by Graham Swift
A “happy home”: that’s another inherent misnomer perhaps, another fantasy out of which we all have to be shaken, but in which, though you’re sixteen, you’re still carefully blanketed and cradled. Though you’ll be woken abruptly enough soon.
For what it’s worth, while you sleep on these last few hours of your sixteen-year sleep, let me tell you how I woke up long ago and came out of a dream (in more senses than one, you’ll have to agree) when I was even younger than you. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about poor Otis, or your poor dad, out there in the streets looking for him, I’ll get back to them. And oh yes, your mother really was, once, if it’s hard to picture, even younger than you.
Let me tell you the story which I once told your father, and never, till now, anyone else. As a matter of fact, I told him that time we went to Craiginish, the year we met: pillow-talking in the “croft,” our skins all salty, that very first night, after he’d “proposed” to me and I’d said yes. You came from happiness, my darlings.
And this story can really be called a fairy tale, since your mother was not only younger than you at the time, but (unlike your Grandma Fiona) she was actually a fairy.
I was thirteen, though this was still, just, the nineteen-fifties when thirteen was younger than thirteen is now. But I didn’t want to be a little fairy.
My all-girls boarding school was a posh sort of place in the Thames valley, as befitted the daughter of a judge. Every year in the summer they’d put on a Shakespeare play, outdoors, in a little natural grassy arena between the hockey field and the music rooms, in front of a clump of trees. And every other year, it seemed, it would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such a good play for the time of year and that setting and, of course, for girls. All those fairies.
I wanted to be Puck. Not a fairy, not Hermia or Helena (fairly soppy parts, in my view), not even Titania. When it comes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck, if a girl may say so, is your only man: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” (the word “girdle” producing a titter in a pack of schoolgirls, for reasons that, thankfully, you don’t have to bother with). But my acting skills, I’ll be honest, were rudimentary and Puck was a part for older girls. So I got Mustardseed: one of the fairies, number two or number three, it doesn’t really matter. A couple of half-baked lines and a little flapping costume the colour of Colman’s best.
It invariably turned grey and chilly, or it blew a gale. The arc lights, evoking moonlight, in among the trees, usually failed or crashed down. It was traditional, painful fun. But that year the weather was perfect: a serene and golden June evening turning to dusky purple even as the show progressed. The scent of newly mown grass. Not even a troupe of squeaking schoolgirls murdering Shakespeare could quite spoil the effect. Even the most long-suffering among the audience of stoical parents couldn’t fail to be charmed.
As my father, I hope, was charmed. I hope it was at least some small, diverting consolation.
He was there, of course, to see me, his Mustardseed, to judge my performance. Just, as it happens, a little later that same year I’d go to see him, to judge his performance or at least just to witness it, from that secret but public gallery. He was there in the audience. I’d seen him secretly then too, from an off-stage spy-point, his bobbing, unostentatious panama visible among some fairly attention-seeking motherly hats. But the person I couldn’t see (and her hat would have made its mark) was Fiona. Beside my father there was an empty space, an unoccupied brown-canvas and tubular-steel chair. It remained unoccupied, as the twilight gathered, throughout the evening.
This wasn’t a matter of some temporary mishap or misunderstanding. My father wasn’t looking at his watch, or appearing merely incidentally worried or annoyed. He kept looking at the “stage,” at the magic transformations being enacted before him, including his daughter’s temporary fairyhood, a vague but fixed smile on his face. I understood that something serious, not minor, had occurred, or perhaps had been occurring for some time, and this was my first, world-rearranging indication of it. My knees felt weak, though the show, of course, must go on. It was just as well I had that mere wisp of a role.
Afterwards, I could have simply asked him. I was thirteen. But thirteen was a still hesitant age. And best not to ask was my instinct. And not the best of times, patches of jaundice-like make-up still on my cheeks. Best just to listen to his obvious brave fib, and nod.
“Mummy’s very sorry. She’s feeling under the weather. Such lovely weather too, such a lovely evening…But you were wonderful, Paulie. A star! They really should have given you a bigger part.”
That summer was the first year we didn’t go to Craiginish. And that confirmed it. By then I knew there was a “situation,” an ongoing situation. Ours was not any longer a happy home or a happy family, though it had been. And from now on I’d have to play a part and quite a big one, I’d have to polish and refine my acting skills, since the situation, if not carefully contained and managed, might be damaging to a judge’s reputation.
Meanwhile, a former yellow fairy, I took a bus to the law courts to see a man in red robes.
There you are, I was a fairy once, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Picture that. I had little wings. It’s midsummer now, though it’s raining, but all of you are dreaming. Your dad, when I told him, certainly tried to picture it. He said he wished he’d been there. He said he was jealous of my dad, even though my dad can’t have been so happy that night. He said he wished he could have seen your mum when she was Mustardseed.
20
OTIS CAME BACK, he simply came back. That’s the plain fact, and the mystery of the matter—as mysterious as his sudden departure.
