by David Nobbs
'I know, Mother, but you don't.'
Then, as naturally as if I was discussing the weather, I told her the story of Ange, more concisely than I've told it to you, but just as honestly. I spared myself no ridicule. I didn't skate over my moments of naïvety. I told her the lot, and she listened, and squeezed my hand with her frail, bony, veiny one, and ran her elderly fingers across the back of mine. Towards the end of my tale the tea arrived, but I carried on and we drank our tea without tasting it, and she didn't even notice that I hadn't brought out a cake.
There were all sorts of things that she might have said when I had finished. She took quite a long time before she said anything, and when she did speak what she said was a great surprise to me.
She said, 'I think I might have liked her.'
My mother and I had travelled a long way in an hour and a half. I stood up, and she stood up, and we just stood there in each other's arms for . . . oh, maybe three or four minutes. Three or four minutes in which we started to make up for fifty-five years of missed opportunities.
Then we continued to drink our tea, which had grown rather cold, and suddenly she remembered that there ought to have been cake.
'No cake today?' she asked.
'No. No cake today.'
'You naughty boy. You naughty, naughty boy.'
TWENTY-FIVE
I don't know how I managed to drive back to my garage. I was quaking. I couldn't believe what a narrow escape I'd had.
I suppose that sounds rather egotistical. After all, my mother had had an even narrower escape.
I set off back to my rooms, carrying the wretched cake. I mean, I couldn't just leave it in the car. If the garage was broken into, and the car stolen, and the burglar died, his family would sue. That's the kind of society we live in. It wasn't easy to carry the cake, and I wished that I hadn't left the empty bag at my mother's. I had to balance the blessed thing on one hand. If I pressed on it my fingers would sink into it, and might pick up some of the poison.
The cake looked beautiful and very inviting. A man whose face I vaguely recognised said, 'Hello, Alan, that looks good. I suppose a slice is out of the question.' I was embarrassed by the damned thing, but I didn't dare dump it in a refuse bin. Oxford has its share of tramps. I didn't fancy what would have amounted to a blind mercy killing.
I had to pass a baker's shop on my way to the college. The owner was standing at the door, taking a snatch of sunshine at a quiet moment, like an old dog. He looked at the cake and gave a wolf-whistle of admiration. I had never heard a cake get a wolf-whistle before, and it gave me an idea.
'I wonder if I could have a bag for this?' I asked.
'I'd be proud to let people think it was mine,' he said.
I felt better with the cake hidden from view, but not much. I felt faint. My legs felt as if they were made of lead. I had to sit down in the doorway of a dental surgery. A mother hurried her young child past me as fast as possible.
I couldn't believe it. A policeman was approaching. They are never around when you need them, but when they're the last thing you need, up they pop.
'I'm not drunk or drugged, officer. I just felt faint. It's the heat. I'm a philosophy don.'
'Have you any means of identification, sir?'
I showed him my driving licence, which was all that I had. It did not state that I was a philosophy don, and I wasn't sure that it satisfied him, because he went on to say, somewhat officiously, 'May I ask you what are the contents of your bag?'
'You may.'
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
'You asked if you might ask me what the contents of my bag are. You may. You are very welcome to.'
'Don't you get funny with me, sunshine,' he said.
'I'm being deliberately pedantic,' I said. 'If that doesn't prove that I'm a philosophy don, nothing will.'
I handed him the bag.
'It's a chocolate sponge,' I said. 'It's not poisoned.'
He smiled wearily, gave the cake a cursory examination, and handed the bag back to me.
'Please try to move on,' he said.
He helped me to my feet. My legs no longer felt like lead. They felt insubstantial, unreal, mirages. I moved them carefully, having no confidence that they would support me, but they did.
'I'll be all right now, officer,' I said. 'Thank you.'
I walked away from him as quickly as I could. I had not enjoyed being so close to him. I was, after all, a man who had intended to poison his mother. I was unfit to live.
I don't know how I got to my rooms. I felt that I was in one of those anxiety dreams in which one gets no nearer to one's destination, however fast one walks.
At last I was there. I took the cake out of the bag. I realised that I had no idea how to dispose of it. Even if I took it to the dump, someone might rescue it and eat it. At best, several gulls would die.
I put it on a plate, and sat it on my little kitchen table. It looked so good.
