The Complete Pratt

by David Nobbs

  All Stick Together was published in October. Advance sales were good, and the publishers wanted Hilary to embark on another tour, so Henry again took a week of his holidays to look after the children.

  On his last day before his week’s holiday, he felt quite important. His recommendation of two smaller chilled stores, in Darlington and Preston, had found favour and was to be implemented. He didn’t feel bitter that it was being passed off as Roland Stagg’s idea. He knew the kind of world he lived in. He too had lost some of his naïvety.

  ‘Have a nice holiday,’ said Roland Stagg, leaving half an hour early to miss the traffic.

  ‘Thank you. I won’t,’ said Henry.

  He didn’t. As day succeeded day, as Hilary toured bookshops and radio stations, the figure of Nigel Clinton was everywhere. It waited for the children outside their schools, it played with them in the Alderman Chandler Memorial Park, it stirred the stew-pot and cooked fish fingers with them. Henry grew more and more certain that his jealousy was not irrational. At night, especially, he knew that Nigel Montgomery Clinton was kissing and touching where he had kissed and touched. It was instinct that made him get up at three thirty-five on the Thursday morning, and go to Hilary’s second-best jeans, her writing jeans, and there in the back pocket he found the letter, as afterwards he believed that he had known he would:

  Dearest Hilary,

  I love you so much, darling.…

  He asked Alastair and Fiona Blair, who had children at the same school, if they would fetch the children that day, and drove madly, wildly, tearfully, angrily, crazily, past Retford and Newark and Love You and Grantham and So Much and Stamford and Peterborough and Darling and Huntingdon and Cambridge and Love You So Much, my Newmarket and Lavenham, towards the nearest to parents that he knew, the nearest to a family that he had ever known.

  Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris were weeding the pretty garden of their sugar-loaf cottage as if the words ‘import’ and ‘export’ had never existed.

  They greeted him ecstatically.

  ‘Welcome to our domestic bliss,’ said Uncle Teddy.

  ‘We owe so much to you,’ said Auntie Doris.

  ‘Hilary has a lover,’ said Henry.

  8 The Swinging Sixties

  ‘DON’T FORGET HOW incredibly lucky you’ve been in landing a woman like Hilary,’ said Uncle Teddy, over pâté and toast in the Aga-cosy kitchen.

  ‘Teddy!’ said Auntie Doris, who always made things worse by protesting about them. ‘He’ll think you’re meaning he’s not good-looking.’

  ‘Doris!’ said Uncle Teddy, who sometimes made things worse still by protesting about them as well. ‘That won’t upset him. He knows he isn’t good-looking.’

  ‘Teddy!’ said Auntie Doris.

  ‘What I’m meaning is,’ said Uncle Teddy, ‘that you confront her very calmly. Don’t raise your voice, and risk letting the thing escalate into a shouting match.’

  ‘Show her the letter,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘Confront her with it, but not in an angry way.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Uncle Teddy. ‘Sorrow and regret at an isolated lapse. That’s the style.’

  Henry would often ask himself why he had believed that advice given by two people who had led such tortuous love lives could possibly be sound.

  At last the children were asleep. The long charade of Hilary’s home-coming was over.

  ‘Now perhaps you’ll tell me what’s wrong,’ she said.

  ‘“Wrong”?’ said Henry. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been polite but dead all evening.’

  ‘It’s been a nice evening.’

  ‘It’s been unbearably nice. Something’s very wrong, and I want to know what it is.’

  ‘Don’t you know what it is?’ said Henry quietly.

  ‘Well, yes, I think I do. I think you’re deeply jealous of my books and my success, such as it is, and I find that deeply ungenerous and very disappointing.’

  ‘Books my arse.’ No! Calm. Don’t raise your voice. Confront her with the letter, but not in an angry way. ‘I think you ought to know that I’ve found this,’ he said in a calm, but wavering voice.

  Hilary took the letter and stared at it wildly. He wouldn’t have believed that she was capable of going as much paler as she did. So she was guilty. Her face extinguished his last desperate hope that it was all a dreadful misunderstanding.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ she said, in a strange, low, icy voice.

