by David Nobbs
‘No thanks, Alec,’ said Ted. ‘Look at that buffet, Alec. Smoked salmon, fresh salmon, wild asparagus, caviare.’ Alec Skiddaw examined the buffet table without interest. Food wasn’t his province. Drink, women, boils and the narration of interminable family anecdotes were his provinces. ‘Not that I rate caviare, me. In my book, it’s just like fish roe.’
‘I’m writing a book,’ said Alec Skiddaw. ‘An autobiography. It’ll be about me and my life.’
‘It’s going to be a right classy do,’ continued Ted. ‘Some folk are going to have to revise their opinion of Ted Simcock, posthumously.’
‘All the biographies you get are about famous people. You know about them buggers already. I’m writing about me and my family, what nobody knows owt about. That’s more interesting. It’s forced to be.’
‘Well, not posthumously, but you know what I mean. When I’ve gone.’
Ted marched off to inspect the bar.
‘That’s right,’ grumbled Alec Skiddaw. ‘Don’t listen to a word I say. Ignorant pig.’
The wind howled, and his boil throbbed. He began to distribute his olives.
‘Elvis! It’s fancy dress!’
Ted’s elder son examined the patriotic decor cynically, thinking back to the last time he’d been here, when Carol Fordingbridge, now his ex-fiancée, had failed to be elected Miss Frozen Chicken (UK). He was wearing his usual grey-green suit.
‘Yes, well, I’m afraid it just isn’t me, Dad, isn’t fancy dress,’ he said.
‘Oh heck,’ said his father. ‘It’s my glittering, sophisticated farewell. So what do my sons do? One only says he may be able to get here, the other doesn’t even bother to dress up. I mean! Really! Elvis!’
‘Yes, well,’ said Elvis. ‘I just can’t see Jean-Paul Sartre making a berk of himself by going to a party dressed as Napoleon.’
A nun walked through from the bar, cradling a pint of bitter in her gnarled fist. She smiled at Ted.
‘Love it,’ he said.
The nun moved on towards the buffet. She was followed by a frogman, taking long, absurd steps with his great webbed feet.
‘Good. Well done,’ said Ted.
Next came a penguin, which waved its flippers, spilling half its beer.
‘Well done. Terrific,’ said Napoleon, inspecting this absurd march past. ‘Look at that,’ he said to Elvis. ‘If the lads from the Halifax Building Society aren’t too proud to let their hair down, what’s so special about Jean-Paul ruddy Sartre?’ He scurried over to the new arrivals. ‘Lads! Welcome to my humble party.’
‘Champagne, sir?’
‘I’d prefer a pint of bitter.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
They set off towards the bar. The dark, intense Alec Skiddaw lowered his voice. ‘I wish I’d got the courage to come dressed like you.’
Elvis glanced at Alec Skiddaw’s Bavarian costume.
‘I wish I’d got the courage to come dressed like you,’ he said.
Three leggy waitresses took up their positions. They were dressed as French maids, with short black skirts and fishnet stockings.
From Ted and Corinna’s new local, the Stag and Garter, there came an arab, Sherlock Holmes, and a nurse. From his bank, the listening bank, there came, appropriately, Big Ears, accompanied by Noddy and Alice-in-Wonderland.
The ravishing Liz Badger made a bold, sweeping entrance. She was magnificently dressed as Queen Elizabeth the First, with wide ruff and flaming red wig.
Ted scuttled towards her, making absurdly short steps in his stiff, painful boots. His spurs tinkled. He expected to see, in Liz’s regal wake, an immaculate Sir Walter Raleigh. Imagine his surprise when Neville, who had come to Ted’s Angling Club Christmas Party as Henry the Eighth, drifted in dressed as a police officer, his round, good-natured, eager-to-please face looking utterly incongruous under a helmet.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ Neville began, in a funny policeman voice, bending his incipiently arthritic knees, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you a few questions, sir.’
‘Yes, yes. Amazingly amusing. Incredibly inventive,’ said Ted. ‘They aren’t exactly integrated costumes, though, are they? I mean … what’s wrong with Raleigh?’
The immaculate Neville Badger, of Badger, Badger, Fox and Badger, looked as if he might be going to burst into tears. He excused himself and hurried off.
