The Complete Pratt

by David Nobbs

  ‘So what do we do?’ he asked. ‘Turn it down?’

  ‘It’s not easy to do that, is it?’ said Hilary. ‘It’ll hurt them deeply, and it does make financial sense.’

  Henry ‘After careful consideration, although we believe you have a great deal to offer, we do not think public relations is necessarily the right field for you’ Pratt nodded glumly. He felt awful.

  He was still feeling awful twenty minutes later, when Cousin Hilda called.

  Cousin Hilda refused even the limited comfort offered by the armchair. Hard chairs are more suited to life on earth, her rigid pose asserted. She sat with her legs slightly apart, as women do who have no thought of sex and its attendant dangers, and with stockings as thick as hers, and pale pink bloomers as voluminous as hers, she had never been exposed to its dangers.

  ‘I’m sorry to call so late,’ she said. She made it sound as if she was being unbelievably bold in calling at eleven minutes past nine. ‘But I had my gentlemen to see to.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to come at all,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Well, we haven’t got much on tonight after Tony Hancock, to say we pay for a licence,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘There’s Panorama, and that’s depressing, and so’s the news, and Picture Parade’s no use to me because when can I get to the pictures, with my gentlemen to see to, and then there’s ballroom dancing, and I’ve never been right bothered about dancing, it only leads to things, and anyroad it includes that rock and roll. On the BBC! Can you believe it?’

  ‘How are your gentlemen?’ enquired Henry.

  ‘Mr O’Reilly doesn’t change,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Mr Pettifer’s never had quite the same spring in his step since he were taken off the cheese counter. I’ve lost Mr Peters. I’ve a Mr Ironside instead, but only through the week. He has family in Norfolk.’ Cousin Hilda paused and went slightly pink. ‘I’ve had a chapter of disasters with my fourth room.’

  ‘Disasters?’ said Hilary gently.

  ‘Drink,’ whispered Cousin Hilda, as if the gas fire might disapprove if it heard. ‘And worse.’

  ‘Worse!’ said Henry. ‘The mind boggles.’

  ‘Well it might,’ said Cousin Hilda, luckily missing the irony. ‘Well it might. That’s how I lost Mr Peters.’ There was silence. Cousin Hilda was clearly torn between the need to unburden herself and the enormous difficulty of broaching a painful subject.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ said Hilary gently.

  ‘This man came recommended,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘He were a regional under-manager with Timothy White’s. Timothy White’s, I ask you, a respectable firm! He made … he made …’

  ‘Certain suggestions to Mr Peters?’ prompted Henry.

  Cousin Hilda nodded her gratitude, and sniffed violently.

  ‘Times are changing,’ said Hilary.

  ‘You’re right, Hilary,’ said Cousin Hilda fervently. ‘You are so right. You have a very sensible wife, Henry.’

  Henry was thrilled by this unparalleled high praise from Cousin Hilda, albeit slightly hurt by the surprise in her tone.

  Cousin Hilda leant forward, and Henry realised that she was winding herself up for something momentous.

  ‘We had fun at number 66, didn’t we, in the old days?’ she said.

  Henry tried to hide his astonishment.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Lots of fun.’

  ‘Plenty of good chin-wags.’

  ‘Yes indeed. Very good chin-wags.’

  ‘I’ve never been a great one for talk at table, and there were moments when I disapproved. I regret that now. Those meals, Henry, when you lived with me, they were the happiest times of my life.’

  Henry could feel his heart thudding.

  ‘It’s different now,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Mr O’Reilly’s never exactly been a live wire, Mr Pettifer’s a shadow of his former self, at weekends when Mr Ironside’s gone it’s like a morgue. I have a little nest egg. I don’t live particularly extravagantly. I don’t need the rent from my fourth room, and you’ll not want to be paying out rent every week when you’re not working.’

  Henry felt that he was drowning. He couldn’t bear the thought of married life under Cousin Hilda’s roof, in the little room which had been home to him from the time he had left Dalton College until he had bravely moved out into a flat early last year. He clutched Hilary’s hand.

  ‘I’m too old to cope with any more under-managers from Timothy White’s or Macfisheries with their ideas.’ Cousin Hilda, who must have been into her fifties by now, sniffed. ‘I’d like it very much if you made my home your home.’

