by David Nobbs
There is another bang of another gavel, or of the same gavel – Timothy doesn’t know or care how the provision of gavels works – and here is John Parkin again in all his pomp and in these dire circumstances.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, Old Coningsfieldians all…’
Yes, you did that bit before.
‘What a pleasure it is to welcome you to the Balmoral Hotel today for this splendid, and I believe unprecedented, reunion. It has been a great pleasure for me to do my bit to get this great event organised, and to ensure that no less than a hundred and thirty-one of us are sitting down here today to enjoy the…er…’ A humorous tone enters his voice like a mouse creeping into a cold cellar. ‘…the roast beef of Old Coningsfield.’ If this is a joke, nobody recognises it as such. ‘But first, there is an announcement to be made. I call upon Timothy Pickering.’
Those splendid independent muscles of Timothy’s do their bit again. His backside rises from his chair, his back straightens, he finds that he is on his feet, and there is a deep, expectant hush in the crowded room. Not a word is spoken at any of the round tables, everyone is looking at him, and he has no idea what to say.
They say that as you are drowning your whole life passes in front of you. It is of course impossible to verify this by interviewing the drowned. However, Timothy is drowning now, and he will be able to bear witness to its truth. So much flashes past. His dead son. His living son. His blind father. Naomi in bed with him in Earls Court. And, in that flash, he knows that he must rise to the occasion with dignity, slough off his despair, be a man.
‘Thank you, John,’ he says. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have a sombre announcement to make. Sometimes a dinner starts with grace. I dislike this, as I don’t believe in God.’
He looks down and sees a flicker of surprise on Naomi’s face. Well, any reaction is welcome. But still…he is at a table beside Naomi, it’s a dream come true, and it’s awful. No. Concentrate, Timothy.
‘I dislike the assumption that it is only through our faith that we may be thankful for what we are about to receive, and that those who do not believe must therefore be assumed not to be thankful. I am thankful to so many people – my dear father, my good friends, the farmers and the wine-makers who made the produce, the lorry drivers who delivered it, the chefs who cooked it, the waiters and waitresses who served it. So many, and more.
‘And I am thankful to be here today, because one of our number, who should also be here today, is not. It is my burden to have to tell you what a few of you may already know, but which will come as a terrible shock to the rest of you. Thomas Bentley, always known to everyone including his parents as Tommo, died yesterday, and I’m afraid he died tragically, by his own hand. Many of us remember his good spirits, his jokes, his vitality. They have helped to ease our lives, but the tragedy is that they couldn’t help to ease his own life.
‘I won’t use that old cliché that we must enjoy the rest of the evening because it’s what he would have wanted. Sadly, it turns out that we knew so little of what was going on in his mind that we cannot possibly know what he would have wanted. However, many of us have come a long way tonight, many of us have not seen each other for a long time, and life must go on. A great deal of work has been put into making this evening a success, and I must particularly single out Peregrine Arkwright, whose initial idea it was. Unfortunately, in cases like Tommo’s, the funeral cannot be held quickly. Many of you, therefore, will have gone back to your homes and will be unable to attend it. In a moment I am going to ask you to observe a minute’s silence out of respect for Tommo. Please observe this as intensely as you can, whether you knew him or not, so that, without guilt or shame, we can enjoy the evening and reaffirm to each other the beauty of existence and the good fortune we have from our favoured place in that existence. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand and remember Thomas Bentley in silence.’
Everyone stands. The silence is intense. Timothy counts the seconds in his head.
‘Thank you,’ he says after what has seemed to him like a very long minute.
There is applause, uncertain at first, then more confident, but still sombre. Then, with a buzz of astonishment and shock, the old Coningsfieldians sit.
Naomi turns to Timothy, and says, with great sadness, ‘You did that so well. So well.’ Then she turns away.
Timothy is even more confused now.
Peregrine looks across at him, anxious, bewildered.
Timothy shrugs and tries to smile.
