by Graham Swift
Once upon a time, as you know, there was your Grandpa Pete and your Grandma Helen—Grandpa and Grannie Hook—in Orpington, when we were all still in Herne Hill. You might just about remember number nineteen Hathaway Drive (also known as The Firs), when Grandpa Pete was still running his business in Sidcup with Charlie Dean. You got taken there once, to the factory, and you didn’t like the artificial-resin smell. As a matter of fact, though I have a little professional knowledge of resins, nor did I. But you knew your grandparents better from Coombe Cottage, just outside Birle, where they’d go at weekends and where we used to go and stay. Then they retired there permanently, when Grandpa Pete was sixty and you were not quite five.
But before Grandpa Pete owned Coombe Cottage, it had belonged to his older brother, Edward, your great-uncle, whose grave, at least, you’d been introduced to. There was a gap of nine years between Pete and Eddie and not much love lost between them, as far as I could tell. Grandpa Pete must have been one of those children who sometimes get called “accidents” or who, at least, were late-in-the-day afterthoughts. It can hardly help sibling relations. A nine-year gap must seem crazy and unimaginable to the two of you.
Uncle Eddie was a schoolmaster in one of those country schools hidden away up drives, among trees. “Birle School.” He was thin and softly spoken and had a droopy moustache. He smoked a pipe and rode a bicycle and, since he lived in the country, he had a library of books on natural history, which he knew a lot about anyway. He was the sort of man who collected butterflies and beetles and birds’ eggs (all of which would be frowned upon now, of course) and he passed some of his enthusiasm on to your dad. He was a bachelor who lived alone, apart from Mrs. Sinden, who came in every day from the village to cook and clean. Even when I met him those few times, he was like a man from another age. Yes, he seemed Edwardian, like his name. This was in the late 1960s and, yes, they’re ages ago now.
But in the even more distant 1950s, your dad used to stay with his Uncle Eddie, whole summers long, when he was a boy and Grandpa Pete was working hard to get his business off the ground. He’d be dropped off in July and picked up again at the end of August. This is why your dad could call himself a “Sussex boy,” even though he was brought up in commuter-belt Kent.
Those summers in Sussex proved a boon for your dad, but they didn’t help relations with his dad or between his dad and Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete got it very wrong if he thought he was neatly solving the problem of summer holidays while exploiting his older brother at the same time. It was always pretty obvious to me that there’d been plenty of love lost between your dad, when he was a boy, and his Uncle Eddie. That Uncle Eddie had been like a second father, a sort of summer father, to him.
It was also pretty obvious, to go back further, that during that time when Grandpa Pete was a prisoner of war and your dad was born—during that time, Kate, he got talking to you about last Christmas—it must have been Uncle Eddie who first saw your dad, first picked him up and held him. I can picture him putting aside his pipe carefully first. Picturing your dad here as a baby dangling from his uncle’s arms is a little trickier, but it’s a nice trickiness.
Uncle Eddie had a heart condition—which didn’t seem to stop him puffing away at that pipe. He’d never had to serve in the war, and that was another source of resentment for his younger brother. Eddie had just sat out the war in that far from pokey cottage of his, while Grandpa Pete had gone off to fight. Oddly enough, according to your father, that was the very phrase that Grandpa Pete liked to use about the war: that he’d “sat it out.” Your dad never really knew if he was referring to being a prisoner of war or just to being in the air force. Airmen, after all, go to war sitting down. And Grandpa Pete, as a navigator, used to have his own little desk, with a desk lamp, up in the sky, though I don’t think it made him any safer.
But perhaps it was just his formula for having been a prisoner, or for stopping his son asking any more questions. I remember you, Nick, once asking Grandpa Pete about the war and saying, “But didn’t you try to escape?” He just looked at you apologetically, as if he was sorry he wasn’t Steve McQueen.
Uncle Eddie died because of his heart condition years before you were born, and I went with your dad, who was pretty upset, to the funeral. Then Grandpa Pete got the cottage and eventually moved there with Grannie Helen. Now, of course, he’s in Birle churchyard too, just a few steps from Eddie.
