by David Nobbs
‘Too right,’ said Tommy Marsden.
‘Is everything all right with you still?’ asked Henry.
‘You mustn’t believe what you read in the papers,’ said Tommy Marsden. ‘I got pissed and slept in once. If you believe the papers, I never train, I play when I’m drunk, and I’ve thrown a boot at the manager. I’d be out, wouldn’t I, if I did? All that business with that tart in Bratislava was set up, too. They just wanted us out of the European Cup. Hey up, here’s another member of the gang. Martin Fucking Hammond.’
‘Please, Tommy, great to have you here, but can you avoid saying “fucking”,’ said Henry.
‘Henry!’ said Cousin Hilda, passing by in search of more pineapple juice.
‘You two allus were stuck-up bastards,’ said Tommy Marsden. ‘I’m a footballer. They expect me to be uncouth. The chicks like me to be uncouth.’
Tommy Marsden moved on, and Henry knew that if he caused an embarrassing scene it was his fault for asking him; he’d asked him because he’d get some kudos from having such a famous friend.
‘Hello, Martin. Hello, Mandy,’ he said. ‘How’s married life?’
‘Very life-enhancing,’ said Mandy Hammond, née Haltwhistle.
‘Good. I’m pleased to hear that.’
‘This do could feed a whole province in Guatemala,’ said Martin.
‘Oh, Martin, I wouldn’t have invited you if I’d known you were going to depress me,’ said Henry.
‘Just joking,’ said Martin Hammond. ‘I know you think I’m a bore. I thought I’d show you I can let my hair down when the occasion demands it.’
The gathering drifted en masse to the main room, which exactly suited the size of the guest list. The ceiling was high and had impressive mouldings, and there was a lovely chandelier which, if it fell, would crush Cousin Hilda, who was giving occasional uneasy looks towards it, not being used to sitting under chandeliers. The whole do was elegant enough to pass muster in a brain surgeon’s world, but modest enough to suit what was a second marriage for both parties.
The top table, while following the rules of etiquette, had a somewhat eccentric look, since Henry’s parents were represented by Cousin Hilda and Auntie Doris. Since there were two bridesmaids, Kate at one end and Camilla at the other, there were at the table six females, two of them children, and only three males, one of them homosexual.
The meal was cold, but delicious. Rough pâté, followed by Scotch salmon and tarragon chicken with new potatoes and various salads, and strawberries and cream. There was good flinty Mâcon Blanc, rather than the Chablis that a doctor’s son would have merited.
Henry, seated between Diana and her mother, knew that he’d got the best of the table arrangement. Mrs Hargreaves told him how happy they were to welcome him as a son-in-law, although Mr Hargreaves flirted dangerously with tactlessness when he leant across and said, ‘We were disappointed in Nigel. We had such high hopes. With you, I have a feeling it’s going to be the other way about.’
The salmon was the proper stuff, not the farmed kind that poisons lochs and dulls taste buds. The chicken had enjoyed the open air and the fields of Sussex. The tarragon sauce was delicious. Henry wished that he could relax, wished that he didn’t feel so anxious about his surrogate parents, about whether the Director (Operations) and the Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed) and their wives were enjoying themselves, about whether Tommy Marsden would disgrace himself, about whether Kate and Camilla would behave with dignity, and whether Benedict and Jack would come to blows at the children’s table over at the far right.
He felt Diana’s hand on his.
‘Happy, darling?’
‘Very happy.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
‘I am.’
‘What?’
‘Happy.’
‘Good. But why do you say, “I am,” as if I’m not? I am.’
‘You don’t look happy.’
‘I’m just anxious, that’s all. I want everything to go well.’
‘It will. And if it doesn’t it’s not your fault. You’re too self-important.’
‘Self-important? Me?’
‘You take responsibility for the whole world.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘Don’t look so hurt. It’s one of the reasons why I love you.’
‘What are the others?’
‘I can’t tell you in public. Do you love me?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘I love you.’
‘No regrets?’
‘No regrets.’
