Graham Swift - Tomorrow

He was on the lookout, of course, let’s not pretend about that. He was experimenting too, and might even have used that convenient word himself. Where would a divorced vet first start to look? I don’t know how many experiments he might already have conducted. But what I do know is that he was my only experiment, my only ever trial run.

And he didn’t take me to Paris, though he was eager to impress. I took a morning train to Gatwick, as if to persuade myself I still might really be flying to Paris. He picked me up there in his car and we drove around for a bit, round Sussex, killing time, and had lunch in a pub.

Then he took me to the Gifford Park Hotel, five stars even in those days. Do you see my dilemma?

ODDLY, I SEE MYSELF now sleeping, alone, in the Hôtel Gustave, rue de Grenelle, Paris, where I truly did sleep and truly by myself, at the beginning of that eventful year, 1978. Not knowing then, of course, how eventful it would be and certainly not knowing that in a few months’ time I would have pretended to have slept again in that same Paris hotel, while in fact I’d slept much nearer home and not by myself. If you’re going to tell a lie, give it some dose of veracity.

And even when I slept with our vet, Alan Fraser, in Sussex in May, I thought about myself in Paris just four months before in January, but as if I might have been thinking of some other woman, some innocent me of long ago. It should have been the other way round, perhaps, I should have been innocent in spring, devious in winter. January and May: it’s a proverbial motif, a not so uncommon subject for the painters of the past. As you know only too well, since among our Rutherford Road collection is a small depiction of just that personified theme by the Venetian artist Vareschi. Gennaio e Maggio. Vareschi, by any art-historical rating, can’t claim to be much more than a very minor old master, but his work commands a price and it’s a measure of something that we possess one at all.

There he sits, anyway, January, that is, scrawny and grey-bearded, contemplating an almost naked and extremely nubile May in some verdant enclave which could be the corner of an orchard or a fanciful wood. Fruit, in any case, of an indeterminate but vaguely testicular kind, hangs among the foliage — it seems to be autumn as well as those other months of the year — and there are some roses with particularly pointed thorns.

You may have wondered, in your strangely dainty way, how such a thing could have its place in our house, or ever have been put into a gilt frame at all. It’s a dirty old man, isn’t it, eyeing up young flesh? Except, of course, it’s “art,” which justifies all kinds of things, and it’s pricey, it’s that business of your mum’s. And, incidentally — though what do you care, at sixteen? — it’s a perennial and much-visited allegory, it’s the whole sad tale of existence. The ageing male, his virile powers in decline, goes looking for some vision of lost youth. He picks up a young girl and takes her off to a hotel. For some curious, perennial reason, the young girl frequently obliges. January’s also, if Vareschi makes no allusion to it, the double-headed, the two-faced one. The whole thing often involves cheating on a wife.

Hardly at all the situation of Alan Fraser and me: him at forty-one and divorced, and me at thirty-two and married.

But I thought about that woman of only that preceding January as if I might have been thinking of someone half my age.

The weather had been true January weather, cold and still and sparkling, the kind of winter weather that can make the stone of Paris radiate. I’d found time, then, to walk, not broodily but simply contentedly, by the icy Seine, the water and the white walls of the quais dazzling, my ears pinched by the air. And I’d wished Mike was with me, our vapour-breaths mingling. Was there any glad moment of my life he shouldn’t share? All the same, I’d inhaled the strange pleasure of a separation that was hardly a separation at all — just a Wednesday night in Paris — and was almost over now anyway.

It would have been the same sort of morning in London perhaps, I thought, the same light teasing the charcoal grey of Bloomsbury and touching the windows of Mike’s cramped attic-office, up among the gnarled and mottled branches of the plane trees that fill the centre of Ormond Square.

Now we have our own place in France.

It was just a week before your dad’s birthday, and I’d even just bought him his present, in an antiques shop in the rue Bonaparte. It was one of those little brass calendar devices which you put on a desk, with a rotatable display of the day, the date and month: a particularly finely shaped and engineered example, elegantly scrolled and chased, with a pen-rest combined and with the pleasing distinction that the dates were, of course, in French. I saw myself, before I wrapped it, setting it to that all-important date for your father (and for me): “ le 20 Janvier .”

Now it sits on his desk in that study-cum-office, the black numbers and letters on the white enamel regularly turned. And if you’ve ever wondered: well, I bought it in Paris in January, 1978. Not such an inexpensive whim for me then. Now we can buy a Vareschi. I saw it in the shop window just as the shop was opening, went in and didn’t hesitate. An electric fire blazed away while I counted out my francs. As I stood in that crystalline air on the Pont des Arts, taking in the classic view, my purchase waited for me, to be collected after my stroll, on my way back to my hotel. Then I’d check out and fly home to Mike.

Will he remember to turn on the date tomorrow? Or will he want it to stay always at yesterday? “ Le 16 Juin 1995. ”

There are points in our lives which, if we don’t know it at the time, we look back on later and see ourselves as if suspended, poised on some mysterious fulcrum. What did I not have then to be thankful for? All of Paris scintillating before me. I simply didn’t know what that year would bring, or take away, or what other hotel rooms I’d see, as well as that one at the Gustave, even before the year was half through. One by Lake Windermere, one in Venice. One, in between, at the Gifford Park. And that one in Paris, in a manner of speaking, twice.

An experiment. A practical, empirical (but top-secret) stage in our ongoing debate and, as it turned out, the decisive one. Your mother’s just playing with you? She was really just up for it with this veterinary surgeon with his hands on her pussy cat? She really just felt, at thirty-two — not exactly young and foolish, though she’s forty-nine now — like acting as if she was nineteen again at Sussex and screwing around? Here was another one to try. I don’t think so.

What you don’t have you can’t lose. But then again, it’s at least partly true that you don’t really know what you have until you lose it, or risk doing so. You don’t know the real things until you’ve sampled the false. At some point as the years gather, it’s bound to come over us perhaps: the perverse and crazy, but oddly almost prudent wish to put the whole fabric of what we possess to the test.

Excuses? I just went to bed with this Alan. Alan! And Fraser, you may have been thinking, is a Scottish name. I let him pick me up in his Peugeot and carry me off to spend a Friday night in a country hotel. I had my reasons, but where did he think it might lead: just one night? It was just such a previous exercise, it turned out, that had landed him in divorce. He made the mistake (the serious mistake, I think) of telling me. It wasn’t calculated to make me feel good. A little weekend escapade, he said, which shouldn’t have been any more, but he’d tumbled further, so it seemed, and then, when it was too late, this other woman (unnamed) had ditched him. Punished at both ends, and at one of them by the upset of his whole domestic apple cart.