A Bit of a Do

by David Nobbs

  As Rita approached, she gave him a smile which he couldn’t interpret.

  ‘Our car’s gone,’ she said brightly, as she slid into her seat.

  ‘Oh my God!’ He clutched at a straw. ‘Maybe they’ve … gone for a drink?’

  Laurence couched this in question form to involve Rita in the effort of trying to find it a not totally unconvincing suggestion. She made no effort to oblige.

  ‘I hardly think so.’

  ‘Gone for a quick … erm … in some deserted spot?’

  Laurence couldn’t hide his distaste as he thought of his wife having a quick … erm … with Ted in the back of a Cavalier 2000 GL on the waste ground beside the canal. But even this disgusting prospect was a palliative to the even more unwelcome possibility which Rita now repeated with apparent calm.

  ‘I think they’ve left us,’ she said.

  ‘Oh my God! What are we going to do?’

  ‘Smile.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep up appearances. You said so yourself. At least until we’re sure.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ Laurence smiled. It was as surprising as an owl’s grin. ‘This is dreadful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rita laughed, a merry little trill that was almost successful.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m keeping up appearances.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Well done.’ Laurence chuckled horribly, and switched the chuckle off much too suddenly. It sounded like an aberration in the plumbing. ‘Not being rude, Rita, but I’d have expected you to go completely to pieces.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rita. She almost added, ‘I’m so glad you weren’t being rude.’ She was almost light-headed. Was this hysteria? Hang on, Rita. You never lacked courage. ‘Well, yes, so would I. It’s odd. I’ve spent most of my life dreading the worst. Now that it’s happened … well … it’s odd, but it doesn’t seem quite as … I mean, it does, it’s awful, but … well, I suppose there’s nothing more to fear, and that’s almost a relief. I mean, the world’s still here. We’re still alive.’

  ‘At least she didn’t take my car,’ said Laurence, as if it were a private thought which he’d said out loud by mistake.

  ‘I really believe you find that a consolation.’

  ‘No. No! But it means she may still have some feeling for me. Why, Rita? We were happy. Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. We … existed pretty satisfactorily, on the whole. Rita, she must come back. I can’t face it. The empty house. Telling the family. Facing my friends. The patients. The girls at the surgery. The cleaning lady. All that sympathy. All that pity. All that emptiness. Oh my God.’

  ‘Keep calm,’ said Rita. She looked round, and gave a short bark of a laugh, like a walrus that has heard a dirty joke.

  ‘Calm!’ said Laurence. ‘You tell me to keep calm when my wife … it’s my fault. I’ve failed her.’

  Rita overcame her natural revulsion, and put a consoling hand on Laurence’s arm.

  Jenny, approaching, saw this, looked alarmed, and veered away. They didn’t notice her, but they couldn’t miss Percy Spragg. If Aunt Gladys from Oswestry was a tea-clipper, Rita’s father was an old Thames barge. The wind was failing. Would he make it?

  ‘Oh my God, here comes your father. That’s all I need,’ said Laurence.

  Rita withdrew her hand. Laurence realized that he hadn’t been tactful.

  ‘Oh Lord. Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Make small talk,’ said Rita, and she laughed. ‘The funny thing was it wasn’t even our shopping.’

  Laurence gave a painfully forced laugh, like an elderly cat sicking up chair stuffing.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Hello! How are you doing?’ He didn’t feel brave enough to venture on Percy’s surname.

  ‘I’m having a good time,’ said Percy Spragg. ‘I’ve had my table in tucks with my impression of Staff-Sergeant Crabtree.’

  ‘Oh no,’ groaned Rita. ‘You didn’t do Staff-Sergeant Crabtree.’

  ‘I’ve never seen Mr Mercer laugh so much,’ said Percy. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t there, Mr Robinghurst.’

  ‘Rodenhurst. My loss was Mercer’s gain.’

  There was an awkward pause.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ said Percy Spragg.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Laurence laughed. ‘It’s a wonderful evening.’

  ‘Absolutely wonderful,’ said Rita, and she laughed also.

