Tomorrow (2 page)

What can I do but tell you how it was? What can I do but give you your mother’s version of that time before you were born? You’re sixteen and the night’s not young, but here’s a bedtime story.

2

I MET YOUR FATHER
when I was twenty and he was twenty-one, in Brighton, in
1966
, when we were both at Sussex University. When I say “met” I really mean “went to bed with,” “slept with,” if there wasn’t, that night, that much sleeping. I should be as frank at the start as I mean to carry on. I’d met him,
merely
met him already, and when I met him in the full sense, he’d already met in the full or nearly full sense my two flat-mates, Linda Page and Judy Morrison.

This is your dad, this man fast asleep beside me now, I’m talking about. And that was how things could be in
1966.
They couldn’t have been like it in
1956,
but they could ten years later, particularly at a new university like Sussex. They weren’t like it all the time, maybe, but for your dad and me, in the early months of
1966,
they were. Whenever we mention “the Sixties” both of you yawn or glaze over as if things are so much more nonchalantly free-for-all and uninhibited now. But I’m not so sure they really are. What are you actually up to, my darlings, at the advanced age of sixteen? You tell me. At least we had the excitement of the new—the “liberated” as we sometimes called it. And it wasn’t so amateurish, or so aimless. Your father slept around. He slept with Linda and (possibly) Judy in fairly quick succession, then he slept with me. Then he never slept with anyone else. He’s sleeping with me now. These are the simple and basic facts which I’ve never doubted and I hope, so far as the last part goes, nor have you. And they add up to something that I hope will count for a lot when he speaks to you tomorrow.

At Sussex there was a university doctor who had the happy name, in the circumstances, of Doctor Pope. Every so often, along with a regular queue of other girls, I’d go along to get my dispensation. I remember another, less eager queue when I was small, to get a polio vaccination. What made that age so new, so different from previous ages, was a little pill: once a day for twenty-one days, then a week off. A bit of science, a bit of social sorcery. It was called the permissive age, but was it the pill that produced the age or the age the pill? Sex must always have been around, our parents must have known how to get it. But had there ever been such a rush of it, a glut of it—as if it had just been discovered specially for us, like gold in the Klondike, in the South Downs? Of course, it hadn’t just been discovered. But we were children of our time, as you are of yours. Though we only understand afterwards, perhaps, what time it is we’re children of.

Doctor Pope was one of those young, fresh doctors, not so long out of medical school, who was only too happy, I think, to have this flow of largely healthy patients, not so much younger than himself and predominantly female, passing through his door. I still see his unpapal, even mock-priestly face. Dark hair, dark eyes, a taste in brightly coloured, unphysicianly ties. Half the girls who went along to him fancied him just a little. He’s one of those minor and incidental figures from the past—one day you’ll find this too—who suddenly float into your head, so that you wonder, where are they now, what are they doing right now? Do they still have that dark hair? Though this same thing can happen, this same sudden looming out of nowhere, with people who can’t be called incidental at all.

Your father slept around and so, thanks to Doctor Pope, did I. Let’s not be exact about who did the most, but let’s give the edge to your father. I was the younger, if only by six months. And, just for the candid record, your father, before he met me and even in those pill-blessed times, always carried a traditional stand-by: the packet of three. You may think this is information that doesn’t particularly concern you. I said to him, “You won’t be needing these.” But your dad had always been—careful.

How it is for you I don’t know. In these mid-
1990
s, when sixteen is eighteen and when, from all I can tell, what once went on at university now sometimes goes on at school, you’d think you might already be beginners at least. What with all that early knowledge you seemed so glad once to advertise. The facts of life? They’ve simply been in the air you’ve breathed, the common small talk (apparently) of infants, they don’t need special elucidation.

But on the other hand, for all the all-around-you of it these days, schoolgirl pregnancies by the dozen (yes, Kate, I worry), I think there’s sometimes too a weirdly opposite reaction. Why rush into something so patently available? A sort of sex-fatigue before it’s even started, a sort of purity or just stubborn sensibleness. Abstention is the new liberation: is that the way the tide is turning? Sometimes when we refer to those oh-so-wonderful, oh-so-yawn-making
1960
s, it’s not just that you make a show of boredom. Sometimes in your eyes there’s the faint hint of a tut-tut. As if you might be about to say to us, a little too late in the day, perhaps: “Oh, grow up.”

There’s a gap of quite a few years between us, as you may have noticed. You’re sixteen, your father’s fifty. But that’s another shift that’s become unremarkable these days. Thirty, thirty-five: that’s no longer a cliff-edge for a woman. Mike says—you’re familiar with his ironical and slightly professorial mode, though it’s not, I’m sure, how he’ll address you tomorrow—that the whole thing is changing, there’s no longer the pressure of brevity, we’ll all reach a hundred, one day, and procreate when we’re fifty. Well. “All other things being equal,” he adds. If there isn’t by then anyway, he says, “some completely new system.” The slightly prophetical mode as well. Once anyway, as we all know, people were lucky to get to forty and there were brides of fourteen. (If not, Kate, of eight.)

