Pratt a Manger

by David Nobbs

  ‘No, not necessarily. It depends how it’s treated.’

  Henry realised that he was beginning to lay down the law on other people’s areas of expertise as well as his own. Dangerous!

  ‘It’s pretty good, I think,’ she said. ‘It’s about a crematorium manager who thinks his place is a cut above the rest. He’s the Miss Jean Brodie of the mortuary. He calls it the crem de la crem.’

  Henry wanted to reply, but a mouthful of nut cutlet just wouldn’t go down. Nut cutlets could be so delicious. This one was heavy, too dense.

  They didn’t understand food, and they ran a restaurant. It was often so.

  At last it was gone.

  ‘It sounds as if it could be good,’ he said, ‘but I do think you have to be careful with comedy about death. But then it’s a bit of a touchy subject with me at the moment. I …’ His voice began to crack. ‘I’ve lost so many dear people this year.’

  ‘Oh God, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said. ‘Oh, Dad!’

  She reached across and clasped his hands, took them to her lips and kissed them.

  ‘It was a very silly remark. I should have realised,’ she said. ‘Do you think I may be losing my judgement? Do you think … do you think I’ve been silly to give up sex? Has it made me lose touch with people’s emotions?’

  ‘Only you can know that,’ said her father. He was feeling very fatherly that afternoon. These snatched moments in their busy lives were so vital, so precious. ‘About sex. I don’t think there’s any disgrace or any harm in not having sex. The Pope’s one of the most complete human beings in the world …’

  ‘Is he? I don’t think he really empathises with women’s problems.’

  ‘Well I don’t think less of dear Cousin Hilda because she died a virgin.’

  Deep in his head Henry flinched, expecting a sniff. There wasn’t one. There didn’t need to be. Cousin Hilda’s sniff was like terrorism. It didn’t need to appear very often. Once the fear of it was established, it could do its work with minimal risk.

  ‘But sex isn’t all … well, it isn’t all sex,’ he went on. ‘It’s love and faithfulness and emotion. It can be ugly and possessive and exploitative and chauvinist, but it can also be beautiful. Yes, I do think it’s a shame to close your mind to the possibility. I think it profoundly misguided, actually.’

  The other remark was made by Bradley Tompkins. Henry had been very successful in avoiding Bradley for many, many months, always giving him advance warning of his visits to Grayling-under-Witchwood, always missing him on his occasional appearances on A Question of Salt, so that he was lulled into thinking it unnecessary to have it written into his contract that he wouldn’t appear in the same show as the man.

  In the first week of December, 2001, they did appear in the same edition. In his CV of a fictional chef, Bradley said – believing it to be an absolute humdinger – ‘He’d read English at university and in his last years he fulfilled his ambition to write a book about punctuation. He finished it just before he got cancer of the semi-colon and died from an oblique stroke.’

  There was a gasp from the studio audience. The camera went straight to Henry’s face. He looked appalled. He saw the red light on, he heard the silence. He had to say something. ‘Sorry, Bradley,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a bad year with death. I can’t see anything funny in it.’ There was a round of applause. Henry was sure that Bradley’s hatred went up yet another notch.

  How many notches can a man’s hatred notch before it becomes a threat?

  Funerals never come at convenient moments, and for Henry that year they were particularly difficult emotionally.

  His fame and fortune were at their height. Hooray, It’s Henry had reached number one in the paperback charts, and he was busy preparing the second TV series. His manuscript for The Pratt Diet was almost ready. Speaking engagements abounded. The Café Henry group continued to expand. Sales of his monogrammed HP crockery and his Asbo foods were excellent. Book signings led to long queues. Money was pouring in. So were offers of marriage.

  It was a roller-coaster year of fame and funerals, and he couldn’t always separate them. In fact, he took his fame to the funerals. It was inevitable.

  The first funeral was in Yorkshire, on a bleak February day, with an easterly wind blowing patchy fog over the Vale of York.

  A lady had rung the offices of A Question of Salt and asked for Henry’s phone number. They refused to give it, on grounds of security, but rang him with her number. When he heard that a woman called Norma Hutton wanted to speak to him, all sorts of possibilities went through his over-active mind. ‘I’ve seen you on the telly, looking straight at me. You feel the same way about me as I do about you, don’t you? We have to meet.’ ‘Do you remember a certain night in Thurmarsh when you drank too much? I am the mother of your eighteen-year-old son and I can’t afford to send him to university.’ ‘We can offer you 3.9 per cent on balance transfers for twelve months.’