  To Henry’s horror, Hilary burst into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but that is so kind of you.’

  Cousin Hilda looked at Hilary as if regretting her use of the word ‘sensible’. She sniffed disapprovingly.

  Hilary blew her nose violently. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Cousin Hilda’s mouth was working with tension, and she had gone pink again.

  ‘There is one other matter,’ she said.

  She pressed her legs together and Henry realised to his horror that she was going to talk about sex. Sweat was running down his back.

  ‘I don’t doubt that I strike you as odd and old-fashioned,’ continued Cousin Hilda.

  Even Hilary’s famous tact was unequal to the task of denying this.

  ‘However.’ Cousin Hilda was remorseless. ‘Even I am aware that there is a side to marriage in which folk … do things.’ She had begun to sweat as well. Henry had never seen her sweat before. ‘I know that it’s the duty of married folk to do these things, otherwise there’d be no procreation of the human race.’ Cousin Hilda was clinging rigidly to her chair. Her knuckles had gone white. ‘I want you to know that you’d be welcome to … er … do your duty in my house whenever tha wants. Except mealtimes. Also, the normal bathtime restrictions would not apply. You could bath as often as you wished, provided that you didn’t clash with my gentlemen.’

  Cousin Hilda stopped at last and tried to smile.

  Tick. Hiss. Whoosh.

  Henry didn’t dare look at Hilary. ‘Thank you very much, Cousin Hilda,’ he said in a stilted voice. ‘That’s a very kind offer, and well worth thinking about. Isn’t it, Hilary?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Hilary. ‘Very kind.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Henry. ‘The thing is … Hilary’s father has offered us a room in their house.’

  Cousin Hilda’s lips began to work again.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I see. And you’d rather go there. More of a home. More fun than an ageing spinster and her gentlemen. I understand.’

  ‘We haven’t decided anything,’ said Hilary with just a hint of asperity. ‘These are very important suggestions, for which we’re extremely grateful, but they’d change our lives considerably, and we really do have to think carefully about them.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Of course. It were foolish of me to think you’d jump at my offer.’

  And she sniffed twice, once in disgust at her own emotions and once in disapproval of her inability to hide them.

  Henry and Hilary agonised after Cousin Hilda had gone. Hiss, tick, whoosh, and barely a boing. Who would they least offend if they accepted the other’s offer? Which prospect filled them with the lesser dread? Wouldn’t it be easier just to stay put? But why should they continue to pay rent when they didn’t need to? And if they stayed, would they not simply offend both parties? They couldn’t make up their minds, so they went to bed and did their bit for the procreation of the human race instead.

  In the morning, as every morning, Hilary worked on her novel, and Henry pretended to work on his. Then, over their frugal lunch of Wensleydale cheese and digestive biscuits with plum chutney, they went back over the arguments of the night before, and reached a decision. Their solution was a good old British compromise, which would please nobody. They would spend half the time before Hilary began working with her family, and half at Cousin Hilda�
�s, and then they would rent another flat, whether Henry had a job or not. They decided to go to Cousin Hilda’s first, so that they wouldn’t have to spend Christmas there. Henry couldn’t bear the thought of another Christmas with Mrs Wedderburn and ginger cordial and Mr O’Reilly in a paper hat and the heady excitement of post-prandial Snap.

  And so, just over a week later, Henry ‘While we are impressed by your personality and enthusiasm we do not consider that you have the experience or physique needed to run a bird reserve’ Pratt and his lovely wife Hilary caught a tram and a bus, because to travel by taxi would have been to incur an enormous sniff of disapproval right at the outset, and arrived at Cousin Hilda’s stone, semi-detached house in Park View Road just twenty minutes after the hired van that had brought their worldly possessions in three suitcases and two packing cases.

  Cousin Hilda opened the door, and Henry re-entered her house with a deep sense of nostalgic gloom marbled with affection. To walk across her dark, cold hall was to embark upon a voyage of nasal nostalgia that made Proust’s madeleines seem insignificant by comparison. Henry was met by the mingled smells of cabbage and linoleum, of the dankness of darkness and the acridity of burning coke, the whole pot-pourri warmed by the succulent nourishing aroma of giant bloomers being aired, and spiced with the only slightly less nourishing imminence of toad-in-the-hole and sponge pudding with chocolate sauce. Faithful readers will deduce that it was a Wednesday.

