The last of the Hooks, the last of the Campbells. Does it really matter? The last of the Mohicans…It sounds all rather grand and heroic — and just a bit masculine, don’t you think, Kate? The last dodo…The last coelacanth…When everything’s done by cloning-to-order and genetic engineering, will it be the men who’ll miss more keenly the old torch-passing stuff of fatherhood or women who’ll miss the authentic taste of maternity?
It’s light, it’s really getting light.
“Uncle” Charlie and “Auntie” Grace were also at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. You always knew, of course, they were never a real aunt or uncle. All the same, they had to be there. They’d flown in from Spain as soon as they’d got the news and, standing there with their tanned faces in that January churchyard, they looked like some holiday couple who’d somehow boarded the wrong flight.
When Charlie jumped out of that same burning plane in 1944 he can’t have supposed, either, that one day, after a profitable career in light industry, he’d retire to a villa with a swimming pool near Málaga — the “Villa Sidcup” as he’d waggishly name it. But he must surely have been thinking as he stood there among those gravestones that he was the last one left now, the very last one of that old crew, the crew that must have been, if only briefly — if just for the space of a night — a bit like some specially put together family.
You both know the story. Grandpa Pete the navigator and Charlie (“What else, with my name?”) the tail gunner, the only two out of seven who’d survived, and then met up again in the same prison camp. It would form a bond, a lasting bond, and so it did. “Dean and Hook.” Now it was just “Dean.” The frost had melted, but his head had its own frosting of close-cropped, almost white hair.
Charlie, of course, had Grace standing beside him, holding his arm: a whole other partnership. But, however it comes about, to be the last one left, the only one left of just two, isn’t that the worst thing ever? Worse than being the end of any line?
But Charlie didn’t just have Grace, you’ll remember, he had Nelson. Given the circumstances of Grandpa Pete’s death, Nelson absolutely had to be there too. And, given those circumstances and Nelson’s manifest capacity for loyalty, you might have thought he would have attached himself now to Grannie Helen, or to Mike. But he attached himself, to everyone’s surprise and vague embarrassment, to Charlie. Charlie stood by his old pal’s grave with Grace on one side and on the other a dog devotedly squatting on its haunches.
Did you miss your grandfather, were you grieving for him? Will you grieve for him now? You didn’t weep. You were fourteen. Nor did Charlie weep, even with Nelson there to induce him, he just stood very still. Only your father wept. Even Grannie Helen controlled her tears, as you would have noticed, though she had most cause to weep, and her son was weeping beside her. A tougher generation? And she’d had all that early training.
Would I like to be a grandmother? Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question. Though it’s a legitimate one, as legitimate as for a woman to ask, at thirty-two: am I going to be a mother? Though, for goodness’ sake, I’m only forty-nine — I still have a whole decade on your father. And “Grannie Paulie,” that’s just plain ghastly.
And the short answer, anyway, is that even the word sends a chill through me, the word itself scares me. As if the next word can only be “widow.” I’ll settle for being a mother. Mike’s wife and a mother: my complete and exact position in life.
But does Grannie Helen, now in her second year of widowhood, draw comfort and strength from being a grandmother, and from knowing that Grandpa Pete died a grandfather? You see what confronts you? You’ll understand now how, despite our sixteen-year rule, both Mike and I, after his dad’s funeral, went through a fever of feeling that this might be the right time, the best time even, never mind empty embargoes. You’d behaved in such a grown-up way, after all, and what could be more appropriate: after the death of one father?
But it would have been too sudden, too cruel, at such a time. And Mike simply wanted to keep you — can I put it like that, and will you blame him? — that year and a half longer. He wanted to “keep you.” And, anyway, suppose that at that already trying time, and through whatever chain of unfortunate reactions, it should have found its way to his mother? What a further blow. And what an injustice: that Mike’s father would have gone to his grave a self-believing grandparent and his mother would have the whole double burden of knowledge. You see what faces you? There was still that official margin of another eighteen months.
And that’s passed now anyway, or has only hours left to run. It’s dawn on the seventeenth of June, a wet and murky dawn, a reluctant sort of dawn. So it should be. And this man lying here, snoring gently, his familiar features reassembling out of the dark, is still sound asleep — how amazing — as if he’s determined to remain so. “This man”: is he no more than that now? I was once Mustardseed, my darlings, Titania’s little helper. O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!
And — how amazing: that’s a bird out there, singing clearly, despite the falling rain, doing what birds must do at dawn in June. It’s not a blackbird, I think. A thrush? A robin? Mike would know, he knows these things. I could wake him, ask him.
I’m afraid of Grannie Helen. I was afraid of her at that funeral. Were you a bit afraid, too, to look her closely in the eye? I didn’t know how to comfort her. My own mother’s example didn’t help me. But Grannie Helen certainly looked, intently and often, at you. Did you notice that? As if perhaps you were really her best comfort on that day, or she was just, perhaps, full of admiration for you. How big you were now, how you’d shot up, not those two infants any more. And it’s one of the features of these sixteen years, which may seem to you to have been immeasurably long — they’re your whole life, after all — that they’ve sometimes seemed to us to rush you along, as if every month has produced some new version of you. There’s been a sort of wild comfort in it, even as it’s frightened us: all that amazing room for change.
But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen, who at seventy-two, we can fairly say, has stopped growing and changing and is just who she is. I’m afraid of that word “widow.” I think she’s probably awake now too, at Coombe Cottage — I feel sure she is — watching the grey light loom and listening to the thrum of the rain. I’m so simply afraid of Mike here no longer being here, it’s the fear of my life. And I know this isn’t the time for me to think of myself and I know it’s up to you, but please don’t take him from me today.
But I’m afraid of Grannie Helen in another way. I have to say this to you too. I’ve seen her look at you intently before. Fair enough, she’s your grandmother — or she doesn’t know she isn’t. I’ve seen her look at you and then at Mike, then back again at you. Fair enough, she’s a mother too. But mothers know things, they can just tell.
I think at that funeral, at which she didn’t cry, she might have been thinking of how successfully she’d protected your Grandpa Pete. Now it might be her own son she’s protecting, if not quite in the same way. Mothers only want the best for their children. It could be that as from today she’ll be protecting you too, from the lie that you’ll think you’ll be keeping from her. If that’s how it’s to be, if that’s how you choose.