Things took a major turn for the worse next morning when Nick and I set off for the sea. On our speedy way out Nick barged the yellow VW into our neighbour’s low chain fence, flattening a post or two. ‘Oh god oh god,’ I said, but Nick was already driving off, at high speed, had gone, by now, too far to turn back, leaving the evidence of our guilt behind us. I was shocked, but giggling with panic and excitement. Nick has always had an antic self, a self of rash or dashing acts and surreal invented voices, improvistos. And yet, on the small white beach at Weybourne, his arm sheltering me from the breeze, we had a short talk and agreed we would get married, and when we went home, he asked my father.
They had been amused, thank God, by the fence, which could only mean one thing: they really liked him. My father was capable of turning that into a crime, but instead he had seen himself in Nick’s shoes; it was the act of a nervous, eager suitor. ‘Vic, I would like to marry your daughter.’ My father laughed soundlessly and tossed back his head in the way he did when he was happy, but he guarded himself against sentiment. ‘I expect you will whatever I say,’ he riposted, robustly, but he shook Nick’s hand. Nick would do for his unmarried daughter.
He did more than ‘do’. They both came to adore him. My mother loved his good looks and charm, and of course, the way he did not bully me. She did not worry that he was poor; she was right, he became a good, steady earner, though we Rankin-Gees have never been rich. They both loved his humour, especially the absurd characters he suddenly improvised from nowhere, a heritage from his ancestry—Sarah Siddons, the famous eighteenth-century actress, was his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother—which sent them into paroxysms of laughter. Later, when he became a BBC broadcaster, they listened loyally to his programmes, bent over the radio in the kitchen, though World Service reception was bad in Norfolk, and wrote him long appreciative letters.
‘I love young men,’ Mum said to me, in much the same words that I use now. ‘There’s something lovely about young men.’ He was there when she was dying, only nine years later, making her laugh in the hospital on the very last evening of her life with a joke that plays upon a less romantic side of tenderness across the generations. It has to be said with a strong Norfolk burr:
‘Arrr yew goin’ ter com up Weely Woods with me tonoight, gurl?’
‘No-ow! Moy mothuhr wooden’ loik it.’
‘Yowur mothuhr ain’ goin’ ter geddit!’
(‘Are you going to come up Weely Woods with me tonight, girl?’
‘No! My mother wouldn’t like it.’
‘Your mother ain’t going to get it!’)
Many people would be doubtful about deathbed jokes, but it was exactly the right thing for Mum. Nick knew that, as he knows so many things, whereas I waste hours debating and doubting. It must be why, when he wants to sleep, his breathing changes and he’s gone within seconds.
Mostly it’s the really big things he gets right. In 1986, he had just finished his first book, Dead Man’s Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson. Nick had delivered to Faber, but got no word. Then Beverly died, and though I agonised, we did as Andy kindly urged us, and went on the holiday we had planned. It had a special significance: we were meeting my parents there, to celebrate Dad’s birthday, in the Algarve that they loved, where they spent every winter, the treat that, mysteriously, saved them money. I had never been to Portugal. We had our flights booked, and a double room at a strange hotel I must have found in a brochure.
It sat on a strip of Algarve coast which was in the throes of savage butchery as huge roads and sewers and foundations for skyscrapers were forced into the earth, which lay spreadeagled, wounded. We tried to walk at night, and parts of the town were like another planet, grassless and treeless, inhabited by big silent machines.
Our own hotel had been dropped here, at random, from somewhere in Scandinavia. It was white, vast, almost uninhabited, like an uglier version of the Snow Queen’s palace, blank, pointless atrium after atrium, with silent rooms to either side. Everything was new: the grass had not grown. There were water-features everywhere. Perhaps that was why the whole wintry fantasy smelled overwhelmingly of pine disinfectant, a terrible, sharp, chemical greenness inimical to anything growing.
We managed to bear it for two days or so, and strode down the coast a mere half-hour’s walk to have a memorably happy, vinous lunch with my parents in a local restaurant whose owner they loved. They were so proud to introduce us to Alfonso: our daughter the writer and her handsome husband. Yes, he is a writer too! The pride was two-way; I was touched and surprised to see the owner knew them and seemed fond of them, as if they ate out often, and were accepted. All through my childhood, ‘going out’ had been dangerous, and my nerves had been jangling, that morning, as we walked by the sea, but age had smoothed enough of Dad’s combativeness away for them to be happy, and us to be happy. For a few golden hours, we sat and enjoyed the new symmetry that came from my marriage and the mysterious specialness that family acquired by being hundreds of miles away from home, in a strange bare landscape where all else was new. What were these tendrils of connectedness, this sudden warm familiarity that clung around us in a world inhuman as the moon? What did family mean? Something new was stirring.