Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  Miss Murchison stepped forward, in her dowdy, baggy clothes, smiling broadly.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘we have a little surprise for you. The French ambassador will explain.’

  Martha Kitchen smiled smugly.

  The French ambassador was tall and elegant and impeccably dressed. How frumpish Miss Murchison looked beside him. He smiled at Charlie, sitting there in his wheelchair, and said, ‘Charlie Fletcher, you are a very brave man and a credit to your country. You did sterling service for France in the Great War, and France does not forget her friends. It is with great pleasure and pride that I present you with the Légion d’honneur.’

  Charlie’s jaw dropped open. It was happening all the time! He was moved to tears. He bent his head forward and the French ambassador leant down and decorated him, then kissed him on both cheeks. Dorothy Whatmore muttered, ‘Disgusting!’ and somebody else said, ‘S’ssh!’ Kate led the applause. When it died down somebody, probably that know-all Martha Kitchen, shouted, ‘Speech.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m not a speaking man. Je ne suis pas . . . un speaking man. Thank you very much. Merci beaucoup.’

  There was more applause. In all the excitement Delia Raddlestone stepped on a balloon, there was a bang, and Charlie flinched, Kate saw him flinch, seventy-eight years since the end of the war, and still he flinched.

  The French ambassador was politeness personified, and stayed for a drink. Kate felt so sorry for him and so ashamed of the lack of sophistication in the place that she went up to him and talked to him in fluent French about Paris, the Crillon, her love of Aix-en-Provence. She didn’t think twice about it. Afterwards she heard Janet Brighouse say, ‘Upstaging everyone as usual,’ and somebody said, ‘Stealing his thunder,’ and that know-all Martha Kitchen said, ‘She’s ashamed of us.’ Even Charlie seemed a bit hurt, and that was terrible. And she’d been so anxious to keep a low profile.

  So that was the explanation of the pain behind the twinkle. Several times Kate asked Charlie what he’d done, and he refused to talk. One day, a cold, sullen afternoon, with a sky the colour of death, an afternoon that had never become properly light, he did talk, over a cup of tea under the prize salmon.

  ‘Just did what I was paid to do. Fought. Killed people. Saved people.’

  ‘Where did the French come in?’

  ‘1915. I led a . . . I dunno . . . decoy, I suppose. Like a diversion. Got the Gerry fire on to us, these French blokes could retreat safely, kind of thing. S’pose that was what it was.’

  ‘Brave.’

  ‘What we was there for. So many died then, so many’ve died later, they’ve got these medals, they’ve no one to give ’em to. Giving ’em away, they are.’

  ‘But you didn’t die.’

  ‘No. Got invalided out first day of the Battle of the Somme. Lucky.’

  ‘How did you get injured?’

  ‘Went back to save a bloke. Young bloke lying injured, can’t have been more than eighteen but he looked older, grown up, seen so much already. I never forgot that look.’

  Kate’s heart was racing. She hardly dared ask, but she had to.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Dunno. We was never properly introduced.’

  ‘Charlie, what did he look like?’

  Charlie looked at her, wondering. She didn’t want to tell him anything. There was no point now, and he didn’t ask.

  ‘I didn’t exactly stop to take an identikit picture,’ he said. ‘I dunno. He had dark hair. I think. Good-looking lad. He looked into my eye, said, “I’m not dying, am I?” I said, “Course you aren’t, mate.” But he was. There was gunfire everywhere, shells exploding. I saw a leg just lying there on its own. Barbed wire. Bloke impaled on the barbed wire, screaming. I think the leg might have been his. I reckon that lad I tried to save was the lucky one. He never had to see all that again. I’ve seen it every day for eighty-one years, Kate.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie.’

  ‘Stupid to go back, s’pose, and get a bullet through me leg for it. Dunno, though. Helped him to die nicely.’

  Well, there was no point in thinking about it. She’d never know. Hundreds of good-looking men with dark hair and the knowledge of hell in their eyes must have died that day. No, there was no point in thinking about it. But, damn it, she began to cry, and Charlie began to cry too. They clutched each other beneath the salmon, that dark afternoon, and cried and cried and cried.

  ‘Look at those two disgusting love-birds,’ said Betty Beveridge who was stuck with her jigsaw.

