Tomorrow Read Free Page A

say to us, a little too late in the day, perhaps: “Oh, grow up.”
    There’s a gap of quite a few years between us, as you may have noticed. You’re sixteen, your father’s fifty. But that’s another shift that’s become unremarkable these days. Thirty, thirty-five: that’s no longer a cliff-edge for a woman. Mike says—you’re familiar with his ironical and slightly professorial mode, though it’s not, I’m sure, how he’ll address you tomorrow—that the whole thing is changing, there’s no longer the pressure of brevity, we’ll all reach a hundred, one day, and procreate when we’re fifty. Well. “All other things being equal,” he adds. If there isn’t by then anyway, he says, “some completely new system.” The slightly prophetical mode as well. Once anyway, as we all know, people were lucky to get to forty and there were brides of fourteen. (If not, Kate, of eight.)
    I don’t know. The world doesn’t feel to me more relaxed and better adjusted, it has this way of suddenly racing. I don’t know how it feels to you. But what I do know is that at sixteen you’re both virgins. I don’t have the proof and I don’t have your direct confirmations, just intuition. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the world around you and how there’s more time at your disposal and how you can just be cool and calm about everything. It has to do with you, with what you are: Nick and Kate, with that invisible rope straining, and sometimes catching painfully, between you. Little upsets and outbursts, not helped by recent symptoms of parental tension. Now and then a door gets slammed.
    I don’t know how tomorrow will affect it. A big snapping of all our ropes? You’re sixteen, you’re eighteen, you’re grown-up and able to handle anything? We’ll find out. Right now it seems to me that you’re as changeable, as suddenly mature then as suddenly childish, as suddenly moody and tetchy then as suddenly brimming with verve and sparkle, as any teenagers. And you’re virgins. It’s a sweet thing, from the outside. Like the sweetness, from the outside, of your inescapable togetherness. And thank God, for the time being, you have each other. You’re virgins, you could say, in another way too.

3
    SUSSEX IN THE SIXTIES: the very phrase like some glistening salad. And Sussex was the place to be, the best, the coolest university in the land. And
of course
it was the place to be: it was where I met your dad.
    I was reading English with history of art. Your father was a student of biology—or biological science, as they called it there. Now I’m one of the directors at Walker and Fitch, and your father’s more than a director, he mainly owns and runs Living World Books, which includes
Living World Magazine.
How far we’ve come. He’s still in science, in a manner of speaking. That is, he sells it. And now and then, as you may have noticed, he’ll still come over all self-searching and conscience-stricken about having deserted “real” science to become a money-maker. As if there weren’t all those lean years before you arrived when he hardly made any money out of science at all. As if it wasn’t his own decision. And now the irony anyway is that times have changed again, there are big fish around poised to swallow up Living World and your dad’s on the verge of selling up completely. Something else he’s yet to announce.
    We had you late in life—with shrewd foresight it may now seem—but the fact is we weren’t to know. Science only became lucrative, it only turned into “popular science,” in your lifetime and your father only emerged as a successful publisher when you were too young to notice.
    Was it something to do with you? Quite possibly. It was arguably to do with you that he gave up true science, abandoned biology in the first place. Since that happened long before you were born, you may wonder how you can have affected it either way.
    Your dad likes to maintain that his latter-day