Free Tomorrow by Graham Swift Page A

on the shoulder and said, “Call me Dougie.”
    By the time they reappeared I could see that your father had lost all traces of his recent trepidation. The only uncertainty left in his mind, I could tell, was the question of how this sixty-six-year-old teddy bear of a man could ever actually have become a judge. A question that had once puzzled me.
    That evening, now that your dad had met my dad and so plainly hit it off, I told your father something that in all our two months, so far, of pillow-talking, I’d never whispered to him. Something, in fact, I’d never shared with anyone before. Now I’m sharing it with you.
    I waited till we were on the train back to Brighton from Victoria. Then I told him how when I was only thirteen I’d gone, all by myself, in the school holidays, to Court Number Six, Royal Courts of Justice, where I knew my father would be presiding, precisely in order to solve that baffling question. It still seems to me an intrepid thing for a thirteen-year-old to have done.
    I’d sat in the public gallery, no one had stopped me, and I’d received a small, unforgettable shock. Because there before me—below me—was a man in scarlet robes and a grey wig, who, though I unquestionably knew him, I wouldn’t have recognised as my father. A man who was fearsomely, awesomely in his element, who ruthlessly, I could see, if I hardly understood a word of what was going on, cut through the quibbles and chicaneries of lesser, if important, wigged men and left no one in any doubt who was in charge in that courtroom. Podgy of stature though he familiarly was, he dominated, he towered.
    I’d felt suddenly terrified, I told your father. Worse, I’d felt suddenly guilty—and it seemed the right place for guilt—to be watching at all in this way, on the sly. Suppose he were to look up and spot me there, small as I was and now trying desperately to look smaller and to keep my head down, in the back row.
    Maybe he had seen me. I didn’t think so. But then how would I have known? Since I’d felt suddenly, unnervingly sure that if he had, he wouldn’t have let the recognition upset for a moment his superlative act. There would have been no sudden fluster, no sudden, inexplicable and unjudgelike smile. He was Mr. Justice Campbell. I was just a child in the gallery.
    Had
he seen me? I still wonder now. I’ll never know. But surely, if he had seen me, he would have told me, at some time at least, when I was grown up. Before he died. Paulie, I saw you, that day.
    I told your father all this—not that last part, of course—as we clacked back to Sussex through that May evening, and I told him not to tell anyone. As if he would have done, as if he was going to broadcast it. But it was a measure of my thirteen-year-old’s fear, even then. And I think I scared Mike just a bit—mellow and sedated as he still was from my dad’s wine. Yes, it had been that same man.
    We’ve never even talked about it again since, though I’ve certainly thought about it, and I think so has Mike. In fact, I think he may have been thinking about it quite a lot recently. I think he may have been thinking about that smaller version of me, seeing a man I did and didn’t know.
    The bottle my father brought up from the cellar was a Clos du Roi, ’55. Some bottles, some vintages you never forget. (Mumm non-vintage—but for all time.) When we moved in here to Rutherford Road, we moved in with you, of course, but also with some eight or nine cases of extremely fine wine. It was all that was left by then. My father may have had to do some selling up. On the other hand, if you want to divest yourself of liquid property, there’s a simple way of going about it.
    He died aged seventy-seven, a single man with a great deal less than what he’d once had. But he died, I think, with what he wanted at the time. He died a Justice. And he died a Campbell—that was the disconcerting bit. He also had me, his only child (of three marriages), and he knew