The Complete Pratt

by David Nobbs

  Their many friends have been puzzled by their on-off, on-off engagement. Well, last night Mr Holliday killed off the speculation with one word. ‘Our marriage,’ he declared, ‘is now definitely ow.’

  His first misprint since Neil Mallet had left couldn’t have come at a worse time. It wasn’t a good idea to make an enemy of both Holliday brothers in one day.

  Israel refused to surrender access to the Gulf of Akaba and the Gaza Strip. Humphrey Bogart died. Egypt seized British and French banks and insurance companies in Cairo. There was to be no more Territorial Army training for men who’d done their national service. Henry’s military career was over.

  On Thursday, January 17th, there were very few buses, due to the fuel shortage and very few trams, due to mechanical failures brought about by the gradual run-down of maintenance services in view of their impending demise. Workmen were rather sheepishly removing the trolley-bus wires right opposite the stop where Henry and Ginny were waiting. All this led to conversation in the queue. Warm clouds of indignant breath rose into the frosty air.

  Henry chatted to a splay-nosed man of about thirty, with receding hair and large ears, and to his spectacularly attractive girlfriend. His name was Dennis Lacey, and he worked in the X-ray department at the Infirmary. The girl, Marie Chadwick, was a nurse. They were in love. Were Henry and … er … in love? He shook his head, embarrassed, and belatedly introduced Ginny, who was polite but cool. Marie had jet-black hair and dark skin. Her mouth was small and sensual. Her nostrils were flared. Henry cast several surreptitious glances at her, to prove to himself how uninterested he now was in any woman except Hilary.

  At last their tram came, and Henry thought no more of this casual encounter.

  On his way to number two magistrates’ court, Henry telephoned Howard Lewthwaite. ‘I’ve found things out,’ he said. ‘Things I can’t discuss on the phone.’

  ‘Have lunch tomorrow,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘There are corners of the restaurant of the Midland Hotel which are further from other living human beings than anywhere else except the morgue.’

  ‘Funny you should mention the morgue,’ said Henry.

  In court – optician failed to see two red lights – Henry felt tired. In the canteen, he didn’t feel hungry. In the Lord Nelson, he didn’t feel thirsty. In the library, reading Colin’s report of the inquest on Uncle Teddy, he felt dizzy. The fire investigation expert had found no evidence of foul play. The fire appeared to have started at the stage end of the main public room. It could have been caused by a cigarette or an electrical fault. Recording a verdict of accidental death, the coroner had added a rider about the danger of inflammable materials in public places.

  By the time he got back to the newsroom, Henry felt dreadful. He realized that he was sickening for the flu.

  It was at that moment that Mr Andrew Redrobe’s summons came.

  He sank gratefully into a chair, and eyed the editor apprehensively across the neat, green-topped desk.

  ‘The correspondence column is jaded,’ said Mr Andrew Redrobe. ‘Suez, Hungary, prescription charges and the folly of getting rid of the trams have been with us too long. What else have we got? The absence of facilities for square-dancing in Thurmarsh and environs! We need a major new issue. You will write a letter, a real bombshell of a letter, condemning the inadequacy and irrelevancy of what we serve up as education. You will sign it “Angry Schoolmaster”.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Damn. It’s the flu making me subservient.

  ‘“Proud Sons of Thurmarsh”. Where are your follow-ups?’

  I hate the series, Mr Redrobe. ‘I’ve been thinking about that, sir.’ Damn.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Er …’I haven’t been thinking about it at all. ‘The Mayor?’

  ‘A half-wit. Any other “ideas”?’

  ‘Not at the … erm … no.’

  ‘You’ve done the Tories. Have to do Labour. The leader is not a son of Thurmarsh. The deputy leader is. Howard Lewthwaite. Do you know him?’

  ‘Know him? I’m engaged to his daughter.’

  ‘And you still didn’t … congratulations, incidentally … think of him for an article?’

  ‘Er … no … thank you, sir, incidentally.’ Damn. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I see. How about Bill Holliday?’

  ‘Bill Holliday??’

  ‘All right, he’s in scrap and used cars, and greyhound racing. Does that make him beyond the pale? Are you such a snob?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He’s a good Thurmarshian, Bill Holliday.’

