Obstacles to Young Love

by David Nobbs

  There is no point now in his avoiding telling the world that he loves her. There is no point. But he doesn’t. He can’t.

  His speech has stunned the table. In fact, it’s stunned the restaurant. The four Muslims at the table at the back are gawping. The rather drunken lovers behind them are gawping. The six men on a night out, whose laughter at the next table has been long, coarse and harsh, burst into applause. They’ve had a show, and they’ve enjoyed it.

  Colin fumes. Naomi still looks astonished. Nick is silent, momentarily unable to remember any better moment from the halcyon days of the industry. Melanie Cass-Wardrobe looks at him in a new way, realising that there is nothing trivial in his rejection of her, they simply met on the wrong night.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Timothy. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Conversation resumes, uncertainly, uneasily, throughout the table and the restaurant. Timothy tries to chew a piece of lamb. He can’t. It won’t go down. He begins to sweat. He starts to feel icy cold. He feels dizzy, rather faint, colder still and colder. Sweat pours off him. The colder he feels, the more he sweats.

  He’s frightened. He turns away and hurries towards the gents. He wants to be alone. Nobody follows. They think he’s drunk. They think he’s rushing to be sick.

  He just manages to get to the toilet before his legs give out. He falls forward, his head crashes into one of the urinals, and he slips onto the floor. He tries to stand, just manages it, just makes it to one of the two cubicles, collapses to the floor again. He scrambles to his feet, and sits on the bowl. The sweat is now streaming off him.

  The door into the toilet area opens and Naomi appears. She looks extremely worried. Colin follows behind.

  ‘Ring for an ambulance,’ she calls.

  Timothy tries to say no, but can’t, can’t get the word out.

  Colin disappears.

  Timothy tries to stand. His feet give away, he crumples to the floor. Naomi tries to hold him and can’t.

  He passes out.

  He comes round. Naomi and Melanie are looking at him anxiously. Other people from the table are trying to peep in and see how he is. Dimly he hears Nick say, ‘I knew a director who fainted seventeen times on one shoot, and he won a Bafta.’

  He sits on the cold floor. His skin is clammy but no longer dripping. He doesn’t feel quite so cold.

  ‘I feel a bit better,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ says Naomi.

  ‘That’s good,’ says Melanie.

  There is just room in the crowded cubicle for them to bend down, one at either side of him, and take a hand. Naomi takes his right hand, Melanie his left. He sits there and lets his hands be stroked, one by the woman he wants, who doesn’t want him, and one by the woman he doesn’t want, who does want him.

  Naomi gets a tissue and gently, oh, so gently, wipes some of the dried sweat from his forehead.

  The paramedics arrive, the crowd disperses, and they soon have him on a stretcher.

  They lead him out through the shocked restaurant. He’s feeling much better now, and intends to have the last word.

  He lifts his head just a little, so that he can see the remains of their table, the six cynical young men, the two drunken lovers, and the four Muslims.

  ‘Don’t have the lamb dhansak,’ he says.

  PART FIVE

  Second Time Around 1995–1999

  It’s hard to imagine a worse moment to start having what the medical profession calls ‘vaso-vagal incidents’ and the rest of us describe as ‘panic attacks’ than on the evening of one’s first meeting for well over a decade with the woman one has loved, without always realising it, for the whole of one’s adult life.

  Of course, as he is carried out of the Indian restaurant on that fateful evening, Timothy believes, despite his show of spirit in saying, ‘Don’t have the lamb dhansak,’ that he may be suffering from something far worse than a panic attack. He quite expects a diagnosis of serious heart problems, or even a brain tumour.

  On his arrival at the hospital his blood pressure is so low that it can barely sustain life. They inject him with steroids before they even try to find him a bed.

