by Graham Swift
Before your Grandpa Dougie’s divorce the wealth was probably at its peak. From then on the depredations began. But, more and more, I think my father somehow, strangely, connived in them: not depredations so much as some gradual, stumbling process of divestment. He was sixty-six, even then. He would marry again twice, and both failed experiments. It was as if he was really, circuitously but slyly, working his way back to being an unencumbered bachelor, a bachelor of law, though, now, of course, a judge. Whatever else might be taken from him, no one could take from him those robes and authority of office.
It’s not just snails who need those shells, Mikey.
And whether or not those depredations were part of some weird plan, I can’t deny that your dad and I helped significantly to deplete the stock. In 1970, when Mike and I married, my father effectively bought us a house. His argument then, when I rather weakly protested, was that it would be so much less for Margaret “to get her hands on” (things were already approaching that stage), an argument that was hard to resist, setting aside the more basic one of gift horses and mouths. But like most of my father’s kindhearted impulses, this wedding gift of a house—or the money to buy one with—caused all sorts of ructions and tensions.
It embarrassed your father and only made him wish, I think, to persist all the more in being the penniless postgraduate and servant of pure science. And it embarrassed his father who, though by then Dean and Hook were prospering and though he’d sent your dad that champagne, certainly wasn’t in the business of making presents of houses. We should stand on our own feet. Young people today—they don’t know the half. All the standard phrases. But how they catch you out much later, my darlings, how they sidle through my head right now, about you.
I think that gap between your dad and his dad widened again around this time. I think your Grandpa Pete was rather confused, and I can understand. A son who worked with snails, in a state of near-pauperdom, while receiving preposterous handouts from a High Court judge who, if he had to be bowed and scraped to, was plainly a fool: more money than sense. Not to mention his flighty wife.
In the war, as you know, Grandpa Pete was a navigator.
But thank God he always liked me, if I say so myself (and I’d once done my own bit of quaking, in Orpington). Thank God he seemed not to fault his son on that point. At our wedding, as it turned out, he shook hands with my father and they embraced like long-lost friends. Weddings can do this. My father came up only to your Grandpa Pete’s nose, though he was the senior by nearly twenty-five years.
And thank God it was a house in never-fashionable, even obscure Herne Hill. It wasn’t a bijou gift-house in a Kensington mews. Nor was it a dive in Earl’s Court. It was leafy but affordable, sensible and child-rearing suburbia. It was Dulwich, as the estate agents said, at two-thirds the price, and the area would soon “come up,” though it never really did. It was a house which, in all the circumstances, your Grandpa Pete could approve of, not that he had any real say. And the truth is I was the one, with some help from my father, who’d mainly steered your dad and me towards it.
I’m talking, of course, though I’m talking of twenty-five years ago, of your first house. You were there for three years of your life. You can dimly remember it: 27 Davenport Road.
But this house, which we’re all in now, is the real house of your life: your life until now. And you could say that this too came from your Grandpa Dougie. Or rather from his death. We couldn’t have bought it otherwise and though we needed somewhere bigger—you were growing fast—this house, if it hadn’t all begun to happen for Mike, would have been a big and risky jump beyond our real means. Now it’s come into its own, it’s even started to look like a staging post itself from which we might move on.
But there was never any question of that, before tomorrow. And it was never, even at the outset, for ourselves. It was for you. You were three years old when we left Davenport Road. Your memories were meeting up with you. There were thirteen years to go—or that was our working plan. We wanted to offer you the best we could get, the best we could provide. We wanted to put those thirteen years of precious memory in the best possible box. Though you have your Grandpa Dougie, who you never saw, mostly to thank.
Rutherford Road, Putney, on the fringe of the Heath—now one of the most “sought-after” streets in the area. I’ve always thought it should be called “Rectory Row,” since each broad-fronted semi looks as if it’s really aching to be in its own sub-rural island of gentility. Your Grandpa Dougie, who died aged seventy-seven, was just a little older than this house we’re in. We once told you, years ago, that it was “Edwardian,” and you told me, Nick, not so long ago, that your sister used to think of it as “Edward,” as if it was a person, a secret friend, a being. Though I’m not so sure you weren’t really in on it too, the Edward thing.
