Tomorrow (8 page)

12

I MARRIED A HOOK.
The jokes work both ways: I was hooked, or I was the lucky girl who hooked a Hook. Twenty-five years ago, in any case, I changed my name from Campbell to Hook, a simple, then-customary procedure which, if you think about it, can seem just a little outrageous.

But what’s in a name? I’ve always liked, anyway, the simple, no-nonsense, Anglo-Saxon sound of it. And it’s your name, my two little Hooks, the name you were born with, have grown up with and, so far as I know, have never resented: your dad’s name, since that’s the custom too.

Kate Hook, Nick Hook: two neat, quick syllables for each of you. Even if you’d never met them, you’d think: “Kate Hook,” “Nick Hook,” well, they’re going to be two bright, sharp, good-to-know people, they’re not going to be a pair of drips. I suppose you might also think: “Hook?”—never trust anyone with a name like that. But I even like that little hint of crookedness.

When I started at Walker and Fitch (good names too, at least in the art world), not long after I got married, I made a decision: to be Paula Hook, at work, not Paula Campbell. It was my decision and it went against the grain again, for
1970.
But it really wasn’t a decision at all. I was happy to wear your dad’s name, to settle the debate permanently and openly: Okay, Mikey,
you
hooked
me.
It’s another debate whether you’d rather buy a picture from a Paula Hook than a Paula Campbell. I know, there was always a joke or two there. That’s the picture, I’m the Hook. I’m a senior director now, anyway. I can turn down lunch with my boss.

And all this made me the crooked and treacherous one, I suppose, trading-in my proud Scottish name to this family from the deepest south. Hook being a Sussex name. But that’s where we’d met—in Sussex, at Sussex. We even told you when you were small that we’d met on Brighton beach, a little myth or half-myth we had to modify later. And in those days it had just been Paulie and Mikey. What’s in a name? What’s even in a family?

But two years after we were married I found out what it really meant to have changed my name. And by then (if you’ve been wondering) we were certainly thinking, more than thinking, of starting a family. One evening your father came off the phone and said, “That was my dad. My Uncle Eddie’s died.” Then he went very silent for a while, and a little later shed some tears—something I’d never seen before then, and which you saw for the first time not so long ago when we were all standing, as it happened, not so very far from Uncle Eddie’s well-weathered grave.

Grandpa Pete was your first death. That had been ours: Uncle Eddie, when we were a good deal older than you were last year. When I saw your dad cry, I thought: it’s only an
uncle,
it’s not his mum or dad. What’s with the tears? Though I’d met Uncle Eddie myself, two or three times, and I had some idea of the story. And wasn’t I now a Hook?

A few days later, on a beautiful spring morning, I found myself standing in that churchyard at Birle, my first visit there for a funeral. It’s a picture-book country churchyard, as you know, it’s pure Gray’s
Elegy.
Though I’m not sure if such things mean anything to you, in
1995,
plugged as you are so much of the time into one kind of electronic life-support system or another. Kids these days—this was your dad’s joke when we bought you your first computers—they don’t ask for the
world,
do they, they don’t even
want
it. For you, perhaps, it’s all the other way round. I’m not so sure you don’t think that churchyards and villages like Birle and country cottages and the country itself don’t really
belong
in some old-fashioned picture-book. I’m not sure you’ve read Gray’s
Elegy.

Anyway, once when you were small you were taken, for the possible interest of it, to that churchyard at Birle and shown those gravestones, a century or two old some of them. Look, that’s your name: Hook. And the most recent one of them was Uncle Eddie’s: Edward Hook. Look, he was born in
1915.
Which seems to have struck a little chord with you, to have made a strange, mutated impression.

And there you were again, early last year, for Grandpa Pete. Your first taste of death. Dank January weather to go with it. I was quietly proud of your fourteen-year-old dignity, so was Grannie Helen. You both seemed so calm. Perhaps you were just numbed and dazed, it was all just washing over you. Then, of course, the memory suddenly flooded over me, making my heart thump in the middle of that funeral: this
wasn’t
your first dealing with death, was it?

