by David Nobbs
‘He couldn’t head a tomato,’ cries Steven scornfully. Steven Venables does scorn well.
Dave Kent doesn’t mind their mockery. It washes off him like water off a carrot’s back. Mockery is his lot. Being happy to be mocked is his salvation. Tommo intends to be a gynaecologist because he likes women’s bodies. Steven intends to become a banker because he likes money and is confident enough not to worry about the rhyming slang. Steven oozes confidence. Dave is quite confident too, but only because he knows he’ll never be anything but a greengrocer, and, luckily, he doesn’t want to be anything but a greengrocer.
‘Come on, English swine. You can’t beat me,’ shouts Timothy.
And they can’t. The shots rain in. He dives, sprawls, climbs, hurls himself to left and right, grabs the ball, punches it, tips it round the post (Tommo’s manky blazer). He cannot be beaten.
If he remains unbeaten until they tire of it and go home, everything will go brilliantly tomorrow.
Then Tommo is bearing down on him, getting closer, which way will his shot go? Timothy hesitates for just a second, Tommo twists his heavy but surprisingly lithe body one way, slips the ball the other way. Timothy twists, flings himself towards the ball, touches it but cannot stop it.
‘Goal!’ cries Tommo. He whirls around the waste ground, turns with his arms outstretched towards the fans packed into the great Abattoir Stand in their thousands. ‘King Kev is unstoppable,’ he cries. His suicide is still many years away.
Stupid though he knows it is, Timothy cannot help thinking that failing to save Tommo’s shot is a bad omen for tomorrow.
Sniffy Arkwright is scurrying towards them on his splay feet, which might as well carry a health warning, so unsuitable are they for football. Coningsfield Grammar isn’t nickname territory, by and large, but Sniffy has always been Sniffy and nobody even knows his Christian name. Besides, his voice, hard though he tries to conceal it, reveals with every sentence that he belongs in the world of nicknames and is at Coningsfield Grammar by mistake. He’s sniffing out the possibility of a game, his eagerness to join in setting up waves of instinctive resistance. The fun is over.
‘We’re just going,’ says Timothy.
Sniffy Arkwright isn’t surprised. People are always just going when he approaches. And, since this is what life is like, he doesn’t resent it.
As they walk away, Sniffy following like an exhausted dog, Steven says, ‘It must be awful to be engaged and not be allowed to do it.’
‘Awful,’ echoes Dave, who is much given to echoing.
‘I couldn’t stop myself if I was with Naomi. Christ almighty,’ says Steven.
‘Careful,’ says Tommo. ‘Timothy thinks Christ is almighty.’
They climb the gate at the end of the waste ground, and drop down into the ginnel that runs behind the new industrial estate down to the stinking river. Sniffy still follows, even though he has no idea where they are going or why.
Suddenly Timothy can hold his secret in no longer.
‘We did it when we went to London that time when we were supposed to be in Paris,’ he says. ‘We did it four times in one night and we did other things.’
‘Yes, and I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ says Tommo.
Timothy suddenly longs most desperately for Naomi’s body. He will pray for strength when he gets home. He will pray for strength and patience, and he will ask God to make sure that Naomi likes the very special present that he is giving her for her eighteenth birthday.
Timothy walks slowly down Lower Cragley Road, clutching his brown paper parcel. He is deeply ashamed of its inelegance. Of course a dead curlew is not an easy thing to wrap, the beak has proved a nightmare, but he still feels that he should have done better. The paper is crumpled. Pieces of tape hang from it like plasters left too long unchanged on cuts and warts. He has never been a dab hand at wrapping presents. Paper is never obedient under his fingers. Tape never sticks properly. String simply refuses to be tied. God knows what struggles he will have in his slow mastery of the art of taxidermy. Well, God knows everything, or so Timothy thinks.
‘It’ll just be a quiet little supper party,’ Naomi’s mother Penny has told him. ‘Just us and you and Naomi’s best friend Isobel, and her brothers and their girlfriends. That’s all. She’s having her own party on Saturday.’
