by Graham Swift
There, another little secret. Why should a song of heartache and separation have become the song of our happiness and togetherness? I don’t know, it just did. Perhaps it was because it was a seaside song and we’d first met in Brighton, or perhaps because of its unintended but gently meaningful resonance, even for us then in our early twenties. It was a swansong, after all, a posthumous hit. Otis himself was dead at twenty-six, that soulful voice imploring from the grave. Try a little tenderness…
Life is short, my darlings, or it can be. Seize it, treasure it, cradle it. But perhaps this has never occurred to you at sixteen.
There was never any question, anyway, once he’d entered our home and once we had to decide on a name, that Otis would be called Otis.
A cat. I know it’s obvious—glaringly and perhaps even amusingly obvious—but we never presented it to ourselves in the way you’re thinking. Otis was (as it would prove) before you, but not “instead” of you. We never spoke or even thought that thought. How could we have done when we didn’t even know you? We just went along, rather awkwardly, to see Otis. And blessed the day. We even blessed Mrs. Lambert.
And we became, so we discovered, cat people. The world divides, they say: cat people and dog people. And some people, of course, who never find out. That’s what our vet said, not Nokes, but the new one. “Some people, sadly,” he said, “never find out”—dropping in that little “sadly” rather delicately. But I suppose he said it to everyone.
I didn’t come from a family who kept pets, a home with an animal, nor did your dad—a strange thing, perhaps, for a future biologist. But I’d say my dad was a cat person, through and through. Perhaps I just mean he was a pussycat himself. And Fiona is a dog person. And perhaps in her case I just mean that there’s another, more strictly correct word I still can’t quite bring myself to use about my own mother. I’m harsh on her, I know. Perhaps it really stems from those days when I thought I’d never be a mother myself. I felt twice betrayed as a woman.
But we can all very definitely say that your Grandpa Pete was a dog person, since it’s become a sort of family legend. When he died last year there was a dog with him, his black Labrador, Nelson. According to your father, there’d never been any sign of it in all the years he’d lived in Orpington, but when he moved with Grannie Helen to Coombe Cottage, it emerged like part of some prearranged formula. What would he do when he retired? He’d get a country cottage, he’d get a dog and he’d take it for long, bracing walks over the South Downs.
Which is exactly what he did. Mike used to say that it was such a rigorously carried through project that he wondered whether some weird replacement wasn’t at work. First there’d been his dad, his mum and him: now there was the two of them and a dog. Uncle Eddie, living in the same place, had never had a dog, and he’d cycled rather than walked, but Grandpa Pete proved to be a dog person. And your dad proved to be a cat person (and a cyclist). It’s just how it goes.
Why Nelson was called Nelson when Grandpa Pete was in the air force is just another of those odd things, but it’s certainly true that Nelson was with Grandpa Pete, in all senses, right to the very end. Even beyond. Since, as you know, when poor Pete Hook dropped dead one crisp January morning in the middle of his regular walk, Nelson was not only with him at the time, but stayed with him patiently and dutifully for some time afterwards, till his body was found, perhaps under the impression that your grandfather would soon get up and they’d continue on their way.
It’s a cruel irony, perhaps, that Grandpa Pete should have been struck down by a heart attack in such healthy circumstances and on a such a sparkling morning. On the other hand, if you’re going to drop dead suddenly, there are worse ways of doing it. And a faithful dog remaining at your side, panting steadily into the frosty air, only completes the picture. It’s the same as with that grave, among the other Hooks, in that archetypal churchyard, you could scarcely have ordered it better.
And maybe the irony isn’t cruel at all. Once, when he was only twenty and only recently married, Grandpa Pete had had to jump into the night sky from a burning plane and must have thought he was more than likely going to die. There was no one to tell him he was wrong. No one to tell him that he’d die one day a retired businessman, walking his dog on the South Downs. Not even Grannie Helen could have guessed it.
Both of you always liked Nelson. You used to call him “Nellie,” Kate, but it was very affectionately meant. All the same, I think you were cat children, and you’re cat people.
