Pratt a Manger (24 page)

‘Emotion’s an odd thing,’ said Henry. ‘I feel almost ashamed on his behalf for his lack of imagination.’

‘I suppose it
is
Bradley.’

‘It has to be, three days after the fracas. It has to be.’

Henry and Hilary debated at some length whether to challenge him. Was it stronger to attack him or to ignore him? Was it
wiser
to attack him or ignore him? Which would provoke him least?

Since they couldn’t decide the answer to any of these
questions,
Henry decided to ignore them. It was definitely easier.

Once he had made this decision, he felt that his strategy must be to avoid contact with the man at all costs. So, when he was next invited on to
A Question of Salt
, he told Nicky that he would only do it if Bradley Tompkins wasn’t on it.

Bradley’s face fell as he saw Henry in Main Reception at the BBC.

‘They told me you wouldn’t be on,’ he said.

‘They told me
you
wouldn’t be,’ said Henry.

They marched to the producer.

‘Orders from above,’ said Sean Cassock.

‘It’s downright deceit.’

‘Harmless. Everyone knows you hate each other’s guts.’

‘I think we have a case for walking out,’ said Henry.

‘I agree,’ said Bradley.

‘There’s nothing in your contracts about it,’ said Sean, ‘and Bradley doesn’t get on so many programmes these days. He probably can’t afford to walk out. You’re in a stronger position, Henry.
Hooray, It’s Henry
is very popular. However, that doesn’t necessarily carry much weight these days, and with a second series very much under consideration it just might not be a good idea to cause so much disappointment to so many people. The studio audience won’t take kindly to either of you when they find out why they didn’t have a show to see, and it’s bound to get in the papers, however much we try to hush it up.’

‘Bastard!’ said Henry and Bradley.

‘You see, you have more in common than you think. Yes, I am, but I’m only doing my job.’

‘The parrot cry of the cowardly throughout the ages,’ said Henry.

‘Oh come on,’ said Sean. ‘Look, if you don’t want to appear together try to get it written into your contracts. Otherwise, sorry, can’t guarantee it. And you don’t need to clash. We aren’t insisting on it. Shake hands and do your best, eh?’

Shaking hands with Bradley Tompkins was like getting hold of a dead, wet flounder.

The programme went well. They avoided controversy, even laughed at each other’s jokes, whether they were funny or not.

The last round was about seasonings. Henry made a joke about Vivaldi’s four seasonings. The camera showed Bradley laughing. True, it was a strained, forced laugh, but at least he had tried.

‘Incidentally, on the question of seasoning,’ Dennis Danvers asked Henry oleaginously, ‘do you believe there should always be salt on the table in restaurants or do you go along with those chefs who say that their food is perfectly seasoned and refuse to give any salt?’

‘I hoped you wouldn’t ask me that,’ said Henry.

‘That’s why I asked it.’

‘I … I believe there should be salt and pepper on the table. Not necessarily because they’re needed, not because I think the public necessarily know any better than the chef how the food should be, but because it’s the customer who’s paying and to dictate to them is, frankly, in my opinion, arrogant.’

‘You cunt,’ screamed Bradley Tompkins. There was an appalled intake of breath by the studio audience. Even Dennis Danvers’s jaw dropped in astonishment. Bradley Tompkins himself went scarlet with horror at this public revelation of the depth of his hatred.

The camera moved straight on to Henry’s face. He smiled. It was the smile of an angel.

‘Thank you, Bradley,’ he said sweetly. ‘I didn’t know you thought me capable of giving as much pleasure as that.’

The audience gasped, laughed, applauded. The applause was long and loud, so, naturally, nobody else heard the sniff.

But Henry did.

Bradley Tompkins squirmed in his seat. He ran his hand through his wig in his nervousness, then suddenly remembered that there was a danger of it coming off. He removed his hand abruptly. There was even some laughter at this. His humiliation was total.

‘Henry!’ said Cousin Hilda’s sniff through the last of the laughter and applause. ‘I’m not sure I know what you meant by that, but if it’s what I suspect, it’s mucky. Ee! I’m glad your mother’s not alive to turn in her grave at it.’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Henry. ‘I’m on television.’