Mike and I have never really talked about it (I’m not that much of a Hook, perhaps), but it always seemed to me that in his last years at Birle, at Coombe Cottage, Grandpa Pete got more and more like his brother—or like his brother as I’d remembered him, or like his brother might have been if he’d lived beyond sixty. Grandpa Pete must have always thought that Eddie was the main item, destined to be, but for a little glitch of family planning, an only child like me and your dad. Could that even be why your dad was so fond of him? Eddie was nine when Grandpa Pete was just a baby, the same age your dad was when he spent his first summer at Birle. These things count maybe.
Anyway, it seemed to me that your Grandpa Pete in his later years got more like Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete never smoked a pipe or rode a bicycle and Uncle Eddie never had a dog, but the differences got less and the similarities got more. Grandpa Pete even died of a heart attack too, if not at fifty-seven. It could be just a coincidence or it could be one of those things that runs in the family. Ever since your Grandpa Pete died, I’ve wanted your dad to go and have his heart checked.
I think his heart might come under a bit of strain tomorrow.
But at Uncle Eddie’s funeral, years before you were born, there was another “uncle,” called Tim. Tim Harvey. He was pretty upset too. He wasn’t your dad’s real uncle. He was another of those pretend uncles, like your “Uncle” Charlie. “Uncle Tim” was Uncle Eddie’s oldest friend, they’d been at college together, and he used sometimes to come and stay at Coombe Cottage when your dad was there as a boy. You would never have met him, though he was still alive when you were small. If we could call Fiona your “fairy grandmother,” then we might have called Tim Harvey your “fairy godfather” or your “fairy great-uncle,” though it might have given the wrong impression.
I asked your father when he first mentioned “Uncle Tim” to me: had there been anything—you know—between him and Uncle Eddie? Two bachelors in a country cottage…But your dad said not a bachelor, actually, in Uncle Tim’s case, a widower, a confirmed widower. His wife had been killed in a flying-bomb raid at the end of the war. Which rather stopped me doing any more teasing.
He’d lost his wife all those years ago, but he was devotedly married now, you could say, to a science journal called The Living World, which he’d kept going all through the war and which had become his life. Your dad said the dead wife’s name had been Eleanor. She’d been wealthy, a sort of patroness, and when she’d died she’d left Uncle Tim a lot of money. Though more to the point, perhaps, when she’d died she’d been pregnant.
A struggling science journal—I’d certainly never heard of it—and when I met him it was clearly Uncle Tim’s standard joke, a little awkward at a funeral, that he’d kept the living world alive.
He scared me just a bit. He scared me like Grannie Helen scares me now. He looked as if he was very familiar with being at a funeral. But I liked him, I felt sorry for him—saying goodbye now to his oldest friend. He was a bit like some struggling, persevering science journal himself: tall, silvery-haired, abstracted—professorial. I was nice to him. In fact, I think I even flirted with him just a little, if that’s possible at a funeral, and only in the way that you can flirt with silvery-haired men you’re both scared of and sorry for. Though I’ve flirted with quite a few silvery-haired men, of all kinds, at Walker’s. It can sometimes help to make a sale.
Perhaps I just mean that while I was being nice to Uncle Tim, I was smouldering for your father. It was a sort of over-spill, perhaps. I was being particularly attentive to Uncle Tim in order to curb my lust for your father. I don’
t know quite how he took it or if, in his grief for his friend, it even registered, but he didn’t discourage me: “So, you’re Mike’s lovely young wife. I remember him in short trousers, you know.” Perhaps he was flirting with me or just accidentally pressing buttons.
We got on, anyway. We warmed to each other, in that April sunshine. So when he offered your dad a job a few months later, I could hardly object. Not, that is, to Uncle Tim himself, if I could object on just about every other score. I could even blame myself for having been, perhaps, a little instrumental.
