Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Poor Elizabeth, sitting there utterly unaware of what her mother was thinking. Kate found herself in 1994, an old woman refusing to behave as she should, irritated that Elizabeth was going on a golfing honeymoon, saying, at Elizabeth’s second wedding, ‘Don’t you want to see the Andean altiplano, the Welsh community in Patagonia, the Spice Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, San Francisco, Seville, Siena, Istanbul and Trebizond? Don’t you want to see the Sacred Valley of the Incas and the Temple of Karnak at Luxor and Mount Olympus? Don’t you want to see the Blue Danube, the Black Sea and the Rose-Red City of Petra? Don’t you long to stand where Socrates stood?’ and Elizabeth had shrugged and said, ‘Well, you know how it is. Terence loves his golf and I go along with it.’ ‘Is that what it’ll say on your gravestone?’ Kate had retorted. ‘Here lies Elizabeth Simpson. She went along with it’? Elizabeth had said, in that irritating way she had of missing the main point, ‘I’m not going to be buried. I’m going to be cremated. I’ve given instructions.’ People had said, ‘Elizabeth’s very nice, but she has no imagination. It’s the German in her coming out.’ This had angered Kate even more than the attribution to Heinz of the responsibility for her lack of humour. No imagination! Heinz had had the imagination to see what was going to happen in Hitler’s Germany long before it happened. He had had the imagination to see into children’s minds and create wonderful toys for them. He’d said, of Elizabeth, ‘So, my princess doesn’t want a throne. She prefers a typewriter.’

  At last, at long last, Elizabeth left. Kate was ready now, for a rerun of her life with Heinz.

  But first she had to endure a visit from Doctor Hallam. She had been surprised to discover, from a remark of one of the nurses, that she was ‘under Doctor Hallam’. She had assumed that, if she was under anybody, she was under Doctor Ramgobi. The phrase struck her as absurd, anyway. The days of being under men were long gone.

  ‘This is Kate Copson, Doctor Hallam,’ said Helen.

  ‘Ah. Yes,’ said a rather posh, supercilious, youthful voice. ‘Yes. Stroke? Yes? Severe? Yes? OK.’

  Kate had thought thin Helen pretty good at answering her own questions. She was a novice compared to Doctor Hallam.

  ‘Temperature? Nearly normal. OK. Blood pressure? No problem. Good. Good. Much activity? Almost none, right. Any sign of mental activity?’

  Doctor Hallam paused for a reply, to Kate’s surprise and, evidently, to the surprise of Helen, who suddenly realised that she was expected to speak, and said, ‘Not really, doctor, but . . .’

  ‘OK. Looks a pretty classical cerebral infarction. Dysphonia, probably dysphasia too. Any problems?’

  ‘Not really, doctor.’

  ‘OK. Good. Fine. Now what have we got being fed into her? Let’s have a little looksie here. M’m. M’m. Right. Right. OK.’ He paused, presumably to think. ‘OK. Right. Erm . . . well, I think old Ramgobi’s got this one about right. No change needed. Good.’

  Doctor Hallam moved on, and Kate thought, If my condition is what you think of as OK, good and fine, I’d hate to be your mother.

  It was still not quite time for Kate to have an uninterrupted life with Heinz. First, after Doctor Hallam’s flying visit, she had to be settled down for the night by thin Helen with the eating disorder. This involved, gentle reader, humiliations that were not entertaining for Kate, or indeed for Helen, and would not be entertaining for you. These humiliations were frequent and prolonged, night and morning. They were terrible for Kate. Realism is all very well, up to a certain point, but I think, after the life that she has led, this lady deserves better than to have these dreadful processes spelt out to the world.

  ‘Have a good night, Kate dear. Sleep well for me,’ said thin Helen, and, to Kate’s astonishment, she kissed her on the forehead. Kate’s defences weren’t ready, and she almost cried.

  Kate wanted to say two things to Helen. She wanted to say, ‘Helen, sweet dear Helen. Eat. Please, please eat, for me,’ and she wanted to say, ‘I will have a good night, don’t you worry. I’m going to spend it with Heinz. Dear, kind, imaginative Heinz, whom I wronged so dreadfully.’

