That simple thing: a picnic, lunch in the park. Not celebratory, nor on the other hand so solemn. Once upon a time, before you were around, your dad and I quite often used to meet “under the Duke of York”—it was one of our places — and walking to meet him today I had the feeling, though you won’t especially want to know this, that I was twenty years younger.
Your dad was there first, his jacket hooked in one finger, patrolling that odd stage of a place like an actor silently rehearsing. I saw him first, then he saw me. The strange little quivering interval when that happens. I remembered that too. He smiled and waved. I smiled and waved and I lifted up my sandwich bag like a trophy.
We had lunch today rather like you did, I imagine, sprawled with your friends on the grass, in a state of post-exam languor, in some corner of the playing fields at your respective schools. Perhaps you’ll always remember doing that. The warm grass under your bellies. You’ll see yourselves locked in the sunny amber of one exam-taking June.
But your dad and I allowed ourselves the dignity of two deckchairs, our exams are still to come.
I said, “I stood up Simon for this,” handing your dad a baguette. He said, “I hope you’d have stood up anyone.” Sunshine poured through the plane trees. The deckchairs and the lunchtime crowds around us made me think, despite the greenness, of Brighton beach, and I wondered if he was having the same thought. I’m all in favour of synchronicity. He said, almost with a little catch of apology, “I just needed to see you.” As if we hadn’t been married for twenty-five years and sleeping together for nearly thirty, as if we’d met only last week and still couldn’t bear to be out of each other’s sight for more than two hours. But I remembered that feeling too.
7
HE CAME CLEAN about the champagne. It hadn’t cost him a penny. I didn’t think any the less of him, nor, I think, did Linda and Judy. It even made the day go better (could it have gone better?), since it was rapidly and unanimously agreed that if it was his birthday champagne, then it must be his birthday. His birthday had been in January, but it was still his birthday or it was his birthday all over again. Or rather, if no one said this at the time, it was our birthday, it was your dad’s and my birthday, if such a thing can be, which I’ll confirm it can. You two aren’t the only ones to have had a joint inauguration. That day — March 19th, 1966—was our birthday, it was our launch party, celebrated, appropriately enough, by the edge of the sea. The ship of our future, which now includes sixteen years of your past, was launched that day and was christened, of course, with champagne.
Will you have such days in your life, will each of you have such days? I hope so. Nothing could make me happier than the knowledge that you will. It’s a stupid and a superstitious thought — a very stupid one to be having tonight — but there must be stored up for us all only so many possible happy days, and my fear is that your dad and I will have taken more than our share, we haven’t left enough for you.
“A bottle for each of you,” your father said, having sped through the streets of Brighton on his bicycle. By now, Linda, Judy and I were fully dressed, even a little over-dressed it could be said (a great deal of Biba) for a Saturday lunchtime. But what do you wear exactly for such an unexpected party? We stood in a row like prize winners while your dad unloaded his duffel bag onto the kitchen table.
“Spare some for me,” he said.
He could do no wrong. Outside, the clouds had dissolved and the sun shone approvingly. Second birthdays definitely occur, lives begin all over again. I was a little in love with Doctor Pope? I admit it. No disrespect to your father. And I was a little in love, as every female student of English was, with John Donne. The words had begun to echo in my head: “And now good morrow…” And now good morrow.
But your dad did the honourable thing. With his bag empty and those bottles on the table he looked a bit like a man who’d been stopped at customs.
“Actually,” he said, “they’re from my dad.”
From his dad? How could his dad possibly have known about or felt so generously towards the three sisters of Osborne Street?
And then your father, who’d already explained to me, in the small hours of the morning, quite a lot about his father, explained to all three of us about his twenty-first birthday back in January.
We felt like honorary daughters. That doesn’t quite work, I know — it would have been to construct the most bizarre family. But for a moment your Grandpa Pete was the talking point, as he’d soon become the toast of three girls in Brighton. If only he’d known. Each of us with our bottle. He must be quite a dad, Mike’s dad, we agreed, we would definitely drink to him.
Quite a dad, I privately thought, champagne apart, just to have produced Mike. And quite something that he’d sent a whole case. This was the 1960s, not the 1980s, champagne wasn’t like fruit juice. Most dads would have settled in those days for sending their son a single bottle, on grounds of expense, on grounds of sheer sense of proportion. Let’s not go overboard. What would your Grandpa Pete have got, after all, for his own twenty-first birthday? A food parcel?
This must all seem so far away to you. As if that “maisonette” in Brighton — but it must still be there — is as distant, in its own way, as some awful camp in Germany. Your dad told me, later, that he’d been overwhelmed to get those twelve bottles. It was like receiving an inheritance. The truth was he wouldn’t even have said he was particularly close to his father, and here was this sudden bounty. That accompanying note, apart from the joke about “Mumm” and wishing him happy birthday, had simply said, “Have fun.” Your dad showed it to me. And he still has it. Your dad and me, we’re sentimental that way. He got it out and looked at it again after Grandpa Pete died.
But he was so moved by those twelve bottles that he couldn’t simply regard them as bottles of fun, he couldn’t just knock them back at the first chance. He even had the thought, since there were twelve of them, that he should broach only one bottle a month for the whole of his year of being twenty-one — a resolution that soon got broken. But it was still a miracle that he had those three bottles left in March.
I think your father, in January 1966, underwent a moment of historical, of filial humbling. Twenty-one: it’s the real ripe age, perhaps, and you’re only sixteen. I think he paused to appreciate, not to take for granted, his own good fortune. Remember, we hadn’t even met yet. And maybe that’s why he invoked, on our first night together, his own once-captive dad. What kind of fun was there to be had then? I think your father, a scientist by vocation and therefore surely not prone to superstition, may have said to himself: but put three bottles by just in case, as safeguards. Save three bottles for a rainy day.
Tomorrow looks like being a rainy day, my darlings.
But that March day, years ago, was anything but a rainy day: a day in March that was more like a day in May.
And what I couldn’t quite tell him yet, in the circumstances, was that my dad, the very awkwardly mentioned and very nearly coitus-interruptive High Court judge, had a whole cellar in Kensington of magnificent and expensive wines, including, of course, a fine range of champagne. It had become in recent years his favourite room in the house. The fact is that in those days before Fiona and then Margaret siphoned off their share, your mother (who’s scarcely hard-up now) was something of a little rich girl. But I didn’t want to scare or prejudice your dad, and certainly not upstage him.