But in the even more distant 1950s, 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.