But perhaps you were just aching to get back to your CD players, your teenage agendas, whatever they were at the time. Sometimes it’s as though there’s a wall of plate glass between us and you. We haven’t noticed it, we think we can just walk through. Can I really remember any more how it actually
feels
—to be fourteen, to be sixteen?

Back in
1972,
in that churchyard, when I was twenty-six, my range of emotions was rather different. I thought: well, who wouldn’t want to be buried in such a place, if they could choose? Death tasted, that day, of April sunshine and new, juicy grass. Lucky Hooks. Who wouldn’t want to be a Hook? Then, of course, it hit me: I
was
one. And then that other thought hit me: that I might, one day, be one of these stones.

It hit me like some almost-actual bolt from that blue and fluffy-white April sky. It travelled right through me. There’s that expression which I fully understood that day: to be “rooted to the spot, to the ground.” And then, I can’t explain it, but perhaps it had to do with being rooted, I felt—well, sappy and juicy. I’d never known quite such rampant
sappiness.

I suddenly felt, I have to confess it, a great lust for your father, for your father’s body—definitely not a new thing, as I must have made plain, but never before in a graveyard. For the body of this man I’d known then for six years. For the body of this man, lying sleeping here, with whom, as it happens, I made the tenderest of sweetest love just two hours ago.

Lust in a churchyard, at a
funeral
: that’s worse than mere randiness in church. Even as your father stood, in his dark suit, mourning his Uncle Eddie. Red-bedspread lust. But lust with a will, a determination, it wouldn’t leave me. Don’t be ashamed of your mother. All through the gathering that followed at Coombe Cottage, in that home of Hooks, while sherries were served on the lawn by Mrs. Sinden, Uncle Eddie’s bravely smiling old housekeeper, I was really thinking: couldn’t there be some magic time-warp in these proceedings so that, without anyone noticing, I could take Mikey off and satisfy my lust with him, then return with him, not a stitch out of place, as if we’d never gone anywhere?

It was April all around, greenly lusting anyway. If only it had been—perhaps I shouldn’t have had the thought—January. From the end of that garden, as you know, you can see, beyond a field or two, the South Downs suddenly swelling up to their bosomy skyline. I’d never felt so much the truth of what your dad had once said about them (Sussex University, after all, was plonked down right in their midst), that they were the most libidinous landscape he knew. All those curves and dips, those little pubic clumps of trees. When you saw them, you wanted, he said, to run your hand over them, like you wanted to run your hand…

Well, Mikey, I thought, let me be your South Downs.

It’s usually men, we’re given to believe, who go through these torments of disguised, of intolerably postponed rapacity. When they do they try to think, apparently, of chastening and chilly things, like funerals and coffins.

At least by the time we got home to Herne Hill that evening the lust had become plainly mutual. I’d infected your father, despite his April grief? Or it’s just how death can work anyway, even on the grieving? Biology talking. Lust, but with a will and a purpose to it. No guesses what it was. I really believed—does this sound strange to you? It sounds now even a little strange to me—that on that April night we would conceive you.

Uncle Eddie died when he was only fifty-seven. That gravestone would have told you. For his twenty-first birthday, Grandpa Pete sent your dad that case of champagne, but his Uncle Eddie sent him a beautiful, leather-bound Victorian book, with some lovely, hand-tinted illustrations: on molluscs. At that point in his life, I think your dad appreciated the champagne more than the book, and he was more interested in girls than snails. But the champagne got drunk and the book got kept. It’s still here, right now, in this house, with Uncle Eddie’s austerely calligraphic inscription inside. “To M.H. from E.H.…” Wilkinson’s
British Terrestrialand Freshwater Molluscs
: what a mouthful, what a present. Four years later we got married, two years after that, Uncle Eddie died.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it’s so slow and sweet and everlasting. How soon you start to count the numbers. I was twenty-six—
already
?—nearer twenty-seven. One moment it’s just life, life, nothing but life, and though you’re in a state of higher education, you know nothing really, you’re just kids really, still at play. Then along come the announcements and reckonings and understandings. You know a bit about death. Even about birth.

