Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Meanwhile, Kate saw Graham for lunches and dinners. They lunched at the Ivy, dined at the Gay Hussar. Graham began to spend the occasional night at Kate’s flat. She stayed once or twice in his elegant Georgian terrace house in Trevor Square. It helped that he was rich. She wasn’t surprised that he was rich. He was a well-known journalist. He was Graham ‘Mr Con-Buster’ Eldridge. He took her to Paris for the weekend. They stayed at the Crillon. They ate good food, drank good wine, made good friends. Olga liked Graham. Daphne liked Graham. Stanley didn’t like Graham. So they had a very satisfactory social life, and it didn’t matter that much if the sex wasn’t terribly good. In that department nobody could compare with Walter, so somehow it didn’t seem to be an important part of that phase of her life.

  ‘That phase of her life’! The phrase jolted her. She opened her eyes cautiously, moved them the little bit that she could manage. There was nothing to see. The light had long faded from her window on the world. The ward was peaceful in the dim barley-sugar glow of the night-light. She could hear Lily Stannidge’s bed creak as she sailed on the Sea of Dreams. Glenda farted, a real rasper. ‘That phase of her life’. That was hindsight. It hadn’t been a phase at the time.

  It was a strange feeling to relive each ‘phase of her life’, knowing, as of course she hadn’t known at the time, how it would end. It was particularly strange in the case of Graham, in the light of what she had found out about him later. Each moment, in the reliving, was subjected to the question, ‘Was it real?’

  Yes, yes, cried Kate silently in the silent ward. Those heavenly walks arm in arm by the Seine, they happened, they were joyous, that joy could not be wiped out retrospectively. That gondola ride in Venice, hindsight couldn’t dim the pleasure she had felt at the time. Graham Eldridge was good company and kind. He never said a cross word to Kate, was always generous with money, as with his friends. Many splendid dinner parties were given in the smart terrace house in Trevor Square, after she’d moved in with him. Graham was always very kind to the family, having no family of his own. During Bernard’s last months in London, before he was forced to give up his job with Simms Fordingbridge, nothing was too much trouble for Graham. They took Bernard to plays, to concerts, to dinners, to Graham’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur.

  Kate would never forget the moment of Graham’s arrival in Swansea. As the taxi pulled up outside the house, the door opened and John Thomas Thomas walked out without his stick, slowly, rather bent now, but without his stick.

  ‘I did it, Kate,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’ve brought another one,’ said Kate to Enid, this time without apology.

  Annie beamed excitedly. They had kippers for tea. Graham led them to believe that there was nothing in this world better than a kipper for your tea, unless it was a pair of kippers. He gave the impression that, while lobster and caviare might have their devotees, there was nothing in the world to equal Welsh cakes and bara brith.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Kate, as Annie began to clear away the things. ‘Leave them a moment. Graham and I have something very important to tell you. We’re engaged.’

  Annie sank into the chair, threw her thick-ankled, thick-thighed, thick-stockinged, thick support-bandaged bunioned legs into the air and cried out in her excitement. She removed her lace hankie from her stocking top and blew her wide nose vigorously. Enid, too, had watery eyes.

  After the meal, Bronwen kissed Kate and Graham. She gave Kate a grave look and said, ‘This time I hope it’ll be for ever.’ To Graham she said, this frail old lady, ‘Look after my little girl.’

  Graham smiled and said, ‘I like that, “Mother”, if I may call you that. Kate is the toast of London, but I suppose to you she’ll always be your little girl.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask where Graham proposed?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Where did you propose, Graham?’ asked Enid dutifully.

  ‘On the train, at the moment when it entered Wales,’ said Graham.

  Annie gasped and said, ‘Oh, there’s lovely. There’s romantic,’ with a sob in her voice.

  ‘I kissed her in the Severn Tunnel,’ said Graham.

  John Thomas Thomas pretended to be deaf, and made no comment on that one, but he heard well enough when Graham said, ‘Would you like a chocolate? I’ve brought some rather nice ones.’

  ‘Oh yes, please,’ said John Thomas Thomas. ‘Is there a key?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Graham.

  ‘Oh good,’ said John Thomas Thomas. ‘I like it when there’s a key.’

