Pratt a Manger (39 page)

It was lucky that they had an estate car. Even so, it would be a struggle to get all the supplies in, in addition to four people and three life-size dummies.

They picked up Jack at King’s Cross Station, and then went to Kentish Town for Kate, who had wrapped the dummies in brown paper, just in case the sight of people loading dummies of themselves into a car aroused unwelcome interest and suspicion.

Hilary drove to The Old Manor House. She drove fast and well. She loved it. It amused the family that behind the wheel she became impatient and ageist – ‘silly old sod, shouldn’t be on the road’ – in complete contrast to her patient and compassionate character in the rest of her life.

On the journey they didn’t talk about the days to come. Henry would brief them about that on arrival. They talked of pleasant things. Henry told his two children how proud he was that they were doing so well, even though their
achievements
were not of the sort that counted for much in a celebrity culture.

Under Kate’s leadership – brave, intelligent, tempered with common sense and the need to put bums on seats – the Umbrella Theatre was building a formidable reputation. Three plays had transferred to the West End, and two of them had done well.

Jack was thriving too. They were three and a half months late starting some jobs, and four months late finishing others. Flick had a thankless task, fielding angry, desperate phone calls, but she was brilliant at it – she should have been in the diplomatic corps – and the punters were so thrilled when they finally turned up to do a job and so excited when at last they finished it that they barely queried the bills.

They talked of their delight at Camilla’s happiness and success. She had been described in the
Observer
as the best painter of horses since Stubbs. Her painting of the winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup had been sold to the owner for £60,000. She and Guiseppe were becoming seriously rich. They were in Venice at the moment for the unveiling of an abstract sculpture of Guiseppe’s. It was called ‘Past Glory’ and had been placed in one of Venice’s tiniest, loveliest squares. Guiseppe had long outgrown his beginnings as a caricaturist.

The family were always excited on arriving at Grayling-Under-Witchwood, passing the trim council houses with their neat lawns and their swings, seeing the mellow buildings of Grange Farm, the timbered cottages scattered among the stone, the handsome Georgian frontage of Farm Grange, the monumental Victorian
vicarage,
the handsome Perpendicular church, the exquisite honeyed frontage of the elegant yet modest manor house.

Hilary drove the car round the back, so that they could empty it far from prying eyes. Even so, she reversed it close to the door, so that the unloading could be done as unobtrusively as possible. Henry was taking no risks whatsoever.

It was exciting to stock up the American-style food centre, the two other fridges, the old-fashioned larder and the cupboards.

It was even more exciting to unwrap the dummies. Kate laid them gently on the floor of the landing and removed the paper carefully and neatly.

There they lay, side by side, Henry and his children.

‘You’re hard on yourself, Kate,’ said Henry. ‘You’re prettier than that.’

‘What about me?’ complained Jack. ‘I don’t look like a man you’d allow near your house, let alone build your conservatory.’

They laughed.

Henry looked at his dummy and thought, ‘Does Sally really fancy me? Is it possible?’

That evening, Henry held a briefing. He was in his element, satisfying a side of his personality that he had only found very occasional opportunities to express – in his excessively successful campaign against diseases of the cucumber, in his excessively unsuccessful attempt to save the economy of Peru by planting cucumbers all over the Andes, and in his organisation of the successful search for
Benedict.
Two successes, one failure. Which would this one be?

There were times, as he briefed them, when his family found it hard not to laugh, but they didn’t dare to. There were times when they were awed by the absurdity of the venture, but they didn’t dare say so.

Henry explained that they would need to live in almost total silence, giving the impression at all times that the house was empty. All conversations would have to be held in whispers. All the curtains would be drawn throughout. The telephone must not be answered under any circumstances. If there were urgent messages, people would have to phone Hilary in Clapham, and she would have to deal with them. The three in the house would be utterly incommunicado.

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Kate. ‘It’s all rather exciting and I’m going to get an awful lot of reading done, but it does seem to be an extraordinarily elaborate and longwinded way of going about things.’

‘That’s your father for you,’ said Hilary.