  ‘Oh, shut up, you dried-up old cunt,’ said Charlie.

  And Kate laughed. Oh, Kate, how far you have travelled from 16 Eaton Crescent.

  Kate recalled now, as the dawn of her 36,449th day approached, the last visit paid by each of her children to the Golden Glade Retirement Home.

  Timothy’s last visit had been several weeks before her stroke. She remembered sitting on the seat just inside the front door, all dolled up in a bright red two-piece suit.

  ‘Visitors again! My word,’ Ellie Smithson had said. She’d stepped into the roll of chief sneerer when Betty Beveridge died.

  Kate wanted to say, ‘You might have more visitors if you weren’t so miserable,’ but she didn’t, she said, ‘One of my sons, and his new lady friend.’

  ‘Have a look at the old school on your way to the Speckled Hen,’ said Martha Kitchen, the know-all. ‘They’re making it ready for Kosovan refugees.’

  And then Timothy was there. Seeing her son in his early seventies with a white beard make Kate feel absurdly old. He bent to kiss her and she knew that he was thinking how much she had shrunk.

  It was a struggle down the path with her zimmer frame. Her body was seizing up as if the blood was freezing like diesel in winter.

  ‘Carrie’s in the car,’ he said. ‘You’ll like her.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. How’s Roberta?’

  Timothy sighed deeply, but said, ‘Doing very well. It’s agonisingly slow, though.’

  Timothy’s daughter Roberta was in a drug rehabilitation clinic.

  At last the painful journey to the car was over. Carrie got out to welcome Kate. The poor woman was shaking. What had Timothy said about her?

  Kate shook hands with Carrie and smiled broadly. Carrie had a wide, friendly, freckled face. She was wearing shorts that might have been described as sensible if they’d been on somebody else. She was tall and brown and flat. She was wearing open-toed sandals. She didn’t have the toes for them.

  It was agony for Kate, getting into the car, getting out of the car, hanging on to the car while Timothy retrieved the zimmer frame from the boot, struggling into the restaurant, dropping gingerly into a chair in the bar.

  The waiter said, ‘And for you, madam?’ in his best ‘Does She Take Sugar?’ voice, and Kate said, very firmly, ‘A kir royale, please, but very light on the cassis.’

  After she’d ordered her rum and coke, Carrie said, ‘Excuse me. Gotta go and point Penelope at the porcelain.’ When she’d gone, Timothy said, ‘You wouldn’t think she was fifty-three, would you?’ and Kate didn’t say, ‘No, I’d got her down for sixty-one.’ ‘At last I’ve found somebody suitable,’ said Timothy. ‘Why on earth didn’t I meet her years ago?’ Kate said nothing. ‘Oh God,’ said Timothy, ‘you don’t like her. I think you’re jealous. I don’t think you’d like any woman I loved.’ Kate smiled sadly and hoped fervently that that wasn’t true. ‘I do like her,’ she lied, this old lady who had long abandoned the cruelty of truth. ‘I do like her. I hope she is right for you. I hope you’ll be very happy. But hush, here she comes, she’s finished pointing Penelope at the porcelain.’

  It was the same agonising journey a few weeks later, on Maurice’s last visit, with his portly fiancée Clare. Maurice was totally bald now, and Clare was unrecognisable as the beautiful young thing who had once charmed the facts out of the BBC library. Kate had the same seat in the bar, chose a kir royale again, and sat in the same seat in the restaurant, at the
table that was easiest for her to reach.

  They talked about Charlie. She admitted to missing him, and to missing their chess.

  ‘There are only three men in the place now,’ she said, ‘and poor things all three. At last it can be said that your mother is finished with men, Maurice.’

  They discussed the Kosovan refugees. Maurice didn’t want to, he was off duty, but Kate had to get it off her chest. ‘Lots of the women think we shouldn’t have taken them,’ she said. ‘Ellie Smithson said, “They’re practically gypsies. What do we want with them?” I often feel ashamed to be British these days. I ought to have died long ago. I haven’t the energy to fight them.’

  ‘Why should you fight them? What good would it do?’

  ‘That’s defeatist. I was never defeatist before.’

  When Clare went to the smallest room, Kate said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever marry her now, will you?’ ‘I suppose not,’ said her youngest son, who was sixty-six years old. ‘I suppose not. I suppose I’m frightened it might change everything.’ ‘After thirty-nine years!’ she exclaimed, and he shrugged.