  The hokey cokey was in full swing. The wonderful evening was nearing its end.

  ‘Come on,’ said Percy. ‘Let’s dance.’

  ‘Me?’ said Rita.

  ‘Well, I’m not dancing with ’im. I’m not a bum-boy.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Come on. Dance with your old dad.’

  ‘All right!’

  Percy and Rita walked slowly towards the dance floor. Rita held his arm, with no little embarrassment. Surely he looked grotesque? Was it possible, so stiffly and painfully did he hobble, that he would be able to dance at all?

  Just as they reached the floor, the hokey cokey ended. The massed, sweating dentists and friends subsided into mirth at their own antics. The pianist gleamed. Sweat glistened on the shoulders of the clarinetist, and her eyes shone.

  Dale Monsal looked tired. ‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, as flat as a soufflé in the Angel Restaurant and Grill. ‘Well, I’m afraid the licensing authorities have beaten us once again.’ There were groans and protests from the same people who had been so reluctant to dance earlier. Percy Spragg looked very disappointed. ‘We like to end on a gentle, romantic, traditional note. Take your partners, please, for the last waltz.’

  Percy brightened up. They stepped onto the floor. It was crowded. They couldn’t have moved otherwise than slowly and sedately, even if Percy had been capable of it.

  ‘Dad! Why did you have to be so crude?’ said Rita.

  ‘’Cos he hates it.’

  There was a wistful, intense quality to the Dale Monsal Sound now, as if the four musicians feared that they would cease to exist when the dance ended.

  ‘Why do you have to hurt me?’ said Rita.

  ‘Because you’ve hurt me,’ said her father.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Oh, I understand. I clash with your contemporary furniture.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Oh, I daresay you’ll have me more now my Clarrie’s dying.’

  ‘Dad! She isn’t dying.’

  ‘She’s dying. I know that. Like I know summat’s wrong between thee and Ted. I’m not such a fool as you think.’

  They were having to shout to make themselves heard above the music and the dancers. What a time to choose to have a proper talk together at last, thought Rita.

  ‘What’s up, our Rita?’

  She lowered her voice as much as she dared. ‘I think he’s run off with Liz.’

  ‘What? Oh, Rita!’ He had very good hearing, when it was vital. ‘Oh, Rita! The bloody fool! I’d give one of these dentists summat to do. I’d kick his bloody teeth in!’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Well, that’s no way to treat my little girl.’

  ‘Dad!’ Rita was amazed.

  ‘Come on, Rita. Defy the world. You had such spirit when you were little. Where’s it all gone, Rita? What’s happened?’

  ‘Life, Dad. Life’s happened.’

  ‘Come on, Rita. You can do it. Show a bit of style.’

  ‘It’s funny. He said that.’

  ‘Well, show him. Show her. Show them. Defy the world.’

  ‘Right!’ There was astonishment in Rita’s voice, astonishment at herself as much as at her father. ‘Right! Come on, our Dad!’

  Despite the lack of space, despite Percy Spragg’s creaking old limbs, they began to show real style. Percy’s eyes sparkled. The years seemed to drop away from him.

  The last waltz was drawing to its conclusion. The Dale Monsal Quartet were putting their all into it.

  Rita grinned at her father. His response beg
an as a grin, but then his face became convulsed with pain.

  ‘Oh, Rita!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, Rita!’

  He collapsed onto. her.

  The dance ended. There was warm applause. Rita lowered her father slowly to the floor, and silence fell rapidly.

  ‘Dad!’ she cried, and she didn’t care that everyone was listening. Appearances didn’t matter. They never had!! That was what was so awful. She knew now that they never had. ‘Dad! You can’t be dead! I haven’t told you that I love you.’

  Third Do

  December:

  The Angling Club

  Christmas Party

  ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t finish the decorations,’ said Lester Griddle, landlord of the Crown and Walnut, lugubriously. ‘We’ve had the bloody VATman here all day, excuse my French.’