  The next day he is given exhaustive and exhausting tests. He’s wheeled down long, draughty corridors and round endless steep corners by various porters. One of them looks so fragile that Timothy, much recovered after a night’s sleep, feels like offering to change places with him. Another clearly has secret ambitions to become a leading figure in Formula One. How they avoid a collision with a trolley carrying an unconscious woman from the operating theatre Timothy will never know. He sits in several lifts, his bare legs numb with cold, smiling at other people’s tense visitors and at patients who look far more ill than he. He’s X-rayed, photographed, injected and strapped to fearsome machines. He’s moved slowly through tubes so narrow that it seems impossible for him not to become stuck. Twice he’s taken past the double doors to a restaurant, from which there comes an odious smell of overcooked animal. He misses lunch, and is grateful. He’s addressed as Timothy, Tim, Dear, Love, Pet, Darling, Mr Pickering and twice, rather alarmingly, Mr Townsend. He regularly waits for long periods, a cold wind blowing up his skimpy hospital nightshirt towards his shrivelled prick, outside doors that look extremely unlikely to open. And all the time he hopes, irrationally, to see Colin brought in on a stretcher, fighting for his life. And each time that he’s returned to his ward, only to find that he’s already late for somewhere else, he hopes to see Naomi there, anxiously waiting for him. Or even Melanie Cass-Wardrobe, with her legs that go on for ever.

  At the end of this long day, aching and shivering and starving, craving nourishing food, he attacks a reconstituted and remorselessly grey meat and potato pie with ill-advised enthusiasm and is amazed that nobody in this great hospital has been able to detect something as simple as a bleeding heart.

  ‘Oh, I forgot,’ the fat, jolly nurse says just before she goes off duty. ‘A young woman rang.’

  ‘Was she called Naomi?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Could she have been called Melanie?’

  ‘No. I’d have remembered that because my sister’s best friend is a Melanie and she’s just emigrated to Tasmania only yesterday, so I’d have thought of her. Because I met her once or twice for a drink on a Tuesday, because my sister and I always go out on a Tuesday. She’s going to miss her. It hasn’t sunk in yet.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ Irritation shows in Timothy’s voice, and the fat nurse’s look reveals just for a moment that she is capable of being much less jolly. ‘What did Naomi say?’

  ‘What did she say now? I’m like working backwards, because I said, “He’s fine today. They think it’s just like a panic attack,” sort of thing, so she must have asked how you were sort of thing.’

  ‘Did she say anything, you know, when you told her I was fine? How did she react?’

  ‘Oh, she was pleased. Very pleased. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but, no, she was pleased. Oh, yeah, that’s right. She said she’d like be sending you some pamphlets sort of thing.’

  ‘Thank you. So, is that what I’ve had, then? Just a panic attack?’

  ‘I’m not a doctor, darling, but I’d say so. Doctor may say something different tomorrow. Wouldn’t think so, though. Night night.’

  The nurse moves off, and Timothy feels a spasm of real depression. He wants love, not pamphlets.

  The nurse may sense something of this, because she turns back and says, ‘She sounded nice.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Timothy says gloomily. ‘She is nice. Very nice.’

  He spends a disturbed night listening to a man dying, and in the morning the registrar confirms what the nurse said. ‘You had an emotional evening, I gather. A lot of stress, evidently. Deep feelings, I’m told. Too much to drink. Eating too late. Spicy food, hard to digest. You didn’t treat your body well, and it felt it had had enough. It rebelled. It closed down. Let this be a lesson to you. Never forget it. Bodies have minds of thei
r own. Nothing wrong with you. You can go home.’

  He feels relieved but also, in a curious way, disappointed. It’s as if he’s been cheated of the central role in a drama. He’s become a bit player in a hospital soap, much like Naomi last night in her sitcom.

  Everything comes back to Naomi.

  ‘Home. You can go home.’

  The words he has longed for. The words he has dreaded.

  Three days later, when he already feels that he has been back in his old life for half a century, a young woman calls at the…the what? Timothy is never quite sure what to call his place of business. ‘The office’ doesn’t seem right, nor ‘the surgery’. He tries ‘the taxidermery’, but that sounds ridiculous. What about his ‘home’? But it doesn’t feel like a home. He ends up simply referring to it as ‘number ninety-six’, unimaginative though that is.

  The young woman is as tall as him. She has striking eyes, large and green, and her black, straight hair falls almost to her waist. What he notices above all, though, is how full her cheeks are. This makes her face seem very soft and he has a ridiculous desire to place his cheek against hers then and there.