“Kate can be a real dope, can’t she, Mum?”
Well, if it was a person, if Edward had kept his eyes and ears open, he might have whispered to both of you a secret or two.
And what doubly struck me about this little fancy was that Edward was the name of your great-uncle, Edward Hook, usually known, in fact, as Eddie, your Grandpa Pete’s older brother, who can’t have meant much more to you than a gravestone in Birle churchyard you’d been shown once when you were small. But perhaps it made an impression, a connection. And Eddie had once owned Coombe Cottage, outside Birle, which despite its name was actually more like some (mid-Victorian) rectory.
But come back—all these houses!—to Napier Street, Kensington. Come back to when my father was a mere sixty-six and your dad, who was twenty-one, was quaking on that white-pillared porch. Poor man, he’s been there quite a while.
And now my father is opening that black door…
They got on like a house on fire. I knew, I’d promised, I would have bet your father that they would. Mike may have thought that when he stood there, face to face with Justice Campbell, he was being rigorously sized up. And so he was. But I was being sized up too. I saw the little glances that bounced off your dad onto me. My father was sizing us up as a pair.
Your dad at this time was just my boyfriend of two months. What a word: boyfriend. But I think my father knew—a true judge, in some things—even before he ushered us into his house, that your dad would be a permanent fixture in my life. There was even a little dart of a look in his eye just for me, that made me think, for the first time: perhaps I should try and get to like this Margaret.
Your dad was wearing, apart from the Chelsea boots, his best black flares and his best cream round-collared shirt. And my dad was wearing—what else?—a cardigan. A rather chunky cardigan, in fact, for a warmish day in May, with those buttons like little footballs: navy blue, over a pale-pink shirt. Blue cord trousers, suede loafers. Mr. Justice Campbell in Saturday clothes.
Though I had every faith your father would pass with flying colours, I knew there would be two principal tests. One was that first clapping of eyes on the front porch—already sailed through. The other was the wine cellar. I’d already told your dad that it was the hub, the nerve centre, and that if he was asked down there, as he almost certainly would be, then it was best not to venture any opinions, but simply to be guided, boggle and agree. Not a difficult thing to do. I couldn’t believe Mike wouldn’t be invited—the only question was how long the invitation would take.
It seemed to me it took rather less than a minute. I didn’t mind at all that I was summarily deserted, and I absolutely knew I shouldn’t tag along. This was a critical moment. Never mind the opening chit-chat, never mind the rest of the house. Your Grandpa Dougie felt we needed something decent to drink.
“Er, Michael—come with me, would you?”
I waited upstairs while subterranean bonding occurred. A judge of men, a judge of wine. It was perhaps five minutes. I looked round the room: the padded-leather fireguard, the tall gilt mirror over the fireplace, the Staffordshire dogs on the mantelpiece, the De Brant still-life in the alcove (we have it now). I thought:
this is my former home.
Your father told me later that after a memorable guided tour my father had picked out a bottle and said (though it was three in the afternoon and more like tea-time) that we should drink it now, right away—by way of welcome. Your father had concurred. My father had patted the bottle. Then, with his non-dusty hand, he’d patted Mike on the shoulder and said, “Call me Dougie.”
By the time they reappeared I could see that your father had lost all traces of his recent trepidation. The only uncertainty left in his mind, I could tell, was the question of how this sixty-six-year-old teddy bear of a man could ever actually have become a judge. A question that had once puzzled me.
That evening, now that your dad had met my dad and so plainly hit it off, I told your father something that in all our two months, so far, of pillow-talking, I’d never whispered to him. Something, in fact, I’d never shared with anyone before. Now I’m sharing it with you.
I waited till we were on the train back to Brighton from Victoria. Then I told him how when I was only thirteen I’d gone, all by myself, in the school holidays, to Court Number Six, Royal Courts of Justice, where I knew my father would be presiding, precisely in order to solve that baffling question. It still seems to me an intrepid thing for a thirteen-year-old to have done.
