The Complete Pratt (104 page)

Henry smiled. He was a lucky man to have won the love of this pale, serene, beautiful woman.

8.00 became 8.07. Tick of clock. Hiss of fire. Whoosh of tyre. Boing!

It was impossible to imagine that, on that very evening, a world which didn’t seem to care would send not one but two visitors, both of them with kind intentions, to Flat 1, 33, Stickleback Rise, Thurmarsh.

The first visitor was Howard Lewthwaite, Hilary’s father. He was pale and looked all of his fifty years. The lines on his face were etched deep. He sat in the only armchair, accepted a cup of coffee, and gulped it eagerly, as if he feared that without its stimulus he might gently expire.

‘I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your tea, have you?’ The Lewthwaites ate dinner, but he called it tea, because he was deputy leader of the majority Labour group on Thurmarsh Borough Council, and couldn’t afford to be thought a snob.

‘Yes, we’ve had our tea,’ said Hilary.

They’d had sausages and mash, with two cups of tea each. They hadn’t enough money to be sophisticated.

‘I’m the sole cause of your unemployment, Henry,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Henry.

‘Ridiculous,’ echoed Hilary.

‘No, no. No, no. You had a great scoop. It would have launched you on your journalistic career. You couldn’t write it up, because my disgrace would have broken Hilary’s heart. The sole cause.’

Neither Henry nor Hilary spoke. If a person is determined to take all the blame, there is nothing you can do. Besides, they had never discussed her father’s misdeeds. Henry hadn’t even wanted her to know about them, but Howard had insisted on ‘wiping the slate clean’.

‘I want to help you,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘I’d like to pay your rent, but I can’t. The golden age of drapery is over. One day,
not
this year, maybe not even next year, but soon, Lewthwaite’s will fail. A hundred and seventeen years of family trading will cease. The proud tradition will crumble in my hands.’

‘It’s kind of you to come round to cheer us up,’ said Henry, and Hilary gave him a warning look. He put his right hand on her left knee and felt a stirring of desire. It was, albeit by a narrow margin, his favourite of her knees.

‘Naddy needs constant care.’ Howard Lewthwaite’s Yugoslavian wife Nadežda was crippled by polio. ‘We hope Sam will go to university. He’ll need a certain level of support for many years.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t need money. I’ll get a job.’

‘Of course he will,’ said Hilary staunchly.

‘Of course you will,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. ‘After all …’

He hesitated. Henry, hoping that a ringing endorsement of his qualities as man, husband and potential employee would follow, composed his face into a suitably modest expression.

‘After all, everybody gets a job in the end,’ said Howard Lewthwaite.

‘I’ll be working from January,’ said Hilary.

‘Couldn’t you get work as a teacher, Henry?’ asked Howard Lewthwaite.

Henry shook his head. ‘I went to too many schools as a child. I couldn’t face any more.’

‘I suppose they’re looking for people with degrees, anyway,’ said Howard Lewthwaite. He smiled warmly at Henry. Henry’s answering smile was just a trifle strained. ‘Anyway, Naddy and I don’t think that your modest savings should be frittered away in rent, and we’d like to offer you a room in our house until you’re both working and can afford a mortgage.’

He beamed, confident that his offer was irresistible. Slowly, his smile foundered on the long silence that ensued.

Henry looked at Hilary and realised that for the first time in their brief marriage he didn’t know what she was thinking. He stroked her knee and felt an aching longing and an unaccustomed bleakness.

He knew what
he
was thinking. He was thinking that he didn’t
want
to share his wife with her family. He didn’t want to compare her slender loveliness with her mother’s crippled body. He didn’t want her obnoxious fifteen-year-old brother Sam banging on their bedroom door and shouting, ‘Are you two having it off in there or can I come in?’ He didn’t want Howard Lewthwaite’s guilt with their dinner that was called tea every night. He dreaded the faint amusement which he knew would greet the discovery that they had both started to write novels. He couldn’t bear the thought of making love to Hilary in the room in which she had suffered her childhood depressions. Above all, he hated the thought of having to express any of these reservations to Hilary.

