by David Nobbs
It was a big commitment, made in an emotional moment. In fact it was an absurd commitment. She simply wouldn’t be able to take them everywhere. She felt that she must be honest with them about this. They weren’t fools. But not now. Not yet. She would take them to as many places as she could, though, if they stuck to their commitment, but she would stick to it if they stuck to it.
An uneasy thought about money flashed through her mind like a sparrowhawk through a peaceful garden. How would she pay for these trips? How could she ever help Sam and Beth? How would she live?
She mustn’t think about this now. Already she had paused for too long. But how could she start again, now that she had stopped? It wasn’t easy to keep up her commentary, here in this overheated, crowded front room in Cadwallader Road. She felt awkward, self-conscious, a bit ridiculous. What could the Fazackerly sisters know of the Renaissance? How could they relate to it? Could it possibly inspire them?
Oli was winding herself up to ask a question. She was going all shy.
‘It were going round cake factory yesterday that your speech t’other night were brill,’ she said, and her great cheeks went slightly red. ‘Carrie Husband said that her friend’s mum thought it were fabulous.’
‘Marvellous,’ said Sally. ‘Carrie Husband’s friend’s mum is just the sort of person we’re hoping to attract.’
She spoke in all sincerity, but even as she said it she realized that this might sound very patronizing. But the Fazackerly sisters missed the subtext of ‘we’ll get the clever ones and the socially aware ones easily enough, but it’s great to hear of ordinary working-class supporters’ that Sally in her self-consciousness as a new leader of men had detected in herself.
She must plunge back into her theme, absurd though it was sounding.
‘Milan is a different kettle of fish again.’
It wasn’t going to work. That gear change had sounded horrid. Oh well, she just had to persist. She talked of the great Duomo, of Leonardo da Vinci, of the stylish galleries.
She ploughed on.
‘The Italians have many faults, but they have a natural sense of style in almost everything they do. And Milan has more style than anywhere else in Italy. It’s the style capital of a stylish land. Ellie, the first time you walk through Potherthwaite, we will get you something really stylish to wear.’
‘Italian?’
‘If you want.’
The three girls exchanged looks. Sally didn’t know what the looks meant. She made an inspired guess.
‘You can all have something Italian.’
All three sisters beamed, and Sally’s spirits rose. It seemed possible after all that they really wanted to work at this.
‘How will we afford that?’ asked Ali.
‘From what you save on food. And on that question, ladies, I’m trusting you, you know. Tell me, tell me honestly, please, are you actually sticking completely to the rules?’
Oli went red again.
‘I brought cakes back Tuesday.’
‘We ate them,’ said Ali.
‘They didn’t taste as nice as we remembered,’ said Ellie.
‘Too sweet,’ said Ali.
‘Ali gave me a right ticking off,’ said Oli. ‘I won’t do it again.’
‘Well done, Ali,’ said Sally. ‘And well done Oli for telling me. Marvellous. And too sweet, that’s fantastic. Your tastes are changing already. Verona, with the Romeo and Juliet connection, and a huge great amphitheatre where they do opera in the open air on summer nights – just imagine it – is probably the most romantic city.’
‘I wish I’d been able to come to your talk,’ said Ellie. ‘I told Ali and Oli they should go. I’d have been all right.’
It was going wrong. She had pitched it badly. She was almost sounding priggish.
‘But Italy isn’t just art,’ she said. ‘It’s food and drink and mountains and lakes and ice cream and beaches and laughter and love.’
‘What did you do afterwards?’ asked Ali. Awe entered her voice. ‘Did you go to a restaurant?’ It had always been the great limit of her dreams – to go to a restaurant.
‘One day I’ll take you all to a restaurant in Italy,’ said Sally. ‘They have wonderful restaurants there.’
But the Fazackerly sisters were still not ready to return to Italy.
‘Which restaurant did you go to?’ asked Oli.
‘We went to the pub first,’ said Sally. ‘The Dog and Duck.’
‘You didn’t!’ exclaimed Oli. ‘Glenda from Packaging goes there.’
