Pratt a Manger

by David Nobbs

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ mouthed her Italian sculptor husband Guiseppe, who was also a great deal prettier than Stubbs or Munnings.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang Nigel (Tosser) Pilkington-Brick, Camilla’s father, who had shared a study with Lampo at Dalton College, where Henry had been their fag. Nigel couldn’t have opened his mouth wider or with more apparent emotion if he’d been in close-up on Songs of Praise. Beside him, his second wife Felicity looked pale and sang palely.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ trilled Denzil Ackerman in a shrill little voice. His parchment skin was yellow and more cracked than ever. He looked his eighty-five years. He looked gaunt. ‘Oh, Lampo, do not destroy this man,’ breathed Henry silently.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang Ted Plunkett, his former friend and colleague on the Thurmarsh Evening Argus, and his wife Helen, still showing traces of glamour even at sixty-two. Helen sang with fervour and some style, Ted with as little movement of the mouth as was consistent with the minimum of social decorum. Ted’s hair was white now, but Helen’s was dyed a rich, golden brown. She wasn’t going to give her looks up without a fight.

  ‘And so say all of us,’ they roared.

  ‘And so say all of us.’

  And Henry cried. Tears streamed down his face. The guests all thought it was just the emotion overcoming him, but Hilary knew that it was more than that and gave him one of her looks, love tinged with scepticism. He sometimes had the uneasy feeling that she could read his mind.

  ‘Far too often I haven’t been a jolly good fellow,’ Henry was thinking. ‘I have to be a jolly good fellow all the time from now on.’

  It wasn’t nice to remember that he had been looking down Nicky’s cleavage only that morning, barely seven hours ago.

  There could be no question of his ever agreeing to appear on television. It would ‘lead to things’ as Cousin Hilda, his surrogate mother, might have said.

  He pulled a pile of old tissues out of his pocket. Several fluttered to the ground. He blew his nose on the rest of them. Hilary glared at him. He picked up the stray tissues, slipped them into his left-hand trouser pocket, got a clean hankie from his right-hand pocket and blew his nose into that.

  As he was picking up the tissues he caught Mrs Hargreaves’s eye. She had the same look in her eyes as she had always had on meeting Henry, a look compounded equally of affection, horror and bravery.

  One day, before I die, I will be elegant in the presence of Mrs Hargreaves, thought Henry.

  ‘You look as wonderful as ever, Mrs Hargreaves,’ he said, and indeed in her mid-eighties she was still a very elegant woman.

  ‘Henry!’ she admonished with a smile. ‘Don’t you think after forty-five years you ought to find it in you to call me Celia?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t see you as a Celia. You’re far too beautiful to be a Celia.’

  Celia Hargreaves’s eyes gleamed, but there was more mockery in them than Henry liked.

  ‘Who would have thought you’d ever turn into such a smooth speaker?’ she said, and he sensed her unspoken continuation of ‘I think I rather preferred you as you were.’

  James Hargreaves was bent and frail. He had shrunk. He looked an ill man. Even doctors end up needing doctors. To Henry he had always represented the epitome of suave masculine sophistication. To feel pity for him seemed to be against the natural order of things.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ he said.

  The retired brain surgeon waved away this irrelevancy as if it was an annoying fly, and said, ‘How’s your greasy spoon doing?’

  ‘James!’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘It is not a greasy spoon. Is it, Henry?’

  ‘Hardly!’ said Henry. ‘They even want me to go on TV in one of these celebrity chef programmes.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said James Hargreaves unflatteringly.

  Maybe I’ll have to, thought Henry. I really am fed up with being patronised.

  ‘It’s such a shame Paul and Christobel couldn’t be here,’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘They’re in the Seychelles.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ said Henry.

  James Hargreaves frowned and Henry’s eyes met Celia’s and he knew that she was laughing inwardly at the memory of past evenings when Henry had been rude and combative. He felt a blush of shame. Oh God, Henry, please, you’re sixty, don’t blush.

  ‘You and Paul seem to have rather drifted apart,’ said Celia.

