Graham Swift - Tomorrow

What was I supposed to say? “There, there?” Or “Tough?” Or even “The cow!?” And now, of course, with me, he was risking nothing, having already lost the lot.

I could be risking everything I had.

I think what people often want from these midlife episodes (and note how I speak from vast experience) is a rather unexciting thing: comparison. They haven’t known it for a while, it’s been one of the rules that they forgo it, but is it, anyway (and this is the real persuasion), such an outrageous thing? They want the reassurance, the instruction or perhaps the sheer surprise of comparison. Life cuts you off from comparison. It might have been someone else, not Mike. I might never have met Mike. Poor me! And if not Mike, then it would have been someone else. Nothing’s written in the stars.

But I, of course, had my quite specific and highly specialised reason to know what it was like, while still having a husband, to jump into bed with another man. Did he appreciate that he was a “test case?” Perhaps he did — after those conversations in his surgery, all that scurrilous talk of insemination. It might even have been a sort of card he played, an unusual but opportune seduction technique. And I was “seduced.”

And he was a verifiable and practised father, if not the most shining example of paternity: two teenage kids. Just two cats now, apparently. What, incidentally, had he done with them, while we stole away to Sussex (Paris)? Just left them to fend for themselves?

Mike, back in Herne Hill, would have fixed himself a supper for one on a tray in front of the telly, then slept ignorantly alone — that is, if we don’t count a still fragile Otis curled up on a corner of the duvet. But then, at this time, the very same proposition would have been going through Mike’s head too: this primitive obstacle, this crude, unscientific bugbear to be overcome, that his wife, that Paula would have to do it, if not exactly at close-range or in hands-on fashion, with another man.

Oh lord. It rained that night too, though it had begun as a fine May day and finished with a balmy, hazy evening. Dinner in the “Akenhurst Room,” candlelit and oakpanelled, while the first drops began to patter, apologetically, on the terrace outside. He just wanted female company, a woman to share his bed? It had been a while, perhaps, and he’d had to go, or felt he had to, to this considerable trouble and expense. It was rather touching. I should have been flattered. I’d become special to him? He saw me as some replacement Mrs. Fraser? He was falling in love with me? God forbid.

I listened to more snippets from his troubled family life, and considered what I might tell him of mine: my late father’s divorces, for example, his three hapless marriages. And incidentally, he was a High Court judge. Switching subjects completely, I might have mentioned that Mike, whom by now, of course, Alan had met, used to work, before he worked on The Living World, on snails. Yes, snails. Perhaps Mike had mentioned them himself. But then if he had, surely Alan wouldn’t have chosen them (another serious mistake) — to eat. Escargots : they were on the Gifford’s distinctly Gallic menu, and Alan, as some Englishmen will, as a point almost of honour and bravado, went for them. Should I have said something?

To your dad and me, who’ll eat most things, they’ve always been strictly taboo.

And — thinking of things French — I thought, later that night, about that woman, in January, in Paris, where I was supposed to be right then. “That girl” I nearly called her. And the fact is I wanted to reach out protectively to her, standing there on that bridge in the wonderful cold light and perfectly happy as she was, to pull her collar up and tuck her scarf a little more snugly round her chin.

But hold on, you’ll be wondering: I had time to think, to contemplate, to conjure up such tender images, on this adventurous and plainly adulterous night, when thinking was hardly high on the agenda?

Yes, I had plenty. Without going into other details, my night with Alan Fraser ended up a little like now. I mean, absolutely not like now in one main respect, but in other respects, like it. It was even raining. The banal truth is that he fell asleep on me, and I stayed awake. There was dinner talk, there was preamble, there was even, I’m sure, during the thing itself, some gasping sex talk — but there was precious little pillow talk. I slept with him, I slept with our vet. I did all the things that that can mean. But, being strictly accurate, he slept with me before I slept with him, and I lay awake for a long while before I slept at all.

Perhaps I simply “satisfied” him. That’s not to claim credit. He simply crashed, sated, as men quite often ungraciously do (“men”: hark at me) into unconsciousness. He was the vet, but I put him to sleep. Not much pillow talk? Scarcely any, really — if I’d even wanted it.

I just lay awake, not particularly wishing to sleep, or even feeling ignored. Not even, I’ll be honest, assailed by feelings of guilt and remorse. Just thinking steadily to myself, as if I actually needed this sleeping stranger at my side to set my thoughts in motion.

Not unlike now. It’s an old and perennial situation, perhaps. You have it all to come, Kate. A woman does her best to be a lover, then, before she knows it, she becomes a mother, a sleeping charge beside her. But, of course, Mike here’s not a stranger. And when I was lying there beside Alan Fraser, I was thinking mainly of your father. It’s what I mean by comparison.

Oh how I love your father.

The room was on a first-floor corner, one of the best in the hotel. It actually had a four-poster bed. He’d forked out for the five-star Gifford Park and I’d been too polite or too amenable, if those are the right words, to protest. How much would it have cost him — just to fall asleep? I had the feeling that the place might have had some previous sentimental significance for him and I didn’t want to probe. And I was certainly too tactful or too compliant to broach its unsettling significance for me. Not so much the place itself (though now it has just such a significance), but the location. Did it have to be Sussex, and not so very far from the ancestral domains of the Hooks?

You see my dilemma? What am I to say, with barely a week now to go? “Cancel it?” Or, more preposterously: “Could it be some other hotel?” I have my excuse and my get-out, of course: you. You and my perfectly appropriate mother’s instinct. How can we possibly even consider our anniversary, even if it is our twenty-fifth, at such a time as this? How can we just go off so soon and leave our bruised and shaken nestlings all by themselves?

Have I brought you now fully up to speed?

And yet I can see all your dad’s reasons, all his needs and urgent contingency planning. It even makes sense: time for you to be alone, to think and talk it through. You’re not helpless babies. And it is our twenty-fifth. I can see how the Sussex thing works now: our territory. Only six miles or so from Birle and at least, for him, there’ll be that umbilical going off in that direction. And — with that direction in mind — what will Grannie Helen think if we don’t do something special for our special anniversary?

Suppose it’s the same room. Oh lord. Suppose (is it possible after seventeen years?) it’s even the same bed. Mike would have gone for the best, of course he would, no expense spared. He’ll have asked for the best — one of the reasons he booked so long in advance.

I can’t get out of it. I’ll just have to pretend, smile and pretend. Or treat it as some grotesque and appalling opportunity for confession. On top of everything else? Mikey, forgive me, forgive me. It was, believe me, all in a good cause.