The Complete Pratt (108 page)

‘Mrs Wedderburn’ll be right glad you’re fixed up,’ she said.

‘Never mind Mrs Wedderburn,’ said Hilary. ‘What about you? Aren’t you pleased Henry’s got a job?’

‘Hilary!’ said Henry.

‘Leave this to me, darling,’ said Hilary.

‘I wouldn’t say I’m pleased, no,’ said Cousin Hilda carefully. ‘It’s nowt to get excited about. It’s natural. I’d say I were displeased when he hadn’t got one, and now I’m not displeased any more.’

‘It’s not the greatest job in the world,’ said Henry. ‘But I won’t be in cucumbers for ever. It’s just a launching pad. It does … er … it does mean we won’t be coming back here to live.’

‘I see,’ said Cousin Hilda.

‘We enjoyed being here. We missed it when we were with Hilary’s family, even the spotted dick. Didn’t we, darling?’

‘Yes, we really did,’ agreed Hilary.

‘What do you mean – “Even the spotted dick”?’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Is there summat wrong with me spotted dick?’

‘Oh no,’ said Henry. ‘Not at all. It’s the best spotted dick I’ve ever eaten.’ He didn’t tell her that the only other spotted dick he’d ever eaten had been at Brasenese College, where all the food had been inedible. ‘We’ll move into rented accommodation and start looking for a house.’

‘I see,’ said Cousin Hilda.

‘Cousin Hilda? Do you love Henry?’ asked Hilary.

Henry’s astonishment was total now, but he knew better than to say, ‘Hilary!’ again. His heart was beating fast and he felt rivulets of embarrassment running down his back.

Cousin Hilda turned away abruptly and shovelled more coke into the roaring fire, although it was already stifling in the little room. The smell of hot glass from the panes in the front of the blue-tiled stove mingled with the remnants of battered cod, jam
roly
-poly, and Mr O’Reilly’s end-of-the-week feet.

As Cousin Hilda bent to her task, Henry saw the white dead skin of her thigh through a hole in her pale pink bloomers.

When she had finished her displacement activity, Cousin Hilda suddenly looked Hilary full in the face. Hilary didn’t flinch. Henry held his breath.

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked after him like a son, haven’t I? He knows I do.’

‘He doesn’t actually,’ said Hilary. ‘He can never quite believe that anybody loves him. I’m not sure that he even realises how much I love him.’

‘Hilary has a reason for feeling particularly emotional tonight, Cousin Hilda,’ said Henry.

‘Don’t make excuses for me,’ said Hilary.

‘Well tell her.’

‘All in good time. I thought there were things that should be said. Families ought to be able to say things.’

‘We were brought up not to say things,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to say things.’

‘That’s why I thought tonight might be a good time to start,’ said Hilary.

It was extraordinary, but Henry had the impression that Cousin Hilda was actually quite pleased.

But she couldn’t resist having one more parting shot. ‘Some folk say too much. I could never be like the Dorises of this world. Her mother used to say, “I’m saying nowt.” Doris should have taken heed.’ Then she turned to Hilary and her face softened into something almost resembling a smile. ‘It’s time now, isn’t it, Hilary?’ she said. ‘Time to find out why you have reasons for feeling emotional tonight.’

And Henry realised, to his amazement, that Cousin Hilda knew.

‘I’m pregnant,’ said Hilary.

Cousin Hilda’s face didn’t move, but a single tear ran down her cheek, and Henry recognised it for what it was. It was a tear for the life she might have led.

And maybe Hilary recognised it too, because she went over to Cousin Hilda and hugged her and held her close and planted a gentle kiss on her forehead, and Cousin Hilda’s lips worked anxiously and at last she spoke.

‘Give over,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so daft.’

And then she sniffed.

Henry recognised it as a truly historic sniff.

It was the first time that Cousin Hilda had sniffed not out of disapproval, but because her nose was running.

During January, 1958, the National Union of Mineworkers claimed an extra ten shillings a week for its 382,000 day wage men, Dr Vivian Fuchs reached the South Pole and Sir Edmund Hillary flew in to greet him with the immortal words, ‘Hello, Bunny,’ scientists at Harwell, revealing secrets of their work on producing electricity through hydrogen power, predicted that the sea would provide a fuel supply sufficient to last mankind for a thousand million years at nominal cost, and Henry and Hilary Pratt both started new jobs.