  And so, that late Wednesday afternoon, as the sun sank with Henry’s and Hilary’s hearts, they arranged their relatively meagre possessions around the tiny little second storey fourth bedroom of number 66, Park View Road. The art deco clock went on the tiny mantelpiece. They didn’t dare, in these stern surroundings, to unpack the bookends given them by Auntie Doris and Geoffrey Porringer. These had a naked man at one end and a naked woman at the other, and if the naked man was meant to be thinking about a book, it must have been Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Their books remained in the packing cases with the bookends.

  The room’s furniture consisted of a severely sagging sofa which converted into a severely sagging three-quarter size bed at night, one hard chair, two small bedside tables with circles where Cousin Hilda’s gentlemen had rested mugs of cocoa, and a rickety and wholly inadequate wardrobe cum chest of drawers. There were two pictures, the depressed monarch of a wet and misty glen, and a portrait of John Wesley in an unusually gloomy mood even for him.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Henry bravely. ‘Our toad-in-the-hole awaits. I could do with a good chin-wag.’

  And indeed at first the atmosphere round the little table in the blue basement room was quite lively. Mr O’Reilly rose to heights of eloquence unknown in his quiet life. ‘It’s very good to have you back, Mr Henry,’ he said. ‘Oh yes indeed. Very good. Oh, we had some fun in the old days, didn’t we? Yes indeed. And now your lovely lady too. Yes yes,’ and then he went very red and subsided into shiny silence.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Norman Pettifer. ‘Any novelty is welcome when one spends one’s life putting tins on shelves.’

  ‘Brian Ironside,’ announced Brian Ironside.

  ‘I believe you have family in Norfolk,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Yes,’ said Brian Ironside.

  ‘Which part of Norfolk?’ persisted Hilary bravely.

  ‘Swaffham,’ admitted Brian Ironside reluctantly.

  ‘It must be a difficult journey,’ quipped Henry wittily.

  ‘It is,’ countered Brian Ironside thoughtfully.

  ‘What line are you in, Brian?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Communications,’ said Brian Ironside.

  ‘Do you go to the theatre much, Hilary?’ asked Norman Pettifer.

  ‘Not as much as we’d like to,’ said Hilary.

  ‘I once saw Johnny Gielgud,’ said Norman Pettifer.

  ‘Really?’ said Hilary. ‘What in?’

  ‘Regent Street,’ said Norman Pettifer. ‘He was coming out of Austin Reed’s.’

  Liam O’Reilly, who had never been to London, sighed, and there was a brief silence.

  ‘Well come on, Henry, Hilary,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Tell us about your plans.’

  ‘We’re both writing novels,’ said Henry.

  Cousin Hilda sniffed twice, once for each novel, and gave Hilary a disappointed glance, as if to say, ‘Nothing surprises me about Henry, but I thought you were sensible.’

  Novels having fallen so flat, Henry felt a desperate need to change the subject. ‘Is young Adrian still making a mess of the cheese counter, Norman?’ he asked.

  ‘Mess is not the word,’ said Norman Pettifer through clamped lips. ‘Farce, fiasco and cock-up are three other examples of total linguistic inadequacy. There isn’t a word in the dictionary to do justice to what Adrian has done to the cheese counter.’

  Norman Pettifer’s bitterness, allied to Brian Ironside’s reticence and Liam O’Reilly’s exhaustion, cast rather a damper on the proceedings, and the sponge pudding with chocolate sauce was taken in silence.

  Nevertheless, when her gentlemen had gone, Cousin Hilda smiled and said, ‘Well, that were right nice. It’s been so cheerless recently, as if I’ve been doing it all too long. You’ve given me a new lease of life.’

  ‘It really is extremely kind of you to have us,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘What are families for? Incidentally,’ she added, dashing their hopes of an early escape to the pub, ‘please don’t feel obliged to leave when my gentlemen do. Treat this room as your home.’

  ‘Actually we were thinking of popping down to the park before the light faded,’ lied Henry.

  ‘It closes at six thirty,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘You’ll be too late.’ She leant forward, to take them further into her confidence. ‘I’ve had to make sacrifices for my gentlemen,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never really been able to say that this house is my home.’

  Henry and Hilary were astounded.

