by David Nobbs
A tall, thin woman in a shabby coat comes through the door, looks around nervously, then approaches Timothy.
‘You’re Timothy, aren’t you?’ she says.
Her eyes are bloodshot. Her complexion is blotchy. Her cheeks are hollow. Her hair is straggly and lifeless. She doesn’t look well.
‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ he agrees cautiously.
‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’
A door creaks open in the barn of Timothy’s heart. An icy wind blows in.
‘You’re my mother, aren’t you?’
She nods apologetically.
‘Yes. I’m Josie.’
He hasn’t seen her since he was two. He can’t have recognised her. Yet he knew. This shakes him, in his delicate post-dream state, more than somewhat.
‘Why have you come?’
‘I read of the sale.’
‘You’re not a collector, surely?’
‘No. No.’
She has three teeth missing on the left-hand side of her mouth.
She colours slightly in the middle of both cheeks.
‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to see how you’ve turned out.’
‘I’m not a cake.’
Her remaining teeth are heavily stained by nicotine.
‘I didn’t know whether to come. Maybe I should go now I’ve seen you.’
Timothy is drawn to that gap every time she speaks.
‘Well, yes, you could. I’m all present and correct. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs. You can leave, reassured.’
She smiles sadly. That gap again.
‘I’m not surprised you’re a bit bitter,’ she says.
‘Well, no. I mean, any marriage can break up, but…just to walk out on your son when he was two. Never get in touch again. What do you think that did to my self-esteem?’
‘It wasn’t personal, Timothy. It was nothing to do with you.’
‘Oh, great.’
He gets a whiff of stale gin and armpit. There is about his mother now the air of a woman struggling to run a doomed pub on her own, or spending her weekends alone with eighty cigarettes and a litre of gin in an unmade bed in a static caravan in a very unattractive caravan park in one of the less salubrious stretches of the Lincolnshire coast.
‘I shouldn’t have come.’
All this in very low voices. A couple of people are looking at them, wondering what this earnest conversation is all about.
‘I’m what they used to call a bad lot. Didn’t your father tell you?’
‘The only thing he told me was that you ran off with a plumber. That upset him. He doesn’t like plumbers.’
She tries to laugh. It comes out as a snort. She has a coughing fit. The cough sounds ominous. Timothy is frightened that he will start to feel pity for her.
‘Your father’s died, I take it.’
‘Oh, no, no. No, he’s fighting fit still.’
‘Oh, Lord. Somehow I assumed he’d died.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I suppose because of the sale. Besides, he’s the dying type.’
‘Is there one?’
‘I think so.’
‘And you aren’t?’
‘No.’ Her smile is sad. ‘I’m the type that should die, but doesn’t. Doesn’t eat, drinks too much, addicted to drugs, just had double pneumonia for the second time, still here, fuck it. Oh, sorry, sad to find how coarse your mother’s become. Will he be coming?’
‘Just try to keep him away.’
‘I’d better go. I didn’t realise he’d be still alive. I don’t think he’ll want to see me.’
‘He won’t be able to see you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s blind.’
‘Oh, no. Oh, I’m sorry. I am sorry about that. Well, in that case…maybe I could stay, watch, see how it goes, not speak to him, he’ll never know I was there.’
‘If you want to. It’s of no account to me.’
‘Tell him – it’ll cheer him up a bit – the plumber soon ditched me.’
A rather dreadful thought strikes Timothy.
‘Do I…?’
‘…have any half-brothers or sisters? No. You’re safe from social embarrassments.’
‘Oh, Mum.’
He closes his eyes for just a second.
‘You wish you hadn’t called me “Mum”.’
‘How do you know that? How did you know what I was thinking about brothers and sisters?’
She smiles even more sadly.
‘I am your mum.’
‘I won’t sympathise. You didn’t have to come.’
She follows his eyes. Roly has arrived, on the arm of a carer. Her mouth drops open slightly as she looks at him. He is looking straight at her and goose pimples run down Timothy’s back. Can his father sense her? He even has the thought that maybe his father’s eyesight has come back, from the shock, but even as he thinks it he knows that it’s crazy, because he wouldn’t have had the shock until his eyesight had come back.