  Liz Rodenhurst smiled faintly as Ted took her coat. She was wearing an elegant yellow-and-white dress which was too expensive and too revealing. You still wouldn’t have thought she was pregnant, if you didn’t know.

  Lester Griddle stared at her cleavage, blinked, and said, ‘I mean, would you believe it? Friday before Christmas, a function in the evening, bloody VATman poking around in my drawers all day.’

  Outside, along the dimly lit Knapperley Road on the southern edge of town, where municipal dumps and used car lots formed a muddy no-man’s-land between the housing estates and the gently rolling farmland, it was black, wet and raw. In the lounge bar of the Crown and Walnut it was warm, smoky and pink.

  Half the bar was festooned with decorations. There were plastic chains in crude primary colours. There were cardboard angels that swung gently in the smoky breeze every time the door opened to admit an angler and his wife and a swirl of arctic night. There was a profusion of holly clinging to light fittings, to pictures, to the mantelpiece, to the glass cases of stuffed fish, to Lester Griddle’s collection of exotic matchboxes, to any flat surface, like climbers bivouacking all over an overbooked Mount Everest.

  ‘I mean, what do the silly buggers want, excuse my French?’ continued Lester Griddle, that smouldering volcano of complaint. ‘Receipts for every packet of pork scratchings?’

  The other half of the bar was entirely innocent of decorations. Ted Simcock thought it typical of Lester and Mavis Griddle, when time was pressing, to decorate half the room completely rather than half decorate the whole of the room.

  ‘Never mind, Lester,’ said Ted. ‘Half the room looks lovely.’ He didn’t say which half.

  There wasn’t a single object in the bar with which Liz felt she could happily spend an evening. Oh God, what bad taste the British had.

  If Ted had thought about taste, he would have said that the whole point of the lounge bar of the Crown and Walnut was its bad taste. You couldn’t relax in up-market country pubs where you were frightened to pass remarks less stylish than the antiques. Here, among these tables with tops of beaten copper and elaborately carved legs with eagles’ feet, among the over-large brown chairs which dwarfed the tables, among the curved lampshades which sent a dim, sinful red glow over the pink curtains and walls, the gold-and-brown carpet, the nicotine ceiling and Lester Griddle’s exotic matchboxes, here a man could be free from feelings of inferiority, from the need to compete with his fellows. Here you could drink good beer or bad beer – there were both – bad wine or worse wine – there were both – and eat snacks that.filled you up without bankrupting you. And that was all the people around the Highcliffe Estate and the Knapperley Road wanted or could afford. Long live bad taste, Ted might have said. If he’d ever thought about such things. Which he hadn’t.

  They came from different worlds. It was part of the attraction. They were living in limbo, in a world of their own, alone together, self-centred lovers, cocooned in their own sensuality. Ted had never been admitted to Liz’s world. It was the first time he had taken her to his. Already he realized that it was going to be more difficult than he had thought.

  He looked round his world. About twenty people had arrived so far. They included his son Elvis, the Sillitoes, and a group of men of various ages who looked as if they would be happier in their normal haunt, the public bar.

  ‘Come and meet the Pilbeams,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to meet the Pilbeams,’ said Liz.

  ‘How can you say that?’ said Ted. ‘You’ve never met them.’

  ‘Exactly. I feel as though I know enough people. I don’t want to meet any new ones.’

  The Pilbeams were standing between the artificial log fire and the Christmas tree, on which three of the fairy lights were failing to twinkle. George Pilbeam was that rare fish, an angler who doesn’t drink. Liz felt that she and they were the three fairy lights that were failing to twinkle. But that didn’t mean that she wanted to meet them.

  ‘Oh, come on, Liz. I’m chairman. It’s my social duty, is mingling.’

  ‘I don’t know any of these people.’

  ‘Exactly. So, if you meet them you will know them, and then it’ll be no problem to meet them. So come and meet them. Liz! It’s no problem to you anyroad. I mean … you’ve got social poise. Oh heck! I used to think, “why can’t Rita be more like Liz?” Now I’m with you and you’re getting like Rita. It’s very unfair sometimes, life.’

  ‘Could it possibly be that the fault is yours?’

