by David Nobbs
‘And I told you to take his advice with a pinch of salt.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but he told me to take your advice with a pinch of salt.’
‘Yes, but I’m right and he’s wrong. That’s why he’s the Director (Operations) and I’m only the Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed).’
Henry staggered, somewhat bemused, into his office, and sat behind his familiar desk, listening to the rain gushing from drainpipes of many styles. The telephone shrilled petulantly, and he jumped.
‘Tubman-Edwards. I need to see you.’
Henry dragged himself to the office of the Head of Establishments.
Mr Tubman-Edwards looked at him sadly.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
So far so good! Henry had no problem in obeying the simple instruction.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Tubman-Edwards. ‘Sid Pentelow is upset.’
‘Sid Pentelow?’
‘Director (Financial Services). He hates people exceeding their budget. As you’re my appointee, it reflects badly on me. You’ve let me down, Henry.’
The rain was beating against Mr Tubman-Edwards’s windows like furious bees.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Henry, ‘but I didn’t even realise I had a budget.’
‘There are budgets for everything. Postage, telephones, travel. My son’s coming up next weekend. I know you weren’t close chums, but I think you got on pretty well, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Pretty well.’
‘Tremendous. Well, we’d like it if you and your wife came to dinner next Saturday, if you aren’t too busy getting ready for Christmas.’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Henry, appalled. ‘We’d love to.’
‘Excellent. These budgets are so generous that I simply never dreamt that anybody could exceed them. But you …’ He looked at Henry sadly. ‘You’re a human dynamo.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘No, not within reason. But you must always remember that we are given finite tasks to perform. If we perform them too well, there’s a danger that one day our work will be over. We’ll have worked ourselves out of a job. None of us would want that, would we? Till next Saturday, then. Shall we say seven thirty for eight o’clock?’
The wind was playing badminton with fish-and-chip papers. A pigeon was tossed over the Queen’s Hotel like a rag-doll. A taxi ploughed through a puddle and drenched Henry. His throat was sore and he thought he might be starting a cold. He only just caught the train and had to stand until Normanton. When he got home, Kate had colic and was screaming, and the stew had stuck and was slightly burnt. When the phone rang, he just knew it would be bad news.
‘It’s me,’ said Helen Plunkett, née Cornish. ‘Ted’s away, and I’ve just had a bath, and I’m completely naked, and slightly pink all over from the heat, and I thought it was high time you came round and I did that interview about those cucumbers.’
Henry felt extremely nervous as his noisy wipers swished and screeched their way to Ted and Helen’s flat in Coromandel Avenue.
He hadn’t really wanted to go, but Hilary had insisted.
‘She’ll try to seduce me,’ Henry had said. ‘I know her.’
‘Exactly. And you will not be tempted. I know you. We love each other utterly, don’t we?’
‘Of course we do.’
‘Well, then. An ideal opportunity to re-dedicate our love.’
As he pulled up outside the unloved, leaf-sodden garden of number 12, Coromandel Avenue, and rushed up to the porch with its stained glass windows at either side of the door, Henry steeled himself to be strong against temptation.
It was a relief that Helen was no longer naked. Indeed, she was wearing a long, loose grey dress which did nothing for her body.
Large photographs of Helen and Ted at their wedding, of Ted’s parents, of Helen’s parents and of her sister Jill, yet another young woman after whom Henry had lusted, sat in silver frames on the heavy, ornate sideboard. The suite was brown leather. Helen made coffee, and plonked herself briskly and unsexily into a chair, leaving Henry alone on the settee.
‘Right. To work,’ she said, to Henry’s relief. ‘Why didn’t you get on to me about the article? It’s been months.’
‘Because you didn’t seem remotely keen.’
‘I’m not. So, excite me. Persuade me. Where’s my angle?’
‘I just thought … a piece about how unjustly the cucumber is neglected,’ said Henry as limply as an old salad.
‘So why is it unjust?’ She wrote busily in her elegant shorthand. Henry began to wish that she was looking a bit more seductive, so that he had something to fight against.
‘Well … I mean … cucumbers are very nice. How’s Jill?’
He hoped he wouldn’t blush. He wondered if she had ever known just how much he had fancied her younger sister.
