Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  ‘Apologise to me for calling her that,’ he said.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Never more so. We need never mention her again, after tonight, but if you continue to believe that she’s a ghastly little bitch there’ll be a cloud between us for ever.’

  ‘Walter! You’ve changed.’

  ‘Apologise.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Walter, that I called Linda a ghastly little bitch.’

  ‘Do you now believe that she isn’t a ghastly little bitch?’

  ‘Well, no, of course I don’t, not just like that. Not entirely. And I never will if we don’t talk about her. So let’s not sweep her under the carpet.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘It’s sexual jealousy, Walter, that’s all, and a rueful admission that she succeeded at something I never attempted – modernising you.’ She put her hand on his and looked straight into his eyes. They were more bloodshot than of old. ‘I said it because I love you.’

  They wandered through the dirty streets of Soho, rubbish blowing, paper bags shuddering in the wind, refuse smelling, greasy men leering, smart tourists looking bemused. They found exactly the restaurant they wanted, and ordered Set Menu A, because it sounded slightly more boring than Set Menu B.

  They discussed the theatre and cinema and music. Walter enjoyed showing off his familiarity with these things. ‘I’m not an intellectual and never will be,’ he said, ‘but I’ve found that I get a lot of enjoyment from art of every kind.’

  ‘Oh, Walter, my love, that’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘and don’t worry about the intellectuals. They try to make art obscure so that they can keep it for themselves, but really it’s for everyone.’

  She told him about the deaths and funerals of Bronwen and John Thomas Thomas and Bernard. He was sad to hear about them, and she cried as she told him. As she blew her nose, the waiter came up and said, ‘Food too spicy for the lady?’ and Walter said, ‘No, the food’s fine. There have been three deaths in her family,’ and the waiter said, ‘So sorry, sir,’ and Walter said, ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ and the waiter retreated in confusion, and they laughed, and the waiter turned and gave them a hurt look, and they were sorry.

  Kate asked Walter if there had been any other women in his life apart from Linda.

  ‘I’ve had sex with four,’ he said. ‘A researcher who asked me which brand of washing powder I used, and I said that my sheets were very clean and would she like to see them, and she said ‘yes’. An American psychiatrist who was even more guilt-ridden than you. A one-eyed Lithuanian zoo designer. And a very attractive Danish yachtswoman who kept saying “I’m going” when she meant “I’m coming”, so the sex was hopeless, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. One of those four was made up.’

  ‘The zoo designer. It has to be.’

  ‘No! She was very real. Passionate about animal welfare and the need to improve zoos. Had her eye gouged out by a tiger. Refused to blame the tiger, blamed the poor design of the zoo.’

  ‘So which one was made up? The researcher?’

  ‘No. That happened, if not quite in the quick way I described it.’

  ‘Not the Dane? I liked her.’

  ‘No, not her. The American psychiatrist. I did meet a psychiatrist, but she was English, and she invited me for dinner, and she answered the door on all fours because she was seeing what it was like to be a dog that day, which gave a literal meaning to the phrase “barking mad”. Oh, I’ve bought a Begelman, by the way.’

  ‘You haven’t!’

  ‘I have. I like it.’

  ‘Walter!’

  ‘Exactly. I have changed.’

  ‘That wasn’t Linda’s influence, was it?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t.’

  ‘Good.’

  They had toffee apples to finish. Walter leant across with a mouth full of toffee apple, looked at her very solemnly, swallowed his mouthful, and said, ‘Is it too soon to ask you to try again?’

  ‘Much too soon. It’d be in appalling taste, with Graham barely cold. But bad taste never bothered you, so you could try.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We started the evening in the Swan with Two Necks. Now I feel like a dog with two dicks.’

  ‘Did you choose the pub so you could say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must have been pretty confident.’

  ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘From what I remember, one dick will be enough.’

  It was. They were very happy. At first they were also very discreet. They waited a few months before breaking the news in the Gay Hussar. Shortly after that they drove down to Swansea in Walter’s Jaguar, and breathed brief life into the sad old house with the happy memories.

  ‘Well, here we are again,’ said Kate. ‘Another husband, but the same man.’

  Enid looked awkward.