It’s easy to scoff at the pet-owners of this world, at the cooing Mrs. Lamberts, until you become one yourself. Sometimes you see, even in these hard-edged times, those poignant scatterings of notices, on trees, on lamp-posts, pleading for information, exuding despair. You never seem to see them being put up, as if that has to be done furtively in the dead of night. Nowadays they’re run off on computers and copiers, there may even be an unhelpful inset photo, but once they always seemed to be hand-copied, a labour of love, in agonised blue biro.
“Have You Seen Our Budgie Archie?”
We scoffed once. Mike scoffed, with the full force of his biological schooling (but I think those snails of his had become his sort-of pets). He called it the anthropomorphic fallacy. An escaped budgerigar in Herne Hill, now which way would it fly—south, to Tulse Hill and Australia? And as if “Archie” would be written all over it, as if even a budgerigar was going to say, “Yes, I’m Archie.”
“I don’t rate Archie’s chances,” your dad said. In those very streets which one day he’d comb at first light, in his cat-suit.
And we came preciously, repentingly close to preparing such a batch of plaintive notices ourselves, restrained only by the thought that it might already be too late. The mockery of all those “Missing”s if Otis was actually dead. And then what do you do? Go out again and solemnly, scrupulously take each little notice down?
But Otis came back. After nearly three weeks, he simply came back. We’ll never know the story, we could hardly ask him. But then the story is perfect anyway in its barest summary: he disappeared, he came back. Has any better story ever been invented? But yes there has, since this is where your story really begins.
It was a Sunday morning, about ten o’clock. We were in the kitchen. The weather was damp and dull, a little threatening, but the back door was resolutely and hopefully half-open. And then there he suddenly was, like a precisely realised wish. A barely believable scuffling sound outside—more laboured and protracted, perhaps, than as we remembered it. But there he was, hesitantly pacing the kitchen floor, as if it might be a trick. As if he might be a trick. But he wasn’t.
It was Otis, certainly, though it also wasn’t Otis. He was thin and weak and bedraggled, his fur had lost its shine. He seemed as amazed to see us again as we were to see him. It was as if he’d wriggled
free, only that morning and only in the nick of time, from some terrible sticky end. He couldn’t explain. We’ll never know.
But how little it takes to transform the world. Misery to joy. Even the feeble flick of a cat’s tail, even the shaky tread of four paws. We held him in our arms again. He weighed less, he weighed so much more. He managed a little reconnective purr.
“Straight to the vet’s tomorrow morning,” I said. A rather peremptory way of marking this miraculous moment—already the brisk, emotion-quashing mother. But Mike agreed. Both of us were oddly practical and bustling. Shouldn’t we have just wept? But the fact is, now it was so wonderfully over, we half wanted to pretend that this nearly three-week desertion had never occurred. It was some weird and not very excusable aberration on our part, perhaps. We fed him. The tins were still there. There was his basket and cushion in the corner. Nothing had changed. We wanted the eclipsing illusion that he’d never been away and we’d never become, meanwhile, the bedraggled and diminished creatures we’d turned into.
But how little it takes. By the afternoon, the day had turned conspiringly, blissfully wet. Steady, set-in rain, like this rain falling now. How malign and bleak that rain would have seemed with Otis still gone. But we went back to bed. I almost said “all three of us.” We hadn’t done this for nearly three weeks, let alone on a wet Sunday afternoon. And Otis, it was not difficult to see, needed his bed too. He was with us again, if not quite with us as before. He curled up exhaustedly on one corner of the duvet, while we went thankfully, irresistibly about things. Even asleep, he worked his magic.
That was late April. Of course, we came to understand that things weren’t, exactly, as they’d been. That Sunday afternoon was like a little separate island of reunion in the falling rain. Otis was back, but he was a shadow of himself and, even with loving care and feeding up, there was still a phantom absence. Again, I don’t really mean my poor dad, barely two months dead as he was. Guess who I mean.
I went along to the vet’s that Monday morning. I had work to do, I was still involved in the Bassano studies, among other things, but I called in and made excuses. I didn’t say, “It’s about my cat.” We might both have gone, but these were the days when Tim Harvey had stepped aside. Your dad couldn’t deputise for himself and an issue was being put to bed that week. There’s a curious phrase, “being put to bed.” Perhaps I felt, in any case, it was my particular duty, as—a mother. I’ve said it twice now, haven’t I? The whole thing was suddenly pretty obvious, or it must have looked so to our vet.
Who wasn’t Nokes, who’d moved on, but a new man, Fraser, whom we’d never had to deal with before. Nokes, it’s true, I’d never much liked. He was like some jaded GP: mid-fifties, a gruff, conveyor-belt approach. No bedside manner. You wondered if he really liked animals. On the other hand, it needs to be said, we got Otis from Nokes, which is how we got you.
Fraser was around forty and reminded me a bit of Doctor Pope—without the psychedelic ties. But the most important thing was that Otis seemed to purr instantly, trustingly under his hand.
“I’m Alan,” he said, having shaken my hand. “And this is…?”
“Otis.”
“Otis. Nice name. Hello, Otis. It looks as though Otis has been in the wars.”
I explained.
“It happens,” he said. “Cats do these things.” I’d heard those words before. “Some go missing for months. But all’s well that ends well. I’d say Otis is going to need some looking after.”
