by David Nobbs
‘You’re not concentrating, Mum.’
‘Sorry.’
After the beach tennis Naomi begins to prepare their picnic. There have to be hard-boiled eggs and salt and pepper in foil to blow away in the wind, which had always upset Penny, though nobody had minded, it had been a tradition, after all. And there had always been sandwiches so that the children could take it in turns to shout, ‘I hate the sand which is in the sandwiches.’ And Guernsey Gâche, a kind of fruit bread. And an apple each.
While Naomi is preparing this feast which reminds her of all those other feasts, Emily thinks hard, then swallows, then says, ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know Francesca?’
What’s coming now?
‘I know of Francesca. I don’t know her.’
‘She’s nice.’
Naomi is horrified to find that she is not entirely pleased to hear this.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. And Dad’s much nicer now he’s with her.’
Worse and worse.
‘Oh, good.’
‘He doesn’t get arseholed any more.’
‘I told you not to use that word.’
‘Sorry. You know September?’
Here we go.
‘Yes.’
‘You know the first week of September?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know I don’t go back to school till the second week?’
‘Yes.’
Naomi swallows again. Am I such an ogre?
‘They want me to go on holiday with them.’
‘Do they? Oh.’ Phrases to give her time to think, time to cope. ‘That’s nice of them.’ You have to learn to let your children go from you a bit at a time, or they will go from you altogether and at once. Naomi knows this, but it doesn’t make it any easier. ‘And what do you think? Do you want to go?’
‘Well, yes. I think it would be nice.’
It will actually be very convenient. She can make that trip to Seville that Clive and Antoine suggested. She can just fit it in before the filming begins for the second series of Cobblers in Koblenz.
‘Well, then. Go.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’ Emily goes up to her and hugs her. ‘I love you, Mum. I love you much more than I’ll ever love them.’
Naomi is thrilled to hear this but at the same time devastated to realise how clearly an eight-year-old can see into her heart.
Suddenly, in the sunshine, Naomi realises that Emily is going to be devastatingly pretty. This fills her with pride, joy and fear. What a lunchtime it is proving to be for contradictory emotions.
It isn’t finished yet. While they eat their lunch in silence, because you have to concentrate on what you’re eating if you’re not to drop the tastiest titbits in the sand, Naomi thinks about the second series. The first series was condemned by the critics and pointedly ignored by her friends, but proved very popular with quite a large section of the public, far too many of whom had come up to her and said, ‘Get them off.’ You work hard at drama school, you attend countless auditions and recalls, you tour in tatty productions and stay in horrendous digs in towns that should have been razed to the ground, and when success comes it consists of people smiling fatuously and shouting, ‘Get them off,’ at you. But it’s work, and she likes the cast, and they have fun, and she knows now that she isn’t a great actress, so there’s no point in taking it all too seriously.
After their picnic, they ignore the deckchairs and lie on the rugs that Naomi has brought. They stare up at the cloudless sky, and Emily asks the question that Naomi has been dreading, and preparing for, since March.
‘Has Granny gone to heaven?’
The truth. Always, the truth is best.
Of course not. She’s been burnt. How could she? It’s over. She’s gone. That’s life. Or rather, it isn’t.
‘What do you think, Emily?’
‘I think she has, because I think she was very good.’
I think that’s claptrap. I don’t want to hurt you, darling, but the human race has to face the fact that death is an end. We simply have to learn not to fear death, and to realise that the idea of heaven and hell is put about to keep us in order out of fear.
Is the truth always best? Naomi has found it so difficult to come to terms with the fact that she didn’t tell her mum what she really believed.
‘She was very good. Let’s hope she went to heaven, shall we, darling?’
How can you hurt and shock an eight-year-old kid? But the lies really ought to end. We should all say what we truly believe at all times. But how can she?
‘And when you die, you’ll go to heaven too, because you’re good too, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think I’m that good. Not as good as Granny. I have thoughts that are not good.’
‘We all have thoughts that are not good, Mum. Thoughts don’t matter. It’s what we do that matters. And what you do is good. Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘The only thing that bothers me is this.’
Naomi wants to smile at the word ‘bother’, which seems so adult. Eight-year-olds shouldn’t be bothered.
‘Granny was burnt. How would they have put her together again?’
‘Even if you believe in heaven, darling, it doesn’t mean that people are there like they are on earth. People who believe in heaven believe that it’s your soul that goes there.’
‘You don’t know what Granny’s soul looks like. How will you recognise her?’
Oh, Emily, Emily, how I wish that everyone was as intelligent as you. What a world we could have.
‘I expect there’s a way, darling. We’ll find out at the time.’
Oh, Naomi, Naomi, what pain it is causing you to say these things.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘I don’t want to be cruel to Granny, but I hope she has to wait a very long time before she meets up with you.’
How can people abuse children and not kill themselves the next day when they wake up and remember what they’ve done?
‘Thank you, Emily.’
