Tomorrow Read Free Page B

success is all down to luck, to just happening to be in the right place at the right time. To luck and to his “Uncle” Tim—I’ll come to him later. But I think it was all a little like that contraceptive pill. Which came first: the pill and the science that produced it, or the change in the air that went with it? Science might never have become popular if your dad, among others, hadn’t discovered a gift, a marketing gift, for making it so. And he didn’t just “happen” to be there. He was there for a long and dubious time (I was one of the doubters) before the time was ever right.
    He still likes to deny this and to have those moments of wistful, scientific regret. But this is at least fifty per cent tosh—trust me—or it’s really about something else altogether. Selling isn’t the same as disowning, or we’d all have nothing to our names. I buy and sell art. For many years, as I remind your father, it was our bread and butter. But I can still
like
it. I can still love Tintoretto. This usually shuts him up. Your dad appreciates a good picture too. Over the years he’s developed quite an eye. He’ll even admit, if you push him, that the art department at Living World is a major factor in its success. “Uncle” Tim was simply never visual.
    And I certainly appreciate, as does your dad, the pictures, if they’re not Tintorettos, that we can buy now and hang on our own walls. This house, as you’ve grown older, has become full of pictures, full, as you like to call it, of “stuff.” And large enough house though it is, you might have wondered—teenagers, these days, seem wised-up on these things—why we haven’t moved yet to an even bigger house that can contain yet more stuff, on a grander scale. Especially as not so long ago we quite casually bought a farmhouse in France—your father called it a “bolt hole”—still being worked on. Selling up, and buying up. All things being equal, to use your dad’s phrase, we might be over there right now for the weekend, checking up on progress and staying at the Hôtel des Deux Églises. I think he wishes it
were
ready, right now, for immediate refuge.
    But all things aren’t equal, though we’re all here in this house tonight, as is only proper. All your memories, just about, are in this house. All your life, just about, is within these walls. “After your sixteenth birthday,” we said. How could we possibly have moved anywhere beforehand, how could we have told you what we’ll tell you tomorrow anywhere else but here?
    Once upon a time your dad and I used to share a basement in Earl’s Court. Tatty posters, reproductions only, on the walls. And in those days, yes, your dad was a real scientist, working in a lab. His special field, as you know, was molluscs, and within that special field, his special area was snails. And his special area within that special area, which he would say wasn’t at all small, was the construction and significance, the whole evolutionary and ecological import, of their shells. How is it done? Why doesn’t a snail just remain a slug? A question that you and I might never think to ask. But it was one of the many instances, your dad might say in his best professorial mode, of biology’s skill in chemistry, in sub-organic ingenuity.
    I’m referring now, of course, to his own article, years ago now, in
Living World.
(A very wishy-washy and barely scientific article, he would say, but I know it meant a lot to him, I know it was a gesture to his long since aborted PhD.) Not just chemistry, but in time and by a long, slow process far beyond the needs of molluscs, mineralogy, geology, the very composition of the world. Or, as he once put it to me when we were still at Sussex: a limpet will never know it, but without the ability of its ancient ancestor to make a shell, there simply wouldn’t be
any South Downs.
    Just think, he might have studied limpets. But I don’t think your father has ever really given up science. And he