Anyway, she told him about yet another Christmas — Christmas 1944—when his dad hadn’t been there because he was having Christmas in a prisoner-of-war camp. At least he wasn’t just “missing” any more. Grannie Helen was spending Christmas at home in Dartford. And your dad wasn’t there either — not quite. Or perhaps you could say that, in a way, he was. She was in her last month and he was keeping her company.
But what your grandmother really wanted to offer your father was a sort of apology. She’d kept it to herself long enough and she might have just gone on doing so, but Mike was twenty-one and that was another thing, perhaps, that had prodded her. He was the same age as his dad had been, back then. What she wanted to make clear was that when Mike was born and Grandpa Pete was still a prisoner, she’d never mentioned him to Mike. She’d never mentioned his own dad.
Of course, Mike was just a tiny baby, so what would he have understood? But then most mothers with a father missing like that who’d one day be coming home would have talked about him, perhaps quite a lot, to make up for his absence. They’d have talked him up. They’d have prattled on about him to this new little pair of ears, if only to keep their own spirits up. And who knows what even a tiny baby, by some instinctual process, might not have picked up?
But then what do I know about such a situation? Nobody could have known when Mike was born that the war would be over inside six months. Grandma Helen had taken another, tougher view of things. She didn’t want to say anything to your dad that she might just find foolish and regrettable later. She didn’t want to spin him some fairy-tale yarn — even if he didn’t understand a word — that she’d only have to unspin. I’m a mother too, I can understand that. There’s a way in which Grannie Helen and I see eye to eye. Though it doesn’t stop me being afraid of her.
The fact is, though Grannie Helen knew that Grandpa Pete was alive and a prisoner, there was no guarantee that she’d see him again. I suppose that was only realistic, and I suppose you could say she’d been well trained in that way of thinking. The only training I’ve ever had in that sort of thing is when your dad gets up early in the morning (but not this morning, I think) and, just for a while, leaves that bit of empty, cooling sheet beside me.
But Grannie Helen would have got into a much sterner habit of guarding her feelings against the worst. When she’d first heard that Grandpa Pete had gone missing, she’d worked on the assumption that he was dead. That’s what she told your dad. She wanted to say that too. She hadn’t nursed fragile hopes. It sounded harsh, but there’d seemed less pain that way, she’d told him, in the long run.
If she hadn’t had a child inside her, it might have been different. But this was one of the reasons, after all, why she — why they — had wanted that child inside her. It’s just your mother’s hunch, but I think it may have been one reason too why Mike remained an only child. Anyway, given that she had a child inside her, she had to be pretty practical and hard-headed.
All this she told your dad. She even told him that when she’d been pregnant and his dad was missing, she’d seriously considered finding someone else — to be Mike’s daddy. It was only how a lot of women in such situations had had to think then, let alone the ones who actually knew their husbands were dead. In any case, now, after all these years, she wanted to say she was sorry. Sorry that she’d had to take that attitude and that she’d kept him in the dark, so to speak, even after he was born. Even if he was in the dark anyway.
Your dad told me that when his mum told him all this he’d had the fleeting thought that she’d actually had some other man lined up, as it were, or more than lined up, and this was what it was all building up to. But she’d read that thought and put him straight. She’d said, “Don’t worry, Mikey, I wasn’t planning on marrying your Uncle Eddie.”
She just needed to apologise, it seemed, after all that time, just for the thoughts she’d had, as if even they had been a form of betrayal. Perhaps she was just glad — a little jealous, maybe — that things were so easy for Mike and me, lucky little war babies. Perhaps she just wanted to tell her son, in some sentimental Christmassy way, brought on by the fact that he seemed to have had this “steady girlfriend” now for most of a year (I don’t know what she knew about all the other girlfriends), how much she loved his father, how much she’d once missed him and feared for him — the man who was sleeping right then, safe and sound in Orpington, his belly full, by a Christmas fire.
Perhaps, if you turn it round, it was all a kind of early training itself, if she didn’t know it then — for when she’d be sleeping by a Christmas fire and Grandpa Pete would really have gone missing for good. Maybe that’s what occurred to your dad, Kate, last Christmas.
Anyway, she told your dad that it wasn’t until the war was over and even a little while after that, that she dared to begin to tell him — and he may or may not have got the message — that, yes, he had a daddy, and, yes, he’d be coming home soon. Very soon now he was going to see him.
I don’t know quite how much of this he actually passed on to you, Kate, what slant he might have put on it. He told me too, later, that he’d told you over the washing-up about that time with his mum, and I thought it best not to probe. But while he was talking to you, Nick and I were having our own little Christmas heart-to-heart.
You and me, Nick, and of course Nelson. Nelson could have been listening in, if he’d wanted to. What do dogs know? He didn’t seemed to mind much that these were the streets of Putney, not the South Downs, or even to be thinking that there was something different and strange and sad about this Christmas. But I think we both had the same thought, Nick — that we were really taking Grandpa Pete for a walk.
Anyway, you suddenly said, looking at Nelson padding on ahead, “Did you and dad ever have a dog?”
And I said, “No.” And then I took a few silent paces. Then I said, “But we used to have a cat.”
And you said, after a bit of a pause too, “Yes, I know.”
You can be a dark horse, Nick. You’re not such a wary, cagey little brother these days.
“You know? But it was before you were born. It was at Davenport Road.”
“Yes. There was a lilac tree there, wasn’t there? Kate told me once that Dad had said there was a cat under the lilac, and she’d kept looking and she’d never seen it. She’d thought Dad was playing a game. Kate can be pretty dumb, can’t she?”
“She can’t have been more than three, Nick. I’m amazed she remembered.”
“Yeah, but it was a real cat, right? It was a dead cat. You’d buried it under the lilac tree.”
“You worked that out? When you were three?”
“Later. That’s not the point. The thing is, why didn’t you ever tell us? Why didn’t you just tell us you’d had a cat?”
“I just have, Nick.”
“Yeah, after all these years.”
“Is it so important?”
I was holding your arm. The streets were deserted and curfew-quiet, as they only ever are at Christmas. Other people’s fairy lights twinkled at us in the dark. For the first time in my life I thought: I’m a mother, leaning on my son.