The Complete Pratt (107 page)

Denzil greeted them in a natty blue apron. Denzil and Lampo kissed both Hilary and Henry, and Henry was very pleasantly embarrassed.

‘I’m doing the cooking. He’s doing the worrying. We take it in turns,’ said Denzil.

‘I never worry,’ said Lampo. ‘He just likes to think I do, because he worries so much.’

Denzil gave an angry intake of breath, and wheeled from the room, narrowly avoiding knocking down two vases, a candlestick and a pomander. Henry flinched. He didn’t like to see Lampo and Denzil arguing, since it was he who had brought them together, albeit inadvertently.

‘We’ve a surprise for you,’ said Lampo. ‘Diana and Tosser are coming for drinks.’

Henry was horrified to feel the quickening of his heartbeat. At Dalton College he had fagged for Lampo and for Tosser Pilkington-Brick. Tosser had married Diana Hargreaves, sister of Henry’s best friend, Paul. Henry had almost loved Diana once. Not now, though. No need for quickened heartbeats now.

Diana and Tosser were in evening dress. They would be. The last time Henry had seen Diana, at his wedding, she had been very pregnant. Now, although never slim, she looked quite shapely. The skin on her broad shoulders, though not as fine as Hilary’s, was attractively brown and smooth. Henry didn’t feel any desire for her, of course, but he felt a worryingly sharp hostility towards Tosser. He found himself hoping that they weren’t happy, and this too disturbed him.

‘We’ve left Benedict with Mummy,’ said Diana. ‘She sends her love, Henry. They both do. They miss you dreadfully.’

They drank champagne, and Tosser said, ‘When you get a job, Henry, do come and see me for insurance and pensions advice.’

‘Tosser!’ said Diana.

‘Diana, please, the name is Nigel,’ said Tosser stuffily.

‘The name is Tosser when you behave like a toss-pot,’ said Diana.

Oh good, they were arguing. No, Henry, don’t feel like that.

But it was difficult not to feel like that. Everyone seemed so fulfilled, Tosser doling out financial advice, Diana producing Benedicts, Lampo working for Sotheby’s – or was it Christie’s? –
Denzil
still churning out his arty-farty cobblers for the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
, Hilary starting work shortly
and
getting on so well with her bloody novel. Out, green-eyed monster.

‘I’ve got a very promising interview next week,’ said Henry.

He groaned inwardly. Why had he been so weak as to feel the need to compete? He didn’t want to talk about his interview.

‘Gorgeous. What’s it for?’ said Lampo, as he opened a second bottle of champagne, which fizzed out all over the inlaid marble top of a Georgian game table and sent Denzil white with anger.

Henry thought he had got away with it, but after ten minutes of frenzied cleaning, when Lampo turned to Denzil and said, ‘Sorry. No harm done, I think,’ Denzil, in order to ignore Lampo effectively, turned to Henry and said, ‘Come on. You never told us what that interview was for.’

‘It’s with the Cucumber Marketing Board,’ said Henry. ‘They’ve relocated to Leeds. There’s a vacancy for an Assistant Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed).’

There was a stunned silence in the little mews house in Chelsea.

Henry ‘We admire your personality but are not convinced that you have the moral commitment that we as a religious body are seeking’ Pratt sat in the foyer of the Cucumber Marketing Board, which was brilliantly user-unfriendly many years before the concept was put into words.

The Cucumber Marketing Board was housed in a four-storey Edwardian building in the business district of Leeds, among banks and solicitors’ offices. The steel-armed chairs and the glass-topped table were far too small for the high-ceilinged room with its dusty chandelier and impressive ceiling rose. The table was strategically placed too far in front of his chair and too near the floor, so that he risked severe backache every time he bent down to pick up the out-of-date copies of
The Lady
and
The Vegetable Growers’ Gazette
, which were the only reading matter provided.

‘Mr Tubman-Edwards will see you now,’ said the receptionist. ‘Second floor. He’ll meet you at the lift.’

