Graham Swift - Tomorrow

The trouble is I know that he — which really means we — will put it to you. We’ll ask you to judge us tomorrow in all kinds of ways, but we’ll ask for your verdict on this tricky secondary matter. Namely whether you think it’s right that, at this particular, traumatic point in your lives, we should swan off to a five-star hotel, leaving you here with the contents of the fridge.

But my hunch is that you will give us your “permission.” I can’t put myself in your shoes, but that’s my hunch, or in one sense it’s my earnest hope, since that will mean that what’s about to occur tomorrow will have gone, so far as such a thing can, “well.” But in one respect your letting us go off like reprieved offenders to celebrate our wedding anniversary won’t help me at all.

I want it both ways. I want both to go and not to go to the Gifford Park. I want you to listen to these things I’m telling you and not to hear them at all. You see what I mean? Every twist and turn.

A corner room. I can’t remember the number. It’s just as well, perhaps. There were aquatints of Sussex scenes on the wall. A sepia photograph of some tweeded folk piled into a shooting brake. It had a fine view, through a latticed, wisteria-hung window, of those ever-suggestive Downs. And it had a chintz-hung four-poster bed with spiralled-oak pillars. Picture your mother in such a room, seventeen years ago, an unfamiliar man beside her, rain falling outside, drenching the wisteria leaves. Did it really happen, that curious little enterprise? It seems now both insignificant and far off, and flagrant as a just discovered crime. And yet it served its practical purpose, it’s true to say that without that bizarre excursion, mysteriously involving a trip to Paris at the same time, there might never have been you.

Your dad’s shown me the glossy brochure he was sent. I already knew: a Jacobean manor house, seat of the Akenhurst family, grandly added to in the nineteenth century by the Giffords, who made a fortune in rubber. Our room — then, I mean, Alan’s and mine — was in the Jacobean bit. There was a creaking, ancient staircase that made you feel, at once, that you were engaged in an act of stealth. Long-bearded, white-ruffed faces watched your every step. It’s inconceivable that something so old and worthy of preservation can have been transformed beyond all uncomfortable recognition in less than twenty years. I can only hope.

Outside, there was, and must still be, a lovely garden: lawns, yew walks, fountains and some sets of just slightly vulgar statuary, a foible of the Giffords, depicting classical scenes. Diana and Actaeon inevitably, Narcissus bending over a pool. We’d done a tour of their half-clad forms before dinner. I thought of them out there in the rain, like creatures in some petrified zoo, the drops forming on the stone nipples and chins. The Giffords, with their rubbery new money, had gone for ancestry and myth.

His skin had its strange but distinct, personal-sweat smell: mine must have had, to him, its own smell too. An individual, yet generic scent. At thirty-two, I could just about remember it from earlier days: the animal tang of someone you’ve never been naked with before.

Or ever again, in this case. We didn’t waste too much time over our departure the following morning. It was clear, bright weather again. Sunlight gleamed in the puddles on the terrace. The curves of the Downs were like a sure draughts-man’s line. I’d slept eventually, and perfectly soundly. And my mind was crystal-sharp and made up. I knew it was all right now, I knew it was perfectly fine.

I asked Alan to drop me at East Croydon, so I could take the train from there. So I could muster again some token illusion that I’d returned from Paris, by a Gatwick flight which would have departed, allowing for the time difference, at around ten o’clock. Another train from Victoria to Herne Hill. I had only a light, one-night case. The rather slinky small black dress inside it would have been explained by the cocktail party I’d been required to attend.

I was ready to abide, scrupulously, by another pretence that in seventeen years your father has never even suspected, let alone uncovered. But he scarcely asked about my time in Paris, because very soon after I got back I changed the topic quickly and emphatically. Perhaps I’d overwhelmed him, anyway, in that still grief-shadowed spring, with the happy, glad-to-be-home light in my face, with the hug I gave him, pressing myself against him hard. It was a fine Saturday in May, not quite lunchtime. I said, “Let’s go for a walk in Dulwich Park, Mikey. Let’s have a look at the ducks. Let’s have a drink in the Greyhound. I did some thinking while I was in Paris, and on the plane just now. A.I.D.: I’m absolutely sure. No problem, I want to go ahead.”

LET ME MAKE ONE thing absolutely clear, in case any doubt has entered your minds: Alan Fraser (MRCVS) is not your father. Neither of you has grey-blue eyes. We — that is, he — took all due precautions, in a hotel once owned by rubber barons. I’d rather lost touch, you could say, with such things.

In any case, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise was — hypothetical. Alan Fraser isn’t your father, any more than Otis was. It’s just that without either of them, you might not be there at all.

But, of course, there must have been a practical exercise. It may not be wise to enquire too deeply into how we were brought about, but since the whole thing will be so calculatedly sprung on you tomorrow, since you’re about to discover that you yourselves were the work of painstaking calculation, you’ll at least want to know how the actual thing was done. Even if you don’t ask, you’re bound to wonder: you won’t be able to avoid a certain — image of your mother.

But, for all I know, perhaps you will ask. Perhaps you’ll both be uninhibitedly hungry for every graphic technical detail. Kids these days, they certainly don’t hold back. I’ve tried so hard to anticipate every possible form your reaction might take, from outrage to laughter, that perhaps nothing will surprise me. Perhaps you’ll even be thrilled to know that you were concocted in such a special way. You’ll want a badge for it (I hope not: what would go on it?). And you won’t feel at all like treading carefully. So, come on, Mum, spill it. We came out of a test tube?

No, not exactly. You came out of me — as I once explained, remember? When all’s said, there’s that wonderful fact and joy of my life, you came out of me. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Has your father?

It’s hardly a secret, anyway, how it was done, how it has to be done. A little mechanical thinking will get you there. It’s no more secret, mysterious or romantic, I’m afraid to say, than a visit to the dentist. To begin with, there was even a certain amount of dull bureaucracy, of form-filling and question-and-answer. First of all, we went along, the two of us, like responsible parents-to-be, to a place that dealt in such things and talked it over, in the strictest confidence of course.

We learnt the fundamental rule, which was the rule of anonymity. It’s the same rule for you, my darlings, as for us, we’ll need to make that clear tomorrow. There’s no way of knowing, even for you. You were conceived anonymously — or semi-anonymously, let’s more accurately say. Though, within the bounds of anonymity, it was possible to be selective, if not exactly fussy: skin, eye colour, hair colour. It was possible to attempt a kind of sketchy match. It was possible, I don’t mean to be flippant, to place an order.

This was when your dad, with all his resolve and resignation, got a little uncomfortable. This was when “He” began to loom, to seem suddenly close and actual, like someone who might already have been told about us and put on standby.