Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  ‘The board says “Swansea”,’ Daniel wasn’t one to give in easily.

  ‘Yes, because it’s the Swansea service, see, but we’re only going as far as Neath, because we lives in Neath, see.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ said Daniel, who understood perfectly, but wanted to make things at least slightly awkward.

  ‘Well, it’s like this, see. The service is the Swansea service. It will cease at Neath. Disruption due to strike. If the board said “Neath” that would mean we were stopping at Neath because we stopped at Neath, not because we were stopping at Neath because we weren’t going on to Swansea because we’re disrupting it, see.’

  ‘Well, I must say, I have a great deal of sympathy for the strike,’ admitted Daniel.

  ‘We all do. We’re communists,’ said Kate. ‘We’re in sympathy with the oppressed throughout the world.’

  ‘Well, there’s nice,’ said the conductor. ‘That’s very touching, that is. Thank you. I’m only sorry, speaking personally, like, that all that sympathy won’t get you to Swansea.’

  But it did. As they got off in Neath the conductor whispered to Daniel, ‘Follow me.’ He led the small group of communists and their children through the deserted streets of Neath. ‘Our Kerry’ll take you,’ he said. ‘Only drawback will be his load, that’s the snag, but you can’t have everything in this life, and possibly not in the next life either.’

  And with that philosophical thrust he left them at the end of a row of low terraced houses.

  Kate had become aware, from the smell as she carried Nigel, that he needed changing. She changed him now. Daniel had brought a torch. Arturo pointed the torch towards little Nigel’s backside while Kate changed the nappy, and thought himself quite a hero for doing so.

  They had to stand at the end of the road for about twenty minutes. They began to feel foolish as well as cold and sad. Then a small, noisy lorry drew up, its back covered by a flapping tarpaulin.

  ‘Sorry to be so long,’ said the conductor. ‘I had to wake our Kerry up. He was travelling to Carmarthen tomorrow. I said, “Better go tonight under cover of darkness, Kerry. Go tomorrow you’ll be branded a strike-breaker. You’ll get stones thrown. You’ll get your tyres let down. I persuaded him to go tonight. He’ll drop you off in Swansea en route, like.’

  ‘Are we prepared to go in a strike-breaking van?’ asked Arturo.

  ‘Of course we are,’ snapped Kate. ‘We have children.’

  There was room for Olga and the three children in the driver’s cab with the strike-breaking Kerry. Kate, Arturo and Daniel sat in the back, on the load, which turned out to be onions, and which wobbled beneath them disconcertingly as Kerry drove through Skewen.

  Everyone was sad at the tragic premature death of Myfanwy Thomas. When Kerry pulled up outside 16 Eaton Crescent, Oliver and Bernard came out to meet them. Oliver was at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, and more handsome at twenty than ever. Bernard was a solemn earnest sixth-form boy. Both boys had been crying. They both had red eyes, and Bernard’s bulbous nose was also red. But neither of them had cried as much as Kate.

  ‘It’s the onions,’ she said. ‘Onions always make me cry.’

  They all knew that onions only make you cry when they’re cut, but none of them said anything. If Kate needed to hide the depth of her grief, they respected that.

  Next day they buried Myfanwy Thomas, who put the care of her patients before her own safety and died of a rare tropical disease at the age of twenty-three. The chapel, more suited to funerals than to weddings, was crowded. The Reverend Aneurin Parkhouse chose sin as the subject of his sermon. Myfanwy had been taken by God because she was good, and we would not be taken by him if we sinned unless we redeemed ourselves, that was his gist. God would not want us if we were evil, he would send us to hell. If Kate had been back at school and this had been a lesson, not a sermon, she would have put her hand up, leader of the awkward squad, and asked, ‘Are you suggesting, sir, that while we may have to face hell, we’ll have a much longer life on this earth if we sin?’

  After the service and the burial, many of the mourners crowded into the front parlour. A fire burnt quietly in the genteel marble fireplace, the grate so far back that all the heat went up the chimney. On the mantelpiece a Georgian clock ticked discreetly. The white fluffy carpet was thick enough to muffle the sound of feet. The heavy cream curtains hung lifelessly in the bay window. Thick lace curtains kept the sun and prying eyes at bay.