  He had to phone her.

  ‘Vale of York Retirement Home.’

  ‘Could I speak to Norma Hutton, please?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I’m Henry Pratt.’

  ‘How kind of you to ring.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘He said you were a gentleman.’

  ‘ “He”?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m not explaining this very well. I’m in a bit of a lather, actually. I’m not used to talking to celebrities. I’m afraid I have bad news, Mr Pratt. Brace yourself.’

  He braced himself.

  ‘Er … right. I’m braced.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I … er … I’m ready for your bad news.’

  ‘Ah. I’m afraid … I’m afraid Mr Pettifer passed on yesterday.’

  Who the hell was Mr Pettifer?

  ‘Oh dear. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s very sad.’

  Hint, please, woman. Help me.

  ‘Yes, he always spoke very very highly of you. He never missed one of your TV appearances.’

  Great, good, fantastic, very gratifying … but who was he?

  ‘He lived for them. They were the highlights of his life. “I knew him,” he used to say. “I’ve sat as close to him as I am to you now.” He’d say that to people who were sitting close to him.’

  ‘Yes. Quite.’ Give me a clue, woman!

  ‘ “Oh, we had such fun in the old Thurmarsh days,” he used to say.’

  Thank you. Thurmarsh. Thurmarsh? Ah. Cousin Hilda. Norman Pettifer! One of her gentlemen, of course. Sacked from the cheese counter, moved to general groceries. A weak face positively overflowing with disappointment.

  ‘I remember him well. Yes, we did … er … have … er … some jolly moments.’

  Jolly moments? At Cousin Hilda’s? Dear God!

  ‘He was our very last grocer. It’s the end of an era.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We used to be known as the Yorkshire Retired Grocers’ Benevolent Home, but grocers are passé, aren’t they? Killed by the supermarkets. We’re just general elderly now. It’s not the same. Mr Pettifer was our last link with the good old days. His passing is the closing of a book. It would be a tremendous fillip to us all if you could come to the crematorium.’

  ‘Of course I’ll come.’

  When he told Hilary, she said, ‘You give of yourself far too easily.’

  ‘Because it’s all I have to give,’ he replied. ‘Darling, if I ever forget where I come from, I’m lost. I’m not going just because of Norman Pettifer. I’m going for Cousin Hilda and all her gentlemen – Liam O’Reilly, Tony Preece, Neville Chamberlain, and all the ones I’ve forgotten. I’m going to remember my own life, and I might have time to pop over to Thurmarsh and see a few old friends.’

  In the end he decided not to go to see his old friends. He couldn’t face it. All that was over. He sat in a cold, desperately empty crematorium chapel and listened to a vicar with no charisma, a poor speaking voice and a tendency t
o dyslexia, murdering the elegant strength of prayers and psalms and gospels.

  There were only five other mourners for the poor forgotten man: Norma Hutton; Sheila Redmond, her friend and formerly her opposite number at what had once been the Yorkshire Retired Drapers’ Benevolent Home; Bernard Birstwith, a cousin; and Tommy Crane and Elsie Carter, his friends from the Home.

  They were invited back for coffee and sandwiches. Dear God! But he couldn’t bring himself to just drive away.

  The coffee was served in HP cups. The sandwiches lay meagrely on huge HP plates. Norma Hutton beamed proudly.

  ‘We bought the whole range because of poor Mr Pettifer,’ she said. ‘It was well over budget – they aren’t cheap, are they, Henry? – but Mr Taplow is a wizard with budgets and we saved elsewhere. Swings and roundabouts, as they say. We were so glad we did. Every time he ate, poor Mr Pettifer would regale us with some memory of you.’ She clapped her hands. One or two of the more alert residents looked up listlessly. The others continued to stare into space. Dear God, isn’t there a better way of ending people’s lives than this?

  ‘Boys and girls,’ said Norma Hutton. ‘This is Henry Pratt. You’ve seen him on the TV, and now he’s here. Isn’t that thrilling?’