A dog has all that trainable, loyal, best-friend stuff, which can sometimes even induce a tear. There’s no record, is there, of a cat sitting staunchly by its dead master? Nonetheless, I think there’s something servile, doltish even, about all that doggy doggedness (I’m sorry, Nelson, it’s nothing personal). Sit. Heel. Stay. A cat knows better, a cat retains its animal integrity and comes and goes as it pleases. A cat will curl up in your lap, all kitten-softness, then do something you could never predict. A cat has a life you never see. But Otis shared our life—and rather more.
The secret nub of the matter (I promised I’d be frank): Otis was a party not just to our reaffirmed coupledom, but to our very coupling. We’ve never needed much spurring into action. And since that day when Doctor Chivers made his pronouncement we could abandon all precaution. We were free now any time. Look, no sperm. Sadness comes in sadder forms. Enough of that self-punishment and back-turning.
And Otis, if nothing more, was our witness.
This is how it would work. Stop listening, if you prefer. Otis had his basket and an old cushion, his designated sleeping quarters, down in a corner of the kitchen, but he frequently—usually—ignored them. We put a cat flap in the back door. He’d slip out at night, into his cat life, then, a little before dawn, he’d slip back in. Just occasionally he’d go for his basket, but more often than not he’d make his way straight upstairs to our bedroom (where the door was left always thoughtfully ajar) and, with a little soft leap, a delicious sudden tautening of the bedclothes and a switching-on of his purr, to top volume, declare himself to be with us.
By tradition, we’d groan and sigh, annoyed, half-awake. Must he? So early? Not again…
Of course, it was all an act, we loved it. The simple and undisguisable fact is that he got us going. It was an undeniable erotic addition, to have him sometimes furrily getting in the way, sometimes simply watching, sphinx-like and voyeuristically—neutered as he was. Don’t neutered cats still have their inklings? It was as if his little gravelly purr, chugging into life like a miniature cement mixer, was actually saying: Come on, you two, do your stuff.
A catalyst. The untold story of cat ownership, perhaps. Dogs, they’re about duty and service and the nobler virtues, but cats…No need, perhaps, to go into the nuances of fur, black and glossy in Otis’s case, against naked skin. And take a look at Titian’s Uffizi Venus, that most gloriously flagrant of nudes. Curled up on the bed, on the ruffled sheets, is a little lapdog, but it should have been a cat, it even looks more like a cat, and Titian must have put it there for a reason.
I think your father was a cat person even when he was principally a snail person. Close your ears if you wish, but once upon a time, when I was still working at Christie’s, your dad used to phone me sometimes, from Imperial, just to say that he was thinking about me, he was thinking about me intensely. His mind wasn’t on his snails. He was thinking about me so much, in fact, that would it be all right if he came round straight away, on the Mike-bike? And could Christie’s meanwhile quickly find us some little niche, some cupboard somewhere, a space in one of the store rooms, among the artworks, where we could have immediate and urgent sexual congress?
I shan’t tell you how these conversations continued, I’ve said too much already. But while I’m on this general theme, let me tell you that the early mornings have always been our favourite time for it. I mean, at home, in bed, not in store rooms, in the properly appointed parental or, as it once was, non-parental bedroom. Any time can be good, a
nd once it used to be pretty well any place, including, as you now know, sand dunes. But, certainly since those days of Otis, we’ve always specially favoured—as if his ghost gets active around that time—the first pale hour of dawn when the light creeps in and the birds, even with a cat around, start to sing.
The very hour which is approaching now. But this rain perhaps (as if it knows) will hold it off a little longer, and delay and dampen all those little songs. It will eke out this fragile summer darkness. And I don’t suppose we’ll be making love this morning.
Life at Davenport Road. The two of us and a cat. Was it quite what Mrs. Lambert had intended? “You’re looking well, you two, this morning.” Had we been looking unwell? “You’re looking full of the joys.” Once we’d been students at Sussex University in the heady and joyous 1960s. Now look at us, this steady, settled married couple in their thirties, in their terraced house in Herne Hill. They even have a cat…
But all houses, perhaps, all couples, all families have a life you never see.
