by David Nobbs
The Angel’s yellowish Georgian facade concealed a crumbling, rambling, heavily altered medieval interior. The Gaiety Bar, whose beamed roof was concealed by plaster except for one small hole, was situated next to the ballroom and was used as a private bar for functions held there. It was just too small to be impressive. The green-and-white striped wallpaper bore the stains of a decade, and there were large damp patches not quite hidden by furniture and radiators. The tables were extremely low, and customers reclined so steeply in the armchairs that their knees were level with the table tops. It was rumoured that the chairs had been designed by the brother of an unscrupulous osteopath. Bar snacks were served in the Gaiety Bar at lunchtimes, although the furniture made it almost impossible to eat them; but perhaps this was the aim, since they were almost inedible. The brown leather upholstery was beginning to burst. Everyone said that the Angel had known better days, though nobody could actually remember them. But it had one great advantage for events such as the Dentists’ Dinner Dance. There was still nowhere else in the town with a function room of the size required, at least not until the Grand Universal opened.
The standing room around the bar was slowly filling up with dentists and their guests. The men wore lounge suits, the women short dresses. Liz Rodenhurst’s black dress was restrained and bold, simple and revealing, elegant and sexy. Her back and shoulders and, almost certainly, her breasts were tanned.
Laurence had invited his son Simon, Jenny and Paul, Ted and Rita Simcock, and Neville Badger. None of them had yet arrived.
‘In Peru they drink a thing called pisco sour,’ Laurence was telling Larry Benson, of fitted kitchen fame. Larry Benson was looking everywhere but at Liz’s cleavage.
‘Laurence!’ said Liz. ‘Don’t bore Larry to death over Peru. He hasn’t paid you for his gold bridge yet.’
She moved off energetically.
‘Your wife is stunning,’ said Larry Benson, trying to breathe in her lingering aroma without being seen to do so. He ran a small firm called Kitchen Wonderland. His wonderland was situated between two Indian restaurants, at the wrong end of Commercial Street.
‘Yes,’ said Laurence, whose chosen apéritif that night was gin and tonic. ‘It’s local brandy mixed with lemon juice and beaten white of egg. Surprisingly enough, it’s very good.’
‘She must have been quite a sensation in Peru,’ said Larry Benson, whose tipple was whisky.
‘Yes. Though why I say “surprisingly” I don’t know. They wouldn’t drink it if it wasn’t. Peruvians aren’t daft. Oh Lord, here are Paul’s parents.’
Ted and Rita Simcock approached bravely. They were already aware that they were the only people in the room in evening dress.
‘Oh God, they’re in evening dress!’ said Laurence. He turned towards them, putting on a smooth, false smile.
‘Ted! Rita! Good to see you.’
He introduced them to Larry Benson.
‘I’m sorry, Laurence,’ said Rita, pink spots showing on her cheeks. ‘I feel mortified. Ted said it was evening dress.’
‘Never mind,’ said Laurence. ‘It sometimes is. It’s up to the incumbent dentist. In my presidential year, it was evening dress.’ It would have been, thought Ted. ‘Anyway, you both look terribly distinguished.’
Laurence Rodenhurst was lying. Ted always looked like a head waiter in evening dress, and Rita’s long, heavy, dark blue gown hung around her in folds that made her look more curtained than dressed.
‘What did his wife see in him?’ said Larry Benson, the moment Laurence had gone to buy them drinks. ‘She could have had anybody. She’s an amazingly lovely woman.’
‘Is she? I hadn’t really … er …’ For an awful moment Ted thought he was going to blush. He looked round and saw Liz, chatting to Timothy Fincham, president of the area dental association for the year. Helen Fincham was at his side, as always. Ted’s eyes practically popped out of his head at the sight of Liz’s stunning outfit. ‘Yes … I … er … I suppose she … er … are you a dentist, Barry?’
‘Larry. No, I’m in kitchens.’
‘So am I, most of the time,’ said Rita. ‘Perhaps that’s why I’m not amazingly lovely.’