  ‘What’s the matter, Enid?’ asked Kate.

  ‘We never have drink in the house. It seems somehow unfair to their memory.’

  ‘I completely agree,’ said Walter.

  Enid glowed with relief.

  When she was alone with Enid in the dark old breakfast room, Kate sank into the rocking chair with a gasp of happiness and sadness, of pain and pleasure, of poignancy too great to be exquisite. Ghosts peopled the room. Bronwen, it seemed, must come smiling from the scullery, bearing Welsh cakes. John Thomas Thomas must come in, a book of essays under his arm. Myfanwy and Dilys, Bernard and Oliver, they would come bursting through chatting and laughing. But no. There was silence, save for the ticking of the old grandfather clock, and Kate saying, ‘How are you and Annie getting on?’

  ‘She won’t leave the house. I tell her it’s too large. I don’t mind sharing a flat. I’d rather have two flats, but . . . Annie’s all right, but she’s clinging to the past, Kate, and you can’t do that, even if you’ve no future to go to. Clinging to the past is like leaning on a shadow.’

  Kate kissed her sister and felt a great surge of affection. Of that warm cocooning family of hers, only Oliver and Enid were still alive, and Oliver was almost lost to her.

  Kate invited Oliver and Bunny to stay, but Bunny said, ‘It’s a bit of a problem, Kate, over the dog,’ and Kate didn’t press the matter. ‘But do come over and see us,’ Bunny added. ‘Come and have a drink and we’ll go to the local pub for lunch.’

  Oliver and Bunny lived in a modern bungalow, convenient and functional, near Abinger Hammer. ‘We know it’s not got much character,’ said Oliver apologetically, ‘but you have to think about your old age.’ He’d retired, even though he was only fifty-seven, but it seemed to Kate that he thought about old age so much that he was embracing it prematurely. He was very friendly and kissed her warmly, and they drank moderate sherry, and reminisced about old family jokes, and laughed a lot. Bunny was very pleasant but not in a very personal way. She didn’t seem to have aged as much as Oliver, but, as Kate said afterwards, she hadn’t had as much ageing to do.

  ‘I’m sorry about the pub,’ said Bunny, ‘but I don’t cook. Oliver cooks for us, but he can’t manage visitors.’

  ‘The pub’ll be fine.’

  The pub was fine, although the landlord and landlady didn’t seem particularly friendly. This may have been because, as they arrived, Bunny said, in a loud voice, ‘It has some rather regrettable people in in the evenings, but it’s fine at lunch-time.’

  ‘We want to be married very quietly,’ Kate told the registrar. ‘There’ll just be eleven of us there.’

  ‘Fine. Fine. We’ll use the smaller room.’

  ‘There’ll be my fiancé and I . . .’

  ‘Good. I’m glad you’ll be there,’ said the registrar, who fancied himself as a bit of a wag.

  ‘My sister and cousin from Wales. My two boys, by my first marriage, one of whom will probably bring his girlfri
end.’

  ‘Excellent. If we impress him, he may bring us his business.’

  ‘If only. My boy from the first time I married my fiancé, plus his fiancé, but don’t hold out too many hopes, they’ve been engaged for years.’

  ‘You’ve been married to your husband once before?’

  ‘No. Twice before. And then there’ll be my daughter from my third marriage, and her husband. And we won’t have any photos. We’re doing it very discreetly, because it’s not very long since my fifth husband died.’

  ‘I see. Well . . . fine,’ said the registrar. His eyes met hers. There was a dry gleam in them. ‘I . . . er . . . I usually give a little talk on . . . er . . . the meaning of marriage, and the seriousness and . . . er . . . the permanence of the enormous step you’re taking. I think under the circumstances I might skip that. You’ll have been told it several times already.’

  It was almost as Kate had predicted. Nigel did come alone. Elizabeth did bring her rather dull husband Don. Maurice did bring his comfortable fiancée Clare. Timothy did bring his new lady friend Felicity. Annie, however, refused to come. ‘She went bright red and said she thought it was disgraceful, with Graham barely cold,’ Enid told Kate. ‘She loved Graham, you know. He praised her chutney. She told me I shouldn’t go either. I told her I loved you and it was none of her business and she’d once been grateful for living with the family, as she’d never ceased to tell us, and if she didn’t like my way of carrying on she should shove off to a home.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Wasn’t I awful?’

