Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Kate gave them a delicious meal, smoked salmon mousse followed by a creamy, garlicky bourride, and a bottle of golden Mersault. She did this even though when she and Walter had visited Daphne, in the days before Jenny, Daphne had given them sandwiches and said, ‘It’s not the food that matters. It’s the people.’ Kate had said, ‘You only say that because you can’t cook. Those macaroni cheeses of yours were disgusting.’ Daphne had thrown back her head and laughed and said, ‘They were, weren’t they? Oh God.’

  Daphne enjoyed the succulent bourride as much as anybody. It was strange how people who expressed no interest in food when they were hosts often managed to dredge up enormous enthusiasm when they were guests.

  As they ate, Jenny Carter said to Daphne, ‘Well, she hasn’t.’

  ‘Hasn’t what?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Recognised me.’

  ‘Oh Lord. Should I have?’

  ‘Maths.’

  ‘Maths?’

  ‘I taught maths.’

  ‘At Penance?’

  ‘Yes. I was walking out with an insurance salesman. I didn’t even know there were lesbians let alone that I was one. I just knew I didn’t like kissing insurance salesmen very much.’

  ‘You came to my first wedding!’

  ‘I looked at your sister’s face and I thought, “What a sad, grey, cloudy face. How beautiful her face would be if the sun ever came out.”’

  ‘Enid.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose, though I didn’t recognise it at the time, it was a lesbian thought. Is she still alive?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘That’s the one I fancied, isn’t it?’ said Daphne.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did the sun ever come out?’ asked Jenny Carter.

  ‘It peeps out once or twice,’ said Walter, ‘but it never quite has the confidence to stay out.’

  ‘It was at that wedding that Jenny and I first met,’ said Daphne. ‘Though it was forty more years before we met properly.’

  ‘Or improperly, as most people would say,’ said Jenny Carter. ‘It was in the Plaza Real in Salamanca.’ She blushed so much that Kate wondered what else had happened in Salamanca.

  Olga visited from time to time, sometimes staying for a few days. Once Stanley Wainwright called round when Olga was there, and they all had a huge salade niçoise in the garden, liberally washed down by a marvellously well-balanced white Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Olga talked about her favourite subject, Daniel, and Stanley talked about his favourite subject, Stanley. He was in his mid-seventies now but still a big, energetic man. Olga was beginning to look frail again, though there was still a rod of steel in there somewhere. Kate couldn’t believe it when she witnessed their first eye contact. Olga and Stanley, both in their seventies. Yet it happened. Within two months they were living together, and they stayed together, with rows and reconciliations, and walk-outs from Stanley, and abashed returns, and Olga patient but remorseless. Kate saw it all in that first look.

  Her third book, The Headless Chicken, came out in 1973. It was a passionate attack on factory farming and animal feedstuffs and chemical fertilisers. It anticipated mad cow disease and genetic engineering. Kate went on television and said that we cannot pretend to be a nation of animal lovers while one battery chicken is produced legally, let alone millions. A local chicken farmer hurled a brick through a window of Rhossili Cottage. Several mass producers of battery chickens, firms with names like Orchard Poultry and Happy Hens, threatened to sue. Kate threatened to expose their methods in greater detail. Large numbers of people bought the book, and many of them continued to buy battery chickens as well. Kate’s television appearance caused a stir. She was a natural. Conservative government ministers described the book as ‘pathetic’. Labour shadow ministers described it as ‘prophetic’. When Labour came into power in 1974, reaction to the book changed. A Labour cabinet minister described it as ‘unrealistic’, a Conservative shadow minister described it as ‘unforgettable’. Kate decided that only oppositions had consciences.

  One morning, just before lunch, Kate came from her study to find Nigel sitting under a parasol on the lawn, doing a crossword. Walter was out collecting blankets for earthquake victims.

  ‘Do it with me, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I think about crosswords. A waste of time. A waste of fine minds.’

  ‘Well, here we are together, mother and son, each with a fine mind. What’s the harm in our minds sharing a bit of fun?’

  So she submitted, and tackled a crossword for the first and last time in her life. She got just one clue. ‘Army and firm surround graduates, with spicy results.’ Answer – Tabasco. He had done brilliantly.