‘Don’t sound so astonished,’ said Sally. ‘I’m not a creature from a different planet.’
God, what must they have thought of me all those years, she thought.
‘Then Marigold and I went for a curry.’
‘She’s nice, Marigold. She called here.’
‘Yes. Yes, she is. Very. Pisa …’
But her comment on Pisa never got off the ground. They were leaning towards other subjects now.
‘So you still haven’t sold?’ asked Ellie.
‘Um … well actually, yes, I think I have, yes. A man came round this morning, spent ages, loves the feel of it. He’s going to make an offer.’
She was really concerned that she was going to blush. This was terrible. This was juvenile. This wasn’t the stuff of leadership.
‘Did you like him?’
They knew.
‘I think it’s nice when you can sell your house to somebody nice,’ said Ellie.
‘Well, he is nice,’ said Sally. ‘I’d be very happy thinking of him there, actually.’
‘I mean, it doesn’t make any difference, I don’t suppose,’ said Ali. ‘I mean, you, like, get your money anyway, know what I mean …’
‘… but it is nice – listen to me, is nice, what do I know, I’ve never owned a house let alone, like, sold it,’ said Oli, ‘but I think it would be, like, comforting to you if you sold it to me to think I were happy there. I’d like to think, like, that somebody else is happy there now.’
‘What’s his name?’ asked Ellie, and there was something about the way she asked it.
They knew.
‘Conrad,’ she said, and she could feel herself blushing.
‘O’oh! Conrad!’ said Ellie, Ali and Oli in unison.
‘But my personal favourite of all the Italian towns is Lucca,’ said Sally.
NINETEEN
A thousand miles apart
Harry and Jill sat a few feet away from each other in the shade of a large cypress, unmistakably British in their floppy hats. They had easels in front of them, and from time to time they peered into the distance, trying to look as though they were observing the scene with deep, painterly vision. Eighteen other Brits sat close by, also with easels, also peering at the wonderful, biblical view. The sun shone on sharp, shapely hills. A castellated village looked white in the searing sun. The tall, slim cypresses looked as if they had been arranged on the hills by an artist with immaculate taste.
Yes, we may dwell on this scene, familiar to us as the background to a thousand religious paintings. We may pause to smile at the sight of twenty British hats, all with something of the absurd in them, dotted untidily around this magnificently ordered landscape. But let us be merciful, let us not peer too closely at what was being created on the fine paper so neatly arranged on Jill and Harry’s easels.
When they arrived home – the next day in fact – as the forecast rain lashed the Pother Valley, their painting holiday would have become a week of triumph, of joy, a sacred memory. On the sixth day of peering at all this beauty and recreating almost none of it, the need to escape the sun had become a bore, the light had become blinding, the pain of sitting still for long periods had turned the hip hip hurrah of earlier days into thoughts of hip hip replacement.
In short, they had discovered that they had no talent. Well, none worth speaking about. They had discussed, as they packed to leave for Italy, how they would get their efforts home to be admired in the cul-de-s
ac, and entered for the annual arts festival that didn’t yet exist but would soon be inaugurated by Sally. Only this reference to her proposed arts festival had reconciled Sally to Harry making the trip. ‘You’re my sergeant major,’ she had reminded him. ‘I think you need to start taking that role seriously, or resign.’
Harry and Jill needn’t have worried about how they would get their paintings home. They were destined to become landfill on a Tuscan hill.
This was a great disappointment to Harry. He had not admitted it to anybody, least of all to himself, but this bald, bluff businessman yearned for spirituality and was too much of a realist to believe that he would find it in religion. Art had been his great hope. This week had been a massive reality check. He would bury his disappointment by throwing himself into his role as Sally’s sergeant major.
But perhaps the week had been an even greater disappointment for Jill, who had suggested the holiday, whose early indifferent paintings had lacked, she had felt, only experience and instruction, and who had hoped that she might begin, this week in Tuscany, her transformation from amateur to professional, that it might be the beginning of a transition in her to mirror the Transition in Potherthwaite. And with Jill there was the added element of marital rivalry. Arnold’s book might not be brilliant – no, let’s face it, we’ve peered at page 537 and it isn’t – but it’s still a book, an achievement in the world of literature. She has always hoped that one day she might match his achievement – no, she’s human, she has wished to exceed his achievement. Where were those hopes now, at the end of her sixth day of avoiding the sun in the hills of Italy?
