Pratt a Manger (28 page)

‘You were ill.’

‘I was ill later. My pride in my integrity was so great that when it was offended I walked out and left Kate and Jack. Sometimes I think I must have been a monster.’

‘Ridiculous. It’s not as if you abandoned them.’

‘No. It was actually a remarkable vote of confidence in you, I like to think. I was confident they would be in good hands, even at the moment when you had behaved so badly that I couldn’t live with you. What a prig I was.’

‘Rubbish.’

The train was going irritatingly slowly. They began to get tense, urging it on with their bodies, willing it on with their minds.

Henry knew that Hilary hadn’t finished what she wanted to say, but this time he had no idea what was coming.

‘I wouldn’t be like that now, if you …’

She stopped.

‘If I what?’

‘Accused me of having an affair.’

‘I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.’

‘I hope not.’

She squeezed his hand and looked away again.

‘I wouldn’t necessarily leave you now if you had an affair,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect anybody to be perfect any more.’

He could hardly breathe.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I was thinking about Helen. You always fancied her.’

‘Oh God. I was a fool.’

‘It’s a hard ask, expecting a man never to be a fool.’

Don’t talk like that, Hilary. Please. I need all the help I can get.

‘I have no intention of cheating on you,’ he said.

‘Good.’

She gave him a quick kiss.

Suddenly, after the kiss, they became conscious that a camera had been on them all the time. At last they had grown so used to it that they had forgotten it. At last the editorial team had some real footage, unaffected by their presence. As a result, the footage wasn’t high-powered enough, and none of it made the final cut.

They didn’t talk much for the rest of the journey, partly because of their awareness of the cameras, and partly because they were busy with their memories.

Henry had been, in popular estimation, very close to being, if not actually being, the worst reporter in the long history of the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
.

Hilary had suffered her worst moments in the town. It was here, in her teens, that she had been raped. She had taught, briefly, and given birth to two children, and found a way into Cousin Hilda’s heart, but she had made no real mark. It was here that she had walked out of her marriage.

‘I’m really sorry, Ted,’ said Henry as they gathered outside the crematorium on a suitably cloudy, dank morning.

‘Me too,’ said Hilary.

‘Thanks,’ said Ted. ‘The point is, she’s left it too late. Who’ll have me now?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Henry. ‘You’re still a fine figure of a man.’

He kissed Ginny warmly and squeezed her hand.

‘Great to see you again, even in these circumstances,’ he said.

She had become distinctly large, and slightly lame.

She hugged him and said, ‘Welcome back, and congratulations on everything’ loud enough for the Ammonia sound man to capture.

Helen’s sister Jill arrived. When she saw the camera, she stopped just out of its range, in order to check her make-up and tidy her hair. She had never been beautiful, but she had been sexy. She was seriously over-weight now. Henry could hardly recognise her. She came up and
kissed
him enthusiastically. When he had fancied her she had shrunk from him. Now that he didn’t fancy her she was all over him, irritatingly tactile. Her husband, Gordon Carstairs, was the man with whom Ginny had kept Henry awake during the long South Yorkshire nights. The years had treated him more kindly than his wife. He still looked craggily sexy.

‘Henry!’ he said, embracing him. ‘Hilary!’ He kissed her. ‘Chocks away! Rhubarb!’

Hilary raised her eyebrows at Henry, and he shook his head imperceptibly. Gordon had always been enigmatic, but now he was incomprehensible.

They moved into the waiting room, out of the lazy breeze. They wondered how many more were coming.

Colin Edgeley was next to turn up, hair white and straggly, still a gap between his teeth, frail, a ghost of the man called Colin Edgeley, with whom Henry had once drunk.

Terry Skipton, his old news editor, fearsome then, old and harmless now, was wheeled in by his wife Violet, whose moustache had gone entirely white.

‘Henry!’ said Terry Skipton. ‘We have followed your every move with pride.’

‘Aye, our kid,’ agreed Colin Edgeley hurriedly. ‘Fantastic. Great. Always knew you had it in you.’

‘Kiss me, Hardy!’ said Gordon Carstairs.

Henry didn’t think that many of Gordon’s gnomic utterances would make it to the final cut.

