by David Nobbs
‘Of course,’ said the eighty-three-year-old author, to the delight of the studio audience. ‘There was a lot of sex in our life.’
‘You come from a very puritanical background,’ said Roly McTavish. ‘What do you think your parents would have thought of all the sex in your book?’
‘The world is full of such bad sex, Roly – rape, child abuse, sado-masochistic violence, stalking, harassment, increasing sexual freedom was supposed to make us more mature about sex, ha ha – that I hope I’d have been able to persuade them that good sex between people who love each other isn’t too disgraceful a subject to discuss.’
‘Nevertheless, you do seem to be obsessed by sex.’
‘Oh no, Roly. There’s art in my book, travel in my book, lots of food and drink in my book, lots of portraits of people in my book, there are lots of jokes in my book. But this is television, and you’re scared stiff people might get bored and switch off, so you go on and on about sex. It’s you, I’m afraid, Roly, who’s obsessed with sex.’
Despite the success of the book, it was the last that Kate wrote for many years. Because she was tired, at eighty-three years of age? Not at all, gentle reader. She simply didn’t have the time. She was too busy with her television series and her toyboy.
Now, at ninety-nine, Kate really did feel tired. The mental rigours of her detective work had exhausted her. The emotional implications of her discovery had exhausted her even more. She had accepted that she was dying. It was time.
Not quite! Not yet! She really did want to finish her review of her life, now that she had got this far.
She was anxious to die before midnight, in two days’ time, thus escaping a card from the Queen, a cake with a hundred candles, the singing of ‘Happy birthday to you’ and, even worse, the song that was so incorrect for those interested in sexual politics, ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’. She felt, therefore, that she couldn’t linger too much on her years with Norman.
She drifted in and out of sleep that night, and in and out of memory. The video played all night. Sometimes she watched it, and sometimes she slept.
Snapshots, then, from her years of fame.
With Timothy in Majorca, still fit enough to take gentle walks through the unspoilt mountains of the north, admiring the glory of the flowers that no pesticides had poisoned, listening to the distant ringing of the bells on the necks of the goats, eating lovely fresh fish simply prepared by Lucy. She really liked Lucy, and was sad when they announced their trial separation. She had wondered, once or twice, on those sun-shrivelled hills, if she was walking with a murderer. Well, now she knew.
Trips with Maurice. Two days in Luxor with him and Clare before he flew off to Kabul. She could see the three of them now, under the hot November sun, dwarfed by the majestic pillars of the Temple of Karnak, stunned by the scale and grandeur, but also by the delicacy and intricacy of the decorations, and Kate wondering, could Maurice, who loved beauty almost as much as he loved truth and justice, be a murderer? Well, now she knew.
Great meals with Nigel. The Auberge de I’Ill at Illhaeusern. He had had the filets de carpe et perche aux haricots cocos blancs. She remembered wondering, as he ate his dead fish, whether she was dining with a murderer. Well, now she knew.
The kindness of Elizabeth and Terence. Twice they gave up golfing holidays to take her to the great cities of Spain and Italy. They admired these cities, but they didn’t respond to them as she did. She was overwhelmed by them, lost in them, moved to floods of tears in the Piazza Del Campo in Siena. Sometimes, on grey days in Britain, she would think, It’s there now, at this very moment the lovers and the pigeons are strutting, the tourists are gawping, the waiters are smiling under the awnings. It made the grey days easier to bear, knowing that it was there, waiting for her.
Later she had the exquisite joy of introducing Norman to Salamanca, and seeing his astonished face as he entered the Plaza Mayor for the first time. She’d been ninety at the time, and he her toyboy of eighty-seven.
She thought back, in her bed that night, to the heady days of Granny Copson’s Corner. Her own television series at the age of eighty-four! It had been Tony Bream’s idea, and he’d confessed to her later that his motivation in putting it forward had been to infuriate Rob Walsall. Tony had seen the interview on the Roly McTavish Show, and had realised that she was a natural. She’d fought against the title. It had sounded cute and patronising, but Tony had insisted, saying that Rob hated it. It irritated her when people assumed that Maurice’s influence had helped her get the series. He would never have deigned to use influence.