There was a pause. Larry Benson, of fitted kitchen fame, sensed that perhaps he had not been entirely tactful. Ted spent longer studying a smiling photograph of Ian Botham than its message, ‘A smashing evening. Cheers. Ian’, could possibly justify. Rita looked round the room, seeking escape, finding none. Larry Benson seemed on the verge of one or two remarks, only to abandon them. Would it be fanciful to imagine that one of the abandoned remarks had been, ‘But you are amazingly lovely, Mrs Simcock’?
At last he hit upon a gem that satisfied him. ‘Are you a dentist, Fred?’ he said.
‘Ted. Oh no, no. I run a little foundry, forge type of effort. You’ve probably heard of us. The Jupiter Foundry.’
‘No,’ said Larry Benson. After another brief pause he added, ‘Well, excuse I. Must go and rescue my lady wife.’
‘Rita!’ said Ted, when Larry Benson had gone.
‘Well! People!’
‘I agree, but … I mean … Rita!’
‘I want to go home.’
‘Rita!!’
‘Is this some memory training like the Americans? Do you keep repeating my name for fear you’ll forget it?’
‘Rita!’
‘Well, you’ve no interest in me.’
‘Rubbish.’ He looked round, and met Liz’s eyes. She winked. He looked away hastily. ‘Absolute rubbish. You’re my wife, Rita.’
‘Precisely. What on earth gave you the idea he’d said evening dress? I feel awful.’
‘Rita! Love! Brazen it out. Show a bit of style.’
‘I haven’t got any style. I don’t like style. I don’t trust style.’
Laurence returned with a whisky and American for Ted, and a gin and tonic for Rita. They raised their glasses in acknowledgement of his generosity, and Ted found his head swivelling in Liz’s direction. It seemed to have developed a life of its own, his head.
Liz blew him a kiss, a very brief kiss, so discreet that he could hardly believe that he hadn’t imagined it, but still a kiss from a dentist’s wife in a bar that contained her husband, his wife, several dentists, and guests from all walks of the town’s professional life. He turned away rapidly, and found Rita looking straight at him. He went cold all over. How much did she know?
‘How’s business, Ted?’ enquired Laurence with no overwhelming curiosity.
‘Oh, absolutely! Absolutely! What? Ah! Oh, it’s beginning to move again. I’m pinning great hopes on our new novelty boot scrapers with the faces of famous prime ministers.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Laurence. ‘That sounds … that is new.’
‘I’ve got some in the car, if you’d like to see them.’
‘Well, I’d … but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’
‘No trouble. I’d like to see what you think.’
Ted rushed out before anybody could dissuade him.
There was a brief, awkward pause.
‘How’s Mother?’ asked Laurence.
‘The doctors seem quite pleased with her,’ said Rita.
‘Jolly good. I was sorry to hear about it.’ There was another pause, mocked by the apparently easy chatter that was welling up all around them. ‘How was the South of France?’
‘Very nice, considering. We only had rain once, but he came out in this terrible prickly heat.’
‘Oh dear! Where?’
‘Well …’ Rita dropped her voice, to make sure that no more dentists would hear her than was absolutely unavoidable. ‘In a rather awkward place.’
‘I meant … in what town?’ Laurence’s face wore a look of faint amusement at the absurdity of all the world except himself.
‘Oh! Avignon. He had to give the bridge a miss.’
There was another pause, in that early evening of pauses.
‘The weather in Peru is usually very predictable,’ said Laur
ence. ‘It’s dry in the dry season and wet in the wet season.’
‘Well, I suppose it would be.’
‘But, funnily enough, it wasn’t when we were there. It had all gone topsy-turvy.’
‘It’s all these satellites.’
Rita wished she could lose her talent for producing conversation stoppers.
Ted removed his sample case from the boot of his Cavalier 2000 GL, looked round the dark, oily, glassed-in car park of the old coaching inn, and went through the narrow passage that linked it with the. outside world. He stood on the pavement of Westgate, gulping in the comparatively fresh air, less polluted these days – partly because of genuine environmental progress, partly because the bulk of the county’s pollution was exported on the prevailing winds to the lakes and forests of Sweden, and partly because so many of the factories were shut down.