His mother waits until his father has been seated, and then goes to sit as far away from him as she can, but behind him, so that she can observe him.
Tommo comes in. Good old Tommo. ‘Got a business meeting at twelve,’ he tells Timothy. ‘Thought I’d pop in for a mo’, lend a bit of moral support.’ He glances towards the door, doesn’t like what he sees. ‘Oh, no. Well, I’m not going to sit with him.’
Tommo hurriedly goes off and sits down. Timothy looks towards the door and sees what Tommo saw. Sniffy Arkwright has arrived.
‘Hello, Sniffy, what brings you here?’ he asks, managing to sound pleased.
‘Thought I might pick something up. I quite fancy something stuffed.’
‘They aren’t stuffed, Sniffy. They’re modelled, as I told you.’
‘Oh, yes. Sorry. My brain! Oh, there’s Tommo. Great. I didn’t think I’d find anyone to sit with.’
The auction begins, and it goes with a swing from the start.
‘Lot one. Peregrine falcon and goldfinch at Gormley Crag. Who’ll start me off for this splendid exhibit? Roly Pickering at his very best,’ intones the auctioneer in his plummy voice. It goes for fourteen hundred pounds.
‘Cheap at the price, for an R. Pickering,’ comments the auctioneer.
A golden eagle fetches nine hundred. A wildebeest makes twelve hundred. Even a Victorian commode raises four hundred and fifty.
Sniffy bids for everything, but always pulls out well before things get dangerous.
‘Lot twenty-three. One fox, with case. This is a T. Pickering, not an R. Pickering.’ The first of Timothy’s efforts goes for a rather shaming ninety pounds. Roly’s show fox, from the table by the front door in the hall, fetches six hundred.
The unwanted wombat goes up in humiliating single-pound jumps. Sniffy pulls out at twelve pounds. It goes for seventeen.
A magnificent R. Pickering deer is sold to the gallery owner for twelve hundred and fifty pounds. A T. Pickering deer, really almost as magnificent, struggles to get to the hundred mark. Then Tommo suddenly bids a hundred and fifty.
‘Two hundred pounds,’ cries Timothy’s mother.
There’s a deep silence in the room now. Everyone is afraid to sneeze or twitch. Josie goes very pale. The auctioneer raises his gavel.
‘Going, going…’
‘Two hundred and ten,’ says Tommo.
Timothy sees Josie giving a great sigh of relief. Absurdly, he feels relieved for her too.
Tommo has to leave before the end. Timothy gives him a thumbs-up. He responds with a ‘What are friends for?’ shrug.
The auction raises the best part of seventy thousand pounds.
Timothy’s mother hurries from her seat, and approaches Timothy while Roly is still being helped out of his chair.
‘Shall I see you again?’ she asks.
He sighs.
‘I don’t think so, Mum,’ he says gently.
‘I suppose a kiss is out of the question.’
�
��Oh, what the hell?’
He kisses her on both cheeks, holding his mouth firmly shut, so that he won’t smell the stale gin and nicotine breath.
She hurries out, not looking back.
Sniffy approaches.
‘Who’s she?’ he asks.
‘Mind your own business.’
‘I see. Well, we can only surmise, then. I tried to buy things. I’m afraid they were just too expensive for me.’
‘Not a problem.’
‘We should meet some time, have a drink.’
‘We should. Ah, Dad.’
Timothy hurries away from Sniffy, and repeats his offer of taking his father to the Majestic for lunch.
‘It’s kind of you, youngest scion of the House of Pickering. But no. The food will be drizzled artistically all over the plate. Little bits of things skulking shyly under other bigger things. I won’t be able to find it to eat it, and if I could find it I wouldn’t want to eat it. Lasagne today at the Cadogan. All in a lump. Easy.’
Timothy walks with his father to the car.
‘Did all right, didn’t we, Dad?’
