-September I’d become pregnant. Though it’s not that bit, you’ve always been able to work that out, that will be such news to you.

SO NOW YOU KNOW what awaits you, what your father will tell you in his own words. I don’t know what precise words he’ll use, if they’re in his head right now, rehearsed and honed over sixteen years — if so, he’s never let me hear them — or if he’ll simply let the moment itself produce them. And, whatever they are, I can’t be sure at all how you’ll react to them.

Tonight you’re like those two new babies again, back at Davenport Road, still deep in that time before you met your memory — or the one we gave you. I don’t want you to be like that, I want you to be Nick and Kate, sixteen years old and as grown-up and as unimpededly advanced into your lives as sixteen can be. But tonight, though you don’t know it and can’t help it, you’re like babies again. So, right now, is your father.

I’m in a house full of sleeping babies. Even this rain, like some second guardian, seems aware of it and is pressing a finger to its lips: Sssshhhh …

Whether he’s learnt his lines or not, Mike must have played the scene so often in his mind that tomorrow will be like waking into a dream. He’s dreaming now, poor man. But I really can’t predict, I don’t think I have the right to, how you’ll react. I picture a bomb going off and this house falling to bits. I picture everything remaining oddly, precariously, ominously the same. An unexploded bomb. It still might go off — next week, the week after, any time.

Your father isn’t your father. He’s going to tell you himself. Who better? But what I hope he’ll tell you too, after giving you all the necessary facts, is that if he could have chosen, if it worked like that and it were just a matter of choosing, then he simply couldn’t have chosen better. And I hope you’ll think, I hope you might always have thought, that it’s the same for you, the other way round. Your dad.