‘What did you say?’ Dennis Danvers asked Henry.

‘I said, “We can’t say that on television,” ’ improvised Henry hastily. This was awful. What if he started talking to Cousin Hilda’s sniff in front of the cameras …

‘Of course we can’t,’ said Dennis Danvers. ‘We’ll have to do a retake.’

Afterwards, in the Green Room, Henry approached Nicky, who was trying to avoid him.

‘I asked you not to put me on with Bradley,’ he said. ‘You said you wouldn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Really sorry actually. I was under orders.’

Henry thought of being angry, of asking her if she had a mind of her own, of making facile references to Nazi Germany, but there wasn’t any point, because he didn’t fancy her any more.

‘I understand,’ he said.

She was still a very attractive young woman, but she was of a different generation and he couldn’t understand how he had ever been excited by her. He felt excited by his lack of excitement. He was no longer in danger of being unfaithful to Hilary. And then a great emptiness swept over him, a sudden feeling of desolation. The room looked so dull. He no longer wanted to talk to anybody in it. He was overwhelmed by a great longing for Sally Atkinson, and realised with amazement that in his shock over meeting Bradley he hadn’t even noticed that she wasn’t on the show. That seemed like a betrayal, which was ridiculous. Oh Lord, Nicky had been speaking.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I … er …’

‘You were miles away. No, I was just saying, don’t worry about the incident with Bradley. He hasn’t even dared show his face. You didn’t half get the better of him. Game, set and match to you.’

‘That’s what worries me,’ said Henry.

Henry’s popularity on television had been assured by his twenty-two appearances on
A Question of Salt
. Now, with
Hooray, It’s Henry
, he had become a superstar. Every
morning,
when he woke up, he had a moment of brief anxiety, when he thought it must all be a dream. Was his show really achieving thirty-eight per cent of the audience share? Was his book really at number three in the Non-Fiction Top Ten, compared to Hilary’s fifty-third place in the Fiction charts with
Carving Snow?

Henry and Hilary did their very first literary lunch together. It was at the Cornucopia Hotel in Throdnall, in the Midlands. Hilary made a thoughtful, witty speech about literature. Henry told jokes about food. Afterwards, the four authors sat at tables and signed their books. There was quite a queue for Henry even before he sat down. Two people were waiting for Hilary. She engaged each of them in conversation, entered into debate about whether they would like a little message and what that message should be. She knew it didn’t matter how many books she sold, and she wasn’t at all resentful of Henry. Of course he would sell more books than her. He was a television personality. Nevertheless, she really didn’t want him to look round and find that there was nobody at all at her table.

‘How many books did you sell?’ Henry asked her afterwards.

‘Seven. How about you?’

‘Forty-seven.’

He didn’t say it nastily. He certainly didn’t gloat. He didn’t mention it again. He could have made some explanation, such as, ‘Well of course it’s only because I’ve been on the telly so much’, which would have irritated her in the extreme.

Nevertheless, she
was
slightly irritated. There had been no reason for him to ask her how many she’d sold.

She felt slightly worried too. It was only a vague feeling, there was nothing to justify it, but she wondered if his success was just beginning to spoil him. Surely not? Surely not her lovely Henry?

Barely a week passed without Henry receiving some kind of suggestion for the commercial exploitation of his popularity.

Hilary warned him against spreading himself too thinly, and, to be fair to him, he did turn down some suggestions.

Not many, though.

He didn’t turn down an invitation to visit the Potteries in order to discuss a range of high-quality tableware using his name. The design aimed at the sophisticated simplicity for which he strove. The plates were square, large, elegant, and white, with his initials attractively intertwined in the centre, and with painted miniatures of food items that began with an H and a P – a herring and a prawn on the fish platters, a ham and a parsnip on the meat plates. Henry tried the complete range out before allowing them to be marketed. He still had his integrity.

He didn’t turn down an invitation from Asbo Supermarkets to create a Henry Pratt range of foods. In fact, he created two – Pratt’s Tyke Treats, loosely based on the recipes of his native Yorkshire, and Henry’s Foreign Frolics, even more loosely based on the delights of staple foods from around the world. Again, Henry insisted on trying out every item in the Café, before allowing it to be sold to the public.

