And that little discrepancy between you only seemed to enhance the balance. Even with twins, there’s priority — one of you had to be born first. And that was you, Kate, by a length. It’s known among the four of us, but it’s stamped upon you anyway: that edge, that lead you’ve always had. But I never saw it as the sign of some race between you — quite the opposite, in fact.
It’s absurd, when I was there, trying my utmost (I assure you) to make the whole astonishing thing happen, that I sometimes picture your birth as if I had nothing to do with it. All your own mutual work. As if you were in some hidey-hole together, waiting your chance, two would-be escapers, and it was you, Kate, who had the courage to poke your head out first and see if all was clear. And the first thing you did was not to make your own quick, brave bolt for it, but to turn back and reach out your hand: “Come on, Nick. It’s okay. Let’s go!”
At two o’clock in the morning, in these small hours, sixteen years ago. I wouldn’t have known if it was raining then, the weather was my last concern.
You helped your brother into the world, Kate. Isn’t that the truth of it? And that’s meant something that I could never have foreseen and that’s occasionally upset the happy motion of the seesaw, if it’s also added, strangely, to its balance. We recognise it between us, I think, don’t we, if it’s never been uttered? That you and I are rival mothers, so far as Nick is concerned. If you both have rival fathers — who will be introduced to you, so to speak, tomorrow — Nick has always had his rival mums.
I think that little pucker was really in his brow at birth, Kate, don’t you? Help me! Wait for me! But since both your faces were such a mass of puckers and creases at that time, I can never be sure. Two little shrimps? Two little livid dumplings! “His father’s frown”—that’s how we say it, that way round. But why shouldn’t we just as well say of a father, why shouldn’t it be just as naturaclass="underline" “Oh, he has his son’s way of knotting his brow?”
Your lungs announced their presence, Nick, seven minutes after your sister. I think your father also gasped.
What will happen tomorrow? But what’s the worst fear of any parent anyway? It starts in the delivery suite. Don’t mix them up with anyone else’s. Having got you, and in such an elaborate way, how frightened we were of losing you. I’m not thinking now, at all, of tomorrow. Of losing you anyway. Your precious little arrived-together selves. Someone should have told us about this perfectly normal parental terror. But didn’t having it prove that we were normal parents?
You can’t have the one thing (or indeed the two) without the other, the possession without the dread: it’s the fundamental contract. Don’t think for one moment that our peculiar contract in any way diminished that. And don’t doubt when you learn what you’ll learn tomorrow that there’s ever been any difference in that respect between the two of us. We’re perfect twins, that way, too. Both of us, either of us would lay down our lives in an instant if it meant not losing either or both of you.
But you know this. You’ve even borne witness to it — or almost. You know, of course, what I’m coming to. What shocked me and paralysed me, that terrible day in Cornwall — what added, I mean, to my multiple shock, panic, terror, utter distraction — was your father’s own terrifying insistence. He screamed it at me, he ordered me: “No! Me! Wait there!” As if, amid everything else, he saw this as his moment of opportunity.
He was the stronger, of course, but I was the better swimmer. He knew this: he’d seen me at Craiginish, he’d seen me in Brighton. He’d seen me, for goodness’ sake, right there in Cornwall. But he dived in almost at the same time as he let out that yell to me. How was he to know that that current that was pulling you out and away from the rocks wouldn’t be as defeating for an adult as for your own nine-year-old frames?
It swept him out to you quickly enough at least. To both of you. I’d already, for the second time in my life, taken overpowering and indelible note of your both-ness. That is, that you were being drawn away from dry land by some force that neither of you could resist and you, Nick, even less than your sister, but you weren’t going to be separated from each other. Your two bobbing heads, like linked, swirling buoys — another image of you that’s with me for ever.
Mike moved rapidly towards you, almost too rapidly. I could only see the back of his own bobbing head. I had the unthinkable thought that in the next few gliding moments you would all be lost, all pulled away from me, all that mattered to me, and I would have to watch. I saw myself standing alone on bare rock, wishing to turn to rock myself.
Everything in my memory of that day is like some evil blend of the benign and the horrific. It was a beautiful day, it was hot, it was more like a day in the Mediterranean than in Cornwall. It was the third summer we’d spent by that little safe, sandy cove and we thought we could trust you now if you scampered off a bit further. You’d learnt to swim two years before. You were good and confident at it, like me. The sea was blue and wallowy and lazy, the tide was coming in. On the other side of the headland, when we got there, there was a touch of breeze and a bit of swell and slap to the waves, but no one would have called that sea dangerous.
There were other happy people on the beach. The two of us had been swimming not so long before and we were lying, drying, becoming sweetly drowsy. It sends a terror through me, even now, that we might have just fallen asleep. But we both had the sudden simultaneous alarm: where are they? It makes me quiver still — I can’t explain our decision — that we might have gone in the other direction first.
Even as I stood there, looking at the three of you, about to leave me, I had the mocking, the split-second dream of a thought: that this would be a nice spot to be in, just to stand here or to sit, on this warm, basking shelf of rock, with these beautiful dark-blue waves now and then sending up pleasing spouts of spray, with the cliffs and the blue sky and the whole hazy, summery coastline curving away. I think I even saw myself flipped safely, inviolately back: a girl again, aged nine myself, on the beach at Craiginish, where none of this could possibly be happening.
But I saw something wonderful enough. I saw your father reach you, and I saw some commotion between you: sounds, words that I couldn’t hear. Perhaps he just barked at you too. But I saw that your father was sizing up the situation, he wasn’t just struggling. I saw — oh God, this was the vital, the crucial factor — that when he turned, the current was only of infant-threatening significance, he could make his way, with effort, against it. On the other hand, he had to make his way with the two of you.
The wonderful thing is that you acted, all of you, like a team. That is, you took decisions, you made pacts among yourselves, all of which might have been risky, but which turned out in every case to be the right ones. It was almost as if you’d practised it. He couldn’t ferry you both in, that might have been disastrous. It had to be Nick first, and that meant that you, Kate (I won’t forget it), had to put yourself at lonely, terrible risk. It stopped me being too angry later. How brave you were, how on your own. I could see there was not much more you could do than hold your own against the current, perhaps make the very tiniest headway. You were thinking of the distance your father would have to cover a second time: you were losing strength and you had to think of how it might be used or wasted.