He finds the terrine as easy to eat as minced face flannel. Naomi continues in conversation with the man on her other side. Timothy tries to talk to the woman on his left, whom he doesn’t know, but he can think of nothing interesting to say. She is soon bored, and turns to the man on her left. There are only eleven people at the table, thanks to Tommo’s absence, and Timothy now has nobody to whom he can speak, and across the table Peregrine, in awkward conversation with an angular woman, is still casting mystified glances in his direction. It’s bad enough that his evening is ruined, but he doesn’t want Peregrine’s to sink with it.
He decides that he must do something. He turns to Naomi.
‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I must speak to you.’
‘Certainly,’ says Naomi coolly, with a practised social smile that is like a knife in his belly. ‘The moment this nice man has finished his fascinating story.’
The nice man’s story is as long as it’s fascinating, but at last Naomi turns to him.
‘You have something you wish to say, Timothy?’
The cold formality of her words is terrible.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. You said something about yesterday. I have no idea what you meant by it. I have longed for this day, as I said, for many, many years, and I think you owe me, if only for the memory of those three nights in Earls Court, especially the second one, the courtesy of listening to what I have to say.’
‘All right,’ agrees Naomi reluctantly.
Timothy describes his journey. The main course arrives, the slightly overdone roast beef of Old Coningsfield, as he tells her about his arrival at Tommo’s, his meeting with Dave Kent, their trip to John Parkin’s, and his embarrassing experiences at Peregrine’s slowly collapsing ancestral home.
She listens in complete silence. He doesn’t know what she is thinking.
‘Are you denying that you spent yesterday afternoon in bed with my friend Isobel?’ she asks in a quiet but determined voice.
Different emotions come at Timothy like arrows from all angles. Anger at Isobel. Relief, overwhelming relief at discovering what this has all been about. But also, disappointment, sharp disappointment, that Naomi believed the story.
‘Your friend is a cow, Naomi,’ he says in a low voice. ‘More wine?’
She shakes her head.
He pours her more wine.
‘Your friend is a complete and utter bitch who is eaten up with jealousy and envy. She grabbed my prick and hurt it quite savagely during a geography lesson on glacial moraines. She hates me because you…’ He is on the point of saying ‘love me’, but he changes the tense at the last moment. ‘…loved me.’
She doesn’t speak. There is a look of horror on her face, but he doesn’t know whether she is horrified because she believes he is lying or because she realises that she has believed Isobel’s lie or simply because she realises how wrong she has been about Isobel. Does she believe him? He has to put it to the test.
‘Shall we go and confront her?’ he asks.
She nods miserably.
It’s quite a long walk to Isobel’s table. People hold out their hands to Timothy, to shake his hand and congratulate him on his speech, so that it becomes a bit of a triumphal procession, which makes him blush. He doesn’t want their praise. It’s a slur on his integrity, on the depth of his feelings for Tommo. And it’s difficult for Naomi, who wants only to hurry to Isobel and confront her. He wants to ignore their outstretched hands, but his sense of social propriety is too strong.
A
t last there is only space between them and Isobel’s table. They approach her with the gravity of Mafia hitmen. She turns a deathly white, then a dull, blotched red. Her guilt shrieks at them. The misery in her face embarrasses Timothy. It reminds him of what he had felt when faced with his mother. He feels violated by the woman’s sickness. He needs to turn away before he becomes contaminated or, worse, sympathetic.
He says nothing.
All Naomi says is, ‘I shan’t be back tonight, Isobel.’
On their way back to their table, Naomi tries to slip her hand into his. She is surprised when his hand refuses hers, pulls itself away. So is he. He hasn’t planned this.
At the table Naomi says, ‘I’m so sorry, Timothy. So very, very sorry.’
‘I can’t believe you believed her,’ he says, and he turns away.
What am I doing? he thinks. What is my body doing? This is not what I want to do. This is not what I ought to do. This is very stupid. What fool said that? This could cost me the happiness of the rest of my life.
But he is hurt. And he turns away.
