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

protested, was that it would be so much less for Margaret “to get her hands on” (things were already approaching
that
stage), an argument that was hard to resist, setting aside the more basic one of gift horses and mouths. But like most of my father’s kindhearted impulses, this wedding gift of a house—or the money to buy one with—caused all sorts of ructions and tensions.
    It embarrassed your father and only made him wish, I think, to persist all the more in being the penniless postgraduate and servant of pure science. And it embarrassed
his
father who, though by then Dean and Hook were prospering and though he’d sent your dad that champagne, certainly wasn’t in the business of making presents of houses. We should stand on our own feet. Young people today—they don’t know the half. All the standard phrases. But how they catch you out much later, my darlings, how they sidle through my head right now, about you.
    I think that gap between your dad and his dad widened again around this time. I think your Grandpa Pete was rather confused, and I can understand. A son who worked with
snails,
in a state of near-pauperdom, while receiving preposterous handouts from a High Court judge who, if he had to be bowed and scraped to, was plainly a fool: more money than sense. Not to mention his flighty wife.
    In the war, as you know, Grandpa Pete was a navigator.
    But thank God he always liked
me,
if I say so myself (and I’d once done my own bit of quaking, in Orpington). Thank God he seemed not to fault his son on that point. At our wedding, as it turned out, he shook hands with my father and they embraced like long-lost friends. Weddings can do this. My father came up only to your Grandpa Pete’s nose, though he was the senior by nearly twenty-five years.
    And thank God it was a house in never-fashionable, even obscure Herne Hill. It wasn’t a bijou gift-house in a Kensington mews. Nor was it a dive in Earl’s Court. It was leafy but affordable, sensible and child-rearing suburbia. It was Dulwich, as the estate agents said, at two-thirds the price, and the area would soon “come up,” though it never really did. It was a house which, in all the circumstances, your Grandpa Pete could approve of, not that he had any real say. And the truth is I was the one, with some help from my father, who’d mainly steered your dad and me towards it.
    I’m talking, of course, though I’m talking of twenty-five years ago, of your first house. You were there for three years of your life. You can dimly remember it: 27 Davenport Road.
    But
this
house, which we’re all in now, is the real house of your life: your life until now. And you could say that this too came from your Grandpa Dougie. Or rather from his death. We couldn’t have bought it otherwise and though we needed somewhere bigger—you were growing fast—this house, if it hadn’t all begun to happen for Mike, would have been a big and risky jump beyond our real means. Now it’s come into its own, it’s even started to look like a staging post itself from which we might move on.
    But there was never any question of that, before tomorrow. And it was never, even at the outset, for ourselves. It was for
you.
You were three years old when we left Davenport Road. Your memories were meeting up with you. There were thirteen years to go—or that was our working plan. We wanted to offer you the best we could get, the best we could provide. We wanted to put those thirteen years of precious memory in the best possible box. Though you have your Grandpa Dougie, who you never saw, mostly to thank.
    Rutherford Road, Putney, on the fringe of the Heath—now one of the most “sought-after” streets in the area. I’ve always thought it should be called “Rectory Row,” since each broad-fronted semi looks as if it’s really aching to be in its own sub-rural island of gentility. Your Grandpa Dougie, who died aged seventy-seven, was just a little older than this house we’re in. We