Surely sexual attraction was a large part of the motive in arranging this trip? Well, a little, perhaps. Harry, like his daubs, was no oil painting, but he had a twinkle in his eyes and energy in his legs and a suggestion of virility that Arnold couldn’t match. And Jill, she had worn shorts on all six days and nobody had thought her foolish, and of how many people in their early seventies could that be said? Even now, at this very moment, Harry, despairing of ‘Morning Mist Outside Montepulciano’, was admiring the exquisite slight fleshiness of her calves, the almost Italianate perfection of her ankles, the youthfulness still obstinately lingering in her shapely sun-burnished knees.
On six evenings they had eaten simply but well, and been free to have offal without incurring exclamations of disgust from their spouses. On six evenings they had drunk honest local wine. On six evenings they had walked up the stairs together. On six evenings they had stopped outside Jill’s bedroom door – they came to that first – and had kissed on both cheeks. On six evenings their eyes had met. On six evenings the messages in those eyes had been inconclusive. On six evenings Harry had said ‘Night night, Jill’ and moved on towards his bedroom.
Now it was time to show their work to the tutor – his verbal dexterity in praising it without telling lies had to be admired – and to pack up their things. Their coach was waiting to take them back to their friendly three-star hotel. Nothing much would happen on the coach. We can safely move a thousand miles north.
Here, in the narrow valley between the inhospitable hills, the fitful sun of the last few days had disappeared. The sky was grey. The clouds over the hills at the head of the valley were pregnant with rain. Arnold and Olive had made much of the sunshine. ‘It’s lovely here too,’ had been their refrain in phone calls and texts. They had been looking forward to saying ‘Well it’s been like this all week’ with a barely hidden triumphant smirk. Now that was ruined. Bloody British climate.
Maybe the weather had something to do with what happened. We can’t be sure. The definitive paper on ‘Air pressure and its effect on the incidence of orgasms’ has yet to be written.
Arnold and Olive were preparing in their different ways for their last evening alone together, if one can be alone together. Arnold was in a world where rain was called ‘precipitation’ and orgasms were unmentionable. ‘Thomas Grindley was Mayor for seventeen years. We can deduce from the fact that 80% of his orgasms happened on Thursdays that his marriage was not …’ You don’t get that sort of thing in local-history books.
At the moment when Olive rang he was busy on chapter 107 – ‘The Macmillan Administration. Had Potherthwaite Never Had it So Good?’ He didn’t like those two ‘had’s, but he wasn’t agile enough to circumvent them. The conversation was brief. Olive knew better than to interrupt his thought processes for any length of time.
‘Dinner at half past six.’
‘Good.’
Olive was making a fine dinner to mark their last evening alone together. That, in itself, was a remarkable gesture – from Olive.
Reluctantly, Arnold rose from his MS – he hoped that stood for ‘masterpiece’, but he wasn’t a fool and in his heart he knew it stood for ‘manuscript’ – and put a bottle of white wine in the fridge. He found himself choosing a remarkably good one, kept for a special occasion. Since he never had any special occasions, he had kept it for years. But he was using it that night. Strange.
At thirty-four minutes past six – absolute punctuality is a social solecism – Arnold rang Olive’s doorbell. The first grim spots of rain were carried on to his glasses by the wind. He had trimmed his moustache. Olive didn’t notice. Nor did she notice that the wine was a 1986 Chassagne-Montrachet. She wouldn’t have commented if she had noticed. She knew nothing about wine, to Harry’s chagrin.
Arnold drank his sherry on his own. Olive, over-reaching herself in the kitchen, was busy keeping chaos at bay. He realized that, like him with the wine, she had made a special effort with the sherry. It was indifferent, but not as indifferent as usual.
