Did you notice the odd look in my eye? A perfectly innocent question, but there was something strange about it. You said, “Before I was born,” not “we.” Nick was still down at the water’s edge with Mike. He came up so much higher against Mike now, and Mike’s always been a good, lean height. Did you notice my little teeter? But I would have quickly smiled, I hope. I would have quickly got all wistful and girl-to-girl, if still motherly. I kept on rubbing you and I told you, you’ll remember, about another beach, far away in Scotland, where, I said, your daddy “proposed” to me. In a sand dune, in fact.
That was eight years ago. Half your life. I could still dare to wear a bikini. It was one of those many panicky but smoothed-over moments — you’ll understand soon what I mean — which have sometimes brought Mike and me to a sort of brink. Why not now? Oh, we’ve had our jitters. But we’ve kept to our schedule. It will be up to you, tomorrow, to judge, to tell us if, in the circumstances, you’d have done the same. But what a stupid idea: if you’d have done the same!
You said you’d like to propose to Nick — to practise proposing to Nick. I said it didn’t tend to work that way round, and it was a thing, anyway, that belonged to “those old days.” And suppose, I said, Nick should say no? My bikini was dark brown, your little costume was tangerine. It’s men, I said, if it happens at all now, who do the proposing.
And sometimes the explaining. But I think you both deserve the full story from me, your mother. Mike will give you his story, his version. I mean, it won’t be a story, it will be the facts, a story is what you’ve had so far. All the same, it will be a sort of version of something real. One thing we’ve learnt in these sixteen years is how hard it can be to tell what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and what’s pretend. It’s one thing you’ll have to decide, unfortunately. Which version is it to be?
At two o’clock in the morning. Of course, we let you know that. A charming little gloss on those facts of life that were bound to get raised sooner or later and can sometimes be (or they could be in those “old days”) a cause of awkward Saturday mornings. Though hardly when you were barely three and first put the innocent question and were both completely enchanted, it seemed, to learn that you both came out of my tummy, that you’d both once been there together. And that seemed to be the bit — do you even remember? — that really tickled you pink, that you’d been there together. So much so that though you’d moved by then to your first little separate beds, it seemed to reinforce your obstinate habit of ending up nonetheless in the same one.
One morning I found you like that, trying to form a positive little single ball of clinging, squirming, not to say giggling flesh. And you said you were practising “not being born yet.” And making, if it’s possible to say so, a pretty good fist of it.
I should have said that it had tickled me pink once that you’d been there together inside me.
As to that other, critical question: how did you get there? — it never came up then. A stage before the stage of not being born yet, that was beyond your reckoning. But you should know that it was our first, unsteady, provisional position: that when it did come up it should be our guide, our testing of the way ahead for the other thing we had to tell you. It should even be, perhaps, the one and the same occasion. Except that when it did come up it was all at my rushing instigation, and you, Kate — this you’ll surely remember — took the wind clean out of my sails.
Another girl-to-girl moment like that one about “proposing,” and it can’t have been so long after. I was the one, not your dad, who suddenly pushed myself to the fore of doing all the explaining. Though I would have started with the standard biology lesson. “Kate, there are some things you need to know…about how babies are really born…”
God knows what prompted it. Some little look in your eye, which I took as a challenge? Just that speed at which you were growing? What had we been talking about? And you might have let me just stumble on, even topple, still clutching you, over a precipice you were entirely unaware of. And if the truth be known, a sort of gong was banging in my head: Come on, get it over with! But you took the wind from my sails.
“You mean periods and stuff, Mum? You mean what boys have to do with their willies? It’s all right, I already know all about that stuff. And don’t worry, I’ve told Nick all about it as well.”
How old were you? You seemed so blithely, safely sure of your ground that I no longer wanted to risk mine. And I’m not sure, to this day, if I ever want to intrude on those early biology lessons you would have given Nick. Your eyes met mine perfectly sunnily. Well, that takes care of that, I thought, that takes care of the facts of life and, until further notice, of the other facts that go with them.
It should all, perhaps, have worked the other way round. That happy well-informedness, apparently, of both of you, should only have let Mike and me press on with our full — agenda. But the fact is it was really then that we fell back on our default position: when they are sixteen. You were surely too young, then, for the full agenda. And, on the other hand, if those facts of life really were taken care of and weren’t any more like some flashpoint still in store, did we need to hurry towards trouble?
Okay, you’ll grasp this, I’m sure: it was to protect us, as well as you, to extend our sweet lease as much as yours. Will you be able to sympathise? Will you blame us — a minor issue, perhaps — for leaving it so long? Or will you understand, at a ripe sixteen, that the timing could never have been perfect and is perhaps academic anyway? At least we’ll have kept faithfully and truly to the date we set ourselves.
Outside I can hear rain just starting, softly plopping on leaves. For some idiotic reason, I checked the weather forecast before we came to bed, as if we had some major journey planned. We won’t be going anywhere, the last thing that matters is the weather. But they promised rain, steady, persistent rain from dawn till late afternoon. Well, it’s started early. Pattering summer rain. I can’t say I’m sorry. Good weather for staying indoors. I can’t say I’m sorry that tomorrow this house will be curtained and cordoned off by a veil of rain.
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.