Cupid's Dart

by David Nobbs

  'How are you?'

  'Oh, mustn't grumble'

  'Good.'

  Silence. Use up as much time as I dared before the next nugget of inspired enquiry.

  'What did you have for lunch?'

  'Meat.'

  'What sort of meat?'

  'I don't know. It had no taste at all. There wasn't apple sauce so it probably wasn't pork. There wasn't mint sauce so I suppose it can't have been lamb. Beef, I suppose.'

  'Was there mustard?'

  Things were going well. We might be able to use up two or three minutes on lunch.

  'They never give anything spicy. I think they think it might make people need a sit.'

  The pudding used up a minute or two, and then my mother said, 'Alan, I don't like the view from this room. It's the same every day. It's getting on my nerves.'

  Well, I'm sorry, but I don't think they'll rotate the countryside to suit you, Mother. But I didn't say this. I didn't say anything. I was summoning up my courage to tell her about Ange. This took quite a long time, and in the end she was forced to speak.

  'So, what's my boy been up to?'

  The perfect cue.

  'Oh, nothing much.'

  I couldn't tell her today. It would take too much energy and moral courage. There wouldn't be any left for our visit to Lawrence and Jane. I'd tell her next week.

  I felt the most enormous relief at this decision. It wasn't weakness. It was only sensible.

  'Alan,' said my mother in an appalled tone. 'I think I need to have a sit. Fetch the nurse, will you?'

  'You don't need the nurse, Mother. I'm here.'

  She looked at me in horror.

  'I mean a proper sit,' she said. 'I can't have you seeing me do that.'

  I thought of saying that I wouldn't exactly watch, but sense prevailed.

  'I'm your son, Mother.'

  'Exactly. I don't know the nurse, so it doesn't matter.'

  I fetched the nurse . . . and waited in the corridor. I felt ashamed of getting a little frisson of excitement out of wasting eleven whole minutes in this way.

  When the nurse came out, I had a word with her.

  'How is she, nurse? I'm her son.'

  'She's got all her marbles.'

  'Oh, I know. Don't tell me.'

  A wry look between us.

  'But how is she . . . in herself?'

  'Getting older. Aren't we all? Nothing . . . nothing specific. She's fallen a couple of times. She's lost her confidence.'

  'Is she . . . difficult?'

  'Not really. She's one of the best.'

  That shocked me. Was it just me that brought the worst out in her?

  I went back in. There was a smell of cheap air freshener, beneath which I could detect a faint aroma of . . . exhausted internal organs.

  'You've been talking to the nurse,' said my mother. 'Asking how I am behind my back.'

  Too right she still had her marbles.

  'Well, I did have a word. I care, mother. You're my mother. You're eighty seven.'

  'There's no need to remind me. I like to forget that. I don't like being the subject of a medical confab, Alan.'

  'Sorry, Mother.'

  Conversation limped along until the girl with the short tongue came in with the tea, a cup for my mother and one for me, and two plates for the chocolate cream, and two forks with which to eat the chocolate cream.

  Now the cake ritual began. I put the cake on the table and cut two slices. I placed the slices on the plates. Then I went to a drawer and fetched two delicate little cake forks. My mother wouldn't eat with the forks provided by the home. They weren't cake forks. She had standards. Besides, she didn't know where they'd been.

  I had a piece of cake too. One time when I had eaten a big lunch and couldn't face cake, she had been suspicious. 'Why aren't you having any?' she had asked. 'What's wrong with it?', and I'd had to eat a piece so that she would eat a piece. She never offered a piece to the girl or to anybody else. I felt humiliated by her meanness.

  We had a second slice of cake. Then I plunged the two forks provided by the home into my piece of cake, so that the girl, who had learning difficulties as well as a short tongue, wouldn't feel hurt. My mother glared. 'You'll get tetanus,' she said. It was always tetanus these days. It had been mastoids or polio when I was young. When I was eight I had poked my ear and my mother had said 'You'll get mastoids,' and I had said, 'But it itches, Mummy,' and she had said, 'Well, don't poke it then, and you're a big boy now. It's time to stop calling me "Mummy". It's time to start calling me "Mother".' I had never told anyone what a devastating shock that was to me.

  I washed and dried my mother's two cake forks and put them back in the drawer. She made no comment, but she tuttutted silently with her eyes. Once she had asked me why I did it, and I had said that I didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings by showing that we hadn't thought her forks clean enough.

  'Sympathy for all the world except your mother,' she had said.

  At last the two hours were over, and I could decently leave. As I stood up and said, 'Time to be off. I'm tiring you,' I had a thought that astounded me.

