The Second Life of Sally Mottram

by David Nobbs

  Let us look at the facts, then. Harry gently moved away from the hug, and said, ‘Night night, Jill.’

  Jill moved away from the hug and said, ‘Night night, Harry.’

  Jill inserted her key card into her door, but didn’t press it.

  Harry walked slowly to his door, inserted his key card, but didn’t press it.

  They gave each other another look.

  ‘Night night,’ said Jill.

  ‘Night night,’ said Harry.

  They pressed their key cards, opened their respective doors, went into their respective rooms, and closed the doors.

  They opened their respective doors, and emerged into the corridor. They looked at each other with surprise.

  They hung on their bedroom doors notices which stated ‘Do Not Disturb’ in Italian.

  An appropriate ending, perhaps, to a scene mired in confusion and tension.

  Except that it wasn’t quite like that. Harry was the less cool of the two, and in the confusion of seeing Jill again when emotionally it was totally redundant to do so, he hung his notice the wrong way round.

  The words on his notice were the Italian for ‘Please Clean My Room’.

  What would Dr Mallet, who wished his name was Bronovsky, make of that? Not much, if his track record was anything to go by. But it does get us back to Potherthwaite.

  Not a lot of time had elapsed since Olive served Arnold seconds, but by now they had finished their seconds and were well into their rhubarb crumble. A gap between courses was a sophisticated move to which Olive did not subscribe. Meals were for eating, finishing, and washing up.

  On this particular evening the washing-up would not be done.

  Maybe it was the drink that made Olive so direct. Maybe it was the drink that made her smile at Arnold with such affection. Maybe it was the drink that made her look at least thirty years younger to Arnold. But although they weren’t habitual drinkers, they hadn’t actually had all that much, and they had had it over a long period of time. More likely, perhaps, and certainly more charitable, to think that all their sudden affection and attraction for each other sprang from true feeling, in part from the feeling of what their life might have been like if they had been bolder and less inhibited in those bad old English days. Maybe too – we couldn’t blame them, could we? Not entirely, anyway – they had been a little bit riled by the easy assumption of Harry and Jill that leaving them behind did not involve any emotional risk whatsoever.

  ‘Come on,’ said Olive.

  Arnold didn’t move a muscle or show any astonishment.

  Olive went across to him, put her arms round his shoulders, and helped him out of his seat.

  ‘Come on,’ she repeated.

  He made no real protest. His ‘What about the washing-up?’ was very weak. His heart wasn’t in it.

  Olive kept her arm round him, then leant across and kissed his cheek. Then she led him, quite forcefully, towards her bedroom. He was like a man who doesn’t know whether it’s heaven or the gallows he’s being escorted to.

  She closed the bedroom door gently behind them.

  Olive and Arnold belonged to a generation that thought of sex as a very private matter. What went on behind the bedroom door was their concern and theirs only. For that reason, and also in respect for two people in their early seventies, we will go no further.

  Except to say that Marigold Boyce-Willoughby, who was walking Kenneth for the Sparlings, told Sally that she passed number 9 in the cul-de-sac quite late, and heard a noise which suggested that Arnold Buss had not felt that he had been led to the gallows.

  TWENTY

  A long, hot summer

  It was a long, hot summer, with the single exception that it wasn’t hot. But it had, for Sally Mottram, all the character of a long, hot summer – slow, lazy, uneventful – even though it was wretchedly cold at times. There were a few fine days – we won’t go mad and call them hot, but they were pleasantly warm – and there was one settled spell of more than a week. ‘Lovely weather,’ Sally commented to a man working at the edge of the allotments, as she passed. ‘We’ll pay for it,’ he growled in true Potherthwaite fashion.

  They did.

  She had not expected to be still passing the allotments at that time, but the sale of ‘The Larches’ and, more important by far, the arrival of Conrad, who was planning to buy her house, proceeded more slowly than she had hoped. These days, as the town’s unelected leader, it behove her to be democratic. She walked everywhere, setting an example of a low carbon footprint. Almost every day her walk took her to flats that she had been sent details of by the town’s estate agents. She was planning, of course, to rent. She couldn’t afford to buy. The estate agents’ pictures surprised her. They were far from attractive, and she had always thought that they tried to present properties in their most favourable light. When she saw them, the properties also surprised her. The estate agents had presented them in their most favourable light.

  On the Transition front, things were hanging fire too. It wasn’t that nothing was being done. Plans were being made. Money was being sought. She soon realized that she was asking for money too soon. Inexperience again. Many people promised money ‘when there’s something to show for it’, but it was difficult to have anything to show for it until you’d been given money. ‘I move in vicious circles,’ she told Marigold. Marigold touched her shoulder sympathetically. After their long confessional evening, they had been slightly tentative with each other, as if worried that they had gone too far, but they had now settled into a deep, stable affection, in which words were often not necessary at all.