I don’t know. The world doesn’t feel to me more relaxed and better adjusted, it has this way of suddenly racing. I don’t know how it feels to you. But what I do know is that at sixteen you’re both virgins. I don’t have the proof and I don’t have your direct confirmations, just intuition. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the world around you and how there’s more time at your disposal and how you can just be cool and calm about everything. It has to do with you, with what you are: Nick and Kate, with that invisible rope straining, and sometimes catching painfully, between you. Little upsets and outbursts, not helped by recent symptoms of parental tension. Now and then a door gets slammed.

I don’t know how tomorrow will affect it. A big snapping of all our ropes? You’re sixteen, you’re eighteen, you’re grown-up and able to handle anything? We’ll find out. Right now it seems to me that you’re as changeable, as suddenly mature then as suddenly childish, as suddenly moody and tetchy then as suddenly brimming with verve and sparkle, as any teenagers. And you’re virgins. It’s a sweet thing, from the outside. Like the sweetness, from the outside, of your inescapable togetherness. And thank God, for the time being, you have each other. You’re virgins, you could say, in another way too.

3

SUSSEX IN THE SIXTIES:
the very phrase like some glistening salad. And Sussex was the place to be, the best, the coolest university in the land. And
of course
it was the place to be: it was where I met your dad.

I was reading English with history of art. Your father was a student of biology—or biological science, as they called it there. Now I’m one of the directors at Walker and Fitch, and your father’s more than a director, he mainly owns and runs Living World Books, which includes
Living World Magazine.
How far we’ve come. He’s still in science, in a manner of speaking. That is, he sells it. And now and then, as you may have noticed, he’ll still come over all self-searching and conscience-stricken about having deserted “real” science to become a money-maker. As if there weren’t all those lean years before you arrived when he hardly made any money out of science at all. As if it wasn’t his own decision. And now the irony anyway is that times have changed again, there are big fish around poised to swallow up Living World and your dad’s on the verge of selling up completely. Something else he’s yet to announce.

We had you late in life—with shrewd foresight it may now seem—but the fact is we weren’t to know. Science only became lucrative, it only turned into “popular science,” in your lifetime and your father only emerged as a successful publisher when you were too young to notice.

Was it something to do with you? Quite possibly. It was arguably to do with you that he gave up true science, abandoned biology in the first place. Since that happened long before you were born, you may wonder how you can have affected it either way.

Your dad likes to maintain that his latter-day success is all down to luck, to just happening to be in the right place at the right time. To luck and to his “Uncle” Tim—I’ll come to him later. But I think it was all a little like that contraceptive pill. Which came first: the pill and the science that produced it, or the change in the air that went with it? Science might never have become popular if your dad, among others, hadn’t discovered a gift, a marketing gift, for making it so. And he didn’t just “happen” to be there. He was there for a long and dubious time (I was one of the doubters) before the time was ever right.

He still likes to deny this and to have those moments of wistful, scientific regret. But this is at least fifty per cent tosh—trust me—or it’s really about something else altogether. Selling isn’t the same as disowning, or we’d all have nothing to our names. I buy and sell art. For many years, as I remind your father, it was our bread and butter. But I can still
like
it. I can still love Tintoretto. This usually shuts him up. Your dad appreciates a good picture too. Over the years he’s developed quite an eye. He’ll even admit, if you push him, that the art department at Living World is a major factor in its success. “Uncle” Tim was simply never visual.

And I certainly appreciate, as does your dad, the pictures, if they’re not Tintorettos, that we can buy now and hang on our own walls. This house, as you’ve grown older, has become full of pictures, full, as you like to call it, of “stuff.” And large enough house though it is, you might have wondered—teenagers, these days, seem wised-up on these things—why we haven’t moved yet to an even bigger house that can contain yet more stuff, on a grander scale. Especially as not so long ago we quite casually bought a farmhouse in France—your father called it a “bolt hole”—still being worked on. Selling up, and buying up. All things being equal, to use your dad’s phrase, we might be over there right now for the weekend, checking up on progress and staying at the Hôtel des Deux Églises. I think he wishes it
were
ready, right now, for immediate refuge.

But all things aren’t equal, though we’re all here in this house tonight, as is only proper. All your memories, just about, are in this house. All your life, just about, is within these walls. “After your sixteenth birthday,” we said. How could we possibly have moved anywhere beforehand, how could we have told you what we’ll tell you tomorrow anywhere else but here?