He did try not to worry. He could hear Mrs Hargreaves asking Auntie Doris all about Miles Cricklewood, where he’d been a vet, what size of practice he’d had, about his parents and his family home. She was showing her broad-mindedness about what was still fairly unusual even in 1968, two mature adults living ‘in sin’. Auntie Doris didn’t have time to worry about the moral aspects. She was too anxious not to contradict herself with the mythical curriculum vitae she provided for her absent vet. She couldn’t remember if she’d placed his practice in Surrey or Sussex. Her memory wasn’t quite what it had been, and it was all too difficult.
Cousin Hilda, on Henry’s other side, between Mr Hargreaves and Lampo, was putting up a surprisingly animated show. She was appalled that Henry was marrying for the second time – she had sniffed several times when he’d told her, and hadn’t known how she would tell Mrs Wedderburn– but now that the event was upon them she would do her level best not to show him up, even if her motivation was largely not to show herself up, her limestone grit coming out in the face of all this soft southern soil. Unfortunately she had no idea what were considered interesting conversational topics in the big world. Every now and then Henry could hear Mr Hargreaves responding with excruciating politeness to her remarks. ‘Moved from the cheese counter to tins! How distressing.’ ‘Well, if they don’t like spotted dick they needn’t be in for tea on a Tuesday, need they?’ and he went hot under the collar at Mr Hargreaves’s boredom, though knowing perfectly well that Mr Hargreaves could cope.
For a while, both Diana and Mrs Hargreaves were speaking to their neighbours and there was nobody for him to speak to. He looked down at the buzzing, cheery room. People were enjoying themselves at all the tables. Nobody was interested in him or in whether he had anybody to speak to.
Shortly before the end of the main course, Auntie Doris passed out and had to be brought round with a cold dishcloth. She couldn’t tell Mrs Hargreaves that the strain of her questions about Miles Cricklewood had been the cause. She blamed the heat.
Nobody blamed the heat when Tommy Marsden passed out. Henry leapt to his feet, and hurried out into the heart of the reception, determined not to look embarrassed. He and Martin Hammond carried Tommy Marsden out, the two members of the Paradise Lane gang who had gone to the grammar school helping the one who didn’t.
Henry returned to his seat and tried to look natural, as though his friends passed out around him every day.
‘I hope nobody else passes out,’ he said. ‘Only they say things go in threes.’
Just after he’d sat down, he heard Cousin Hilda say to Mr Hargreaves, ‘I know very little about brain surgery,’ and throughout the strawberries and cream he could hear Mr Hargreaves talking about brain damage, and defunct areas of the brain, and he could see Cousin Hilda nodding sagely, as if she understood, and he had visions of horrible accidents, of Diana lying with her head smashed, of knives in brains, and he felt faint. The sweat was pouring down his back. Diana from a long way off asked him if he was all right, and he said, ‘Kiss me. Please, kiss me,’ so urgently that Diana gave him a passionate kiss, and he kissed her back. They kissed long and hard at the top table in front of all their guests, as though they were on their own, and people laughed and clapped and Lampo cried, ‘Bravo!’ and Paul shouted, ‘Dirty beast!’ and Cousin Hilda looked horrified, and Jack looked at Benedict and said, �
�Yuk!’ and Benedict said, ‘Double yuk!’ and Jack said, ‘Twenty-seven thousand four hundred and ninety-third yuk!’ and Benedict said, ‘Thirteen trillion four billion seven million three hundred and ninety-fifth yuk!’ and just for a moment it looked as if it might be possible for them to become friends.
Henry felt better. The glasses were charged for the toasts. Lampo stood up and began to read the telegrams.
‘“My love, my blessing, and my hopes for your happiness – Hilary,”’ read Lampo.
Henry passed out.
10 Kate and Jack and Benedict and Camilla
IF YOU’VE NEVER driven an elderly Mini from London to Thurmarsh with four children between the ages of eight and eleven crammed into the back, two of whom have the natural arrogance of southern prep-school children, and one of whom might eat the chip on her shoulder if she wasn’t feeling car sick, you’ll have to imagine the first day proper of Henry and Diana’s marital idyll.
‘Haven’t seen anybody spitting on pavements yet,’ said Benedict, just after they had passed through Newark.
‘Just because it’s all horrendously sordid doesn’t mean we’re in the proper North yet,’ said Camilla.
Kate began to hit out at Camilla, losing control and yelling.
Jack put a calming hand on Kate, but she hurled his gesture back at him.
