by David Nobbs
Soon he is a married man, and Hannah is Hannah Pickering, and her mother is not losing a daughter, she’s losing a daughter and her daughter’s husband.
They file slowly out and into the elegant, flower-bedecked Guinevere Suite, its roof decked out like a marquee. Canapes under the canopy. The champagne flows. Even Liam has some. He’s very solemn about it and says, ‘Congratulations, Dad,’ going very red and hating himself for going red, and Timothy says, ‘Love you, son,’ and is thrilled to find something he can say and mean.
‘Always knew you had it in you,’ says Mr Cattermole, his voice as frail as papyrus.
Dave Kent looks worried. He hates wives, and Timothy has another one, who seems very nice now, but you never know, she may well turn out to be as ghastly as the first one, relegating Dave’s own wife to third place in the Horrendous Wives League.
Steven is thrilled. He likes seeing men get trapped. He introduces his partner, Vandra. She smiles superciliously. Her body is lean and wiry. Well, what would you expect from a trapeze artist? But is she really a trapeze artist? Timothy doesn’t dare to ask, doesn’t know how to ask. ‘Incidentally, is your partner by any chance a trapeze artist?’ sounds curiously naff.
He puts on a social face. He circulates. He does his bit, and thinks, If you do your bit as much as I’m doing, can it still be your bit? Doesn’t it become your lot? Well, I know what my lot is now. Marriage to Hannah.
‘Is Hannah pretty today?’ asks his father, which is a curious way of putting it, but appropriate, because Hannah looks radiantly pretty some days and rather ordinary on others.
‘Yes,’ says Timothy. ‘She’s like a swan with her long, slender neck. Her cheeks are full like downy pillows, her mouth is wide and generous, and her eyes are big and green.’ He begins to feel much better about things as he describes her.
‘Thank you,’ says Roly.
They move on to the King Arthur Room for the wedding breakfast. To the left of the great double doors is the seating plan. Timothy doesn’t need to look at it. He will be at the Top Table. To the right of the doors a plaque announces that Coningsfield Rotary Club and Round Table meet here. How could they not?
Top tables are hell to Timothy. There’s an awful lot of food. He can’t taste it and he doesn’t want it, but he’s sitting next to the man who chose the menu, so he chews and chews with stoic dedication. He smiles a lot, and pleases his father-in-law by having a few drinks. He’s a bit more worldly than I gave him credit for, thinks Freddie.
Mr Cattermole, who seventeen years ago still had enough life in him to be described as a lech by Naomi, doesn’t even make it to eight thirty. He dies during the cheese, but he dies as he lived, quietly, unassumingly, suitably. In a corridor outside the Galahad Room, under a sign saying ‘Reserved for Allied Dunbar’, to be precise, while trying to find the gents’ toilet. But the Langenthwaite Castle staff really turn up trumps in this crisis. The matter is handled with total discretion. Hotel guests are told that he has fainted and is being taken to hospital as a precaution. In the King Arthur Room nobody knows anything about it, except for Mrs Cattermole, of course. The show must go on.
And the show does go on, and on, and on. The speeches are interminable, and deserve to be forgotten. Freddie tells stockbroker jokes, Tommo rambles amiably enough and makes one or two cracks about the world of biscuits, including the word ‘hobnobbing’ used to comic effect. Timothy doesn’t try to make people laugh. He gives a brief account of his father’s talents and fame, a very concise explanation of the dignity of taxidermy, and then just praises Hannah and says how lucky he is, and under the influence of his own words, believes it.
After that he is very tired. They repair to the Guinevere Suite, transformed into a night club. He has to dance a bit, of course, which is a shame, as he has two left feet, but Hannah has two right feet, so it sort of fits. On and on the wedding goes, slowly move the clocks this night. On and on go the congratulations, there are so many people to speak to, he has no idea who most of them are, he can’t hear them, they can’t hear him, why is the music always too loud? He feels that he doesn’t want another drink for at least ten years. He hardly gets a chance to have a word with Hannah. And then he begins to feel unwell. He recognises the symptoms, the intense cold, the shivering, the sweat on his brow. He knows that he must look deathly pale. He struggles to make it to the gents’ toilets, but he doesn’t even make it to the edge of the room.
