Graham Swift - Tomorrow

There are plenty of “real” families (I have to use that expression) where it can seem, after all, that all the wrong choices got made. If only they could choose again, start again. And one day, perhaps not so far in the future, it will all be a matter of choice. Mike seems to think so. He has his peculiar, private reasons for thinking so, maybe, but then he’s still technically a biologist and he’s publisher of Living World Magazine, ear close to the scientific ground. Not that we all don’t pick up the vibrations.

Mike thinks it’s coming, even sooner than we might suppose. It’s upon us. Give it thirty years, he says. Soon it will all be a matter of genetic engineering. Old-fashioned human biology will have had its day. Which means, when you think about it, though I don’t want to think about it, least of all tonight, that you may at some point in your future be one of just a few, peculiar, old-style generations to see sprouting up around you the first generation of made-to-measure infants.

Or, as you’ll discover tomorrow, you’re already part of a gathering process. Since even sixteen years ago your dad and I had our choices, our freedoms, which simply wouldn’t have been there not so very long before. And what “strides” haven’t been made since? We could specify, we could stipulate, up to a point — you should know this — before you were born. All down to science. We could even see you before you were born. That’s a commonplace bit of magic now, I know, but your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen or Grandpa Dougie and Fiona were never able to see Mike and me.

And how wonderful it was, to see you.

We were born in the historic year of 1945, when a lot of big things happened, but your dad will tell you (he’s told me enough times) that the biggest thing to have happened this century was a quiet little event that occurred in a laboratory: the discovery of the structure of DNA. Though, as your dad will be the first to admit, he didn’t have a clue about it at the time. He was only eight years old, it was 1953. It was before he started spending those summers at Uncle Eddie’s, learning about frogspawn and birds’ eggs or whatever, a biologist in the making. But even when he was doing that, he hardly had a clue about DNA.

I’m not sure that Uncle Eddie, with all his old-fashioned natural-history books and mahogany collecting boxes, would have done either. Perhaps it was “Uncle” Tim, Tim Harvey — then sole editor of The Living World —who brought the momentous news, on one of those weekend visits to his old chum at Coombe Cottage. Have you heard, Eddie, have you heard? The Living World was about to devote a whole special issue to this extraordinary discovery…

I picture him and Uncle Eddie sitting up late into the night, Uncle Eddie puffing hard on his pipe, chewing it all over. And I picture them in subsequent years, when your dad would have been there too, a nipper of nine or ten sleeping upstairs, wondering: should they tell him, should they try to explain to the lad, or just let him get on with his “Nature Study”? A little like people must have said in that year that I was born: Have you heard? They’ve dropped an atom bomb, on Japan. Should we try explain it to the kids?

Your dad and I were born before DNA. Those innocent times. Of course, it had always existed, it was always there, it was just that nobody really understood it yet. And when they did, I can’t say I was any the wiser. I’ve grown up with it all around me, but I can’t say that I could tell you even now, and biologist’s wife though I am, what it is. No doubt you could tell me, it’s part of basic education these days.

In any case, tonight wouldn’t be the right time to say you should ask your father.

For some reason, when I think of DNA I can’t help thinking of my dad, cracking those codes in a sort of wartime laboratory, and blundering one day into the arms — and, oh Lord, the legs — of a pretty secretary called Fiona.

Your dad isn’t your dad. It wasn’t ever possible that he could be. But what I want you to know is that I wanted him to be. Oh, how I wanted him to be. I still wanted him to be even when that decision was taken that, though he wouldn’t be, you would still have a father. I only wanted him to be, in a way, even more then. I still want him to be now.

That same year, that same busy, roller-coaster year of 1978, we went to Venice for a weekend. It was June. It was our anniversary, as it will be again very soon, but it wasn’t a special anniversary. It was our eighth. Is there some humble metal for eighth anniversaries? Nickel? Steel? Zinc? And it was one of those several weekends of ours that were effectively subsidised by my employers, Walker and Fitch.

Simon had even said in his wrong-footing way, “Fancy a weekend in Venice?” All I’d have to do was meet someone from Montebello’s — a convenient Friday lunch, say. It could all be done in a day, in fact. But Simon was clearly dangling a bait. A weekend for two possibly, I dared to ask, in my most insinuating mode. He went through an act of looking totally askance. But we came to a not unfamiliar deal: that we— Mike and I, that is — would find the extra air fare. A room for two was hardly any different from a room for one.

Though it didn’t have to be the Rinaldi Palace. This really was a present from Simon. “Since it’s your anniversary, Paula. I really didn’t know. And since you’ve been with us for nearly as long.”

I think he did know it was our anniversary coming up, though maybe he was simply thinking: she’s had a tough year, she’s still getting over her dad. Sweet Simon, I’d learnt it wasn’t hard to be nice to him. And all I had to do was meet Signor Masi from Montebello’s and be nice to him over a long lunch. Simon perhaps knew what he was doing — he might have gone himself.

I said to Mike, “You’ll have to kick your heels, Mikey, while I go and meet this man.” He looked scrutinisingly at me. “The things girls have to do,” he said, “for the sake of art.” It was Venice, I said, there’d be things he could do. I said he should go and look at the Tiepolos in the Scuola dei Carmini, one can’t look enough.

A Thursday night to a Saturday night: our anniversary on the back of a business trip. But it was rather more than that. It was our way also of marking, confirming—“celebrating” isn’t really the word — our decision: to go ahead, with “A.I.D..” My first appointment was booked, in fact, for the following week. It had all been fully resolved.

And yet. And yet we made love that weekend more busily and intensely, I believe, than we’d ever done in all our semi-wishful resortings to hotels. As if the opposite of the situation were really the case and this was our last chance, a desperate, last-ditch bid for the real thing. Maybe the unique magic of Venice…Maybe a room (last-ditch?) overlooking the Grand Canal…

And maybe I was the more intense. No, I know I definitely was. Mike had made his commitment. He wanted this weekend simply to endorse his assent — to reassure me. I think he was even bewildered by my intensity. He’d never known me quite this crazy for it.

And perhaps even Signor Masi registered, and possibly misinterpreted, that our long (altogether too long for me) lunch in one of Venice’s finest restaurants was touched by a tingle of sexual impatience. Had it helped to swing the deal Walker’s wanted? Did Mike even think, when we teamed up again in our hotel room in the late afternoon, that this Signor Masi had turned me on? He hadn’t, actually. He was large and round and bald and (I have to say it) over fifty, though his name was, potentially, a turn-on. It was Sergio, Sergio Masi. I never mentioned that to your father.