by David Nobbs
Bravely, they sat with Liam O’Reilly, who interspersed his silences with the occasional burst of gratitude for their return and regret at its impermanence; with Norman Pettifer, who grew gradually more disillusioned by their lack of knowledge of the theatrical greats; and with Brian Ironside, who unbent so dramatically under Hilary’s gentle probing that in less than a month she had learnt the names and ages of his three children.
Bravely, they ate their toad-in-the-hole and sponge pudding with chocolate sauce on six more Wednesdays, their roast pork and tinned pears on seven Thursdays, their battered cod and jam roly-poly on seven Fridays, their roast beef preceded by Yorkshire pudding on seven Sundays, their liver and bacon and rhubarb crumble on seven Mondays, and their roast lamb and spotted dick on seven Tuesdays. How wrong Henry had been last January, when he had thought that he was eating his last spotted dick ever.
But what of Saturday, the careful reader cries.
Showing reserves of courage that can only be marvelled at, Henry and Hilary informed Cousin Hilda that they would be having a night out every Saturday.
‘Every Saturday?’ she exclaimed.
‘Well, that’s only once a week,’ said Hilary. ‘And we thought if we did it on a regular basis you’d know where you were.’
If they expected gratitude for this consideration, they were to be disappointed.
On the first of their seven Saturdays out, Henry and Hilary went to Troutwick, Gateway to Upper Mitherdale, to visit his Auntie Doris, who ran the two-star White Hart Hotel with her second husband, the slimy Geoffrey Porringer.
Auntie Doris could not be described as happy. She still loved her first husband, Henry’s Uncle Teddy, whom she believed to have died in a fire at his night club, the Cap Ferrat in Thurmarsh. The fact that he was living in the South of France, and bigamously married to a girl who had been Hilary’s best friend at school, had the effect of drawing Hilary into the circle of deceit and misapprehension, and making her feel thoroughly at ease with Auntie Doris. But then everyone felt thoroughly at ease with Auntie Doris. She was a splendid landlady. She had found her niche, and had suddenly grown huge without ceasing to look glamorous and attractive. She was fighting the effects of age and the enormous spirits that she now drank with enormous spirit, and if she spent more on herself than on redecorating the pub, that was part of its charm. Not for nothing had it become known throughout the Yorkshire Dales not as ‘The White Hart’ but as ‘Doris’s’.
Nobody, on the other hand, felt at ease with Geoffrey Porringer, because he didn’t feel at ease with himself. And this, to Henry, was his saving grace, which was why Henry now called him Uncle Geoffrey, which Geoffrey Porringer liked, even though Geoffrey Porringer still referred to him as ‘young sir’, which Henry hated.
And so, as the young farmers bought pink gins for pink Doris in the antiques-stuffed lounge, Henry and Hilary sipped quietly with Geoffrey Porringer, who said, ‘A novel, eh, young sir? Whatever next?’ And when Henry told him that Hilary was also writing a novel, he said, ‘Both of you, eh? Well well. Clever stuff.’ And then he added, ‘I read a novel once. Not my cup of tea. Still, more power to your elbows,’ and when Hilary suggested that maybe he should try another novel, because novels did vary enormously, he said, ‘No, no. It was rubbish, it’s true, but it was the fact that it didn’t happen that I couldn’t cope with. Didn’t seem any point to it. Still, I’ll try your stuff. You’re family. That’s different.’
‘Speaking of family,’ said Auntie Doris, leaving the serving momentarily to her three stressed barmen, ‘can you really live with the Sniffer?’
‘She’s very kind,’ said Hilary.
‘Oh yes,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘She’s very kind, granted, but…,’ she lowered her voice, ‘can you make love in a place like that?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Henry. ‘She goes shopping four times a week.’
Auntie Doris’s chins wobbled on her face, and her gins wobbled in her glass, and her breasts wobbled in their outsize bra, and farmers and vets and blacksmiths smiled and said, ‘There goes Doris. Off again. Wonder what’s tickled her this time,’ and Auntie Doris said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s tickled me this time,’ and she told the story of Henry and Hilary’s love-making; and Hilary went pale and smiled and hated it, and Henry went red and grinned and found to his surprise that he loved it, and Geoffrey Porringer slid into the shadow of his wife’s personality and slipped a whisky into his beer when she wasn’t looking.