  And will probably crush me to death in his car dump. Great.

  ‘I’d also suggest Sidney Kettlewell, of Crapp, Hawser and Kettlewell. A great Thurmarsh employer.’

  Who refused to employ my one-eyed dad. Wonderful.

  ‘And the one schoolmaster in this town I’ve any time for, because he does speak his mind. Gibbins of Brunswick Road.’

  In whose class I made a monumental fart. Terrific.

  Please let me go. I feel awful.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Henry. You’re not finding enough stuff on your own initiative.’

  ‘I am onto something, Mr Redrobe. I’m onto a really big story, on my own initiative.’

  ‘Ah! Fire away.’

  ‘I… er …’ I’m too weak to talk about it now. I want to tell Howard Lewthwaite first. I want some proof. ‘I’m seeing somebody about it tomorrow. I need proof before I make allegations about people in the public eye. Could you give me a week, sir?’ Damn.

  ‘A week, then. No longer. I’m all in favour of initiative, but I don’t like being kept in the dark. I don’t like mavericks. A newspaper is a team effort.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I don’t want glory out of this.’ Liar. ‘I don’t mind handing all the stuff over at all.’ Shut up. You’ll say things you regret. ‘I just want to be sure of my facts.’

  ‘People in the public eye, you say? I’m intrigued. I can hardly wait.’

  But Mr Andrew Redrobe had to wait. Henry managed to type his letter, signed ‘Angry Schoolmaster’. He managed to walk to the tram stop. He managed to undress himself and get into bed. He stayed there for more than a week.

  The cold war between Russia and the United States intensified. The winter in England remained mainly mild. In Cyprus there was widespread trouble between Greeks and Turks after a Turkish policeman was killed in a bomb attack. At Cardiff Arms Park England, minus Tosser Pilkington-Brick, narrowly defeated Wales.

  Every day, Ginny tried to interest Henry in food. Almost every day she sang out, with false brightness, ‘Another letter from Durham!’ As he began to recover, he gave her letters to post to Durham. The better he felt physically, the more his indebtedness to Ginny irked. He hoped she’d catch the flu, and become indebted to him, but she didn’t. She told him that Ted and Helen had matching flu, and Gordon had it. ‘He’s been over-exerting himself, I expect,’ she said. ‘We’ll see how she handles two households of invalids. I don’t see her as Edith Cavell.’

  Hilary’s letters were full of incident and vitality. When he thought back to the drab, lifeless girl he’d met in Siena, he knew he should feel delighted. And yet … here was he, feeble and damp-haired in a tiny room that stank of his own sweat, and there was she, striding vivaciously around Durham. How long, he felt after each letter, before she tired of him, found somebody better, some gigantic student whose intellect matched his frame. So, as he waited for each letter, he grew more and more nervous. When they came, he longed to tear them open but had to wait till Ginny had gone. And always they were so full of love for him that he was reassured, until … until it all began again. And, because he could hardly say, ‘On Monday I lay in bed and sweated. On Tuesday I lay in bed and sweated again,’ he found himself forced into the sentence by sentence school of letter writing. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the lecture on John Donne. I’m very pleased Mr Tintern liked your essay. I share completely your views about Selwyn Lloyd.’ Supposing she replied, ‘I’m glad you’re glad I enjoye
d the lecture on John Donne. I’m very pleased you’re very pleased Mr Tintern …’ Supposing their love ground to a halt in bad letters.

  At the end of each letter, he swore his undying love in explicit descriptions of what he’d like to do – oh god, supposing they died in a crash and Cousin Hilda found his collected love-letters, tied by an elastic band that any decent person would have reserved for jam jars.

  As he began to get better, he felt deeply sexy, in that sweaty fug of a bedroom. Desperately, he listened to the wireless. The music programmes transported him back to his childhood at Low Farm, outside Rowth Bridge. Sandy Macpherson, Rawicz and Landauer, Harold Smart and his electric organ, Ronald Binge, Max Jaffa, Reginald Leopold and his players, out it poured. His childhood seemed a long way away, and he got depressed about Lorna Arrow and Eric Lugg.