Timothy likes Naomi’s mother and he quite likes her father but is utterly tongue-tied in his presence. He has good reason to be wary of Isobel, and the thought of meeting both of Naomi’s brothers and their girlfriends for the first time all at once terrifies him. Oh, please, please, God, if you love me, as you say you do, move the clocks on and let it all have happened already.
God does not respond. Maybe Wednesday is his busy night. Timothy has to force himself to turn right into the garden of L’Ancresse. He has forgotten that yesterday he was a man. He is in psychological short trousers today.
He rings the bell. The door opens and Naomi stands before him in all her assumed purity. She is dressed in white, and has a pink bow in her hair.
He kisses her awkwardly, mumbles, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and thrusts the parcel rather too firmly towards her. She fumbles for it and almost drops it.
‘You squashed my breasts,’ she says.
‘Sorry.’
A bad start. Don’t panic, though.
‘What on earth is it?’ she says, examining it with, it has to be said, an element of disbelief.
‘Open it,’ he says.
He has hopes of getting this bit over in private, but his hopes are dashed.
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘We’re having presents later.’
He has spent ages getting ready. He has brushed his hair five times. He’s wearing his best suit, which is also his only suit. Luckily, he is unaware that his tie clashes with his shirt. Unfortunately, he has no colour sense, and unfortunately, he has no sense that he has no colour sense.
Naomi leads him into the living room. A log fire is burning brightly. The family stand in front of it like a firing squad. Above them is a painting of a heavily reefed sloop in high seas off Harwich. On the chaise longue in the bay window there is a pile of elegantly shaped presents, all wrapped in attractive gift paper, most of them tied with gossamer knots. Naomi places Timothy’s parcel on top of the pile. It sits there like a deformed weathervane.
‘We’ll have the presents after supper,’ explains Naomi.
Introductions are made. Timothy meets Naomi’s elder brother Julian and his fiancée Teresa. Julian is solid and smiling. Shaking hands with him is like holding a sweaty sea bass. Teresa is tall, cool and beaky. Her handshake is wristy and malevolent. They both look at Timothy as if he is an interruption. He then meets Naomi’s other brother Clive and his girlfriend, who turns out to be a boyfriend, named Antoine. Clive is slight, boyish, wry. He presses Timothy’s hand sympathetically. Antoine is tall and good-looking in a rather stately way. He is wearing a thick bottle-green corduroy suit and is the only man in the room without a tie. His handshake is brisk. Timothy runs his hand down his trousers in an involuntary gesture of shock. He has never shaken hands with a homosexual before.
Timothy also shakes hands very warily with Isobel. No one else in the room, and certainly not Naomi, knows that Isobel once leant across and pinched his prick with savage envy during geography. He has never felt quite the same about glacial moraines since. Or indeed about Isobel. Perhaps it’s the name, he thinks. Isobel is not a suitable name for a child. You’d have to spend the first thirty years of your life waiting to grow into it.
He feels very uneasy. He’s sure that his suit is badly cut. He worries that, even though he has chewed so much gum that his jaw aches, his breath may be tainted by fear. He is certain that he is unshapely, drab, ugly, the human equivalent of his parcel, which will sit on top of the pile on the chaise longue like a stinging rebuke all evening. If only he knew, if only Naomi could tell him, that, while her engagement to a taxidermist’s son who has helped her lose her virginity in a cheap hotel in Earls Cour
t is not the stuff of her parents’ dreams, it is as nothing compared to their first meeting with Antoine this evening. They’d had no idea that Clive’s girlfriend was a boyfriend. They’d not been told that he was French. They’d had not the slightest inkling that he was a struggling artist with no money who sometimes rode a bicycle over pools of paint to achieve his unruly effects. In the Undesirable Partner Stakes, Timothy is an also-ran.
And all the time, the badly wrapped curlew sits there, impossible to ignore.
‘What on earth can it be?’ asks Julian.
‘Something with a spout?’ suggests Teresa.
‘A teapot, perhaps. Though why should Timothy give Naomi a teapot? Unless…’ Clive smiles. ‘Unless they are about to set up home together. Has a date been fixed?’
‘Hardly. They’re very young,’ says Naomi’s father hastily.
Naomi looks across at Timothy and smiles uneasily. Something about her smile worries him, but he soon forgets it because he has a far greater worry. He’s terrified that someone will successfully guess the parcel’s secret.