When my father died, just a few years later, it turned out that, though he’d lived in Kensington most of his life, he wanted to be buried at Invercullen, in Argyllshire, among his ancestors: gravestones with the name “Campbell.” It meant a long and rather ghastly journey north for your dad and me—not at all like our earlier journey to Craiginish. It meant rather a lot of things. I said to your dad, “I think you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”

But one of the things it meant to me, amid a great inundation of grief, was that little prickle of treachery: that I was a Hook now, not a Campbell. It might even have occurred to the two of you, last year, that though Grandpa Pete had lived most of his life in Orpington, there he was now in that churchyard at Birle, just yards from his brother Eddie. It seemed he’d reserved the plot even before he and Grannie Helen retired permanently to Coombe Cottage. More significantly still, he’d booked a double plot. So Grannie Helen must have agreed, though her maiden name was Kingsley, and the Kingsleys came from Dartford.

What weird things families are. How weird that we all sit somewhere in the branches of a family tree.

When I stood with your father at your Great-uncle Eddie’s funeral, I’d been off the pill for a while, if nothing yet had happened. But that sudden, highly awkward surge of lust was like some extra confirmation, an endorsement. I “wanted his children.” And what a strange phrase that is, “his children,” another dubious bow to custom. I wanted
my
children too. (I wanted that dark suit off him.)

Quite clearly it
wasn’t
that night you were conceived, though it had everything going for it, even the time of the month. All the same, perhaps you could say it was where you really “began,” seven years before you were actually born: at Uncle Eddie’s funeral. How canny you were, Kate, when you secretly christened this house.

I was twenty-six, Mike was twenty-seven. We were in that seven-month period of every year—we’re in it now—when your dad has the edge on me. I haven’t finished yet with that crucial year of
1972.
This year, on his fiftieth birthday, Nick, you needled your father—I suppose every son has to—about what it felt like to be an old man of half a century. As if being forty or even thirty isn’t already ancient to you.

You did it jokingly and gently enough, and your dad took it in the same spirit. It didn’t seem to rattle him, I think he was prepared for something like it. And you’ll both of you remember what he said. He said that fifty was nothing these days, it was the prime of life. I was glad to hear it. But in any case, he said, he wasn’t bothered, because after a certain point in his life he’d always really felt the same age inside, the age at which he’d sort of stopped. Remember? And you said, Nick, still a tender fifteen yourself, “Oh yeah, and what age was that then?” And he said, “Twenty-seven.”

13

YOU NEVER KNEW
your Grandpa Dougie. You’ve never even seen his grave, on a hillside in Argyll. And you’ve never met your Grannie Fiona, last locatable even further north, amid the oil and twinkling granite of Aberdeen.

The Campbell side of things, disappearing into Scottish mist, was always the remote and fairy-tale side of things, not to mention those complicating and never-seen step-parents of mine, somewhere in between. But the truth is it was the Hook side, with which you’ve had close and familiar dealings, which was really the fairy-tale side. And it’s time you were told—you’re sixteen now, after all—the full, unexpurgated fairy tale.

Which includes the fairy tale of how your father’s legendary snails, which you also never met but with which he once worked very closely, eventually turned into this thing which, along with some lucrative art dealing, has kept us now very comfortably indeed for years. I mean, of course, Living World Publishing. You can’t complain that you’ve ever gone without. In fact, you’ve even been a little spoilt. But I hope you’ll agree that, contrary to another kind of moralising fairy tale, this has been at no cost to happiness. This has been a happy home. And nothing has made it happier, for us, than that you’re in it.

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
1960
s and, yes, they’re ages ago now.

But in the even more distant
1950
s, 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.