During the lemon meringue pie, Naomi turns to him, and says, ‘I’m so sorry, Timothy. Really. I knew that the Timothy I knew wouldn’t contemplate such a thing, but how was I to know whether you had changed or not. And I haven’t seen Isobel for over twenty years. I haven’t had a moment to find out what she’s like. I was a child last time I saw her.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he says. ‘I understand, and it’s all forgotten.’
But it isn’t. He’s stubborn. And he turns away again. The woman on his left has escaped from him. He has no one else to talk to. But his face is set.
Naomi talks to the man on her right with a vitality that is artificial and assumed, but it may grow into something more natural as the evening progresses. This is very dangerous.
But Timothy is stubborn.
After the meal, as they make their way back to the Sandringham Room where the band has begun playing, Peregrine asks Timothy what’s wrong. He gives a swift precis.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ says Peregrine. ‘You spoke beautifully about Tommo’s problems. Why create a problem? Life’s hard enough.’
This is unanswerable, so Timothy doesn’t answer it. He now wishes to speak to Naomi, but he doesn’t know how to.
Rick Ferrensby, asked to find a good band within the budget, has succeded in half his task. ‘The Ricking Slickers’ are well within the budget. Reunited for the first time in eleven years, they are naturally a bit rusty at first. And, all right, even when the rust wears off they aren’t actually terribly good, they never were, they only thought they were, but they are Coningsfieldian, Old Coningsfieldians, ‘less of the “Old” if you don’t mind’, and as the evening goes on they rediscover some of the basic principles of musicianship, and they choose good numbers for people to dance to, and they are very amiable, and it all works quite satisfactorily.
About half an hour into the dancing, Timothy sees Naomi dancing with Steven Venables, and he knows that this nonsense must stop.
Steven is rich, and lonely, and arrogant, and she cared enough for him to go to bed with him once. Steven is surely dangerous?
It is at that moment, when he watches Naomi with Steven and knows that there is no danger, that Timothy understands that Naomi loves him as much as he loves her, and all nonsense must stop. So he goes over to them, and he smiles at Naomi, and she smiles back, and she drifts gently away from Steven, it’s as if he wasn’t there. In the end, after all the agonising, it’s as simple as that, they are together, as one, and she can feel his prick hardening against her thigh, and Peregrine, watching from the edge of a floor he hasn’t dared to step onto, can imagine Timothy’s prick hardening against her thigh – he knows only too well what hardening feels like though he has to imagine the ‘against her thigh’ bit – and he feels only happiness for them, and looks forward to going back home to do whatever the thing he bought at Janus London enables him to do.
As they dance, Naomi puts her face very close to Timothy’s ear, and says, ‘I was amazed by that grace of yours. So you don’t believe in God any more.’
‘No.’
‘Was it…?’ She stops. She wishes she hadn’t started. She doesn’t want to mention Sam’s death this evening.
‘Sam’s death? No, funnily enough, it wasn’t. I had doubts, perhaps I had some doubts even before that, but…I believed that you should fight against doubts.’
‘And you needed to believe that Sam’s death was to some end? That it wasn’t utterly pointless.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it was. Pointless.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, Timothy. I wish I’d been with you, to help you.’
‘I wouldn’t have had Sam if you had, and his brief life was good. And I wouldn’t have had Liam, or you Emily.’
They dance round and round, to the accompaniment of the occasional wrong notes from the Ricking Slickers. Tonight, at last, there will be no wrong notes from Timothy or Naomi.
And Timothy, bending close to her ear, tells her about his doubts, his visit to the church in Seville, the skylark, his belief in the inefficacy of prayer, and the revelation that a life without faith, without expressible meaning, could still be a wonderful thing. He holds her, feels her, turns her, caresses her, kisses her, tells her, and they move as one, their faces almost touching, the rest of the world invisible.
And Peregrine, watching them mouthing what he assumes to be endearments, dreams that one day he might bend his mouth to some woman’s ears and murmur, ‘You are so beautiful, my dear,’ or ‘I want to rip your clothes off your body,’ or ‘I want to squeeze your nipple very firmly but gently with my teeth,’ or whatever it is men say – he hasn’t the faintest clue what they say – when they whisper into women’s ears.