‘Won’t bloody try to help in future,’ he grumbled.
Diana shouted, ‘Shut up, the lot of you,’ and Henry stopped the car with a jerk. Camilla was shoved forward, and banged her head, precocity dissolving into tears straight away, and Kate clambered miserably out of the car and was violently sick on the verge.
Diana wanted Kate to sit in the front after that, but she refused, knowing what hostility such a favour would arouse.
‘Don’t want her in the back,’ said Benedict. ‘She smells of sick.’
Diana leant across and hit Benedict, harder than she intended.
Henry winced.
Benedict went very quiet, but Henry and Diana could sense his fury and himiliation.
Henry wished the sun was shining. The countryside looked grey and drab, the houses poor and dusty. He longed for his beloved North Country to shine, but it refused. They sidled in, between collieries and clapped-out steelworks, through a land in limbo between an ugly, virile past and a flat, uncertain future. How he wished that there were just himself and Diana and his beloved Kate and Jack in the car, and not these two southern children with their assumptions about lifestyles, their contempt for his old car, their scorn of the North. He wondered if Diana was wishing that there were just herself and Henry and her beloved children, and not highly strung, super-sensitive, carsick Kate and infuriatingly placid Jack. How well did they really know each other? Was this a dreadful mistake? Had they rushed in too quickly, on the rebound? He looked at Diana’s strained face, and wondered if she was thinking the same thing, and panic gripped him.
The puncture was the final humiliation.
‘How quaint,’ said Benedict. ‘I didn’t realise people actually had punctures any more.’
How good it was, in that difficult time, to fight the diseases of the cucumber. Henry’s new office was in the basement with no carpet and no windows, but there was no sense of demotion in his move underground. Here in this large, bunker-like room he was king. How exciting it was, in those first stressful weeks of his new marriage, to stick flags in a large relief map of the United Kingdom. Basal rot in Myton-on-Swale. Green mottle mosaic intermittent from Beverley to Market Weighton. Downy mildew prevalent around Kettering. Fusarium wilt particularly common from Wimborne to Dorchester.
Henry knew that his enthusiasm was at least faintly ridiculous. He wasn’t at all surprised when John Barrington wandered into his long, low-ceilinged basement room, looked at all the flags with the diseases written on them, and said, ‘How’s the war going, Winston?’
‘Pretty damn well, John,’ he said. ‘Pretty bad genetic yellowing in parts of Essex, casualties are inevitable, but some of the cucumbers’ll get through.’
‘Damn good show,’ said John Barrington, and Henry smiled a slow, half-pleased smile.
Jack and Benedict shared one bedroom, Kate and Camilla another. The children were too old for mixed-sex sharing, and in any case they were anxious not to polarise the southern and the northern children.
Benedict had been imbued with the social assumptions of Tosser Pilkington-Brick. White upper-middle-class Conservative rugby-playing English males were superior to every other form of intelligent and unintelligent life. Whippet-fanciers, miners, socialists, Henry, immigrants and women were on a par with maggots. He felt hostile to Henry, but even more hostile to Diana, who had betrayed him and his beloved father.
Jack’s deep good nature meant that he could endure an enormous amount of Benedict’s sarcasm without rising to the bait. This infuriated Benedict, who became taut with rage, and this amused Jack. Because Jack was so very tolerant, the argument could be pushed to quite an extreme point before his slow, slow fuse began to burn. If it ever did come to a fight, it would be a serious one. Benedict would have to back off, because he could hardly win any glory from beating a boy two years younger than himself, and he could conceivably lose, since Jack was a big, strong lad. To an extent, therefore, Jack had the upper hand. This infuriated Benedict, but it did give him a degree of respect for Jack.
It wasn’t clear what Jack thought about the relationship between Henry and Diana. He never spoke of it.
Henry and Diana felt that Camilla’s social arrogance was not nearly as deep as Benedict’s, and that she’d like to make friends with Kate if she could do so without incurring her brother’s scorn. She wasn’t at all hostile to Diana, blaming her father for the break-up to the point where if he hadn’t had a Jaguar and a big house with a swimming pool she might not have even wanted to visit him.