‘Neville and Jane were Elizabeth and Raleigh,’ explained Liz. ‘They were Antony and Cleopatra. They were every romantic pair in history. “Jane loved fancy dress.” It brings it all back. His perfect first marriage. I feel about two feet high, Ted.’
‘You? Never!’
‘Never before. A painful experience. Are you pleased? Liz’s come-uppance?’
‘Liz! ‘Course I’m not! Really! You look grand, anyroad. You look right regal.’ Liz accepted the compliment as her due. ‘Liz?’ Ted’s tone changed abruptly, became confidential. ‘Tonight may be the last time you and I see each other before I go to Nairobi. That means – well, it might be, mightn’t it? – the last time we ever see each other again ever. Liz?’ His face was close to his former lover’s as he made his appeal. ‘Will you do something really special for me tonight?’
‘Ted!’
‘Not that! How could you think that? And how could you of all people be outraged even if you did think it? No, what it is is … will you suspend your feud with Rita, for tonight at any rate? For Corinna and me? As a personal favour?’
‘Rita is deliberately humiliating me, Ted. Lopping a lump off our garden with her ring road. Destroying my magnolia and eighteen roses.’
Ted abandoned his request in the face of Liz’s white-hot tirade. ‘Enough said,’ he said. ‘Now come and meet the lads from the Halifax Building Society.’
Napoleon led Queen Elizabeth over to the nun, the frogman and the penguin. ‘Lads,’ he announced. ‘This is Liz Badger.’
He left her to it and hurried over to Neville. Behind him, a party from Allied Dunbar entered, dressed as a Viking, a polar bear, Carmen Miranda and a French onion seller.
The wide windows of the Royalty Suite, being on the first floor of the hotel, afforded an excellent view over the ring road to a twee, red-brick executive housing estate, which appeared to have been built for very small executives with dwarf families and vast cars. Outside the hotel, facing the ring road, the flags of the major nations were the gale’s playthings. The road was busy with French and German juggernauts and sad, defeated caravans returning early from wrecked holidays, swinging alarmingly in the wind. Later, the Meteorological Office would announce that this was the windiest June day since 1886. That day, in fact, Northallerton was windier than Cape Horn.
What did Neville see, as he gazed at this inspiring view? His dead wife, in her six handicap hey-day? The scene when this road, which would be known as the outer ring road when the outer inner relief ring road was built, was itself built, and beautiful women who were now in old people’s homes had complained about the destruction of their magnolias? We will never know. Neville’s eyes were faithful watch dogs, guarding his emotions.
‘Neville!’ said Ted.
Neville dragged himself away from the window. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I love Liz, Ted, but my love can’t erase all memory of Jane. Every now and then something brings it back. And my heart and stomach burst.’
‘I know,’ said Ted. ‘And in your time you and Jane dressed up as every pair in history.’
‘Every pair except Joseph and Mary. But there are people in this town who’d be very offended if Liz came as the Virgin Mary.’
‘I see their point. Neville? I’ve sown the seed. In Liz. Will you water that seed?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve asked her to end her feud with Rita, at least for … oh no!’
Rita stood in the doorway. She was magnificently dressed as Queen Elizabeth the First, with wide ruff and flaming red wig. Beside her stood Sir Walter Raleigh. Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe, Liz’s brother, looking ever
y inch the discoverer of tobacco, laid his cloak on the floor of the multi-purpose function room. Rita stepped regally across it. Geoffrey swung the cloak back onto his shoulders. And Rita saw Liz.
The two Queen Elizabeths stared at each other in horror. A transvestite who had hoped to create a sensation entered quite unnoticed.
Liz flounced across to Neville.
‘Take me home,’ she commanded.
‘No, no. Look … Liz … oh Lord … let’s … er … in the bar, quick.’
Neville hurried Liz into the bar.
Napoleon scuttled over to Rita and Geoffrey.
‘Rita!’ he said. ‘Hello, Geoffrey. Rita! What on earth possessed you to come as Queen Elizabeth?’
‘How like a man to blame his ex-wife rather than his ex-mistress for the unfortunate coincidence.’
‘No, but … I mean … it isn’t you, is it, isn’t absolute monarchy? It isn’t. Is it? I mean, you’re a socialist councillor.’