Of course. The obvious way to dispose of it was to eat it. Why hadn't I thought of that before? I was certain that I had lost Ange. I had nothing left to live for, and I didn't deserve to live. I had intended to kill my mother, that lovely, unhappy, unfulfilled woman whose whole life had been a disappointment, and whom I had misjudged so monstrously in my egotism.
I cut myself a slice. I was shaking. It looked so delicious. It turned out that I was good at baking after all.
I put the slice of cake on a plate. I took the plate in my hands.
I didn't want to die.
I put the plate down.
I didn't want to die, but I wanted not to live any more.
I picked up the plate.
My mother needed me. She needed me! I had to go on living.
I put the plate down again. I decided to put it in the bottom of my rubbish bin, but, before I could do so, the doorbell rang.
My doorbell was ringing.
My doorbell never rang.
I wouldn't answer.
It might be the police. 'A colleague has reported that you had a suspicious cake in a bag. We have reason to believe that it may be poisoned. You have been reported as buying weed killer in garden centres all over Oxfordshire.'
The bell rang again, insistently.
I wouldn't answer.
Ange! It might be Ange! It must be Ange! Nobody else ever called, except my students, and it hadn't been a student's knock. She had realised how much she loved me, how she couldn't live without me. This was my reward for not killing my mother.
'Coming'
I unlocked the door, which was an elaborate process, and even more elaborate than usual on this occasion, because in my excitement I was clumsy.
To expect to see one's beloved and be disappointed, that is cruel – but to expect to see one's beloved and find oneself staring into the bland, greedy, anxious, ambitious face of young Mallard, that was almost too much to bear.
'I wonder if I could come in, Alan?' he asked. 'I need your advice.'
I was flattered. Even at that moment of emotional turmoil I was flattered. Very few people have ever asked me for my advice.
'Come in,' I said.
The social conventions are very strong, and I heard myself offering him a cup of tea.
'That would be lovely,' he exaggerated.
I went into my little kitchen and immediately saw the cake. I was about to pick it up when I realised that he had followed me.
I put the kettle on and ignored the cake. I was irritated that he had followed me into the kitchen and that he was standing so close to me. I believe this is called crowding someone, though whether one person can become a crowd is extremely dubious. Perhaps 'invading my space' describes it better. I would have felt that young Mallard was invading my space if we were sitting on opposite sides of the Albert Hall, so this was well nigh intolerable.
'You've probably heard that I made a bit of a cock-up of the Ferdinand Brinsley,' he said.
The gas wouldn't light.
'Let me do it,' he sai
d.
The bloody thing lit for him. It would. I had never liked it.
'I did hear that it didn't go down so well,' I said. 'I was really sorry.'
When one hates someone, one has to tell a lot of lies, and each lie makes one hate them more. It really is a vicious circle.
'It was my first big lecture.'
'Well, at least you've broken your duck, Mallard,' I said. It was said for Ange, absent though she was.
'Well, there is that,' he said, missing the humour, if you can call it that, 'but frankly, Alan, I feel that I've lost my way. I'd welcome your advice.'
'Why me?'
'Well, you're experienced. You have a reputation. The world is agog for your book on Germanic philosophy.'
'Agog? Surely not?'
'In some quarters. Everyone says that you have a very fine mind but have not yet produced that definitive work. You've been fourteen years on it, I'm told. It's going to be a great event, Alan. So I wondered if I could . . . .this is a frightful imposition . . . ask you to read some of my stuff and help me, put me on the right road.'
'Well . . .'
This was the last thing I wanted. It was one more reason to eat that cake. I recalled a phrase that Lawrence used about him when he wanted to puncture Jane's delicacy.
'A mallard up shit creek without a paddle,' I said. 'That's serious. I don't know. I really don't know. I am rather busy.'
I had finished making the tea. I took the tray into my sitting room. It was a very ordinary college scene, two dons having tea in a book-lined room. Ordinary except for that bloody cake, sitting there on the kitchen table, staring at me even when I wasn't in the room, following me about.
'Aren't you going to offer me a slice of that delicious-looking cake I saw in your kitchen?' asked young Mallard.
He really did look so young, much younger than his thirty years. I realised that he was greedy too. His eyes glinted with lust for cake.
'No,' I said. 'I'm not.'
He went pink He looked even younger when he was pink.
'Oh?' he said. 'May I ask why not?'
'Yes, you may.'
I wasn't just being pedantic. I was wondering rather furiously what I could possibly say.
