Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

starting to dry and warm the pebbles already. And what do people do on a warm, sunny Saturday in Brighton, the first such Saturday of the spring?
    But
champagne.
That was really impressive, in a student kitchen, in 1966. Champagne for four. Even when I found out that your father already
had
that champagne, it hadn’t cost him anything, I was still impressed by his ingenuity, his quick thinking. I was impressed, in a different way, by the fact that he still had three bottles left.
    He said, could we give him twenty minutes, while he went to “fetch” some champagne? We had no reason to suppose he didn’t mean “buy.” My first thought, in any case, was that I didn’t want to be separated from your father even for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was suddenly like a chasm. I would have offered to go with him, foolishly insisting, perhaps, on sharing the bill, but something in his eyes was telling me, gently, not to. Linda and Judy, meanwhile, for their own reasons, were clearly determined I should stay right where I was. Twenty minutes! They couldn’t wait: to round on me as soon as your father was gone and say: “
Well?
”
    Your dad had a bicycle, chained to the railings between us and next door. The Mike-bike, which came to be there quite a lot. He used to ride it in a crazy, splayed-kneed way to stop his flares getting caught in the chain. He disdained cycle clips, like a true man. That Saturday he rode it not to the nearest off-licence, but, as fast as he could, to his room across town, where there were still, remarkably, three bottles left from the whole case his dad had sent him for his twenty-first birthday in January, two months before. Dean and Hook must have been doing well. With those three bottles dangling dangerously in a duffel bag from his handlebars, he came whizzing back—I still picture his furious purple legs—true to his word.
    That day on Brighton beach we drank champagne provided by your father. Though it had really come from his dad, your Grandpa Pete. I’ve often wondered if he ever knew. Did Mike tell him? For some delicate reason, I’ve never asked. It would have been a bit tricky, perhaps, for Mike to have given the full and complete details, but he might have glossed a bit, just given the gist.
    I even thought once of telling your Grandpa Pete myself—or of checking if he knew. This was at our wedding, or at the little reception afterwards in the back garden in Kensington: another occasion when champagne flowed. My dad had assured me that it would be “nothing too grand, just like you want.” But the champagne was vintage Taittinger. Mike’s dad’s champagne had been Mumm, Cordon Rouge. Though it had been a whole case and it had meant he could make a neat little joke—Mike kept the card: “And Love from Mumm.”
    I’m sure that wasn’t what stopped me: some fastidiousness that your Grandpa Pete might feel outclassed in his choice of champagne. He was looking mellow and tipsy enough, as I was, on my father’s stuff, and this might have been the perfect moment for some slightly daring daughter-in-law and father-in-law bonding. I was the blushing bride and I might have made your Grandpa Pete blush. For whatever reason, the moment passed. And I think he never did know. A minor secret.
    Grandpa Pete would have been not yet fifty then—at our wedding. How weird. You’ll remember how back in January, on your dad’s fiftieth, we all felt a bit sorry for him. Just a year on from
his
dad’s death, which had been so badly, and suddenly, timed: less than two weeks before Mike turned forty-nine. No birthday for him that year, though not a big number at least. But now with every successive birthday, he’d have to cross that sad ditch first, the anniversary of his father’s death. And this year was his fiftieth, and his dad wouldn’t be around to see it.
    Your Grandpa Pete: your first death. You thought, quite reasonably, that on his fiftieth birthday your dad was a little subdued, not