‘I’m also a woman.’
‘And how!’ said Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe. ‘Oh sorry, Ted. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’
‘Oh no,’ said Ted. ‘No, no, Rita and I are …’
‘Yesterday’s cold potatoes?’ said Rita.
‘Yes. No! Well, yes, in a … I mean, we’re both in … well, I’m in love again, anyroad, and you … I mean …’ Ted abandoned this un-Napoleonic floundering.
‘Where is Corinna?’ asked Rita.
‘Taking an age to get into her costume. It’s her athlete’s heel, is time. But, Rita, why not somebody more suitable? Florence Nightingale? Mrs Pankhurst? Germaine Greer? Why Elizabeth?’
‘Because I thought I’d look magnificent.’
A monk and a spotty schoolgirl, both from Ted and Corinna’s new local, waved their greeting. Ted nodded back.
‘I rather hoped you might say I do,’ said Rita drily.
‘What? Oh, you do. You do. Magnificent.’
‘Too late. And also we were lent our costumes by the Operatic. They’ve just done Merrie England. I’m sorry, Ted. I didn’t mean to upset Liz tonight.’
‘No, well, it can’t be helped. You’re very quiet, Geoffrey.’
‘I think you rather lose the art of small talk, Ted, when you’ve spent twenty-two years among primitive tribes who don’t speak a word of English.’ Geoffrey’s soft, luxuriant, greying beard lent authenticity to his Raleigh. Facial hair grows now much as it did then. His soft voice seemed gentle and courteous, yet it clearly riled Ted.
‘You won’t annoy me, Geoffrey,’ said the former king of the boot scrapers. ‘The great anthropologist won’t get under my skin with his “I’ve seen the world” routine.’
The insulted emperor stalked off.
‘I wasn’t meaning anything like that,’ said Geoffrey.
‘I know. You wouldn’t,’ said Rita.
‘I’ve never been anywhere where you have to be as careful what you say as you do here. When you’ve spent twenty-two years among … oh Lord. There I go again. The great anthropologist’ll be upsetting you next.’
‘I don’t believe you could ever upset me, Geoffrey.’
‘You’re an extraordinary woman, Rita.’
‘It’s beginning to look that way. Odd, isn’t it?’
‘If you go home, everyone’ll remember it as the time you both came as Queen Elizabeth and she stayed and you ran away.’
Liz contemplated the inevitable disdainfully.
‘I haven’t much choice, have I?’ she said at last.
‘I don’t think so. Brazen it out. Show a bit of style.’
‘It’s a deliberate campaign to ridicule me.’
‘If it is, and I don’t say that I agree that it is, then by rising above it you’ll make her look ridiculous.’
They were talking in low voices, even though they were quite a way from the bar counter, where Alec Skiddaw was serving a vampire and a pearly king and queen. The pearly king and queen were George and Iris Spooner, Ted’s new neighbours in the flats. The vampire was a representative from the Bridlington Mercantile Credit Company.
Neville tried to shift his square, blue, aggressively modern chair closer to Liz. But it was fixed. It was intimacy-proof as well as fire-proof. He leant across, as best he could, and said, ‘Darling? Do you remember what happened last time we came to this hotel?’
‘We got engaged.’
‘Yes. I love you … Liz.’
It was only for a split second that the panic-stricken doyen of the town’s lawyers stumbled for his wife’s name, but it was too long.
‘You almost called me Jane, then.’ Liz stood up, looking every inch a Queen of England. ‘I wonder how many times you’ll call me Jane before the evening’s out.’
‘No! I didn’t. I couldn’t. There’s no …’
Liz finished it for him. ‘No comparison?’ And she swept out.
In the flexible, multi-purpose function room, the Dale Monsal Quartet were tuning up excruciatingly. They comprised piano, drums, saxophone and clarinet. The eponymous Dale Monsal, on sax, was a gloomy, withdrawn man with a long, sad face. The pianist was male, black, wiry, and all smiles. The drummer was male, white, huge and fierce. The clarinettist was female, white and mature. Normally she wore her hair in a severe bun which contrasted dramatically with her low-cut evening dresses. Today, she had sacrificed her bun and her bosom. The musicians were dressed as a barber’s shop quartet, with striped jackets, bow ties and straw boaters.