  ‘In your pocket. Careless to leave it.’ No. No gibes.

  ‘Careless? Careless? I didn’t think my husband would go through my pockets.’

  ‘Obviously, or you wouldn’t have left it. It’s lucky I did, isn’t it?’ No! Sorrow and regret. ‘Look, darling, I … things happen, and I can forgive if … er … give him up and we’ll work harder together and … work something out. I’m prepared to try.’

  ‘You are prepared to try? My God! Big of you.’ Her words stung him. He flinched. If he hadn’t known that she was hitting out in self-defence, he’d have believed that she really hated him.

  She gave him a look that was dredged from the depths of her bruised eyes. He recognised the dry swirling of panic. A horribly dry look. A strangely sad look. He’d have preferred tears.

  And then she swung round and simply walked out of the house. She didn’t even shut the door.

  He just stared, bemused, at the space where she had been. Nothing in the advice of Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris had prepared him for this.

  He hurried upstairs. The children were fast asleep, little chests rising and falling peacefully.

  He had to go after her. He’d have to risk it.

  He couldn’t risk it. Kate and Jack were his absolute responsibility, and he loved them without reserve.

  He phoned his neighbours, the Wiltons. They were in. They promised to come round immediately, without hesitation. He hadn’t expected that, because he hardly knew them. He thanked them warmly, told them under which stone he’d leave the key, pulled on his tatty old duffel coat, slammed the door, left the key under the agreed stone, and rushed off down Waterloo Crescent.

  He turned left into Winstanley Road, towards the town centre, because surely Hilary wouldn’t have set off towards the countryside on such a dingy October night? He hurried, half-running, then walking till he got his breath back, he was so unfit.

  Winstanley Road dipped towards the town centre, and became less prosperous with every frantic, gasping step. At the point where it became York Road it began to smell of decay, of rising damp and falling incomes, of struggle and strife.

  At last he saw her, marching resolutely through the ill-lit town, marching wildly in the drizzle with no coat.

  Past the grandiose brick shell of the shabby Midland Road Station he chased her, past the lavatorial marble of the Chronicle and Argus building, no time for memories now. Up Brunswick Road, past unloved, unlovely terraces, past the gabled fortress that had once been Brunswick Road Elementary School, in which, on a morning almost as awful as this night, Henry had won false fame with a fart. Now he merely wheezed. Wildly Hilary walked, and her wildness gave her strength. Although breaking into asthmastic trots at regular intervals, Henry was catching her up only slowly.

  Down the other side of the hill she strode, as the road dipped into the Rundle Valley. On the right were the great steelworks of Crapp, Hawser and Kettlewell. Once, the nights had rung with their virility and glowed like the gates of Hell. Now they played a sadder, gentler tune.

  Drizzle turned to rain and, as if to wound Henry with thoughts of the child he’d been and the man he had become, Hilary turned down Paradise Lane, past the little terraced house where he was born.

  Through the gate onto the towpath she strode, across the Rundle and Gadd Navigation, over the waste ground, onto the wide footbridge over the faintly phosphorescent Rundle. There, under a night sky turned orange by the massed street lights, Henry caught her.

  ‘Hilary,’ he implored. ‘My darling! I’m sorry!
’

  Why am I saying I’m sorry, he wondered, when it’s she who’s been unfaithful to me? Because I love her and don’t want to lose her.

  She didn’t even look at him, but turned away, along the river. The rain fell harder. Orange clouds scudded dimly across the sky.

  ‘Hilary!’ he repeated.