  It was eleven years since I had even mentioned 'Germanic Thought From Kant to Wittgenstein' to her. This was partly out of pique because she had once said, 'And how's your little book coming on?', but mainly because of the sheer impossibility of any meaningful dialogue on the subject. Now I knew that being unable to talk about Ange hurt me even more than having to ignore 'Germanic Thought from Kant to Wittgenstein'. The implication of that was barely credible to me. I was astounded and even rather frightened to realise that Ange was more important to me than my masterpiece, my life's work, my raison d'être, but it's a fact, I knew at that moment that she was.

  I also realised that I had been fooling myself, that I couldn't tell my mother about Ange, not next week, not the week after, not ever. It might kill her.

  Now there was a thought. There was a thought.

  You're shocked? So was I.

  THIRTEEN

  'Here's another.'

  Yes, Ange was regaling Lawrence and Jane with pre-curry parrot jokes. I was less worried this time. My thoughts were that if the evening went well, that would be a bonus, and if it went badly, agonising though it would be, it would mean that there would be no more such evenings, and Ange and I would be able to develop our relationship in peace. I had a great sense of serenity that evening, and that, as I am sure you will realise by now, was rare for me. I had felt it from the moment I had seen her walking out of Oxford Station, a beaming smile on her lovely face. I had felt it necessary to hide just how deeply pleased I was to see her, and I'd had a feeling that she was also hiding how excited she was to be with me again, but maybe I was fooling myself.

  I'd also had to hide that I was relieved, hide that the days and nights since I had last seen her had been an agony, hide that it had taken every scrap of willpower I possessed to refrain from phoning her to see how she was, to find out what she'd been doing, to check that she was coming.

  So now I was off my guard, happy, exhilarated, ready to take my beloved's side in any arguments that might develop.

  'There's this bloke, right? . . . has this very naughty parrot, and he's going out, so he says to the parrot, "Any tricks from you today and you've had it, right?" And he goes out, and he comes home, and there's thirty hundredweight of coal dumped in the lounge.'

  'Sorry, what?' asked Lawrence. 'I didn't catch it. What was dumped?'

  'Coal.'

  'Oh . . . coal.'

  'Coal, in the lounge, on the pale carpet. So he rings the coalman up, and he says, "What's all this then? Why is there coal all over my carpet?", and the coalman says, "You ordered it this morning, told me to put it there", and he rings off. The bloke's puzzled, and then he sees the parrot looking mischievous, and he says, "You did it, didn't you? You ordered it." So he grabs the parrot, and nails it to the wall. "Right, you little green sod," he says, "you can stay there for a week." On the other wall there's this
crucifix, Jesus on the cross, and the parrot, he says to Jesus, "How long have you been there?" "Two thousand years," says Jesus. "Two thousand years? Blimey," says the parrot. "How much coal did you order?" '

  Ange giggled charmingly at her own story. I made sure that I laughed uproariously. The faces of Lawrence and Jane didn't crack.

  'Did you read Bentwood's piece about jokes and their value as a displacement activity?' said Jane. 'Very interesting.'

  'Yes, I did,' said Lawrence. 'I must confess that I thought he was using a sprat to catch a mackerel.'

  'Bentwood's sprats have more truth in them than other men's mackerels,' she responded, with a coy intellectual satisfaction which made me think that she must fancy Bentwood.

  'Jane's purpose in introducing Bentwood into the conversation, Ange, is to exclude you politely but utterly. It's La Recolte at Chittingbourne St Mary all over again,' I said.

  'Alan!' said Lawrence.

  'Bentwood, I should explain,' I continued, 'is a large and loquacious Welshman, brilliant but unreliable. A sort of Tons Thomas of philosophy.'

  'Tons Thomas?' said Lawrence.

  'We mentioned him last time,' I said. 'Surely you haven't forgotten the Mercurial Man Mountain from Merthyr?'

  'Are you making fun out of me?' said Ange.

  I was astounded. I had thought I was making fun of Lawrence and Jane.

  'No! No!'

  'You think it's so funny, don't you? International darts. Tons Thomas. Such a huge joke. Well, Tons is a good bloke, he's a nice guy and I like him.'

  'I know you do. You've slept with him.'

  Even before I'd finished saying it I realised that this was a very grave tactical error. The trouble was that I wasn't being tactical; my jealousy came from another source, swift and unbidden, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  'Yeah,' said Ange furiously, 'and I'm going to sleep with him again, right, because he's young and he's normal and he wants me for a bit more than my mind.'

  I still wasn't very worried. I was embarrassed by the row, yes, and I was embarrassed by her remarks about my wanting her only for her mind, yes, even at that moment I was concerned about my sexual image in front of my Head of Department and his wife.

