And anyway that champagne we drank on Brighton beach was the best I’ve ever tasted. I can still see the little dull-red chain of roses round the rim of the hastily shop-bought waxed-paper cups. Champagne glasses? You’d have had to be joking. Lunch that day — and here I can report that your dad really did pay for everything — was the standard stuff of the beach-front caffs, an emphasis on greasy chips. But it was washed down with bubbly. We had no ice bucket, but that was no problem: the English Channel in March, a pocket of pebbles at the water’s edge, and the tide was almost full. How everything came together. We agreed on ten minutes’ chilling time, then settled for five.
And there is that great advantage of champagne, that you don’t need to remember a corkscrew. But I didn’t forget to keep one of the corks. The other two, I decided, were Linda’s and Judy’s business, perhaps they just floated out to sea. But I kept my cork. It’s precious beyond reckoning. Did I say I can be sentimental? It’s in a special box I have where I’ve kept all kinds of stuff. I’m a foolish old mother in that respect. Pressed flowers from Craiginish. Your primary-school artistic triumphs, as valuable to me — and your mother knows about art — as Tintorettos. Then there’s a little collar, also now a dull red, with a small bell on it and a name tag. More of that later.
Brighton beach in the middle of March: not always inviting. But it turned as warm as summer. The sea was calm and compliant and grew bluer by the minute, and the waves, lapping gently in and breaking with a silver flash then turning to creamy foam round first three, then two and then a single bottle of champagne, might as well have been champagne themselves.
By that third bottle, if your father had told me that he’d planned that day long in advance, foreseen it and planned it in every detail — as he’d planned, all along, those special transitory roles for Linda and Judy — I would, of course, have utterly believed him. But how could he or either of us have known that day would unfold as it did, so perfectly? Some days are just gifts, some things are just gifts. He’d planned the weather? He’d planned that the tide would be so co-operatively full and then — but it’s only what tides do — slowly, respectfully creep away? That the afternoon would turn gold and dreamy, and that as the light deepened and the tide slipped further out, Linda and Judy, without any prompting but with immaculate, if drunken, timing, would get up and slip away too, guests at our feast who knew nonetheless when they ought to be going? As if they weren’t leaving us where everyone could see, on the pebbles of Brighton beach, but in some special, private, garlanded bed.
But we hardly noticed them going or heard their softly crunching, retreating footsteps, since, nestled up to each other in a sort of gauzy blanket of champagne, and not having had much sleep the night before, we’d drifted away ourselves.
8
WE WERE BOTH “only” children. Do “onlies” attract “onlies?” And we were both “war babies”—your fearsome parents — me in the sense that I was conceived in the war, Mike in the true and classic sense that he was born in it, and hurriedly produced, like armies of other little war babies, to be what was left of his dad should his dad soon not be there. For a little while that’s exactly how it must have looked. Your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen acted only just in the nick of time, since shortly after she became pregnant Grandpa Pete went “missing,” a word which often meant the most dreadful thing possible.
1945: how weird it sounds now to give it as your date of birth, like saying 1789 or 1492.
When your dad was born, in January 1945, his dad wasn’t there and wouldn’t be there for another five months. It was the son, in theory, who was waiting for his father’s arrival, not the other way round. Not that your dad would have known what was going on or had any idea how significant his own arrival was, even before it had quite occurred. It’s just as well, perhaps, that memory waits for us further down the road from our birth. But do these things somehow filter through anyway? I’ve often tried to put myself in the position of Grannie Helen in that brief period when your father would have been the unborn consolation in her womb.
I was waiting, further down the road, for your father. I know it sounds silly. I was waiting, too, for him to be born.
Was there always a little gap, a discrepancy, between your dad and his dad? You’ve noticed it too? Was it just the gap, the edgy stand-off that exists between any son and father, or was it that niggling gap of around five months? His dad had tried to close it, perhaps, with those twelve bottles of champagne. Perhaps for a while he succeeded. I think your dad may have wept a little when he read that message: “Have Fun.” What an odd reaction to such a message. And he certainly wept, as you yourselves saw, at his father’s funeral, in Birle churchyard, eighteen months ago. It was the first time you’d seen your father weeping, and they say it’s not good for children to see their father in tears. I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure your father wasn’t weeping for a different sort of gap.
As it happened, it wasn’t until the year I met your dad that Grannie Helen ever really spoke to him about that time before and just after he was born. Did that have something to do with me? Your dad told me, anyway, that he’d had this chat with his mum, at Christmas. He let me in on a private conversation with his mum.
And you told me, Kate, that he brought it all up again with you last Christmas — the first one without Grandpa Pete. Grannie Helen was dozing in our living room. You and Mike had volunteered to do the washing-up. Nick and I decided to take a walk round the block. I can see how all the circumstances would have primed your dad. You told me, Kate, that he told you about a Christmas years ago when Grannie Helen had told him about that time when Grandpa Pete wasn’t around.
I may have looked at you rather oddly — as I did that time at Carrack Cove — and you may have wondered why. But you just said to me, “Dad’s really missing Grandpa Pete, isn’t he?” Good, sweet, daughterly words. And true.
“Yes,” I said. “The first Christmas, it’s tough.”
I didn’t say, though I might easily have done, that I could remember the first Christmas without my dad. I’d had a major consolation, a double consolation: you and Nick were in my womb.
I just said — as if it needed to be said — that Grandma Helen would be missing him too. Your dad and Grandpa Pete always used to do the washing-up at Christmas. They’d roll up their sleeves and put on aprons, a ritual, two-man chore. Now, this year, for whatever reason, your dad had chosen you. It was another wobbly moment.
You may both have noticed that there’s a bit of a gap too, these days, between your Grannie Helen and me. I mean, there’s always been a bit of a gap: she’s my mother-in-law, it’s a ritual thing too. I always got on better with Grandpa Pete, I think I get on better with men all round. But now there’s an extra gap between Grannie Helen and me, just when, perhaps, there shouldn’t be. I ought to be offering her comfort and support, and I’ve done my best. But I’m afraid of her, if I’m honest, I’ve become a bit afraid of her.
Is she lying awake too right now, just like me, but by herself, listening to the rain?
It seemed just a touch romantic, I’ll admit, when I first heard it from your dad: that his dad had once been “missing,” then returned as if from the dead, to lift his son in his arms. If it never really quite squared with the man I’d get to know who ran a factory in Sidcup, or the man who’d sometimes do those strange little comic double-acts with his old pal, Charlie Dean—“Uncle Charlie” to you. Grannie Helen always said they should have gone on the stage. Charlie and Pete, “Dean and Hook”—it could have worked. Charlie the little bouncy joker and Pete, like some older brother, the tall, slightly solemn straight man. Have fun, have fun.