  She turned and came towards him. Her face was deathly white. He thought she was going to hit him. She pushed him. He fell backwards, flailing wildly. The acid waters of the Rundle met over his head, as they had done when he was four years old. He was drowning, burning, dying. He forced himself upwards, desperately, his head broke the surface, he gulped air frantically, excruciatingly. Hilary had gone. He went under again. He surfaced again. He tried to touch the bottom, but couldn’t. He told himself to keep calm. He began to swim. The river, swollen by the recent rains, swept him downstream towards the weir. He struck out for the bank, handicapped by bursting lungs, aching chest and sodden clothes. He heard the curiously comforting rattle of a long goods train, and the very uncomforting roar of the weir. He flung himself towards the bank as the weir approached. He dragged himself up over trapped driftwood and broken bottles, slipped in the mud, hauled himself slowly back up with rubbery arms, just managed to pull himself over the lip of the sodden bank, and lay there, gasping, spluttering, the least impressive beached whale in history.

  Later, when he was standing for Parliament and all this could be looked back on in tranquillity, Henry would say, ‘I was pushed into the Rundle in 1939. It was an open sewer. I was pushed into it in 1964. I realised instantly that pollution had increased over those twenty-five years. Elect me, and I will make it my life’s work to rid our town of this pollution. Elect me, and I will give you a river into which it will be a positive pleasure to be pushed.’

  But on this October night his mouth tasted foul, he felt sick and poisoned, his breath returned to normality only slowly, and Hilary had disappeared completely.

  He stood up. Water dripped off him. He’d lost his left shoe and a used condom was hanging from his right shoe. He flung shoe and condom into the river.

  He trudged back, in his soaking socks, over the river, over the waste ground, across the steep hump-backed bridge over the Rundle and Gadd Navigation, along the towpath, through the gate into Paradise Lane, and past the house where he was born. He picked his way carefully, watching out for broken glass and dog turds.

  There were no trams any more, and there were all sorts of rumours about how Bill Holliday had won the scrap contract. He didn’t attempt to wait for a bus, stinking as he did of sewage and dead fish.

  He wheezed on sore feet and jellied legs, up Brunswick Road, down the hill to the town centre, past the lit windows of Premier House, where production of the morning’s Chronicle was in full swing, and along York Road, parts of which were as smelly as his clothes. Stragglers of the night gave him looks as dirty as his trousers. A drunk, urinating in the gutter, stared at him as at an inferior being.

  As he limped up the garden path, he had a wild hope that Hilary would be there, remorseful. But she wasn’t. The Wiltons greeted him as if his was the only way to dress, and left only reluctantly and after assurances that he would phone them if necessary.

  He phoned the police, had a whisky, and a bath, and went to bed to toss through a long, lonely night.

  In the morning, he told the children that Hilary had gone to see a friend, but they sensed that something was wrong, and were fractious.

  The police phoned at nine forty-five. She’d been found wandering near Hoyland Common. She’d been taken to the General Hospital. She was suffering from exhaustion and hypothermia. She didn’t know who she was.

  She looked at Henry and showed no sign of recognition. She looked feverish. Her eyes were hot but blank. He tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him. He phoned Howard Lewthwaite in Spain, and within half an hour he had booked himself on a plane to London that evening.

  Even facing Howard Lewthwaite was better than inactivity. Henry told the children that Mummy had been taken ill, but would be all right. He arranged for them to spend the night with Alastair and Fiona Blair, who had become good friends, and he drove to London to meet Howard Lewthwaite off the plane.

  Hilary’s father looked old and ravaged beneath his suntan. Henry told him what had happened. It seemed the only course.

  ‘I simply can’t believe it,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘She wouldn’t.’

  ‘I thought that,’ said Henry. ‘But she did.’

  ‘Have you any proof?’ asked Howard Lewthwaite.

  ‘There was the letter,’ said Henry, flicking the wipers on.

  ‘That was him telling her that he loved her. You haven’t seen a letter from her telling him that she loved him.’

  This simple truth was a revelation to Henry. He realised that what he’d taken as proof was no kind of proof at all. But he couldn’t yet face the implications of even the possibility that he’d been wrong.

  ‘Then why did she keep the letter?’ he said.

  Howard Lewthwaite didn’t reply.

  Henry didn’t tell him that before he’d seen the letter he’d been certain that she and Nigel were having an affair. The intensity of his jealousy was a very personal shame.

  ‘When I showed her the letter she went absolutely white,’ he said. ‘I didn’t need to ask her anything more.’

