Free Tomorrow by Graham Swift Page B

I had the man I loved. There was just one thing, which he never mentioned, that he didn’t have.
    He opened that bottle in front of Mike and me in his familiarly unceremonious way and sniffed it. “Spot on—after a breathe.” Thirty seconds later, after fetching three glasses, he said, “It’s breathed.” He poured. He said to Mike, but as if specially for my ear: “I drank this wine in August 1944. All kinds of wine was getting back to England then, care of Special Operations. It was the evening I proposed to Paulie’s mother. Do they still do that these days? Welcome, Michael, to my somewhat depleted home.”
    I could tell that your dad was letting slip down his throat something unlike anything that had slipped down it before. Later he said it was well named, it made you feel like a king. We moved out with our glasses into the sunshine in the little walled garden, where four years later (Taittinger ’61) our wedding would be celebrated.
    I wish you could have seen him. Not your dad when he was twenty-one in his cream shirt (though I wish that too): your Grandpa Dougie. I wish you still could see him—I wish
I
could—from some special gallery. And not, I mean, the man I once saw in the wig and robe, whom you’ve seen anyway, in a sense, in the silver-framed photo in the hall. New visitors to this house sometimes pause and say, “My God—who’s that?” And I say, a little sternly, in keeping with the photo, “It’s my father, actually, it’s Mr. Justice Campbell.”
    No, I wish you could have seen that other man, that out-of-court man, my one-time daddy, pouring wine for Mikey and me at Napier Street. He’d have loved to have seen you.

11
    I CRIED WHEN HE DIED. I was just like Mike, I cried at my dad’s funeral, at Invercullen, when there was rain, at least, to prompt me and to screen me—not like this soft, midsummer stuff falling now: an icy Caledonian onslaught. But I cried, anyway, afterwards. For weeks I was like a wet sponge, one touch would set me going, in spite of my saying to myself: come on, you’re over thirty, stop blubbing like a girl. But that’s what all my tears were really, I think, my childhood finally seeping out of me.
    And I thought I’d parted with my childhood, finally and formally and even rather beautifully, that year I met your father and he met mine. I thought I’d said goodbye to it with Mike. Our childhoods aren’t so easily discarded, it seems. At thirty-plus—at forty-plus—they can still pop up and claim us. And why should we want to part with them anyway, like friends who’ve begun to embarrass us? Perhaps you’ll tell us tomorrow. Sixteen is really like eighteen now? Childhood is a smaller and smaller luxury? And I’ve seen you, my pets, trying to leap out of your childhoods, like fish onto land, long before now. It’s made my heart leap into my mouth.
    I can still see Mike’s childhood in him—summers at his Uncle Eddie’s—though I was never there with him. It’s a sort of privilege I have, another special gallery. And I told him, on that train back to Brighton, about that time when I was thirteen. Was I still a child then? Dimming green fields slipped by the window, clumps of ghostly-white may blossom. It would have been one of those old, vanished, plumply upholstered train compartments. String luggage racks, wooden-framed invitations to south-coast beauty spots. Another world. Another sort of childhood too, it seems now. We had it to ourselves. Your dad had taken off his Chelsea boots, his socked feet were between my thighs. The Clos du Roi was still in our veins.
    “We must go to Craiginish,” I said, “this summer. It’s our last chance.” Perhaps I really meant “my.” “Before my mum gets it.”
    I could still say “mum.” She hadn’t yet become just “Fiona”—with now and then an emphasis on that first, already hissy “F.”
    What a time to be talking about Scotland, while we sped back to the Sussex coast. Your dad might have