I’d sat in the public gallery, no one had stopped me, and I’d received a small, unforgettable shock. Because there before me—below me—was a man in scarlet robes and a grey wig, who, though I unquestionably knew him, I wouldn’t have recognised as my father. A man who was fearsomely, awesomely in his element, who ruthlessly, I could see, if I hardly understood a word of what was going on, cut through the quibbles and chicaneries of lesser, if important, wigged men and left no one in any doubt who was in charge in that courtroom. Podgy of stature though he familiarly was, he dominated, he towered.
I’d felt suddenly terrified, I told your father. Worse, I’d felt suddenly guilty—and it seemed the right place for guilt—to be watching at all in this way, on the sly. Suppose he were to look up and spot me there, small as I was and now trying desperately to look smaller and to keep my head down, in the back row.
Maybe he had seen me. I didn’t think so. But then how would I have known? Since I’d felt suddenly, unnervingly sure that if he had, he wouldn’t have let the recognition upset for a moment his superlative act. There would have been no sudden fluster, no sudden, inexplicable and unjudgelike smile. He was Mr. Justice Campbell. I was just a child in the gallery.
Had he seen me? I still wonder now. I’ll never know. But surely, if he had seen me, he would have told me, at some time at least, when I was grown up. Before he died. Paulie, I saw you, that day.
I told your father all this—not that last part, of course—as we clacked back to Sussex through that May evening, and I told him not to tell anyone. As if he would have done, as if he was going to broadcast it. But it was a measure of my thirteen-year-old’s fear, even then. And I think I scared Mike just a bit—mellow and sedated as he still was from my dad’s wine. Yes, it had been that same man.
We’ve never even talked about it again since, though I’ve certainly thought about it, and I think so has Mike. In fact, I think he may have been thinking about it quite a lot recently. I think he may have been thinking about that smaller version of me, seeing a man I did and didn’t know.
The bottle my father brought up from the cellar was a Clos du Roi, ’55. Some bottles, some vintages you never forget. (Mumm non-vintage—but for all time.) When we moved in here to Rutherford Road, we moved in with you, of course, but also with some eight or nine cases of extremely fine wine. It was all that was left by then. My father may have had to do some selling up. On the other hand, if you want to divest yourself of liquid property, there’s a simple way of going about it.
He died aged seventy-seven, a single man with a great deal less than what he’d once had. But he died, I think, with what he wanted at the time. He died a Justice. And he died a Campbell—that was the disconcerting bit. He also had me, his only child (of three marriages), and he knew I had the man I loved. There was just one thing, which he never mentioned, that he didn’t have.
He opened that bottle in front of Mike and me in his familiarly unceremonious way and sniffed it. “Spot on—after a breathe.” Thirty seconds later, after fetching three glasses, he said, “It’s breathed.” He poured. He said to Mike, but as if specially for my ear: “I drank this wine in August1944. All kinds of wine was getting back to England then, care of Special Operations. It was the evening I proposed to Paulie’s mother. Do they still do that these days? Welcome, Michael, to my somewhat depleted home.”
I could tell that your dad was letting slip down his throat something unlike anything that had slipped down it before. Later he said it was well named, it made you feel like a king. We moved out with our glasses into the sunshine in the little walled garden, where four years later (Taittinger ’61) our wedding would be celebrated.
I wish you could have seen him. Not your dad when he was twenty-one in his cream shirt (though I wish that too): your Grandpa Dougie. I wish you still could see him—I wish I could—from some special gallery. And not, I mean, the man I once saw in the wig and robe, whom you’ve seen anyway, in a sense, in the silver-framed photo in the hall. New visitors to this house sometimes pause and say, “My God—who’s that?” And I say, a little sternly, in keeping with the photo, “It’s my father, actually, it’s Mr. Justice Campbell.”
No, I wish you could have seen that other man, that out-of-court man, my one-time daddy, pouring wine for Mikey and me at Napier Street. He’d have loved to have seen you.