  It was four in the morning when they reached the hospital. Henry realised that Howard Lewthwaite didn’t want him to stay. So he went home and tried to sleep. He was utterly exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. It was true, he hadn’t got proof. For Hilary to be unfaithful was deeply painful, but if he’d got it wrong his guilt would be even more painful. He needed proof.

  At half past six, unshaven and hollow-eyed, having had barely a wink of sleep for forty-seven hours, he set off for London again. There wasn’t much on the roads that Sunday morning. He drove fast, barely conscious of the mechanics of driving, going through the events of the last two days again and again.

  He found Nigel Clinton’s flat in Highgate without difficulty. Hilary’s editor was very surprised to see him, and shocked at his appearance.

  ‘What on earth’s up?’ he said. ‘You look awful. Has something happened to Hilary?’

  Henry sank into an armchair and an enormous feeling of exhaustion swept over him. He’d intended to have an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, but since he was several inches shorter than Nigel it was perhaps just as well that he was seated, with Nigel towering over him, as he said, ‘Have you been having an affair with my wife?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Nigel. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

  ‘Did you write to her, saying, “Dearest Hilary, I love you so much, darling”?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I loved her. Sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. I loved her from the first moment I met her, but I never stood a chance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She loves you. She’s utterly faithful and always will be. I was so jealous that Saturday when I saw you all together. I’ve taught myself, with great difficulty, not to love her. I’m free again now.’

  All his life Henry had experienced conflicting emotions, but in that flat, of which he would take away not the slightest visual memory, he was almost torn apart by them. Joy, relief, pain, shame, despair.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He stood up. He went dizzy, and felt that he was going to faint.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Yes. Just very tired and very hungry.’

  ‘You aren’t going to hit me, then?’

  ‘Why should I? You’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I tried, though. I tried hard to do something wrong. You look very pale.’

  ‘I’m going to have to sit down again.’

  ‘I only cook spaghetti bolognese. But I cook a very good spaghetti bolognese.’

  Henry’s return journey was horrific. It was the fourth time
he had driven between London and Thurmarsh in two days, and he’d had no sleep at all during that time. He had cramp, backache, arm-ache, a headache, and a sense that his brain was too small to fit his head. He’d gone to London to make Nigel Clinton eat humble pie, and instead he’d eaten Nigel Clinton’s spaghetti bolognese. And he’d made the worst mistake that he’d ever made in his life.

  He recognised now that Hilary was innocent and his jealousy had been the mental illness of a possessed man. He realised now that when she’d gone white it was with anger at his hunting through her pockets and reading her mail and with disgust at his lack of trust.

  The nights were drawing in, and the light faded early on that suitably sombre October evening. The clouds were heavy, but there was no rain. Smoke from wood fires rose straight into the still sky, and curls of mist licked the hedgerows. Half the time Henry was unaware that there was a road and that he was in his Mini. He was in the summer house in Perkin Warbeck Drive, with Hilary telling him of the boy who had left her and the man who had raped her. She’d told him what it was like to wake up in a hospital ward, among strangers, not knowing who you were, and to realise gradually that this was the same old you, the same old earth, the fight had to go on, you hadn’t taken a large enough dose. Anna had told him that Hilary was mentally ill. ‘I’ve had a lot of depression,’ she’d said that night. ‘And I tried to kill myself. And I went very inward. If that’s mental illness, I’m mentally ill.’

  He had sobbed, ‘What a responsibility.’ He had said, ‘You’re a complete fool, you know. I’m clumsy, insensitive, thoughtless, hopeless. I’m a case.’ He was, and he’d failed utterly in his responsibility. The tears streamed, the mist turned to fog, the journey became a nightmare.

  He reached the General Hospital at ten fifteen that night. He was told that Hilary was under sedation. Such was his physical state that a suspicious and brave nurse accompanied him to the car park and watched until she was certain that he had really left the area.

  Henry slept for thirteen hours, had horrendous nightmares, and woke to realise that he had completely forgotten about his own children and was already three and a half hours late for work.