  ‘Not really. We just have busy lives.’ Come off it, Henry. You know you have. You mock because Paul married a lawyer when he was studying law and a doctor after he’d changed to medicine. You call their home Bedsyde Manor, which infuriates them. You keep up with his parents because they represent an image of beautiful living and … be honest … because you once had sexual fantasies about Celia and still thirst for her approval.

  ‘I have to be grateful to Paul, though,’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t been friends with him at school I’d never have met you. Or Diana.’

  ‘And we’re glad you did, despite everything, aren’t we, James?’ said Celia Hargreaves.

  ‘What? Oh! Yes! Absolutely! Yes! Definitely!’ said James Hargreaves, frail retired brain surgeon, each exclamation mark confirming Henry’s belief that the man couldn’t stand him.

  He saw his ex-wife moving across the room, on her own, towards Denzil. This was his chance of a word out of Gunter’s earshot.

  ‘Diana!’ he said, intercepting her. It was neatly done, he was so much more accomplished socially now. His only mistake was to take a canapé en route, so that his ‘And how’s the sexy Mrs Axelburger this evening?’ was mouthed through hard-boiled egg and caviar. Even as he said it he realised that Diana didn’t look at all sexy any more. She had put on weight. She looked prosperous and Swiss.

  ‘Henry!’ admonished Diana, echoing her mother, and brushing crumbs from Henry’s canapé off the sleeve of her striking purple outfit. ‘You think it’s so amusing to mock. “Marrying a Swiss dentist. Surely she could have got something more exciting?” You show up how narrow and prejudiced you really are.’

  ‘Sorry.’ His canapé finished, he was now free to kiss her.

  ‘M’mm!’ she went, as people do when they want you to believe that they are enjoying the experience of being kissed by you more than they actually are. ‘M’mm!’

  ‘Diana? Are you happy? Truly?’

  ‘Happier than I’ve ever been, Henry. Truly.’ She laid an affectionate hand on his sleeve. She had two very expensive rings on her affectionate hand. ‘Over the weeks. Over the months. Over the years.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What I mean is, day in, day out, I’m very happy. There aren’t quite the peaks there were with you …’

  ‘Ironic, in Switzerland.’

  ‘Henry, I’m trying to answer a serious question very seriously. When will you grow up? At our best, those were the happiest moments I’ve ever had. But at our worst, Henry, oh my God.’

  ‘Your teeth look well cared for, anyway.’

  Diana hit him across the cheek, gently, affectionately, but with just a little irritation.

  ‘I’m paying you a kind of compliment in a funny sort of way,’ she said. ‘Can you still not cope with that sort of thing?’

  ‘Give me a chance,’ he said. ‘I’m only sixty.’

  ‘You’re looking fine, Denzil,’ he said, as he continued his regal tour of the room, his glass replenished, his lies mounting in the face of the relentless ravages of time.

  ‘Nonsense. I’m obscenely old and I look it and I hate it. My face is like crumpled yellowing old paper. I look like an old copy of the Manchester Guardian. I disgust me. Lampo is devastated that he can’t come, Henry.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh, but he is. Only something absolutely unavoidable would have kept him away.’

  ‘Ah.’

  A brief silence fell between them, as if they had done enough talking for one lifetime.

  ‘Have y
ou found any good biscuit tins lately?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My little hobby bores you rigid, and you only toss it in when the conversation is seriously flagging. I’ve never known it to crop up quite so swiftly. I’m becoming a bore. I’ve lived too long.’

  ‘Nonsense. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was an unwelcome subject.’

  ‘No, no. No, it really isn’t, actually. I found a really sweet little tin in a bric-a-brac shop in Abingdon. It’s from the Darjeeling Shortbread Company. It has a picture of a huge Indian in a turban.’

  ‘Fabulous. That’s great, Denzil. What a find. Excuse me, I must have a word with my daughter.’

  ‘Kate!’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘You look …’

  ‘What, Dad?’

  ‘Well, lovely, of course, despite …’

  ‘Despite what?’

  ‘Well … dressing down to hide your loveliness, darling.’

  ‘Sorry, but I had to come straight from the theatre.’