  Progress was made in one area. The tireless Harry persuaded more than two hundred people to devote a morning or afternoon every week to taking part in a clear-up campaign, the removal of litter from the town. Almost half the rubbish consisted of wrappings from McDonald’s. People who ate there seemed to have an irresistible urge to rid themselves of the evidence of their meal as soon as possible.

  Even this relatively small initiative created its problems. The clear-up inevitably produced a reaction against the project. Youths from the council estates, particularly the Baggit Estate, led by Luke Warburton, who thought volunteers were all snobby middle-class do-gooders, drove round at night throwing empty Carling cans, used condoms, Conservative Party newsletters and the remnants of yet more McDonald’s dinners into the posher gardens of the town. A few of the volunteers gave up and others wanted to, but Sally fought on, assuring them that this was just a game and in the end the litter bugs would tire of it. Harry’s bald head could be seen all round the town as he sought to catch them in the act. He proposed to set up teams of volunteers to chase and threaten them. He would have been happy to take on the job himself, even though he was in his seventies. Foiled in this ambition by Sally, he made a list of suspects and told her that he was happy to give the list to the police if that was what she wanted. It wasn’t what she wanted. She told Harry that in her opinion that would be playing into their hands. They would run rings round the police. The best thing to do was the last thing they would want, which was to ignore them completely. That would solve the problem. She didn’t doubt it.

  She did doubt it, of course. She doubted it very much. But she couldn’t say that.

  She told Harry that she thought they needed to have a talk. She took him to the Dog and Duck. They sat in a corner. Harry was wary, on his guard, smouldering, awaiting rebuke. They talked for an hour. She asked him about his sailing, about his businesses, about his life. Not a word of rebuke did she utter. Harry entered the pub a frustrated rebel. He left a devoted puppy. Sally was almost disappointed how easy it was.

  And all that long, indecisive summer she was looking for somewhere to live. She looked round flats so small that it was an exaggeration to say that she looked round them. She saw a flat, near the river, that had a clearly visible water line seven feet above all the carpets. It wouldn’t have been much more obvious if there had been a plaque saying ‘High water mark. Flood. 23 N
ovember 1978’. One flat smelt of stale cheese, although the fridge was empty. In the bedroom of the next she counted seventeen woodlice. At another, on what was laughingly described in the particulars as ‘the patio’, a rat gave her a defiant look before running off. The lawyers reported that at last there was progress with the sale of ‘The Larches’. It was what she had longed for, and now it terrified her.

  To Sally’s great relief her tactics over the litter just about worked, and it became possible to transfer the work of some of her volunteers to other, more positive projects. Restoration work was begun on the Playhouse – and, to prove that all this wasn’t some middle-class takeover, to the children’s playground in Boswell Road – and there were heavily publicized plans for teams of volunteers to repair the ravages of time at Warwick Road, the football ground, where Potherthwaite Athletic (optimism and self-delusion again) had finished the season seventh in the Evo-Stik League.

  The real problem, however, was that the great council meeting at which they were to make their decision on the proposal for a second supermarket wouldn’t take place until September, and everything hung on that. Slowly, largely in secret, Sally was planning a protest march, a huge protest march, to show the town’s feelings a few days before the vote. If they could persuade the council to reject the plan, they could start on renovating the High Street with the knowledge that it would soon be pedestrianized; they could begin to design their new park, and the whole thing would lift off. A sculpture trail – was that too fantastic? What about Eric Sheepshank, on his rotting narrowboat, with his sculptor’s block? He was there on the doorstep, waiting for inspiration. And there was Ben Wardle, that strange boy. She recalled the little column of stones he had built on the waste ground. It had grown, in Sally’s memory, into an instinctively graceful tower, a work of naive genius, a harbinger of mature artistic mastery.

  Another memory grew as well. Conrad grew. He grew taller. His brown eyes became more and more soulful and sparkly. His dark hair was rich and thick, with not a shade of grey. She didn’t believe in love at first sight – that was ridiculous – but she found that she had to believe in desire at first sight. She had planned to show him round the house as slowly as she could, but she hadn’t needed to. He had lingered for almost two hours, accepting two cups of coffee. He had told her that his wife was dead. One night she had imagined him naked beside her, and she had willed herself not to desire the magnificent body that she had invented for him. But it had been no use. She ached for him, ached as she had never ached – she was in love, and to her horror she realized that she was in love for the first time, her first stab at an emotional life had never been the real thing. Now she longed for two contradictory happenings – her departure from this hollow home, and her building a home with the man she loved, who would be living in her hollow home. This love was absurd. Adult Sally, Sally the leader, Sally of the Transition movement, knew that. But Sally the woman, Sally the unfinished girl, Sally whose love life was going to have to be very busy if she was ever to equal even the average number of orgasms in this life of hers, felt sick with love and sick with herself.