  Her name is Hannah.

  ‘How much would you charge to stuff a salmon?’ she asks. ‘It’s to be a surprise for my dad, if I can afford it.’

  ‘We don’t stuff,’ says Timothy sniffily. ‘We model.’

  It’s not a propitious first remark to make to the woman who will become one’s second wife.

  Naomi would not look back on her second wedding day as one of the highlights of her life. In fact, she wouldn’t even look back on it as one of the highlights among her wedding days. She finds its scale embarrassingly small, and she isn’t even entirely sure that she’s marrying the right man.

  Present in the rather cavernous registry office, dwarfed by rows of empty, unlovely chairs, even though thirty chairs have been tactfully removed and stacked in the basement, are just fifteen people. The registrar, of course, a brisk woman with enormous breasts and a bossy manner. Colin and Naomi, naturally, Naomi in green and purple and Colin looking constricted in a dark suit and bright red tie. Naomi’s father, William, his face weatherbeaten from a month’s sailing. Her daughter Emily, who had her eleventh birthday last week. Her brother Julian, unexpectedly unaccompanied. Clive and Antoine, hotfoot from Paris. Rosie, an acting friend of Naomi’s, who played the wife of the cuckoo-clock maker in Cobblers in Koblenz. Glenda, the midwife in Nappy Ever After and Naomi’s only other real thespian friend (and lesbian, as it happened). Colin’s father, clothes shop owner Michael and his second wife Gloria. His brother Taylor, who was also his best man. His schoolfriend and fellow West Ham supporter Vince Cosgrove. And Lennie Welsh, a struggling stand-up comedian for whom Colin contributed occasional one-liners.

  There is just one telegram. It’s from Colin’s first wife. It reads, ‘Wishing you all the best. Hope the bitch gets food poisoning.’ This telegram is not read out.

  Naomi has an uneasy feeling that this is unusual among weddings in that her family believe that, if she is not exactly marrying beneath her, she could and should have done better, and Colin’s family feel exactly the same.

  But if she has had any doubts about marrying Colin, she has kept them well hidden even from herself. They have been happy together, seeing films and plays, eating and drinking, and the sex has been good. Get Stuffed, although it has brought them together, is little more than a hack job, which will lead rapidly to better things. Colin has great respect for his own talent: there are great things in him, he will write wonderful drama series providing a host of rewarding roles for Naomi. Their writer – actor partnership will go down in theatrical legend. In time everyone will forget Get Stuffed.

  And then, just after they have tied the knot in the dry registry office manner, just when they are about to show, in their affection and excitement, that deep down this actually is a great day in their lives, Naomi sees Timothy, sees him as he was at the BBC Television Centre, hears his words, ‘I hated seeing you being kissed by that bloke all the time.’ Regret sweeps over her. There is a great pit in her stomach and the rest of her body is sinking into it. It’s as brief as an earthquake. And then it’s over, it’s gone, she’s just standing there as normal in this prosaic room, she is making all the noises of delight, there are outbreaks of kissing on all sides, and everything is as it was before. Except that, after an earthquake, nothing is as it was before.

  The reception is held in a little Italian restaurant round the corner from Colin and Naomi’s flat. This is Colin’s idea. It’s what he wants. He hates formality, dreads convention, abhors solemnity and pomp. It isn’t even a private room, just a large alcove to the side of the restaurant. Nor is the food particularly good. But the champagne and the wine flow, and the food is just good enough, and the waiters are very cheery. In fact, they are rather more cheery than the wedding guests. ‘Lovely cannelloni for the lovely bride.’ ‘Oh, nice steak for the groom, give you energy, no?’ ‘Yes, quite possibly “no”, actually,’ says Colin. ‘Oh, you English, you are like the table. You are reserved.’ The waiter laughs uproariously.

  People move places between courses, so that everyone gets a chance to talk to everyone else. It’s a good idea, in theory, but in practice it means that just as tongues are loosening and subjects of mutual interest are being discovered, the relationship is nipped in the bud and you are saying, ‘So where do you live?’ to someone whose place of residence is of no possible interest to you.