  ‘Not your home?’ echoed Henry emptily.

  ‘Not as such. Not in the sense that Mrs Wedderburn’s house is her home.’

  ‘But your house is full of people and hers is so lifeless.’

  ‘She has a parlour.’

  ‘But she never uses it.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t. That’s the point of a parlour,’ explained Cousin Hilda. ‘It’s a place for your best things.’

  ‘But then you never use your best things,’ said Henry.

  ‘Of course not. Then they don’t spoil,’ said Cousin Hilda.

  ‘Well what’s the use of having them, then?’ asked Henry.

  ‘You know they’re there,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Cousin Hilda, and Hilary felt that she had regained some of the approval she had lost over the novel.

  Little did Cousin Hilda know that, if ever Hilary had any best things, she would use them regularly.

  But would she ever have any best things? It didn’t seem likely that night, as they turned their sagging sofa into a sagging bed, clambered into it, realised how much it creaked, and attempted to do their duty towards the procreation of the human race.

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Henry at last. ‘It’s not just Cousin Hilda. I don’t want to make Mr O’Reilly envious and Norman Pettifer even more bitter. It’s the thought of them all, down there, listening, wondering.’

  ‘Well never mind,’ said Hilary. ‘Seven weeks isn’t long, and you’re still my lovely man.’

  The next morning, Hilary and her lovely man walked over to the Alderman Chandler Memorial Park, where Henry, when he had thought he was a homosexual, had followed a fair-haired boy from the grammar school, and later, once he had realised that he wasn’t a homosexual, had asked Stefan Prziborski about precautions. Now, twenty-two years old, married, with a beautiful wife whose small, shapely breasts and trim bottom he adored – how could he ever have thought her scrawny, even in Siena? – he ought to be feeling happy in the warm October sunshine. But he wasn’t. For one thing, the park was failing him. It was very
much as he had remembered – there were still very few animals in the cages, one of the swings was still broken, most of the glass in the Old Men’s Shelter was still missing, and there weren’t nearly as many varieties of duck on the pond as on the board which showed pictures of all the ducks that were supposed to be on the pond. But none of that had ever mattered, because the park had been a huge expanse, redolent of adventure and discovery. Now it had shrunk. It was small and neat.

  Were their lives going to be small and neat? No! They were fighters. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be dispirited by their surroundings.

  Henry led Hilary home boldly. On the gravel drive they met Cousin Hilda with her shopping bag. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll only be gone while half eleven,’ she told them.

  The gentlemen were all at work, and Cousin Hilda would be at the shops till half past eleven! Barely, if ever, can a sofa bed have creaked so much at 66, Park View Road, Thurmarsh.

  Bravely, in the days to come, Henry and Hilary sat, one on the hard chair, the other on the converted sofa, with their manuscripts on the bedside tables. Bravely, Henry pretended to write his novel, but he already knew, in his heart, that he wasn’t a novelist.

  Bravely, Henry applied for further jobs. Bravely, he went for interviews. Bravely, he shrugged off the fact that his managerial genius was not recognised by British Railways, Blue Arrow or Thurmarsh Bottling Limited. Let the nation suffer late trains, unsuitable appointments and bottle shortages. See if he cared.

  Bravely, Henry and Hilary adjusted the pattern of their love-making to the rhythms of Cousin Hilda’s shopping. Four times a week was well above the national average, anyway, and if Monday (bread and household goods) and Tuesday (meat and vegetables) were rather rushed affairs, Thursday (meat, bread and groceries) and Friday (fish, meat, vegetables and sundries) were really quite leisurely.

  Bravely, every afternoon, come rain or shine, they set off, across Cousin Hilda’s dark, cold hall, past the barometer which, being slightly wrongly adjusted, took almost as pessimistic a view of the prospects as did its owner, and plunged into the knotted streets of Thurmarsh for an hour’s brisk walk. Once or twice, nostalgia tempted Henry towards the dingy back-to-back terraces of Paradise Lane, where he had been born, and they gazed into the murky waters of the River Rundle, into which he had been pushed eighteen years ago, and into the marginally less poisonous waters of the Rundle and Gadd Navigation, into which he had been thrown eleven years ago, and he hoped, over-optimistically, as it turned out, that he would never be deposited in either of them again.