It’s a different kind of thought, perhaps, but I had it: what do these little drawings matter beside the loss of a father? It’s not a question a professional should voice, but I asked it (and I adore Bassano). It’s a question I even took an absurd stage further. What do these mere drawings, of a lamb, a rabbit, a cockerel, matter beside a living cat? Would I have protested or lamented if, in order to guarantee the return of Otis, they’d been torn up and consigned to the oblivion they’d only recently come from? Or suppose Simon had said to me, if I can cast him in such an unlikely role: Paula, I’m afraid that Walker’s temporary possession and the world’s permanent ownership of these drawings depends on one little condition — that you sacrifice your cat. Would I have said, “No problem, Simon, leave it with me. No argument, no contest?”
Of course, Simon could never have made such an outlandish demand. (Or could he?) I’d never told him, in any case, about Otis. But he certainly knew that my father had died and he often glanced at me around this time with a real (and slightly paternal) concern — a rather heavier version of his look yesterday morning — as if for once he could shelve that jokey, brittle gambit of his: now, tell me all your troubles.
It’s a question that can sometimes insidiously arise in a job that’s all about putting a price on mere inanimate objects: what price a living human being? One Titian? Ten? And what price a cat? A small if exquisite study by some less illustrious old master? But do cats even come into it?
It’s a question that gets harder if your job’s also your passion. And it’s a question that somehow wracked me after Otis vanished, even as I told myself, to no great effect, “For God’s sake, pull yourself together.”
You yourselves may already be thinking, now you’ve been put in a certain picture, that in those years after we’d “decided against you,” I’d have had, after all, my second love to fall back on. That second love that was then blooming under Simon’s tutelage — or rather, you may even be surmising, taking needy root in the absence of you. Your mother had her pictures to console her. Or, more crudely, she had her career to think of (all the more so since your dad seemed not to have one). She was just like plenty of women, in fact, who have that blunt reason, anyway, for forgoing progeny. And how, indeed, with you around, could I have gone on those foreign art expeditions? Or found the time (or peace) to learn Italian?
Come on, Mum, you’re even thinking, don’t wrap it up in all that other stuff, you didn’t get where you are in the art business without a little hard-nosed determination.
But not “fall back on.” Or even “console.” A love is a love. Don’t turn me into half a woman. And would I swap you for twenty Titians? No. And hardly hard-nosed determination. Just imagine your mum for a moment, going into Walker’s every day while really moping for a missing pet. Scarcely a brisk or an edifying picture.
But it’s for you now to judge, to assess and to authenticate the double picture: your two parents in dismay for an absent cat. It will no doubt seem to you a very childish spectacle, one to bring out the latent, tutting, head-shaking adults in you. But don’t be harsh on your own beginnings.
“He’ll be back,” Mike said. “Cats do these things. Lives of their own, he’ll be back.” Your dad, the biologist, the wise expert on animal behaviour. But the days passed, and your dad, I know, was thinking, praying, just as much as I was: please don’t let him be dead, please don’t let Otis be flattened somewhere, a gritty, bloody mess at the side of the road.
Reactions and repercussions. Nearly six years had passed since those bad enough days of the visits to Doctor Chivers, but now we found ourselves only re-enacting that earlier time — lying once more, I’m afraid, with even less evident psychosomatic cause, with our backs turned coldly on each other, our very bed yearning for that soft early morning thud. Not just dismay, but abstinence, and not just abstinence but blame. This must be someone’s fault. If we’d never gone and got Otis in the first place…And wasn’t that Mike’s fault? (Mike, who’d been such a pillar when my dad died.) Mike, and that cat-woman, Mrs. Lambert.
Judge us, strictly if you must. What a pair of babies we must have been. But think it through. There’s still a lot of explaining to do. Take it, perhaps, if you can, as a sobering piece of instruction. You’re sixteen and now and then you must still feel the clutches of childhood pulling you back and making you feel, just when you don’t want to, like mushy infants again. But your parents were twice-sixteen and more when a cat succeeded in turning their lives upside down.
Unless I’m wrong about you. Unless you really do live in that cool and shrugging, impervious world where tomorrow will be just a passing, absorbable jolt to you. And why should I be just as afraid of that? A tougher world, in some way I don’t understand. Surely the argument should run that, in places like Putney at least — Putney, of all places — the living should only get softer and softer. Surely it has. But maybe you’re part of some new steely generation whose future is going to require stern stuff of you, in ways that even you don’t know yet. Though that waiting fact, I sometimes sense it, is already being instilled into your little frames (I still think they’re little). You’re being geared and primed, even as you sleep right now.
Enough, it seems to me, that you have to face tomorrow. The future, right now, is simply tomorrow. By which, of course — I keep forgetting — I really mean today. We’ll find out soon just what you’re made of. And that’s the very phrase, I think. Our ludicrous distress over a cat: what was that really made of? I need to tell you more about Otis. But don’t, at least, imagine that we’ve ever thought about you, as we once found ourselves thinking about him: that if you’d never come into our home, we’d never have suffered all the agonies of fearing we might lose you.
18
PICTURE US, ANYWAY — and mock us, if you will — in our bedroom in Herne Hill, in the first weak light of dawn, our backs grimly turned on each other, waiting, hoping for a little duvet-denting pounce. After the fifth or sixth day, even this pathetic scene would have looked more pitiful still. The fact is, Otis wouldn’t have been there, but nor would your dad. You’d have seen your mother lying by herself with just a dip in the sheet where your dad had been.
I never urged him to it. On the other hand, I never told him not to. I never said: don’t be a fool. Your dad, who could hardly blame himself for Otis’s disappearance, nevertheless, after a certain while, saw it as his duty, his vaguely penitential mission to get Otis back. The days of his dawn patrols.
I’d pretend still to be asleep or at least I’d never acknowledge his slipping from the bed. I’d give the impression, perhaps, that this was behaviour I only expected and would even have demanded. There’s a word, perhaps, for my behaviour. I’d be aware of him getting up and stepping carefully across the room. A little later, I’d hear the click of the front door being gently shut behind him. I wouldn’t move.
It may be hard for you to imagine your father — though it may become tomorrow’s presiding image — like some vagrant without a home. When these days he drives a top-of-the-range Saab, and in any case has the occasional services of a driver, in a dove-grey jacket and peaked cap, to pick him up, often me as well, and drive him hither and thither (I’m talking, of course, about Tony, in his black Mercedes, who’s stopped threatening — I know it wouldn’t look cool — also to drop you off at school). It may be hard to picture your father wandering like a lost soul round the streets of Herne Hill. But I still see him doing it and never without a pang.