  At first, the chatter in the room was muted. John Thomas Thomas was gaunt with grief. Bronwen’s eyes gave the lie to her smiles. Kate, going to the scullery for more tea, met Bernard coming from the scullery with more bara brith. She hugged him impulsively. Poor Bernard, he had never been hugged like that by a woman before, and he blushed. Poor Bernard, little did he know it, but he would never be hugged like that by a woman again. He never cleaned his teeth properly, and he always had skid marks on his underpants, what woman would fancy him?

  ‘The sad thing is, none of us really knew her, I beg your pardon?’ said Bernard.

  Kate had noticed that he had developed a habit of saying ‘I beg your pardon’ after he’d stuck his neck out and said something that he regarded as controversial. He didn’t lack moral courage, so he did come out with things, but he lacked confidence, so he anticipated the objection that he expected. He had no idea, of course, that he was doing it. She found it immensely endearing and it made her long to protect him.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ she asked, fulfilling her expected role as an objector.

  ‘Well, she was a nurse. She never let us see her caring side.’

  ‘That’s very perceptive,’ she said, and almost added, ‘for eighteen.’ She hoped she hadn’t sounded patronising.

  As well as bara brith, that rather less than exciting Welsh fruit loaf, there were bloater-paste sandwiches and potted-meat sandwiches and Welsh cakes and scones and three different kinds of cake. And the tea people drank!

  In the breakfast room, on her way back from the scullery with yet another pot of tea, Kate met Enid going to the scullery for more bloater-paste sandwiches. Enid looked very pale, and shocked Kate by saying, ‘Everyone thinks it should be me that’s dead. Wishy-washy Enid with her infected tonsils and her migraines. Boring Enid, who hasn’t a thought in her head.’

  ‘Oh, Enid,’ said Kate. ‘How can you think that? If those are the sort of thoughts you have in your head you’d be better off having none.’

  Arturo didn’t lift a finger to help, but Daniel handed round the cakes with the best of them. He might have been born to shine at Welsh funerals. Kate knew that everyone was thinking, ‘I know he’s Jewish, but what a pity Kate didn’t marry him.’

  Herbert Herbert (Herbert Herbert Cricket, not Herbert Herbert Politics) told Kate that Oliver was the golden boy of the University of Wales. He represented the university at cricket, rugger, hockey and croquet. When she put it to Oliver that he was the golden boy, he said, ‘Fiddlesticks.’

  ‘We’ve a wonderful family, you know,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh, I know. I wish they weren’t so narrow, but . . .’

  ‘They wouldn’t be our wonderful family if they weren’t.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Annie scurried inelegantly backwards and forwards, replenishing plates, refilling cups, so privileged to be allowed to be one of this wonderful family that she showed it at all times, to Kate’s irritation, which was really irritation with herself for allowing herself to be irritated.

  She couldn’t talk to her mother or they would both burst into tears. She couldn’t even meet her mother’s eyes.

  Her father said to her, ‘I’ve been speaking to your friend Mr Begelman. He’s very suitable.’

  ‘What for, father?’

  ‘For a friend. I congratulate you. He’s . . . serious.’

  The conversation began to get more animated, more cheerful, as if people had forgotten that they were at a funeral. Kate felt upset about this, for Myfanwy
, but even as she felt it she knew that it was silly. The service had been their expression of their loss. This gathering was their affirmation, uncertain though it was as yet, that life must go on.

  She mustn’t be angry with Arturo, or regard him as egotistical, because she overheard him talking about his work to Bernard. No, that didn’t anger her. What angered her was that he was telling Bernard things he hadn’t told her.

  ‘I’m planning an exhibition in which all the pictures will be hung upside down,’ he was saying.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Bernard.

  Kate pretended to be examining a rather anaemic watercolour of Snowdon.

  ‘I intend to paint all my pictures upside down,’ continued Arturo, delighted to lord it over a younger man.

  ‘Good Lord. You or the pictures?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are the canvases going to be upside down, or are you?’

  ‘Oh, the canvases. If I was upside down all the blood would go to my head. I’d pass out.’