Sometimes, during or after our grey-lit lovemaking, we’d hear outside, a little like Otis’s purr, the whirr of a milk float and that oddly satisfying and calming sound, the chink of a milk bottle being placed on the porch. How strange—and mystifying for you—to consider that the peace of those early mornings would one day be shattered (I’m not in the least complaining, I’m not in the least reproaching you) by your squallings and clamourings. You used to make me think, though you were several decibels louder, of those seagulls in Brighton. That was when you let me have a moment to think.
Or we’d hear, around the same time, that brisker, rougher but also pacifying sound, of the morning paper being thrust through the letter box. All’s well with the world really, those two sounds seem to say, no matter what that newspaper actually has to tell you. Just count your blessings, just be thankful.
And all this went on for several years, until one black day Otis disappeared.
17
IT NEVER RAINS but it pours, they say. My father died in February, 1978. I call him your Grandpa Dougie, but he wasn’t your grandfather when he died and I sometimes wonder, if he had been, if he’d ever have formed that ceremonious and masochistic notion of being buried at Invercullen. The dead, I suppose, can’t be masochists. They can make it hard on the living.
I never saw my father in a kilt, the very idea would have made me giggle. But then I saw him that time in his red robes and wig, which was no laughing matter, and it seems that what counted for him at the end was the green, black and blue tartan of the Campbells. Black and blue, certainly. You never knew your Grandpa Dougie, but at least you were spared his funeral. Grandpa Pete’s last year was an easy ride, in some ways, in comparison.
“There’ll be a piper,” I said to Mike, “be prepared. Someone’s bound to arrange it, they have to.” And so they did. And if you’re going to have to hear that wailing sound, there’s an argument that says let it be at a funeral, at a burial, when its keening and skirling will get to you. (It did.) And if the weather’s wild and wet to go with it, then so much the better. Though there’s a degree of wet, wild weather, you might think, that will defeat even the efforts of a bagpipe. Never mind the poor little birds, trying to sing in the rain.
My own deluge of grief couldn’t quite drown out the suspicion that this was some last sly joke of my father’s. He was smirking, somewhere, at the whole scene, he’d even whisked up the weather. And it was all my fault, perhaps. If, short of making him a grandfather, I’d at least levelled with him and told him the score—Dad, you’re never going to be a grandfather—then my conscience would have been squared with him. But how would that have cheered him in his last remaining years? He cheered himself up, instead, with a third young wife, called Georgina York, who wasn’t, as her name suggests, in the least bit Scottish.
I said to your dad, “You’re going to have to meet a few Campbells. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”
But perhaps it was all just, simply, ancestral. All just the urging (is there any real basis for it in biology?) of the blood in his veins. My dad, the lambswool laird. Take me back, please, to where I came from. I felt, in any case, that little twist of treachery, mixed with a strange twist of pride: me, the daughter and only true child, the star, in one sense, of the show, alongside those three—let’s use this word if I can’t use the other one—witches.
In any case, I felt bereft.
My father travelled up in his coffin, in an undertaker’s vehicle, before we did. We resisted all thoughts of travelling with him (he surely wouldn’t have expected that) in grotesque, five-hundred-mile convoy. We drove up separately, deciding, in the painful circumstances, not to attempt the whole trip in one day, but overnighting en route—in a hotel overlooking Lake Windermere. Not one of our happiest hotel experiences. In the night the windows began to rattle. The bed felt like a raft. It was February, but until then greyly mild. The next day the choppy waters of the lake signalled worse to come, further north.
But before all this we’d had to arrange other, temporary, away-from-home accommodation. It’s one of the guilty drawbacks of cat ownership and it’s worst, the pang is sharpest, if you happen to be travelling, yourself, for sheer pleasure. But then again, if the reason is your father’s funeral…
We used to take Otis to a place we’d found, in Carshalton, called, ridiculously, Felix Lodge, which traded on the notion that your cat too might really be enjoying a high-class, country-club-style break from it all. It was really just some rows of large wire cages set among trees, a few potted plants thrown in. Your dad told me—after Otis died—that it had always made him think of his father’s wartime captivity.