His hands were feeling Otis for hidden injuries, and Otis went on purring.
“After the late-great, I assume?”
Of course, I had to tell him, with a little flutter of embarrassment and without further embellishment, that he was right. He said there weren’t any rules that he knew of for naming cats.
He had the bedside manner. He had a touch of downright impudence too. Doctor Pope had a little of that, and it had worked, pretty infallibly, on nineteen-year-old girls. But I was thirty-two now.
Perhaps I had that age, and other things too, stamped on my forehead. The fact is that our vet, Alan Fraser, was the first person to utter, and with a casual, smiling directness, as if he’d just completed some easy diagnosis, the words—the thought—that your father and I had never uttered to each other. “Child substitute,” he said.
Child substitute! No doubt as part of some long and reasonably delicate sentence, but it leapt out at me like some pronouncement in italics. Not even a question mark. How dare he?
But he seemed ready even for my flush of indignation. He smiled almost teasingly.
“It’s nine o’clock. You’re my first. I know that’s because it’s been counted as an emergency—which, incidentally, it isn’t, strictly. But anyway, most young mothers usually come in a little later, after they’ve dropped the kids off at school.”
It was true. In the waiting room there were two old biddies, one with a cat, one with a Scottie dog. Both of them had given me narrow looks when I was called in first.
I nearly walked out. I nearly grabbed Otis from under his hands and stormed out like a real matron. Except that, of course, would have made it obvious that a nerve had been touched, it would have made me look a fool. And in any case, he spoke with that unruffled smile, as if he’d hardly needed to explain his process of deduction, it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes. As if he’d been here many times before and always thought it best to get it out in the open.
“Don’t be offended—you wouldn’t be the only one. And no need to look apologetic. It’s one of the virtues, one of the many virtues, of having a cat. I have two of my own. They’re wonderful creatures, I don’t have to tell you that.” Otis still purred away. “He’s a lovely cat—though not at his best right now. I’m sure it made your day when he came back. We’ll need to do some tests, I think.”
I’m getting very close to the nub of things now, to what your father is going to say to you. It seems to me, in fact, that he’s going to have to speak to you a bit like a vet or a doctor, or some sort of knowledgeable and caring practitioner. You’ll have your unexpected and worrying appointment.
I began to think, in those days when Otis required particular looking after, that another virtue of having a cat might actually be that of also having a vet. Someone, I mean, unlike Ian Nokes, you could actually talk to. God knows, you can’t often do that so easily with your doctor, you always feel you’re taking up their precious time. And that’s when it’s you who’s under discussion. But vets can be people-doctors too, it seems. And Alan Fraser’s surgery, with Otis there, like some guarantee, on the table, could be a strange little closeted confessional.
Speaking of doctors: when Doctor Chivers gave your dad the grim news, it was not really in his brief to do much further talking, along the what-happens-now lines. He was just a sperm man, really. He sketched in some possibilities, which would be matters for other professionals, but, of course, it would be up to your dad and me, as responsible adults, to weigh up for ourselves the available options. And, as you now know, though it must have sounded extremely odd to you, we settled on—childlessness.
But of the options we rejected (I really am telling you now only what your dad will elaborate tomorrow) the first to go was adoption. We both felt that that would be too much like theft. We wouldn’t be there at the beginning. It would be too much—though we didn’t have the comparison to assist us then—like going along to Mr. Nokes after a hint from Mrs. Lambert.
But a second option we gave more room to. For a while it actually dangled, if “dangled” is really the word I want. I mean artificial insemination. An ugly and chilling expression, even more upsetting, perhaps, than “child substitute,” but a viable, and not so complicated alternative. Are you still listening?
In these days of IVF they speak more of “donor insemination,” it makes it sound more personal perhaps. Back then, in the early Seventies, it was known officially as “artificial insemination by donor,” though it was hastily switched around in the Eighties,
after the arrival of AIDS, to “artificial donor insemination.” But your dad and I once freely, if not exactly blithely, used the seemingly supportive acronym A.I.D.
But rejected it. For reasons which had more to do, perhaps, with your father than me, but which had to be respected. There are all sorts of things we can speculate about in comfortable theory. Certain primal sensitivities come into play in the actual situation, even for a rational scientist.
But I have to say that the reasons that mattered to your father certainly mattered to me too. The choice, as I boiled it down, was really between “How much did I want your father’s child?” and “How much did I want a child?” It was the first question that counted more. Can I ask you to understand that? I wanted this man’s child, for reasons that I hope are obvious. And neither of us could have it. Which left only one way of proceeding.
But six years later our vet, to whom I found I could talk in sympathetic confidence, to whom I found myself mentioning things I hadn’t mentioned to my own mother who I no longer talked to, or to my own father who was dead, mentioned to me that very phrase, that acronym, that Mike and I had used, but only to each other, and then dispensed with, years before.
I had to go back several times with Otis, more times, in fact, than expected, and if he’d broached that “child substitute” at that very first meeting, you could say that certain other things could hardly remain undiscussed. Do vets take oaths of professional secrecy? Otis kept purring away. Perhaps his ears were buzzing too.