‘Hilary! This may seem mad, but it’s not arbitrary or self-indulgent. I know what you’re thinking – Field Marshal Pratt and his silly games – but you see, I suspect two people. I don’t know which of them it is. How can I go to the police? How can I accuse one, in case it’s the other? I want simple, overwhelming proof. I want to catch them red-handed.’

‘Supposing they don’t rise to the bait?’ asked Jack.

‘In that case no harm will have been done. I mean it’s only for a week. Hostages are cooped up for years with no knowledge of when it will end. Prisoners endure dreadful
lives
and know only too well how long it will be before it ends. I’m asking you to spend one week at most, possibly far less, without telephones and TV and fresh air. A difficult week, if it turns out to be a whole week, but an adventure. A family adventure.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ said Hilary. ‘I won’t be here.’

‘It’s a terrible shame. We’ll miss you,’ said Henry, ‘but there’s no other way. You know that. You have to be seen driving away with us.’

‘I know, but … it’s going to be awful … wondering what’s happening … not being able to phone.’

They tried so hard to be normal that evening, eating and drinking, visiting the pub, joking about Rodney’s Back Passage. Henry and Hilary discussed their week in Spain with the Cramthornes, who gave them the phone number of friends they would never visit, since they weren’t going to Spain. It seemed that pretence now went with Henry every time he went to The Coach.

Charlie Mitten, who had five large furniture vans with the legend, ‘Mittens – They Move You With Gloves On’, asked if they knew anything about Mrs Scatchard, woman of mystery. Henry was able to say, in all honesty, that they never met socially, except in Rodney’s Back Passage.

Freddie Hargreaves opined that it was unlikely that anybody had ever met in Mrs Scatchard’s back passage. Jenny Hargreaves, who was a churchwarden, coloured and said, ‘For shame, Freddie Hargreaves’, but she couldn’t help laughing.

Logger Masefield had won the pork in the weekly meat raffle. He asked Henry how he should cook it. Henry suggested inserting a few slivers of garlic, rubbing it well
with
salt, pouring a generous glass of white wine over it, adding a few sprigs of thyme, leaving it to marinate for a few hours, then putting the meat and the marinade in a baking tin, covering it with greased paper and cooking it in a moderate oven for an hour, adding more liquid if necessary, then coating it with chopped parsley mixed with fine breadcrumbs, lowering the oven and cooking it for a further forty-five minutes.

The general opinion, expressed with much laughter, was that this might be a bit beyond Logger, who became indignant. ‘Just because I live in a caravan you think I’m dead ignorant,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that, and I’ll invite you to share it, Henry.’

‘If only we weren’t going to Spain,’ said Henry. He wondered if they were mentioning Spain too often.

They had a third drink, Jack thrashed Kate at pool and they left to a chorus of ‘Have a good holiday. Give our love to the Spaniards’ and ‘Arrividerci’ and ‘That’s Italian, you moron.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Rodney Merganser in his Back Passage, after they had gone. ‘Usually they’re careful to be very discreet about their comings and goings, for fear of burglars overhearing them, but they’ve practically taken out adverts for this trip.’

Nobody thought any more about it, however.

Before Hilary left, they closed the curtains in every room of the house.

Hilary wandered around outside, pretending to be looking for flowers, but actually keeping watch while Jack and Henry brought the dummies down to the car and
Kate
placed them artfully in their seats, Henry in the front beside Hilary, and little Kate and bulky Jack in the back.

‘This really is absurd. Is it actually necessary?’ asked Jack.

‘It’s necessary to him,’ said Hilary.

‘It’s the little details that single out the truly brilliant generals,’ said Henry with a grin. ‘Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Monty, me. No, seriously, why take chances? Somebody sees Hilary driving off alone, the whole thing’s blown.’

‘Will I really look as if I’ve got live people in the car?’ said Hilary. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, Kate, they’re brilliant, but they don’t move.’

‘People will see a full car flashing by,’ said Henry, ‘and they won’t have time to think, “Good Lord. Three of the four people in that car weren’t moving around at all. You don’t think they could possibly be life-size dummies of people left behind in the house, do you?” ’

Hilary left at about six o’clock on the Sunday evening. She kissed them all inside the house.