  He hunted through the box for some time, comparing the shapes and squiggles of the chocolates in the box with the illustrations in the key.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m holding you all up. I’m looking for a marzipan one.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ said Graham. ‘The world is in too much of a hurry these days.’

  There was no incident so small that Graham Eldridge couldn’t find a suitable remark with which to decorate it.

  ‘Besides,’ he added, for, if ever he saw a lily, he felt compelled to gild it, ‘you deserve a marzipan one today of all days.’

  ‘Why?’ asked John Thomas Thomas archly, knowing the answer, charmingly vain now as he approached second childhood.

  ‘Because today you threw away your stick as you had said you would and as the world doubted you would.’

  How much had Graham meant of what he said, and did it matter? He gave pleasure wherever he went. They took him round the Mumbles and he marvelled at its charm. They took him round Gower and he exclaimed at its beauty.

  ‘Do you like him?’ Kate asked her sister and Annie in the breakfast room, on the morning of their departure.

  ‘I think he’s lovely,’ said Annie, and blushed furiously. Graham had looked at Annie’s abysmal photos of Switzerland as if he had never seen better examples of the photographer’s art. He had praised her chutney and her jam. She was eating out of his hand.

  ‘I think he’s too good to be true,’ said Enid, and nothing in her voice suggested that this was anything other than a nicely turned compliment.

  ‘Who’s too good to be true?’ asked Graham, entering quickly and silently, as he did.

  ‘Why, you of course, darling,’ said Kate.

  ‘I am, aren’t I?’ said Graham. ‘It must all be a sham.’ He laughed heartily, and pushed the rocking chair gently, to charm and delight his beloved. ‘I have this knack of always saying the right thing.’ He kissed the top of his fiancée’s head. ‘But the thing is, I always mean it.’

  There was the faintest of faint drizzles on the hydrangea air of Eaton Crescent as they got into the taxi to take them to the station. John Thomas Thomas, minus his stick again, walked boldly down the tiled path to the very edge of the pavement.

  ‘Come again, Graham Eldridge, and bring more marzipan,’ he said.

  ‘Try to keep me away,’ said Graham Eldridge. ‘I love my new Welsh family.’

  Graham’s work as ‘Mr Con-Buster’ made him quite a celebrity in his day, though of course it is entirely forgotten now. To a journalist news soon becomes stale. He can’t object if he in turn becomes yesterday’s news. But the interest created by his revelations was enormous, and many people were surprised that he refused to repeat them on the rapidly expanding television service.

  From the outset he encouraged Kate to be his assistant, and she loved the work. She’d not worked for money since her teaching days in Penance. She loved the monthly pay cheque, the shared routines, the travel. And of course it was emotionally gratifying to expose the world’s exploiters and con men.

  During the years of their collaboration Kate and Graham worked on uncovering several large-scale confidence tricks.

  There was the scheme where you bought a square acre of the Peruvian rain forest for twenty pounds, and received a scroll to inform you of the fact, and a certificate stating that your patch of South America was saved from exploitation for all eternity. The land in question turned out to be desert, where no tree had ever gro
wn.

  There was the double-glazing salesman who asked for a pound’s deposit and was never seen again. A pound was such a small sum even in those days that very few people complained, but pounds add up, and by the time Graham tracked him down he was a substantially prosperous man.

  There was the racing tipster who sent you tips through the post. You paid him five pounds if the horse he tipped won, and nothing if it didn’t. This was a brilliant trick. Nobody complained for years, since, if they didn’t win, they didn’t pay a penny. He tipped every horse in the race, so some people were bound to win, and he was bound to become rich, while hundreds of people wasted good money on dud horses.

  The children, products of Kate’s marriages to three husbands, had mixed feelings about her marrying yet another. Kate felt that she ought to try to think herself back into her memory of their feelings, since they might be relevant to the identification of the murderer.