He caught her eye and wondered if
she
knew what
he
was thinking.

Hiss. Whoosh. Tick. It was becoming imperative for somebody to say something.

‘That’s very kind of you, Howard,’ he said. ‘Incredibly kind.’

‘Amazingly kind,’ agreed Hilary.

‘I see,’ said Howard Lewthwaite flatly. ‘You don’t want to come. The institution of the extended family in advanced Western societies has broken down irretrievably. I was a fool not to realise it.’

Henry ‘You have a lively mind but it is our feeling that you are too creative a person to function well as a member of a team’ Pratt looked to his wife for support. She didn’t fail him.

‘That’s absurd, Daddy,’ she said. ‘It’s an incredibly kind offer, but we need to think about it. We need to consider its implications for our sense of independence and our mutual self-fulfilment.’

Howard Lewthwaite nodded. ‘That’s fair enough,’ he said. ‘You’re speaking my language there.’ He stood up somewhat stiffly. His back was giving him gyp, and his temper hadn’t been improved by his doctor’s explanation that we were designed to walk on all fours, not on two legs, thereby implying that our endless pain is entirely the result of the hubris of the species and is in no way caused by the incompetence of the medical profession.

‘Thank you for the coffee,’ he said. ‘It’s love and support that
we
’re offering you. I can’t pretend you’d be independent, but I hope we could do it in a way that isn’t incompatible with your mutual self-fulfilment. Anyway, the offer’s still on the table.’

Henry went to the door with him, shook his hand warmly, and came back into a room that suddenly seemed far too small. He felt awful. He didn’t know what to say. He stroked Hilary’s knee again, but the gesture was mechanical and he felt no stirrings.

‘I agree with you,’ said Hilary.

‘Agree with what?’

‘What you were thinking. Sam being impossible, Mummy crippled, Daddy guilty, our both writing novels seeming faintly amusing.’

Henry felt a surge of love and admiration and relief, but also a cold wind of unease. He was beginning to feel that Hilary was very much cleverer than he was. His novel wasn’t coming on well. She said that hers wasn’t either, but he wasn’t sure that he believed her. He felt a twinge of jealousy, and didn’t like the feeling.

‘So what do we do?’ he asked. ‘Turn it down?’

‘It’s not easy to do that, is it?’ said Hilary. ‘It’ll hurt them deeply, and it does make financial sense.’

Henry ‘After careful consideration, although we believe you have a great deal to offer, we do not think public relations is necessarily the right field for you’ Pratt nodded glumly. He felt awful.

He was still feeling awful twenty minutes later, when Cousin Hilda called.

Cousin Hilda refused even the limited comfort offered by the armchair. Hard chairs are more suited to life on earth, her rigid pose asserted. She sat with her legs slightly apart, as women do who have no thought of sex and its attendant dangers, and with stockings as thick as hers, and pale pink bloomers as voluminous as hers, she had never been exposed to its dangers.

‘I’m sorry to call so late,’ she said. She made it sound as if she was being unbelievably bold in calling at eleven minutes past nine. ‘But I had my gentlemen to see to.’

‘It’s very kind of you to come at all,’ said Hilary.

‘Well, we haven’t got much on tonight after Tony Hancock, to say we pay for a licence,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘There’s
Panorama
, and that’s depressing, and so’s the news, and
Picture Parade
’s no use to me because when can I get to the pictures, with my gentlemen to see to, and then there’s ballroom dancing, and I’ve never been right bothered about dancing, it only leads to things, and anyroad it includes that rock and roll. On the BBC! Can you believe it?’

‘How
are
your gentlemen?’ enquired Henry.

‘Mr O’Reilly doesn’t change,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Mr Pettifer’s never had quite the same spring in his step since he were taken off the cheese counter. I’ve lost Mr Peters. I’ve a Mr Ironside instead, but only through the week. He has family in Norfolk.’ Cousin Hilda paused and went slightly pink. ‘I’ve had a chapter of disasters with my fourth room.’

‘Disasters?’ said Hilary gently.

