Graham Swift - Tomorrow

But does Grannie Helen, now in her second year of widowhood, draw comfort and strength from being a grandmother, and from knowing that Grandpa Pete died a grandfather? You see what confronts you? You’ll understand now how, despite our sixteen-year rule, both Mike and I, after his dad’s funeral, went through a fever of feeling that this might be the right time, the best time even, never mind empty embargoes. You’d behaved in such a grown-up way, after all, and what could be more appropriate: after the death of one father?

But it would have been too sudden, too cruel, at such a time. And Mike simply wanted to keep you — can I put it like that, and will you blame him? — that year and a half longer. He wanted to “keep you.” And, anyway, suppose that at that already trying time, and through whatever chain of unfortunate reactions, it should have found its way to his mother? What a further blow. And what an injustice: that Mike’s father would have gone to his grave a self-believing grandparent and his mother would have the whole double burden of knowledge. You see what faces you? There was still that official margin of another eighteen months.

And that’s passed now anyway, or has only hours left to run. It’s dawn on the seventeenth of June, a wet and murky dawn, a reluctant sort of dawn. So it should be. And this man lying here, snoring gently, his familiar features reassembling out of the dark, is still sound asleep — how amazing — as if he’s determined to remain so. “This man”: is he no more than that now? I was once Mustardseed, my darlings, Titania’s little helper. O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

And — how amazing: that’s a bird out there, singing clearly, despite the falling rain, doing what birds must do at dawn in June. It’s not a blackbird, I think. A thrush? A robin? Mike would know, he knows these things. I could wake him, ask him.

I’m afraid of Grannie Helen. I was afraid of her at that funeral. Were you a bit afraid, too, to look her closely in the eye? I didn’t know how to comfort her. My own mother’s example didn’t help me. But Grannie Helen certainly looked, intently and often, at you. Did you notice that? As if perhaps you were really her best comfort on that day, or she was just, perhaps, full of admiration for you. How big you were now, how you’d shot up, not those two infants any more. And it’s one of the features of these sixteen years, which may seem to you to have been immeasurably long — they’re your whole life, after all — that they’ve sometimes seemed to us to rush you along, as if every month has produced some new version of you. There’s been a sort of wild comfort in it, even as it’s frightened us: all that amazing room for change.

But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen, who at seventy-two, we can fairly say, has stopped growing and changing and is just who she is. I’m afraid of that word “widow.” I think she’s probably awake now too, at Coombe Cottage — I feel sure she is — watching the grey light loom and listening to the thrum of the rain. I’m so simply afraid of Mike here no longer being here, it’s the fear of my life. And I know this isn’t the time for me to think of myself and I know it’s up to you, but please don’t take him from me today.

But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen in another way. I have to say this to you too. I’ve seen her look at you intently before. Fair enough, she’s your grandmother — or she doesn’t know she isn’t. I’ve seen her look at you and then at Mike, then back again at you. Fair enough, she’s a mother too. But mothers know things, they can just tell.

I think at that funeral, at which she didn’t cry, she might have been thinking of how successfully she’d protected your Grandpa Pete. Now it might be her own son she’s protecting, if not quite in the same way. Mothers only want the best for their children. It could be that as from today she’ll be protecting you too, from the lie that you’ll think you’ll be keeping from her. If that’s how it’s to be, if that’s how you choose.

Mike wants us to go to the Gifford Park, just those few miles from Birle. A coincidence? A coincidence on top of another coincidence, known only to me. There’ll have to be some first time, anyway, when Mike and I see Grannie Helen, knowing that, now, you know. There’ll have to be a first time for you. And when that time comes for me I’ll have to look at her, knowing that you know, but thinking also that she might have guessed all along. Are you with me? And what kind of double-double dissimulation and treading on eggs is that going to entail? I could do without that, too, next weekend.

Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it’s all just the stress of this situation and all in my overstretched imagination. It’s dawn, one week after your sixteenth birthday. It’s raining, it’s teeming. Some little bedraggled bird I can’t identify, which no doubt has a nest somewhere which is getting drenched too, is singing its heart out. Perhaps I’m wrong, but sometimes mothers can just tell things. In any case, they only want the best for their children.