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 fooclass="underline" 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 once told you, years ago, that it was “Edwardian,” and you told me, Nick, not so long ago, that your sister used to think of it as “Edward,” as if it was a person, a secret friend, a being. Though I’m not so sure you weren’t really in on it too, the Edward thing.
“Kate can be a real dope, can’t she, Mum?”
Well, if it was a person, if Edward had kept his eyes and ears open, he might have whispered to both of you a secret or two.
And what doubly struck me about this little fancy was that Edward was the name of your great-uncle, Edward Hook, usually known, in fact, as Eddie, your Grandpa Pete’s older brother, who can’t have meant much more to you than a gravestone in Birle churchyard you’d been shown once when you were small. But perhaps it made an impression, a connection. And Eddie had once owned Coombe Cottage, outside Birle, which despite its name was actually more like some (mid-Victorian) rectory.
But come back — all these houses! — to Napier Street, Kensington. Come back to when my father was a mere sixty-six and your dad, who was twenty-one, was quaking on that white-pillared porch. Poor man, he’s been there quite a while.
And now my father is opening that black door…
They got on like a house on fire. I knew, I’d promised, I would have bet your father that they would. Mike may have thought that when he stood there, face to face with Justice Campbell, he was being rigorously sized up. And so he was. But I was being sized up too. I saw the little glances that bounced off your dad onto me. My father was sizing us up as a pair.
Your dad at this time was just my boyfriend of two months. What a word: boyfriend. But I think my father knew — a true judge, in some things — even before he ushered us into his house, that your dad would be a permanent fixture in my life. There was even a little dart of a look in his eye just for me, that made me think, for the first time: perhaps I should try and get to like this Margaret.
Your dad was wearing, apart from the Chelsea boots, his best black flares and his best cream round-collared shirt. And my dad was wearing — what else? — a cardigan. A rather chunky cardigan, in fact, for a warmish day in May, with those buttons like little footballs: navy blue, over a pale-pink shirt. Blue cord trousers, suede loafers. Mr. Justice Campbell in Saturday clothes.
Though I had every faith your father would pass with flying colours, I knew there would be two principal tests. One was that first clapping of eyes on the front porch — already sailed through. The other was the wine cellar. I’d already told your dad that it was the hub, the nerve centre, and that if he was asked down there, as he almost certainly would be, then it was best not to venture any opinions, but simply to be guided, boggle and agree. Not a difficult thing to do. I couldn’t believe Mike wouldn’t be invited — the only question was how long the invitation would take.
It seemed to me it took rather less than a minute. I didn’t mind at all that I was summarily deserted, and I absolutely knew I shouldn’t tag along. This was a critical moment. Never mind the opening chit-chat, never mind the rest of the house. Your Grandpa Dougie felt we needed something decent to drink.
“Er, Michael — come with me, would you?”
I waited upstairs while subterranean bonding occurred. A judge of men, a judge of wine. It was perhaps five minutes. I looked round the room: the padded-leather fireguard, the tall gilt mirror over the fireplace, the Staffordshire dogs on the mantelpiece, the De Brant still-life in the alcove (we have it now). I thought: this is my former home.
Your father told me later that after a memorable guided tour my father had picked out a bottle and said (though it was three in the afternoon and more like tea-time) that we should drink it now, right away — by way of welcome. Your father had concurred. My father had patted the bottle. Then, with his non-dusty hand, he’d patted Mike on the shoulder and said, “Call me Dougie.”