Tomorrow (6 page)

10

BUT COME BACK
to when he was twenty-one, and to another visit. To one day in May when I stood with your father outside the front door of number seven Napier Street, Kensington, waiting for my father to open it.

I’d never seen your dad look so scared. He was quaking in his Chelsea boots. Ever since I’d told him, in that unfortunately timed way, that my father was a High Court judge, your dad was convinced that
his
moment of judgement must come. On that May afternoon he was about to be condemned.

No amount of soft-pedalling on my part would reassure him: it’s a wonder I got him to that doorstep. In the Queen’s Bench Division they didn’t sentence criminals—not that your dad was one—or send anyone to the gallows. Not that, by
1966,
anyone
was sent to the gallows. Though it’s a rather chilly historical fact that not so long before, they still were. And an even chillier fact which I don’t like to dwell on and didn’t like to dwell on then, that if my father had chosen criminal law he might, for a brief period at least of his judge’s career, have been one of those who sent them there. How far we’ve come since before you were born.

In any case, as I tried to persuade your father, my father was a complete sweetie, a lamb. He wore lambs-wool cardigans from Harrods. He was not Judge Jeffreys. You’d never even guess he was a judge. But none of this washed with your dad, it even gave him more cause to quake. A sweetie—yes, of course he’d be, with his
own daughter.
Your dad knew the situation well enough by then: that my father was about to divorce his wayward wife. Which left this mutually devoted and clinging household of two, father and daughter. The more fondly I spoke of my father, the more Mike was sure he was going to be Mr. Interloper, Mr. Rival. My dad was going to cut him dead.

Pity your poor father, if it makes sense to pity retrospectively, standing outside my father’s front door. Picture him then, when you look at him tomorrow. He really had nothing to fear. And if only he’d known his real moment of judgement was to come much later in life.

It was useless to explain to him that the Kensington situation was not as simple as it seemed. My father was not quite the wronged and wounded party, taking his only comfort in me, meanwhile seething with unvented spite. He was magnanimously—or soft-headedly—anxious that the divorce shouldn’t be punitively framed. Fiona was still the mother of his only child (and knew how to milk his better nature). There’d still been the good years. I remember them. The three of us outside “Craiginish Croft” waiting idiotically for the time-release shutter (the photo’s in that box): Dougie, Fifi and Paulie, as we called ourselves then, like a litter of puppies. My mother stood to get a good deal more than most lawyers—not acting for a judge—would have advised. She’d get Craiginish, for a start. If I hadn’t, that spring, been busy tumbling into bed and into love with your father, I might have argued more fiercely with my poor daddy about that.

Then again, there was the potentially ruinous factor of Margaret Gould, my stepmother-to-be, already staking her place. He had to be very careful this didn’t give Fiona grounds for extracting even more. I’d already begun to hate Margaret—
that
interloper. So couldn’t I understand your dad’s qualms? I’d already begun the unbecoming process of outlawing my own mother. Perhaps it’s me you should really be judging tomorrow.

It would have been better, in some ways, if my father had actually gone out and, in a spirit of reckless and conspicuous revenge, “picked up” Margaret. But he was sixty-six and it might have wrecked his judge’s career. Judges don’t “go out,” they don’t “pick up.” And judges, perhaps by definition, should be fair to all parties and free from all vindictiveness. In any case, that wouldn’t have been him. He
had
“picked up” Margaret, but in his normal, helpless, passive-but-effective way, like a burr that had stuck insistently to one of his cardigans. A sweetie and a softie: though I couldn’t convince your father, going through agonies, outside his front door.

The door was a glossy, implacable, judgemental black, the standard livery of Kensington, but that didn’t help your dad. It stood at the top of steps inside a porch supported by two glossy white pillars. On one of them would have been a large, finely serifed black “
7.
”

Adding to your dad’s unease, I can’t deny it, was the sudden palpable tang of wealth in his nostrils. At Sussex there was the general levelling of student existence. Now he was the boy from Orpington, about to be put in his place by a Kensington your-lordship. Not that he’d minded, I’d noticed, having a “bird” (don’t laugh, it was the word then) from just up from the King’s Road. Those Chelsea boots he was quaking in were the genuine article, in the sense that we’d bought them, in the King’s Road, not so very long before.

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.