Pratt a Manger (3 page)

He looked in both ovens. Nothing. He peered in the larder fridge and the food centre. Nothing new. Nothing for a surprise dinner party that was no longer a surprise.

Yet Lampo didn’t get things wrong.

Perhaps they were all going out to dinner. A private room at Bartholomew’s, across the common, possibly. That must be it.

He wanted to kiss Hilary. He wanted to do more than kiss her. He wanted to prove that one wasn’t remotely old at sixty, not these days.

He went to the loo, had a careful pee, aiming at the side of the bowl so that there was no noise. He didn’t pull the chain. He didn’t want to disturb his beloved’s work. All jealousy was long gone.

He washed his hands in the tiniest trickle of water, then stared at himself in the mirror. His old friend Martin Hammond had once said that he looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Why am I shaving my father?’ Henry could never have thought such a thing. He didn’t remember his father well enough. He had only been twelve when his father hanged himself, and only eight when his mother was run over by a bus. He didn’t think about them very often, but now, on this milestone of a day, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of loss. It was a strange feeling. He was aware that he was missing the memory of
his
parents even more than he was missing them. The loss of all those times that other people had with their parents swept over him. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he mouthed to the mirror. ‘Oh, Dad, I wish you could see me now.’

He examined himself again. Martin had always looked old, even as a member of the Paradise Lane Gang, when he’d been four. Henry had never looked old. He didn’t look his age now. Did he? Well, not quite, surely?

It couldn’t be denied that he looked at least fifty-five, and that was bad enough. It was ridiculous. He felt young and silly still, unformed, immature, developing slowly. He felt twenty-five going on twelve. Sixty! It was just too too absurd.

He went back into the kitchen, made himself a mug of builder’s tea, watched a blue tit bravely resisting a great tit’s bullying on the bird feeders. The back garden looked sad and sullen as the light faded on that grey afternoon. Spring had not yet touched it.

Why was he so reluctant to entertain the possibility of being on TV? A little fame would be very pleasant, surely? He could handle it, could he not?

No, Henry, he told himself sadly. No, Henry Ezra Pratt, son of a parrot strangler, you couldn’t handle it.

How far you have come already, Henry Pratt, from the false paradise of Paradise Lane, with its shared midden and its tin bath taken down off its hook every Saturday. Do you need to go any further? Are you not happy, Henry Pratt, as you are?

He longed to see his darling. He imagined how much her beauty would surprise him when he did see her, even though he saw her every day. He didn’t dare disturb her,
though,
so he did what he sometimes did when he wanted to be with her. He slammed a door, to show that he was home. That gave her the option of ignoring it, if work was too pressing.

She came into the kitchen, smiling broadly, smiling that momentous smile of hers that had at last become as free and trusting as it had been in the early days of their first marriage.

‘Happy birthday, darling.’

They kissed. They kissed each other’s lips, very gently, then explored each other’s mouths very gently with their linked, slurpy tongues. Henry grew slightly embarrassed at the intensity of the feeling, and broke the kiss off.

‘I’ve booked us in at Bartholomew’s,’ said Hilary.

So it wasn’t Bartholomew’s.

‘Just the two of us. It’s the way you said you wanted it.’

That put him in a difficult position. If he said, ‘Absolutely. I couldn’t bear to share the day with others’, she would be crestfallen about her surprise. If he said, ‘Absolutely not. What an anti-climax’, she’d be pleased about her surprise but hurt that he didn’t think her company enough.

Wisely – yes, even he could sometimes be wise – he said nothing.

The merciful darkness hid the soft London rain from them as they washed each other’s sexual juices away with pineapple and almond soap, in their en-suite Jacuzzi.

Hilary rinsed his thinning hair with the shower attachment. All thoughts of Nicky were forgotten.

‘We haven’t ordered a taxi,’ he said.

‘It’s all arranged,’ she said.

By this time he genuinely believed that Lampo had been mistaken and they were going to a restaurant and meeting nobody. Then he heard one or two slight noises from downstairs, and he saw that Hilary was beginning to look rather tense.

The moment he got out of the bath, Henry feared that he would begin to sweat and would need another bath. He soaked his flannel beneath the cold tap and squeezed it urgently down his front.