‘Very well. Do they have any amazing nutritional value?’
‘Still happy with Gordon?’
Jill had gone off with the enigmatic Gordon Carstairs, former lover of Ginny Fenwick and the only one out of all of Henry’s ex-colleagues who had so far escaped to Fleet Street.
‘Very happy. They come up occasionally. They’re good sports. We have fun.’
Helen’s pearly grey eyes met Henry’s, and he saw the spark of mischief in them. Then it was switched off abruptly.
‘Well come on,’ she said. ‘Do they have any nutritional value? Are they good defences against disease, like garlic and ginger?’
‘Er … as far as I know they aren’t really any use against disease, no. I mean, they are actually ninety per cent water, so they hardly have any nutritional value whatsoever.’
‘OK. So that’s out, then. So is it their incredible taste? Has this not been fully appreciated?’
‘Well, I mean …’ Oh God, I’m floundering. ‘I mean, they’re nice, of course … very nice … but I wouldn’t say they have a particularly strong taste. A nice taste. Subtle. Not strong.’
‘Well I suppose they wouldn’t be if they’re ninety percent water.’
‘Perhaps taste isn’t the area we should concentrate on.’
‘Well, is it their phallic symbolism? Do they have ritual value? Is there a Splutt Cucumber Dance? Or a midnight procession in which all the adult men in Rawlaston wear funny hats and march to the Trustee Savings Bank with cucumbers in their trousers?’
‘Of course not,’ said Henry stuffily. ‘This isn’t France.’
‘You look tired. Love life too much for you?’
‘No. It’s the rest of life that’s too much for me.’
‘Poor Henry. You’re a fighter, though. You’ll keep going. Now, what do you want me to say about these bloody cucumbers?’
Henry wanted to tell her to forget it, but no, he was a fighter, he would keep going. He took a sip of coffee. It was fearsomely strong, and it gave him at least the illusion of energy.
‘Perhaps what I’m seeking is to make them fashionable again. I mean, cucumber sandwiches were once synonymous with afternoon tea.’
‘I’m afraid Thurmarsh prefers toasted teacake.’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about afternoon tea specifically. What I’m saying is, I’d like to make the cucumber a little bit chic.’
‘Terrific,’ said Helen. ‘What a shame I work for the Thurmarsh Evening Argus, not Vogue.’
All good fighters know that there are moments when it’s best to concede defeat.
‘I think I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Helen. Thank you for the coffee. Give my love to Ted.’
When he got home, Kate was asleep in front of the fire. Hilary looked tired but lovely. She kissed him warmly.
‘You weren’t long,’ she said. ‘But then I knew you wouldn’t be.’
‘Of course I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I love you too much.’
‘Was she desperately disappointed by your strength and resolve?’
‘Well … perhaps not desperately.’
As they undress
ed, Henry felt sad as well as exhausted. It had been a long, tiring, thoroughly bad day, but he should still have told Hilary that Helen hadn’t attempted to tempt him. He felt that he was in danger of losing something extremely valuable. He was in danger of losing himself.
4 The Whelping Season
HENRY FELT INCREASINGLY intimidated on the drive to Leeds. The formal invitation had made him uneasy. The address sticker on the back of the envelope had made him nervous. The address – Mr and Mrs D. F. C. Tubman-Edwards, the Dower House, Balmoral Road, Alwoodley, Leeds – had overawed him.
The Dower House was set between a stockbroker mock-Tudor excrescence and a turreted extravaganza that looked as if it had been hewn off one end of a Château of the Loire, in one of the most prestigious streets in North Leeds. The huge houses were set in suitably large gardens.
How could he have continued to feel overawed after he’d discovered, at the top of a long, curving drive, that the Dower House was a boxy little brick villa, dwarfed by its setting?
How could he have felt so intolerably stiff in his best suit? How could he have allowed himself to feel that his old school blackmailer was his social superior?
Why had it mattered so much that his rusting Standard Eight looked so pathetic parked between a Riley and a Rolls?
