Graham Swift - Tomorrow

A third party entered your parents’ lives. A fourth party, if you count Otis, who I haven’t forgotten. And, just as with Otis, we had to find a name for him, a token, working name, since he came under that plain wrapping of anonymity. We didn’t even have a number. Not that we wanted or needed, in those early days, to refer to him that much.

Except, perhaps, to thank him.

Yes, to thank him. Will you possibly look at it that way too tomorrow? Even consider it at all, that you might like to thank him? The trouble is, that only begs that other enormous but entirely understandable question: that you might like to meet him. That’s impossible, though it may not stop you wishing it. It’s impossible now as it was back then even to get a simple message of thanks through to him. There are no channels. And how do you thank someone, in any case, whose name you don’t even know?

Tomorrow you may feel the need to give him a name of your own. It’s not such a small matter. You’ll have to use it for the rest of your lives. And perhaps we shouldn’t even mention to you the name we’ve used. Or we should humbly and graciously trade it in for yours. We thought of calling him many things: “Mr. D.,” for example, for “Mr. Donor.” Though that was tricky because “D.” might also stand for “Dad.” Your dad (what a mountain there is in such a little word) came up with some inventive and truculent offerings of his own, which may not be so amusing to you. Such as “The Grand Inseminator” and “Spunky Jim.” But in the end we settled on a formula that was neat and wholly to the point: Mr. S., short for Mr. Sperm.

AND, OF COURSE, I can see him in you. I don’t have to look for him randomly in the street, on trains. He’s there before my eyes, invisibly, every time I look at you. And from tomorrow, I’m sure, that mirror-gazing of yours will suddenly get rather serious.

You don’t have grey-blue eyes. You have, as has often been innocently observed, your mother’s dark brown, green-shot eyes, her nose, her cheekbones: but your father’s mobile mouth, your father’s expressions. Despite those specifications we made, it would seem that it was my genes, predominantly, that kicked in. Your dad has clear-blue eyes. We ordered them certainly, the same again, please. So you should know that Mr. Sperm, or whatever you choose to call him, has blue eyes too. But it didn’t work out that way, you got my eyes. Which didn’t stop people from saying, as if the other fifty per cent must be glowingly apparent somewhere else: Ah, but that’s their dad’s smile.

This is the strangest thing — how you’ve conspired, yourselves, in the conspiracy. People see what they expect to see, so why should they not have believed they were seeing Mike in you? Then again, from the start, you saw two faces looming over you that you took to be your parents, and why should you not have taken them as your model? And we did a lot of smiling over you, believe me. But perhaps it was Mike’s smile that got imprinted, perhaps it was his you felt the greater obligation to.

If we’ve performed a part for sixteen years, then, without knowing it, so have you — and even more convincingly. There have definitely been times — whole lengths of time — when we ourselves have fallen totally for the illusion, when we’ve completely forgotten. You’ve been unwittingly such consummate actors, such consummate accomplices, that now it’s like an extra cruelty that you’ll have to undo it all.

And yet I’ve noticed already that it’s started to slip, it’s already started to look less plausible. You’re sixteen, you want to be yourselves. The last thing you want to look like is your half-century-old parents. The last thing you want to do — it’s perfectly natural at your age — is catch yourselves mimicking some fossilised gesture of ours. Will this help matters or just confuse them tomorrow?

These days, you don’t even want to look like each other. But wasn’t that, from the start, the little unexpected marvel that helped fool everyone? We couldn’t have bargained for it, and certainly couldn’t have specified it when we put in our request list. But people simply, perhaps, mistook the one thing for the other, or the one thing distracted from the other. Of course there was consistency and resemblance here, of course you must look like us, because you looked so much like each other.

When we took those holidays down in Cornwall, you were perhaps at the very peak of your symbiosis, your two-peas-in-a-podness: a little team of two acting as one, wanting no other company. It’s what everyone else would notice, your happy, frolicking duality. And so, by a simple process of completing the square, they’d acknowledge our immaculateness as a family.

But I would notice your differences, your imbalances. A mother sees things. I would often see how you were like your father (Mike, of course, I mean), or I would see how the illusion was achieved. Nick, you were always that fraction behind your sister, you waited on her initiative, her shelter. When the two of you ran across the beach, your feet making little sand-puffs, her shoulder was always just ahead of yours, you were tucked in her slipstream, like birds in formation. She learnt to swim first, but as soon as she did, so did you. The same with bicycles.

It seemed to me, Nick, though it’s a big thing to say, I know, that you always relied on Kate to hold your world together. And that while Kate was simply happy and though you might be happy too, a small voice inside you was always saying: please, Kate, don’t let this stop, please don’t let this come to an end. The world was always a question for you, and a possible disaster, hingeing on your sister. Was this my imagination?

But this all had more than one source, I could see that too. You had a special frown, just a tiny knot, a question mark in the middle of your brow, which could appear sometimes, oddly, just when everything else was sunny. But then it wasn’t your frown. It was your father’s. I mean Mike’s. It was the special frown he’d have, and had never had before you were born, whenever he’d remind himself of the fact, whenever he’d stop forgetting and say to himself: but this isn’t what it seems, this can’t go on for ever.

Which way round did it work, Nick? You borrowed it from him? He took it from you? But there it was, on both of you, a father-and-son resemblance: both of you disturbed by happiness. Not your father’s smile, actually, but his frown. I’d see Mike sometimes reach out and for no apparent reason, Nick, put his hand on your brow, as if feeling for a fever. How my pulse would rush. But you must surely remember this yourself. I could see him wanting to smooth away that little obstinate pucker, to take it away in his palm. How could he not be your father when he wanted to touch and reclaim that little mark of himself in you?

Those holidays in Cornwall, midway through this sixteen-year period, when for whole days, weeks long we’d all be so close, were like some almost believable high point for me, the very sun and sea and air colluding, like some annual process of kindly weathering, to mould and fuse us together. By the same token, I think Mike always thought they threatened to expose us. All of us there in just our swimming things. It will be on one of these holidays, I think he thought, in the middle of our August happiness, that the whole thing will somehow come apart, get dashed to bits, like a Cornish shipwreck. That cottage where we regularly stayed, Gull Cottage, with its hollyhocks and lavender bushes and its ship’s-steering-wheel mirror and sand getting everywhere, reminded him, too, of Craiginish Croft (that trapped essence inside): another paradise waiting to be lost.