  ‘This Parsifal chap’s pretty good,’ he said. She’d forgotten about that! Lying in bed in hospital she marvelled at his cheek. Of course he’d done brilliantly. She thought now that he’d longed to tell her that he was Parsifal, but hadn’t dared to. That hadn’t been all, though. He had gone on. She said, ‘Crossword compilers must have funny minds.’ He said, ‘I daresay they’re very ordinary.’ She said, ‘I wonder what this Parsifal chap is doing at this very moment.’ ‘Having a crap, probably,’ he said. ‘Nigel,’ she said, shocked. ‘Oh, Mother,’ he said, ‘you’ve never been able to reconcile yourself to the inevitability of lavatories, have you?’ ‘I find them boring precisely because they’re inevitable,’ she said. ‘Tolstoy never mentioned them. Jane Austen never mentioned them. Their characters didn’t explode from severe constipation, so we may assume that they went to the lavatory. They just didn’t think it interesting enough to mention, and nor do I. Now there are lavatories in everything. Is that progress?’ She saw him trying not to laugh. ‘Oh Lord,’ she said. ‘You’ve been winding me up and I’ve fallen for it.’

  Maurice’s occasional visits were snatched between wars and coups. His mother always wanted to talk to him about world affairs, but he always refused, preferring to go down to one of the village’s two pubs with his homely fiancée Clare, and play dominoes and darts and cribbage with the locals. ‘I have to unwind between jobs,’ he said once. ‘It’s the way I cope. Sorry, Ma.’

  Timothy was the only one who ever stayed for any length of time, and that only once. He and Daniella had decided to live apart for three months to get what he called ‘a perspective on things’. He’d had writer’s block in the Majorcan winter. ‘I need to get back to my roots,’ he said. Kate lent him her study, and that was almost the only time that she had a serious argument with Walter during their third marriage. ‘Your writing’s ten times more valuable than his,’ he said. ‘Let him use his bedroom.’

  ‘He has writer’s block,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’

  Anyway, Timothy’s writing block was swiftly cleared. Fans of the good Inspector Trouble should be eternally grateful to Kate. (In Timothy’s books it was impossible to be merely grateful, you had to be eternally grateful; it was his second most favourite adverb, beaten to Adverb of the Decade only by preternaturally, of which he was preternaturally fond.) It was Kate’s sacrifice of her study that made it possible for them to enjoy that classic tale of evil among the wallflowers, Trouble With Dancers. (The one in which a complete team of Morris dancers is poisoned, so that nobody will ever know which of them was the murderer’s real target, but that was reckoning without Inspector Trouble – who had, of course, the advantage of having been faced with this particular plot already, in Trouble at the Hockey Festival. Timothy was flattered to find Trouble With Dancers reviewed in the Financial Times, not realising that the critic only reviewed it because it gave him the chance to sound off about his bête noire. ‘How can anybody be imprisoned for murdering Morris dancers?’ he wrote. ‘He should have been decorated.’)

  It was a great surprise to Kate when Elizabeth married again. ‘It’s brave of you after what happened,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m hardly likely to meet two Dons, am I?’ said Elizabeth.

  There was no risk of Terence becoming dull through association with Elizabeth. He was alr
eady dull when she met him.

  Kate felt rather guilty that she had difficulty in finding things to discuss with Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a very good mother. The twins had shown no obvious ill effects from the sudden total loss of their father, who never even sent Christmas cards, and now they showed no obvious ill effects from the arrival of a stepfather. At school Trevor was academic and Mark sporty. They weren’t particularly close, not in the way that Kate and Dilys would have been close, but they both loved visiting Kate and Walter and playing in their delightful garden with so many trees to climb.

  Kate knew that Heinz sent Elizabeth little presents for the children every Christmas. He had married again, and had sent Elizabeth (but not Kate) a photograph of his wedding day. Kate asked Elizabeth what Anke was like and she said, ‘Very pretty. Just as pretty as Inge,’ but she didn’t give any details and she didn’t show any emotion and when Kate said that she’d like to see the photo, Elizabeth said, ‘Oh, I threw it away. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point. Sorry.’

  When Elizabeth wasn’t there, she seemed to Kate to be a rather shadowy figure, but, every time she saw her, it struck her that she wasn’t shadowy at all, but sensible and straightforward and very very solid. She had thick golfer’s calves and bought most of her clothes from Jaeger.