They filed into the chapel. Apart from the journalists there were a few cousins and nephews and nieces, and the odd neighbour, but it was a sad end for a sparkling woman.

The service began. The undertakers brought in the coffin. The cameras turned. At least, thought Henry, she was in the spotlight at the last.

The vicar was straight out of Central Casting. This was his audition, his performance and his credit. He even introduced himself by name. His thunderous sing-song resounded round the sparsely filled chapel like a fart in a compression chamber. Henry hoped fervently that the man wouldn’t make the final cut.

Afterwards, there was a brief reception in a local hotel, a glass of wine and a few sandwiches. The sandwiches, like the function room, were sparsely filled. Hard though Henry tried not to be, he found himself at centre stage. He was the sun, and people were cheered by his glow. ‘We are honoured by your presence,’ intoned the vicar, who was on orange juice, in case the bishop happened to see the programme.

After the sad reception the journalists went to a sad pub for a sad drink. The camera did not accompany them. The producer felt that he had enough footage of the event.

Without the camera, everything changed. Now the tribute to Henry’s success became resentment. Ted scowled. Colin, who never went out any more and so got drunk on a few pints, said, ‘I suppose you think you’re still my fucking friend because you send a fucking Christmas card every fucking year.’

‘New balls! Baghdad!’ exclaimed Gordon Carstairs.

‘Do you remember Neil Mallet?’ Henry asked, desperate for silence not to fall. ‘Always going off home to do his laundry.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Ginny. ‘I have to get to the dry cleaners by five.’

Henry gave up after that.

The party soon broke up, by silent consent.

‘Those were our best days,’ said Ted, as he left rather unsteadily. ‘They were our halcyon days. If only we’d known it at the sodding time.’

Henry’s eyes met Hilary’s, and he knew that they were both thinking the same thing. They still had their rampaging days. They still had their halcyon days.

Later, in a radio interview, Henry gave his opinion of
A Month in Their Life
.

‘Everything was affected by the camera,’ he said. ‘Nothing remained utterly true. To call any non-fiction “reality television” is to admit that we are a society that has lost respect for language and for the rigours of definition and meaning. I think we’re in danger, therefore, of removing all meaning from our lives.’

‘Pretentious bastard,’ muttered Ted to his shaving bowl, in the emptiness of his home, when he heard it.

It was no surprise when Denzil went: he’d been failing for years. Henry couldn’t bring himself to write to anybody on the paper to tell them. It was all too far in the past. It was over.

There was a reasonable turn out at Mortlake Crematorium. Quite a few people from Denzil’s local – Lampo hated pubs but Denzil popped into one every Saturday morning; one or two of Lampo’s former colleagues at Sotheby’s; two or three collectors; a biscuit-tin enthusiast; Henry and Hilary and Kate and Camilla and Guiseppe; Mrs Hargreaves; Tosser; two neighbours; and five assorted relatives, two of whom Lampo had never met.

‘They think there may be money,’ Lampo whispered to Henry in the chapel. ‘Little do they know there are only biscuit tins, and he’s left them and the house to me.’

There was a small party afterwards at Lampo’s. Everybody went except one of the collectors.

‘I won’t be able to stay, Lampo,’ Tosser said to his old schoolmate. ‘I’d like to, but … Felicity, you know. At the moment she’s … edgy. She has these edgy times.’

Henry and Hilary invited Mrs Hargreaves out to dinner at a restaurant of her choice near her home on the following Tuesday. She said that none of them were any good, but they could tell that she was thrilled.

The biscuit-tin enthusiast wandered around examining the biscuit tins with such enthusiasm that Lampo asked Henry to keep an eye on him. Henry rather enjoyed doing this. It took his mind off the sadness of the house without Denzil, and it enabled him to try out his untested skills as a private detective. He wandered and talked, watching as he talked, but very discreetly. He felt that he did it to the manner born. The man couldn’t possibly suspect that he was under surveillance.

‘I’m not going to steal them, you know.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re keeping an eye on me, furtively,’ said the biscuit-tin man. ‘I say “furtively”. I’ve never seen anything so blatant. You make the police look subtle.’

Tosser approached Henry as he was talking to Lampo.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘The three of us, eh? The two study mates and their fag, fifty years on. Well, well.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I shall have to shoot, I’m afraid.’

