“What was its name?” you said.
“Otis. He was called Otis.”
Nelson padded on ahead.
“As in Otis Redding?”
“Yes, Nick. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of Otis Redding.”
“I haven’t heard of any other Otis. Till now. You and Dad had some thing about Otis Redding?”
“He was a lovely cat, Nick, a lovely black cat. He died the month before you and Kate were born. I think that’s why we’ve never told you.”
Your dad and Grandpa Pete always did the washing-up at Christmas, a tradition. They did it for the last time barely two weeks before Grandpa Pete died. It was the last father-and-son chat they ever had. You must have been thinking that, Kate, as Mike was talking to you.
I dare say Nick told you about Otis, though you’ve never brought it up. But I dare say that you remembered that thing about the lilac tree, and tomorrow — today — you’ll be thinking: well, now that cat’s finally jumped out.
But I don’t know if Mike told you the last bit of what his mum said to him all those Christmases ago. Maybe not. Or maybe the turkey carcass, sitting there amid all the wreckage on the kitchen table, would only have prompted him. She’d said that even when she knew Grandpa Pete was coming back, even when he did come back, she’d thought it might have been a mistake, to have talked up the event beforehand.
The thing is, prisoners of war didn’t just sit around in their camps cheerfully waiting to be liberated — any more than they all tried to escape. He’d been force-marched, in midwinter, along with thousands of others, a lot of whom died. Your Grandpa Pete had been at death’s door for a while, in a hospital, still in Germany. So had Charlie Dean. They never talked about it. I think they helped each other survive.
And even when he was well enough to be returned home he was hardly like the man Grannie Helen had last seen over a year before. This was in late June 1945, almost exactly fifty years ago. What a crowded month June is. Grandpa Pete was just a shadow of himself. He was home at last, but as Grannie Helen put it to your father that Christmas in Orpington, “My God, Mikey, there wasn’t much of him. He needed some feeding up. He was all skin and bone.”
31
NOW YOU’RE ABOUT to learn he was never your grandfather anyway, something he never had to learn himself. You see how far the ripples can go? Back in those days when you were about to be born we had to play a little at being god. What will the world be like in sixteen years’ time? It will be1995. Pete and Helen will have turned seventy…
Once, over sixteen years ago, your dad had to make another big announcement that you could say was the opposite of the one he’ll make today. Perhaps today you may even find yourselves wondering about it. He had to phone his mum and dad to give them a simple, happy message — and by then they must have been wondering if it was ever going to come. I was sitting listening while your dad made that call. He wanted me to be there. And Otis was there too, curled in my lap.
It follows, of course, that you were present too, if not exactly listening, though that call was very much about you. And Otis may already have known what else was in my lap, because though I was stroking him, he wasn’t purring. There’d come a time soon when Otis would get very poorly and wouldn’t sit in my lap at all. But you should know that though you never saw him, you were sometimes very close to Otis, very close indeed, close enough to have heard — if he’d been so inclined — his muffled purr.
But perhaps he wasn’t purring that day because he was listening, like me, to what your dad was saying into the phone.
“Paula’s pregnant” is what he said, the formula he chose. It wasn’t a lie, and why not give all credit to the mother? But what your dad never said, to his own parents, as someone making such a call might very understandably have said, was: “I’m going to be a dad.” Or: “You’re going to be grandparents.” He was very careful not to use — though he’d get to use them later, even without thinking — the words “grandparents” or “grandchildren.”
This would have been in the autumn of 1978. It was a false call he was making, you could say, a fraudulent call, though not in fact, in any word I heard uttered, untruthful. And what you should certainly know is that when your dad was making it he was genuinely, plainly excited. No one at the other end would have had cause for doubt or suspicion, and why on earth should they? Does anyone say or even think after such an opening statement: “Oh — and who is the father?”
Your dad put on a remarkably convincing act, but at the same time it wasn’t an act at all. It was like that moment when we first “saw” you. He didn’t act then. The truth is that though I’d worried about how he would handle that phone call, when it came to it, I actually felt jealous. I mean I felt jealous that I’d never be able to make one like it myself.
Since it was Grandpa Pete who answered (and your Grannie Fiona was already lost in fairyland). The first words your dad said were, “Hello Dad.” Your Grandpa Pete got the news first. Of course, sitting close by though I was, I couldn’t hear his side of the conversation, let alone see how he reacted — my situation was a bit like yours with Otis — but I can definitely vouch that he was very excited too. He was not only taken by surprise by what his son had to say, he was also rather overcome. There was quite a long pause, in fact, in which I think I could detect, just as surely as Mike could with his ear pressed to the receiver, the sound of a man being changed into a grandfather. It’s a distinctive sound, perhaps. It was as if Grandpa Pete, at the other end, had had to put down his receiver, turn around, take a few deep breaths, then come back as that transformed figure.
And that only made me doubly jealous. Although what I also felt was: well, that’s really done it now, Mikey, no going back. That’s the seal on it. You can hardly say now, “Actually — there’s something you should know.”
But the jealousy bit didn’t stop there. Because some while later your dad had to make another call and then, too, it was Grandpa Pete who answered.
“I’ve got something else to tell you, Dad. Even better. Twins.”
Then too he avoided the word “grandchildren.” But I was doubly-doubly jealous.
When Grannie Helen first knew she was pregnant, neither she nor Grandpa Pete would have had any special reason to think: what will the world be like when our child’s sixteen? What sort of world will it grow up into? Their world was pressing enough at the time — and could it get any worse? And when, just a little later, Grandpa Pete was shot down over Germany and taken prisoner, it must have been a comfort for him to know he had a child now on its way. It must have been quite something. And it must have meant a lot to him, if he had no idea when or if he’d see his home again, when the message at last got through to him in his prisoner-of-war camp, that his child had safely arrived and it was a son.
Perhaps during, or very soon after, that first phone call Mike made, Grandpa Pete would have shed a tear or two. Perhaps some pretty terrible memories would have flashed through his head. When he jumped from that burning plane he can’t possibly have supposed that one day he’d send that unborn son of his, when he’d be twenty-one, a case of champagne, let alone that one day that same son would phone him to inform him, if not in so many words, that he was a grandfather. Biology’s a strange thing (but ask your father), it squanders millions of sperm as if the numbers don’t matter, but now and then, it seems, it can seize any single one of us and shake us to the core.
Now you’ll know that those tears you saw your father shed at his father’s funeral weren’t the simple tears you thought they were, if tears for a father are ever that simple. Now you’ll know that this man lying here is really the last of the Hooks, the very end of the line, the last of the Hooks of Sussex. Just as your Grandpa Dougie — your real grandfather — turned out to be, despite his three marriages, the last of the Campbells, or of his particular strand of them, a point he seemed eager to drive home at his funeral.