Once upon a time your dad and I used to share a basement in Earl’s Court. Tatty posters, reproductions only, on the walls. And in those days, yes, your dad was a real scientist, working in a lab. His special field, as you know, was molluscs, and within that special field, his special area was snails. And his special area within that special area, which he would say wasn’t at all small, was the construction and significance, the whole evolutionary and ecological import, of their shells. How is it done? Why doesn’t a snail just remain a slug? A question that you and I might never think to ask. But it was one of the many instances, your dad might say in his best professorial mode, of biology’s skill in chemistry, in sub-organic ingenuity.

I’m referring now, of course, to his own article, years ago now, in
Living World.
(A very wishy-washy and barely scientific article, he would say, but I know it meant a lot to him, I know it was a gesture to his long since aborted PhD.) Not just chemistry, but in time and by a long, slow process far beyond the needs of molluscs, mineralogy, geology, the very composition of the world. Or, as he once put it to me when we were still at Sussex: a limpet will never know it, but without the ability of its ancient ancestor to make a shell, there simply wouldn’t be
any South Downs.

Just think, he might have studied limpets. But I don’t think your father has ever really given up science. And he can still say things, still give the little lectures that almost stop you in your tracks.

Snails, not limpets. One moves, just about: the other just clings. Mike went for snails. And what a fitting choice, I’ve sometimes thought, but never, of course, ever said, for a man who’d arrive late in life. Your dad, and his snails.

They’ll be out there now, it occurs to me: a whole crop of them in this summer rain. Rain always brings them on, or brings them out. This house is being surrounded, perhaps fittingly and even with a delicate, nostalgic empathy, by snails. We treat them now like the regular garden pests they are, despatch them casually and mercilessly. But once your father was an expert on snails. And once upon a time, in Sussex, he was a genuine student of biology, though I might have said then that his special field in biology was his own.

Linda Page and Judy Morrison might have said the same. I shared an upper flat with them in Osborne Street, Brighton. They became our “bridesmaids.” You’ve met Linda some years ago. She married a nice plump lawyer in the end and now lives in Highgate. What you’ve never known is that once she slept with your dad. Judy’s become less in touch. I mustn’t let her get like Doctor Pope, like one of those people you just wonder about. We used to have our regular get-togethers, the three of us, our lunches or girls’ nights out. Sometimes these would be in Piero’s in Jermyn Street, just up the road from Walker’s (Simon, eyebrow ever cocked, wanted to be introduced). Linda and Judy: if there were ever two people to whom I might have just blabbed the whole story. When we got on to our third, unneeded bottle. But I never have.

The Three Sisters of Osborne Street. We shared most things. We may even have shared your dad. I’m still not sure if it actually happened with Judy. Your dad is good, and he’s needed to be, at being cryptic. But however far the previous sharing had gone, after I’d had my first share there was definitely no more sharing. This you should know, if only for the straightness of the record. It was Linda your dad visited first, or it would be more correct to say, it was Linda who first brought him home. And your dad and Linda didn’t last so long. It’s an unresolved question who ditched whom. I think they ditched each other, gently. Then, putatively, it was Judy. But then it was me.

Number thirty-three Osborne Street, Brighton. A stone’s throw, as they like to say ambitiously in Brighton, from the sea. But on a still night, if the tide was in, you might sometimes just hear the soft crash of waves, like far-off cymbals I always thought, and on a wild, wet night you’d have the feeling that the rain on the window might be spray.

We had the top two floors: three bedrooms and a kitchen. It all had its own front door and separate stairs: not so much a flat as a “maisonette.” A word of its time. As well as the Three Sisters we were the Three Maisonettes. Linda had the front bedroom, I had the one next to hers, Judy had the room at the top. And we all had our visitors.

Mike has maintained ever since, which may be complete tosh too, but I’ve never not gone along with it since it would hardly behove me to disagree, that he had to sleep with Linda and Judy first in order to get to me. Fair’s fair: all of us right there under the same roof. As if he were some knight in armour and Linda and Judy were just challenges, obstacles who popped up to waylay him on his otherwise unswerving quest.

In any case, the result was the same, and I have my own simple summary of it all, from which I’ve never wavered. I can’t really remember if at the time I was actually jealous or impatient, or just desperate, as he worked his way, according to him, to me. Or if I actually thought—or hoped—that contriving to be third in line might give me some precarious advantage. But what I’ve always simply told your father and now I’ll tell you is that I was lucky, oh so lucky, third-time lucky.

Luck which stayed. The incontestable and lasting truth is he never went on to anyone else. Our auditioning days, so to speak, were over. We’d each found the one. Your father got into bed with me one night in Brighton nearly thirty years ago and, though the place and the room and the bed have changed from time to time, he’s never got out.