by David Nobbs
‘I’m Kate Thomas,’ she told him. ‘I’m Oliver’s sister.’
‘Walter Copson,’ he said. ‘I was at Cambridge with Jonathan Pelt-Wallaby.’
They stood for the grace, which was spoken by John Thomas Thomas.
‘Oh Lord,’ said John Thomas Thomas in his rich, resonant Welsh tones – he could have been a preacher if he hadn’t been a headmaster – ‘make us truly thankful for what we are about to receive. Oh Lord, on this day of joy for these two young people, help us to remember the many millions in this world who are less fortunate than ourselves. Help mankind find the energy and vision to conquer this great depression. Lead us to a greater understanding of the causes of poverty and help us to fight the iniquities and inequalities that contribute to it, so that, when the suffering is over, the world may be a better place. Amen.’
As they sat down, Walter said, ‘Bit heavy, wasn’t it? Bit preachy? Likes the sound of his own voice, I think.’
‘Not really,’ said Kate very sweetly. Not many opportunities on this scale fall into one’s lap. ‘My father is a very sincere and modest man.’
Walter was, for a moment, devastated. Even his broad shoulders sagged at the immensity of his gaffe. Kate looked over his back to the top table, and saw Fenella’s mother congratulating John Thomas Thomas and pretending to have been delighted with the text of his grace.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate,’ said Walter. ‘We’re off on the wrong foot.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ said Kate. ‘It means things can only get better.’
‘I noticed you in the church,’ said Walter. ‘I hardly dared hope that I’d have the good fortune to sit next to you.’
‘I think it’s a stroke of good fortune for me too,’ said Kate.
The wedding breakfast began gently, with melon. Its arrival gave Ian Pelt-Wallaby a chance to break in on Kate and Walter.
‘Ian Pelt-Wallaby,’ he announced.
Kate introduced herself and Walter.
‘I was at Cambridge with Jonathan Pelt-Wallaby,’ said Walter.
‘Ah yes. I don’t know him awfully well. I’m actually one of the Shropshire Pelt-Wallabys,’ said Ian Pelt-Wallaby. ‘Despite which my father sent me to Winchester, not Shrewsbury. Some idea of making me stand on my own two feet, I believe.’
The young lady on his left spoke to Ian Pelt-Wallaby about the melon, and Walter took the opportunity to whisper to Kate, ‘Frightful family, the Pelt-Wallabys. Apart from Jonathan, and Fenella, who’s actually quite a sweetie. The rest of them won’t give me house room.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Trade. They regard me as new money, even though we were founded in 1808.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Boothroyd and Copson.’
‘Boothroyd and Copson! That sounds so solid. What do Boothroyd and Copson do?’
‘Make pistons.’
Kate had never thought that pistons sounded sexy before. The trouble was that she could think of nothing to say about them.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘The lady says, “Oh,”’ said Walter. ‘If I’d said I was a solicitor, she’d have said, “Really? What’s your speciality? Divorce?” If I’d said I was a doctor, she’d have said, “Really? Are you a surgeon or a specialist or a GP or what?” But I say, “We make pistons,” and the lady says, “Oh.”’
‘I think your pistons sound utterly enchanting,’ said Kate. ‘Instinct tells me that they’re probably the most marvellous pistons in the whole world. But I don’t know anything about pistons. I feel as the poor King must feel when he’s being shown around a steelworks.’
‘You must come up and see my pistons some time,’ said Walter.
‘I’d love that.’
‘Do you play gofe, Kate?’ asked Ian Pelt-Wallaby.
‘No.’
‘Pity. It’s such a lovely game.’
‘I don’t like games,’ said Kate.
‘What do you like?’ asked Walter.
‘Conversation. Laughter. People. South Wales. Mid Wales. North Wales. Food. Wine. Animals. Birds. Theatre. Music. Books. Wit. Style. Trust. Love. Gardens. Walking. Pistons.’
Walter’s eyes held hers. She felt quite excited. She had never felt quite like this with Arturo, she realised now. Oh Lord, don’t start thinking about Arturo, Kate Thomas.
‘Do you play gofe, Walter?’
‘I’m moderately keen on gofe, Ian, yes,’ said Walter, smiling at Kate to show that he didn’t really pronounce it ‘gofe’.
