Read Online Tomorrow by Graham Swift - Free Book Online Page A

when you look at him tomorrow. He really had nothing to fear. And if only he’d known his real moment of judgement was to come much later in life.
    It was useless to explain to him that the Kensington situation was not as simple as it seemed. My father was not quite the wronged and wounded party, taking his only comfort in me, meanwhile seething with unvented spite. He was magnanimously—or soft-headedly—anxious that the divorce shouldn’t be punitively framed. Fiona was still the mother of his only child (and knew how to milk his better nature). There’d still been the good years. I remember them. The three of us outside “Craiginish Croft” waiting idiotically for the time-release shutter (the photo’s in that box): Dougie, Fifi and Paulie, as we called ourselves then, like a litter of puppies. My mother stood to get a good deal more than most lawyers—not acting for a judge—would have advised. She’d get Craiginish, for a start. If I hadn’t, that spring, been busy tumbling into bed and into love with your father, I might have argued more fiercely with my poor daddy about that.
    Then again, there was the potentially ruinous factor of Margaret Gould, my stepmother-to-be, already staking her place. He had to be very careful this didn’t give Fiona grounds for extracting even more. I’d already begun to hate Margaret—
that
interloper. So couldn’t I understand your dad’s qualms? I’d already begun the unbecoming process of outlawing my own mother. Perhaps it’s me you should really be judging tomorrow.
    It would have been better, in some ways, if my father had actually gone out and, in a spirit of reckless and conspicuous revenge, “picked up” Margaret. But he was sixty-six and it might have wrecked his judge’s career. Judges don’t “go out,” they don’t “pick up.” And judges, perhaps by definition, should be fair to all parties and free from all vindictiveness. In any case, that wouldn’t have been him. He
had
“picked up” Margaret, but in his normal, helpless, passive-but-effective way, like a burr that had stuck insistently to one of his cardigans. A sweetie and a softie: though I couldn’t convince your father, going through agonies, outside his front door.
    The door was a glossy, implacable, judgemental black, the standard livery of Kensington, but that didn’t help your dad. It stood at the top of steps inside a porch supported by two glossy white pillars. On one of them would have been a large, finely serifed black “ 7. ”
    Adding to your dad’s unease, I can’t deny it, was the sudden palpable tang of wealth in his nostrils. At Sussex there was the general levelling of student existence. Now he was the boy from Orpington, about to be put in his place by a Kensington your-lordship. Not that he’d minded, I’d noticed, having a “bird” (don’t laugh, it was the word then) from just up from the King’s Road. Those Chelsea boots he was quaking in were the genuine article, in the sense that we’d bought them, in the King’s Road, not so very long before.
    Before your Grandpa Dougie’s divorce the wealth was probably at its peak. From then on the depredations began. But, more and more, I think my father somehow, strangely, connived in them: not depredations so much as some gradual, stumbling process of divestment. He was sixty-six, even then. He would marry again twice, and both failed experiments. It was as if he was really, circuitously but slyly, working his way back to being an unencumbered bachelor, a bachelor of law, though, now, of course, a judge. Whatever else might be taken from him, no one could take from him those robes and authority of office.
    It’s not just snails who need those shells, Mikey.
    And whether or not those depredations were part of some weird plan, I can’t deny that your dad and I helped significantly to deplete the stock. In 1970, when Mike and I married, my father effectively bought us a house. His argument then, when I rather weakly