  Naomi chats to Colin’s father and discovers many fascinating details about the difficulty of anticipating which colours will be in fashion when buying shirts for the new autumn season. She listens to his second wife’s hope that Colin will not suffer from the same snoring problem that seems to assailed all the male members of the clan after the age of thirty. She sits beside Taylor for the main course and is rather dismayed to discover just how keen Colin is on football, a subject he has hitherto barely mentioned. For dessert she gets Vince on one side and sails with him into the unexplored waters of West Ham’s defensive frailty. On the other side she has Emily, who says, ‘I think this wedding has come a bit soon for you, Mum. You should have become a star first. Then you could have married in a castle and had all the other members of the National Theatre there.’ Naomi asks her how she’s getting on with Colin. Emily clams up and says, ‘All right, thank you.’ Naomi has heard Colin saying, ‘You’re quite tall, aren’t you?’ which is just the sort of remark children loathe, so she says, ‘Give him time, darling,’ which puzzles Emily.

  Over the coffee and grappa Naomi sits next to Glenda, who says, ‘Your brother kept putting his hand on my knee. I had to tell him I’m a lesbian. Didn’t get another word out of him.’

  As the party begins to break up, Antoine says, ‘I haven’t had a chance to have a word. Are you going to be happy, Naomi?’

  When Clive says, ‘I really hope this works out really well for you, I really do,’ Naomi begins to get really worried.

  Rosie kisses Naomi on both cheeks and says, ‘Your brother kept putting his hand on my knee. I had to pretend I was a lesbian. He said, “Fuck me, what’s wrong with that profession of yours?”’

  Julian kisses Naomi and strokes her bum very briefly and says, ‘Ah, well. I wouldn’t think anybody who married my sister was good enough for her, but I think he could turn out be an improvement on Simon.’

  Naomi holds her father in a determined hug. This is one day when he isn’t going to get away with not being tactile. She says, ‘Do you know you’ve got odd socks on?’ He winces and says, ‘I’m not actually very good at this widowhood caper.’

  Afterwards, several of the guests agree that it was strange, but they can’t remember the stand-up comedian making even one faintly amusing remark throughout the whole event.

  The happy couple set off for a honeymoon in Majorca.

  Timothy sits with Hannah in a cosy corner of the Happy Valley Chinese Restaurant. He is awash with jasmine tea and frustration. It is, aft
er all, many years since that third night in Earls Court, when he told Naomi that sex outside marriage is wrong. He tries not to have regrets about the past, but how he has come to regret that.

  He runs his hand up her thigh under the table. Her thighs and hips are broad. Plenty of kissing there.

  She frowns.

  ‘Timothy! Behave!’ she says.

  He wonders if she knows that when she is matronly it excites him even more. He doesn’t know if he can stand much more of this.

  More food arrives. They have ordered too much.

  They always order too much.

  This is their eleventh meal out, and their fifth at the Happy Valley. It’s their favourite. They love the crispy duck and the jasmine tea. He still isn’t a big drinker, despite the Pennine Piss-ups, and she is almost teetotal, so at restaurants of other nationalities they are never quite sure what to drink.

  It’s a Sunday evening, a quiet time in the Happy Valley. They have spent the whole day together. They have driven out to Troughton Hall, a stately home so large that there are rumours of the death of a small boy from starvation during a game of hide-and-seek. The paintings and tapestries and the Chippendale chairs and the Adam ceilings have exhausted Timothy, and then there has been the pain in his balls, which has built up through the long day till he could hardly stand up straight as the guide pointed out the Rubens in the Long Gallery. At the sight of the nude in the Rubens painting Timothy almost passed out. This can’t go on.

  After returning from the countryside, they called in at number ninety-six, and prepared Roly’s tea together.

  ‘Dad always comes first,’ Timothy has told her.

  He swings the lazy Susan round to bring the thin, delicate pancakes round towards him. He takes slices of the chilled cucumber and spring onion, spreads the luscious, spicy, sticky sauce, puts a few pieces of the crispy duck on top, rolls the pancake up, takes a bite and sees half the pancake’s innards fall out onto his plate. Why can’t he do it delicately, like her?