by Graham Swift
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.
And a world expert on Piazetta. And in more than thirty years of buying and selling, he hasn’t lost the love which is my love too. No disrespect meant to your father. It’s not a case of one thing or the other, and it’s not confessing to anything treacherous to say that when I was starting at Walker’s, in the years after I’d married your dad, before you were born, it was Simon who really brought out in me the second passion of my life. No disrespect, either, to you.
Art’s not for the very young? For you it’s just “stuff.” You have to have grown up and had a taste of loss. I’ll explain that later. Art’s just compensation? I’m not saying that either. And I’m definitely not saying I could imagine an alternative life for myself with—God forbid—Simon Fitch. But two people who in most other respects may be entirely mismatched can still thrill together to a third thing, a passion shared. The light falling round people in a painting which is like the light falling round real people too, except it can’t go out. What do you care for such things? The light which fell today (yesterday, I mean), just sunny June light shafting into the narrow streets between Jermyn Street and Pall Mall. What was so special about it?
But “better at art than life,” that’s what I think Simon would confess of himself, if you ever dared to press his rawest nerve, to prod his art dealer’s solar plexus. He’d like some compensation the other way round. At sixty-one, the light, in that respect, is starting to look a little thin.
I know he’s fond of me. More than that, possibly. It’s he, perhaps, who at one of our lunches should grasp my wrist and unburden his breast, but it hasn’t happened in over twenty years and I think my job is safe.
I think Simon thinks—if we set aside the “Walker and Fitch wouldn’t be Walker and Fitch without you” and other such tripe he talks—that what’s lying here now, under this roof, may be a sort of perfection, as good as it gets. Art and life. If only he’d found the same recipe. And I can’t disillusion him. I love my husband. I love you, my precious ones, I love this home. And Simon’s been here, of course, and seen it and you, and you’ve seen him. You treated him, the first time at least—paraded in your jimjams before bedtime—like some visiting crown prince. You almost bowed and curtsied (but I won’t remind you). Simon Fitch and his stately wife, Veronica, for dinner.
But he was enchanted by you, always asks after you. And to cap it all, I think he’s always been enchanted by what we’ll call the “Living World Story”—by how his indispensable junior colleague became in time and in turn rather out-shone, professionally speaking, by her once obscurely occupied and poorly paid husband. He once proclaimed, like some minister who’d personally blessed our union, that your dad and I were “Science and Art.” Now look at that splendid pairing.
If I were to tell Simon the little truth behind that splendour—that even you don’t know about yet—I don’t think he’d adjust his appraisal. I don’t think he’d suck thoughtfully at his half-rims, step back and (as he can do) declare the picture not to be genuine after all. I think he’d just relish the entrusting and the opportunity to protect.
But the thought that I might have spilled out to Simon at lunch today, over a plate of crab linguini, the full facts of this imminent weekend is—unthinkable. Poor Simon. But unthinkable.
And anyway now I’d had, abruptly, to cancel and, in the secret circumstances, to be blunt about my reasons. Though I was a little mean and sly.
“Another lunch date, Paula? Who is this special client?”
“It’s Mike.”
“Ah. Well—far be it from me…”
The sunshine fell too into Simon’s office, onto his crisp striped (Jermyn Street) shirt.
It wasn’t lost on Simon, of course, that it was very odd that Michael Hook, head of Living World and a busy man, should want or feel it proper to phone his wife in her busy office at ten-thirty on a Friday to press her to lunch.
“Well, of course. Of course, Paula.” He looked suddenly solicitous—and intrigued. “You must have—something important, I dare say, to discuss.”
“Yes,” I said, being tactful.
But not discuss actually. Just mark, just observe what day it was, which Simon couldn’t possibly have guessed. And it was a fine one in June and your dad had a simple plan. Not even a restaurant. A restaurant seemed ceremonious and conspicuous. Mark, not celebrate. And this was lunch, not quite yet that actual terminal supper, which we’d already agreed had to be simply at home, and absolutely without any attempt at ceremony, with you.
I can say now that that would have been a tricky undertaking, I’m not sure how we’d have managed it, and I should thank you for getting us out of it. Since what, in the event, did we find? You were both out celebrating, your recent release from exams. There were separate, dutiful phone messages from each of you to say you had your separate Friday-evening plans, hastily fixed up, it seemed, like our lunch. The days have long gone for asking permission: “Fine. Have fun. Home by midnight.” This was hardly a night anyway for taking you to task.
And in fact you were both home before eleven. They can’t have been such riotous celebrations. Neither of you seemed especially worse for wear, and neither of you had been aware till you came in that you’d both been doing similar things. Of course, you were immediately and automatically uninterested in that fact. These days you don’t like anything that smacks of synchronicity. Your lack of enquiry after each other meant that your dad and I couldn’t do much enquiring either. It turned out, this last day, to be one of those not so uncommon days which pass with our exchanging barely a handful of words with you. How different tomorrow will be.
After some fridge-raiding, you both seemed ready to go to bed, or at least to your rooms. They’re tired, we said condoningly, clearing up after you, those exams have caught up with them. Ordinary parental concession. Soon afterwards we came up too.