  Kate could never imagine Terence and Elizabeth getting up to high jinks in bed. One evening, however, at Rhossili Cottage, with the wind and the owls in mournful chorus, Terence suddenly looked almost roguish and said, ‘What about going to bed, old girl?’ but Elizabeth, missing the point as usual, said, ‘You go on up. I’m not tired.’

  Annie moved in to a home at last, and Enid was able to buy a small flat in a windy block in Sketty, with a distant view of the sea. Now that Annie was in a home, and Enid no longer needed a break from her, the two of them came to Rhossili Cottage for a week. ‘You wouldn’t know anybody if you came to Swansea now,’ Enid told them. ‘Gladys Morgan that had the florist’s is gone, Mansel Morris that dyed his hair that had the grocer’s shop hasn’t any hair to dye any more and the grocer’s is a building society. Herbert Herbert Politics has had a heart attack, and Herbert Herbert Cricket emigrated to the Algarve because of Mrs Herbert Herbert Cricket’s arthritis, and he died of a broken heart, because there isn’t any cricket on the Algarve. You wouldn’t recognise Swansea, it’s all foreign restaurants and such nonsense. Even the Kardomah’s gone. The market’s still the market, and that’s about all there is. Even laver bread’s posh now.’

  While Enid and Annie were there, Stanley and Olga arrived unexpectedly for the weekend, Stanley rather drunk and very argumentative, Olga spreading her hands as if to say that it wasn’t her fault, and saying, ‘I only told him that he hadn’t Daniel’s instinct for colour. I mean, surely that isn’t an insult to a sculptor? But I forgot that Stanley is so conceited that he believes that if he could have demeaned himself to become a painter he’d have been a better painter than my Daniel.’

  Enid and Annie were astonished by this stormy and drunken invasion of their peace by people who hadn’t even been invited. Enid hadn’t seen Stanley or Olga since the retrospective. Annie threw her bunioned legs in the air and said, ‘Oh my. Oh my.’

  The next morning they all went for a camel ride down the bridle path to Nether Fletchfield. They came to a barn, and Kate and Walter went in and took all their clothes off and made love on camel-back. The camel tried to throw them off. It writhed and jerked and Kate writhed and Walter jerked and the Morris dancers cheered and waved their phallic symbols, and Walter was enormous inside her, and she was . . . awake in Ward 3C, and she realised that she’d been dreaming. Oh, such dreams to have three nights before your hundredth birthday.

  It was a little disappointing to return from such a dream to the reality of that weekend with Enid and Annie and Stanley and Olga. The six of them had gone to Cookham for lunch, in Stanley’s Rolls. When Stanley suggested going to Cookham, Olga said, ‘Not Cookham, surely, Stanley? Won’t you get upset to know that not only aren’t you the best artist there, you aren’t even the best artist called Stanley there.’ She turned to Enid and Annie and said, ‘Stanley Spencer lived in Cookham.’ Enid already knew this, and Annie had never heard of Stanley Spencer and remained mystified.

  Annie, who had once sniffed at melon and said, ‘Putting on airs,’ said, ‘Oh! A Rolls-Royce,’ and even her goitre blushed with excitement. As Stanley approached a corner rather fast, Annie said desperately, in the absence of children, ‘I imagine the insurance on a Rolls-Royce must be astronomical.’ Stanley said, ‘You’re right, Annie. Let’s crash it and prove I don’t care as much about money as everyone says I do.’ Stanley accelerated, Annie almost fainted, Enid screamed, and Stanley just managed to keep control of the car. As he straightened out after the corner, Enid said, ‘Glynis Hodges whose father kept ferrets was thrown through the window of a post-bus on the Great St Bernard pass. They didn’t find her body for four days,’ and Kate said, ‘For shame, Enid. Stanley’ll think we only talk about death in Wales.’

  They lunched in a riverside pub, alone in the spacious restaurant, just conscious of the hubbub in the crowded bar. Annie made no comment when they all ordered starters, but she went as red as a Pomerol when Stanley tried to make her have a glass of wine. Enid came over all sophisticated and said, ‘This wine’s lovely. It’s a little less full-bodied than a Rioja.’