It’s hard to imagine a worse moment to have one’s second experience of what the medical profession calls ‘vaso-vagal incidents’ and the rest of us describe as ‘panic attacks’ than just before the end of one’s second wedding reception. It’s not the climax that Hannah had been anticipating, with, it has to be admitted, a mixture of hope and fear. Now she will have to wait to discover which emotion was the more justified.
Naomi knows that her attitude to churches is strange. She loves them, when she has them to herself, and can wander around and examine monuments to people who, unlike her, had faith. She loves the beauty of them, especially when they are not too dark. She just doesn’t like them when services are being held in them, and she hates them when they are crowded, and the more fervent the worshippers are, the more she hates them. And she loathes organ music.
Today she has organ music, loud and, to her, empty. Today she has a modern Catholic church, a bare, unlovely shell of a place, but brimming with candles, incense, piety and emotion. Today she has to contend with a huge crowd of very religious people who are all deeply moved.
Naomi is deeply moved too. She hasn’t met Padre Paul since her honeymoon in Peru, but she recognised a good man and has never forgotten him.
She is sitting beside Simon, and beyond Simon is his second wife, Francesca, who is slim beyond belief, a walking tribute to rowing machines, Pilates machines, cycling machines, treadmills and sun salutations.
The funeral is in Guildford. It’s been a long journey from Coningsfield, and this evening she has to go all the way back again. She’s upset that Colin wouldn’t come. It would have helped. ‘I never met him,’ he’d said, ‘and I’ve got to get on with the rewrites.’ It made sense. He had deadline trouble with the third series of Get Stuffed. Yes, it made sense, but sometimes in a marriage you needed something more than sense. Naomi feels that Colin has failed her today.
She knows that Simon’s uncle was a charismatic figure and a widely loved and respected priest, but she cannot believe how many priests file slowly in behind the coffin. There must be more than fifty of them, tall, short, thin, fat, but all looking as though they are in a trance. What are they really thinking? She cannot guess.
It’s a strange experience, being an atheist in a congregation such as this. As the service rolls on, with intensity and dignity, it’s very difficult not to be moved by it. This is not some hollow sham, some conventional ritual, but a deeply felt moment of shared admiration and values. Naomi shares the admiration, even shares some of the values, but she feels utterly excluded from whole parts of the experience. It’s hard to hold on to the fact that you don’t wish to be included, you are excluded of your own volition. It’s hard not to feel that you are in some way a failed human being, inferior to those who have the faith. But it’s also hard not to feel that you are a person who sees more clearly than others, who is more honest than others, who, far from being inferior, is actually superior. Naomi doesn’t want to feel inferior or superior. Naomi feels very sad that Colin is not at her side today. She needs his help.
She wonders if she is the only person here who doesn’t believe. There can’t be many, but surely there must be a few? She looks round at the crowded pews. Some people have glistening eyes. Many seem to be in a kind of ecstasy of suffering. Some are calm and impassive. Are they atheists, or is that just their way? We reveal so little of how we feel.
There comes a part of the service in which individual members of the congregation can go forward and say their bit about Padre Pablo. Naomi likes this bit, it’s refreshingly free from dogma
and pretention and falsehood.
A Peruvian woman with a face so serene that you cannot tell her age walks quietly to the lectern, and delivers, in a low voice as clear as a mountain stream, one of the most beautiful – and shortest – speeches that Naomi has ever heard.
‘We must all carry on Father Paul’s work of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.’
Naomi is excited. These words are a call to action. She is on her feet. She is walking towards the lectern. She looks back and sees shock and fear on the faces of Simon and Francesca. She glances across to the massed priests. She reaches the lectern. She realises that she has no idea why she is there. What is she going to say? What can she say? Why has she done this stupid thing?