Dusk had descended on Dolcis, and Lotus, and Saxone, and Freeman, Hardy and Willis, and on the marbled facades of the Halifax, Abbey National, Leeds, Harrogate and Wakefield Building Societies, and on the grimy concrete mass of the Whincliff Shopping Centre, and on the offices of the Argus, which had been painted off-white and were now off-off-white, and on all the other buildings of the sloping, curving, once-lovely street.
Three young welders on a pub crawl were hunched against the rising wind as they struggled from The Blue Posts to The Three Tuns, and a coachload of laughing women descended from a blue village bus and made their way arthritically down West Riding Passage to the bingo in the old Regal in Slaughterhouse Lane.
Simon Rodenhurst, of Trellis, Trellis, Openshaw and Finch, drove his red MGB into the car park of the Angel Hotel, and didn’t see Ted.
How Ted wished he was spending this evening somewhere unpretentious, like the dear old Crown and Walnut.
He sighed, and returned to the Gaiety Bar.
Perhaps it was because of the extreme discomfort of the chairs, or perhaps it was because of the natural herd instincts of the English, but the gathering throng of dentists and their guests were standing shoulder to shoulder around the bar, as if penned there by an invisible sheepdog.
‘This time last year she would have danced till dawn. She had more energy than anybody.’ The immaculate Neville Badger’s voice cracked. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Neville!’ said Liz.
‘Embarrassing, isn’t it? The man keeps breaking down in public. And him a past captain of the rugby club. Funny how you can never tell the ones with no moral fibre.’
‘Neville! Don’t be absurd.’ Liz kissed him. ‘Dear Neville!’
What on earth was Ted showing her husband, with Rita such an aghast spectator?
‘Other people’s tragedies are so desperately boring, aren’t they?’ said Neville Badger.
‘What? Oh, Neville, no! You could never bore me. No, I was just intrigued to know what Ted’s showing Laurence.’
Ted was showing Laurence a boot scraper. There were rungs for scraping boots, and beside them, at one end, the upturned face of Clement Attlee, moulded in lead and ridged for the reception of mud.
‘Clement Attlee,’ said Ted.
‘Amazing,’ said Laurence.
‘Thank you for a great evening – Des,’ said a smiling photograph of Des O’Connor. Nobody could remember ever seeing him in the Angel Hotel, but he must have visited it when appearing at the theatre.
‘You’ve got to have them these days, gimmicks,’ said Ted. ‘I mean … who could resist grinding his boots on the face that nationalized the railways?’
He produced a similar object, with the face of Sir Winston Churchill complete with lead cigar. Laurence frowned his disap proval of this liberty, but Ted said, ‘It’s got to be bipartisan, has business.’
‘Do you … er … do you have any of the present incumbent?’ asked Laurence.
‘No,’ said Ted. ‘I tried, but the mould cracked.’
Jenny entered. She was wearing a patterned south Indian dress which prettily solved the problem of not outraging the conventions while not conforming to them. She was beginning to show distinct signs of pregnancy, if you looked hard enough, and since she was attractive, people often did. Only that week the manager of Beacock and Larkin’s, gents’ outfitters but a ladies’ man, had placed a hand on her stomach ‘to see if I can feel it moving’, and that hadn’t fooled her, and she had taken her custom elsewhere – to Leonard’s, of Bridge Street, if the truth be known. The custom in question had consisted of a tie for Paul to wear tonight, his only tie having been chewed by the unruly mongrel of some visiting anarchists. And then, after all that, Paul had refused to wear a tie. All in all, the purchase couldn’t be said to have been one of Jenny’s most conspicuous successes.
‘Dad?’ she said, approaching them just as Ted snapped his sample case shut. ‘They won’t let Paul in without a tie.’
‘Oh, the silly boy,’ said Rita.
‘Do you know how many wars there have been in the world since the Second World War?’ said Jenny.
‘What?’ said Laurence.
‘I’ll tell you. Fourteen. That’s just major international wars. It doesn’t include civil wars or border skirmishes. Well, in the context of all that misery, does it honestly matter whether Paul wears a tie?’
‘Of course not,’ said Laurence. ‘So why is he making such a fuss?’
‘He isn’t. Society is. He isn’t saying people can’t wear ties. Society is saying they must.’