Kate was deeply protective of, and loving towards, Henry. She was also more developed intellectually than Camilla, and never ceased to point this out. She wasn’t doing this entirely for her own glory. She was doing it out of loyalty to Henry and Thurmarsh and the North of England and Winstanley Primary School and Mrs Williams, who was her best teacher ever. It was very upsetting, therefore, to be rebuked by Henry for saying, ‘I’m not surprised you like horses, Camilla. You’re pretty thick really,’ and it made it impossible for Camilla to show any friendly overtures to Kate.
Henry and Diana hunted for a larger house, but couldn’t afford one that cost a great deal more than Dumbarton House would fetch. This meant, inevitably, that, if it had five bedrooms, it would be in a worse area or fairly dilapidated. They put their names on the list of every estate agent in Thurmarsh.
HEALTH WARNING: THE NEXT PARAGRAPH COULD BE DISTRESSING TO ESTATE AGENTS OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION.
Three estate agents didn’t send anything. One sent everything twice, which was a shame, as all their details were of half-built three-bedroom bungalows in cul-de-sacs, and went straight into the bin. Another sent details of country mansions costing £25,000. From another they did get details of the right kind of houses, but only in Hull and Goole. Only one offered them the right house in the right place at the right price, but the details were sent to the wrong address, and the house was sold by the time Henry and Diana read about it.
They considered moving nearer to Leeds, but decided against it, because Kate and Jack were settled in their schools.
It has to be admitted that, loving parents though they both were, it was a great relief to them when Kate and Jack set off for their annual summer holiday with Hilary in Spain, and, a week later, Benedict and Camilla were taken to Menton by Tosser.
Left on their own in Thurmarsh, Henry and Diana led as civilised a life as their shortage of money would allow. Henry was very conscious that Diana had never been short of money before, and more than once made her angry by harping on the subject. She was upset that he should think money mattered to her, and stated how unimportant she found it, sometimes in words that pleased him �
�� ‘I love you. I don’t care about wealth. You are my wealth’ – and sometimes in words that pleased him slightly less – ‘I’m a grown-up. I knew what I was letting myself in for.’
They ate an occasional modest meal at Sandro and Mario’s, Thurmarsh’s first Italian restaurant, and at the Taj Mahal – ‘You had a lovely lady. Now you have another lovely lady. What is the secret, please?’ Henry was always pleased to see Count Your Blessings.
They went to dinner with Alastair and Fiona Blair, with the Mathesons, though rarely now that Anna had emigrated to Canada, and with new friends from the Crescent, Joe and Molly Enwright. Joe was a teacher, Molly a painter.
Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. France exploded its first hydrogen bomb. Henry gave Diana her first full-scale Thurmarsh Friday night experience. First stop, the Lord Nelson. Helen sniffy, Ginny sad, Colin maudlin, Ted sarcastic and Ben astounded that Diana didn’t know any of the grounds of any of the teams in the second division. Second stop, the Devonshire. Sid Hallett and the Rundlemen wearing flowery shirts in distant homage to flower power, and longer grey hair in an attempt to look vaguely hippy. But the music was the same, and so were the damp patches under their arms. Third stop, the Yang Sing, Thurmarsh’s first proper Chinese restaurant, which had superseded the Shanghai Chinese Restaurant and Coffee Bar, now that the era of frothy coffee had ended.
‘Well, what did you think?’ asked Henry as they undressed in the silent house.
‘It’s a bit different from Hampstead,’ was Diana’s Delphic reply.
For three hectic days they had all the children with them, brown with memories, sullen in the Thurmarsh monsoon. Then Camilla was off to St Ethelred’s in Devizes, and Benedict to Brasenose College in Surrey, both paid for by Tosser, who insisted on continuing their private education. Henry thought that at eleven and nine they were too young to go to boarding school, but he had to admit that he was glad they did and, to his slight shame, he didn’t attempt to persuade Tosser to change his mind.
Benedict and Camilla were glad to leave the overcrowded house and meet their friends and be in their proper environment again, but they resented the fact that Kate and Jack would still be enjoying home comforts when they weren’t, and in a house that was no longer overcrowded. Kate and Jack were happy to be staying at home, and fiercely loyal to the schools of Thurmarsh, but also resentful that so much money was being spent on Benedict’s and Camilla’s education, and feeling diminished by being excluded from their adventure in the great world outside.