  She’d never considered Elizabeth as a potential murderer, and she didn’t now. There was nothing fantastic in Elizabeth’s life. She’d grown into a thoroughly decent, thoroughly reliable, slightly dull woman. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither clever nor stupid. In 1957, at the young age of nineteen, she gave up secretarial college and married a rather dull insurance broker named Don. Elizabeth certainly wished that Kate was still with Walter. She hated the idea of Walter marrying Linda. But Graham was in no way to blame for the fact that Kate wasn’t with Walter, and Elizabeth’s initial attitude to him was one of caution. Gradually, however, he charmed her. For one thing, he seemed to be the only person in the world who found insurance broking riveting. ‘People think insurance is boring,’ he told Elizabeth one day. ‘I simply don’t understand that. Don and I have some fascinating chats about how you evaluate risks in different circumstances.’

  In 1958 Elizabeth gave birth to twin boys, Mark and Trevor. Graham loved to play with them, and they adored him. It was just too funny, when they were barely three, to hear them solemnly reciting the names of the Tottenham team that won the league and the cup in the 1960–61 season. Mark had a very deep voice, for a child, and Trevor a little piping one. ‘Brown,’ they would cry, ‘Baker, Henry, Blanchflower, Norman, Mackay, Jones, White, Smith, Allen, Dyson.’ ‘What a forward line,’ Graham would tell them. ‘The most boringly named forward line in the history of football, but what players!’

  No, by 1961 Graham was a firm favourite. Elizabeth could never have murdered anyone, and she certainly had no reason to murder Graham.

  Timothy. Timothy was no longer teaching at Brasenose Preparatory School. His novels were earning him enough to live on. Four had been published now. They were called Trouble at School, Trouble at the Mill, Trouble at the Double and Trouble in Torquay. They were murder mysteries featuring Inspector Trouble, as unlikely as he was eponymous. They were ingenious, but silly. They weren’t serious in the sense in which John Thomas Thomas used the word. They were puzzles created by a man clever enough to have written better books. Kate’s puritanical streak prevented her from admiring Timothy’s work, and, because she couldn’t admire the books, she found it impossible to finish them, and couldn’t find it in her to pretend enough to give Timothy the admiration he craved. Other people did give him the admiration, but he didn’t crave it from them. Also, his relationship with his mother was made more difficult by his belief that she had expected Milly to leave him, although she had never said anything to that effect. It was bad enough to lose your wife to a pig farmer on the Somerset Levels, without the added humiliation of believing that your mother wasn’t surprised.

  All in all, Kate didn’t feel that Timothy had been in a good frame of mind, initially, to welcome the arrival of yet another father figure. He was at first almost hostile, definitely mistrustful, and was cool and wary in Graham’s presence. One day, however, over drinks in the tiny paved garden at Trevor Square, Graham said, ‘Of course I’ve read your books, Timothy. They have the subtlety and sexuality of a Simenon allied to the raw bite and honed elegance of a Chandler, yet with a seasoning that is uniquely their own,’ and Timothy realised for the first time what a great fellow he was.

  ‘Did you really mean what you said to Timothy about his books?’ Kate asked Graham that night.

  ‘Almost,’ he said. ‘I mean I don’t think they’re quite as good as Simenon and Chandler, but I don’t need to say that, do I, and they aren’t far off. You ought to be very proud of him, darling.’

  Kate did try to be proud of Timothy, but she couldn’t help thinking that if this physically timid man had been able to bring himself to murder anybody, he’d have been more likely at that time to have murdered her than Graham.

  Nigel only met Graham once before the wedding, and not many times afterwards. His career with Muller-Burns was thriving, and he spent much of his time in Glasgow and Cologne. Every year, the firm held a Muller-Burns Burns Night, in Glasgow, and all their top German people were told, ‘We have ways of making you eat haggis and bashed neeps.’ Pale from this culture shock, the Germans hurried back to Cologne to make ready for the arrival of the top British people for their turn at culture shock in the form of Carnival, where they drank a lot of beer, thumped tables a lot, and listened to several hours of jokes in German, which they understood about as well as the Germans understood the Glasgow jokes. The rest of his year was less hectic socially, but he was involved in high-level research which was emotionally draining and very time-consuming. When he did meet Graham, he seemed to Kate to be somewhat wary, as if he didn’t trust him entirely, but when she asked him if he disliked Graham, he denied it vehemently, and made a point of inviting Graham out to lunch. He phoned Kate afterwards and said, ‘We’ve had a very good lunch. I had the artichoke vinaigrette, the coq au vin and the cheese.’ ‘What about Graham?’ she asked. ‘Oh, he was very fishy,’ he said. ‘In what way?’ she asked, not without a certain amount of trepidation. ‘He had the lobster cocktail and the Dover sole.’ ‘No, I meant, how did you get on?’ ‘Oh!’ He sounded surprised to be asked this, as if it was something he just hadn’t thought about. ‘Perfectly well. He has an easy surface charm which he uses to hide the fact that deep down he is actually very charming indeed.’