Then he phoned the Café to make sure that Greg was coping and that Michelle, his manageress, was managing.

As Hilary began to put her dress on, he gasped with desire and ran his lips up her thighs, under the dress.

‘All that money spent on clothes,’ he said, ‘and you look best with nothing on at all.’

‘I wouldn’t be allowed into Bartholomew’s like that, unfortunately.’

She smiled, saw there was still some life in his penis, and said, ‘M’m. Not bad for sixty.’

He wished he could be sixty every day, if it made him feel as sexy as this.

‘My God, you’re putting on the full works tonight,’ he said, as she got out her ruby and diamond necklaces, her only real extravagance. ‘I cannot believe you’re doing all this just for little old me.’

That was stupid. There was no point in teasing, since he could never let her know that he was teasing. She gave him a searching look. For a moment he was worried that he might blush.

‘Phew, I am hot,’ he said, in case his face had gone red, using the words a girl called Mabel Billington had used to him once, when he was still a virgin, more than forty years ago.

‘I’ve laid out your smoking jacket,’ she said.

‘Isn’t that a bit OTT for the two of us?’

Henry! Stop it!

‘I love you in it.’

She had laid out his clothes on the bed in the biggest guest bedroom. She made all the decisions in such matters. She was his style guru.

She dried his hair and brushed it.

‘You’ll be the most handsome man at the party,’ she said.

‘I thought I was the only man.’

‘Precisely.’

They laughed. As they left their bedroom he ran his hand along the inside of the cheeks of her buttocks. She removed it and gave it a little smack.

‘Shall we have a quick drink in the sitting room,’ she said, ‘while we’re waiting for the taxi?’

‘Great.’

The moment they entered the room, all fourteen guests clapped. Henry hadn’t needed to worry about managing to look surprised when he witnessed the surprise that wasn’t a surprise. They stood there, all with glasses of champagne in their hands, like … like a human autobiography. Henry Pratt, we are your life.

Two charming and very smart waitresses handed Henry and Hilary their glasses of champagne.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ the fourteen guests yelled.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his beloved daughter Kate with fervent tunelessness. She was small and slim, but despite this she stood out in that gathering. All the other guests were wearing their party best, but she was in tattered jeans, an old green T-shirt and a frayed denim jacket. Her smile, though, was the broadest and warmest in the room.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his builder son Jack lustily and lovingly. Beside him, his earth-mother wife Flick, comfortable and comforting, sang equally lustily. They both loved Henry. In fact, they had named their first child after him.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang James and Celia Hargreaves, the parents of his best friend at school. They sang with slight Hampstead embarrassment, letting their hair down bravely, showing the common touch like minor royalty.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang their daughter Diana, Henry’s second wife, her body thickened by happiness and Swiss food. Behind her, her dentist husband Gunter opened and closed his immaculately maintained mouth, but no sound emerged. He didn’t know the words.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his step-daughter Camilla, daughter of Diana and her first husband, Nigel (Tosser) Pilkington-Brick. As a child, with her slender neck and long face, she had resembled the horses she loved so much, but in adulthood the equine echo had become faint and rather appealing. She had become a painter of horses, and she was a great deal prettier than Stubbs or Munnings.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ mouthed her Italian sculptor husband Guiseppe, who was also a great deal prettier than Stubbs or Munnings.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang Nigel (Tosser) Pilkington-Brick, Camilla’s father, who had shared a study with Lampo at Dalton College, where Henry had been their fag. Nigel couldn’t have opened his mouth wider or with more apparent emotion if he’d been in close-up on
Songs of Praise
. Beside him, his second wife Felicity looked pale and sang palely.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ trilled Denzil Ackerman in a shrill little voice. His parchment skin was yellow and more cracked than ever. He looked his eighty-five years. He looked gaunt. ‘Oh, Lampo, do not destroy this man,’ breathed Henry silently.

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang Ted Plunkett, his former friend and colleague on the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
, and his wife Helen, still showing traces of glamour even at sixty-two. Helen sang with fervour and some style, Ted with as little movement of the mouth as was consistent with the minimum of social decorum. Ted’s hair was white now, but Helen’s was dyed a rich, golden brown. She wasn’t going to give her looks up without a fight.