  ‘No! You were wonderful.’

  There were still eleven people in the smaller of the register office’s rooms, despite Annie’s absence.

  ‘Is this any of your business?’ Kate asked the uninvited guest.

  ‘It’s very much my business,’ said Inspector Crouch. ‘At least five of you are, potentially at any rate, murder suspects. Besides, I’m beside myself with joy at seeing you recover from the trauma of your loss so quickly. I said to the wife this morning, “I’d hate to miss it.” “Well, be very tactful,” she said. “Just don’t let thoughts of arrest and imprisonment cast any kind of shadow on the joyous ceremony.”’

  That was the last Kate ever heard from Inspector Crouch. She thought of him occasionally, pursuing his enquiries, a lonely figure in the American corn belt, his umbrella raised against the rains of Otago, battling against red tape in huge drab offices off the Nevsky Prospect, interfering with the selling of double glazing.

  Kate and Walter bought a cottage near Marlow. It was a cottage too beautiful to be true. It had thick, well-kept thatch. Honeysuckle twisted round the front door. There were geraniums and wallflowers in profusion. Daffodils bloomed each spring in the rough bank down to the orchard. Kate called her happy years here ‘The Biscuit Tin Years’ and when Daphne Stoneyhurst first visited Rhossili Cottage (Walter had grown to love Rhossili and was happy with the choice of name) she said, ‘Darlings, this is a painting too clichéd even for me.’ ‘I know,’ said Kate. ‘It’s really embarrassing, but we love it.’

  Walter and Kate enjoyed many happy years together, travelled a great deal, but neither of them was entirely happy with a life of endless idleness, and they threw themselves into other activities. Walter did charity work, collecting clothes and money and seeking his son’s advice as to which was the worthiest trouble spot to target. Kate started to work for the Samaritans. The amount of unhappiness in the world never ceased to shock her. She also took up photography as a hobby.

  They also threw themselves into the oldest activity of all, not with the frequency or the abandon of their earlier years, but with more vigour than the young would believe. ‘It used to be the positions that were varied. Now, as arthritis strikes, it’s the locations,’ commented Kate post-coitally one night, after they’d made love to the sound and rhythm of the Tasman Sea. They experienced coitus interruptus on the Orient Express and coitus Intercity on the Inverness sleeper. They travelled by Aer Lingus for cunnilingus in Cork (where they almost visited Red Ron Rafferty’s pub, but sanity prevailed). They enjoyed fells and fellatio in the Lake District.

  They invited Enid to go to Spain with them, and she accepted. ‘Annie grumbled, “Why haven’t they invited me?”’ she told them. ‘I told her it was because she disapproved of you. She’s got a month on her own to regret being so narrow. She said, “It’ll be horrid in this great house all on my own.” I said, “Try a month in a home and see how you like it.” She said, “I’ll be all right.”’

  The three of them toured the great cities of Spain – Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Salamanca, Toledo, Segovia and Madrid. Enid enjoyed every moment and went pink when Walter pressed Rioja on her. He told her that sangria wasn’t alcoholic and she chose to believe him.

  The beauty of the cities filled Kate with fury about what was being done to British cities in the sixties. In her beloved Swansea, in particular, the planners were finishing what the Luftwaffe had begun, the destruction of a town’s history. In Eastern Europe they rebuilt their cities stone by stone and brick by brick and the West mocked. But the public preferred history to the kind of architecture dumped on them by ignorant planners, arrogant architects and good architects who found themselves hamstrung by planners and budgets. The public preferred Warsaw and Gdansk to Plymouth and Coventry. We ruined our towns and cities with brutal office blocks and shoddy shopping malls and had the insolence to criticise the Italians for being bad custodians of their art treasures. It was Enid’s suggestion that Kate turn all this anger into a book.

  ‘I couldn’t write a book,’ she protested.

  ‘You can do anything you want,’ said Enid.

  Kate shook her head at her sister’s simple faith, but in fact The Bad Building Book, illustrated with her own photographs, did better than she had dared to hope.