  Henry’s whole face seemed to congeal. He had to force his cheeks apart to create a smile. A man laughed hysterically. A woman moaned. Nobody else reacted.

  ‘He read everything about you in the papers – read them aloud, he did – and I think everyone felt that some of the glory rubbed off on them.’

  Stop it. Stop it, please.

  ‘Ellen – she’s a card, she can be right comical at times, can Ellen – Ellen put HP sauce on her plate and said, “HP sauce on an HP plate – I was always saucy!” How we laughed.’

  After the feast, he had to shake hands with every inmate. Goodness knew how many diseases he would pick up – impetigo, psoriasis, ringworm and alopecia at least, to judge from appearances.

  ‘He’d sit there, where Vera’s sitting …’ began Norma Hutton.

  ‘I’m not Vera,’ said the woman in the chair that Norma had pointed at.

  ‘Yes, you are, dear.’

  ‘Am I? Oh.’

  ‘He’d sit there and watch you, and he’d say, “To see him now, all suave and sophisticated, you’d never guess that he used to come home drunk and be sick all down the stairs – and on the coal!” ’ said Norma Hutton.

  ‘One’s sins are never forgotten, Mrs Hutton,’ said Henry. ‘One’s embarrassments gather strength over the years.’

  ‘It’s Miss Hutton actually,’ said Norma.

  Henry wasn’t surprised.

  The death of James Hargreaves didn’t surprise Henry either – he’d been in failing health for some years – but there were surprises for him in Hampstead Parish Church, which was packed with relatives, friends and old medical colleagues, some of them very old indeed.

  He was surprised that Celia Hargreaves, still a picture of elegance in her early nineties, wore white, contrasting with the conventional black worn by her son Paul and his wife Christobel.

  He was surprised to see Belinda Boyce-Uppingham there. He had forgotten that she had been a close friend of Diana. How he had fancied Belinda as a boy and young man. How humiliated he had been by the class divide. Well, he was a star now, and she was a tired, rather gaunt farmer’s wife, who had been exhausted by her unsuccessful attempts to give her husband a son and heir. Henry bore her no ill-will, but he felt a little frisson as he anticipated meeting her in his new role as a celebrity chef. Robin towered beside her, looking more like a tree-trunk than ever. Henry would hardly have been surprised to have seen a greater spotted woodpecker trying to nest in him.

  He was surprised that Denzil had made it. He looked so desperately frail now, and it wasn’t as if he was even close to James or Celia Hargreaves, but style was important to Denzil, and when he couldn’t go to other people’s funerals, he’d be ready to go to his own.

  Henry smiled at Diana and Gunter, at Paul and Christobel, at Lampo.

  After the service they walked, in fitful sunshine, through charming streets, and across the main road to an area where charm gave way to distinction.

  There were glasses of wine and elegant nibbles in the mellow, slender, four-storey Hampstead house. Henry felt uneasy, re-entering this house where he had made so many faux pas in his youth. Diana clearly realised this.

  ‘How does it feel to re-enter this scene of your humiliations, as a successful and world-famous figure?’ she asked.

  ‘Hardly world-famous,’ he said.

  ‘I think so. We even get you in Switzerland. Dubbed, I’m afraid. I can’t watch you. You look like you, and you sound like Adolf Hitler.’

  He winced, partly at the thought of his sounding like Hitler and partly at this talk of his fame. It seemed so inappropriate, so crass, so tactless, so invasive on such a sad occasion.

  Mrs Hargreaves hurried up to him, kissed him and said, ‘Promise you won’t forget me.’

  ‘How could I?’ said Henry. ‘You’re my yard-stick.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very elegant,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I want to be a yard-stick. What do you mean by it, exactly?’

  ‘Whatever I do, I think, “Would Celia approve?” “Would Celia think I’m making a faux pas?” “Will Celia think I’m no longer a Northern hick?” ’

  ‘Oh, Henry. We adored that Northern hick.’ She grimaced and put her hand to her throat. ‘There. I’ve made a faux pas. I should have said, “Henry! You were never a Northern hick.” ’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to lie.’ He touched her arm. She was of a generation that didn’t show their emotions, but he thought that he ought to help her to do so now. ‘How are you really?’

