Luck which stayed. The incontestable and lasting truth is he never went on to anyone else. Our auditioning days, so to speak, were over. We’d each found the one. Your father got into bed with me one night in Brighton nearly thirty years ago and, though the place and the room and the bed have changed from time to time, he’s never got out.
4
“SLEEPING WITH”: it’s a funny expression. It doesn’t mean what it says, though sometimes it just does. As if the closest you can ever get to another human being is to lie beside them, unconscious that they’re even there. I’ve slept with your father for nearly thirty years. That’s nearly ten years, if you think about it, of mutual oblivion. Though look at me here, wide awake. I’m not sleeping with him tonight.
And we didn’t do that much sleeping that night, thirty years ago. Though it’s not the sleeping (of either kind) that counts, right at the start, take your mother’s word for it. It’s the pillow talk. You’ll find that out one day, I hope, though you haven’t even begun the process, so far as I can tell, of finding someone to sleep with. It’s hardly for me, your own mother, to say: time to get going, it’s 1995, time to start sleeping around, time to follow your mother’s hardly commendable example. You’ve only ever slept with each other, long ago when you were babies and again, rather subversively, when you were toddlers, which you won’t want reminding of anyway.
But listen to your mother, pillow-talking to herself.
I knew it wasn’t the same with Linda at least: no pillow talk there. Her room was next to mine, the wall wasn’t discreet. Plenty of noise, plenty of bed sound. And I heard — it’s a very strange thing to remember now — Linda’s rather high-pitched, hurrying gasps. But I didn’t hear many words, I didn’t hear much conversation. And after not so very long I didn’t hear anything: just the sound of two people asleep while I lay awake, the sound of two people sleeping together and doing, really, just that.
But Linda, if she were awake, when it was the other way round, if she were listening with some special device, a glass to the wall perhaps, would have heard us whispering and murmuring away long into the night. Heard our thrustings and thrashings-about certainly, and later on heard something softer, slower, just a lovely, steady undulation, I recall, the merest gentle creaking of my bed. But, in between and afterwards again, she’d have heard, if she listened hard, the sound of us swapping the stories of our lives. Though I’m not so sure, if I’m honest, and knowing Linda, if she’d have cared that much or been so free to listen, having moved on from your dad, a thing I find hard to comprehend, though I have to thank her for it utterly.
Pillow talk. It’s how you know, it’s how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day — some night — I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not just to merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven’t already guessed that your future, too, will be shared?
I was twenty, he was twenty-one. At some point, deep in the middle of that night, he told me that when his dad had been twenty-one, he’d been a prisoner of war, somewhere in Germany. Why did he say that then? I didn’t really want to know about his dad, not quite yet. He was talking, of course, about your Grandpa Pete. But I suppose it only made me want to squeeze him a bit more — your dad, I mean. Should I be telling you this? I suppose, on that very first night, I was squeezing your dad’s dad in him. I imagined your dad as a prisoner of war, who’d just made it back. Thank God! As if my legs were wrapped round your Grandpa Pete. Who’s dead now. What a thought.
We’d both been born in 1945—Mike in January, me in August — and each of us, we discovered, was an only child. In January 1945, when Mike was born, his dad had been in some freezing prison camp. Now here we were, by the seaside, with the run of a fashionable campus on the South Downs, having the time — having the night — of our lives.
It’s all in the luck of your birth.
I hate to think how remote and historical that year 1945 must seem to you. It starts to look pretty remote and historical to me. You never think your own life is going to include the feeling “that was another age, another time, another world.” But it does, it will for you. Even sooner, perhaps, than you think. And I suppose it’s a feeling we’re all going to have more of, if we all start living to a hundred.
He said his parents lived in Orpington. His dad had a small factory in Sidcup—“Dean and Hook Laminates,” as you know. But these were things I hardly wished to dwell on as we lay there together at Osborne Street. So: he lived in Orpington and I lived in Kensington. Did it matter? We both lived in Sussex now — we would soon be living, not just sleeping, together. And Mike, it turned out, was a sort of Sussex boy anyway.
“And your dad?” your father said to me.
A fair exchange and a reasonable question, if I didn’t entirely welcome it and I needed to take a deep breath. One of our first conversations was about fathers. My dad — your Grandpa Dougie, whom you never knew — was sixty-six even then. He had me (and it was only me) even later, much later, than Mike and I had you. My father was forty-five when I was born: he was almost, but for a few months, as old as the century. And in 1944 he’d married a woman twenty years younger than he was, my mother, Fiona, who’s now still only seventy-five. I don’t know why I say “only.” She’s also, of course, your Grannie Fiona, whom you’ve also, for different reasons, never met. I don’t think being called “Grannie” was ever one of her chief aims in life. My father sometimes used to call her Fifi.
Family life—my family’s life, I mean — it’s all now a matter of history, but at the time I met your father it was still in the process of unravelling. It was like one of those things you gossip about at school. My parents had separated, they were getting divorced. Fiona had someone else, my future stepfather, Alex. And, not to be outdone, so did my dad. That’s to say, to be accurate, someone was hovering around him, ready to swoop: my future stepmother, Margaret, a mere thirty-six.
I was younger than you are now when I first got wind of all this. If it’s not the same thing, I can offer you my early experience, in solidarity. In 1966 I’d been living with the familiar ache of it for several years, but I wasn’t keen to unload these unappealing complications on to your dad and, as it seemed to me, his straightforward little Orpington threesome.
But that wasn’t quite the only problem on that otherwise (believe me) truly blissful night.
Come back to that bedroom in Osborne Street. The bed had a slatted wooden bedhead, of common and unbeguiling design, like a section of polished fence. There was a bedside light with a parchment shade and, across the room, a standard lamp. On the floor were three giant-sized red cushions, my three-piece suite. A lot of that room was on the floor. But on one wall, watching over your dad and me, though since both those lamps were off they may not have been able to see very much, were the faces of Manfred Mann. Five-four-three-two-one.
I won’t forget that room. I don’t know if that night you could hear, we weren’t specially listening, the sound of the not so distant sea. On the other hand we were engaged in a wonderful, slow, wave-like motion that neither of us wanted to stop. We were making love, but we were also falling, falling in love. It’s possible, I assure you, for the two things to happen at once. I’m the proof. Once it used to be the case, or it was supposed to be, that you fell in love and then, after being patient and chaste for perhaps a long and excruciating time, you got to make it. Now, I sometimes think, it may be all the other way round. You make love and then, maybe and maybe only rarely, you fall in it. But on a March night thirty years ago it happened at the same time. Though it may be a shade more honest to say to you now, since I’d never have made the mistake of saying it then, that I’d fallen in love with your father — who’d been around the house after all — just a little bit, before.