Uncle Tim, breaking his own parsimonious habits (for a supposedly wealthy man), would sometimes treat us, like a forgetful guardian, to liberal lunches. I’d have the weird feeling, as he poured the Sancerre, that some legacy was under review, some announcement might be made over coffee. Or your Grandpa Dougie (without Margaret) would regale us at the Connaught, asking nothing in return, I sometimes felt, than that I should make it the occasion of a little announcement, which was never forthcoming.
He would be seventy-five soon. Perhaps I might make that little announcement, and how it would make his day, at his birthday party. He would divorce Margaret soon. Marry Georgina. Oh Daddy.
Our Brighton, our Sussex, our London — its gravity shifted from Earl’s Court and the King’s Road to the West End. And to unglamorous, unassuming, unexpectant Herne Hill. Count your blessings in life. Good, time-honoured counsel. Count your ample blessings. Stop counting sperm, that’s been done. No one knew our little secret. We could even manage to ignore it, to forget it, ourselves — leaving just that space we never mentioned for miracles. What you never had, you can’t miss, or fear to lose. More sound, homespun, reassuring advice.
And, anyway, one day, for no particular reason, we got a cat.
16
IT WAS MRS. LAMBERT at number twenty-three who put us up to it, or rather, who nobbled your father. In those days every quiet inner-suburban street had its complement of kindly, plucky old ladies, living all alone in their three-bedroomed houses as if they’d never done otherwise, but taking a beady-eyed interest in young couples like Mike and me. I wonder where they’ve gone.
Mrs. Lambert didn’t live all alone, exactly. She had two cats, Toby and Nancy, and one day she cornered your father by her front gate and said that Mr. Nokes, the vet in Wells Road, had a lovely black cat going right now, a rescued stray, just a handsome black moggy. Who would want to abandon such a thing? She was just passing it on, but there’d be no harm, would there, in our going to have a look?
I don’t think Mrs. Lambert’s neighbourly wheedling would have worked so well on me. But there you are, when your dad was in his twenties he was a soft touch for little old ladies. And your dad might have ignored it, but he mentioned it to me, as if he had a duty to please Mrs. Lambert. He said that Mrs. Lambert had said that if it didn’t find an owner soon, well, you know…And, put like that, it made us seem like callous murderers if we didn’t go and take a look.
I said, “For God’s sake, Mikey — a cat? A cat?” But we went along to take a look. And we were sold.
This is the simple truth that I don’t think your father will mention tomorrow, though, arguably, he has even more invested in it than I do. Before there was you, there was a cat. But it goes a bit further, since it would be true enough to say that you owe your existence, your very genesis to a cat. You came from a black cat called Otis. A remarkable train of events, since Otis, like so many cats, had been well and truly neutered. But without Otis you might never have found your way into the world.
There, it’s out of the bag. A secret that’s never really needed to be a secret — I mean the existence of Otis — but we’ve kept it so, all the same. You’ve never heard us, at least till very recently, even mention his name. He died before you arrived. He was still there, at Davenport Road, not so very long at all before you were born and we left Davenport Road when you were still three. I’m always surprised you have any memories of the place at all. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll try to dig up some more.
Otis. After Otis Redding, of course: the late-great Otis Redding, whose happy little paean, My Girl, had wafted over Brighton beach in the spring of 1966. And whose bitter-sweet but oddly buoyant ballad, Dock of the Bay, had later floated, one summer, over London — over Earl’s Court, over our basement and its red bedspread, over Mike’s snails in the lab at Imperial, where he sneaked in a transistor radio — and become, for some reason, our song, Mikey and Paulie’s song, the song of our togetherness, our co-existence, our future.
There, another little secret. Why should a song of heartache and separation have become the song of our happiness and togetherness? I don’t know, it just did. Perhaps it was because it was a seaside song and we’d first met in Brighton, or perhaps because of its unintended but gently meaningful resonance, even for us then in our early twenties. It was a swansong, after all, a posthumous hit. Otis himself was dead at twenty-six, that soulful voice imploring from the grave. Try a little tenderness…
Life is short, my darlings, or it can be. Seize it, treasure it, cradle it. But perhaps this has never occurred to you at sixteen.
There was never any question, anyway, once he’d entered our home and once we had to decide on a name, that Otis would be called Otis.
A cat. I know it’s obvious — glaringly and perhaps even amusingly obvious — but we never presented it to ourselves in the way you’re thinking. Otis was (as it would prove) before you, but not “instead” of you. We never spoke or even thought that thought. How could we have done when we didn’t even know you? We just went along, rather awkwardly, to see Otis. And blessed the day. We even blessed Mrs. Lambert.
And we became, so we discovered, cat people. The world divides, they say: cat people and dog people. And some people, of course, who never find out. That’s what our vet said, not Nokes, but the new one. “Some people, sadly,” he said, “never find out”—dropping in that little “sadly” rather delicately. But I suppose he said it to everyone.
I didn’t come from a family who kept pets, a home with an animal, nor did your dad — a strange thing, perhaps, for a future biologist. But I’d say my dad was a cat person, through and through. Perhaps I just mean he was a pussycat himself. And Fiona is a dog person. And perhaps in her case I just mean that there’s another, more strictly correct word I still can’t quite bring myself to use about my own mother. I’m harsh on her, I know. Perhaps it really stems from those days when I thought I’d never be a mother myself. I felt twice betrayed as a woman.
But we can all very definitely say that your Grandpa Pete was a dog person, since it’s become a sort of family legend. When he died last year there was a dog with him, his black Labrador, Nelson. According to your father, there’d never been any sign of it in all the years he’d lived in Orpington, but when he moved with Grannie Helen to Coombe Cottage, it emerged like part of some prearranged formula. What would he do when he retired? He’d get a country cottage, he’d get a dog and he’d take it for long, bracing walks over the South Downs.
Which is exactly what he did. Mike used to say that it was such a rigorously carried through project that he wondered whether some weird replacement wasn’t at work. First there’d been his dad, his mum and him: now there was the two of them and a dog. Uncle Eddie, living in the same place, had never had a dog, and he’d cycled rather than walked, but Grandpa Pete proved to be a dog person. And your dad proved to be a cat person (and a cyclist). It’s just how it goes.