  Elizabeth and Terence brought the full family gathering, Trevor with his boyfriend Richard, Mark with his wife Sarah and their sixteen-year-old son Ben and their five-year-old daughter Victoria, who came along when hope had been abandoned.

  Victoria went down the path ahead of Kate, removing obstructions so that the zimmer frame would have a smooth passage. Everybody said there was more of Kate in Victoria than of her grandmother or her mother. Everyone said she looked just like the photographs of Kate at five.

  Kate had been shocked to learn that as a university lecturer Trevor got £30,000 a year, and as the sales manager of a firm making plastic bags Mark got £50,000 a year plus a car, but this wasn’t the time for serious economic debate.

  She sometimes wondered if Trevor felt envious of Mark and Sarah for having a bigger house, a better car, better holidays, and Ben and Victoria. That day, from a look she caught in Trevor’s eye, she got her answer. He pitied them.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Great-granny,’ said Victoria.

  ‘Thinking.’

  ‘I think sometimes too.’

  ‘Good.’

  They had to put two tables together this time, but they didn’t mind. They were always very obliging at the Speckled Hen.

  Kate made them laugh about the Kosovan refugees, when she told them how she had turned on Ellie Smithson and said that the world had to unite against ethnic cleansing, and Ellie Smithson, missing the point as usual, said, ‘We wouldn’t get any cleansing if we didn’t employ ethnics. The British just don’t want to do it.’

  ‘There are people like that who always miss the point,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They’re terribly irritating. I don’t know how you can put up with them. Don’t you really think now that you should come and live with us?’

  ‘We’ve discussed it,’ said Terence. ‘We both want you to.’

  ‘We’d be happy to have you for holidays,’ said Trevor, ‘if you could stand Richard’s snoring.’

  ‘Bitch!’ mouthed Richard, so that Victoria wouldn’t hear.

  ‘Same in this quarter,’ was Mark’s slightly less than ringing echo.

  They must be calculating that I’ll die quite soon, so I won’t be a burden for long, thought Kate.

  ‘When I’m very old like you, Great-granny,’ piped up Victoria, ‘I want to live with people I know who love me.’

  ‘Please come, Gran,’ mumbled Ben after glares had been directed towards him. He looked sulky. Oh, how he reminded her of Gwyn. But the world had led him to expect so much more than Gwyn (he could hardly end up with less) and he had a spoilt, wilful look.

  ‘You’re all very kind,’ said Kate. ‘Very kind. I want to cry. But I made my decision, and it’s too late now.’

  Nigel came less than two weeks before her stroke. ‘I’ve just been to the Speckled Hen,’ he said. ‘I had the venison terrine and the brill.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take me?’

  ‘It’s too difficult for you now.’

  ‘The others have all taken me.’

  ‘Have they? Well, in my judgement, and I hope you feel I’m old enough to have earned the right to have a certain amount of judgement, in my judgement, as I say, it has now become too great a burden for you to undertake the journey.’

  ‘Couldn’t I have made the decision?’

  ‘I don’t think so. You will never admit defeat.’

  ‘Do you mean that next time I leave this place I’ll leave feet first?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  But she did.

  In the end, she just had to explode. It had been building up for so long. One Sunday, in October, when she saw them standing around the entrance hall with their zimmer frames, waiting for their lunch like a flock of vultures, she could hold it in no longer. Old people have difficulty holding things in, and she was glad that in her case it was anger rather than urine.

  ‘Don’t you care about anything except yourselves any more?’ she yelled at them. ‘Don’t you think of other people at all? Stuff your faces, move your bowels, make sure you have the best seat in the lounge. There are hundreds of thousands of us with our zimmer frames, looking at our soap-watching, material-sodden society and doing sod all about it. Can’t we even talk about it? What about the morality of saturation bombing? What about the drug culture? What about the increasing gap between rich and poor? What about corruption in high places? What about corruption in low places? What about cover-ups, not about sex – who really cares what people do in private – but about foods that poison the animals we eat and so poison us, and all the hormones and poisons and pesticides that are found in mothers’ milk, and cruelty to civets by the perfume industry, and cruelty to badgers by almost everybody? Don’t you want to do anything about this land where a sense of responsibility, a sense of decency, a sense of pride and a sense of shame are becoming as rare as skylarks and lapwings, a land where we don’t dare rebuke people for dropping plastic burger boxes for fear they’ll beat us up, a land of road rage and air rage and now zimmer-frame rage? I’ve known so much irony in my life but here you are living out the greatest irony of all. Can’t you see, you fools, that by being so obsessed with avoiding the death you fear so much you’re bringing on the very thing you fear? Stop thinking of yourselves and you’ll live longer, I tell you. Oh, can’t you see it?’