  The comedy programmes rolled off the assembly line too. The Goon Show, Take It From Here, Ray’s A Laugh, Life With The Lyons, Midday Music Hall with the Song Pedlars, Barry Took, Lucille Graham and Vic Oliver. Every time he laughed, he wished Hilary was there, to laugh beside him.

  He listened to everything from schools talks on the Lapps of Scandinavia and Neutralism and the Spirit of Gandhi to Jean Metcalfe visiting Vera Lynn’s home, from Mrs Dale’s Diary to an investigation into whether social mobility between the classes had been achieved in our society (‘Ask Belinda Boyce-Uppingham,’ he shouted. ‘Ask any bloody snob.’ He added, in a low moan, ‘Ask me.’), from Science Survey on the problem of vibration to Naturalist’s Notebook, which included a contribution on oil contamination, and a recording of a striped hawk moth, which was the best recording of a striped hawk moth he had ever heard on the wireless. And still he felt sexy. He couldn’t fantasize about Hilary, who belonged to reality. That left him feeling sexy about almost everybody–Jean Metcalfe, Vera Lynn, Mrs Dale, Mrs Archer, the Lapps of Scandinavia, even Gandhi. He returned hurriedly to thoughts of Hilary.

  Ginny returned halfway through the recording of the striped hawk moth, so he never heard how it finished.

  ‘Nice evening?’ he asked.

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘You met a nice man!’

  ‘No. Gordon’s still ill.’ She gave him a shrewd glance. ‘You’re better!’ she said. She sounded as if his improvement was the only blot on a splendid day.

  ‘I wish you had met a nice man,’ he said. ‘You deserve one.’

  ‘Presumably that’s why you ruled yourself out of the running.’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘You are better. My job is done. Good night,’ said Ginny.

  He was better. Next day, he telephoned Howard Lewthwaite, and arranged to meet him for lunch on Tuesday.

  John Foster Dulles said that, if the United States became involved in a Middle East war, he would rather not have British or French troops alongside them. Only 2 out of 19 wrecks in the southern section of the Suez Canal had so far been removed by the UN salvage team.

  A virulent letter from an angry schoolmaster appeared in the Thurmarsh Evening Argus. Its author sat in a secluded corner of the vast, scantily filled restaurant of the Midland Hotel, beneath a photograph of Stanier Pacific No. 46207 Princess Arthur of Connaught, passing through Rugby with the down Welshman, consisting of fourteen bogies.

  ‘It is good to see you. Are you better?’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

  ‘Much better, thank you. Before we start on the main business, Mr Lewthwaite, I’ve been asked to do you for “Proud Sons of Thurmarsh”.’

  ‘Oh! I’d be honoured, Henry.’

  The waiter handed them menus.

  ‘Let’s get the ordering out of the way, shall we?’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

  They studied the vast menus.

  ‘Do you ever get criticized, as a socialist, for spending a lot on meals in public?’ said Henry.

  ‘I never thought of that,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘I was going to order a good burgundy. I think we’d better have the house carafe. And there’s not a bad choice on the table d’hôte, is there? I like cod mornay.’ They ordered their meals. Howard Lewthwaite leant forward and said across the huge table, ‘Right. What are these things you’ve found out?’

  ‘The burning of the Cap Ferrat was arson,’ said Henry. ‘The death of its owner was murder.’

  Howard Lewthwaite went white and sat very still. Henry met his glance and knew. Howard Lewthwaite knew that he knew. They held the gaze. Neither wanted to be the first to be seen to be unable to bear the awfulness of that moment. Henry’s flesh crawled. His scalp itched. Hilary seemed very far away.

  ‘You’re part of it,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Not part of murder and arson,’ said Howard Lewthwaite vehemently.

  The elderly wine waiter brought what looked like a sample bottle. It contained what looked like a sample. He poured a quarter of an inch of wine. Howard Lewthwaite sniffed it. ‘Yes yes,’ he said. ‘Absolutely revolting. Pour away.’

  Henry raised his glass.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you going to congratulate me?’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘Winning the Nobel Prize for Naïvety.’

  ‘Henry!’

  How quiet the room was.

  ‘You’re a friend of Peter Matheson,’ said Henry. ‘You’re a friend of the chief planning officer. You invite both of them to your party. You try to put me off by telling me you’re convinced nothing illegal has happened. I should have guessed.’