Maurice did keep her well informed about the politics behind the scenes, though. He told her that Rob Walsall was demanding programmes with street cred, programmes that were street raw, programmes that showed Britain as she was. He told her that Tony Bream argued that Granny Copson was just as much Britain as she was as were unemployed black youths in Brixton. He didn’t tell her till years later that Rob Walsall had only agreed to the programme because he was convinced it would destroy Tony Bream’s reputation. It was of course, a huge success, and made Tony Bream’s reputation, which infuriated Rob Walsall.
Kate, more and more outspoken now, didn’t exactly thrill Rob Walsall when she told him, ‘You’re obsessed with street cred because you’ve only ever seen a street from the back of a taxi.’
Ironically, though . . . ‘Oh, not another irony,’ I hear you cry. Well, yes, another irony, I’m afraid . . . despite her confrontation with Rob Walsall, despite the title of her programme, Kate refused to become a TV cross between the Women’s Institute and an old people’s home. She refused to confine herself to wise old saws, to interviews with eccentrics and naturalists and naturists and herbalists. She insisted on being, in her own way, at the cutting edge.
She upset church leaders with her programme on religious intolerance. Her fury at the bigotry, hatred and cruelty that mankind is capable of in the name of religion got the better of her. She managed to offend the Church of England, the Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the United Reform Church, the Pentecostal Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the supporters of Islam and the Scientologists. Good going in twenty-seven minutes. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her remark that ‘Jesus would be turning in his grave if He hadn’t ascended from it’ as flippant. ‘Well, thank goodness for flippancy,’ she said. ‘Nobody ever killed or persecuted or went to war out of flippancy.’
She upset church leaders again, and many senior figures in our great political parties, such champions of family values except in their own lives, when she introduced Norman as her boyfriend and asked him, ‘Do you enjoy sleeping with me?’
‘Not much,’ he said.
She was genuinely shocked for a moment. Everyone assumed that the exchange had been rehearsed, but it hadn’t.
‘I like being awake in bed with you, though,’ he continued. ‘Not that I’m capable of a great deal of activity at my great age.’
‘What did Enid and Annie and Oliver think of that?’ I hear you exclaim. You’re very vocal today. Well, I wasn’t going to mention it, we’ve been to so many funerals together, you and I, but Annie and Oliver had died. Enid was still very much alive, though, and Kate had solved the problem of her inevitable outrage by inviting her to be in the studio audience for that edition of the programme. If she’d watched it in Swansea she’d have died of shock, and would never have dared show her face in the Uplands again. Being part of it, in London, made her feel really quite bold.
‘Of course, I only have rather a vague idea of what people do in bed,’ she said in the hospitality room afterwards, to the astonishment of the researchers, ‘but, please, Kate dear, Norman dear, don’t exert yourselves too much. Iris Johns’s husband died in the act in the very hotel in Madeira in which they’d honeymooned thirty years earlier, and he was a fit man, he’d sung in the Pontardulais Male Voice Choir, and they had an awful job getting his body home.’
Kate, o
f course, made a programme about death. Many of you may have seen it. She ended the programme with these words, spoken direct to the camera with an intensity to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck: ‘We are all born once. We all die once. That is the end of the equality meted out by this world. Let us not fear this thing. We cannot avoid the fear of painful illness, but we must not fear death itself. It is not only inevitable, but desirable. Eternal life would be appalling. The value of life lies in its brevity. Relish the miracle of life every day. Make the most of it, both for yourselves and for others. If you live as long as I have, and are lucky enough to have as rich a social life as I have had, you’ll go to many funerals. Don’t fear them. Don’t fear other people’s death. Hard though it is, don’t grieve for your loss, but think of their peace and give thanks for their life which lives on in you. Nothing ends with your death, except unimportant little you. Life is a relay race. Pass the baton. Good-night.’