Luckily, before this can happen, they are called in to supper, which is served in the rather bare dining room. It smells of not being used often enough. The oblong table is simply laid, with the usual National Trust mats and no tablecloth. The meal, too, is simple – melon, roast chicken and trifle. Naomi’s parents do not have sophisticated tastes. But the melon will be juicy, the chicken tasty, the trifle first rate. There is also wine – a rarity at the Walls table. Only white, no red. Timothy refuses to try it. Julian takes a sip, looks at Teresa, then at the label, and nods. Antoine comments, in his almost showily immaculate English, that if he painted blue nuns the bourgeoisie would have kittens. Timothy remembers the nun on the train and catches Naomi’s eye. She smiles. There is a brief moment of complicity across the table. But then she turns to talk to Clive. It is clear that she adores Clive.
Timothy is sitting between Julian and Antoine. He wishes that he was next to Naomi, but he understands that her brothers must have that privilege. He’s relieved that he’s not next to Isobel. The vicious little cow might squeeze his balls in mid-trifle. He sometimes wonders if Naomi is a good judge of character.
Julian turns to him with the air of a man dispensing charity, but his words are bombs that will explode if Timothy understands the subtext.
‘I have to say, and this will probably amaze you, that in the whole of my life I have never met a taxidermist,’ he says, smiling deceptively.
‘Oh. Well, perhaps you could come and meet my dad some time,’ says Timothy.
‘An offer it would be hard to refuse,’ says Julian. ‘Tell me, I’m intrigued, is your house full of stuffed birds and animals or does your father see as much as he can stand of them during his working hours?’
Timothy understands enough to realise that this is one person who will not go into raptures of delight at the unveiling of the curlew.
‘We don’t actually stuff them,’ he says rather stiffly. ‘That’s a popular misconception.’
‘I sit corrected. I apologise for my ignorance,’ says Julian stuffily, and turns away.
Antoine turns to Timothy and asks him if he’s ever been to France.
‘No,’ says Timothy. He knows that his reply is short to the point of being brusque. He tries desperately to think of something to embellish it, but he is hopelessly incapable of dealing with Antoine. ‘Never,’ he says.
‘Do you like art?’ asks Antoine.
‘Oh, yes. My dad says what we do is a kind of art.’
‘Are there any particular artists that you admire?’
‘I like Peter Scott,’ offers Timothy after some thought.
‘I do not know this Peter Scott,’ says Antoine.
‘He does birds. Geese. Ducks. That sort of thing.’
‘I see.’
‘They look, you know, just…er…’
‘Just like real live birds, ducks, geese?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘Oh, dear.’
Timothy feels humiliated, but Antoine continues.
‘When we get to know you all, Clive and I will take you under our wing. We’ll go to exhibitions. We’ll show you true art. Good art. Great art. Oh, and bad art. That’s always fun too.’
Timothy finds the prospect daunting. He isn’t ready for this. He’d almost prefer humiliation. It’s easier to deal with. Less emotionally demanding. He finds himself staring at a painting on the wall above the hostess trolley. It shows a ketch beating up the Deben towards a stormy sunset.
Antoine knows what he is thinking.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not good.’
‘Bad?’ ventures Timothy.
‘No. Not bad. But what use is “not bad”? Not bad is no use. Why are all the paintings in this house pictures of boats?’
‘Naomi’s father sails.’
‘And her mother?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. That’s bad.’
‘Well, I think she gets sick. Very sick.’
‘No, no. I don’t mean it’s bad that she doesn’t sail. I mean it’s bad that all the pictures are of boats when she doesn’t sail.’
The conversation stops there. Antoine is perfectly happy for it to stop but Timothy thinks that it’s entirely his fault.
Now Penny calls across the table to Antoine and asks him questions about France, about his background, about his painting. Then she looks across at her husband, seeking help.
William, who has been staring wistfully at the schooner that is bowling along up the Solent above the bulky Victorian sideboard handed down from his family and impossible to sell until they’re all dead, gives Penny a slight nod, turns to Antoine, and says, ‘I believe quite a large proportion of people in French cities live in flats and apartments.’