I hope you had fun anyway. If you think they were not particularly memorable evenings, you may find that you’ll always remember them nonetheless. You weren’t to know there was something else—to mark. Conceivably, on this of all nights, I might still be waiting up for you, listening out for you, in this rain. By now, I’d be seriously worried. But you’re safely tucked up and I’m telling you this story.
I left my office a little after twelve-thirty and walked towards Lower Regent Street. Your dad left his office in a cab. I met him at the top of the Duke of York’s Steps. I’d called in, on my way, at the sandwich bar in Crown Passage. We walked down the steps and across the Mall to the park.
That simple thing: a picnic, lunch in the park. Not celebratory, nor on the other hand so solemn. Once upon a time, before you were around, your dad and I quite often used to meet “under the Duke of York”—it was one of our places—and walking to meet him today I had the feeling, though you won’t especially want to know this, that I was twenty years younger.
Your dad was there first, his jacket hooked in one finger, patrolling that odd stage of a place like an actor silently rehearsing. I saw him first, then he saw me. The strange little quivering interval when that happens. I remembered that too. He smiled and waved. I smiled and waved and I lifted up my sandwich bag like a trophy.
We had lunch today rather like you did, I imagine, sprawled with your friends on the grass, in a state of post-exam languor, in some corner of the playing fields at your respective schools. Perhaps you’ll always remember doing that. The warm grass under your bellies. You’ll see yourselves locked in the sunny amber of one exam-taking June.
But your dad and I allowed ourselves the dignity of two deckchairs, our exams are still to come.
I said, “I stood up Simon for this,” handing your dad a baguette. He said, “I hope you’d
have stood up anyone.” Sunshine poured through the plane trees. The deckchairs and the lunchtime crowds around us made me think, despite the greenness, of Brighton beach, and I wondered if he was having the same thought. I’m all in favour of synchronicity. He said, almost with a little catch of apology, “I just needed to see you.” As if we hadn’t been married for twenty-five years and sleeping together for nearly thirty, as if we’d met only last week and still couldn’t bear to be out of each other’s sight for more than two hours. But I remembered that feeling too.
7
HE CAME CLEAN about the champagne. It hadn’t cost him a penny. I didn’t think any the less of him, nor, I think, did Linda and Judy. It even made the day go better (could it have gone better?), since it was rapidly and unanimously agreed that if it was his birthday champagne, then it must be his birthday. His birthday had been in January, but it was still his birthday or it was his birthday all over again. Or rather, if no one said this at the time, it was our birthday, it was your dad’s and my birthday, if such a thing can be, which I’ll confirm it can. You two aren’t the only ones to have had a joint inauguration. That day—March 19th, 1966—was our birthday, it was our launch party, celebrated, appropriately enough, by the edge of the sea. The ship of our future, which now includes sixteen years of your past, was launched that day and was christened, of course, with champagne.
Will you have such days in your life, will each of you have such days? I hope so. Nothing could make me happier than the knowledge that you will. It’s a stupid and a superstitious thought—a very stupid one to be having tonight—but there must be stored up for us all only so many possible happy days, and my fear is that your dad and I will have taken more than our share, we haven’t left enough for you.
“A bottle for each of you,” your father said, having sped through the streets of Brighton on his bicycle. By now, Linda, Judy and I were fully dressed, even a little over-dressed it could be said (a great deal of Biba) for a Saturday lunchtime. But what do you wear exactly for such an unexpected party? We stood in a row like prize winners while your dad unloaded his duffel bag onto the kitchen table.
“Spare some for me,” he said.
He could do no wrong. Outside, the clouds had dissolved and the sun shone approvingly. Second birthdays definitely occur, lives begin all over again. I was a little in love with Doctor Pope? I admit it. No disrespect to your father. And I was a little in love, as every female student of English was, with John Donne. The words had begun to echo in my head: “And now good morrow…” And now good morrow.
But your dad did the honourable thing. With his bag empty and those bottles on the table he looked a bit like a man who’d been stopped at customs.
“Actually,” he said, “they’re from my dad.”
From his dad? How could his dad possibly have known about or felt so generously towards the three sisters of Osborne Street?
And then your father, who’d already explained to me, in the small hours of the morning, quite a lot about his father, explained to all three of us about his twenty-first birthday back in January.
We felt like honorary daughters. That doesn’t quite work, I know—it would have been to construct the most bizarre family. But for a moment your Grandpa Pete was the talking point, as he’d soon become the toast of three girls in Brighton. If only he’d known. Each of us with our bottle. He must be quite a dad, Mike’s dad, we agreed, we would definitely drink to him.
Quite a dad, I privately thought, champagne apart, just to have produced Mike. And quite something that he’d sent a whole case. This was the 1960s, not the 1980s, champagne wasn’t like fruit juice. Most dads would have settled in those days for sending their son a single bottle, on grounds of expense, on grounds of sheer sense of proportion. Let’s not go overboard. What would your Grandpa Pete have got, after all, for his own twenty-first birthday? A food parcel?
