Tomorrow by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

every female student of English was, with John Donne. The words had begun to echo in my head: “And now good morrow…” And now good morrow.
    But your dad did the honourable thing. With his bag empty and those bottles on the table he looked a bit like a man who’d been stopped at customs.
    “Actually,” he said, “they’re from my dad.”
    From his
dad
? How could his dad possibly have known about or felt so generously towards the three sisters of Osborne Street?
    And then your father, who’d already explained to me, in the small hours of the morning, quite a lot about
his
father, explained to all three of us about his twenty-first birthday back in January.
    We felt like honorary daughters. That doesn’t quite work, I know—it would have been to construct the most bizarre family. But for a moment your Grandpa Pete was the talking point, as he’d soon become the toast of three girls in Brighton. If only he’d known. Each of us with our bottle. He must be quite a dad, Mike’s dad, we agreed, we would definitely drink to him.
    Quite a dad, I privately thought, champagne apart, just to have produced Mike. And quite something that he’d sent a whole case. This was the 1960 s, not the 1980 s, champagne wasn’t like fruit juice. Most dads would have settled in those days for sending their son a single bottle, on grounds of expense, on grounds of sheer sense of proportion. Let’s not go overboard. What would your Grandpa Pete have got, after all, for his own twenty-first birthday? A food parcel?
    This must all seem so far away to you. As if that “maisonette” in Brighton—but it must still be there—is as distant, in its own way, as some awful camp in Germany. Your dad told me, later, that he’d been overwhelmed to get those twelve bottles. It was like receiving an inheritance. The truth was he wouldn’t even have said he was particularly close to his father, and here was this sudden bounty. That accompanying note, apart from the joke about “Mumm” and wishing him happy birthday, had simply said, “Have fun.” Your dad showed it to me. And he still has it. Your dad and me, we’re sentimental that way. He got it out and looked at it again after Grandpa Pete died.
    But he was so moved by those twelve bottles that he couldn’t simply regard them as bottles of fun, he couldn’t just knock them back at the first chance. He even had the thought, since there were twelve of them, that he should broach only one bottle a month for the whole of his year of being twenty-one—a resolution that soon got broken. But it was still a miracle that he had those three bottles left in March.
    I think your father, in January 1966, underwent a moment of historical, of filial humbling. Twenty-one: it’s the real ripe age, perhaps, and you’re only sixteen. I think he paused to appreciate, not to take for granted, his own good fortune. Remember, we hadn’t even met yet. And maybe that’s why he invoked, on our first night together, his own once-captive dad. What kind of fun was there to be had then? I think your father, a scientist by vocation and therefore surely not prone to superstition, may have said to himself: but put three bottles by just in case, as safeguards. Save three bottles for a rainy day.
    Tomorrow looks like being a rainy day, my darlings.
    But that March day, years ago, was anything but a rainy day: a day in March that was more like a day in May.
    And what I couldn’t quite tell him yet, in the circumstances, was that my dad, the very awkwardly mentioned and very nearly coitus-interruptive High Court judge, had a whole cellar in Kensington of magnificent and expensive wines, including, of course, a fine range of champagne. It had become in recent years his favourite room in the house. The fact is that in those days before Fiona and then Margaret siphoned off their share, your mother (who’s scarcely hard-up now) was something of a little rich girl. But I didn’t want to scare or prejudice your dad, and