Your dad likes to maintain that his latter-day success is all down to luck, to just happening to be in the right place at the right time. To luck and to his “Uncle” Tim — I’ll come to him later. But I think it was all a little like that contraceptive pill. Which came first: the pill and the science that produced it, or the change in the air that went with it? Science might never have become popular if your dad, among others, hadn’t discovered a gift, a marketing gift, for making it so. And he didn’t just “happen” to be there. He was there for a long and dubious time (I was one of the doubters) before the time was ever right.
He still likes to deny this and to have those moments of wistful, scientific regret. But this is at least fifty per cent tosh — trust me — or it’s really about something else altogether. Selling isn’t the same as disowning, or we’d all have nothing to our names. I buy and sell art. For many years, as I remind your father, it was our bread and butter. But I can still like it. I can still love Tintoretto. This usually shuts him up. Your dad appreciates a good picture too. Over the years he’s developed quite an eye. He’ll even admit, if you push him, that the art department at Living World is a major factor in its success. “Uncle” Tim was simply never visual.
And I certainly appreciate, as does your dad, the pictures, if they’re not Tintorettos, that we can buy now and hang on our own walls. This house, as you’ve grown older, has become full of pictures, full, as you like to call it, of “stuff.” And large enough house though it is, you might have wondered — teenagers, these days, seem wised-up on these things — why we haven’t moved yet to an even bigger house that can contain yet more stuff, on a grander scale. Especially as not so long ago we quite casually bought a farmhouse in France — your father called it a “bolt hole”—still being worked on. Selling up, and buying up. All things being equal, to use your dad’s phrase, we might be over there right now for the weekend, checking up on progress and staying at the Hôtel des Deux Églises. I think he wishes it were ready, right now, for immediate refuge.
But all things aren’t equal, though we’re all here in this house tonight, as is only proper. All your memories, just about, are in this house. All your life, just about, is within these walls. “After your sixteenth birthday,” we said. How could we possibly have moved anywhere beforehand, how could we have told you what we’ll tell you tomorrow anywhere else but here?
Once upon a time your dad and I used to share a basement in Earl’s Court. Tatty posters, reproductions only, on the walls. And in those days, yes, your dad was a real scientist, working in a lab. His special field, as you know, was molluscs, and within that special field, his special area was snails. And his special area within that special area, which he would say wasn’t at all small, was the construction and significance, the whole evolutionary and ecological import, of their shells. How is it done? Why doesn’t a snail just remain a slug? A question that you and I might never think to ask. But it was one of the many instances, your dad might say in his best professorial mode, of biology’s skill in chemistry, in sub-organic ingenuity.
I’m referring now, of course, to his own article, years ago now, in Living World. (A very wishy-washy and barely scientific article, he would say, but I know it meant a lot to him, I know it was a gesture to his long since aborted PhD.) Not just chemistry, but in time and by a long, slow process far beyond the needs of molluscs, mineralogy, geology, the very composition of the world. Or, as he once put it to me when we were still at Sussex: a limpet will never know it, but without the ability of its ancient ancestor to make a shell, there simply wouldn’t be any South Downs.
Just think, he might have studied limpets. But I don’t think your father has ever really given up science. And he can still say things, still give the little lectures that almost stop you in your tracks.
Snails, not limpets. One moves, just about: the other just clings. Mike went for snails. And what a fitting choice, I’ve sometimes thought, but never, of course, ever said, for a man who’d arrive late in life. Your dad, and his snails.
They’ll be out there now, it occurs to me: a whole crop of them in this summer rain. Rain always brings them on, or brings them out. This house is being surrounded, perhaps fittingly and even with a delicate, nostalgic empathy, by snails. We treat them now like the regular garden pests they are, despatch them casually and mercilessly. But once your father was an expert on snails. And once upon a time, in Sussex, he was a genuine student of biology, though I might have said then that his special field in biology was his own.
Linda Page and Judy Morrison might have said the same. I shared an upper flat with them in Osborne Street, Brighton. They became our “bridesmaids.” You’ve met Linda some years ago. She married a nice plump lawyer in the end and now lives in Highgate. What you’ve never known is that once she slept with your dad. Judy’s become less in touch. I mustn’t let her get like Doctor Pope, like one of those people you just wonder about. We used to have our regular get-togethers, the three of us, our lunches or girls’ nights out. Sometimes these would be in Piero’s in Jermyn Street, just up the road from Walker’s (Simon, eyebrow ever cocked, wanted to be introduced). Linda and Judy: if there were ever two people to whom I might have just blabbed the whole story. When we got on to our third, unneeded bottle. But I never have.
The Three Sisters of Osborne Street. We shared most things. We may even have shared your dad. I’m still not sure if it actually happened with Judy. Your dad is good, and he’s needed to be, at being cryptic. But however far the previous sharing had gone, after I’d had my first share there was definitely no more sharing. This you should know, if only for the straightness of the record. It was Linda your dad visited first, or it would be more correct to say, it was Linda who first brought him home. And your dad and Linda didn’t last so long. It’s an unresolved question who ditched whom. I think they ditched each other, gently. Then, putatively, it was Judy. But then it was me.
Number thirty-three Osborne Street, Brighton. A stone’s throw, as they like to say ambitiously in Brighton, from the sea. But on a still night, if the tide was in, you might sometimes just hear the soft crash of waves, like far-off cymbals I always thought, and on a wild, wet night you’d have the feeling that the rain on the window might be spray.
We had the top two floors: three bedrooms and a kitchen. It all had its own front door and separate stairs: not so much a flat as a “maisonette.” A word of its time. As well as the Three Sisters we were the Three Maisonettes. Linda had the front bedroom, I had the one next to hers, Judy had the room at the top. And we all had our visitors.
Mike has maintained ever since, which may be complete tosh too, but I’ve never not gone along with it since it would hardly behove me to disagree, that he had to sleep with Linda and Judy first in order to get to me. Fair’s fair: all of us right there under the same roof. As if he were some knight in armour and Linda and Judy were just challenges, obstacles who popped up to waylay him on his otherwise unswerving quest.
In any case, the result was the same, and I have my own simple summary of it all, from which I’ve never wavered. I can’t really remember if at the time I was actually jealous or impatient, or just desperate, as he worked his way, according to him, to me. Or if I actually thought — or hoped — that contriving to be third in line might give me some precarious advantage. But what I’ve always simply told your father and now I’ll tell you is that I was lucky, oh so lucky, third-time lucky.