  ‘Mine? Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Is that what you want me for, my “social poise”?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t!’ He looked round. Nobody was within earshot, but he still lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I want you for your body.’ He saw Liz’s look. He added hurriedly, ‘Plus your mind and personality, obviously. That goes without saying.’

  ‘Did Rita mingle at these dos?’

  ‘That was different. That was marriage. You and I are in love. Aren’t we? Well, then! So … we make sacrifices for each other. So … come and meet the Pilbeams.’

  ‘Still working as a waiter, are you?’ said Rodney Sillitoe, the big wheel behind Cock-A-Doodle Chickens. He was wearing a new Harris tweed jacket which wouldn’t have looked crumpled on anybody else.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the cynical Elvis Simcock, whose black tee shirt bore the legend, ‘I think, therefore I am. I think’. ‘It turned out I was a holiday relief. At the end of October, when the regular waiters had finished their holidays, they sacked me. It’s a nonunion hotel. Therefore, no comebacks.’

  All the customers were clustered into the decorated half of the bar, perhaps hoping that the good cheer of Christmas would rub off onto them. Elvis was trying to edge the Sillitoes towards the undecorated half.

  ‘It must be tough for you,’ said Rodney. ‘You haven’t got any marketable skills, have you?’

  ‘I’ve got a philosophy degree. I’ve spent three years studying the world’s greatest thinkers.’

  ‘This is what I say. You haven’t got any marketable skills.’

  ‘No. My business is merely logical analysis. Since the nation is collapsing because nobody seems capable of thinking properly about its problems, you’d think it’d be worth employing somebody trained in how to think properly. But no.’

  ‘Well, don’t get bitter, Elvis.’

  Betty Sillitoe’s eyes moved from one to the other, as if she were umpiring their conversation. Her black-and-gold dress went perfectly with her platinum hair and dark roots.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be bitter if your dad left your mother and shacked up with your younger brother’s stuck-up wife’s even more stuck-up mother?’

  ‘Elvis!’ Rodney joined willingly in the move into the unmapped half of the room, the uncharted seas where Liz would be unable to overhear them. ‘Jenny isn’t stuck up.’

  ‘No? Well, her mother is. Couldn’t you have stopped him?’

  ‘I tried. He wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘I nearly didn’t come. There’s a lot hasn’t.’ Leslie Horton, water bailiff and organist, who hated to be called Les, was just arriving with his wife Patricia, who hated to be called Pat, but there were stil
l only about twenty-five people present, and Mavis had catered for fifty.

  ‘I think that’s mainly internal,’ said Rodney. ‘There’s been some bad feeling since the fracas at Wisbech.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s always been very cliquey, has the angling club,’ said Elvis. ‘You’re very quiet tonight, Betty? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ mumbled Betty Sillitoe, hardly opening her lips.

  ‘She’s upset about her dental work,’ said Rodney. ‘She’s had a bridge done and she hates it.’

  ‘I didn’t want to come,’ mumbled Betty, ‘but I’ve had to, to see he doesn’t have too much to drink while I’m not here.’

  ‘Betty!’ said Rodney. ‘As if I would!’

  Ted and Liz joined them, Ted having abandoned his effort to get Liz to meet new people.

  ‘Hello,’ said Liz. ‘And how’s Elvis?’

  ‘Thirsty,’ said Elvis, downing the remains of his pint and going off to the bar.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ said Ted. ‘He’ll come round in time.’

  ‘Dry white wine, Liz? Usual, dear? Give me a hand, would you, Ted?’ said Rodney. He led Ted away without waiting for replies to any of these questions, but before they reached the bar, he stopped. ‘Betty saw Rita outside the Knaresborough Building Society,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘She looked awful.’

  ‘Well, what can I say?’

  ‘How about … “I’m sorry”?’

  ‘Rodney! You know I am!’

  ‘She’s not long lost her father, Ted.’

  ‘I know. I know. Not that they ever got on, but still … I know.’

  ‘She’s had her mother in the General for months, not getting any better, it seems.’