Henry couldn’t believe it. Could this possibly be the same Tubman-Edwards, the bully of Brasenose and Dalton, whom Tosser Pilkington-Brick, when he was a hero and not a financial consultant, had forced to smile on the other side of his face? If so, it was goodbye, cucumbers.

He wished he looked taller and more athletic. He wished that his dark grey suit didn’t look crumpled.

He walked along a dark, uncarpeted corridor to the lift, which clanked precariously to the second floor, where he was met by a rather anxious man in his fifties, wearing a pin-striped suit and an MCC tie with a blob of egg yolk on it. A tiny piece of cotton wool had stuck to a cut on his neck.

‘Dennis Tubman-Edwards,’ he announced. ‘It’s Henry, isn’t it? We’re friendly people here.’

He smiled, seeming unaware that his smile gave a twisted, slightly sinister look to his face. Henry saw the resemblance to J. C. R. Tubman-Edwards (Plantaganet House) for the first time.

Mr Tubman-Edwards led him along a carpeted corridor, past the offices of the Director (Operations) and the Director (Admin.) and opened the door of Room 208, which carried the legend ‘Head of Establishments’.

Mr Tubman-Edwards seated himself behind his very bare desk, and gestured to Henry to sit in the hard chair provided for interviewees. The office was not large and was almost entirely taken up with filing cabinets. There were just two pictures on the walls – a lurid portrait of the Queen and a school photograph of the Dalton College boys from Mr Tubman-Edwards’s final year. His desk was bare except for a pen, a pad of lined paper, and two photograph holders.

‘You were at school with my son, I believe,’ said Mr Tubman-Edwards, turning one of the photographs round so that Henry could see the unprepossessing face of the ghastly boy.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Henry, wondering desperately whether this was good news or bad.

Mr Tubman-Edwards winced and gasped. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Touch of shrapnel still lodged in the skull. Gives me gyp intermittently. Not to worry. Chums, were you?’

It might be a trap. Better be honest. Not too honest, though. Pity he needed the job. He would have loved to have said, ‘Couldn’t stand the great sack of blackmailing yak turd.’

‘Er … not particularly,’ he said.

‘What’s your ambition in life?’ asked the father of the great sack of blackmailing yak turd in the same casual, conversational tone.

Henry realised that he had been thrown a conversational hand-grenade. To pitch his ambition too high – ‘I’d like to feel that I’d helped to save Western civilisation’ – would be to risk ridicule and, more seriously, rejection. To pitch it too low – ‘I’d like to feel that I could support my family and give them double glazing for life’ – might be even more disastrous.

‘Er …,’ he began, more to show that he was still alive than anything, and as soon as he had stopped, he realised that to be indecisive would be the most fatal fault of all.

Too late. Oh well. Mr Tubman-Edwards smiled his slightly crooked smile and tapped his HB pencil on the desk. Must say something.

‘I
suppose
,’ he said, investing a deeply thoughtful inflection into his voice, to suggest that his long hesitation had been caused by deep thought, ‘I
suppose
my ambition is to find an ambition that satisfies me.’

‘I see,’ said Mr Tubman-Edwards neutrally. ‘I see. And what is your attitude to cucumbers?’

If this next abrupt change of subject was intended to jolt Henry, it failed. He felt on safer ground with cucumbers than with ambition.

‘I like them,’ he said, and then, to his horror, he heard himself add, ‘I think they’re the Cinderellas of the salad bowl.’

Fortunately, Mr Tubman-Edwards took him seriously.

‘In what way?’ he asked.

‘Well what is a salad built around for most people?’ said Henry. ‘Lettuce and more lettuce. Tomatoes. Hard-boiled eggs. I think because it’s the same colour as lettuce – green,’ he wished he hadn’t added the explanation, ‘… the cucumber is often added as an afterthought. I’d like to raise the profile of the cucumber, give it in
post
-war cuisine a prominence akin to its dominance of the teatime sandwich in the pre-war world.’

J. C. R. Tubman-Edwards’s father seemed impressed, if also slightly stunned.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Excellent. Splendid.’

A wave of self-disgust swept over Henry. How could he sit there and pretend, for the sake of a measly job, that cucumbers were so important? Where was the fighting spirit on which he prided himself?