  Kate was the artistic director of the Umbrella Theatre in Kilburn.

  It hurt Henry that her wonderful smile wasn’t being beamed at some lovely young man. It seemed such a waste in a sad world. He couldn’t resist asking her about this, as usual, even though he knew that it would irritate her, as usual.

  ‘So, is there still no …?’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were going to ask if there’s still nobody in my life. Do try to start treating me as an adult. I’m almost thirty-eight.’

  ‘Well, exactly. And …’

  ‘And I’ll soon be too old to have babies. Dad, accept it. You are never going to hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet.’

  She walked away, but came back immediately.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to spoil your great day. It’s just that I just can’t believe …’

  ‘What? What can’t you just believe?’

  ‘That at sixty you’re still so obsessed with sex.’

  The hum of conversation grew steadily louder. The champagne seemed inexhaustible. Henry chatted to Ted and Helen. He was amazed that Hilary had invited them. It was thirty-five years since they’d been colleagues on the Thurmarsh Evening Argus, but Hilary knew that Henry had fancied Helen for most of half a lifetime, and had finally made love to her on a snooker table, dramatically scuppering his political career before it had begun, and all for a moment of pleasure which he’d been too drunk to remember. Were her legs still beautiful at sixty-two, he wondered.

  Ted looked at him sourly, Helen looked at him coquettishly, Henry looked at Ted sourly, Helen looked at Ted sourly, Henry tried not to look at Helen at all, but it was impossible. Those pearly grey eyes were magnets. The lips had thinned with age, but retained their pert, blatant invitation.

  Hilary joined them.

  ‘I hope you approve of my inviting Ted and Helen,’ she said to Henry.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I think it’s lovely.’

  ‘I wanted to show how much I trust you now,’ said Hilary, smiling sweetly at Helen.

  Ted scowled. Henry remembered Nicky’s cleavage and felt that he’d been punched in the stomach.

  Before they went in to dinner, Henry went to the loo, where he telephoned the Café to make sure Greg and Michelle were coping. He knew that Hilary didn’t think he trusted them enough, so he spoke very quietly.

  He gasped as he entered the dining room. He couldn’t believe how it had been transformed while he was upstairs with Hilary. The great table, lit only by candlelight, was beautifully laid. Seventeen napkins had been folded like swans. Seventeen place mats depicted the paintings of Sisley, to whom Henry had been introduced by Mr and Mrs Hargreaves. Seventeen elegant name tags, illustrated with a small painting of the Café Henry, revealed where people were to sit. The painting was by Camilla.

  The guests took their allotted seats, with gasps of pleasure at the brilliance of the scene, as the rain beat impotently on the wide window of the elegant yet cheery room.

  ‘Who’s missing?’ asked Helen. ‘Why is there an empty place?’

  Hilary looked rather nervously at Henry across the table.

  ‘It’s for Benedict,’ she explained. ‘For Diana and Nigel’s son, who became Henry’s son and therefore my son.’

  Diana gasped, and Henry had the feeling that in her heaven of cow bells, cuckoo clocks and substantial dental invoices she had almost forgotten that she had a lost son.

  ‘Will you say a few words, darling?’ asked Hilary.

  This was a great shock to Henry.

  ‘Er … well … yes. Yes, of course,’ he said.

  He had absolutely no idea what he was going to say.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what to say,’ he began. He had learnt to rely on honesty when all else seemed to fail. ‘I wasn’t expecting this. Well, of course I wasn’t. I wasn’t expecting any of this. I’m completely overwhelmed.

  ‘Well, Helen, Benedict was the victim of … of the marital difficulties of Diana and Toss— Nigel. It wouldn’t be right to go into that tonight, with Diana and Nigel both here, but Benedict resented me, and he resented his mother for marrying me. He went badly off the rails.’

  He avoided looking at Kate, who had run off with her half-brother when she was sixteen. Was that, it occurred to him now, an element in her renunciation of sex?

  ‘He disappeared. We lost all trace of him until last year, when he attacked me and tried to kill me at King’s Cross Station. That beautiful boy … and he was beautiful, he was so beautiful … was drunk, drugged and deranged.