Why hadn’t it occurred to him that, instead of feeling humiliated because J. C. R. Tubman-Edwards was a merchant banker and he was Assistant Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed) of the Cucumber Marketing Board, he should have realised that Mr and Mrs Tubman-Edwards, with their social pretensions, must be even more humiliated that, in his fifties, the merchant banker’s father was merely the Head of Establishments of the Cucumber Marketing Board?
Henry, in his suit, and Hilary, smart in her short black and gold dress, were astonished to find that Mr and Mrs Tubman-Edwards, and their son, and the two other guests, Dougie and Jean Osmotherly, were in evening dress.
‘It’s a family tradition on Saturday nights,’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards.
‘Frightfully pretentious, my people,’ said J. C. R. Tubman-Edwards proudly.
‘We don’t tell people, because we don’t want to embarrass them in case they haven’t got any. Not all young people do, do they?’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards, whose voice could have cut glass at twenty paces. She was small and neat and looked as cold as the dead, immaculate drawing room in which they were drinking cheap sherry poured out of a very expensive decanter.
‘We know because we live next door,’ said Dougie Osmotherly, who turned out to be big in ball-bearings and the owner of the Rolls.
Fancy taking the Rolls to go next door, thought Henry.
‘Next door?’ said Hilary. ‘Really? Tudor or turrets?’
Henry flinched, but Dougie and Jean Osmotherly were unperturbed.
‘Tudor,’ said Jean, who was wearing a diamond ring, a diamond necklace, a diamond bracelet, a brilliant ruby ring, and four other rings.
‘I love your jewellery, Jean,’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards.
‘So embarrassing,’ said Jean Osmotherly. ‘One hates to look showy, but it’s so much safer on the person with all these burglaries around.’
‘Turrets is a problem,’ said J. C. R. Tubman-Edwards. ‘A scrap-metal dealer lives there. Moved in from your neck of the woods actually, Henry. My folks are furious. Well, I mean, it’s a bit off, isn’t it, choosing a posh area like All-Yidley and finding oneself next to a scrap merchant.’
Henry went cold at this gratuitous piece of anti-Semitism. He longed to object, but in his dark suit which had gone from being overdressed to being under-dressed in one second, he hadn’t the confidence. Knowing that he must say something, he said, ‘Scrap merchant? Not Bill Holliday, by any chance?’
‘You don’t actually know him, do you?’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards, as if to know Bill Holliday would be the ultimate solecism.
‘Well only slightly,’ said Henry hurriedly.
The thought of Bill Holliday, whom he had once believed to be trying to kill him, didn’t do wonders for Henry’s confidence.
‘Henry and Josceleyn were chums at Brasenose and Dalton,’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards.
The mention of Brasenose and Dalton, and the memory of Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards blackmailing him and calling him Oiky, didn’t do wonders for Henry’s confidence.
‘Well, not close chums,’ he said.
‘We ran into each other a few times, though, didn’t we?’ said Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards.
Later Henry would wonder why it was he and not Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards who’d been on the defensive in this conversation. It was Josceleyn who’d been the eventual loser in their battle, even if it had taken the looming presence of Tosser Pilkington-Brick to seal the victory.
What a shoot-out, Henry thought now, Tosser and Josceleyn staring at each other down the double barrels of their names.
But all he said was, ‘Yes. A few times.’
A gong resounded through the boxy Dower House, with its frosted glass doors. Henry looked for self-mockery and found none.
The dining room was as cold as Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards’s eyes. The stuffed fox over the brick fireplace struck an inappropriately rural note.
‘I’m rather piqued with Josceleyn,’ said Margaret Tubman-Edwards. ‘He was supposed to bring his girlfriend. He’s untidied my table.’
‘I’ve given her the old heave-ho,’ said Tubman-Edwards. ‘Kept dragging me to the ballet. Trying to improve my mind.’
Not much use unless you have a mind to improve, thought Henry. Oh why oh why didn’t he have the courage to say it?
‘Not much use unless you have a mind to improve,’ said Mr D. F. C. Tubman-Edwards.
Everybody laughed, but neither Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards nor his mother laughed with their eyes.