Liz strode regally across the room, noticing nothing, not even seeing Geoffrey and Rita until, as she passed their table, Geoffrey called out, ‘Liz!’
‘Tell her how you used to pull my hair, Geoffrey.’ Liz threw the words over her shoulder, barely checking her queenly stride.
‘Did you?’ said Rita.
‘Not every day. I was pretty horrid to her. But then she was extremely horrid to me. She cut the squeak out of my favourite teddy. This’ll be the final straw.’
‘What will?’
‘My loving you.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Dale Monsal intruded on their conversation. His slow, world-weary voice was as dry as a desert, as flat as a prairie. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Dale Monsal, and this is my quartet.’ He gestured limply towards his colleagues. ‘Music is our business, and delight is our aim. Let us therefore plunge headlong, metaphorically speaking, into that mythically blue river which watered the fertile fields of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.’ He half-turned towards his musicians. ‘One, two, three.’
The Dale Monsal Quartet plunged headlong, metaphorically speaking, into something very similar to the familiar strains of ‘The Blue Danube’.
‘Is that why you love me?’ Rita took up the conversation as if the interruption hadn’t occurred. ‘Because it’ll be the final straw for Liz?’
‘Of course not,’ protested Geoffrey. ‘It does add a twist of pepper to the stew, though.’
‘The stew! What a romantic image. Not even a casserole.’
‘I can’t promise you romantic images, Rita. When you’ve been twenty-two years … oh my God! I must stop saying that!’ Geoffrey’s voice took on a gentle intensity. ‘What I can promise you, my darling, is that I really will try never to say anything remotely hurtful to you. Good Lord! Who are those idiots?’
The much-travelled anthropologist was staring towards the door, as if he had seen something more extraordinary than anything his tribal rituals had ever afforded. Perhaps he had. Rodney and Betty and Jenny, dressed as huge peppers, stood side by side in the doorway.
‘My two best friends and my daughter-in-law,’ said Rita.
‘Sorry!’ said Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe.
Ted clanked across the dance floor towards the new arrivals. Rodney, Betty and Jenny had come, respectively, as red, green and yellow peppers. Their costumes were huge, brightly coloured, pepper-shaped bags with padded, ribbed, peppery shoulders. Their hands and lower arms protruded from holes. On their heads they wore flat hats, red, yellow and green, wit
h upturned, incipiently drooping stalks. The hats were shaped like the bits that you cut out of peppers before you remove the pith and seeds. Careful thought had gone into these costumes. The three peppers smiled with modest self-satisfaction, awaiting Ted’s compliments. They were somewhat disappointed to hear him say, ‘What are you – a set of traffic lights?’
‘Peppers,’ said Rodney with as much dignity as he could muster.
‘You what?’
‘Symbolic of our vegetarian restaurant,’ said Betty.
‘Advertising your business, even at our farewell do?’
‘There’s no room for shrinking violets in business, Ted,’ said Rodney.
‘Rodney! Look!’ Betty gave an un-pepperlike whoop. ‘Rita and Liz have both come as Queen Elizabeth!’
‘Betty! Dignity! As befits joint managing directors of Sillitoe’s.’ But Rodney’s eyes followed Betty’s. ‘Oooh! Yes! They look identical!’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Jenny. ‘I must go to … whichever of them I decide I feel sorriest for most.’
Jenny edged past Betty. So large were their costumes that both women had to turn sideways before she could get through. She hurried round the side of the dance floor, where the onion seller was getting on very well with Alice-in-Wonderland, Dick Whittington was waltzing sedately with his cat, and Punch, alias Larry Benson, of fitted kitchen fame, was tripping round with Judy, alias his lady wife, who was actually no lady.
Jenny found herself on collision course with the cynical Elvis, her brother-in-law, her lover. His expression owed more to his cynicism than his love.
‘I know,’ said Jenny. ‘Simone de Beauvoir wouldn’t have been seen dead dressed as a green pepper.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Haven’t you come as anything?’
‘Can’t. I might get bleeped.’
‘What?’
‘The news desk has given us bleepers. I mean, I couldn’t go on a big story dressed as a parsnip, could I?’
‘You wouldn’t go during Ted’s farewell party, would you?’