  Walter told Olga that he thought that inside Daniel’s social realism there had been a surrealist trying to get out, and the dynamism caused by the conflict had been the central thrust of his creative magnetism. Stanley stared at him and said, ‘I didn’t know our piston manufacturer claimed to know anything about art,’ and Kate said proudly, ‘Walter looks at art with an engineer’s eye, and it always works,’ and Annie said, ‘I’m listening to an artistic conversation! Aren’t I just the luckiest person alive?’

  Once a year, Kate and Walter visited Oliver and Bunny in their labour-saving bungalow. They had a sherry there, and then went to the pub. Bunny was getting deaf now, and talked even more loudly. Every year she made at least one faux pas.

  In 1973, as they entered the bar, she yelled, ‘Their food’s not very good, no presentation at all, but I’ve never heard of anyone actually being poisoned.’ In 1974, she boomed, ‘They aren’t very friendly, but the car park’s very difficult at the other place.’ In 1975, she didn’t say anything as they entered, but, just before they left, a stunningly beautiful West Indian girl with a magnificent Rastafarian hairdo came in to empty the fruit machine. Kate wanted to cry to think of such a gorgeous creature having to do such a mundane job. Bunny screeched, ‘What on earth has that black girl got on the top of her head?’

  They didn’t go to the pub in 1976. They didn’t need to. Bunny had committed her greatest faux pas of all. She’d taken a wrong turning and driven her car into Chichester harbour and drowned. Oliver invited them to stay for weekends after that, saying, ‘I can do this now. Poor Bunny just didn’t like visitors. She liked people, she was a good mixer. But not visitors.’ Oliver cooked lasagne and steak pie and gammon and eggs, and they didn’t go to the pub once.

  Irony never seemed far away from Kate’s life. It stalked her happiness like an obsessed lover. That dark night in hospital had been lit by happy memories of her life with Walter. Seventeen years of happiness they had that night. Now, just as a sky as grey and sallow as Oliver’s skin began to pale in Kate’s window on the world, her memories came to the point where Walter began to fade. Stronger grew the October morning. Weaker grew Walter. The great bulk shrank. The skin hung loose. The eyes tried to hide from the world, hollow dark sensitive orbs above increasingly black bags. Death came to Walter Copson slowly but remorselessly. He retained his humour to the end. Kate admired and loved him more and more, and they were very kind at the hospice when she could look after him no longer. He was always good-humoured except on the final Tuesday, when he didn’t recognise her, but on the Wednesday, his final day of life, his clarity had returned, and he w
hispered, as she squeezed his hand, ‘I’ve been so lucky.’

  Kate was eighty-one when Walter died. Her face at the funeral was set and stern. She wore bright red because it had been his wish. She was criticised for it, and didn’t bother to defend herself. She told herself again and again that she’d been lucky to know Walter at all, let alone marry him three times. She told herself that she had been so much luckier than Enid or Annie, neither of whom had ever felt a man inside her. She told herself that she had been so much more fortunate than Oliver and his double dose of double barrel, than Bernard who had died a virgin, than Myfanwy who had died so long ago that she was almost forgotten, and than Dilys, who had never had a proper life at all. She told herself that she could have been born a toad, and been squashed to death by a Volvo on the A303. She told herself that she was fortunate to have a daughter who, if not the princess of her hopes, was a thoroughly nice person, and had produced two fine twin boys. She told herself that she had been enriched by the production of three sons, only one of whom was a murderer. And, because she was such a very determined woman, she found great consolation in these thoughts.

  They had a small funeral tea at Rhossili Cottage, and Kate was dignity itself. Enid handed round Welsh cakes and bara brith that she had brought from Swansea. She kissed Kate impulsively in the kitchen and said, ‘I shall never know sadness like you are feeling, so I suppose that in our very different ways we’ve both been very lucky people.’

  Heinz and his second wife Anke had come over from Niederlander-ob-der-Kummel, both in their eighties, both more erect than they had any right to be.

  ‘How’s the Sperm Count?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Kate, you are outrageous,’ said Heinz.

  ‘I hadn’t meant to be. It’s how I think of him,’ said Kate.

  Heinz explained the joke to Anke, who smiled without comprehension and said, ‘Graf Von Seemen is a sad, lonely old man. He is very sorry for himself.’