  Nigel rose to a position of considerable eminence in Takimoto Burns. He had homes in Cologne, Islington, Loch Lomond and Tokyo. He always seemed to be alone and he always seemed to be somewhere else. Kate once asked him, ‘Do you ever meet yourself going in the opposite direction?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m too busy reading my documents to look up and see me.’

  Timothy continued to produce the Trouble novels – Trouble in Malta (no holiday was ever wasted), Trouble in the Balearics, of which Kate said, ‘It sounds painful,’ and Walter said, ‘Shame on you, Kate Copson. Respect your children.’ Timothy married Felicity, and they had a little girl called Roberta. Kate almost dared to hope that at last he would be happy.

  Elizabeth at that time certainly wasn’t happy. When Don abandoned her and the children in Leatherhead and began a new life in Buenos Aires, the possibility dawned on Kate and Walter that he might not be quite as dull as they had supposed. If he had been, it was unlikely that the daughter of an Argentinian polo player would have married him and stayed with him happily until his death twenty-two years later. Kate had to face the possibility that he had become dull through proximity to Elizabeth.

  Maurice continued to visit the world’s trouble spots. As his fame grew, the mere sight of him boarding a plane was enough to send the stock market tumbling in the country he was visiting. His intense, freckled face, beneath a steadily decreasing head of hair, was seen looking grave and depressed in a wide variety of places. ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Gaza.’ ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Saigon.’ ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Salisbury, Rhodesia.’ ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Rawmarsh Main Colliery.’ ‘Maurice Copson, BBC News, Londonderry.’

  Kate phoned him once and said, ‘Walter’s dying.’ He said, ‘You’re joking!’ She said, ‘Yes, wasn’t that an awful thing to say, but I thought if we had a crisis here we might see you here. I long to hear you say, “Maurice Copson, BBC News, Rhossili Cottage”.’ He did visit a bit more often after that, in the company of his charming fiancée Clare, and Clare took to visiting sometimes on her own. There were rumours, of course, that Maurice had a girl in every airport. Clare never asked him about it
, as far as Kate knew, and never had a fling herself, as far as Kate knew, and she seemed happy to have a share of her magnetic, vibrant, journalist fiancé, who was never in one place for long enough to marry her. Sometimes, though, in the garden of Rhossili Cottage, or in the village pub, Kate thought that Clare’s smiles looked brave.

  Timothy’s smiles were not so brave when Felicity left him and took Roberta with her.

  Kate’s second book had the rather ambitious title, The Causes of Unhappiness. It was written as a result of her experiences with the Samaritans. Unhappy people found it helpful. Happy people didn’t read it. It sold extremely well from its publication in March 1969 until November of that year, when the build-up to Christmas began and nobody could admit that such a thing as unhappiness existed.

  Kate heard that Inspector Crouch had retired. The murder of the man she’d known as Graham Eldridge remained unsolved.

  Walter gave up modern cars and bought an old 1934 Wolseley, which he tended lovingly. Every two or three months they drove down to Swansea and took Enid and Annie for a run. Annie was all over Walter now, for fear that she’d be left behind.

  Enid was desperate to get a flat, but Annie continued to cling on. Once, before a drive to Saundersfoot, Annie said to Walter, ‘You will drive slowly, won’t you, Walter. Only Enid’s a nervous passenger. She’ll never admit it, but she is.’ Walter told Kate and Enid, and, on the way home, Enid said, ‘Can’t you go a bit faster, Walter? I want to get to the shop before it runs out of Welsh cakes.’ Kate adored this more mischievous Enid but felt sad for the life that she might have led.

  Kate and Walter took great pleasure in entertaining visitors to Rhossili Cottage. It was their greatest joy to share its peace and beauty with friends and family.

  Sometimes the friends caused surprises. Daphne arrived one day in 1971 with a companion, named Jenny Carter. At seventy-three Daphne was still a strong woman, handsome in her way, with a thick crop of formidable grey hair. She was at peace with her lesbianism now, all cusps forgotten. Jenny Carter was at peace with her lesbianism too. The two of them were living together, happily and prosperously, in a flat near Sloane Square. Daphne was still painting what was basically the same painting, and still selling it, mainly to people who’d bought it several times already.