Tomorrow by Graham Swift Page B

toiled away, a third, a fourth year, at his PhD. Those snails of his were supposed to be his stepping stones—an unfortunate phrase—to his brilliant future in science.
    It may be hard for you to imagine that your dad and mum, who now own this house and do all that we do, once shared a rented basement in Earl’s Court. Your dad was “researching” at Imperial, I was a trainee at Christie’s in the Old Brompton Road. Our bed then (compare this barge of a bed we’re in right now) was a mattress on the floor. Not so much an economy, though that was needed, as a gesture to sprawling decadence. We never invested in a real bed, though we did invest, one impulsive and salacious day in the Portobello Road, in a vast, crimson, slinky-thin bedspread beneath which, immersed in its ruby glow, we’d often flail and tussle, like people caught in a happy ballooning accident.
    In those days—forgive me—you were very far from our thoughts, you weren’t even on our radar.
    My lunch with your dad in the park today didn’t just make me think of Brighton. It made me think of those trainee days and of a happy month I once spent as a menial at the Dulwich Gallery, a place I’m still very fond of. Some lovely Poussins, a gorgeous Watteau. I’d mooch about in my lunch break in the park just across the road—it had a lake with ducks—and think about Mike, across town, at Imperial, and think how sweet and treasurable even the most unambitious moments of life can be. Our “careers” were in place anyway, in reassuring embryo, Mike’s perhaps a little more latently than mine. But there was no rush, there was even the argument that the slower the incubation, the more glorious the outcome. I’m sounding like some biologist myself.
    But I was even, in those days, still a little enchanted, a little seduced by your dad’s devotion to snails. I was devoted to his devotion. Who cares about snails? Some people find them repellent. But if Mike cared about them…That’s how it worked. Under our red bedspread I willingly learnt a good deal about snails, about their natural history and life cycle, not least about their extraordinary reproductive system and method of performing the sexual act (you’d think those shells would be a major encumbrance), though now’s not the time to be going into that.
    Your dad used to say that the simple joy of biology was the sheer peculiarity of things. What makes anything special? And I used to think that for me the question “What made Mikey special?” was a question that required no answer, let alone a scientific one. Nor did it occur to me especially to ask: what makes anyone, who might, after all, do all sorts of things, become a specialist in snails?
    In the park with your dad today I saw myself in that other park in Dulwich. It was spring. The rhododendrons were out, the ducks clucked. There were little scudding flotillas of chicks. I didn’t imagine then that one day I’d ever want to say to this man here, this special specialist: “Perhaps there’s been enough of snails now, Mikey. Where are their silvery trails leading us?” I didn’t imagine that one day I’d want to make this man—my husband as he’d then become—reconsider his own sticky trail in life.
    His work involved breeding the things, long-term, patient cycles of experiment. It didn’t seem to involve sudden, life-changing discoveries.
    I’ve never been a fan of Seurat, but in the park today I thought of those lounging, sprinkled figures, made up of dots themselves, as if people are really just clouds of atoms, which your dad would no doubt say is exactly what they are. I had that strange feeling that I was meeting him all over again, as though, if I’d never known him and had gone down to St. James’s Park to choose from the crowds, I’d still have picked him out. I should have told him perhaps. I should have said, “It would have been the same even now, Mikey, no question. Even at fifty.”
    Except I had the sudden,