Dame Peggy Ashcroft looked as if she had heard this sort of thing many times before. None of the regulars could remember seeing her in the Angel Hotel, but she must have been there more than once if her message, ‘Excellent as always – Peggy’, was anything to go by.
‘I mean,’ said Jenny, ‘what difference does his wearing a tie make to his worth as a human being?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Ted. ‘But it makes a hell of a difference to his getting any dinner.’
‘You all enjoy laughing at us, don’t you?’ said Jenny. ‘Well, maybe we are naive, but it’s better than dying of terminal smugness.’
‘I’ve got a dental association tie in my car,’ said Laurence with suppressed anger. ‘If he has no rooted objection to maroon.’
‘The nastier the better,’ said Jenny. ‘He won’t care if it’s got four crossed molars on a ruptured abscess.’
Laurence stalked out past the inseparable Finchams at a pace his pregnant daughter couldn’t match.
Rita wasted no time in asking Ted, ‘Why on earth did you show him your boot scrapers?’
‘Because.’
‘Because what? What do you mean – “Because”?’
‘Because there’s no room for shrinking violets in the world of the small foundry.’
‘Shrinking violets! I don’t know. Between you and Paul, I’ll have a nervous breakdown. I will. Ask Doctor Gillespie.’
‘Be fair to the lad, Rita. He’s got principles.’
‘Yes, and we all know where he got them from. Before he met her, he lay in bed till twelve and wandered around picking his nose and listening to rubbishy music like any other normal, healthy boy.’
Ted had an uneasy feeling that Dame Peggy Ashcroft had winked at him.
‘I’ll put me prime ministers in the boot,’ he said.
‘Don’t leave me,’ begged Rita, but he was on his way.
As he approached the door, Liz intercepted him and made it look accidental.
‘Liz!’ he said. ‘Don’t keep winking and blowing kisses. She’ll see.’
‘I must see you outside,’ said Liz.
‘Liz! We were dead lucky at the wedding. I mean … aren’t they enough for you, our Tuesdays?’
‘No, actually they aren’t.’
‘Oh heck.’ Ted raised his eyes imploringly to a photograph of General Dayan. There was no help from that quarter. The face was stern. The message, ‘Good food. Good service. General Dayan’, was of no practical value. ‘Liz?’ he said. ‘Are you kinky about this? Does it turn you on, doing it in the middle of dos? It’s pr
obably got a medical name. Functionomania. Do-itis.’
‘All right. We can do it in here if we’re careful.’
‘Liz!’
‘Talk! I’m talking about talking, Ted. I have to talk to you.’
‘Liz! She’s watching.’
‘It’d be unnatural if we never talked. I mean, we do have a young married couple in common. Just make sure you take it calmly. Pretend to show me those things you were showing Laurence.’
‘Oh heck.’
Ted opened his case, and got out a boot scraper with the face of Neville Chamberlain. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back. He had an uneasy feeling that the three eyes of Rita and General Dayan were fixed upon him.
‘Make sure I take what calmly?’ he said.
‘What on earth is that?’ Liz was gawping in astonishment at the boot scraper, and Ted realized that he had never seen her gawp in astonishment before, not even at the magnificence of his naked body on their Tuesdays, when she was ostensibly at her aerobics and he was supposedly at work.
‘Don’t bother about it,’ he said. ‘I’m only pretending to show you them.’
‘It’s not the kind of thing you can ignore.’
‘Good. If that’s a harbinger of the trade’s reaction, it bodes well. They’re boot scrapers with the faces of famous prime ministers. That’s Neville Chamberlain. You’re impressed, I can see.’
‘Ted, listen, I’m …’ Jenny and Paul approached with Laurence, who was still simmering. ‘… doomed never to tell you.’
Paul’s suit looked a worse fit than ever now that he seemed to be developing the symptoms of a sympathetic pregnancy, and the maroon tie clashed horribly with his green shirt.
Neville Badger wandered slowly round the edges, of the bar, pretending to be interested in the photographs, reading the messages as if he expected to find the meaning of life in them, thinking about last year’s dance, thinking about Jane. The inseparable Finchams veered away to avoid him, but Rita made a beeline for him.
‘Hello,’ she began.
He looked at her blankly.
‘Sorry?’ he said.