But on the other hand, Tim Harvey could hardly have known how uncannily perfect his timing was—in just what a vulnerable condition your dad would be, setting aside his Uncle Eddie’s death, by the time he made his offer. Setting aside, too, that question I’d begun now to ask: how much longer, with those snails?
But then this was surely crazy. A struggling science periodical that hardly anyone seemed to read—run from an attic in Bloomsbury? And only its deputy editor? It was just as well, I said to Mike, they seemed to like me at Walker’s. It was just as well we had just the two of us to feed. I might have been a little crueller, if I hadn’t also had to consider your dad’s “condition,” and if it wasn’t for my own complicity, so far as it went, on that back lawn at Coombe Cottage.
In a nutshell, Tim wanted your dad to be not just his deputy but his heir, if I don’t think he ever quite used the word. It was as if your dad had been earmarked, even from those short-trousered days perhaps, and now Tim was thinking of the future. He wanted your dad, in the fullness of time, to take over his baby. Though, again, that’s my word not his.
And, in a nutshell, I yielded. Partly for those back-lawn reasons, and partly for intimate and sensitive reasons I’ve yet to come to. A temporary phase, I thought. Be flexible. A passing aberration. A year or two…
It’s lasted over twenty.
Now, of course, I’m not sorry. Now, of course, I even shamelessly like to make out that I knew all along, I kept the faith. Our ship (no more, in those days, than a rather leaky boat) would one day come in. Your dad likes to say it was all Uncle Tim’s doing, really. That right-place and right-time theory. And Tim had always told him (he says now) that one day there’d be a bonanza. In science? I think that’s just your dad being modest. It doesn’t sound like Tim Harvey. The “fairy godfather” factor only goes so far. Tim may have had the money and even his wishful thinking, but he had his limitations. And your dad had his hidden talents. I think they were even rather hidden from your dad.
But you’re familiar with the story now, you’re part of it—its real heirs. Things began to come good for us in the end, not so long after you arrived. Tim stepped aside when I was on maternity leave, dealing with the insomniac havoc you wreaked on Davenport Road (forgive me) and wondering if I ever really had worked in art dealing. Meanwhile, your dad’s talents had begun to blossom. Don’t ask me where he got the energy. Then Tim died, in 1981, leaving most of what was left of his private wealth to what he liked to call “LW.” Then it was the Eighties and there was a publishing boom.
You know the rest: Living World Magazine, Living World Publishing, Living World Books. A whole new image. That now familiar logo, the little button-sized, blue and green Yin-and-Yang biosphere. It more or less just got better and better. But, most importantly—and who can say if you didn’t actually bring out that other entrepreneurial man in your father and give him all that drive?—there was the bonanza of you.
I remember how in what I’ll call now the “in-between” years—I mean, before there was you, in the mid-Seventies—when I was starting to do well (and just as well) at Walker’s, I’d sometimes find myself saying, at art-gatherings I had to go to: “My husband? He’s deputy editor of The Living World.” Or, later: “My husband? He’s editor of The Living World.” It sounded good, of course, it sounded important: what could be bigger than the living world? People in the art world aren’t necessarily clued up on science. And it was certainly better than saying, however confidently and breezily, “My husband works on snails.”
All the same, I’d wait for the vacant stare or the bluffing, knowing nod—keeping up a sort of bluff myself. Or I’d prepare for the embarrassed and embarrassing, “I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard…”
But once, at least, it made a big, even a startlingly strong impression. It was with our vet—who would, of course, have been a scientific man. He actually said, “I’m impressed.” It turned out he was a regular subscriber, one of the very few I’d ever knowingly met.
“Your husband’s editor of The Living World? Well, I’m impressed.”
And, naturally, I told your dad. I said, “I had this interesting chat with our new vet.”
But you’ll be thinking: vet? What vet? How does a vet come into the story?
14
I’M JUMPING AHEAD. Come back to Davenport Road in the year that Uncle Eddie died. I need to explain now some difficult and delicate things. I need to explain in my own words what your father will explain in his tomorrow. It’s one thing we’ve agreed on: your father will do the talking. Who else, in the circumstances? But he’s asleep now, amazingly, before the biggest speech of his life. And I want him to sleep. Sleep on, Mikey, as long as you can. And what is your mother supposed to do, while these last vigilant hours slip away? Simply keep silent?