  The summer slid slowly past. There were further instances of graffiti appearing in inaccessible places on the walls of prominent buildings. A leader appeared in the Chronicle mocking the police’s inability to catch a dyslexic young person, probably a girl, with the physical ability of a monkey. ‘This monkey is making a monkey out of our police,’ it stated. Six days later, the words ‘ILLIRITATE SCUM’ appeared right on top of the wall of the Chronicle’s office. There were also two more very strange burglaries. A painting was stolen from Councillor Stratton’s apartment in Potherthwaite Hall, and a large pile of brochures on dealing with poverty disappeared from the Jobcentre. What was strange was that the following week the painting appeared on the wall of the Jobcentre, and the brochures on poverty turned up in the bidet in Marian Stratton’s bathroom. The police also had to inquire into the arrival of a traffic cone on the head of the statue of the first Mayor of Potherthwaite, Councillor Amos Marsden.

  August was always the silly season. It was hard not to notice that people talked more of these mysteries than of the progress of Transition. The movement might have had its successes in Totnes and Worthing, in Lewes and Brixton and the Valley of the Lot in France, but it had met its match in Potherthwaite.

  Disillusionment swept over Sally. She was no nearer to finding a flat. Without Marigold’s support she would have crumbled. But she didn’t crumble. She invited Frank Stratton, the town’s most influential councillor, to lunch, to try to get him on her side in the battle to come. On the day she felt weak, and was on the point of cancelling when Marigold phoned and praised her to the skies. ‘Two women against the town, Sally. Don’t let me down.’

  If she had cancelled the lunch, would any of the rest of the Potherthwaite story have happened?

  She took the councillor to the Weavers’ Arms. The pub was quiet, and she chose a dark corner table. Over the meal, she chatted aimlessly and left him to wonder why he was there. After the meal, very gently, as he sipped his large Armagnac, she told him. She didn’t mention the protest march, but she did say that she was forming a committee to try to bring the Transition movement to bear on Potherthwaite, and that she would like a councillor on it, and that without falsehood – she wasn’t one for buttering people up – he was far and away the best and most caring and most intelligent and most enlightened member of the council and she would like him on her committee. He didn’t demur. Why should he? It was probably true.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sally,’ he said. ‘I like you. You know that. I admire you. I hope you know that too. But no, I couldn’t accept, not before the council’s decision. I know what you people want for the town. I understand. So if I go into the council chamber, on the night of the vote, with everyone knowing I am on your committee, how can it be a level playing field for me?’

  ‘Is it a level playing field anyway?’

  ‘Oh, Sally, don’t be so suspicious. Why does everyone always think we’re corrupt? This is Potherthwaite, not Palermo.’

  ‘Is the supermarket bribing you?’

  ‘No. In no way. They are offering, very generously, and they have no need to, to help fund the new road leading to the supermarket. That’s not a bribe. That’s sensible business.’

  ‘Not a bribe?’

  ‘No. We are not obligated to concur.’

  ‘That’s a good one, “not obligated to concur”. It’s a bribe.’

  ‘Is your Armagnac not a bribe?’

  ‘Frank! That’s ungrateful.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It is. Lovely stuff, incidentally.’

  ‘Would you like another?’

  ‘Thank you. It’s not a bribe, Sally, we are free to vote against them.’

  ‘OK, not a bribe, but not a level playing field either.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not. Thank you very much for what you’ve promised for the football ground, incidentally.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject, Frank.’

  Sue brought Councillor Stratton his double Armagnac. He gazed at it as if he hadn’t touched strong drink for years.

  ‘We’re all behind a lot of what you talked about at the church hall, Sally,’ said Councillor Stratton, raising his glass to her. ‘We want to be your friends and colleagues.’

  ‘But you won’t vote against the supermarket?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  He took a sip of the Armagnac.

  ‘Awesome stuff. I like you, Sally, and I’m going to say this, and mean it. If the vote was to be held at this moment in time, I would say “yes” to the supermarket, but Frank Stratton doesn’t do closed minds and, if you all put a fantastic case to us, a case that in our moral responsibility to the town that democratically elected us we cannot resist, then I, and perhaps many others, will change our minds.’

  Councillor Stratton’s every word had sapped a little more of Sally’s hope. The naivety of her suggestion that he join a committee appalled her. S
he wasn’t up to this.

  ‘I like you, as I said.’ The words continued remorselessly. ‘There isn’t a person in this town who doesn’t respect you for … how you’ve faced … what happened. So, I want you to know that what I’m about to say is not a threat.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘If a single word about the supermarket’s offer to share the cost of the road comes out, you won’t stand a chance in this town.’

  Her heart sank even further. She wasn’t used to dealing with people like this. ‘Thanks, Frank,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad that isn’t a threat.’

  ‘Good. We understand each other.’

  Only too well.

  Frank Stratton stood up. So did Sally.

  ‘I’m just advising you, Sally,’ he said, in a kindly voice, as to a naughty but well-meaning child. ‘Don’t get in out of your depth.’

  He held out his hand, utterly unaware that, although she felt more tired than she could ever remember feeling, so tired that she had even thought of telephoning Judith to ask her to come north and give her some sisterly support, he had stiffened every sinew of her resolve in just seven words.

  She longed to give his hand a really firm, hard shake, but she wanted Frank Stratton to misunderstand her words.