‘Have you ever played the fifteenth on the West Course at Wentworth?’ asked Ian Pelt-Wallaby.
‘No.’
‘Oh. It’s a par four dogleg. You have to keep the ball down the left-hand side of the fairway. I was lucky enough to birdie it yesterday.’
Kate looked round the room, while Ian talked to Walter about such diverse subjects as the seventh at Sandwich, the sixteenth at Troon and the fourteenth at Carnoustie. She could see that things were a little forced on the top table. She felt such love and compassion for her parents as they ate their sole-and-asparagus tartlets and didn’t touch their elderflower cordial. Horace Pelt-Wallaby looked quite shifty, sipping his Chablis, and Oliver was trying hard to look as if he wasn’t really enjoying the wine. She looked round the great tent, throbbing with charm and conversation. Things seemed to be going with a swing at almost all of the fifteen round tables. But she caught sight of Enid making heavy weather of a man with a handlebar moustache, Enid pale and struggling in the midst of all this vitality. Oh, Enid, she thought, oh my dear dear Enid, if only you had some gumption.
It was quite a shock to Kate to remember at this point that she was a mother. Nigel and Timothy at the tender ages of five and three had been judged too young for bliss. Well, she hadn’t exactly forgotten their existence. She had forgotten that she hadn’t told Walter of their existence. Here they were, getting on like a house on fire – he had just rested his great, piston maker’s hand briefly on her soft thigh, to let her know that he wasn’t really thinking about gofe – and she hadn’t told him that she had children. If she didn’t tell him, he’d show her his pistons, one thing would lead to another, they’d end up going to bed together and going at it like pistons and afterwards she’d say, ‘Well, I must say that beat childbirth into a cocked hat. Oh, did I tell you, incidentally, that I have two small boys by my first husband, who hanged himself? Oh, didn’t I? Sorry.’
She had shocked herself with the thought of going at it like pistons with Walter. She looked across at the top table and wondered if Oliver and Fenella were still virgins. She looked at her dear parents making excruciating polite conversation and thought how lucky it was that they couldn’t see into her mind. She would have no compunction about sleeping with Walter. She knew that already. No compunction, and no guilt.
In the meantime, she must address this question of the boys. How should she do it? ‘I suppose you don’t have any children, unlike me’? ‘I hope the boys are behaving themselves with our friends’? ‘We didn’t have alcohol at my wedding’?
Anyway, she needed to tell him, so she turned to Ian and said, ‘Ian, the young lady on your left has nobody to talk to at the moment.’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Ian Pelt-Wallaby. ‘Do you think I should mount a rescue operation?’
‘Yes, I do.’ She turned to Walter, and was just about to speak, when he said, ‘Do your boys like games?’
‘Timothy doesn’t much, but . . .’ Only then did she realise the implications of his remark. ‘You know about the boys!’
He smiled into her eyes. ‘I’ve been asking around during the champagne. I know a lot about you. I get the impression you’re a rather extraordinary lady.’ He rested his great horny hand on her slim, delicate one, very gently, just for an instant. An electric instant. ‘I must talk to the lady on my right now,’ he said. ‘Social duty calls.’
The lamb en croute arrived and proved as palatable as the sole-and-asparagus tartlets. Margaux succeeded the Chablis. The moment Walter t
urned away from Kate, Ian steamed in like a dish of boiled potatoes.
‘Of course I don’t get as much time to play gofe as I would like,’ he said. ‘I’m on call a lot of the time.’
‘On call?’
‘I’m an anaesthetist.’
‘I can’t say that surprises me.’
‘Why on earth do you say that?’
‘Because I think you’re probably very good at putting people to sleep.’
Ian Pelt-Wallaby went as pink as his lamb. His mouth opened and shut like a bemused haddock’s.
‘That really is a most astonishingly rude thing to say,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Kate, and she gave him a really sweet smile, which confused him totally. ‘But you see you’re being pretty rude yourself. You can’t wait to talk to me because I’m pretty and you’re desperately trying not to talk to the young lady on your left because she has a squint. You’re wasting your time with me because I am immensely attracted to the man on my right, who is talking to the matronly lady on his right because he has good manners, as you should have, having been to Winchester. Mind you, your school motto sums up everything I find repellent about the public school system. “Manners maketh man”! Manners hideth man. Your motto is a recipe for the creation of confidence tricksters.’