But Timothy is mouthing none of these things.
‘The Victorians were terrified of uncertainty,’ he is saying. ‘But there is nothing wrong with uncertainty. It’s a natural state. The real menace is incorrect and unjustified certainty. That’s what I’m terrified of, and I really am terrified. There’s a lot of it about.’
The Ricking Slickers are playing, and singing, a song they wrote themselves. It’s called ‘My Baby ain’t a Baby any More’.
‘I’m so pleased,’ says Naomi. ‘It would still have been all right if you believed. But it’s so much better this way. For me it’s one of the greatest things in life, agreeing with people. And to agree with you…Oh, Timothy.’
Now, as the floor begins to thin, they start to dance with energy and excitement. Naomi has natural grace. Timothy has none. It doesn’t matter. They are together in more important things than rhythm.
Some people are very drunk, a few are sick, more than one liaison is established which should not be established, on and on they dance, and all the while Peregrine watches.
Now the floor is crowded again, the evening is ending, the Ricking Slickers rise to a crescendo, the room is full of happiness and regret. Happiness that the evening has happened, regret that it is ending. Timothy and Naomi, at last, have no regrets.
And, when at last the dancing is over, Peregrine says that Naomi can come back to Green Acres and share Timothy’s room, his parents won’t mind and, if they do mind, what does it matter, he’s not a child – as the Slickers said, their baby’s not a baby any more. And Timothy thinks, ‘Yes, you are, but I won’t say “no”.’
So they go back in a taxi in the barely dark summer’s night. And, out of respect for Peregrine, and to a lesser extent for the driver, Timothy and Naomi do no more than hold hands in the taxi, gently tracing the shapes of each other’s fingers. During the last few hours of the party they forgot to drink, so they are relatively sober, and Peregrine has been so wrapped up in their events that he has also forgotten to drink very much.
Timothy asks about Colin and Naomi says, ‘Who?’ and he says, ‘Oh, good.’ He asks her about her family. She tells him that Clive is still happy with Antoine, who is
becoming fashionable, that Julian has now experienced five broken engagements, and that her father has just had his History of Ancient Greece, all nine hundred and eighty-three pages of it, rejected for the first time, but not, she believes, for the last time. And he tells her about his blind father and about the visit of his mother to the auction house. And Peregrine laps up every single word.
It’s a long ride, but for Peregrine it ends too quickly. Timothy and Naomi, though, cannot arrive soon enough.
By the time they get to Green Acres, the first faint light is creeping over the north-eastern horizon. The three of them walk up the wide staircase together, then Peregrine smiles shyly and whispers, ‘Well, you know the way.’ He hugs Timothy with sudden, brief intensity, almost breaking three ribs, kisses Naomi with exquisite clumsiness, and is gone.
Timothy and Naomi walk with light tread along the wide corridor, floorboards creaking, and suddenly Timothy isn’t sure if he does know the way. Very, very gently he opens a huge door, and yes, thank goodness, it’s his room.
The heavy, faded velvet curtains are not drawn. He goes to the window to draw them, then decides not to. He wants the dawn to creep over Naomi’s body.
They undress each other with slow solemnity. Timothy gasps at Naomi’s beauty. He cannot believe that he has, at the end of it all, won the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. (Whisper it not to him, ever, that, lovely though she is, Naomi is not more beautiful than many of the lovely women who grace our undeserving planet.)
As Timothy enters Naomi, it is as if twenty-five years of frustration pass away, and yet there is still, beneath the ecstasy, a touch of frustration. He wishes to possess her beauty, and it is impossible to possess another person’s beauty. Her loveliness hurts him as well as thrills him. But oh, that orgasm. Oh, the pleasure, and oh, the pleasure of feeling the other’s pleasure.
The dawn spreads across the room. Timothy gazes at his lover in the freshness of the summer’s morning, and now for a few moments he feels nothing but pleasure, no sense of anticlimax, no shame, no weariness.