There’s a break in her voice. She’s going to burst into tears. She mustn’t, mustn’t, mustn’t. Quick. Fetch the director. Trevor Nunn walks along the beach. No, not Trevor Nunn. He can be sentimental. Harold Pinter. Hi, Harold. Naomi, don’t show your emotion. Bottle it. There must be no sentimentality. No indulgence. And, before you speak, pause. And then pause again.
Oh, thank you, Harold.
She is safe.
The city throbs with heat. The air dances with it. And, at two o’clock, it’s not yet even lunchtime in Seville. Dave Kent has taken Timothy to the market in Triana, across the sluggish, mud-coloured Guadalquivir from the city centre. It’s the second time they’ve been, and it’s the last straw for Timothy.
On their first day they didn’t visit the Cathedral or the Alcazar. They visited two markets and two supermarkets. ‘I’m at the crossroads, vegetable-wise,’ Dave had said. ‘I need to smarten up my ideas. I need an intake of European sophistication.’
They had looked at huge red and green and orange peppers shining like traffic lights. Dave had looked in awe at wild mushrooms of strange, delicate shape. He had been particularly impressed by the aubergines, smooth, shining, as blackly purple as thunder clouds.
‘Just look at the sheen on them, Timothy,’ he’d said. ‘It shows how healthy they are.’
‘Isn’t that horses?’
‘Horses and aubergines. Same difference.’
On the second day Dave had hired a motorbike, and with Timothy at the back, with helmetless heads and a great wake of dust behind them, they had frazzled their way through the burning orange orchards.
Now, on the third morning, Timothy’s thoughts had turned to the Cathedral, the Giralda, the Alcazar, the great sights of Seville.
‘I’d just like to pop back to the market,’ Dave had said. ‘I just want to check on the way that feller’d strewn half watermelons among the veg. Not among t
he fruit. Among the veg. That was innovative, Timothy. That’s the kind of forward thinking Coningsfield is crying out for.’
Timothy wondered for a moment if Dave had an ulterior motive in dragging him past endless fruit and vegetable stalls. Was this some kind of vegetable aversion therapy? But no. Dave wasn’t clever enough for that. In fact, he wasn’t clever enough for doing anything except selling fruit and vegetables. It was what made him such an easy travelling companion.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Timothy had said reluctantly, ‘if you promise to go and see the sights after that.’
Dave had promised, though not without a sigh of resignation.
Then, at the market, Dave had sampled the local nectarines – ‘I’m not hungry, but it’s research, i’n’t it?’ – and had spilt juice all down the front of his T-shirt. They’d gone back to their hotel to change, and now, at last, Timothy is edging Dave in the direction of the Giralda, the exquisite Moorish bell tower that guides the path of lost tourists all over the city.
Not that he really wants to see the Giralda. Or the Cathedral. Or the Alcazar. He knows that he will fail to be excited by their ravishing beauty, that he will believe that he will never be able to appreciate beauty again, that beauty will only heighten his despair by reminding him of how completely he is excluded from its pleasures, and that this will bring an uneasy comfort, a relief that his grief is so immutable and eternal.
No, he is only pulling Dave in the direction of those famous monuments because he knows that if he is forced to look at another pile of aubergines he’ll be sick.
On their way they pass a small greengrocer’s. Dave eyes it wistfully. Timothy pulls him past it. Dave takes a last lingering look at a pile of peaches that are almost bursting with uncontainable ripeness and vigour. He squares his shoulders, summons up his last reserves of energy, and follows in Timothy’s wake, up the breathless furnace of the street, towards the Barrio Santa Cruz and the Giralda.
Naomi sits with Clive and Antoine outside a tapas bar on the shady side of the Calle Mateos Gago. At midnight, in this street that curves down to the Cathedral, the buzz of happy revellers is like the excitement of starlings settling down to roost, but now, at two o’clock in the afternoon after a long late lazy Spanish morning, things are more sedate.
She enjoys being in the company of gays. They are usually very polite and attentive, they don’t cast furtive glances towards her crotch, she doesn’t have to be on the defensive, and their presence deters heterosexual bores. But of all the gays she could possibly be with, her favourites are Clive and Antoine.
Clive is dressed in T-shirt, jeans and sandals, but even here in this heat Antoine hides his artistic identity behind smartly creased dark trousers and an immaculate white short-sleeved shirt. Looking at him, people would be unlikely to say, ‘I bet that man’s an artist. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that he paints large, brightly coloured pictures which boldly and energetically explore what he regards as the essential synergism between chance and design which, he believes, must inform art if it is not to wither back into representational sterility or collapse in a chaos of undefined forms.’
They have a bottle of local white wine, which they are drinking slowly, rolling the lovely cold liquid round their parched mouths before allowing it to slip down their throats.
Clive raises his glass.
‘To the success of the second series of Cobblers in Koblenz.’
‘To the success of the second series of Cobblers in Koblenz,’ echoes Antoine.