Kate enjoyed that moment. She really felt that Ian Pelt-Wallaby deserved it. More than thirty years later her words would come back to haunt her. Lying in a hospital bed, sixty-eight years later, she felt sorry for Doctor Ian Pelt-Wallaby, anaesthetist and golfer and long since dead, no doubt, who might have felt better about his encounter with Kate if he’d known that the last laugh would be on her.
The Pelt-Wallabys dropped the Thomases entirely after the tragic death of Fenella Pelt-Wallaby in childbirth just before Christmas, in 1932. That Christmas a card winged its way to the family home in Swansea. After that, nothing. The anger that the Thomases felt towards the Pelt-Wallabys was muted only by the fact that they had no more wish to see the Pelt-Wallabys than the Pelt-Wallabys had to see them, but Kate, that proud and snorting thoroughbred, had felt the humiliation more than most and felt it even now, lying in Ward 3C, remembering that Christmas of 1932, in that substantial gabled terraced house in Swansea.
Kate was almost eight months pregnant, and her swollen stomach seemed a gross piece of tactlessness. She knew it was absurd to think like that, she didn’t believe that Oliver thought it so.
If it hadn’t been for Nigel and Timothy they might have dispensed with family celebrations altogether, but the boys were unaware of the screaming silence of the absent child, of the cot that had been bought and sold.
Nigel, old enough at seven to sense that something untoward was happening that Christmas, responded by behaving badly. Not only did he reduce Timothy to tears by telling him that Father Christmas was really his new father Walter, but he stole the orange from Timothy’s stocking. Later Timothy saw the swelling in Annie’s thick left stocking and said, ‘Is that an orange in your stocking, Annie?’ and Annie said, ‘No, Timothy, it’s a bunion,’ and Timothy said, ‘I like bunions fried,’ and Nigel said, ‘Not onions, frogface. Bunions,’ so that was all rather amusing, and even Oliver had to smile, Lord knew what was really going through his mind. His eyes were deep set and there were dark bags under them, and the sorrow made him look more handsome than ever. He remained his usual affable, charming self and didn’t allow even Kate close enough to discuss his tragedy. To be a surgeon and to be helpless, as you lose your wife and child in the act of birth, that must have been particularly hard to bear, thought Kate. To be the golden boy, the charmed one, and find that it counted for nothing, that was hard. Kate wondered what John Thomas Thomas said to God about that in his prayers. John Thomas Thomas’s presence in the house that Christmas was a bit like that of a God. He was a kindly figure, but an aloof one. He sat, silent and magisterial at the festive table, joining in and yet apart, and, for the first time, Kate found something rather pathetic in him.
Walter praised the stuffing, and Annie went even redder than usual and said that she had made it. Kate could see that Annie was in love with Walter. Probably Enid was in love with him too. He was a deeply lovable man.
They had planned to have their first Christmas Day at home, in the large house of the heir apparent to the kingdom of the pistons, in the rolling land to the south-west of Birmingham, where the leaders of industry lived. They would have given Nigel and Timothy a day to remember, and on Boxing Day they would have entertained Walter’s parents. Walter would have produced fine bottles of wine from his cellar, and crusted port. The Thomases drank nothing with their meal, not even water. But Walter was the first to say, after the tragedy, that they must rally round. They had got married very quietly, as they had wanted. Now it was the time to think of other people.