  'Ange!' I said. 'I wasn't making fun of you. I wasn't.'

  She stood up, glared at me, turned and strode from the room.

  'Ange!'

  I went to pursue her, but Lawrence hurried into my path and stopped me.

  'No, Alan,' he said.

  'Let me go,' I shouted.

  I tried to push past him. He pushed me in return. I was stunned. I was furious.

  'Let me go,' I yelled again, and then I shouted, absurdly, 'It's a free country.'

  He continued to push me. I raised my right arm to try to hit him. He grabbed my arm and pushed it backwards. I tried to knee him in the groin but missed, and while I was off balance he gave me a great shove and I fell backwards into a chair. I kicked out and caught his leg with my foot. He gave an outraged 'ow' and I tried to scramble to my feet while he was hopping around in pain, but he recovered in time to shove me back into the chair. I didn't stand a chance. He was younger than me, and fitter, he had a personal trainer and cycled at weekends, and he had Jane hopping around at his side, waiting to put the high-heeled boot in if necessary. I couldn't believe what had happened, and I was panting so much that I was incapable of speech. I really wasn't fit. If I survived the night, I must start to take some exercise.

  Two minutes earlier there had been a civilised scene in this sitting room. Two academics and their ladies had been having a drink before sitting down to a famous curry. Now my lady had stormed out, I was fighting to get my breath, and my Head of Department had rolled up his trousers to examine his leg. How fragile is the order and calm with which we try to live our lives.

  As soon as he had established that his leg was still there, Lawrence came and stood over me, watching me trying to recover my breath.

  'I'm really sorry about that,' he said. 'Really sorry.'

  'So am I,' I said icily.

  'I know. Out of order. Absolutely no blame attached to you for your reaction, Alan. In fact I may say that I found your fighting spirit impressive in one your age. Not sure young Mallard would have had it in him.'

  That was so Lawrence, so . . . is the word 'snide'? To claim to be supporting me and to slip in a reference to young Mallard, who was being warmed up to be my nemesis.

  'I had to do that, Alan. Trust me. I did it for your own good.'

  I stood up, breathed deeply, began to be capable of speech. I gave Lawrence a dignified glare and blessed the fact that I am two and a half inches taller than him.

  'There are two remarks that I have never been able to stand,' I said. 'One is "Trust me" and the other is "I did it for your own good". It takes some kind of genius to use them both in the same sentence.'

  'Now look, Alan,' he said. 'Whether you are going to see her again or not, it's best not to go after her now. Believe me. I know about women.' He became conscious of Jane's look boring into him, and he added, 'From the old days.'

  I didn't deign to reply. It was too late to go after her now, anyway. She would have disappeared into the Oxford night.

  'Listen, Alan,' said Jane, who had watched the fracas with icy serenity. 'Don't think we like having to tell you this, but we feel we must. She isn't for you. Has it occurred to you, and this is going to make you angry with me, I know, but has it occurred to you that she might be a gold digger?'

  'She's digging in the wrong gulch if she is. I'm an academic, not a footballer.'

  'Believe us, Alan, she'd probably sleep with anybody.'

  'No. Only darts players. This is the age of specialisation.'

  'All right,' she said, 'but the fact is that she's practically a whore.'

  'That's very insulting,' I said.

  'Well you were pretty insulting to me.'

  'Yes, but only because you're a bitch.'

  If I had been a footballer, and not an academic, I would have felt that I had scored a goal. The development of the conversation had led to a position in which I had an open goal, couldn't miss, and as I put the ball into the net I felt a real sense of exhilaration. I had wanted to say that to Jane ever since I had known her.

  She stood up, slowly, carefully, with control.

  'I shall overlook that,' she said, opening her mouth less than she usually did when she spoke. 'I shall forget it. I will not let fifteen years of friendship be destroyed because of one moment of madness.'

  She strode from the room with dignity. I had to admit that to myself. I certainly wasn't going to admit it to Lawrence.

  Lawrence poured me some more of the Macon-Lugny, a generous measure, and, even though I knew that he was doing it so that he could pour himself a generous measure without looking greedy, I was grateful. I did actually believe that he had been trying to save me, and, even though I didn't want to be saved and didn't believe that I needed to be saved, I knew that there was at least a bit of integrity and affection behind it. And it was hard, ultimately, not to sympathise with him in his marriage to Jane, in his knowledge that his department didn't respect him, in his awareness that the Inspector Didcot Mysteries hadn't made the TV screen because they were what Ange – oh, Ange! – would have cheerfully called 'crap', and boring crap at that.