There was just time, after the launch of the two ranges,
for
Ben to stack them on the shelves of the Streatham Asbo.

‘He’s my dad,’ he said proudly, and all the staff were happy to see his pride, because they all liked him.

‘We’re more Foreign Frolics than Tykes Treats in Streatham, Dad,’ he told Henry (all thoughts of his real dad had long been forgotten). ‘But I spose Tyke Treats are more geared to the North. Mind you, we do sell a few Tykes Treats on a Friday. Anyway, the prospects look rosy.’

Sadly, the prospects didn’t look so rosy for Ben. He was having to leave the job. His health wasn’t up to it: his immune system was shot to pieces, and he had endured bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis, leading his doctor to advise that it was dangerous for him to continue to go out to work.

In the Café, inevitably, more and more fell upon Greg and Michelle. Henry appointed a new chef, a talented and personable young lady called Karen, who looked too frail to withstand the rigours of the kitchen, but wasn’t. Henry had less and less time to spend in the Café, whatever he might have wished. In fact this rather pleased him, because his fame had brought a new kind of customer, the celebrity-seeker, the autograph hunter, people who were to humans what twitchers were to birds. This was threatening to disrupt the Bohemian atmosphere on which he prided himself. If he wasn’t there so much, it would help to preserve what was left.

Henry would spend even less time in the Café once he had bought his weekend cottage.

From time to time, Henry and Hilary had discussed the possibility of such a thing. They had argued passionately about the social evils caused by weekend homes, the blight on picturesque villages which became ghost communities during the week, the pushing up of house prices in rural areas till the local people couldn’t afford to buy, the effect on village shops of people coming up from London with a boot stuffed with goodies from Harvey Nichols and Fortnum and Mason’s, and who then bought up the whole stock when they got stranded by snowdrifts.

Joe and Molly Enwright, friends and neighbours of Henry in the Thurmarsh days, had known of a couple, he a theatre director, she a writer, who had two children, he a painter, she an actress. The theatre director and the writer had split up, and the actress had walked out on the painter. The theatre director had homes in London, Herefordshire and Majorca. The writer had homes in Islington and Devon. The painter had homes in Warwickshire and Tuscany, and the actress had homes in Notting Hill and Brittany. Four people, nine homes. And all four of them voted Labour.

Now that they could afford a place in the country, Henry and Hilary wondered if they had been too quick to condemn the practice. The countryside needed new life. The decline of farming as a source of employment had long ago rendered change inevitable. Henry could drink so much in the village pub that he might save it from closure single-handedly. They wouldn’t bring groceries to the village. They would support the village store. They wouldn’t complain when cockerels crowed at daybreak, and silage or slurry smelt all day. Indeed, they might be
able
to influence other incomers who were less enlightened in their attitude to country pursuits.

They didn’t entirely forsake their principles, though. They wouldn’t dream of buying some small place that might suit a young plumber or bus driver. They would buy a house so large that the locals wouldn’t have been able to afford it in any case.

They led busy lives and the search for their rural paradise took a long time. The manuscript for
The Pratt Diet
was coming along very slowly. Every house that they saw seemed to have a snag.

The new millennium began. In Uganda, up to five hundred members of the millennium cult, The Movement of the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, were killed in a church fire. Police believed it was murder after cult members had demanded their money back when the cult’s prophecy that the world would end on the last day of December, 1999 had failed to materialise.

In May, 2000, Ken Livingston was elected Mayor of London, and Henry and Hilary found The Old Manor House in Grayling-under-Witchwood, a pleasantly straggling village in the North Cotswolds, away from the most touristy areas.

The house was a dream, with three gables and mullioned windows, built in honeyed stone, mellow, English, and exquisite. There was a mature mauve wisteria on the front, and a fig tree on a sheltered wall in the garden. It was set back from the village street, and at the rear, apart from one simple cottage in the same honeyed stone, there was open country. Some lambs were
having
a game, leaping and racing with sheer exultation at the privilege of existence. The place was perfect. Surely there would be no drawbacks here?