The Christmas pudding didn’t come in flaming, brandy was not allowed even for that purpose. It was rich and sticky and gastronomically absurd when everybody was already full to bursting, but it was tradition and everybody tucked in enthusiastically and pretended that they enjoyed it. Nigel got a penny in his portion, and Timothy got a penny in his portion, and Annie got a penny in her portion and said, ‘Aren’t I just the luckiest person in the whole world?’ and then she went red as she realised that the pudding had been made just before the tragedy, and the third penny had been for the baby, even though the baby could not have understood. Kate wondered whether the baby had had any consciousness as it died in the act of being born, and the thought terrified her, and she because acutely conscious of the living being inside her, which she was sure would be a girl. How could she endure the tension of childbirth now? She gripped the table, sweat poured down her back, she thought she would pass out, she was chewing a particularly recalcitrant mouthful of pudding, it would never go down, her throat had closed, her mouth was too full, somebody asked if she was all right and she tried to say, ‘I feel as though I’ve got claustrophobia of the mouth,’ but she couldn’t speak for pudding, so she made a little pantomime of that, and people laughed, and the moment passed. She felt dizzy and weak, but immensely relieved. She wasn’t going to faint. She wasn’t going to need to be rescued. Walter, her rock, leant across and touched her hand and smiled, then fetched a jug of water. She drank two glasses, and it tasted sweeter than any wine.
Light relief was provided, inadvertently, by Nigel.
‘What are husbands for, Mummy?’
Everybody laughed. It sounded so funny. Timothy laughed especially loudly, because everyone else was laughing, but he had no idea what he was laughing at. Nigel flushed sullenly.
‘Don’t laugh at me!’ he shouted, and rushed out of the room, slamming the door.
Walter hurried after him, and in a couple of minutes they came back. Nigel looked very awkward and abashed.
‘I explained that we were laughing with him, not at him,’ said Walter.
‘Husbands are daddies, aren’t they?’ asked Nigel.
‘Yes, dear. Some husbands are daddies,’ said Kate. She looked uneasily at Oliver, so cruelly denied the pleasure of being a daddy. His face was a stone.
‘Your husband isn’t my daddy, is he?’ persisted Nigel.
‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ said Kate. ‘This isn’t really a suitable time for it.’
Bernard asked if anyone thought that the formation of a National Government to deal with the economic crisis could be the first rung on a very slippery ladder which might lead eventually to the destruction of our democratic traditions. Poor Bernard, thought Kate, it was his way of trying to lighten the conversation.
On Boxing Day they had a run out in two cars. Walter drove in front in his brand-new 3 litre Laguna. Oliver followed in his Riley 9 Monaco. Walter took John Thomas Thomas and Bronwen and Enid and Nigel. Oliver took Bernard and Annie and Kate and Timothy. Annie had never been in a car before, and she was terrified. She gave instructions to Oliver in the guise of a monologue to Timothy. ‘Uncle Oliver’s coming to a steep corner in a minut
e, Timothy. Watch Uncle Oliver slow down quite a lot.’
They drove up out of the town on to the hills and moors of a bare Gower. Over barren moorland, through stunted skeletal winter woodlands they drove in their splendid, gleaming cars. They turned left by Oxwich Castle. ‘Watch Uncle Oliver go very slowly, because it’s a very steep hill, Timothy.’ They crossed a vale of marsh and reeds and lurking birds, and then they were at Oxwich. There were only a few people on the beautiful long beach that curved beneath the bare winter hills. One or two boys, wearing Christmas presents, were playing ducks and drakes, skimming flat stones across the water, bouncing them over the low breakers. The wind ruffled their hair, Kate touched Oliver’s hand just once but didn’t meet his eyes. Nigel and Timothy galumphed on the great sands that stretched for miles, and Nigel hit Timothy, and Enid said, ‘Tell them to be careful, Kate. Glandon Llewellyn, whose father paved Cousin Nancy’s garden, fell in three inches of water, knocked himself out and drowned.’ Nobody drowned on this occasion. They went home and had cold ham and Welsh cakes and bara brith.
The next day they visited the cold aunts in their cold houses. That evening Herbert Herbert Cricket and Herbert Herbert Politics called with their respective spouses, Mrs Herbert Herbert Cricket and Mrs Herbert Herbert Politics. They sat in the front room, and talked about the Irish Question, and whether the League of Nations had the will-power to stand up to Japan, and poverty, and pistons, and the price of laverbread, and hasn’t Jones and Jones gone down, used to be such a fine store, they’re missing that son of theirs who was killed.
On the 28th Oliver set off to rebuild his life, Bernard went back to London and Simms Fordingbridge, and Walter and Kate and the boys left for the Midlands.
‘Next Christmas you’ll all come to us,’ called out Kate, as Walter cranked the Laguna, proving that, whatever talents she had in other directions, she had precious little as a prophet.