‘Of course they aren’t the be-all and end-all,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not quite with you,’ said Mr Tubman-Edwards. ‘They aren’t the be-all and end-all of what?’

‘Of life,’ said Henry.

He feared that, in that brave, reckless moment, he had lost all chance of working for the Cucumber Marketing Board. But he was wrong.

He would often wonder, in the years to come, if things would have been better if he’d been right.

ON FRIDAY, JANUARY
10th, 1958, there was a second successful launch of the Air Force’s Atlas Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile at Cape Canaveral, a burglar found so much wine and spirits in a director’s room at an Edinburgh shop-fitting firm that he was found drunk at the director’s desk when the work-force arrived, and Hilary left for the doctor’s before the post came.

The moment Henry had read the letter, he wanted to stand in the middle of Perkin Warbeck Drive and announce the good tidings with such a yell of triumph that it would be heard in Lambert Simnel Avenue and Wat Tyler Crescent. But there was only Nadežda to tell, and he didn’t want to tell her before he told Hilary.

He wheeled Nadežda to the French windows, from which she liked to watch the birds. A pair of chaffinches were foraging under the bird table, the male strikingly colourful, the female gently subtle. A jaundiced sun was filtering through high clouds. There was still a little frost under the conifers and in front of the summer-house, but in Henry’s heart there was a warm glow. No matter that the call of the cucumber gave him no great sense of vocation. No matter that he would never know whether he had got the job on merit or because he’d been at school with Mr Tubman-Edwards’s son. No matter that an unworthy little voice had already whispered to him that there was no need to tell anybody, not even Hilary, about the Tubman-Edwards connection. Pratt of the Argus was employable again. The world was a beautiful place.

He rehearsed the scene in which he would tell Hilary and she would admire him. He heard footsteps on the gravel path, but it was the heavy crunching feet of the nurse who would wash and dress Nadežda and give her the massage that did so little good.

He stood at the French windows, looking out at the summer-house, where they had discovered the depth of their love. Four
starlings
descended on the bird table, and the chaffinches flew away. How could a sore foot take a doctor so long?

At last he heard her light, quick steps. He opened the front door, and there she stood, his pale ethereal love, and her eyes sparkled, as if she already knew. He ushered her in with mock courtliness, closed the door, and said, ‘I’ve got some news.’

‘So have I,’ said Hilary. ‘I’m pregnant.’

He gawped. He couldn’t grasp it. She couldn’t be, his slender love.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, with more amazement than delight. And then the amazing fact of it filtered through, and he said ‘Good Lord’ again, with more delight than amazement, and he rushed to her and she to him and they hugged in the sadly impersonal hall, and he said, ‘When?’ and she said, ‘Beginning of August,’ and they laughed a bit and cried a bit and she said, ‘I must tell Mummy.’

The nurse had finished washing and dressing Nadežda and had wheeled her back to her favourite position by the French windows.

‘I’m going to have a baby, Mummy,’ said Hilary, bending to kiss her mother’s lifeless hair, while the nurse gently kneaded those deceptively perfect shoulders.

‘Oh my darlings, I’m so happy for you,’ said Nadežda with a gasp, and they both heard, in the silence that followed, her unspoken thought, ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong with it.’

Suddenly sobered, Hilary turned to Henry and said, ‘Didn’t you say you had some news?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Henry, as three magpies attacked the bird table, and the starlings flew off. ‘I’d almost forgotten.’ That’ll teach me to rehearse scenes, he thought. ‘Our baby will have no cause to be ashamed of its Daddy. Our son or daughter, when he or she goes to school, will be able to boast that their father is the Assistant Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed) of the Cucumber Marketing Board.’

Cousin Hilda sniffed.

‘Cucumbers!’ she said. ‘I don’t use them.’

‘Is that all you can say?’ said Hilary.

Henry and Cousin Hilda looked at Hilary in astonishment. Two milky cups of Camp coffee stood on the otherwise bare dining table in the basement room of number 66, Park View Road. Cousin Hilda had not indulged.