Rob Walsall got his revenge in the end, of course. He had ways of seeing the advance schedules of all the other companies, and so he was able to schedule Granny Copson’s Corner against major blockbuster shows. He denied it, of course, but Kate knew that it couldn’t be coincidence that she found herself scheduled against David Jason four times. Rob Walsall axed Granny Copson’s Corner to howls of fury from Middle England. ‘It simply wasn’t getting the ratings any more,’ he said.
She didn’t miss the fame. She’d never taken it seriously, and it had been a two-edged sword. She did miss the power, though. What a joy it was to be able to go on television and sound off about what you perceived as the evils of the world. She wanted life to consist of more than just retirement, waiting to die. She began to write another book. The idea crystallised when she found that someone had crashed into her car, and hadn’t left a note. Her book was called Responsibility. It was an analysis of the need to take responsibility, both privately, for our own actions, and also publicly, for the actions of all the groups to which one belonged, from family to village to nation to species. Every time we opt out, she suggested, we die a little. Every time we avoid responsibility, we lose a little bit of self-esteem. In the end, we are the losers. It’s hardly necessary to state that she found the book impossible to get published. It wasn’t an exciting message. It wasn’t a message for the nineties.
Norman! He’d been visiting friends in the village and they met in the pub. Kate liked him the moment he walked in. He seemed an untroubled man, a simple man in the best sense. Tall, silver-haired, with just the slightest stoop, dignified, courteous, charming. Impeccable manners. Oh Lord, Kate thought, what do those manners conceal? But she never did find any skeletons in his cupboard. He loved his beer and his walking, his food and his conversation, but above all he loved Kate.
They went on cruises and they toured the world. They gave lunch and dinner parties. They went to theatres and exhibitions. He took her book seriously, was proud of her, and was disappointed for her when she couldn’t get it published.
Norman had been a pilot with BOAC. Every summer he’d spent a week of his holidays picking strawberries in Kent. ‘It was the exact opposite of what I did for the rest of the year,’ he explained, unnecessarily. ‘My wife thought I was mad.’
‘I don’t think you were mad.’
‘Why didn’t I meet you before?’
‘Tut-tut, Norman. Be grateful we met at all.’
The very last trip they made was to Swansea and Cornwall. She showed him the house in Eaton Crescent. It was still in good repair. She didn’t knock on the door and ask to see inside. It would have seemed too alien.
Penzance seemed alien too. Around the harbour there were one or two new buildings that made her blood boil. They weren’t modern enough to be New-Brutalist. They had to be Post-Neo-Brutalist. Post-Neo-Brutalism, in Penance!
They went to one or two old haunts in south Cornwall, around the Helford river, that seemed as beautiful as ever, but the centre of Cornwall seemed a bleak and desolate place to Kate now, with its mournful wind farms and pylons and abandoned mines. Tregarryn was all holiday homes now, except for the house itself, which was uninhabited and beginning to decay. In Tintagel everything was the King Arthur this or the Merlin that. There was even a watering hole called the Excali-bar. All the magic, all the atmosphere of antiquity, had long been trampled away beneath the tourist armies. We ruin the thing we go to see.
That night, in their hotel, they held each other very tight and listened to the wind, and Norman soothed Kate’s anger.
Nothing made Norman angry, and that was the only thing about him that ever made Kate angry. She sounded off about her pet hates and he smiled his ‘There goes my darling Kate, sounding off again’ smile, and she got even angrier. ‘Don’t you care?’ she shouted once. ‘Can’t do anything about it, old girl.’ She couldn’t remember, now, what that one had been about.
He died, in his bed, in his sleep. So did Enid, that lifelong narrator of violent death. Ironic, really.
21 Angela
IT WAS A bad morning in Ward 3C. Angela Critchley started shouting just as Delilah was squeaked back in.
‘Rodney!’ she shouted. ‘Rodney! My waters are breaking. Rodney, I’ve started.’
‘Oh fuck, I’m back,’ said Delilah.