This must all seem so far away to you. As if that “maisonette” in Brighton—but it must still be there—is as distant, in its own way, as some awful camp in Germany. Your dad told me, later, that he’d been overwhelmed to get those twelve bottles. It was like receiving an inheritance. The truth was he wouldn’t even have said he was particularly close to his father, and here was this sudden bounty. That accompanying note, apart from the joke about “Mumm” and wishing him happy birthday, had simply said, “Have fun.” Your dad showed it to me. And he still has it. Your dad and me, we’re sentimental that way. He got it out and looked at it again after Grandpa Pete died.
But he was so moved by those twelve bottles that he couldn’t simply regard them as bottles of fun, he couldn’t just knock them back at the first chance. He even had the thought, since there were twelve of them, that he should broach only one bottle a month for the whole of his year of being twenty-one—a resolution that soon got broken. But it was still a miracle that he had those three bottles left in March.
I think your father, in January 1966, underwent a moment of historical, of filial humbling. Twenty-one: it’s the real ripe age, perhaps, and you’re only sixteen. I think he paused to appreciate, not to take for granted, his own good fortune. Remember, we hadn’t even met yet. And maybe that’s why he invoked, on our first night together, his own once-captive dad. What kind of fun was there to be had then? I think your father, a scientist by vocation and therefore surely not prone to superstition, may have said to himself: but put three bottles by just in case, as safeguards. Save three bottles for a rainy day.
Tomorrow looks like being a rainy day, my darlings.
But that March day, years ago, was anything but a rainy day: a day in March that was more like a day in May.
And what I couldn’t quite tell him yet, in the circumstances, was that my dad, the very awkwardly mentioned and very nearly coitus-interruptive High Court judge, had a whole cellar in Kensington of magnificent and expensive wines, including, of course, a fine range of champagne. It had become in recent years his favourite room in the house. The fact is that in those days before Fiona and then Margaret siphoned off their share, your mother (who’s scarcely hard-up now) was something of a little rich girl. But I didn’t want to scare or prejudice your dad, and certainly not upstage him.
And anyway that champagne we drank on Brighton beach was the best I’ve ever tasted. I can still see the little dull-red chain of roses round the rim of the hastily shop-bought waxed-paper cups. Champagne glasses? You’d have had to be joking. Lunch that day—and here I can report that your dad really did pay for everything—was the standard stuff of the beach-front caffs, an emphasis on greasy chips. But it was washed down with bubbly. We had no ice bucket, but that was no problem: the English Channel in March, a pocket of pebbles at the water’s edge, and the tide was almost full. How everything came together. We agreed on ten minutes’ chilling time, then settled for five.
And there is that great advantage of champagne, that you don’t need to remember a corkscrew. But I didn’t forget to keep one of the corks. The other two, I decided, were Linda’s and Judy’s business, perhaps they just floated out to sea. But I kept my cork. It’s precious beyond reckoning. Did I say I can be sentimental? It’s in a special box I have where I’ve kept all kinds of stuff. I’m a foolish old mother in that respect. Pressed flowers from Craiginish. Your primary-school artistic triumphs, as valuable to me—and your mother knows about art—as Tintorettos. Then there’s a little collar, also now a dull red, with a small bell on it and a name tag. More of that later.
Brighton beach in the middle of March: not always inviting. But it turned as warm as summer. The sea was calm and compliant and grew bluer by the minute, and the waves, lapping gently in and breaking with a silver flash then turning to creamy foam round first three, then two and then a single bottle of champagne, might as well have been champagne themselves.
By that third bottle, if your father had told me that he’d planned that day long in advance, foreseen it and planned it in every detail—as he’d planned, all along, those special transitory roles for Li
nda and Judy—I would, of course, have utterly believed him. But how could he or either of us have known that day would unfold as it did, so perfectly? Some days are just gifts, some things are just gifts. He’d planned the weather? He’d planned that the tide would be so co-operatively full and then—but it’s only what tides do—slowly, respectfully creep away? That the afternoon would turn gold and dreamy, and that as the light deepened and the tide slipped further out, Linda and Judy, without any prompting but with immaculate, if drunken, timing, would get up and slip away too, guests at our feast who knew nonetheless when they ought to be going? As if they weren’t leaving us where everyone could see, on the pebbles of Brighton beach, but in some special, private, garlanded bed.
But we hardly noticed them going or heard their softly crunching, retreating footsteps, since, nestled up to each other in a sort of gauzy blanket of champagne, and not having had much sleep the night before, we’d drifted away ourselves.
8
WE WERE BOTH “only” children. Do “onlies” attract “onlies?” And we were both “war babies”—your fearsome parents—me in the sense that I was conceived in the war, Mike in the true and classic sense that he was born in it, and hurriedly produced, like armies of other little war babies, to be what was left of his dad should his dad soon not be there. For a little while that’s exactly how it must have looked. Your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen acted only just in the nick of time, since shortly after she became pregnant Grandpa Pete went “missing,” a word which often meant the most dreadful thing possible.
1945: how weird it sounds now to give it as your date of birth, like saying 1789 or 1492.
