Graham Swift - Tomorrow

This would have been in the autumn of 1978. It was a false call he was making, you could say, a fraudulent call, though not in fact, in any word I heard uttered, untruthful. And what you should certainly know is that when your dad was making it he was genuinely, plainly excited. No one at the other end would have had cause for doubt or suspicion, and why on earth should they? Does anyone say or even think after such an opening statement: “Oh — and who is the father?”

Your dad put on a remarkably convincing act, but at the same time it wasn’t an act at all. It was like that moment when we first “saw” you. He didn’t act then. The truth is that though I’d worried about how he would handle that phone call, when it came to it, I actually felt jealous. I mean I felt jealous that I’d never be able to make one like it myself.

Since it was Grandpa Pete who answered (and your Grannie Fiona was already lost in fairyland). The first words your dad said were, “Hello Dad.” Your Grandpa Pete got the news first. Of course, sitting close by though I was, I couldn’t hear his side of the conversation, let alone see how he reacted — my situation was a bit like yours with Otis — but I can definitely vouch that he was very excited too. He was not only taken by surprise by what his son had to say, he was also rather overcome. There was quite a long pause, in fact, in which I think I could detect, just as surely as Mike could with his ear pressed to the receiver, the sound of a man being changed into a grandfather. It’s a distinctive sound, perhaps. It was as if Grandpa Pete, at the other end, had had to put down his receiver, turn around, take a few deep breaths, then come back as that transformed figure.

And that only made me doubly jealous. Although what I also felt was: well, that’s really done it now, Mikey, no going back. That’s the seal on it. You can hardly say now, “Actually — there’s something you should know.”

But the jealousy bit didn’t stop there. Because some while later your dad had to make another call and then, too, it was Grandpa Pete who answered.

“I’ve got something else to tell you, Dad. Even better. Twins.”

Then too he avoided the word “grandchildren.” But I was doubly-doubly jealous.

When Grannie Helen first knew she was pregnant, neither she nor Grandpa Pete would have had any special reason to think: what will the world be like when our child’s sixteen? What sort of world will it grow up into? Their world was pressing enough at the time — and could it get any worse? And when, just a little later, Grandpa Pete was shot down over Germany and taken prisoner, it must have been a comfort for him to know he had a child now on its way. It must have been quite something. And it must have meant a lot to him, if he had no idea when or if he’d see his home again, when the message at last got through to him in his prisoner-of-war camp, that his child had safely arrived and it was a son.

Perhaps during, or very soon after, that first phone call Mike made, Grandpa Pete would have shed a tear or two. Perhaps some pretty terrible memories would have flashed through his head. When he jumped from that burning plane he can’t possibly have supposed that one day he’d send that unborn son of his, when he ’d be twenty-one, a case of champagne, let alone that one day that same son would phone him to inform him, if not in so many words, that he was a grandfather. Biology’s a strange thing (but ask your father), it squanders millions of sperm as if the numbers don’t matter, but now and then, it seems, it can seize any single one of us and shake us to the core.

Now you’ll know that those tears you saw your father shed at his father’s funeral weren’t the simple tears you thought they were, if tears for a father are ever that simple. Now you’ll know that this man lying here is really the last of the Hooks, the very end of the line, the last of the Hooks of Sussex. Just as your Grandpa Dougie — your real grandfather — turned out to be, despite his three marriages, the last of the Campbells, or of his particular strand of them, a point he seemed eager to drive home at his funeral.

The last of the Hooks, the last of the Campbells. Does it really matter? The last of the Mohicans…It sounds all rather grand and heroic — and just a bit masculine, don’t you think, Kate? The last dodo…The last coelacanth…When everything’s done by cloning-to-order and genetic engineering, will it be the men who’ll miss more keenly the old torch-passing stuff of fatherhood or women who’ll miss the authentic taste of maternity?

It’s light, it’s really getting light.

“Uncle” Charlie and “Auntie” Grace were also at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. You always knew, of course, they were never a real aunt or uncle. All the same, they had to be there. They’d flown in from Spain as soon as they’d got the news and, standing there with their tanned faces in that January churchyard, they looked like some holiday couple who’d somehow boarded the wrong flight.

When Charlie jumped out of that same burning plane in 1944 he can’t have supposed, either, that one day, after a profitable career in light industry, he’d retire to a villa with a swimming pool near Málaga — the “Villa Sidcup” as he’d waggishly name it. But he must surely have been thinking as he stood there among those gravestones that he was the last one left now, the very last one of that old crew, the crew that must have been, if only briefly — if just for the space of a night — a bit like some specially put together family.

You both know the story. Grandpa Pete the navigator and Charlie (“What else, with my name?”) the tail gunner, the only two out of seven who’d survived, and then met up again in the same prison camp. It would form a bond, a lasting bond, and so it did. “Dean and Hook.” Now it was just “Dean.” The frost had melted, but his head had its own frosting of close-cropped, almost white hair.

Charlie, of course, had Grace standing beside him, holding his arm: a whole other partnership. But, however it comes about, to be the last one left, the only one left of just two, isn’t that the worst thing ever? Worse than being the end of any line?

But Charlie didn’t just have Grace, you’ll remember, he had Nelson. Given the circumstances of Grandpa Pete’s death, Nelson absolutely had to be there too. And, given those circumstances and Nelson’s manifest capacity for loyalty, you might have thought he would have attached himself now to Grannie Helen, or to Mike. But he attached himself, to everyone’s surprise and vague embarrassment, to Charlie. Charlie stood by his old pal’s grave with Grace on one side and on the other a dog devotedly squatting on its haunches.

Did you miss your grandfather, were you grieving for him? Will you grieve for him now? You didn’t weep. You were fourteen. Nor did Charlie weep, even with Nelson there to induce him, he just stood very still. Only your father wept. Even Grannie Helen controlled her tears, as you would have noticed, though she had most cause to weep, and her son was weeping beside her. A tougher generation? And she’d had all that early training.

Would I like to be a grandmother? Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question. Though it’s a legitimate one, as legitimate as for a woman to ask, at thirty-two: am I going to be a mother? Though, for goodness’ sake, I’m only forty-nine — I still have a whole decade on your father. And “Grannie Paulie,” that’s just plain ghastly.

And the short answer, anyway, is that even the word sends a chill through me, the word itself scares me. As if the next word can only be “widow.” I’ll settle for being a mother. Mike’s wife and a mother: my complete and exact position in life.