  8 Heinz

  Wednesday 8 January 1936

  Dear Dilys,

  Here’s a bit of news to brighten up the cold winter days. I’ve met a new man, and I think I’m in love. My new man is a gentleman, and a gentle man (I’ve learnt that the two are not always the same). By profession he’s a designer of toys, and he loves children. He’s so good with the boys, it’s a pleasure to see him with them. He’s courteous and well-mannered and kind, so in many ways he’s the ideal catch. There is a snag, though. Heinz is German.

  Does that sound awful? I don’t mean that I’m prejudiced against foreigners. But it does mean that he’s struggling to make a living here. Aren’t we all? (Walter sends me a cheque every month. Every month I tear it up. Some people think this is very unfair on the children, but it cannot be otherwise. I will not take money from the man. Secretarial work is not so awful, and I make enough for us to survive, since dear Olga looks after the children when I’m out and will take no money for it.) Also, with the threat of war hanging over Europe we have to expect to face prejudices and I’m not sure how strong I am any more. And how will I tell Mother and Father? I know that neither of them would say anything. Father’s too good a man to rebuke me for loving a foreigner. Mother loves me so much, she loves us all – yes, you also, Dil, despite ‘the event’ – that she would never criticise me. But they’ll see complications ahead and it’ll worry them. They’ll think, ‘Why can’t things ever be simple, for Kate?’ and, yes, I suppose I sometimes think that too.

  You’re the one we should envy, Dilys. You have your formidably wonderful John, your rock, and your two lovely children, one of each, somehow typical of the magnificent simplicity of your life. And with you, of course, as with everything else in my life, there’s the fly in the ointment. Horrid fly. Nasty, smelly ointment. I’m referring, of course, to your being so far away. I can never afford to visit Canada now. Is there no hope of your visiting Europe?

  I realise that I haven’t told you how I met Heinz. It’s very simple. He lives in a bedsitter opposite us. I met him at the baker’s.

  Why should a German toy designer be living in a mean street in West Hampstead? Because, dear Dilys, he’s that great rarity, a man of principle. He walked out on his job with the Nordrheinmechanischemetalwerkenspielwarengesellschaft on principle because they’re introducing Nazi toys to corrupt the minds of little children. He also fled the country because he’s convinced that the fight is lost there and the peril can only be countered from outside. Having decided, he worries about it no more. He is a very logical man, yet if that suggests that he’s dull and humourless, nothing could be further from the truth. His eyes are a light and piercing blue, which could be as cold as an Arctic dawn, but they are warmed by a sparkle of humour that is not like anything we usually describe as Teutonic.

  I hope John and the children are well and that Gladstone has recovered from his worms. I still can’t get over your naming a poodle after a Prime Minister!

  Dear Dilys, I miss you so. Write at length, and soon – please.

  With more love than I can say.

  Kate

  ONE MORNING IN March that year, Heinz met Walter for the first time. Walter was collecting Maurice, and arrived almost at the same moment as Heinz, who had called to ask Kate to go to a concert that evening. Kate offered them coffee, and the two men eyed each other cautiously from their battered old leather armchairs. What a contrast they made. Both men were tall, but there the resemblance ended. Walter was thickset, powerful, clumsy, his hair still jet black and a dark growth on his chin and cheeks even when he had just shaved. Heinz was slim, slight, neat, with sandy hair, a shy moustache and a small, immaculately trimmed goatee beard. Outside, beyond the shabby French windows, the children were playing with Ruth, Barbara and Reuben in the shared garden.

  ‘Why don’t I treat you two young lovers to dinner?’ asked Walter. ‘You are lovers, a
ren’t you?’

  Neither Kate nor Heinz replied to his second question, but Kate replied to the first.

  ‘Thank you, Walter, it’s kind of you, but I’d rather not,’ she said.

  ‘Pride, Heinz,’ said Walter. ‘She has too much pride.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Heinz quietly, looking at Kate searchingly.

  ‘Oh, you think so, do you, Heinz?’ said Kate.

  ‘Yes, I think so, Kate,’ said Heinz.

  ‘The standard of the repartee’s gone down since my day,’ said Walter.

  ‘I know that you send Kate a cheque every month, Walter,’ said Heinz. ‘M’m, good coffee, Kate. I know that she tears them up. I admire her for this, as for much else. I think that to refuse the offer of a meal is perhaps to turn pride into churlishness.’

  ‘You speak excellent English, Heinz,’ commented Walter.