‘Felicity,’ said Henry and Lampo in unison.

Tosser nodded, shook hands with them, and left.

Even here, at this low key event, there was no escape for Henry from his fame. One of the collectors approached him and said, ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

‘Oh?’

‘My daughter’s friend was in tears because of you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘She bought a set of your plates for a friend’s wedding.’

‘What was wrong with them?’

‘She thought HP stood for Harry Potter. She was so disappointed.’

However famous you are, thought Henry, there’ll always be somebody more famous than you. He found that reassuring.

Henry and Hilary stayed till everyone else had gone, and then a bit more. They just couldn’t find it in themselves to leave.

‘How are you?’ asked Henry, his banality rescued by his sincerity. ‘Really?’

‘I can’t feel anything except guilt,’ said Lampo. ‘I just feel so guilty.’

‘You stood by him. You stayed with him.’

‘He was very hurt. He hid it, but he was very hurt. I can’t even feel sad for him. There’s too much guilt. And I wouldn’t have wanted him to last much longer. He would have gone into a real decline. He was spared that. I’ll always be grateful that he was spared that.’

‘What about your friend?’ asked Hilary. ‘Is it too early to ask, or will he move in?’

‘Oh, no. No, no. This isn’t his kind of place. He’d find
it
stifling. I’ll sell, and we’ll get somewhere else – possibly in the country.’

‘May we meet him?’

‘Eventually.’ Lampo sighed. ‘I must warn you he isn’t … well, let’s put it this way: he isn’t Denzil. Yes, of course you’ll meet him, but not while Denzil’s barely cold. Of
course
you’ll meet him. You’re my closest friends, you know.’

‘Thank you.’

‘My best friends.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The most loyal and affectionate of all my friends.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Damn it, you’re my only friends.’

In the vintage Daimler, on the way home, Henry sighed deeply.

Hilary gave him a wry look. He flinched. He knew her wry looks.

‘Why the sigh?’ she asked.

‘Why the wry look?’

‘Because I thought I knew what the sigh meant.’

‘I thought I knew what the wry look meant.’

‘We know each other too well. Yes, I was thinking, you’re fed up with all this sadness coming along and interrupting your enjoyment of your success.’

‘Well, I am human.’

‘I know, and I do love you. Anyway, maybe things will cheer up a bit now.’

Five days later, two aeroplanes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

*

The modern pine table had been distressed to make it look old. Henry was beginning to look old without help, and this made him distressed.

He was eating his second slice of toast, the one with marmalade, very slowly, while reading a letter.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘What a year. Another one’s gone.’

‘Oh my God. Who?’

‘Timothy Shitehouse.’

‘Should you call him that now he’s dead?’ asked Hilary.

‘Everybody always did. It’s a term of affection. All right, then: Timothy Whitehouse. Do you remember him?’

‘I remember what he was. Director (Operations) of the Cucumber Marketing Board.’

‘Just so. The letter’s from John Barrington. I think you’d left me before he came into my life. He succeeded Roland Stagg as Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed).’

‘Your boss, in fact.’

‘Yes, but I have to give the pompous sod his full title. I disliked him intensely. Being elected Gherkin Man of the Year went to his head.’

He read the letter to her.

My dear Henry,

I am so sorry to bring a cloud into the clear blue sky of your success, which has thrilled us all, but dear old Timothy Shitehouse has gone to join Roland Stagg in the great marketing board in the sky.

We’ll be having a bit of a wake, and it would be
wonderful
if you could be there. Nobody is likely to forget how much you can drink at parties and you might liven us up a bit.

Dear old Timothy. He wasn’t of this world, but I liked him. He died in his sleep; didn’t wake up one morning. I think we all want to go like that.

As you probably know, the Cucumber Marketing Board was disbanded two years ago, but it lives on in our annual reunions.

I know that you and I didn’t always see eye to eye, Henry, but in my retirement I am much changed. It turns out that having been Gherkin Man of the Year not once, but twice, doesn’t cut much ice with the younger generation, with which my family abounds. I am regarded as a harmless old bore. If I was ever a little arrogant – I know people thought I was – I lost that long ago. All in all, I think we could have a jolly little session in the only decent pub in the area.