Tomorrow
Graham Swift
 Mike Hook is a wartime child. His father, "Grandpa Pete," and his mother, "Grandma Helen," both hardly turned 20, hastily get married in 1944 just before Pete rejoins the RAF to fight in the Second World War. He is shot down over Germany, survives, and spends several months in a prisoner-of-war camp. In January 1945, while he is still away from home, his son Mike is born. After the war and his safe return to England, Pete becomes a successful entrepreneur. Mike, who remains an only child, develops an interest in nature quite early in life and eventually, in the 1960s, decides to read Biology at the recently opened University of Sussex. There, in 1966, he meets Paula Campbell, who has come from London to study English Literature and Art, and their relationship soon turns out to be much more than just a fling. Paula is the only child of a divorced High Court judge with Scottish roots. That man, "Grandpa Dougie," born shortly after the turn of the century, contributes to the war effort by deciphering code somewhere in the English countryside. There, already in his mid-forties, he falls for Fiona McKay, a young secretary with pretty legs who is twenty years his junior, and marries her. Paula, also born in 1945, is sent to a girls' boarding school. Already during her years at school Paula feels his father's growing estrangement from his wife, a development which culminates in divorce and "Grandma Fiona" running off with a man her own age "dripping with some kind of oil-derived, Texan-Aberdonian wealth". After that, Paula hardly ever sees or talks to her own mother again. Just as Mike, she remains an only child. After finishing school, she decides to go on to Sussex University. In tune with the spirit of the age, both Mike and Paula adopt a promiscuous lifestyle during their student days. However, they realise immediately after their first meeting that they are meant for each other and, deeply in love, decide to become monogamous and to spend the rest of their lives together. They get married in 1970 at the age of 25 and gradually start pursuing their respective careers&mdash;Mike as the editor of a struggling science journal, Paula as an art dealer. In 1972, Paula eventually goes off the pill as they both wish to have children. When Paula does not become pregnant, the couple decide to have themselves tested: [...] We looked sadly and sympathetically at each other, as if one of us might have to choose, heads or tails, and one of us might have to lose. At this stage we still hoped. But I have to say&mdash;and you must both be starting to muster an intense interest&mdash;that this was, in all we'd known so far, the worst moment of our lives. Little war babies to whom nothing especially dreadful, let alone warlike, had happened. The divorce of your parents, the death of an uncle&mdash;these things, for God's sake, aren't the end of the world. But this little crisis, even before we knew it was insuperable, was like a not so small end of the world. In one, strictly procreative sense, it might be exactly that. [...] It was a blow, my darlings, a true blow. And where it truly hurts. It turned out there was a problem and that the problem was your dad's, not mine. [...] Mike&#39;s diagnosed infertility prompts them to remain childless (rather than try to adopt children) and to stay together, Paula suppressing the biological urge to procreate and look for a different partner. However, they decide not to inform anybody of the new situation, not even their own parents, who in turn never broach so delicate a subject with their children and just wait passively for the big announcement. In the meantime, when a neighbour offers them a cat they take her up on it and call him Otis, after recently deceased Otis Redding. Otis becomes the focal point of their married life, so much so that when Paula takes him to the vet she is bluntly told that Otis is their &#34;child substitute&#34;. The vet becomes Paula&#39;s confidant (and lover, but just for one night), and he advises her to reconsider her abandoned wish to have a child while pointing her to the options available to her through the fledgling field of reproductive medicine. In the end Mike and Paula make up their minds to give it a try, Paula is artificially inseminated, and in 1979, after her own father&#39;s and Otis&#39;s death, gives birth to twins whom they christen Nick and Kate. Again, they do not tell anybody about how their children were conceived, especially not that their natural father is &#34;Mr S&#34;, an anonymous sperm donor. As the new day is dawning, sleepless Paula is aware of the fact that the biggest revelation yet in the lives of her two children is imminent. She also makes a mental note to explain to them that they should decide wisely whether to tell anybody the news or not as the implications would be far-reaching: Grandma Helen, for one, might feel cheated out of her grandchildren. On the other hand, Paula can well imagine that her mother-in-law, by sheer maternal instinct, has known about their secret all along.