She clings to the sides of the lectern. The silence is deep. People are expecting her to say something. She has to say something. She is terrified that if she doesn’t speak quickly somebody will cry out. Supposing someone shouted, ‘Get them off.’
The truth, not always but whenever possible.
‘I’m an atheist,’ she says.
There’s a buzz of surprise, a murmur of cautious shock.
‘I’m an atheist, but we are not as far away from each other as perhaps we think. My friends, my friends, I agree with that wonderful lady. What a mission in life – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. You don’t have to be religious to do that. Father Paul was a great man, he believed in the need for clean water above all things, and I’m so with him on that, and he did his best, he turned a blind eye to birth control, but, oh, turning a blind eye to birth control is not enough. We are destroying our planet.’
There are mutterings. What she has said is not appropriate to the situation. She hasn’t meant to say it.
She stumbles back to her seat. She doesn’t look at anybody. Her face is set. She tries not to look at Simon and Francesca, but a glance escapes. She sees that they are taking care to avoid her eye.
The next speaker makes no reference to her speech. The service rolls on. Naomi feels…well, what does she feel? That she was right to try, but somehow, it didn’t come out right. How do you make sure that these things come out right?
She finds herself looking at the priests. She knows that celibacy is difficult. She knows that some priests do terrible things, particularly to, or with, small boys. She shocks herself with a terrible thought. By the law of averages and statistical probability, there is likely to be one child abuser among those priests.
She tries to fight this ghastly, inappropriate thought, though what does it matter, since nobody will ever know that she is thinking it. But then it gets worse. She spots a particular priest, a fairly short, rather fat priest, with a look on his face that might be the height of piety but looks a bit more like smug self-satisfaction, and she thinks, He’s the one.
She tries to forget this thought. She tries to think about Colin, about how he will react when he hears how she walked to the lectern and spoke. But she knows how he will react, and it isn’t interesting. He’ll say, ‘Thank God I wasn’t there.’
She tries to think about the Ivy. She doesn’t need all the glamour of showbiz, award ceremonies and so on, but she would like, just once, to be taken to the Ivy, to see what it’s like. Perhaps she can persuade Colin.
Thinking about Colin doesn’t work. She pictures him wrestling with a scene involving her, trying to make her funny. She is coming, slowly, bit by frightening bit, to really believe that she is not funny. She finds herself looking at the priest again, and a shiver runs down her spine. He’s the one.
How can men who profess faith do such dreadful things? Her anger slowly rises, contempt fills her gullet, she has to fight against the urge to go outside and throw up.
The service ends. The coffin is carried out, slowly. Behind it file the priests, so slowly, with such dignity, such calm, such an indivisible look of both sorrow and joy. Naomi’s priest is right by her now, and as he passes, she says, very quietly, ‘You dirty bastard.’ She hasn’t meant to say it, it has forced itself out through the turmoil of her soul.
She is horrified by what she has said. Appalled. She said it so quietly that she hopes Simon and Francesca didn’t hear. But she knows that the priest heard, because he turns to look at her, and on his face there is an expression of complete astonishment, utter bewilderment and absolutely no shame. Naomi knows, in an instant, to her horror, that she has got it terribly wrong.
Timothy feels the tension seeping into Hannah’s body. It’s horrid. It’s as if she’s slipping away from him into a private world from which he’s banned. Suddenly his flesh against hers becomes very uncomfortable. He’s not a selfish lover, he’s too sensitive to try to force things, so he rolls off her on to his back, then reaches out with his hand to stroke her beautifully flat stomach, just at the very edge of her pubic hairs, very gently.
‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’
The sex has been the best thing in their early married life. It has, in the rather coy words he used when asked about it by Tommo, ‘surpassed expectations’.
‘It’s your dad. It makes me self-conscious thinking about him listening.’
‘How do you know he’s listening?’