‘Rodney! Quick!’ A nurse rushed to her, and she began screaming and weeping. ‘I don’t want another child. Look what happened to the last one. Haven’t seen him for thirty years.’
Was that part of her madness or a dreadful moment of truth? Kate couldn’t cope with all this. She’d had enough. Can you blame her, as Angela Critchley started screaming again, for retiring into fantasy?
She opened a small secret door in her head, which nobody knew was there. It led into the panelled library of her brain. There were books from floor to ceiling in the panelled library of her brain, and further doors led to long corridors, off which there were large numbers of brain cells, also lined with books. It was extremely peaceful in Kate’s brain that morning.
‘Come in, gentlemen,’ she said.
Her three sons entered her brain gravely. Soon two of them would learn who had murdered Graham. One of them already knew.
‘Pull up a comfortable thought, and sit on it,’ she said.
They sat down. Far away she heard Doctor Ramgobi saying, ‘Why has this woman been removed from intensive care?’ and thin Helen saying, ‘They’ve an emergency,’ and Doctor Ramgobi saying, ‘So what? This woman is an emergency.’ But that was in another world.
‘Now I’ve assembled you here, in the library,’ said Kate, ‘because I know which of you killed Graham.’
‘Good God!’ gasped Maurice.
‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ spluttered Timothy.
‘Careful, Timothy,’ warned Kate. ‘If this was one of your books that would almost certainly mean that it was you. In fact, when I began to consider the murder it soon dawned on me that there were a whole series of preposterous clues, as if it was in one of Timothy’s books.’
‘I know you don’t like them,’ complained Timothy, ‘but must you rub it in?’
‘Quiet,’ contributed Nigel. ‘I want to know who did it.’
‘Oh, do you?’ crowed Timothy. ‘That means it was probably you.’
‘Shut up, Timothy,’ commanded Kate. ‘I don’t want a peep out of any of you. Now I wasted a lot of time on all those clues, and poor old Inspector Crouch wasted months. They were, I admit, ingenious clues, if rather childish. But eventually I realised that they had a purpose that wasn’t childish at all. They were designed to make investigators concentrate on the question “How?” and the question “Who?” and ignore the vital question “Why?” And the very fact that they were so decorative led me to think that they were a smokescreen for something that wasn’t decorative at all, something that wasn’t childish at all, something that was unadorned and adult. They were little boys’ mind games, such as Nigel and Timothy might be expected to indulge in, but which seemed out of character for Maurice. I felt certain that
Maurice could kill . . .’
‘Ma!’
‘Don’t protest, Maurice. I felt that Maurice could kill, but only for reasons of conscience or perhaps of misplaced altruism. However, I felt that Maurice was clever enough to create these absurd little puzzles as a smokescreen.
‘All three of you said you’d like to kill Graham, if certain things happened. They were all pretty far-fetched reasons for killing, and I didn’t believe any of them.
‘I examined all sorts of potential motives for murder, and I decided that none of you could murder for petty reasons or for sexual reasons or because you were mad.’
‘Big of you!’
‘Do be quiet, Nigel. I also looked at the whole thing from the point of view of what I wanted to find out about Graham. He’d said that he was investigating what he called “a huge con against the whole human race”. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it, at that stage. I must admit that after I’d discovered that he had a false name, a history of crime and three abandoned wives I concluded that he’d probably been lying about this huge con. But if I found he hadn’t been lying it would go some way towards enabling me to believe that he’d changed for the better, as people can, especially under my influence, let’s have no false modesty. Supposing Graham had been speaking the truth. Supposing the reason why he wouldn’t tell me was that it implicated one of my beloved sons. I’d still have to face the discovery that one of my sons was a murderer, but at least I would learn something good about Graham.’
Far away, in the ward, Angela Critchley screamed and screamed.
‘What on earth’s that?’ asked Maurice.
‘A woman’s dying,’ explained Kate. ‘She thinks she’s giving birth, but she’s dying. It’s very sad, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so don’t even think about it.’
The screaming grew weaker, and stopped. It was very quiet, then, in Kate’s brain, until she resumed her tale.