‘Yes,’ says Antoine, as if it has been just the question he was expecting. ‘Probably more than here, I think. We do not all see the need to own a house. We are not quite such a nation of gardeners.’
‘Yes. So I’ve heard,’ says William. ‘I sometimes think only our gardens save us from mass outbreaks of insanity. You must have other escapes.’
Antoine doesn’t rise to this.
‘How did you and Clive meet?’ asks Penny brightly, oh, so brightly.
‘On the train,’ says Clive. ‘I was going back to college. I’d popped up to Edinburgh to see an exhibition. And there was this impossibly handsome man strolling sexily down the carriage. Naturally I followed him.’
There is a brief silence. Naomi cannot believe how bravely her parents are taking this. If only she’d known, maybe she and Timothy could have been honest with them. Too late now.
‘Your food is very different from ours, isn’t it?’ continues Penny remorselessly.
‘They eat frogs’ legs,’ says Isobel savagely. It is the only thing she says during the entire meal.
‘We eat all sorts of other things as well,’ says Antoine. ‘You should try our cassoulet.’
Poor Timothy. He can think of nothing to say. He assumes that what he is hearing is sparkling repartee. He hasn’t the experience to realise that this is one of the most stilted conversations he’ll ever hear. He feels out of his depth. He wants to talk to Naomi, but she is sailing down memory lane with her brothers and he has the feeling that she has forgotten she has a fiancé. And all the time his present sits there, in the lounge, waiting. He clings to the thought that, because it has been so wretchedly tied up, it will be all the more of a sensation when it is revealed. But he is not entirely convinced. How slowly time passes. That wretched ketch seems to have been sailing towards that bloody sunset (he apologises to God for his language) for hours, and they still aren’t onto the trifle.
Julian gets to his feet.
‘We must have a toast,’ he announces. ‘Is there any more wine? Everyone must have wine.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ says William. ‘We aren’t wine people, I’m afraid.’
He goes out and comes back with another, differently s
haped bottle.
‘It’s not the same, I’m afraid,’ he says.
‘That’s a relief,’ says Julian.
‘Oh, Lord, wasn’t it good? Sorry. Maybe this’ll be better. Not doing my job, eh? Out of touch.’
Julian opens the bottle and makes no comment.
Antoine says. ‘I’d be on safer ground painting black towers.’
‘Right,’ says Julian. ‘All got a drop?’
‘Timothy hasn’t,’ says Antoine.
‘I don’t drink,’ protests Timothy.
‘Got to have a drop to toast our Naomi,’ insists Clive.
Antoine fills a quarter of a glass with wine and hands it to Timothy.
‘Right. The toast. To my dear sister on her eighteenth birthday. How pretty you are, Naomi. Hasn’t she grown pretty, Clive?’
‘Every inch a Juliet.’
‘To our lovely sister Naomi. Happy birthday,’ say the brothers in unison.
‘To Naomi,’ they all cry, raising their glasses.
Timothy takes a sip and almost chokes, but it doesn’t taste too bad, it’s reasonably sweet and warm, he can’t think what all the fuss is about.
Clive leads them into singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’.
William moves his lips but he is so embarrassed that no sounds emerge, Antoine doesn’t know the words, Penny sings too loudly to drown the silence, Julian growls like a stag in rut, Isobel performs as if she’s in an opera but goes too fast and gets ahead of everybody else, Teresa smiles blankly, coolly, beakily, and Timothy succumbs to his choking fit and turns purple. It cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as a musical triumph, and, after they have all sat down, there is another moment of silence.
Naomi stands.
‘I think I should make a speech,’ she says.
There are cheers and cries of ‘Hurrah’. William hunches himself against further embarrassment and dreams of sailing sweetly into St Peter Port harbour on the evening breeze.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ says his daughter. ‘Thanks for the lovely chicken, Mum, it was really great, and for the wine, Dad, very nice. It’s really great to have my best friend Isobel here, and I’m thrilled that my dear brothers could make it, and it’s really great to meet their partners. But above all it’s great to have my fiancé here tonight. I’m really looking forward to that intriguingly shaped present. I’m sure he’s got me something really great.’