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ said Heinz, pleased. ‘Thank you. I think it is quite correct if a trifle stilted due to lack of familiarity with the vernacular.’

  ‘I know why Kate is so anxious not to accept help from me, Heinz,’ said Walter. ‘Yes, Kate, this coffee is good.’

  ‘Why is Kate so anxious not to accept help from you?’ asked Heinz.

  ‘Because she still has strong feelings for me,’ said Walter.

  ‘Is that so?’ asked Heinz.

  ‘Yes, Heinz, it is so,’ said Walter.

  ‘The standard of the repartee’s gone down since your day,’ said Kate, and then she sighed. ‘All right, Walter. I don’t wish to be churlish. I accept your offer of dinner.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Walter. ‘What time shall we say? Eight o’clock?’

  ‘That should be all right,’ said Kate. ‘The children will go upstairs to Daniel and Olga’s and sleep on the floor. They like that. They think they’re camping.’

  When Kate went up to the first-floor flat, she saw Olga alone. Daniel was painting in his little studio at the back. Olga was even paler than in the Tregarryn days, so that, with her round face and long nose, she looked like a Jewish barn owl. The Begelmans’ living-room was very bare, as if they were flaunting their poverty. The only richness was on the walls, which were like a museum of Daniel’s paintings. Kate became more and more certain of their high quality every time she saw them.

  Olga readily agreed that the children should stay the night, then she hesitated for just a moment.

  ‘What is it, Olga?’ prompted Kate.

  ‘I don’t know if I can ask this. Well, I can ask, I suppose. It’s Daniel.’ Kate had known that it would be. She had realised, over the years, that gentle, frail Olga would fight like a ferret for Daniel. ‘He’s so depressed. So . . . convoluted. So . . . knotted up in himself. A night out with the boys would do him so much good.’

  ‘It isn’t actually a night out with the boys, Olga. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but . . . don’t take this the wrong way, Kate, but, beautiful though you are, feminine though you are, to me you are one of the boys.’

  ‘Is there a right way to take that?’

  ‘Oh yes. I mean that you are always game for some fun.’

  ‘It’s not easy to ask, Olga. Walter, whom I’m divorcing, is paying.’

  ‘We can pay. We’re not quite on the breadline yet. But Daniel is so isolated here, Kate. He’s stranded here in West Hampstead.’

  ‘In your own words,’ said Kate, ‘ “I can ask, I suppose.”’

  Kate didn’t want to ask Walter, she didn’t want any more favours from him, but it would be good to have Daniel with them, and so, when Walter brought Maurice back from the zoo, she did ask.

  ‘I’ve arranged about the children,’ she said, ‘and that’s all fine, but . . . you know who Daniel Begelman is? The Jewish painter who was with us at Tregarryn. He’s a very nice man, he’s a very good painter, he can’t sell his work, he’s pretty depressed, he’d be so grateful, so, I wondered, could we invite him along?’

  ‘He sounds riveting company.’

  ‘Well, no, that he isn’t. But he’d enjoy it, and I don’t think Olga’d mind too much.’ Her instinct was that Walter would be less likely to agree if he knew that Daniel’s wife had made the request.

  ‘Why can’t he sell his work if he’s good?’

  ‘Too unfashionable to sell to galleries. Too uncomfortable to hang in private homes. There are no roses and honeysuckles on the cottage wall of his art.’

  ‘Is that a crack at my lowly tastes?’

  ‘Yes. Did Maurice enjoy the zoo?’

  ‘No. He wanted to free all the animals.’

  ‘The darling! Can we invite Daniel, then?’

  ‘Did you ever fancy him?’

  Kate’s instinct told her to be honest.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he fancy you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still fancy him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does he still fancy you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you should definitely ask him. A friend of your first husband, whom you still fancy, your second husband, whom you still fancy, and the man who will in all probability soon be your third husband, and all of them lusting after you like mad. It should be quite an evening in the old Bandalero tonight.’

  Walter came in a taxi, to pick them up. ‘The rich man entertains the paupers in style,’ he announced.

  On the way to the Bandalero, the cab was held up in traffic. This gave them the opportunity of studying two large sculptures, one of God and the other of Mammon, which stood above the flamboyant pillared porch of a particularly megalomanic bank. They stared at the statues in silence for a moment.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Walter.