They ate insipid leek and potato soup out of Spode soup bowls, and tiny fillets of lukewarm shoe-leather meunière off Spode fish plates, washed down with cheap white wine poured from a very expensive decanter. They talked about Josceleyn’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Pellet and Runciman. ‘Wasn’t there a Pellet and a Runciman at Dalton?’ said Henry, and there was momentary family unease at the hint that Josceleyn had got his job through the old boy network rather than talent. Hilary suggested, politely, that merchant bankers were parasites. Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards flushed and Henry flinched and Dougie Osmotherly said, ‘Well, I think you’re all parasites except those of us at the sharp end, who make things,’ and roared with laughter, as if someone else had said something very witty, and Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards said arrogantly, ‘You’re an anachronism, Dougie. In fifty years nobody’ll make anything except money in this country.’
Over a pallid steak and kidney pudding, eaten off Spode meat plates, washed down with Bulgarian red wine poured out of a very expensive decanter, there was talk of Conservative fund-raising functions, and Jean Osmotherly invited Henry and Hilary to one and Hilary said, politely, that she was afraid that on principle she wasn’t prepared to support the Conservatives, and Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards said, ‘Well, they’re all Conservatives in All-yidley,’ and Hilary said, ‘I’m sorry, Josceleyn, but I can’t let that go. I just loathe anti-Semitism,’ and Henry felt proud and horrified at the same time, and Josceleyn looked genuinely contrite and said, ‘Oh Christ. You’re not Jewish, are you?’ and Hilary said, ‘No,’ and Josceleyn looked puzzled and said, ‘Well, what are you complaining about, then?’ and Hilary said, ‘I hate racialism,’ and Josceleyn said, ‘Well, I was only bloody joking, for Christ’s sake,’ and Margaret Tubman-Edwards said, ‘Josceleyn! That’s enough,’ and the stuffed fox stared, and Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards said, ‘I see. Everybody’s rude to me and when I defend myself it’s all my bloody fault as usual. I’m going to the fucking pub. Coming, Henry, old mate?’ and Henry said, ‘Of course not, old mate. I’m invited to dinner,’ and Josceleyn Tubman-Edwards stormed out, and Dennis Tubman-Edwards said, ‘Well at least your table’s tidy now, Margaret,’ and Mar
garet Tubman-Edwards said, ‘Shut up and pour some more wine, Dennis,’ and Dennis Tubman-Edwards grumbled, ‘Seems it’s illegal to joke these days,’ and Henry and Hilary exchanged glances which said, ‘We seem to be becoming connoisseurs of dinner parties at which people walk out.’
For the rest of the evening they talked with careful banality about the rival charms of the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District, the French way of life, the quality of the Thurmarsh shops, the best ways of hiding the hi-fi, and other safe subjects. Nobody dared leave early because that would have been to admit that the evening had not been an unqualified social success.
Shortly before midnight, Dougie Osmotherly stood up and said, ‘Well, Jean needs her beauty sleep even if I don’t, and we’ve a long way to go.’
‘Yes, we must go too,’ said Henry.
‘Oh don’t let us break the party up,’ said Jean Osmotherly.
‘Have one more port, Henry,’ said his Head of Establishments, and it sounded suspiciously like a command.
Dougie Osmotherly pointed his Rolls towards next door, with many jokes about driving carefully and not falling asleep on the way home.
When Dougie and Jean had gone, Dennis and Margaret Tubman-Edwards sighed in unison and Margaret said, ‘Sorry about them, but we owed them a meal desperately and what can one do when one lives in the land of the nouveaux riches?’
‘We are of course the anciens pauvres,’ said Dennis Tubman-Edwards.
His wife didn’t laugh.
Henry drove off full of drink as many people did in those days. By the time they reached Thurmarsh he was fighting against sleep.
Paradise Villa seemed very lifeless without Kate, who was spending the night with Hilary’s family.
‘You were very quiet tonight,’ said Hilary, as they sat at opposite sides of the bed and undressed like weary zombies.
‘You weren’t,’ said Henry pointedly.
‘Don’t you want me to be what I am and say what I think?’ said Hilary. ‘Do you want me to have no beliefs and no feelings and no social courage whatsoever?’
Henry wanted to say, ‘God, your body’s beautiful. Your skin is so lovely.’ So why did he say, ‘What do you mean by that? Is that what you’re saying I’m like?’