And that occasion for depositing Otis was as wrenching as they’d ever been. I don’t suppose Otis knew what was going on at all. But then I’m not so sure, given his subsequent behaviour. Who knows what animals know? Does Nelson miss Grandpa Pete? I know that when we left Otis that time—his green eyes staring at us from behind the wire—I couldn’t hold back any more the flood of tears waiting inside me. My tears hadn’t really happened yet, they hadn’t found their moment. Felix Lodge was unhappily named.
But how our big feelings can get drawn out of us by small things. I don’t mean to belittle Otis at all. I’ve often wondered just how much there was in his little green piercing stare. Your Grandpa Dougie’s eyes, for the record, were a deep brown with just a touch, a hint of green. Like your eyes and mine. Your dad once looked into my eyes and called them “seaweedy eyes.” It made my spine quiver. He would say things like that from time to time. He’s not just a scientist. Or a publisher.
My eyes were pretty seaweedy that day, anyway. I cried salty tears all the way home to Herne Hill. Mike had to pull over at one point to comfort me. Poor Mikey, what times he let himself in for when he stayed that night at Osborne Street. He sat in the driver’s seat, holding a box of Kleenex, while on the back seat Otis’s empty white-wired travelling-cage was silently eloquent. I cried enough at my dad’s funeral, in that wind and rain, but I don’t believe I ever cried so wringingly as I cried once at the side of the road, somewhere between Beddington and Mitcham.
Your Grandma Fiona didn’t cry at Invercullen. She was there, at least, and all the real water was long under the bridge. Nor did my stepfather, Alex, who had no particular reason to, dripping as he was with some kind of oil-derived, Texan–Aberdonian wealth. Twenty years my father’s junior.
I suppose if my mother had cried I would have only hated her hypocrisy. Though I suppose there was another scenario: that the two of us might have cried together. Hugging and howling in some awful melting moment of reconciliation. In that freezing weather? So then you might have met her. And Mike, poor man, might have had to deal with her on an ongoing basis. He dealt with her bravely enough on that already challenging occasion.
“The Living World? A science journal? Well, how interesting, Michael…”
And if you’d been there—I mean, already there, or not even
literally there but parked somewhere, like Otis, in deference to your tiny status—would that have made all the difference? Softened up her act and made Alex shift uncomfortably, perhaps, on his feet? We’ll never know. It didn’t happen. Your fairy grandmother. Thank God I never said to her, “And we have a cat.”
Undoubtedly the best moment of that wretched start to the year was when we returned to Carshalton (a sunny, crocussy, even spring-like Carshalton, I’m glad to say) to collect Otis. But it was only the prelude to the worst. Some six weeks later, when I was just beginning to learn to live with the absence of my father, Otis went absent too. He went out one night, in his usual cat’s way, but he didn’t return to leap on our bed the next morning, or the next. Or the next after that.
I say “the worst.” Worse than my father’s death? I don’t mean that literally, of course. The second absence was like an ill-timed, small-scale echo of the first? Yes, but I don’t mean that exactly either. I mean that Otis’s disappearance, his mere disappearance, was in itself like a grief. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. And perhaps it would have been even if my father had still been alive. It was a separate grief and, yes—you may even begin to understand—perhaps it went a little further. When all is said, my dear, dear daddy was seventy-seven, and fathers do die at such an age.
You must judge us, my angels. You never saw him, but tomorrow you may need to borrow some of the spirit of your long dead grandfather. There’ll be a lot for you to judge in a few hours’ time.
It so happened that when Otis disappeared Walker’s were handling some recently discovered studies of rustic subjects, including several animals, attributed to no less a figure than Jacopo Bassano. The art world partly lives for such unexpected finds, only then, of course, to become enmeshed in questions of authenticity. And even when the discoveries are judged authentic, there’s the secondary, oddly unsettling thought: that they might have been lost for ever, that not so long ago, in fact, the art world, now giving these precious items its kid-glove treatment, was perfectly happy without them.