  ‘Or perhaps merely eager to impress,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I hesitate to mention it in front of a lady,’ said Heinz, ‘but the private parts are curiously clumsy.’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Daniel. ‘Yes, they’re Wainwrights.’

  They drank their aperitifs at a corner table in the crowded bar. Fashionable London swirled around them, many of the men in evening dress, and the influence of Schiaparelli prominent in the heavily padded shoulders and great bulbous sleeves of many of the women.

  ‘Poor dears,’ said Kate, ‘they think they’re so chic, and they look as if they’re getting ready for baseball or for war.’

  ‘The latter is, sadly, the more likely,’ said Heinz.

  ‘I only mock the fashions because I can’t afford them,’ admitted Kate cheerfully.

  Kate and Heinz drank dry Martinis, Walter and Daniel had whiskies. They talked at first about Tregarryn and its inmates.

  ‘Stanley used to spout about the purity of art,’ said Kate. ‘Now he’s prepared to take commissions from banks.’

  ‘He only adopted such an idealistic pose because he wasn’t sure if he was marketable,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Well, you’ve never sold out,’ said Kate.

  ‘I’ve never sold anything. I can afford to be idealistic. I can’t afford anything else.’

  ‘I don’t really believe that,’ said Kate. ‘I believe you’re a man of principle.’

  Her eyes held Daniel’s for just a moment, and a faint flush came to his pale cheeks. Walter gave a little grin, but his eyes didn’t smile. There was a faint flush on Heinz’s cheeks too.

  ‘What about the woman?’ Walter asked. ‘What was her name? Daphne? What became of her?’

  ‘Can’t paint her stuff quickly enough,’ said Kate. ‘Sold out in a different sense.’

  ‘Daphne is so pleased by her painting that she paints the same one over and over again,’ said Daniel. ‘The galleries know what they’re getting – a ready sale. The public know what they’re getting – a charming, undemanding picture. Daphne knows what she’s getting – a good living.’

  ‘Are you bitter?’ asked Walter bluntly.

  ‘Not with her. I never resent other artists’ successes. I only resent my failure.’
r />   ‘I wonder if the people who snap up her stuff realise she’s a lesbian,’ said Kate.

  ‘I wouldn’t call her a lesbian,’ said Daniel. ‘I’d call her a bisexual.’

  ‘Well, I know she had a bit of a fling with Arturo before I met him.’

  ‘There was a bit more than that,’ said Daniel.

  ‘She had a fling with him after I met him? After I married him?’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  Daniel looked uncomfortable. So did Heinz. Walter seemed to be enjoying himself.

  ‘Did she go to bed with Arturo after I’d married him, Daniel? I want to know.’

  ‘Well, if you must know, yes. Once or twice. When you were shopping, usually.’

  ‘No wonder nobody would come shopping with me. That riles me almost as much as the sex.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No. I’m glad you’ve told me. It releases a bit more of my guilt. But if you didn’t mean that, what did you mean?’

  ‘When Olga’s parents were ill, and she had to go away, Daphne came to my bed more than once.’

  Kate’s heart began to pound. Heinz was giving her a very concentrated, quizzical look. The question had to be asked. She just hoped her voice wouldn’t sound strained.

  ‘What happened when Daphne came to your bed?’

  ‘Oh, I threw her out, of course.’ Daniel tried to make his smile insouciant. He couldn’t. He’d never been insouciant in his life.

  Kate went weak at the knees. She began to shake with relief. She wished Heinz wasn’t staring at her. He seemed to realise that he was being less than his usual courteous self, and tried to smile. The smile didn’t work. There was great tension round the table.

  Daniel’s eyes met Kate’s and she knew that he was wondering just how much she wanted him. He had no idea that she was in the process of rejecting the possibility of an affair with him. She had been amazed at the extent of her relief when she’d discovered that he hadn’t been unfaithful to Olga with Daphne. She would have liked herself more if the relief had been because of her feelings for Olga, but she had to admit that she’d never liked Olga very much. She had realised in a flash that her desire for Daniel, a desire considerably greater than she had ever admitted to herself, was inextricably bound up with her admiration of him. If she tried to make him unfaithful to Olga, and failed, she would be disappointed. But if she tried to make him unfaithful, and succeeded, she would be devastated. She began to feel much calmer, almost happy. She began to think that now she would be free to like Olga more.