If it wasn’t for this rain, I think by now there’d be the first streaks of light. It’s no longer pattering and trickling. It’s started to beat down as if from some motionless, massing cloud. Centred on Putney. Just a wet Saturday in June, or time to build an ark?
Among all the possessions and artworks in this house is, still, if you don’t know it, a small and precious selection of the paintings you both did at primary school when you were six or seven. They’re in that special box of mine. But they would have been displayed once, if you remember, on our kitchen wall. For a period of your life there was a constantly changing show. You knew then, just about, that I worked with “art,” I bought and sold pictures, and when your pictures got taken down to be replaced by your latest productions, you used to think I went off and sold them. You were nobly contributing to your mother’s livelihood. You never enquired further and never seemed to mind that you weren’t getting a percentage of your own. What a grasping dealer your mother was. But I didn’t throw them all away, you’ll be pleased to know, I kept some of the best. And if I’d had to give a top prize, there’s little doubt I’d have given it to your Noah’s Arks.
There was a strict kitchen-gallery policy of not favouring one of you over the other, and I’d never have let on anyway, even with my professional eye, which one of you I thought was the better watercolourist (though, actually, I think it was you, Nick, one way in which you could pip your sister). But since you both went to the same primary school and were in the same class, you both very often painted the same subject. There was equality, at least, in that.
Noah’s Ark must be a sure winner, anyway, the all-time favourite for primary-school painting sessions. Is there a child who’s never been asked? A rainy afternoon in the classroom, the lights are on, out come the paints. The teacher tells the story first, then the brushes get to work. For both of you, of course, it was that memorable phrase “two by two” that struck an inspirational chord. The animals went in two by two and they did so, you were given to understand, so that the world would be saved. Whether or not you knew what that really meant, you clearly thought that being what you were meant your own salvation was guaranteed. In those days you used to get called “the Hook twins,” something you’d loathe now.
But there was clearly also some confusion in your minds as to whether the Ark and the Flood were things that had happened or that might or would. This was shown by the fact that both of you, with connivance or not, included yourselves among the elephants, camels, inevitable towering giraffes and, in your case, Nick, a couple of surprising (since they can swim) but really rather charming polar bears.
But there, in both cases, are both of you. You’re not readily recognisable, but Kate’s the one with the longer hair and the stiffly triangular skirt. Your place on Noah’s Ark has been emphatically reserved. In fact, in both cases again, neither Noah or his wife are visible at all and it rather looks as though the two of you have assumed those venerable roles and are not just among the lucky passengers, but have taken charge of the ship.
We didn’t flummox you by asking if there was a chance your dad and I might be saved too and be given our place on board, and you were too young for the joke that it was your dad, surely, who ought to be Noah, being in command as he already was of The Living World. But those pictures certainly got saved. They’re in this house now, in my box. Remarkable thick blue ribbons of rain fall down in each of them, though in your case, Nick, out of a convincing enough thundery-black sky. And that box, you’ll now understand, with its hoard of items, a surprising number of which are in sets of two, has come to seem itself like a miniature ark, waiting for some particularly rainy day.
30
BUT I THINK I can really see it now, round the edges of the curtains, the first grey hint of light. It’s today now, not tomorrow, I can’t pretend any more: the first day of your second life.
Your dad told me once about a time when Grannie Helen told him about the time before he was born. Here I am, doing the same for the two of you. But I know, Kate, that only last Christmas he told you about that very same thing, about another Christmas long ago when his mother had talked to him. And you must have worked out that he was talking about the year he and I first met, that year when, as far as I’m concerned, my second life began. It was another little piece, perhaps, in that jigsaw you’d tried to put together ever since I told you about the word “propose.” Though perhaps you’d long stopped caring about seeing the whole picture, and you no longer had a little girl’s notion that something similar (even with Nick) ought to happen to you.
But you would have worked out that he was talking about Christmas 1966. Maybe he just told you anyway, made a thing of it, even: “It was the year your mother and I first met.”
He was at home for Christmas, in Orpington. I was in Kensington. By then, I would have met your dad’s parents only a couple of times and that business of the sand dune was definitely just a secret between Mike and me. But I think his mum knew. Not about the sand dune, I mean. I think she knew that Mike and I weren’t a temporary thing. Mothers can tell things. She’d have known too, without needing to know any details, that the way Mike and I had got together was a lot different from the way she and Grandpa Pete had once set out to share their lives. It was 1966, it was a different world. She probably even thought: kids, these days, they have it on a plate. But anyway she decided to tell Mike — and he decided to tell you, Kate, all those Christmases later — about that time when his dad wasn’t around.
And, of course, he wasn’t around then, last Christmas. The first Christmas without him and the first anniversary coming up, in January, not to mention your dad’s fiftieth barely a week later. A tricky time of year all round. Your dad said to you, “Come on, Katesy, let’s do the washing-up.” Or rather he whispered it. Grannie Helen had fallen asleep. Perhaps she was dreaming of Grandpa Pete. But there was something in his voice, in that whisper, I don’t know if you felt it too, that was the same as if he might have said, “Let’s have a private word, Kate, let’s have a heart-to-heart.”
And I had one of those wobbly moments. You know what I mean now. I thought he might be going to tell you, to jump the gun, so to speak, and, for some reason, over the washing-up and, for some reason, just you and not Nick. It was a sign of how edgy things were (it was “next year” now, after all, and next year was close) that I could actually have thought this. It would have been a strange way of going about it. The truth is, ever since Grandpa Pete’s death, part of me had been on alert. I thought your dad might just blurt it now, any time.
It turned out he just wanted to remember that other Christmas with you. Though, come tomorrow, Kate, you may think, looking back, that he’d been nudging pretty close to the other thing. It was a little preparation.
Back in 1966, it had been Grandpa Pete who’d fallen asleep, full of Christmas dinner, by the fire. And it was Grannie Helen, as you know, Kate, who’d said to him then, not let’s do the washing-up, but let’s go for a walk, while your dad sleeps it off. The strange thing is that last Christmas I said almost exactly the same to you, Nick. I said, “Well, if they’re going to do the washing-up, let’s take a walk round the block.” It didn’t occur to me I was echoing Grannie Helen. I was trying to put aside that feeling that Mike was about to do some blurting — surely not — but I was also simply thinking of Nelson.
We had that reason to take a walk too. The first Christmas after Grandpa Pete’s death: it could hardly be at Coombe Cottage. Grannie Helen came to us, and that meant Nelson came too. And she was the one fast asleep now, in our living room. And, being fast asleep, she can’t have known anything of what your dad was telling you, Kate, in the kitchen. But then I’m not so sure. She’s a canny woman. She must have felt, when she walked round the block with Mike, all those years ago, that it was the right time to speak.