  ‘Ah. So what’s the point?’

  ‘The point? What isn’t the point? The point is, we look at people in a preconceived way, we look at the world in a preconceived way, we bring to our study of it a whole range of assumptions, a whole visual language of satisfied expectations, which prevent us seeing anything as it really is. To see anything as it really is we have to start to look at it as it really isn’t, in order to reassemble it as it really is. That’s the whole point of art.’

  ‘It seems rather a simplistic way of attempting to achieve anything as grandiose as that, I beg your pardon?’ said Bernard.

  Arturo went back with the Begelmans on the day after the funeral. He needed to get back to work. There were still no trains, but they managed to borrow an Alvis 12/50 Tourer through the good offices of Herbert Herbert (Herbert Herbert Politics, not Herbert Herbert Cricket). Arturo had driven Stanley’s car occasionally, so he was confident that he’d be all right, and, somewhat to Kate’s surprise, he was. He would bring the car back when the strike was over, and take Kate and Nigel home by train.

  Kate was very happy to stay with her dear parents and try to help them come to terms with their grief. She spent long hours talking with her mother, often in the great master bedroom past which she had crept on that night. Annie jumped at the chance of taking Nigel for walks. She told Kate how much she loved children. When Kate asked her if she’d like children of her own, she said, ‘Certainly not. I couldn’t imagine letting a man do the awful things he has to do to you before you can have them. I can’t think how you can endure it.’

  Kate followed the progress of the General Strike closely. She wanted it to succeed. She longed to see better conditions for the workers. She would never be on the side of the Establishment. But she didn’t want it to succeed too quickly. It was so lovely to be at home again for a few days.

  The strike collapsed, disappointing her both politically and personally. On the day of its collapse she walked all the way back from town with Enid. Both of them felt low. Enid didn’t want Kate to go home, and Kate didn’t want to go.

  As they climbed the long, gentle slope of Walter Road, that artery of respectability in the less than respectable town, two schoolgirls passed by and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Thomas.’

  ‘Your pupils seem to like you,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh, I get on all right with them,’ said Enid.

  ‘They respect you too.’

  ‘Oh yes. They aren’t the problem.’

  ‘Who are the problem?’

  ‘Adults. I have nothing to say to them. I have no small talk. I’m not original. I’m never funny. I’m never exciting. I’m not pretty like you, so I’ll never find a man.’

  ‘Oh, Enid! You are pretty.’ A slight exaggeration, but only slight, and permissible between sisters.

  ‘The men I might have married are lying in Flanders Field.’

  Enid said this just as they were passing uncomfortably close to Gwyn’s house. There, on the right, was the bulk of St James’s Church. There it was, behind the church, the window of what had been his bedroom. Kate couldn’t help glancing at it, and she couldn’t help wondering if Enid had brought the subject up because she knew. She longed to talk to Enid about Gwyn. She couldn’t.

  ‘Oh, Enid,’ she said, ‘come and see me at Tregarryn in the holidays. Please!’

  She tried not to speed up, but she longed to put the road to Gwyn’s house behind her.

  ‘I’d be in the way. I’d have nothing to say to artists.’

  ‘Oh, Enid. To hell with artists.’

  This cheery profanity shocked Enid deeply and brought home to Kate the gulf that now separated them.

  ‘To hell with the artists. I want you. I need you.’ And then Kate admitted to Enid what she had barely admitted to herself. ‘I’m so very unhappy.’

  Enid arrived on a bad day. Kate had had a bad morning, shopping in Wadebridge. Arturo, to give him credit, had pushed Nigel’s pram up the steep lane, dank under its canopy of trees, but he’d drawn the line at coming to Wadebridge with her, and in some ways it was even harder taking the pram down the hill, there was always the fear of its running away, and that was without the shopping bags piled high all round the poor boy. Luckily Nigel had been in placid mood, but she was seven months pregnant and by the time she got home she was utterly worn out.

  Arturo would have gone shopping with her if she’d insisted, but he would have been so sulky, impatient and long-suffering that she would have wished he wasn’t there.