  The brown Windsor soup arrived. Those were the halcyon days of brown soups.

  ‘How could you do it, Mr Lewthwaite?’

  Howard Lewthwaite smiled. His smile was as thin as the soup. He looked older.

  ‘Lewthwaite’s is failing,’ he said. ‘Naddy’ll die if I don’t take her to live in a hot, dry climate. You’re quite right. There is a development plan for the whole area between Market Street and the river. I’m not ashamed of that. It needs redevelopment. We call it the Fish Hill Complex. A gleaming new shopping centre, Henry. Thurmarsh needs it. Tower blocks by the Rundle, with grass in between. Using the river. What views. Higher than anything in Sheffield or Leeds. Mixed housing, right in the centre. A good plan.’

  ‘Those are nice streets.’

  ‘Henry! They’re run-down. They’re clapped-out.’

  ‘They’re being deliberately run-down so the poor conned townsfolk can be told, “They’re run-down. They’re clapped-out.”’

  Howard Lewthwaite didn’t reply.

  ‘All this secrecy. Fred Hathersage. Anthony Eden denied collusion with France and Israel. Do you deny collusion? Are there back-handers flying about?’

  The cod mornay arrived.

  ‘A bit of everything, gentlemen?’ said the waitress.

  ‘A bit of everything,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

  Henry didn’t know how he could still eat. But anything was better than thinking. Thinking about Hilary. Thinking about Howard Lewthwaite as a father-in-law.

  ‘You feel I’ve let you down,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

  ‘I feel you’ve let Hilary down.’

  Howard Lewthwaite’s eyes met Henry’s again.

  ‘You’re going to suggest I drop the matter,’ said Henry.

  ‘You’ll be losing that prize for naïvety.’ Howard Lewthwaite smiled. His smile was as tired as the broccoli.

  Henry looked across the restaurant to the table where he’d sat with Lorna. This room wasn’t redolent of happy memories for him.

  ‘You seem to be forgetting the arson and murder,’ he said.

  ‘Today’s the first I’ve heard of arson and murder,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

  ‘Murder of the man who took me in as his son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The owner of the Cap Ferrat was my uncle.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, Henry. Oh my God, what a business.’

  ‘Yes. The burning of the Cap Ferrat was so convenient for you. Didn’t you ever suspect it might be arson.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I’m
front runner for the Nobel Prize for Naïvety. You’re a politician. Dirt’s your natural environment.’ No! This is your father-in-law to be.

  ‘I think I did have a little wonder, to be honest,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘I think I closed my mind to the possibility fairly rapidly. Something unpleasant that I didn’t want to admit to myself. Can it be true, Henry? Arson, possibly. Murder? Thurmarsh isn’t Chicago.’

  ‘That’s what Stan Holliday said.’

  ‘Did he? Oh dear. In that case it probably is Chicago. Where does Stan Holliday come in?’

  ‘He was overheard by my source, which I can’t reveal, saying it was arson and murder. I challenged him. He denied it far too vehemently.’

  ‘That’s all you’re going on, is it? No proof?’

  ‘No proof, no.’

  They ate in silence for a few moments.

  ‘How’s your cod mornay?’ asked Howard Lewthwaite.

  ‘Disgusting. Another sauce that should never have been revealed.’

  ‘Look. Perhaps it was arson, but your uncle could still have died accidentally. I mean … why should anybody murder him?’

  ‘So there’s no owner of the club to pay the insurance money to. So there’s no owner of the club to suspect that it was arson.’

  ‘Your nomination for the Nobel Prize is withdrawn,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘Will you give me a week to try and find out what I can, Henry?’

  He had to agree. Hilary was coming down that weekend. He couldn’t bear to spoil the weekend. But he couldn’t resist making Howard Lewthwaite wait for a few long seconds for his reply. He hadn’t often had that kind of power.

  ‘One week,’ he said.

  They both plumped for the apple pie. Henry got out his notebook.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘It’s time to start another interview in my series, “Great Criminals and Hypocrites”, alias “Proud Sons of Thurmarsh”.’

  ‘We don’t need to do this if you don’t want to,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.