Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Your dad told me once about a time when Grannie Helen told him about the time before he was born. Here I am, doing the same for the two of you. But I know, Kate, that only last Christmas he told you about that very same thing, about another Christmas long ago when his mother had talked to him. And you must have worked out that he was talking about the year he and I first met, that year when, as far as I’m concerned, my second life began. It was another little piece, perhaps, in that jigsaw you’d tried to put together ever since I told you about the word “propose.” Though perhaps you’d long stopped caring about seeing the whole picture, and you no longer had a little girl’s notion that something similar (even with Nick) ought to happen to you.

But you would have worked out that he was talking about Christmas 1966. Maybe he just told you anyway, made a thing of it, even: “It was the year your mother and I first met.”

He was at home for Christmas, in Orpington. I was in Kensington. By then, I would have met your dad’s parents only a couple of times and that business of the sand dune was definitely just a secret between Mike and me. But I think his mum knew. Not about the sand dune, I mean. I think she knew that Mike and I weren’t a temporary thing. Mothers can tell things. She’d have known too, without needing to know any details, that the way Mike and I had got together was a lot different from the way she and Grandpa Pete had once set out to share their lives. It was 1966, it was a different world. She probably even thought: kids, these days, they have it on a plate. But anyway she decided to tell Mike — and he decided to tell you, Kate, all those Christmases later — about that time when his dad wasn’t around.

And, of course, he wasn’t around then, last Christmas. The first Christmas without him and the first anniversary coming up, in January, not to mention your dad’s fiftieth barely a week later. A tricky time of year all round. Your dad said to you, “Come on, Katesy, let’s do the washing-up.” Or rather he whispered it. Grannie Helen had fallen asleep. Perhaps she was dreaming of Grandpa Pete. But there was something in his voice, in that whisper, I don’t know if you felt it too, that was the same as if he might have said, “Let’s have a private word, Kate, let’s have a heart-to-heart.”

And I had one of those wobbly moments. You know what I mean now. I thought he might be going to tell you, to jump the gun, so to speak, and, for some reason, over the washing-up and, for some reason, just you and not Nick. It was a sign of how edgy things were (it was “next year” now, after all, and next year was close) that I could actually have thought this. It would have been a strange way of going about it. The truth is, ever since Grandpa Pete’s death, part of me had been on alert. I thought your dad might just blurt it now, any time.

It turned out he just wanted to remember that other Christmas with you. Though, come tomorrow, Kate, you may think, looking back, that he’d been nudging pretty close to the other thing. It was a little preparation.

Back in 1966, it had been Grandpa Pete who’d fallen asleep, full of Christmas dinner, by the fire. And it was Grannie Helen, as you know, Kate, who’d said to him then, not let’s do the washing-up, but let’s go for a walk, while your dad sleeps it off. The strange thing is that last Christmas I said almost exactly the same to you, Nick. I said, “Well, if they’re going to do the washing-up, let’s take a walk round the block.” It didn’t occur to me I was echoing Grannie Helen. I was trying to put aside that feeling that Mike was about to do some blurting — surely not — but I was also simply thinking of Nelson.

We had that reason to take a walk too. The first Christmas after Grandpa Pete’s death: it could hardly be at Coombe Cottage. Grannie Helen came to us, and that meant Nelson came too. And she was the one fast asleep now, in our living room. And, being fast asleep, she can’t have known anything of what your dad was telling you, Kate, in the kitchen. But then I’m not so sure. She’s a canny woman. She must have felt, when she walked round the block with Mike, all those years ago, that it was the right time to speak.

Anyway, she told him about yet another Christmas — Christmas 1944—when his dad hadn’t been there because he was having Christmas in a prisoner-of-war camp. At least he wasn’t just “missing” any more. Grannie Helen was spending Christmas at home in Dartford. And your dad wasn’t there either — not quite. Or perhaps you could say that, in a way, he was. She was in her last month and he was keeping her company.

But what your grandmother really wanted to offer your father was a sort of apology. She’d kept it to herself long enough and she might have just gone on doing so, but Mike was twenty-one and that was another thing, perhaps, that had prodded her. He was the same age as his dad had been, back then. What she wanted to make clear was that when Mike was born and Grandpa Pete was still a prisoner, she’d never mentioned him to Mike. She’d never mentioned his own dad.

Of course, Mike was just a tiny baby, so what would he have understood? But then most mothers with a father missing like that who’d one day be coming home would have talked about him, perhaps quite a lot, to make up for his absence. They’d have talked him up. They’d have prattled on about him to this new little pair of ears, if only to keep their own spirits up. And who knows what even a tiny baby, by some instinctual process, might not have picked up?

But then what do I know about such a situation? Nobody could have known when Mike was born that the war would be over inside six months. Grandma Helen had taken another, tougher view of things. She didn’t want to say anything to your dad that she might just find foolish and regrettable later. She didn’t want to spin him some fairy-tale yarn — even if he didn’t understand a word — that she’d only have to unspin. I’m a mother too, I can understand that. There’s a way in which Grannie Helen and I see eye to eye. Though it doesn’t stop me being afraid of her.

The fact is, though Grannie Helen knew that Grandpa Pete was alive and a prisoner, there was no guarantee that she’d see him again. I suppose that was only realistic, and I suppose you could say she’d been well trained in that way of thinking. The only training I’ve ever had in that sort of thing is when your dad gets up early in the morning (but not this morning, I think) and, just for a while, leaves that bit of empty, cooling sheet beside me.

But Grannie Helen would have got into a much sterner habit of guarding her feelings against the worst. When she’d first heard that Grandpa Pete had gone missing, she’d worked on the assumption that he was dead. That’s what she told your dad. She wanted to say that too. She hadn’t nursed fragile hopes. It sounded harsh, but there’d seemed less pain that way, she’d told him, in the long run.

If she hadn’t had a child inside her, it might have been different. But this was one of the reasons, after all, why she — why they — had wanted that child inside her. It’s just your mother’s hunch, but I think it may have been one reason too why Mike remained an only child. Anyway, given that she had a child inside her, she had to be pretty practical and hard-headed.

All this she told your dad. She even told him that when she’d been pregnant and his dad was missing, she’d seriously considered finding someone else — to be Mike’s daddy. It was only how a lot of women in such situations had had to think then, let alone the ones who actually knew their husbands were dead. In any case, now, after all these years, she wanted to say she was sorry. Sorry that she’d had to take that attitude and that she’d kept him in the dark, so to speak, even after he was born. Even if he was in the dark anyway.