‘I suppose so,’ says his father. ‘I suppose so. I think I’d hoped for more. The vanity of an old man, Timothy. Still, I believe Van Gogh never sold a picture in his lifetime, so we smile on.’
At the car, Timothy says, ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell you, Dad. I heard about Mum yesterday.’
‘You did? Who from?’
‘Old boy in the Wig and Mitre. Said he’d known you in the old days.’
‘Name of?’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘Careless.’
‘Don’t you want to know about her?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh. Well, I think I should tell you. It may cheer you up. Her plumber ditched her pretty damned pronto.’
‘Excellent. That is good news. No, I am pleased to hear that, I admit. Not learned a great deal in my life, but I do have one good piece of advice for women. Don’t sleep with plumbers. No good will come of it.’
‘She…er…I got the impression…he had the impression…because he knew a few people who sort of knew her…that things weren’t good for her.’
‘Oh. What things?’
‘Well…life. Fortune. He thought she drank. And took drugs. And wasn’t in good health. Certainly no oil painting any more. He said.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry about all that. I am saddened.’
‘Saddened, Dad?’
‘Of course. I loved her once.’
‘Shall we have a drink at the bar first?’
‘I think that would be very nice.’
‘Kingsley Amis once said that one of the two most depressing remarks ever made in restaurants was, “Shall we go straight through?”’
‘Absolutely. What was the other one?’
‘I’ve forgotten. So, what would you like, Naomi?’
‘Campari and soda, please.’
‘Excellent choice. I do like my guests to choose drinks I approve of. Campari and soda, please, and…do you have a good Sercial Madeira?’
‘Of course, sir.’
Naomi has no idea whether her agent has some work proposal to offer, though lunch seems an odd way to approach it, if he has. She knows that he’s always liked her, had a soft spot for her, and he is a pretty hard character, with quite a few hard places and not too many soft spots. Melvyn is tall, slightly grizzled, very dry, undoubtedly handsome, somewhat aloof, looks as though he might be an actor, perhaps wishes he was. She thinks the motivation for the lunch might be guilt. He hasn’t found her any work lately. But aren’t theatrical agents immune from guilt, some above it, some below it?
Anyway, she’s determined to make the most of the occasion. Life with her father is simple – delightfully simple, she tells people – but she is going to enjoy her Campari and soda, a glass of white wine, her share of a bottle of red, perhaps even, if things go well, an Armagnac, and maybe she wouldn’t be looking forward to all this quite so keenly if she was finding the simplicity quite as delightful as she pretends. Bread and cheese overlooking the river tomorrow…and tomorrow…and tomorrow. Unless there really is an offer of work, of course.
‘So, how are you?’
The ‘are’ is in italics, with a lot of unspoken words clinging to its frail body, like ‘under the circumstances’ and ‘considering that you were three-quarters round the bloody twist last year’.
‘Very good. No, really, very good.’
The ‘very’ is in italics too, but Naomi is painfully aware that not as many silent words are clinging to its coat-tails.
‘So the marriage is over.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘I can’t pretend to grieve, Naomi.’
‘No. Quite.’
‘I met him the other day, at a recording of his wretched sitcom pilot. Set in a dental surgery of all places.’
Naomi’s blood runs cold. She didn’t even know that it had got that far.
‘It was about as amusing as the draining of an abscess. It’ll flop unless it gets an injection. Of humour. It’s called This Won’t Hurt. Well, I tell you, it will. I put you up for it, of course. He said that he couldn’t work with you again.’
‘The bastard! He told me he thought he could write funny lines for me now that we weren’t together.’
‘He’s a two-faced little shit of minuscule talent. It’ll never go to a series. Which should be good news for him. He told me he half wanted it to fail, he had an idea for a novel which would be a mixture of Waugh and Proust. “Snobbish and very, very long, do you mean?” I suggested. He wasn’t pleased. Oh, Lord. Should I be saying this? Do you miss him? Does a part of you still love him?’
‘No parts of me love him. My ears, my eyes, my belly button, my toes, all of them are relieved each morning when I wake up in bed alone.’