‘Drink,’ whispered Cousin Hilda, as if the gas fire might disapprove if it heard. ‘And worse.’

‘Worse!’ said Henry. ‘The mind boggles.’

‘Well it might,’ said Cousin Hilda, luckily missing the irony. ‘Well it might. That’s how I lost Mr Peters.’ There was silence. Cousin Hilda was clearly torn between the need to unburden herself and the enormous difficulty of broaching a painful subject.

‘Tell us what happened,’ said Hilary gently.

‘This man came recommended,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘He were a regional under-manager with Timothy White’s. Timothy White’s, I ask you, a respectable firm! He made … he made …’

‘Certain suggestions to Mr Peters?’ prompted Henry.

Cousin Hilda nodded her gratitude, and sniffed violently.

‘Times are changing,’ said Hilary.

‘You’re right, Hilary,’ said Cousin Hilda fervently. ‘You are so right. You have a very sensible wife, Henry.’

Henry was thrilled by this unparalleled high praise from Cousin Hilda, albeit slightly hurt by the surprise in her tone.

Cousin Hilda leant forward, and Henry realised that she was winding herself up for something momentous.

‘We had fun at number 66, didn’t we, in the old days?’ she said.

Henry tried to hide his astonishment.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Lots of fun.’

‘Plenty of good chin-wags.’

‘Yes indeed. Very good chin-wags.’

‘I’ve never been a great one for talk at table, and there were moments when I disapproved. I regret that now. Those meals, Henry, when you lived with me, they were the happiest times of my life.’

Henry could feel his heart thudding.

‘It’s different now,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Mr O’Reilly’s never exactly been a live wire, Mr Pettifer’s a shadow of his former self, at weekends when Mr Ironside’s gone it’s like a morgue. I have a little nest egg. I don’t live particularly extravagantly. I don’t need the rent from my fourth room, and you’ll not want to be paying out rent every week when you’re not working.’

Henry felt that he was drowning. He couldn’t bear the thought of married life under Cousin Hilda’s roof, in the little room which had been home to him from the time he had left Dalton College until he had bravely moved out into a flat early last year. He clutched Hilary’s hand.

‘I’m too old to cope with any more under-managers from Timothy White’s or Macfisheries with their ideas.’ Cousin Hilda, who must have been into her fifties by now, sniffed. ‘I’d like it very much if you made my home your home.’

To Henry’s horror, Hilary burst into tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but that is so kind of you.’

Cousin Hilda looked at Hilary as if regretting her use of the word ‘sensible’. She sniffed disapprovingly.

Hilary blew her nose violently. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Cousin Hilda’s mouth was working with tension, and she had gone pink again.

‘There is one other matter,’ she said.

She pressed her legs together and Henry realised to his horror that she was going to talk about sex. Sweat was running down his back.

‘I don’t doubt that I strike you as odd and old-fashioned,’ continued Cousin Hilda.

Even Hilary’s famous tact was unequal to the task of denying this.

‘However.’ Cousin Hilda was remorseless. ‘Even I am aware that there is a side to marriage in which folk … do things.’ She had begun to sweat as well. Henry had never seen her sweat before. ‘I know that it’s the duty of married folk to do these things, otherwise there’d be no procreation of the human race.’ Cousin Hilda was clinging rigidly to her chair. Her knuckles had gone white. ‘I want you to know that you’d be welcome to … er … do your duty in my house whenever tha wants. Except mealtimes. Also, the normal bathtime restrictions would not apply. You could bath as often as you wished, provided that you didn’t clash with my gentlemen.’

Cousin Hilda stopped at last and tried to smile.

Tick. Hiss. Whoosh.

Henry didn’t dare look at Hilary. ‘Thank you very much, Cousin Hilda,’ he said in a stilted voice. ‘That’s a very kind offer, and well worth thinking about. Isn’t it, Hilary?’

‘It certainly is,’ said Hilary. ‘Very kind.’

‘The thing is,’ said Henry. ‘The thing is … Hilary’s father has offered us a room in their house.’