There was a slight delay. This resulted in his having a second glass. He said he only would if she did. She, in her nervousness, did.
The special meal that Olive produced consisted of roast chicken with sage-and-onion stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, chipolata sausages, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, purple-sprouting broccoli and carrots. Nothing could have pleased Arnold more. It looked wonderful.
At first they ate in comfortable silence. They had been brought up in the days before talking at mealtimes had been invented. The idea hadn’t had a long life. It was disappearing fast. There were now very few mealtimes in many households. Millions of people didn’t even have tables to eat at.
This was a truly peaceful moment, and there was nobody to spoil it, to say, ‘I had a wonderful chicken dish with garlic and cumin in Salisbury,’ or ‘We must be the only country in the world that tries to make a great sauce out of bread.’
Then Olive told him of an incident that had occurred not much more than an hour ago. She had made her daily phone call to Harry, and Jill had answered. She had assured Olive that she was not in Harry’s room – the call had been put through to the wrong room.
‘It’s unsettled me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether to believe her.’
‘Well, of course you can believe her,’ said Arnold.
‘How can you be so sure?’
If Olive hoped for a resounding character reference about Harry’s reliability and morality and the depth of his unswerving love for her, she was to be disappointed.
‘If she was in Harry’s room she’d hardly have been stupid enough to answer the phone,’ he said.
Olive had been a wonderfully efficient secretary to Harry all her life with him. How could she sometimes be so stupid? She blushed at her stupidity.
Arnold had dismissed the question of the wrong bedroom, but the conversation laid bare the fact that all week, at their less special lunches – they hadn’t dared risk a dinner until now – there had been a third guest at the table. Suspicion.
Now that the subject had been hinted at, the floodgates were open.
‘Do you think they have been … you know …?’ asked Arnold.
Olive sighed and put down her knife and fork, as if what she was going to say was too important to be interrupted by any thought of food.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve …
He used to go away a lot of course, and … I was his secretary so of course I knew most things. I never … as far as I know he never … but I don’t know. I didn’t dare ask. I suppose, if I didn’t know it … I wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, Arnold.’
‘No,’ said Arnold naively, ‘but you were pretty. I certainly thought so, that summer.’
‘That summer in Cheltenham. Sounds like a film title.’
‘No film in our story.’
‘Could we … should we … have seconds?’
‘Do you know, I think I will. It’s my kind of food.’
A sudden burst of rain spattered against the windows like an over-obvious sound cue in a radio play. It made both of them think about sun-drenched Italy. Luckily neither of them thought about the fact that in Italy it was one hour later. Harry and Jill might be walking upstairs to bed at that very moment, their meal complete.
As indeed they were. Well, not exactly at that moment. They had just about completed their meal, and their conversation had been very different. At no stage did either of them wonder whether Arnold and Olive were up to anything. Neither of them believed that their spouses were ever up to anything any more. They were finishing their affogato. There was no one to say, ‘Cold ice cream with hot coffee poured over it, what sort of pudding do you call that?’ A few minutes later, Harry handed their waitress a very generous tip, wild words of international affection were uttered, and Harry and Jill walked slowly from the room.
Near the foot of the stairs they stopped to examine pamphlets about local attractions they hadn’t had time to see and would now never see. Then Harry’s hand reached across to Jill’s far buttock, almost touched it, but retreated.
They walked slowly towards Jill’s room. Usually at this moment they kissed, but that night she opened her bedroom door before they kissed. However, she didn’t move towards her room and he had no idea whether she wanted to. All at the same time he felt a great desire for her body and he had a tender vision of Olive serving him a meal with a sad lack of confidence. Love flowed through him, and he couldn’t have said who it was for. Or rather, he knew that it was for both of them but he had no idea in what proportions. He was hugging Jill and she seemed to have decided to hug him at exactly the same moment. Neither of them ventured a kiss that night. Perhaps they were both frightened of what it might lead to. Perhaps they were frightened of each other. Or perhaps, in their quiet ways, they just loved their dear old partners too much. It’s difficult to tell from the outside; we are mysteries to each other from the day we are born.