‘He says he doesn’t sleep well.’
‘Probably that means he wakes up early.’
‘We don’t know that. It may mean he takes ages to drop off.’
They are speaking in whispers.
The last bus to Gressingham Lane Top roars past up the hill.
‘That bus would have woken him even if he was asleep before.’
‘You went all tense before the bus, so that’s irrelevant. Anyway, he’s quite an old man. He probably can’t hear very well.’
‘When people are blind the other senses grow sharper to compensate. I bet he can hear your socks when you drop them on the carpet, which I wish you wouldn’t do, now that I come to mention it. Couldn’t you pile your dirty clothes neatly on a chair or take them to the laundry basket or something, not just drop them higgledy-piggledy all over the place? It’s not nice.’
Timothy is beginning to realise that tidiness, cleanliness and hygiene may become issues in their marriage.
‘I thought we were discussing our sex life, not my laundry.’
‘We are, but I just thought I’d mention it while I thought of it. Sometimes you have to mention things when you think of them. I mean, dirty clothes just—’
‘Yes, yes, I get your point.’
‘There’s no need to get irritated. He’ll hear. Like he probably hears every gasp, every moan. Poor man, blind, alone, abandoned for a plumber over three decades ago, tossing in his empty bed, waiting for my cries of ecstasy.’
‘Well, on that point, do you have to make quite so much noise?’
‘Well, yes, I think I probably do.’ Her thin, almost priggish dirty-socks voice has melted away. Now her tone is breathy, sexy, he can feel himself stiffening. ‘I love my sex with my lovely man.’
He twists her right nipple very softly. She gives a tiny gasp, and gently removes his hand. They lie there, silent, close. She strokes his leg briefly, to show that she wasn’t upset by his touching her nipple, she was just worried about making a noise.
‘Timothy?’
This is said in yet another tone of whisper, a tone steeped in ulterior motive, a tone that sends a shiver of unease through him.
‘Yes?’ He wants to say, ‘Yes, darling?’ but her tone of voice makes the word ‘darling’ shrivel before he can release it.
‘I’m very fond of your dad, as you know, very fond, but…’
His heart begins to flutter with anxiety. He decides not to say anything, to make her say it all.
‘Well, I’ve been thinking.’
Evidently.
‘He’s been going to the Cadogan for three weeks every summer when you go to Cornwall, and you’ve said yourself that he’s happy there, and that it’s a very nice place.’
He remains silent. She is going to have to force the words ou
t like the last bit of toothpaste from the tube.
‘This house is very dark and gloomy, and you say the Cadogan’s lovely and light and airy.’
What use is that to him when he’s blind?
‘And it’s very close. We could visit every day, or bring him here every day.’
We could, but would we? Suddenly he sees her saying, ‘Oh, does he have to come today? He comes every day.’
‘I mean, it’s not natural, a parent in the same house as a newly-wed couple.’
It’s very natural. It happens all over the world, except among the rich and spoilt. It used to happen in this country all the time.
‘I mean, I don’t want to be mean. I am a Christian, after all.’
He has been beginning to think that she is more of a Christian than he is. But this doesn’t seem very Christian, and she clearly realises this, which is why she has felt it necessary to mention it.
‘Say something, Timothy.’
‘I am not putting my father in a home.’
There is silence between them then, utter silence. Neither moves a muscle. Now neither even thinks of giving the other an affectionate stroke of the hand. There are a hundred miles of tundra between his prick and her vagina.
‘I was only exploring,’ she says. ‘Only thinking aloud. Only suggesting. Nothing more.’
‘Drop it.’
She is unable to yet. After a minute or two of deep silence she speaks again.
‘I love your father. I’m very fond of him. I like him a lot. I was only…trying out ideas.’
There is more silence between them.
‘I won’t mention it again.’
A car with a loose fan belt growls and squeaks up the hill.
‘Ever.’
Cautiously, even timidly, her hand reaches out across the dry tundra, and touches him.
