Graham Swift - Tomorrow

And on that terrible day when something even worse (there could be) than those fears of his nearly happened, perhaps you noticed, if you were able to notice, that his relief, his joy, his sheer emotion when it was over, was even greater than mine. If we were both of us off the scale.

I don’t mean that I didn’t feel exactly the same: the worst thing that could ever happen and it hadn’t . Oh, my angels. But I didn’t, I couldn’t have the second thought that he was having, even as he struggled to get back his breath. That you were saved, you were still there and it was beyond words, but — one day — he was going to lose you anyway.

Perhaps tomorrow in fact.

Perhaps tomorrow you’ll simply relive that day again. It will come back to you — has it ever gone away? — and it will be your answer. The worst day, until this one that’s coming, of your lives. You’ll see him again swimming towards you. I wasn’t able to see his face then as it would have looked to you, as it came towards you. I wasn’t able to see the expression on it. But how could that man not have been your father?

Or perhaps you’ll remember how that day began: with your pretence, your foolish meddling with our terror and joy. And you didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps tomorrow, on top of that cold returning memory, you’ll have the sudden freezing thought that if the very worst had happened that day and you’d disappeared for ever, then, of course, you’d never have known what you must know now. The lie would have had no end.

I don’t want to think about it either.

Mike’s going to be the outcast tomorrow? Or simply the one, now, you’ll have to rescue?

But spare a thought for your mother. Why do people have children? Why did Grannie Helen get herself pregnant in all that haste? In one sense the haste wasn’t necessary. After the war Grandpa Pete was still there, and there too, luckily for me, was Mike. But now, of course — there has to come a time some time — Grandpa Pete isn’t there.

If Grandma Helen still wants to see Grandpa Pete, or see a living bit of him, there’s only one thing she can do. She can look (not now, of course) at this man lying next to me. I can’t hold that against her, but it’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of her, and it’s one of the reasons, but not the main one — a secondary worry sprouting from a secondary worry — why I’m afraid of the Gifford Park. If your dad should really get it into his head to go traipsing off those few miles to see her, for Sunday morning coffee, to take her to lunch, even, at the Star in Birle, it will be the first time we see her since we’ll have told you. Are you with me?

But this is something that never occurred to your dad and me — though, God knows, we tried to think of everything — when we went along to discuss it all at the clinic. We were simply younger then. When you look at yourselves in the mirror tomorrow you’ll be doing for the first time something that I’ve done, over and over again, when I’ve looked at you. That is, there’ll be someone, when you look, who you won’t see, and now you’ll know it. When I look at you, I don’t see, I can’t see your father. What does that matter? I can just look at him . But think again, though you’re only sixteen. Think of that day in Cornwall.

When your dad looks at you, it’s a simple, patent fact: he can see me . In you, Kate, of course, especially. I’m not trying to flatter myself. He can even see me when I was younger than I am now, though your dad never knew me when I was sixteen.

I’m the one who’s alone in this respect. I ask you to consider it, and I won’t skirt around it any longer. If Mike were suddenly not to be here, I wouldn’t have anywhere to look. I wouldn’t be like Grannie Helen. I wouldn’t have that age-old shred of consolation of looking at you and knowing that you were his too.

Think of it: as a couple gets older there’s only one, unspoken question. But perhaps the two of you, being what you are, have known this all your lives and from the very start. Who will go first? Who will it be? And how can it be?

Don’t worry, we’ve no intention. We’re only forty-nine and fifty. These days, that’s still young, isn’t it? We’re spring chickens. But I can’t see him in you. I want you to remember it: all I have and ever will have of this man here I call your father — and it’s more than I can ever say — is bound up in this sleeping body next to me now. Understand that tomorrow.

TO COME BACK to that time when he was sitting in the car park and I was inside having congress with — Mr. S. Your father must have wondered how many more times he might have to do this, to go through this weird, supportive but extraneous ritual, waiting for me to emerge through the glass doors. But I was lucky second time around, which is lucky indeed. The frozen and preserved stuff, they rather tactlessly tell you, simply isn’t as reliable as the fresh. But I only needed two goes — two goes, I’ve sometimes thought, for the two of you, but, of course, it doesn’t work like that.

I learnt I was pregnant that October. But even before that Otis had entered his slow and final decline. Perhaps he’d never truly recovered, though under Alan Fraser’s care it had seemed that he had and one explanation (though it was mainly your father’s) for his eventual deterioration was that when Fraser moved to his new practice, Otis was simply left without proper veterinary care. The new incumbent, Myers, according to your dad at least, was frankly not up to much.

All this pains me, of course. Your dad genuinely got on with Fraser. He would vie with me to be the one to take Otis along for his check-ups and injections — and for the friendly chats. I admit that after my night at the Gifford Park I was quite happy for your dad to take on that role exclusively. It was hardly likely that Fraser (I’ll call him that now) was going to own up to your father. On the other hand, I can see that he might constantly have feared that your dad, having had my confession, might one day turn up, with or without Otis, and deliver some unpleasant comeuppance. So he made his exit that July.

That’s all rather far-fetched, I know. It puts me at the root of it all — the sly bitch pitting one man’s ignorance against another man’s guesswork. That was hardly my position. I’m not even sure if I cared that much. Remember, I was now concentrating on becoming your mother. That was my position. I’d put myself, with all the guesswork that can entail, in the hands of a fertility clinic.

It’s entirely possible that Fraser’s sudden departure had nothing to do with Mr. and Mrs. Hook. Though I wasn’t sorry, by then, to see him go. The plain truth is he’d served his non-veterinary purpose. Am I now sounding even a little vicious? But I was clearing the path towards your birth. And so far as Otis’s relapse and decline went, I’ll always believe that something similar was going on. I mean that Otis knew he’d served his purpose too. Even Fraser, if he’d stuck around, wouldn’t have been able to save him.

He understood, even before there was any physical sign, that our house was being prepared for a presence other than his. His mysterious disappearance — who knows? — might even have been some clairvoyant protest at the prospect, which didn’t work, which even redounded against him. He imagined, purring under Alan Fraser’s hands, that all might be as it was again, we’d learnt a lesson. Then, when we went to Venice perhaps and he was interned once more in Carshalton, he realised he was wrong.

Call me unscientific. There’s a feline logic. Your father never subscribed to this theory, he was even rather rattled by its fantasticality. How could Otis know he was being sidelined? In any case, Otis gradually declined. If there was a scientific explanation, Myers couldn’t come up with it or provide an antidote. It wasn’t for want of trying. Unlike your father, I don’t think Myers was such a bad vet — if he lacked the bedside manner. Perhaps I’d developed a general charity towards vets. Otis wasn’t a young cat any more. Since we’d acquired him as a kind of orphan, we’d never known exactly how old he might be. Anyway, cats, it seems, for all their nine lives, sometimes simply fade away.