‘Will you miss me?’ she asked Henry.

‘Of course I will.’

‘Do you still love me?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I hope so.’

She went to the door, turned and waved.

‘Don’t forget not to ring,’ said Henry.

‘I won’t.’

And then she was off, and they couldn’t even move a curtain to watch her drive away.

*

The three of them felt very strange when Hilary had gone. Suddenly all the excitement left them, and the realisation of the long, long hours ahead weighed heavily upon them. Jack was about to talk. Henry held his finger to his lips, urgently. Jack nodded.

That evening they talked only in whispers. They cooked with the utmost care, silently. They ate with exaggerated caution, lest a knife scraped against a plate. The phone rang twice but they didn’t answer it.

Field Marshal Pratt was a stickler for details, a disciplinarian with an iron fist in an iron glove. His army had time on their hands, and that was always dangerous. They would think his extreme caution more and more absurd, but he was determined to maintain their total discipline at all times.

The question of flushing the toilet was raised in a whisper.

‘Only when absolutely necessary,’ was Henry’s coy whispered reply, ‘and with the seat down, and the door shut. It’s the one risk that we can’t avoid taking. You will be following the Pratt diet. You shouldn’t have any problems with wind. Don’t laugh, Jack.’

Kate read plays until the light faded. Reading plays depressed her enormously. There were all these hopeful writers longing for their work to be produced. Some of them were hopeless as well as hopeful. Others had talent, but no idea how to discipline it. Some had good ideas, but no technique. Some had good technique, but no ideas. Some of the plays would be fun, but impossible to stage. Some would be easy to stage, but no fun at all. Some would be overly didactic, others would have nothing
whatsoever
to say. Some needed a cast of thousands. One of them featured a major volcanic eruption, hard to manage at the Umbrella. It had always been so, and it would always be so, but twice in the past, in seven hundred and seventeen plays, Kate had struck gold, and so she took her slush pile very seriously.

Henry, meanwhile, tried to catch up on his mail, since Mrs Daventry was on holiday. The amount had fallen, though not a lot. What had changed was the balance of it. At least forty per cent was now hostile.

‘Bradley Tompkins always was an easy target. I’m sad to see you following in the steps of scum like Dennis Danvers.’

‘There’s no smoke without a fire, and nobody could drop mounds of horse shit in your garden unless you deserved it.’

‘I thought you were different from the other celebrities, but you aren’t. You’re all brushed with the same tar.’

‘What a role model. Kids will be standing on tables pissing into wine bottles when they should be at school studying. Photo a fix? Come off it. Face up to yourself.’

‘I am Predisent of the Dylsexia Society. We were going to invite you to pseak to us. No longer!’

Some people went to enormous trouble just to put him down. Only two days ago he had received a bulky parcel that had cost a fortune to post. It had been from a woman in Wellingborough, and it had contained a pair of size fourteen boots. ‘You’re too big for your boots, so these may come in handy,’ she had written.

While Henry and Kate toiled, Jack played patience impatiently.

Dusk fell, and the first watch began. Henry and Kate stayed up and waited, sitting in the dark, silently. Jack slept. At three in the morning Henry woke Jack, and he and Jack kept watch while Kate slept.

The realisation that this could go on for days sobered them considerably.

‘Come on, keep your spirits up,’ whispered their inspiring commander.

But it was hard. In the morning, Jack played patience impatiently. Kate struck no gold. Henry jotted down ideas for his next cookery book, a gastronomic tour of Europe. He wondered idly if … His head lolled. The commander was asleep. His foot soldiers both smiled affectionately, and indicated to each other, also affectionately, that they thought that he was just a little mad.

Kate played Jack at backgammon. Henry woke up and dealt with a few more letters.

‘I’ve gone off you, big style. I’m glad now that you never came for that blow job. Consider the offer closed as of today. Incidentally, I’ve moved. It is easier to come off at junction 39 now.’

‘My mum makes better Yorkshire puddings than your Asbo ones, and she’s Croatian.’

‘My name was Henry Pratt, but recently people have started to make remarks, which was getting on my nerves, so I’ve changed it by deed poll. Yours sincerely, Jamie Oliver.’