  ‘We don’t know if Benedict is alive or dead. There is a great black hole in the middle of our family’s galaxy. We’ve tried to find him, perhaps not hard enough. We lead busy lives. I can’t even be sure that he knew who I was when he tried to kill me, though I suspect, from his fury, that he did.

  ‘My dear wife is a very special person and I am sure that her purpose in laying a place for Benedict is to say to him, across the ether, “Dear son, there is still a place for you in this house.” Of course there is.

  ‘I once believed in God. I find myself unable to do so now, but I also find myself unable … on virtually every issue I think about, actually … to be utterly confident that I am right. There’s nothing wrong with doubt. Socrates and Jesus had doubts. Kilroy Silk and Jeffrey Archer don’t. I think that proves my point. So, I say to you, Lord, if you exist, forgive my doubts and bring Benedict back home.’

  His voice cracked. The tears were flowing again. He didn’t mind. Stiff upper lips seemed to him as old-fashioned as galoshes and Brown Windsor soup. He looked round the table as he blew his nose. It was difficult to see clearly, but he was certain that Kate and Camilla and Hilary were crying, possibly Diana and Jack as well.

  ‘Right. The emotional bit’s over,’ he continued. ‘Let’s all get pissed – but before we do, and before the place setting is removed, having done its symbolic job, may I ask you all to stand and raise a glass to Benedict.’

  They all stood, raised their glasses and said, ‘To Benedict.’ Nigel, Benedict’s father, said it loudest of all, but to Henry his expression looked like that of a politician at the funeral of someone he was known to dislike.

  There was a brief, stunned silence, and then applause, which began self-consciously and ended fervently.

  The meal was delicious but conventional. Hilary hadn’t wanted the caterers to outshine Henry. There was smoked salmon, guinea fowl in red wine, cheese and rhubarb fool, with a vegetarian alternative for Kate.

  As one of the excellent waitresses provided by the caterers poured him a fourth glass of wine, Henry heard a sniff, a distinct sniff of disapproval. He didn’t think anything of it – at the time.

  At the end of the feast, James Hargreaves stood up and cleared his throat. There were cries of ‘hush’ and Hilary banged sharply on the table with a spoon.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen
,’ said James Hargreaves when complete silence had finally fallen. ‘As the oldest person present …’

  ‘After a recount,’ interrupted Denzil, who had drunk too much.

  ‘After a recount … it falls to me … I mean, I welcome the chance … to thank that extraordinary lady … that extraordinary lady …’

  There was utter horror on James Hargreaves’s face.

  ‘Hilary,’ whispered Camilla at his side.

  ‘Precisely,’ said James Hargreaves, who knew that Camilla had spoken, but hadn’t been able to hear what she’d said. ‘Precisely. Just so. Because of course she is an extraordinary woman. A brilliant novelist. I’m not a great reader of fiction, I can’t quite see the point of it since it didn’t happen, but I once read the first five chapters of one of her books, and they were tremendous. Simply tremendous. So it should be no surprise that she has provided this surprise meal for … for … for he’s a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us.’

  This time, James Hargreaves wasn’t quite so shocked by the fog that descended on him.

  ‘Some of us have known him for … many years, and it’s hard to believe he’s reached sixty. I don’t mean I’m surprised that he’s made it, I just mean that he still seems so … so … so there you are. Terrific. And now, he tells me, that this very lunchtime, a young lady from the television … oh Lord, he’s shaking his head furiously, I think I’ve dropped a … I … er … oh dear … I don’t … I don’t feel very … I wonder if somebody could pass me a …’

  As he toppled, Camilla tried to break his fall, and they went down together. Camilla hit the ground first and he fell on top of her and trapped her there. There was a shocked silence. Most of the people at the table thought that he had died.

  Helen grabbed hold of his pulse.

  ‘He’s alive,’ she said. ‘I think he’s just fainted.’

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘So terribly sorry. I’m afraid my dear man has rather lost the plot.’

  Guiseppe rushed to Camilla, closely followed by Jack and Flick.