Graham Swift - Tomorrow

Your dad had a bicycle, chained to the railings between us and next door. The Mike-bike, which came to be there quite a lot. He used to ride it in a crazy, splayed-kneed way to stop his flares getting caught in the chain. He disdained cycle clips, like a true man. That Saturday he rode it not to the nearest off-licence, but, as fast as he could, to his room across town, where there were still, remarkably, three bottles left from the whole case his dad had sent him for his twenty-first birthday in January, two months before. Dean and Hook must have been doing well. With those three bottles dangling dangerously in a duffel bag from his handlebars, he came whizzing back — I still picture his furious purple legs — true to his word.

That day on Brighton beach we drank champagne provided by your father. Though it had really come from his dad, your Grandpa Pete. I’ve often wondered if he ever knew. Did Mike tell him? For some delicate reason, I’ve never asked. It would have been a bit tricky, perhaps, for Mike to have given the full and complete details, but he might have glossed a bit, just given the gist.

I even thought once of telling your Grandpa Pete myself — or of checking if he knew. This was at our wedding, or at the little reception afterwards in the back garden in Kensington: another occasion when champagne flowed. My dad had assured me that it would be “nothing too grand, just like you want.” But the champagne was vintage Taittinger. Mike’s dad’s champagne had been Mumm, Cordon Rouge. Though it had been a whole case and it had meant he could make a neat little joke — Mike kept the card: “And Love from Mumm.”

I’m sure that wasn’t what stopped me: some fastidiousness that your Grandpa Pete might feel outclassed in his choice of champagne. He was looking mellow and tipsy enough, as I was, on my father’s stuff, and this might have been the perfect moment for some slightly daring daughter-in-law and father-in-law bonding. I was the blushing bride and I might have made your Grandpa Pete blush. For whatever reason, the moment passed. And I think he never did know. A minor secret.

Grandpa Pete would have been not yet fifty then — at our wedding. How weird. You’ll remember how back in January, on your dad’s fiftieth, we all felt a bit sorry for him. Just a year on from his dad’s death, which had been so badly, and suddenly, timed: less than two weeks before Mike turned forty-nine. No birthday for him that year, though not a big number at least. But now with every successive birthday, he’d have to cross that sad ditch first, the anniversary of his father’s death. And this year was his fiftieth, and his dad wouldn’t be around to see it.

Your Grandpa Pete: your first death. You thought, quite reasonably, that on his fiftieth birthday your dad was a little subdued, not so much because of the growing-old factor (is fifty old ?), but because he was thinking of his dad. True. But I know he was thinking of something else too, something still to come. It was a quiet fiftieth, anyway. And your dad rather likes to celebrate, I’ll say that for him, he’s good at celebrating. He loves nothing better than to pop the champagne, and in these last few years, courtesy of Living World, he’s been able to do it quite a lot. That day in Brighton was a precedent, perhaps.

But here’s a complication. There’s a cause for celebration coming up, as you know, very soon, in just a week’s time. It’s our wedding anniversary. Not just that, it’s our twenty-fifth. We’re about to turn silver. You may already have bought us (it troubles me to think about it) some special silvery present, and you may also have been wondering why nothing’s been said on the subject so far, and surmised that your dad has been keeping some surprise up his sleeve.

Well, he has, but not for me. It’s just how it’s come about: it’s a year of big numbers, and of bad timings. And you’ll understand in a little while why it’s been a thorny question between us: our anniversary, I mean. What to do ?

Your dad’s all for celebrating it, that’s his natural instinct. It’s about us, he says, there’s us anyway. He wants us to go away for the weekend, as couples often do on these occasions, to celebrate us. That, of course, would mean leaving you here by yourselves. No problem, you may think, what would be the big deal? Except, this year, you might not actually agree.

Your dad says it would be a good thing nonetheless. It would give you time to think, to talk things through, to be by yourselves. I’m not so sure. To me it feels like absconding, it feels like deserting my babies. And I know, I know: you’re sixteen.

But not so long ago Mike told me he’d booked us into a hotel anyway. He actually did it months ago — it’s that kind of place, a five-star country hotel. The Gifford Park. We had a bit of a row. I suppose it was mean of me, it was pretty foul of me, arguing with my husband about his generous arrangement for our special wedding anniversary. But it could be mean to you, you’ll realise — our just waltzing off.

He said, well, we could always cancel, any time. A little soft touch of blackmail. And, oh, I could see where he was coming from: an escape plan, a safety net — not having that bolt hole ready in France. He said, well, let’s just see, let’s leave the booking standing and let’s see.

I’m not sure he should even have made that booking without telling me first. It could never have been, this year, like some straightforward, happy surprise. But that’s how he is, he likes the big and generous gesture. You’ll understand.

HE MADE A GESTURE even about today — by which now I mean yesterday, Friday. He called me at work to say we should meet for lunch in town. We hadn’t made any prior plans, but he called me to say we couldn’t just let it pass unmarked: our “last day.” His last day, your last day, I’m not sure what to call it. And I’m not sure it was a case of “marking,” more of nerves and solidarity, but I had to allow him his prerogative. The condemned man’s choice of supper. I think my notion of our “last day” had been of something entirely indistinguishable from any other: a Friday, a working day, the more workaday and busier, perhaps, the better.

But the truth is I was glad of your dad’s last-minute call. I can’t say my own nerves have been steady. And I too had begun to feel there should be some — gesture. Though I didn’t think it should come from me, like an offering of pity.

But I was glad of your dad’s call in another way. You’ll think this absurd of me, I’m not your age, after all. It was like that call you get when you think you may not get a call, when you even think that something may be ending. That simple word in my ear: “Paulie?”

The only small problem was that I had to cancel, abruptly, my lunch with Simon. I had to stand up my boss. And all week long, I think, Simon, who notices things, had been noticing my nervousness, my not quite sparkling form. Everything okay, Paula?

Every month or so Simon likes to have a one-to-one lunch with one of his directors, and this was my turn. All part, as he sees it, of his caring and counselling and not merely boss-like role. He nearly always begins, after the first sip of wine, with a: “Now — tell me all your troubles.” A wry joke by now, since I never seem to have any to tell him. Though I have a hunch that nothing would do more for Simon’s sense of his own worth than if I were to grasp his wrist across the table and pour out some tale of woe, even show signs of wanting to cry on his shoulder. And perhaps this week he’d been scenting the possibility.

A complicated soul, my boss. The soul of sweetness, charm and urbanity, but a discontented soul who, since he has no envy or spite and no obvious cause for them (“unhappily married art dealer with a house in Holland Park” doesn’t quite get the sympathy vote), rumbles not with anger but with a strange thwarted charity.