  ‘I’m sad, of course, and when all this is over I daresay I will miss James most dreadfully, but I’m relieved that his struggle is over. His decline has been remorseless and I’ve hated every second of it. He’s been released and I’ve tried to persuade myself that this means that I’ve been released too. I’m wearing white to remember our wedding, Henry.’

  ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘Silly boy. I hate black at funerals. They’re depressing enough without that. Look at Paul and Christobel, Henry. So conventional.’

  ‘Yes, but a lovely looking couple.’

  ‘You’re more my son to me than he is.’

  He couldn’t hide his shock.

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s how I feel.’

  ‘You can’t mean it.’

  ‘But I do. I love Diana dearly, in a way I have never quite managed to love Paul. I’m so delighted she’s happy with Gunter. I said to James, “I can’t believe I’m happy that she’s married a Swiss dentist, but I am.” He’s so kind, Henry, and I value kindness above all else. But Paul … he’s fine, a fine son, as they say, but … he’s like a theory. A theoretical son. I expect to knock on his face and hear a voice say, “Sorry. He’s out today.” ’

  ‘I don’t think you should be saying these things.’

  ‘Perhaps not. You amused James on the TV. He said, “I shouldn’t be laughing, but I am.” ’

  Much as he didn’t want to discuss his career and his fame that afternoon, Henry couldn’t help feeling a little upset by James’s remark, ‘I shouldn’t be laughing.’ Why shouldn’t he? Was there something not good enough for the James Hargreaveses of this world, something not quite out of the top drawer, about the amusement he gave them?

  ‘I must circulate,’ said Celia. ‘Promise to come and amuse me frequently.’

  ‘I promise.’

  He found himself talking to Paul and Christobel before he’d had time to digest Celia’s comments. Conversation was a bit of a struggle. It always was with them, nowadays.

  Then Paul astounded him.

  ‘You will keep seeing Mother, won’t you?’ he said. ‘I feel … it’s strange, but I know that I’d get on better with her if she wasn’t my mother, and I wasn’t her
son. The fact of the relationship throws us into clichéd situations and responses. She’s livelier with you. She’s always had a soft spot for you, as you for her. I realised that in Brittany.’

  Oh, not that again.

  Henry looked across the room and met Celia’s eyes, and he could have sworn that she knew what they’d been talking about. He began to blush.

  ‘He’s blushing!’ said Christobel.

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Henry. ‘It’s so embarrassing to be reminded.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Paul complacently.

  Henry went in search of more wine and found Lampo.

  ‘How are things, Lampo?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine. Really. Really fine. The system really works. I’m not sure Denzil really believes that it does, but it does.’

  He was now coming up to Mrs Hargreaves again. She was talking to Hilary and he stopped for a moment.

  ‘I’m making Hilary promise to come and amuse me too,’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘To marry Hilary once showed taste. To marry her twice showed taste, persistence and humility.’

  Henry laughed, touched Hilary briefly on the bottom, and moved on.

  As he steered his full glass back through the lovely ‘It’s the way he would have wanted it’ throng that filled the elegant, well-proportioned rooms of the Georgian town house, Henry saw Belinda Boyce-Uppingham without Robin. It was a moment to be seized, but his route took him past Denzil, and he had to stop.

  ‘So, Denzil, how are things?’ he asked, aware that it was becoming his stock question, but unable to think of a better one.

  ‘Fine, Henry. Absolutely fine. The system works perfectly. I’m not sure Lampo really believes it does, but it does.’

  Belinda was still without Robin.

  ‘Excuse me, Denzil.’

  ‘Dear boy. Move on. I’m not fun any more.’

  ‘Denzil! It’s just that I need to speak to Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. We go back even further than I do with you.’

  He approached her determinedly, avoiding all possible further delays by not looking at anybody else.

  ‘Henry! You look wonderful.’

  ‘Well, so do you, Belinda. How’s things?’

  ‘Fine. Tessa and Vanessa and Clarissa are married. Marina never will be. She’s plain, poor girl. Vanessa can’t have children but the others have seven between them. Vanessa’s an interior designer, the other two don’t work. Tessa’s anti-hunt which has shattered Robin. Davina’s divorced which has shattered Robin. Petunia’s gay which has shattered Robin.’