And on the seventh of their Saturdays out, when they visited Auntie Doris and Geoffrey Porringer again, Henry and Hilary found that the joke was rumbling on. ‘You look well, young sir, young madam. Hilda’s obviously been shopping a lot,’ said Geoffrey Porringer, whose blackheads seemed worse than ever.
They had extra staff on, so Henry and Hilary were able to have dinner with Auntie Doris and Geoffrey Porringer, in the small cosy restaurant with its low-beamed ceiling, fine Welsh dresser and moderate English food.
They were handed their menus by a very pregnant Lorna Lugg, née Arrow. Henry had to stop himself flinching visibly at the sight of his childhood sweetheart so enormous with child by Eric Lugg, his childhood tormentor. Her face, once so pert and lovely, was plump and almost bovine now.
He felt an unworthy desire to say something incredibly clever and witty, to show Lorna how much more there was to life than Eric Lugg could provide. It was easy to fight off this desire, since he couldn’t think of anything clever or witty.
‘Hello, Lorna, how long till the big event?’ he said.
‘Three weeks,’ said his former sweetheart. ‘This is me last neet.’ How broad her accent was. How Henry hated that and how he hated himself for hating it.
‘This is my wife, Hilary,’ he said. ‘Hilary, this is Lorna.’
‘Hello, Hilary,’ said Lorna Lugg. ‘Nice to meet you. The soup of the day is vegetable, and the fish of the day is haddock.’
‘It’s nice to meet you too,’ said Hilary. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Can you tell me, is the pâté rough or smooth?’
When Lorna had taken their orders, the thing for which Henry had been longing occurred, but in the wrong context. He was offered a job at last.
‘Come and be my restaurant manager,’ said Auntie Doris.
‘I can’t,’ said Henry. ‘Hilary’s got a job at Thurmarsh Grammar in January.’
‘You can work here too, Hilary,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘A family hotel. A family business. Think what pleasure that’ll give my poor Teddy, if he finds out.’
Henry’s blood ran cold. Could Auntie Doris know that Uncle Teddy was still alive?
‘How could he?’ he said, trying to sound casual.
‘No,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘He couldn’t. Not from down there.’
Did she mean Cap Ferrat? Did she know it all? Henry couldn’t trust himself to speak.
‘Down there?’ said Hilary. ‘Down where?’
‘Hell, of course,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘I loved my darling Teddy, but I can’t pretend there was a chance of his getting into the other place.’
And she roared her new ‘landlady with big personality’ laugh.
Geoffrey Porringer frowned and looked sulky, either at Auntie Doris’s reference to her darling Teddy or at the prospect of Henry and Hilary joining the staff of the White Hart.
‘Thank you for the offer,’ said Henry, ‘but it’s the wrong trade for me. I like my drink too much.’
‘It does take some people that way,’ said Auntie Doris, ‘but it won’t if you’ve got anything to you.’
On Tuesday, November 26th, 1957, President Eisenhower suffered a mild stroke, two RAF Canberras were destroyed by sabotage in Cyprus, an acoustics engineer in a restaurant in Chicago ‘proved’ that women were the noiser sex, and Henry Pratt ate what he hoped would be his last spotted dick ever.
The atmosphere round the little table in the basement room with the roaring blue-tiled stove was tense and stifling. Cousin Hilda could barely eat, and Henry had a lump in his thro
at, which is not a good idea when you’re eating spotted dick.
‘We’ll miss you, Mr Henry,’ said Mr O’Reilly. ‘And you, of course, Miss Hilary. Oh yes.’
‘It’s been very nice to meet you both,’ said Brian Ironside, to general astonishment.
‘All good things come to an end,’ said Cousin Hilda.