11
I CRIED WHEN HE DIED. I was just like Mike, I cried at my dad’s funeral, at Invercullen, when there was rain, at least, to prompt me and to screen me—not like this soft, midsummer stuff falling now: an icy Caledonian onslaught. But I cried, anyway, afterwards. For weeks I was like a wet sponge, one touch would set me going, in spite of my saying to myself: come on, you’re over thirty, stop blubbing like a girl. But that’s what all my tears were really, I think, my childhood finally seeping out of me.
And I thought I’d parted with my childhood, finally and formally and even rather beautifully, that year I met your father and he met mine. I thought I’d said goodbye to it with Mike. Our childhoods aren’t so easily discarded, it seems. At thirty-plus—at forty-plus—they can still pop up and claim us. And why should we want to part with them anyway, like friends who’ve begun to embarrass us? Perhaps you’ll tell us tomorrow. Sixteen is really like eighteen now? Childhood is a smaller and smaller luxury? And I’ve seen you, my pets, trying to leap out of your childhoods, like fish onto land, long before now. It’s made my heart leap into my mouth.
I can still see Mike’s childhood in him—summers at his Uncle Eddie’s—though I was never there with him. It’s a sort of privilege I have, another special gallery. And I told him, on that train back to Brighton, about that time when I was thirteen. Was I still a child then? Dimming green fields slipped by the window, clumps of ghostly-white may blossom. It would have been one of those old, vanished, plumply upholstered train compartments. String luggage racks, wooden-framed invitations to south-coast beauty spots. Another world. Another sort of childhood too, it seems now. We had it to ourselves. Your dad had taken off his Chelsea boots, his socked feet were between my thighs. The Clos du Roi was still in our veins.
“We must go to Craiginish,” I said, “this summer. It’s our last chance.” Perhaps I really meant “my.” “Before my mum gets it.”
I could still say “mum.” She hadn’t yet become just “Fiona”—with now and then an emphasis on that first, already hissy “F.”
What a time to be talking about Scotland, while we sped back to the Sussex coast. Your dad might have thought, if he wasn’t so happily mollified by top-notch burgundy, that he was really being put through the hoops. First my father—so far, so good—now a trip to the bloody Highlands. And what a prospect: some windswept bea
ch, as he must have seen it, in the frozen north. A “croft.” A croft? I had to do some serious talking up.
But we went that July. The sleeper from King’s Cross, then a hire car from Fort William. My father blessed and subsidised the trip. When he handed me the keys, which he’d soon have to surrender for good, he said rather solemnly, “Say goodbye to the place for me, won’t you?” And all the way up I hoped it wouldn’t be one of those Scottish summers—grey, wet and squally, clouds charging in over the islands. That the Gulf Stream would do one of its timely tricks and bring a touch of the Caribbean to northern Argyll.
But so it was. It was actually hot. And the “Croft,” your dad could see now with his own eyes, wasn’t a croft but a substantial, if eccentric and isolated, summer house, even with an air about it of some misplaced Riviera villa. What’s more, as we opened it up, and skimpily furnished though it was, it released an impregnation, a bouquet of former occupation. Even your dad, who’d never been there before, could recognise the corky, trapped-in-a-bottle smell.
I wish we could have gone there with you. But don’t you remember—won’t you always—the smell of Gull Cottage in Cornwall?
We opened windows. They yawned and sighed. When you add fresh oxygen to that bottled-up stuff a heady chemistry occurs. And they opened up to a view below of a white crescent beach, backed by dunes and washed by long, slow, rolling breakers—on which there wasn’t a soul. My Brighton-train rhapsody, fondling your father’s feet, hadn’t all been sales talk. I didn’t have to say, “I told you so.”
And so it was there, at Craiginish—but this I really hadn’t premeditated or prefigured, it was never part of my idyll-painting—that the “proposal,” as I would later call it, took place. “Proposal” really isn’t the right word. Your dad even likes to quip that it was a slip of the tongue. But what else to call it? It was there, in the high summer of 1966, that your dad and I became—an even more exotically antique word—“betrothed.” Though having betrothed ourselves, in a decidedly impetuous and breathless way, we didn’t actually get married for another four years.