This bedroom, in the dark, with the rain outside, feels like some temporary refuge.
I need to explain that there might never have been you. There was Mike and me, the two of us, but there might never have been you. The world, our lives, this house might never have contained you. Big stuff. But then not so remarkable, you’re already thinking. We all have the flicker of the thought, then brush it aside as superfluous: I might never have been born. Gosh, but here I am.
Some people can wish—I hope you never will, I sincerely hope you never will—that they’d never been born. But it’s not as though any of us could ever have asked, chosen. We always have that little retort to throw back at our parents. Though, speaking for myself—but I think I speak for Mike too—I can’t suppress the quite illogical but painful thought that if you weren’t there, if we hadn’t allowed you into the world, we’d have committed a crime, we’d have done something terrible to you.
Have I ever told you? Have we ever told you? How beautiful you are.
Professor Mike here will point out that nature is colossally wasteful. For every life that makes it, a staggering number of potential lives are lost. There may be millions of us walking around, but we are all extraordinary little exceptions. The same is true of ants or centipedes—think of all those never-to-wriggle legs—or, I’m sure, snails.
But then, if we didn’t ask or choose, but we just arrived against all the odds, how many of us can say that we were really meant? Another thing to throw at our long-suffering parents who’ve done so much to make a home for us. Though even that, of course, isn’t always true. Sometimes there isn’t much of a home to speak of. Sometimes our parents aren’t there or have parted. Sometimes we don’t even know who they are.
It’s another notion we all have, perhaps, then dismiss it, leaving it surprisingly unpursued, considering how totally relevant it is: the notion of tracing ourselves back to our actual moment of conception. It involves a taboo, an intrusion, like entering unasked the parental bedroom. Or it just involves a risk. Who knows in what chancy and sordid circumstances we might have first come about? Perhaps best not to find out. And were our parents, anyway, at the time actually thinking of us?
How wonderful, though, if in following that route back, we were to come to some marvellous chamber, to be guided to it even by our smiling parents themselves—to some glorious bed, a tapestried four-poster, say. There you are, you see, for you we wanted only the very best. Though how many of us might arrive at the back seat of a Ford?
I honestly don’t know where my dad and Fiona…Or if they were particularly intending. I just think, I hope, they were happy at the time. It would have been in th
e autumn of 1944. And how terribly far off that sounds. Your dad strikes me as exceptional not just in being able to pinpoint the circumstances, but in being pretty confident of the hundred-per-cent intention. Helen and Pete married, then honeymooned—in the Cotswolds—in the limited time that was granted, on special leave. Your dad might even have been conceived precisely on his parents’ wedding night, like a perfect little old-fashioned, recipe-book procedure. The act and the intention were perfectly joined.
But I can honestly say that you were truly and wholly intended. You could not have been more deliberately meant, both at the time and before. You’re doubly exceptional in that respect. You’re double, anyway. You were born, as it happens, in Gemini, but there was nothing fluky about your being born. As for that Gemini thing—which I know rather bugs you—don’t blame us, at least, for that. We used to say to you, when you were smaller, that you’d have been two stars anyway.
I can honestly say too that I’d never intended you more, never wanted to conceive you more—if, hot with lust for your father, I’d never have quite put it to myself in such cool terms—as on the evening after Uncle Eddie was buried. I really thought it was going to happen. In which case, it would have been our bedroom in Herne Hill. Or, very nearly, the upstairs landing. Did your father have the same sense of propitiousness too? He was grieving for his Uncle Eddie. On the other hand, he was definitely up for it.
But, obviously, it didn’t work. Just think, if it had, you’d have been born in 1973. You’d have been January babies, just like your dad. A tough month, on the purse, for me. By now (just think) you’d be twenty-two. Though why am I assuming—it’s simply a habit I can’t ever get out of—that you would always have been two?