It was Hilary who found it difficult to make love in her family’s pleasant brick house in Perkin Warbeck Drive. Her brother Sam, sixteen now, had become marginally more sophisticated and marginally less obnoxious. Instead of the crude, ‘Are you two having it off in there?’ that Henry had feared, he banged on their door and yelled, ‘Are you two having coitus interruptus in there?’ ‘We don’t have coitus interruptus, dope,’ Hilary replied. ‘You do when I’m around,’ gloated Sam, and he burst in to find them rearranging their clothes in the ample chest of drawers. As there were no locks on the doors, Hilary lived in constant fear that Sam would enter, so they could only make love during school hours. Henry, on the other hand, wanted Howard Lewthwaite to know that his daughter’s husband wasn’t falling down on the job, so he wanted to make love when Howard Lewthwaite was in. But the only time when Howard Lewthwaite was in and Sam was out was early closing day. Wednesday afternoon was therefore reserved for their main bout of the week. Every Wednesday afternoon, Hilary would say, ‘We’ve got work to do,’ and, as they left the room, Henry would turn and wink at Howard Lewthwaite, without Hilary knowing, as she would have been horrified, and without Nadežda seeing, as she would have been upset. Hilary feared that the knowledge that they were making love would upset her mother by bringing home to her what she was missing due to her crippled state.
‘She must know we make love,’ Henry pointed out. ‘She must hope we make love, because she loves you.’
‘Yes, theoretically she must. But at this particular moment of this particular afternoon, I doubt if she would want to know.’
‘You feel guilty because she’s crippled and you aren’t.’
Henry regretted this remark as soon as he had made it. It wasn’t kind, he felt, and he was aware that there were stirrings inside himself over which he had no control, under whose influence he could conceivably find pleasure in hurting the one he loved, and this disturbed him.
To his surprise, however, Hilary was not at all upset. ‘Of course I feel guilty,’ she said. ‘I love her so very much.’
And so, Hilary attempted to make love very quietly, without rattling the bedhead, and eschewing the sharp cries of gasping passion that had occasionally surprised the neighbours in Stickleback Rise. Henry’s aim, on the other hand, was to make love in animal fashion, with vigorous movements and heavy grunting and moaning. And although they were able to laugh at themselves and their excessive selfconsciousness, a degree of tension and artificiality had entered into what had previously been delightfully natural between them.
Indeed, they felt a degree of tension and artificiality in the whole of their life in Perkin Warbeck Drive. The house, lacking a woman’s touch due to Nadežda being chair-bound, seemed lifeless. The lounge, as Howard Lewthwaite felt that it was politically correct to call it, was heavily floral, almost luxurious, but lacking the sparkle that would have been given by real care on Nadežda’s part. The dining room, too, with its dark mahogany table, brown Windsor chairs and brown Windsor soup, was an excessively careful room. Howard Lewthwaite did the cooking. Even under the circumstances of his wife’s illness, he could not have equated his political conscience with having domestic servants, and if this seems hypocritical coming from one who hadn’t been above a bit of town planning corruption on quite a major scale, well yes, Howard Lewthwaite was a hypocrite. Nice men often are.
And Howard Lewthwaite was a nice man whose natural good humour had been eroded by exhaustion, ill-luck, guilt and worry. His acts of corruption had been caused by his need for money to take Nadežda to live in a better climate. Because she was unable to stand up, she was developing a chest condition which was far more likely to kill her than her polio. It was impossible to emigrate while Sam was still at school. Howard Lewthwaite was worried that his drapery business in Market Street wouldn’t last that long.
Sam, naturally, spent most of his time in his room, rocking round the clock with Bill Haley. His family, equally naturally, were happy for him to stay there.
So, the house that had seemed so full of life and love when Henry had first visited it last New Year’s Eve – was it really less than a year ago? – seemed full of worry now. The rustic summer-house, where Henry and Hilary had discovered their love for each other, had yielded up all its mystery and romance in one go.
On the early evening of Tuesday, December 10th, shortly before their dinner that was called tea, Henry looked at his watch and said, ‘Spotted dick just being served,’ and, to his astonishment, Hilary said, ‘I’m missing all that, you know,’ and, to his even greater astonishment, he heard himself say, ‘So am I.’
Every day Hilary wrote her novel and Henry pretended to write his, and every Wednesday afternoon Hilary said, ‘Hush. Don’t grunt so loudly,’ and Henry grimaced. And British Home Stores, the British Council of Churches, and the Yorkshire Branch of the Institute of Quarrymen failed to recognise the latent genius of Henry Ezra Pratt.
