Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Your dad told me that when his mum told him all this he’d had the fleeting thought that she’d actually had some other man lined up, as it were, or more than lined up, and this was what it was all building up to. But she’d read that thought and put him straight. She’d said, “Don’t worry, Mikey, I wasn’t planning on marrying your Uncle Eddie.”

She just needed to apologise, it seemed, after all that time, just for the thoughts she’d had, as if even they had been a form of betrayal. Perhaps she was just glad — a little jealous, maybe — that things were so easy for Mike and me, lucky little war babies. Perhaps she just wanted to tell her son, in some sentimental Christmassy way, brought on by the fact that he seemed to have had this “steady girlfriend” now for most of a year (I don’t know what she knew about all the other girlfriends), how much she loved his father, how much she’d once missed him and feared for him — the man who was sleeping right then, safe and sound in Orpington, his belly full, by a Christmas fire.

Perhaps, if you turn it round, it was all a kind of early training itself, if she didn’t know it then — for when she ’d be sleeping by a Christmas fire and Grandpa Pete would really have gone missing for good. Maybe that’s what occurred to your dad, Kate, last Christmas.

Anyway, she told your dad that it wasn’t until the war was over and even a little while after that, that she dared to begin to tell him — and he may or may not have got the message — that, yes, he had a daddy, and, yes, he’d be coming home soon. Very soon now he was going to see him.

I don’t know quite how much of this he actually passed on to you, Kate, what slant he might have put on it. He told me too, later, that he’d told you over the washing-up about that time with his mum, and I thought it best not to probe. But while he was talking to you, Nick and I were having our own little Christmas heart-to-heart.

You and me, Nick, and of course Nelson. Nelson could have been listening in, if he’d wanted to. What do dogs know? He didn’t seemed to mind much that these were the streets of Putney, not the South Downs, or even to be thinking that there was something different and strange and sad about this Christmas. But I think we both had the same thought, Nick — that we were really taking Grandpa Pete for a walk.

Anyway, you suddenly said, looking at Nelson padding on ahead, “Did you and dad ever have a dog?”

And I said, “No.” And then I took a few silent paces. Then I said, “But we used to have a cat.”

And you said, after a bit of a pause too, “Yes, I know.”

You can be a dark horse, Nick. You’re not such a wary, cagey little brother these days.

“You know ? But it was before you were born. It was at Davenport Road.”

“Yes. There was a lilac tree there, wasn’t there? Kate told me once that Dad had said there was a cat under the lilac, and she’d kept looking and she’d never seen it. She’d thought Dad was playing a game. Kate can be pretty dumb, can’t she?”

“She can’t have been more than three, Nick. I’m amazed she remembered.”

“Yeah, but it was a real cat, right? It was a dead cat. You’d buried it under the lilac tree.”

“You worked that out? When you were three?”

“Later. That’s not the point. The thing is, why didn’t you ever tell us? Why didn’t you just tell us you’d had a cat?”

“I just have, Nick.”

“Yeah, after all these years.”

“Is it so important?”

I was holding your arm. The streets were deserted and curfew-quiet, as they only ever are at Christmas. Other people’s fairy lights twinkled at us in the dark. For the first time in my life I thought: I’m a mother, leaning on my son.

“What was its name?” you said.

“Otis. He was called Otis.”

Nelson padded on ahead.

“As in Otis Redding?”

“Yes, Nick. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of Otis Redding.”

“I haven’t heard of any other Otis. Till now. You and Dad had some thing about Otis Redding?”

“He was a lovely cat, Nick, a lovely black cat. He died the month before you and Kate were born. I think that’s why we’ve never told you.”

Your dad and Grandpa Pete always did the washing-up at Christmas, a tradition. They did it for the last time barely two weeks before Grandpa Pete died. It was the last father-and-son chat they ever had. You must have been thinking that, Kate, as Mike was talking to you.

I dare say Nick told you about Otis, though you’ve never brought it up. But I dare say that you remembered that thing about the lilac tree, and tomorrow — today — you’ll be thinking: well, now that cat’s finally jumped out.

But I don’t know if Mike told you the last bit of what his mum said to him all those Christmases ago. Maybe not. Or maybe the turkey carcass, sitting there amid all the wreckage on the kitchen table, would only have prompted him. She’d said that even when she knew Grandpa Pete was coming back, even when he did come back, she’d thought it might have been a mistake, to have talked up the event beforehand.

The thing is, prisoners of war didn’t just sit around in their camps cheerfully waiting to be liberated — any more than they all tried to escape. He’d been force-marched, in midwinter, along with thousands of others, a lot of whom died. Your Grandpa Pete had been at death’s door for a while, in a hospital, still in Germany. So had Charlie Dean. They never talked about it. I think they helped each other survive.

And even when he was well enough to be returned home he was hardly like the man Grannie Helen had last seen over a year before. This was in late June 1945, almost exactly fifty years ago. What a crowded month June is. Grandpa Pete was just a shadow of himself. He was home at last, but as Grannie Helen put it to your father that Christmas in Orpington, “My God, Mikey, there wasn’t much of him. He needed some feeding up. He was all skin and bone.”

NOW YOU’RE ABOUT to learn he was never your grandfather anyway, something he never had to learn himself. You see how far the ripples can go? Back in those days when you were about to be born we had to play a little at being god. What will the world be like in sixteen years’ time? It will be1995. Pete and Helen will have turned seventy…

Once, over sixteen years ago, your dad had to make another big announcement that you could say was the opposite of the one he’ll make today. Perhaps today you may even find yourselves wondering about it. He had to phone his mum and dad to give them a simple, happy message — and by then they must have been wondering if it was ever going to come. I was sitting listening while your dad made that call. He wanted me to be there. And Otis was there too, curled in my lap.

It follows, of course, that you were present too, if not exactly listening, though that call was very much about you. And Otis may already have known what else was in my lap, because though I was stroking him, he wasn’t purring. There’d come a time soon when Otis would get very poorly and wouldn’t sit in my lap at all. But you should know that though you never saw him, you were sometimes very close to Otis, very close indeed, close enough to have heard — if he’d been so inclined — his muffled purr.

But perhaps he wasn’t purring that day because he was listening, like me, to what your dad was saying into the phone.

“Paula’s pregnant” is what he said, the formula he chose. It wasn’t a lie, and why not give all credit to the mother? But what your dad never said, to his own parents, as someone making such a call might very understandably have said, was: “I’m going to be a dad.” Or: “You’re going to be grandparents.” He was very careful not to use — though he’d get to use them later, even without thinking — the words “grandparents” or “grandchildren.”