Graham Swift - Tomorrow

The bulk of Living World Books are still just “nature books”: lovely to look at, brightly designed, modern-day equivalents of Uncle Edward’s book of molluscs. Your dad sometimes worries about this. It’s a sort of thorn in the side that he seems to need. He worries about the “just nature” books. He worries that the “just nature” stuff is really heads-in-the-sand stuff, it’s not even good science. Those dire warnings aren’t made up, the planet’s in serious trouble. I think he worries about being a “just nature” man himself. Still running around Sussex in short trousers, not even knowing about the existence of DNA. Or me.

But look at your mother. The planet’s in serious trouble, and she’s still dealing in art. Part of her’s still in the Renaissance.

Was it a better world in 1972 when, as you now know, you were never really on the cards at all? Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought that, like your parents, you were pretty well timed, two little cold-war babies, emerging, just when you were ready to emerge, into a world that was no longer cold: a happier, sweeter climate all round. Now, just a few years on, it’s not looking so good. We’re even told the climate’s getting too warm.

Your futures? Your future? What will the world be like in just five years’ time, in the year 2000, when you’ll be twenty-one? What will it be like in another sixteen, when you’re thirty-two, the same age I was when I decided to become a mother? What will it be like when you’re fifty, your dad’s age? You won’t thank me for sometimes being prey to this sort of arithmetic (especially tonight), or for sometimes concluding that your dad and I, born neatly in 1945, may have been set down in the best slot history has ever put on offer. But maybe every generation thinks that.

The planet’s in serious trouble? It’s 1995, a millennium’s ending, we’re all about to go over the edge? I don’t know if the planet’s in serious trouble, listening to this rain doing the garden good. I think number fourteen Rutherford Road might be in serious trouble. These might be just the early hours of Doomsday. Is that what we’ll call it when we look back? “Doomsday.” “Bombshell Day?” Will it just find its regular place, one day, in our calendar, in our private annals? That day, that day in June. We’ll refer to it frankly and calmly — though, of course, just among ourselves — with a touch of respect and solidarity, even a touch of humour. “Bombshell Day,” as a joke, because no bomb, really, ever went off. “Doomsday,” because it wasn’t the end of the world, just a wet Saturday in June. Another special day, a week after your birthday, that every year will be discreetly but smilingly observed?

I see everything in this house in just a few hours’ time looking the same as it always was. I see everything — every item, every picture on the wall, every little memento, every gathered-together token of our good life and good fortune — looking hollow and false. But then none of that stuff (as you so sensitively call it) would matter anyway, believe us, not in the balance with you. I’ve told Mike so many times that, surely, I must believe it myself: that he has nothing to fear, not about the fundamental thing. “Have they had any better dad?” (Well, have you?) So many times that I must have finally convinced him. Look at him here, sound asleep. But in any case you must simply believe me that your dad, who in recent years — whatever he gets called tomorrow — has taken on the unexpected sobriquet “Mr. Living World,” would gladly give up everything, would give the living world, if you could really be his.

If it wasn’t for this rain, I think by now there’d be the first streaks of light. It’s no longer pattering and trickling. It’s started to beat down as if from some motionless, massing cloud. Centred on Putney. Just a wet Saturday in June, or time to build an ark?

Among all the possessions and artworks in this house is, still, if you don’t know it, a small and precious selection of the paintings you both did at primary school when you were six or seven. They’re in that special box of mine. But they would have been displayed once, if you remember, on our kitchen wall. For a period of your life there was a constantly changing show. You knew then, just about, that I worked with “art,” I bought and sold pictures, and when your pictures got taken down to be replaced by your latest productions, you used to think I went off and sold them. You were nobly contributing to your mother’s livelihood. You never enquired further and never seemed to mind that you weren’t getting a percentage of your own. What a grasping dealer your mother was. But I didn’t throw them all away, you’ll be pleased to know, I kept some of the best. And if I’d had to give a top prize, there’s little doubt I’d have given it to your Noah’s Arks.

There was a strict kitchen-gallery policy of not favouring one of you over the other, and I’d never have let on anyway, even with my professional eye, which one of you I thought was the better watercolourist (though, actually, I think it was you, Nick, one way in which you could pip your sister). But since you both went to the same primary school and were in the same class, you both very often painted the same subject. There was equality, at least, in that.

Noah’s Ark must be a sure winner, anyway, the all-time favourite for primary-school painting sessions. Is there a child who’s never been asked? A rainy afternoon in the classroom, the lights are on, out come the paints. The teacher tells the story first, then the brushes get to work. For both of you, of course, it was that memorable phrase “two by two” that struck an inspirational chord. The animals went in two by two and they did so, you were given to understand, so that the world would be saved. Whether or not you knew what that really meant, you clearly thought that being what you were meant your own salvation was guaranteed. In those days you used to get called “the Hook twins,” something you’d loathe now.

But there was clearly also some confusion in your minds as to whether the Ark and the Flood were things that had happened or that might or would. This was shown by the fact that both of you, with connivance or not, included yourselves among the elephants, camels, inevitable towering giraffes and, in your case, Nick, a couple of surprising (since they can swim) but really rather charming polar bears.

But there, in both cases, are both of you. You’re not readily recognisable, but Kate’s the one with the longer hair and the stiffly triangular skirt. Your place on Noah’s Ark has been emphatically reserved. In fact, in both cases again, neither Noah or his wife are visible at all and it rather looks as though the two of you have assumed those venerable roles and are not just among the lucky passengers, but have taken charge of the ship.

We didn’t flummox you by asking if there was a chance your dad and I might be saved too and be given our place on board, and you were too young for the joke that it was your dad, surely, who ought to be Noah, being in command as he already was of The Living World. But those pictures certainly got saved. They’re in this house now, in my box. Remarkable thick blue ribbons of rain fall down in each of them, though in your case, Nick, out of a convincing enough thundery-black sky. And that box, you’ll now understand, with its hoard of items, a surprising number of which are in sets of two, has come to seem itself like a miniature ark, waiting for some particularly rainy day.

BUT I THINK I can really see it now, round the edges of the curtains, the first grey hint of light. It’s today now, not tomorrow, I can’t pretend any more: the first day of your second life.