  Twice she had asked Stanley. ‘Shopping?’ he’d said on the first occasion. ‘Where?’ ‘Wadebridge.’ ‘Wadebridge??’ He’d made it sound like a cross between Swindon and the Tower of Babel. ‘Kate, I would come normally but not today,’ he’d said. ‘I’m at an absolutely vital stage with Liberty.’ He’d been commissioned to create a large figure called Liberty which would grace the portals of Redruth Library. ‘I see,’ Kate had said, ‘your Liberty is my slavery.’

  But she’d tried once more, and on the second occasion he had agreed too readily. There must be a snag. There was. He’d pulled into a farm track, just beyond Delapole, and tried to persuade her to make love to him, on the grass verge, under the stunted hawthorn hedge. She’d had to punch him, and had given him a nosebleed, and he’d been very, very cross. The arrogance of it, the unbelievable arrogance.

  Daniel would have come, of course, and Olga would have looked after Nigel, but Daniel and Olga had left the community almost as soon as they had got back from Myfanwy’s funeral. They had gone to Russia. ‘They’ll respect us there,’ Daniel had said. ‘We talk about being communists. We aren’t. We don’t share our earnings. We aren’t a community in the true sense.’

  ‘Artists have to be individuals first and foremost,’ Stanley had said.

  ‘The strong should support the weak,’ Daniel had insisted.

  ‘Quite right,’ Arturo had said. ‘We have to be responsible members of society as well as individuals.’

  ‘I think the idea of the strong supporting the weak is insufferably patronising,’ Daphne had said.

  ‘It’s funny how the two of you who make money don’t want to share it and the two who don’t do,’ Kate had said.

  None of them had liked this remark.

  ‘Why don’t you go and finish that fish stew?’ Arturo had said, and Kate hadn’t liked that remark.

  Kate missed them badly. Well, she missed Daniel badly.

  It was no use asking Daphne to go shopping. ‘Listen, darling,’ she would say, ‘You can do the fucking women’s jobs if you like, but don’t expect me to collaborate in your humiliation of your sex. If we have a rota, and the men do their first turn first, because I don’t trust the bastards, yes, I’ll do it. Not before.’

  And when she got back from her shopping trip that day, with an hour to put everything away, snatch a brief rest and traipse up the hill again to meet Enid’s bus, Arturo wasn’t painting at all. He was sunbathing on the top terrace, naked except for a pl
aster cast round his private parts.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Modelling my private parts for Stanley. He says he can’t do genitals properly. He says you told him that, so it’s your fault. I hope he can get the cast off or you’re in trouble.’

  ‘I’m seven months pregnant, Arturo. I’ve lugged this pram almost two miles.’

  ‘Downhill.’

  ‘It’s just as hard downhill, and here you are sunning yourself.’

  ‘The sun is incidental. You always say I’m an egotist. I’m enduring the agony of itchy and extremely painful private parts in order to help a fellow artist and I get criticised. You’re never satisfied, Kate.’

  ‘I won’t be if you can’t get that cast off.’

  ‘That isn’t funny.’

  ‘Not to you, no. You’ve no sense of humour.’

  ‘You aren’t exactly being hilarious, you bitch.’

  He’d never called her anything like that before. She was absolutely furious. Stanley came out at that moment, all innocent smiles, and said, ‘Hello, Kate,’ with a casual cheeriness that infuriated her, and she said, ‘You’ve chosen the wrong man, Stanley. You’ll have to make adjustments in scale.’

  Arturo didn’t speak to her again all day. All through supper he chatted to Enid, who grew more and more embarrassed, but not a word did he utter to his wife. Stanley tried to joke about the difficulty he’d had in getting the cast off Arturo. ‘I nearly ruined his Saturday nights for ever,’ he said, and that infuriated Kate and Arturo and embarrassed Enid still more. Only Daphne behaved well that night. She was charming to Enid and resisted several chances of making the kind of rude crack at which she would usually jump.

  The next morning, Kate went down to breakfast to find Enid sitting all alone at the great kitchen table, as white as a sheet.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Kate asked.

  Enid was so upset she could hardly speak.

  ‘Daphne!’ she spluttered. ‘Daphne . . .’