‘And so say all of us,’ they roared.

‘And so say all of us.’

And Henry cried. Tears streamed down his face. The guests all thought it was just the emotion overcoming him, but Hilary knew that it was more than that and gave him one of her looks, love tinged with scepticism. He sometimes had the uneasy feeling that she could read his mind.

‘Far too often I haven’t been a jolly good fellow,’ Henry was thinking. ‘I have to be a jolly good fellow all the time from now on.’

It wasn’t nice to remember that he had been looking down Nicky’s cleavage only that morning, barely seven hours ago.

There could be no question of his ever agreeing to appear on television. It would ‘lead to things’ as Cousin Hilda, his surrogate mother, might have said.

He pulled a pile of old tissues out of his pocket. Several fluttered to the ground. He blew his nose on the rest of them. Hilary glared at him. He picked up the stray tissues, slipped them into his left-hand trouser pocket, got a clean hankie from his right-hand pocket and blew his nose into that.

As he was picking up the tissues he caught Mrs Hargreaves’s eye. She had the same look in her eyes as she had always had on meeting Henry, a look compounded equally of affection, horror and bravery.

One day, before I die, I will be elegant in the presence of Mrs Hargreaves, thought Henry.

‘You look as wonderful as ever, Mrs Hargreaves,’ he said, and indeed in her mid-eighties she was still a very elegant woman.

‘Henry!’ she admonished with a smile. ‘Don’t you think after forty-five years you ought to find it in you to call me Celia?’

‘I’m sorry. I just don’t see you as a Celia. You’re far too beautiful to be a Celia.’

Celia Hargreaves’s eyes gleamed, but there was more mockery in them than Henry liked.

‘Who would have thought you’d ever turn into such a smooth speaker?’ she said, and he sensed her unspoken continuation of ‘I think I rather preferred you as you were.’

James Hargreaves was bent and frail. He had shrunk. He looked an ill man. Even doctors end up needing doctors. To Henry he had always represented the epitome of suave masculine sophistication. To feel pity for him seemed to be against the natural order of things.

‘You’re looking well,’ he said.

The retired brain surgeon waved away this irrelevancy as if it was an annoying fly, and said, ‘How’s your greasy spoon doing?’

‘James!’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘It is not a greasy spoon. Is it, Henry?’

‘Hardly!’ said Henry. ‘They even want me to go on TV in one of these celebrity chef programmes.’

‘Good Lord,’ said James Hargreaves unflatteringly.

Maybe I’ll have to, thought Henry. I really am fed up with being patronised.

‘It’s such a shame Paul and Christobel couldn’t be here,’ said Celia Hargreaves. ‘They’re in the Seychelles.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ said Henry.

James Hargreaves frowned and Henry’s eyes met Celia’s and he knew that she was laughing inwardly at the memory of past evenings when Henry had been rude and combative. He felt a blush of shame. Oh God, Henry, please, you’re sixty, don’t blush.

‘You and Paul seem to have rather drifted apart,’ said Celia.

‘Not really. We just have busy lives.’ Come off it,
Henry.
You know you have. You mock because Paul married a lawyer when he was studying law and a doctor after he’d changed to medicine. You call their home Bedsyde Manor, which infuriates them. You keep up with his parents because they represent an image of beautiful living and … be honest … because you once had sexual fantasies about Celia and still thirst for her approval.

‘I have to be grateful to Paul, though,’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t been friends with him at school I’d never have met you. Or Diana.’

‘And we’re glad you did, despite everything, aren’t we, James?’ said Celia Hargreaves.

‘What? Oh! Yes! Absolutely! Yes! Definitely!’ said James Hargreaves, frail retired brain surgeon, each exclamation mark confirming Henry’s belief that the man couldn’t stand him.

He saw his ex-wife moving across the room, on her own, towards Denzil. This was his chance of a word out of Gunter’s earshot.

‘Diana!’ he said, intercepting her. It was neatly done, he was so much more accomplished socially now. His only mistake was to take a canapé en route, so that his ‘And how’s the sexy Mrs Axelburger this evening?’ was mouthed through hard-boiled egg and caviar. Even as he said it he realised that Diana didn’t look at all sexy any more. She had put on weight. She looked prosperous and Swiss.