Read Online Tomorrow by Graham Swift - Free Book Online

panicky
opposite
feeling: that I was meeting him for the
last
time. I’d got it all wrong. “I just needed to see you,” he said. It wasn’t a meeting, it was a last look. People do that too, they meet one last honourable time, just in order to part. Your dad was already staging his
disappearance.
    How stupid of me. When we climbed up the Duke of York’s Steps again all the breath went out of me. He said, standing in that old place, “I’m glad we did this. I won’t forget that we did this.” Two sandwiches in the park! I didn’t dare say anything foolish. He hailed a cab at the corner of Pall Mall and kissed me before stepping into it. I watched it weave its way, its black roof glinting, up Lower Regent Street. And fifteen minutes later Simon, who I think was vaguely on the lookout, would have seen me return and shut my office door behind me in the way that people shut even office doors when they want to cry.
    But, look, he’s still here, isn’t he? How absurd of me. Your dad’s still here.
    And he can still talk, as you know, in a special way about snails. As he can talk about all kinds of creepy-crawlies and barely considered life forms, as if passing on some marvellous secret. His business these days may be, so to speak, the whole range of available products, but he can still do a good pitch on the little individual item.
    You know not to yawn when your dad talks about snails. A look comes into his eye. You know not to push the mollusc jokes. What you don’t know is that there came a time, after we’d moved to Davenport Road, when your dad announced to me that he had to go one last time to the labs at Imperial. He had to make one last visit. He didn’t elaborate, and I should have guessed perhaps. But he told me afterwards. He said he’d gone there personally to exterminate his remaining working stock of snails. He said he wanted to do it himself, efficiently and “humanely”—a strange word to use about snails. He hadn’t wanted to leave it to “some technician.”

10
    BUT COME BACK to when he was twenty-one, and to another visit. To one day in May when I stood with your father outside the front door of number seven Napier Street, Kensington, waiting for my father to open it.
    I’d never seen your dad look so scared. He was quaking in his Chelsea boots. Ever since I’d told him, in that unfortunately timed way, that my father was a High Court judge, your dad was convinced that
his
moment of judgement must come. On that May afternoon he was about to be condemned.
    No amount of soft-pedalling on my part would reassure him: it’s a wonder I got him to that doorstep. In the Queen’s Bench Division they didn’t sentence criminals—not that your dad was one—or send anyone to the gallows. Not that, by 1966,
anyone
was sent to the gallows. Though it’s a rather chilly historical fact that not so long before, they still were. And an even chillier fact which I don’t like to dwell on and didn’t like to dwell on then, that if my father had chosen criminal law he might, for a brief period at least of his judge’s career, have been one of those who sent them there. How far we’ve come since before you were born.
    In any case, as I tried to persuade your father, my father was a complete sweetie, a lamb. He wore lambs-wool cardigans from Harrods. He was not Judge Jeffreys. You’d never even guess he was a judge. But none of this washed with your dad, it even gave him more cause to quake. A sweetie—yes, of course he’d be, with his
own daughter.
Your dad knew the situation well enough by then: that my father was about to divorce his wayward wife. Which left this mutually devoted and clinging household of two, father and daughter. The more fondly I spoke of my father, the more Mike was sure he was going to be Mr. Interloper, Mr. Rival. My dad was going to cut him dead.
    Pity your poor father, if it makes sense to pity retrospectively, standing outside my father’s front door. Picture him then,