‘Good. That’s reassuring. Living with your father, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘How does that work?’
‘Well, it’s quite delightful. Simple, but delightful. We went sailing last summer, to Denmark.’
‘Nice little country.’
She dislikes his patronising tone.
‘It’s not Denmark’s fault that it has never invaded and conquered and annexed huge parts of the rest of the world,’ she says.
‘So, where did you sail to in Denmark?’
Naomi is astonished. Melvyn has never seemed remotely interested in her leisure activities. He’s not a man to whom you could show your holiday snaps.
‘We sailed right through the Limfjord, which is delightful, then down via an idyllic little island called Samsø, then Copenhagen…’
As she talks Naomi is at the helm again, capturing that last extra degree of wind, her father bringing her up a mug of tea, smiling happily, trusting her. She knows that she looks good in her shorts and jaunty yachting cap. She knows that he is proud of her. Melvyn sees suddenly the return of true beauty to her face.
But he has heard enough. She will never get the chance to tell him about Sønderborg and the Kiel Canal.
‘Surprisingly good restaurants in Copenhagen,’ he says, bringing the conversation onto his second favourite subject. ‘Lovely Danish restaurant in the Old Brompton Road. Now, what are you going to have?’
As Naomi is tucking into her rillettes of salmon – creamy, buttery yet also slightly rough – Melvyn says, ‘What about Edith?’
‘Edith?’
‘Your daughter.’
‘Oh. Emily.’
Melvyn isn’t interested in me. I am not a person who could call her daughter Edith. He would know that if he cared.
‘Emily. That’s right.’ His tone suggests that he is praising her for remembering her daughter’s name. Naomi has always liked Melvyn, but he’s irritating her today. ‘So, what about Emily? Does she enjoy living with her grandfather?’
‘She’s not with us.’
‘Oh. Don’t tell me she’s with Marcel?’
‘Marc
el?’
‘Proust. The “in memory of sitcoms past” man.’
Quicken up, Naomi. He’ll think you’ve gone dull, down by your river.
‘Oh, Colin, no, no, oh, good heavens, no, Melvyn, she’s precious. I wouldn’t leave her with him.’
‘Good. I was worried.’
‘No, she’s with Simon and Francesca, Simon’s second wife, but she’s very nice, well, Emily likes her, she likes them both, Simon is a bit of a changed man, I have to admit. Erm…last summer…’
‘When you…’
‘Exactly. Dad wanted me to go sailing with him, I left Emily with them, we went sailing, and we came back, and we all met in London…’
Mum, I want to live with Simon and Francesca.
‘Are you all right, Naomi?’
‘I’m fine, Melvyn, really. Lovely rillettes. Delicious Menetou-Salon. I’m fine. It’s just…a little painful. She wanted to go and live with them. Not with me. Oh, she loved me. Loves me. But.’
‘See plenty of her?’
‘Oh, yes. Heaps. It’s just that, when I…’
‘Last summer.’
‘Precisely…she was a little bit…you know…well, frightened.’
‘I think you were a bit frightening for a time.’
‘I think I was. I’m all right, Melvyn. Honestly. Is this what this lunch is all about, to see if I’m all right?’
‘No, not exactly.’
The question of what the lunch is all about hangs in the air over the widely spaced, well-filled tables like a cloud that just may grow into a thunderstorm, but may slip harmlessly by. It’s a restaurant of the old school, discreet, serious, reliable, ever so slightly dull.
Naomi’s whole brill with saffron and tomato butter sauce arrives. It’s amazing how a generous, well-cooked dish can cheer a person up. Emily is truly happy, and that is what truly matters.
‘I’m greedy, Melvyn,’ she says. ‘I love a whole fish, on the bone. I mistrust fillets. There’s never enough.’
‘You’re a good woman to take out to lunch,’ says Melvyn. ‘I’ve three women on my books that I won’t eat with. Can’t bear to see them pushing their food round the plate. But, despite your appetite, or even because of it, you look very good. When you smiled, remembering your sailing holiday, do you know, I’d almost forgotten how lovely you are.’