Naomi raises her glass, drinks and grimaces.
‘You don’t like it? I think it’s rather good,’ says Clive.
‘It wasn’t the wine. I’m just not looking forward to the show. People love it, but I don’t. And the critics slated it.’
‘Join the anti-critics club,’ says Antoine.
‘The critics have a point, you know, Antoine,’ says Clive. There’s iron behind his gentle tone. He’s grasping a nettle, seizing an unexpected chance.
‘Oh?’ says Antoine, exaggerating the tartness in his voice to show that he’s not really offended. ‘Pray explain.’
‘This business of insisting that there’s always an element of chance in everything you paint – he’s getting small children in now to either start or finish the paintings, Naomi…’
‘They love it.’
‘That isn’t the point, and you know it.’
‘It’s part of the point. What can be wrong in giving pleasure to children?’
Suddenly Clive is angry.
‘If your art is a game to you, let’s forget it,’ he says.
‘Of course it isn’t. I’m teasing. You take it so seriously that I can’t resist.’
‘You’re the artist. It’s you who should be taking it seriously.’
‘I do. I do.’
Naomi is happy to listen, though not happy to hear them disagreeing. Disagreement disturbs her. In her utopia everyone would agree about everything, and it wouldn’t be boring, it would be heart-warming and exhilarating. This is one of the reasons why she finds it absurd to be at odds with so many people about religion.
She feels that she must intervene.
‘So what was the point you said the critics had, Clive?’ she asks gently.
‘Oh, that he only has the one idea, this mixing up of chance and design. Why can’t you do some paintings that are entirely planned and designed, entirely structured, Antoine?’
‘Because I believe that our society is no longer structured. There are no clear forms in life any more. Everything is a battle between order and disorder. I have to be truthful.’
A horse, pulling four German tourists in a trap, clip-clops elegantly through the square in front of the cathedral.
‘It’s a bee in your bonnet,’ says Clive.
‘What does that mean? What is this bee in this bonnet?’
‘It’s a phrase. The bee is trapped in your bonnet, and cannot escape, so it will sting. So having a bee in your bonnet is bad.’
‘I don’t have a bee in my bonnet. I have an idée fixe, yes, but it doesn’t sting.’
‘It stings the critics, and they sting you in turn.’
‘I can’t help that. It might please a lot of people if art went back to the old certainties of form and composition and perspective, but it’s simply not an option.’
‘All right,’ admits Clive. ‘I just want you to make a bit more – oh, dirty word – money.’
Perhaps because she is made uneasy by Clive and Antoine’s rumbling disagreement, civilised though it is, Naomi jumps at the opportunity of a link to a new subject, and reveals a secret that she has been intending to hide. Suddenly she wants to share it.
‘I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet.’
‘Oh?’
‘Religion. I have this great desire to convert people.’
‘Naomi!’
Clive is shocked.
‘From religion. I want to convert them from religion.’
Clive is still shocked.
‘Don’t do it,’ he says. ‘Don’t take that on.’
‘Let this bee out of your bonnet now, Naomi,’ says Antoine. ‘No good will come of it if you don’t.’
Timothy is utterly unaware that within five minutes his whole life could change. Within five minutes, if he steers Dave through the shady, airless, white lanes towards the Giralda, he will pass the tapas bar outside which Naomi is drinking white wine with Clive and Antoine. He will see Naomi, they will talk, they will discover that they are both free from emotional entanglements, and with his beloved childhood sweetheart he will learn to live and love again. It’s a prospect to make a writer of fiction blush with shame at his facile use of coincidence. This is real life, however, and the prospect can only excite anyone with half a heart.
But Timothy stops, turns to Dave, and says, ‘Do you mind if I pop into this church for a moment, Dave? On my own? I want a quiet moment.’
‘No probs. Where will I see you?’
‘Ba
ck here in quarter of an hour?’
‘Fine. I’ll have a quick San Miguel. Actually, I need to do a bit of thinking too. I’ve been all shook up, to be honest, with what I’ve seen. I’m behind the times. I’ve got to spice up me presentation.’
Dave now has seven shops in his Garden of England chain.
Timothy walks towards the Iglesia de Santa Maria La Blanca.
The chill of the church is a shock after the dry fever of the heat outside. Its roof is an elaborate pattern of swirls and whirls and whorls in stuccoed profusion. It’s an old church, converted from a synagogue in 1392. On the north wall hangs a Last Supper by Murillo, as striking as one would expect from a citizen of this city of drama and extremes. But the church itself is surprisingly self-effacing. Timothy feels at ease here. He will be able to pray.
As he walks slowly towards the front of the church, he sees a very elderly woman going into a confessional. He wonders what sins she could possibly have had the energy to commit.
To his right a young man is shaking with silent sobs as he prays. Timothy can’t bear to witness the severity of his grief, and hurries on. How can God have time for me and my insignificant troubles? he thinks.
