Graham Swift - Tomorrow

And the plain truth is that, meanwhile, something wonderful was happening. Otis dwindled while I got bigger.

By the later stages of my pregnancy — by the spring of 1979—it was clear that Otis’s condition was mortal: it was only a matter of time. But I couldn’t share your father’s heaviness of heart, his grief-in-readiness, yet again, for a cat. Nor his remarkable ability, even if I was the mother-in-readiness, to nurse Otis, tenderly and patiently, through all his last frailties. If anyone could have saved Otis, I think it was your father. I was inside some immune and happy bubble — a bit like you. I was eight months gone when, in early May, Otis died. It will sound heartless of me to say I accepted his death dry-eyed, that I barely mourned, I who’d once been abject at his mere absence, who’d wept just to leave him at a cattery. I couldn’t weep for his death.

I can think of him now, and my eyes go watery. I can picture him now, as if he might be out there, too, his fur getting saturated in this rain. I can recall with an extra thud of my heart that little thud on our bed. But when he died there were no tears. I was full of you. How could I weep? It even seemed like a small forfeit to have paid to fortune. A cat.

It was your dad who wept — and you’ll know he’s capable of that. I’m not so sure that when he shed those tears at his father’s funeral he wasn’t remembering another ceremony at which he did the burying himself. Tears can work like that.

Will it help you at all, tomorrow, to imagine your father weeping for a cat?

He dug a large hole under the lilac tree. Apparently you remember that lilac at Davenport Road, or you do, Nick. It was a true, cat-sized grave. Your father expended great labour and care over it, a once-only job. He made sure it was deep enough so that Otis’s bones would never be disturbed. For a while, as he dug, I thought his mood was simply work-manlike and practical: how to dispose efficiently of a cat. I remembered his snails.

Even your dad could see, if he didn’t accept it as an explanation, that a death was being exchanged for a birth. It was May, the air was warm, the soil was yeasty, our little garden was bursting. On the other hand, it was your dad who, almost exactly a year before, had gone out on those mad patrols in the spring dawns, fearing then that Otis might already be a corpse.

There’s no better way, perhaps, of absorbing and deflecting emotion — perhaps it’s been so arranged — than to dig, to attack the earth with a spade. The lilac was in bloom. It seemed the right, the obvious spot. In my condition, of course, there was no way I was going to assist your dad with his excavating, but I stood there with him after he’d carried out Otis very gently, in some sacking, as if he still might be alive, and put him in his place. He shovelled earth back on top and patted it firmly down. It was only then, with nothing else to do except say, “Goodbye, Otis,” that he leant on his spade and wept.

Your father, who is a scientist by training and has shown himself in recent years to have quite a canny head for business, is an emotional man. When we walked back from our lunch in St. James’s Park, before he took that taxi, I half expected him to clasp me like some soldier leaving for the front. Perhaps he’ll weep tomorrow and get very emotional indeed. Perhaps he’ll go for scientific rigour. Perhaps he’ll try to be businesslike. My father was a perpetual soft touch, soft as they come, at least to me — but he was that iron judge. We all have more than one creature inside us perhaps. And there are some moments in our lives that make us ripe for metamorphosis. Tomorrow you’ll start a new life. And you’ll have to choose between your fathers, if you see what I mean. You’ll have to give judgement on who that man is.

I won’t be the one on trial, but in any case I’m giving you now my testimony in advance. What would your judgement be of me? A bit of a vixen when it comes to it, a touch of my own mother, the seldom-sighted Fiona McKay? I think if your dad knew the truth, had all the facts of my behaviour before him, the twists and turns and mood-swings of that pivotal year before you were born, he might, in the end, just stoically shrug and say that it was all just biology working through me, it was just the old, eternal, ever-crafty maternal instinct, using me as its tool. What a good excuse.

But, anyway, what he’d also say, I know it, is: don’t we have two beautiful kids?

We decided on no marker, no silly, cat-proportioned memorial. Just the lilac itself. In both our heads, perhaps, was the unavoidable funeral music, incongruous as the sound of waves in Herne Hill: “ Sit-ting on the dock of the bay …”

We planted lily-of-the-valley and grape hyacinth over the grave. We were already thinking, perhaps, that you should never know. Otis belonged, firmly, to a world before you. But it seems, Nick, that you might have guessed. In any case, it occurs to me that, as a matter of simple, incontestable fact, you were there, both of you were there, even as we buried Otis. You were there, inside me. You couldn’t see a thing, but both of you were undoubtedly present and in attendance at Otis’s funeral.

Both of you. And that was simply the most wonderful, crowning fact of all, that had made me impervious to sorrow and tears, and would make even your father very soon forget his grief for Otis — as they say, if I wasn’t quite ready yet to put it to the test, a mother’s birth-pains are instantly forgotten once birth occurs.

If we’d ever doubted this thing that we’d done — I mean, that I’d done, with your father’s assent and cooperation — if we’d ever questioned, even after the point of no return, the strange bypassing path we’d taken, then didn’t nature, in the end, simply reward and approve and exonerate and congratulate us? Nature — and science. Including that wonderful and still young then science of sonography, which enabled us to see you, even before you were “there,” even before that day by the lilac tree.

If we’d had no doubts at all, there still might have been an awkward follow-up. Suppose all went well and, yes, we acquired a child. Then suppose we wanted another one. What exactly would have been the procedure then? To go back and ask for the same “Mr. S.,” to ask him to oblige once again? But that delicate question would never require an answer, and all doubts, quandaries and compunctions were resolved. One November day we both looked at a strange, blurry, magical screen and saw two little pulsating blobs. Forgive me, but the image stuck: two little floating shrimps. The whole complete and entrancing set all in one go and, as it proved, a boy and a girl. A nuclear family. Twins.

GEMINI. On the tenth of June, 1979. And, as we have told you, without any fraudulent invention, at more or less two in the morning. Something we certainly couldn’t specify, but it was what we got. What an extraordinary, world-transforming little word it suddenly seemed to be: two.

And how did your father feel, even months before — when he looked with me at that wobbly screen? Doubly excluded, doubly dismissed? It’s important for you to know, it’s of the utmost relevance for tomorrow. I was there — I had to be — to see you for the first time, but I also looked at your father. And what I saw, for the first time, was that it was real for him. Whatever he may have expected, whatever reactions he may even have prepared, he was smitten from that moment on, as smitten as I was, by you. Quite simply, I saw your father swoon, I saw him tip into love all over again — excuse me for saying so, but I think I could recognise the spectacle. I could almost see the train of thought in his head. Not his? No — not really? Mine, certainly. But none of that was the point. Ours, ours.