  ‘Hush, dear. You’ll give yourself a stroke,’ said Martha Kitchen.

  Know-alls! Who needs them?

  23 Victoria

  KATE CLOSED HER eyes, and slept, and woke, and slept, and half-woke, and half-slept. There was pain in her head this morning. Several times she drifted off and woke up in a different place. In Majorca, with Carrie saying, ‘Have you moved your bowels this morning, Mrs Critchley?’ In Tregarryn, with Arturo, but Arturo was old and bent, and his private parts were deformed, and Stanley was looking at them and saying, ‘You see. I do get them right. That’s what they look like.’ In Swansea, in bed with Gwyn, she tried to see his young face, she couldn’t move, she was paralysed, and she remembered. Just for a moment, then, she had seen Gwyn as he had been, she had been able to recall every tiny bit of his beauty, and then it was gone.

  They brought Delilah back.

  ‘Oh fuck, it’s back to the funny farm,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, well, we don’t really want you either,’ said the nurse, a new one. ‘But there’s no room in intensive care.’

  Doctor Ramgobi was furious.

  ‘She needs twenty-four-hour monitoring,’ he said.

  ‘Could she be transferred to Gravesend?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘The journey might be too much. I wouldn’t risk it,’ said Doctor Ramgobi.

  ‘I’m not fucking deaf,’ said Delilah. ‘I don’t like being talked about as if I was a parcel.’

  ‘You aren’t a parcel,’ said Doctor Ramgobi. ‘You’re a quandary.’

  ‘I’ve eaten better men than you for breakfast,’ sa
id Delilah.

  Kate slipped away from it all, slipped away to Walter’s arms. It was nice in Walter’s arms. In the distance she could still hear the noises of the ward – ‘Have you ever been to the Mona Lisa, doctor?’ ‘In the Louvre? Yes. It was much smaller than I expected. I do think he might have painted it bigger if it was going to be so well known. Why?’ No, no, I don’t know about no Louvre. The Mona Lisa Club in Newport. I did a novelty dance there. I shoved a snake up me bum.’

  Unlucky bum, thought Kate, and even unluckier snake. Switch off, damn it. Don’t get dragged into the affairs of Ward 3C. Surf the net of your mind while it’s still there, Kate Copson.

  She felt the nurse’s hand on her pulse. She couldn’t tell which nurse it was. The nurse seemed very far away. She was sinking, drifting, floating, disintegrating. There was another hand on her pulse now. Doctor Rambogi’s. Ramgobi’s. Obviously he must be concerned. Why should anyone be concerned? It simply wasn’t proportionate, the amount of effort involved in keeping old people alive. But then nothing was proportionate. Winning eight million on the lottery while the people next door starved wasn’t proportionate, life was enough of a lottery without a lottery. It wasn’t proportionate to divert a trunk road to save the habitat of the rare gunge-leaf hairy spider while keeping twelve million chickens in little concentration camps all over the countryside. Don’t get angry, Kate. Don’t think any more. Don’t you understand? It’s over.

  Shortly after lunch – she could only dimly hear the noises of the last lunch of her life, she felt as if she was cocooned in cotton wool, was this death, no, not yet – the visitors began.

  Elizabeth was the first to arrive, with Kate’s great-granddaughter Victoria.

  ‘Hello, Great-granny,’ came a piping little voice.

  ‘She can’t hear you, darling,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I told you.’ To Kate, Elizabeth said, ‘I didn’t want to bring her, but she insisted. She loves you.’

  ‘Why do you talk to her, Granny, if she can’t hear you?’ asked Victoria, thoroughly justifiably, Kate thought.

  ‘Well, we can’t be certain she can’t,’ said Elizabeth.