  Maurice was more of a problem than the other three children put together. As a rising BBC journalist in his twenties he had, or at least pretended to have, an enormous amount of confidence in his judgement of almost everything, but above all of people. He was also completely lacking in vanity, so when Graham praised his early television appearances, it cut very little ice with him.

  He called on his mother one day, when he knew Graham would be out, and said, ‘Are you really going to marry Graham?’

  ‘No,’ said Kate with unwonted heaviness. ‘We’re just playing a practical joke on the registrar. Why?’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s just too perfect. He always says the right thing.’

  ‘He’s courteous, well-mannered, thoughtful, sympathetic, intelligent and understanding.’

  ‘Are you worried that he has no relatives?’

  ‘No, it’s a relief. We have so much more time to look after my relatives.’

  ‘No, but isn’t it all a little bit convenient? Parents killed in a house fire.’

  ‘Convenient?’

  ‘Only child.’

  ‘Oh my God! He must be the only only child in the country. Divorcee in Husband Only Child Shock.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ma. No aunts or uncles living?’

  ‘He’s fifty-six. They’d all have been over eighty.’

  ‘No nephews, no nieces, no cousins?’

  ‘The family is dying out. Families do. It upsets him greatly, actually.’

  ‘Have you checked up on these uncles and aunts?’

  ‘No! What do you expect me to do? Say, “I know what we could do for a holiday, Graham. Have a dead-uncle tour. They’re always fun. Check on a few graves, take some photos of crematoria.” I mean, I know we Welsh are obs
essed with death, but that’d be going too far.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Maurice, I don’t wish to discuss the subject any more.’

  He went quite white. His knuckles were white. Kate had never known him so pent up.

  ‘How’s your father?’ she asked.

  He grunted.

  ‘Silly man,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Getting engaged to bloody Linda. After you! Trying to relive his youth. Can’t he see she’s only out for all she can get? Shitty little gold-digger.’

  ‘I’ve never had a row with you, Maurice, never. I’ve always respected your judgement and maturity. I think your success is beginning to warp your mind. Suddenly nobody’s good enough for Walter or me. The truth is, Maurice, you just can’t bear to see either of your parents happy. I think you ought to seek professional help for your personality problem.’

  ‘Me?? Me?? Goodbye, Ma.’ He stormed to the door, then stopped, and said, ‘Oh hell.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve caught something of your Welshness. I can’t storm out in case I’m killed on the way home.’

  ‘Maurice!’

  He came over to her and hugged her. They held each other in silence for at least half a minute.

  ‘Sorry, Ma,’ he said, as he left. Looking back on it now, of course, she realised that she should have been apologising to him. She had closed her mind to a possibility that she just couldn’t face.

  The decision to marry in private was an easy one. Graham had already said, ‘I’m going to feel embarrassed having no family on the great day,’ and it was clear that the day would have been an ordeal for Bernard, who was now too ill to work and had gone back to Swansea to die, like a sick animal crawling into a hedge. It would also have been a decision of appalling difficulty for John Thomas Thomas, who loved his daughter but thought that divorce was wicked, and Bronwen would have stood by John Thomas Thomas’s decision, however much it broke her heart. And Oliver? In his retirement in Surrey he remained semi-detached from the family. The family, for their part, believed that Bunny despised Wales. John Thomas Thomas and Bronwen were invited to Surrey for a long weekend every year, and so were Enid and Annie, but Oliver and Bunny were never seen in Wales except at funerals. Only Enid and Annie, therefore, regretted the private nature of the ceremony, and even they felt a degree of relief at being spared the agony of deciding what to wear.