'Oh God,' he said. 'I forgot you're known for your pedantry. Why are you not offering me a slice of cake?'
I couldn't say, 'Because it's poisoned.' I said, 'Because I'm fifty-five and you're thirty. Because you're young. Because you're greedy. Because you're a mallard that wanted to fly before he could swim. Because I hate you.'
'Well!' he said. 'Well!' He had gone bright red. 'I knew it was a mistake. I knew you were a bastard.'
He walked out of my rooms and tried to slam the door behind him, but the heavy doors on those old staircases don't slam.
I felt sorry for him at that moment. The moment I had told him that I hated him, I didn't hate him any more. Hate is like that. But what else could I have done? I couldn't kill him, a young man with most of his life before him. I couldn't have sat there and watched him killing himself. Or taken a slice too, so that we died together. Mystery of Sponge Dons' Deaths. That couldn't happen.
When he had gone I started to shake. I shoved the cake into the bottom of my rubbish bag, and took the bag out to my dustbin, my very own dustbin marked 'Calcutt'.
Such was my state that, the moment I had removed the cake, I wanted to eat it. Such was my confusion that I didn't go for it, because I felt that it might be unsafe to eat having been in the bin. When I realised this I felt quite disgusted with myself for my lack of mental clarity. How could I ever have had any pretence to writing a great book on philosophy?
I knew what I had to do. I had to rid myself of an intolerable burden – my pretension, my delusion, my career, my book.
You will be amazed that I had only one copy, but I had written it in longhand. My study on that stone staircase in that stone building was as fire-proof as any room could ever be, nobody steals from the studies of dons, nobody would want to steal my book even if they did, and I would have all the time in the world to have a copy made when I had finished it.
For several years now I have possessed a shredder, which cuts documents in two different directions so that it's impossible for them to be pieced together. I use it for things I intend to throw away – financial documents, bank statements, early drafts of articles for magazines.
I fetched 'Germanic Thought from Kant to Wittgenstein' from my desk and I began to shred it. I cried a bit as I did it, but once or twice I laughed, with a laugh that was probably not entirely sane. It was exhilarating, though, even on that desperate night, to get rid of all this unoriginal, tedious nonsense on which I had wasted the last fourteen years of what I exaggeratedly refer to as my life. Germanic. I'd had to put that, instead of German, because bloody Wittgenstein had gone and been born Austrian, ruining my title, the inconsiderate bastard.
It took a long time, because I kept having to empty the shredder. The pile of tiny pieces of paper grew larger and larger all around me. Eventually it got ridiculous and I went to a cupboard where I keep a large roll of black bags – I am a cautious man. I stock everything in bulk. I have three huge bottles of washing up liquid – and I started to shove the shredded remains of my life's work into the bags.
I went to bed just after five thirty, feeling desperate, yet also liberated. I felt angrily light-headed, anxiously relieved and utterly exhausted.
I woke suddenly to the realisation that I had almost killed my mother, which, curiously, seemed much more wicked now that I hadn't done it. It was a glorious morning of high summer, utterly incongruous. As I walked to fetch the Mem Saab, Oxford was full of the delicious scent of new-mown grass. I drove along the Abingdon Road to the rubbish dump, or the Recycling Centre, as it is called in these enlightened days.
The skips were huddled in the centre of the dump like carts in a Western shoot-out. I drove around the outside of the group, noting the signs on them. Rubble. Fridges and Freezers. Bikes. Soft Plastics. Textiles. Newspapers and Magazines. Landfill. Green Waste. Bric-a-brac. Cardboard. Glass.
I found myself back at the starting point and started a second circuit.
I knew that my book was rubbish, but I didn't know what kind of rubbish it was.
I parked under some scruffy trees, which were whispering gently in the wind as if discussing my predicament, and entered a dirty Portakabin. An immense man in an oily vest sat at a desk.
'Excuse me,' I said.
'Yes?' he said without looking up.
'Erm . . .' I began, feeling very foolish. 'I'm throwing away a lot of shredded paper, but it's wrapped in black bags and I'm not quite sure where I should put it.'
'Landfill,' he said, and again he didn't look up.
Landfill! I ask you. Nobody could say that I'm conceited about my work, but . . . landfill. Fourteen years of work.
I had passed the Landfill skip, which added to my anger. Back in my car, I roared off on my third lap, Schumacher at last. I screamed to a halt, and suddenly my anger left me.