Then it was almost Christmas, there were drinks in the heaving, dark, masculine back bar of the Lord Nelson with Henry’s former colleagues on the Thurmarsh Evening Argus, all writing novels and dreaming of Fleet Street and/or literary fame. Ted Plunkett’s seductive wife Helen said, ‘Not pregnant yet, Hilary?’ and raised an eyebrow, ‘Didn’t I miss much with Henry, then?’ and Hilary said fiercely, ‘You missed a lovely, lovely man,’ and Ted sighed because he should have married Ginny Fenwick, and Ginny Fenwick blushed because she knew why Ted had sighed, and Henry felt a deep nostalgia for those busy, boozy days, and for the camaraderie of the workplace, and this disturbed him; and it worried him that so many things disturbed him, when he loved Hilary and was so happy with her.
On Christmas Day there were ingenious presents, there was turkey and Christmas pudding with threepenny bits in it, there were mince pies, there was plenty to drink, and although the obligatory nature of the enjoyment prevented true spontaneity, neither Henry nor Hilary felt any nostalgia for Cousin Hilda’s that day.
Denzil Ackerman and Lampo Davey invited them to London for New Year’s Eve, and they accepted, since they both knew that no New Year’s Eve in Perkin Warbeck Drive could ever equal last year’s in romantic intensity.
In Denzil and Lampo’s bijou mews town house in Chelsea, tasteful decorations covered every available space, although there weren’t many available spaces, since the house was bursting at the seams with pretty little objets d’art, notable among them being Denzil’s unrivalled collection of vintage biscuit tins.
Denzil greeted them in a natty blue apron. Denzil and Lampo kissed both Hilary and Henry, and Henry was very pleasantly embarrassed.
‘I’m doing the cooking. He’s doing the worrying. We take it in turns,’ said Denzil.
‘I never worry,’ said Lampo. ‘He just likes to think I do, because he worries so much.’
Denzil gave an angry intake of breath, and wheeled from the room, narrowly avoiding knocking down two vases, a candlestick and a pomander. Henry flinched. He didn’t like to see Lampo and Denzil arguing, since it was he who had brought them together, albeit inadvertently.
‘We’ve a surprise for you,’ said Lampo. ‘Diana and Tosser are coming for drinks.’
Henry was horrified to feel the quickening of his heartbeat. At Dalton College he had fagged for Lampo and for Tosser Pilkington-Brick. Tosser had married Diana Hargreaves, sister of Henry’s best friend, Paul. Henry had almost loved Diana once. Not now, though. No need for quickened heartbeats now.
Diana and Tosser were in evening dress. They would be. The last time Henry had seen Diana, at his wedding, she had been very pregnant. Now, although never slim, she looked quite shapely. The skin on her broad shoulders, though
not as fine as Hilary’s, was attractively brown and smooth. Henry didn’t feel any desire for her, of course, but he felt a worryingly sharp hostility towards Tosser. He found himself hoping that they weren’t happy, and this too disturbed him.
‘We’ve left Benedict with Mummy,’ said Diana. ‘She sends her love, Henry. They both do. They miss you dreadfully.’
They drank champagne, and Tosser said, ‘When you get a job, Henry, do come and see me for insurance and pensions advice.’
‘Tosser!’ said Diana.
‘Diana, please, the name is Nigel,’ said Tosser stuffily.
‘The name is Tosser when you behave like a toss-pot,’ said Diana.
Oh good, they were arguing. No, Henry, don’t feel like that.
But it was difficult not to feel like that. Everyone seemed so fulfilled, Tosser doling out financial advice, Diana producing Benedicts, Lampo working for Sotheby’s – or was it Christie’s? – Denzil still churning out his arty-farty cobblers for the Thurmarsh Evening Argus, Hilary starting work shortly and getting on so well with her bloody novel. Out, green-eyed monster.
‘I’ve got a very promising interview next week,’ said Henry.
He groaned inwardly. Why had he been so weak as to feel the need to compete? He didn’t want to talk about his interview.
‘Gorgeous. What’s it for?’ said Lampo, as he opened a second bottle of champagne, which fizzed out all over the inlaid marble top of a Georgian game table and sent Denzil white with anger.
Henry thought he had got away with it, but after ten minutes of frenzied cleaning, when Lampo turned to Denzil and said, ‘Sorry. No harm done, I think,’ Denzil, in order to ignore Lampo effectively, turned to Henry and said, ‘Come on. You never told us what that interview was for.’