On Hilary’s first day at Thurmarsh Grammar School for Girls, Henry traipsed the cold pavements of Thurmarsh, looking at a succession of dismal flats. Her absence pierced him like a cruel frost. At lunchtime, on an impulse, he went to the Lord Nelson, in Leatherbottlers’ Row, in the hope that he would run into some of his old colleagues from the
Evening Argus
. Nobody he knew came in. Even the bar staff were unfamiliar to him. He sat at their usual corner table in the brown, clubby back bar, and had a Scotch egg, a ham sandwich, two pints of bitter and a bout of melancholia. He wished that he could put up a notice explaining that ‘Mr Henry Pratt isn’t really lonely and pathetic. He is revisiting old haunts while waiting to take up one of the most prestigious appointments in the cucumber world.’

Just as he was about to leave, Peter Matheson, leader of the Conservative minority on Thurmarsh Borough Council, and father of Anna, Hilary’s schoolfriend who lived with the bigamous Uncle Teddy in Cap Ferrat, entered the bar. He had been a prime
mover
in the saga of corruption which had seemed likely to make, but had ultimately been allowed to break, Henry’s brief journalistic career. Henry disliked him intensely, yet felt so lonely without Hilary that he accepted a drink with eagerness.

‘I don’t usually drink at lunchtime,’ said Peter Matheson, when they were settled at the corner table, ‘but I’ve had some grave news about Anna. I haven’t even told Olivia yet.’

Henry’s blood ran cold. Had Peter Matheson discovered that she was married to Uncle Teddy? Or had she died?

‘You remember that girlfriend of hers who was becoming a nun?’

‘Yes,’ said Henry cautiously, remembering the tale that Anna had told her parents to explain her presence in France.

‘Well Anna’s joined her. She’s become a nun.’

Henry felt a surge of relief. Anna wasn’t dead. And of course he knew that she hadn’t become a nun.

‘Oh I am sorry,’ he said, hoping that he looked sufficiently grave.

‘It’s an extremely strict order. She isn’t even allowed to see her parents. We’ve lost our only child.’

Henry was appalled, but also reluctantly impressed, by Anna’s ruthlessness. He bought another round, didn’t mention his own good news, and talked to Peter Matheson in a suitably muted manner.

For the remainder of the afternoon, back in Perkin Warbeck Drive, Henry counted the minutes till Hilary’s return. He planned to kiss her, tell her how much he’d missed her, ask her about her day, take her to bed and lay his head against her still smooth stomach, trying to sense the developing foetus within.

In fact, perhaps because he had drunk two more pints than he had intended, he gave her only a perfunctory kiss and found it impossible to tell her how much he had missed her. He felt jealous of all the experiences from which he had been excluded, and managed to invest his, ‘How did you get on?’ with only a grudging expression of interest.

‘It was a bit odd really,’ said Hilary. ‘The headmistress said, “Welcome to Thurmarsh Grammar. I hope you’ll be very happy here,” and I said, “Thank you very much. I’m sure I will. I’d like to give in my notice. I’ll be leaving in July. I’m pregnant.”’

‘You didn’t!’

‘I did. I thought it only fair to make my position clear from the start.’

Henry shivered. He couldn’t always cope with Hilary’s directness.

On Henry’s first day at work, Hilary found it difficult to concentrate on the subjunctive tense, and Act One of
Macbeth
, and Lily Rosewood being sick all over Jeannie Cosgrove’s satchel. All day she was wondering how he was getting on. Her love had robbed her of her sense of proportion, and she felt sick with anxiety lest his new career be an instant fiasco. ‘It can’t be. They’re bound to recognise his lovely talents. They’re bound to take my lovely man to their hearts,’ she told herself. But the tension persisted. She hung around the school as long as she could, and walked home slowly, to their charming, but tiny, one-bedroom flat in Copley Road. Her route took her down Market Street, past the beginnings of the new Fish Hill Shopping Complex, along the Doncaster Road, down Blonk Lane, past the football ground, up Ainsley Crescent, left into Bellamy Lane and right into Copley Road. A fine, penetrating drizzle was falling, and her unreasonable and absurd tension rose throughout the journey.

She set to, in the characterful but primitive little whitewashed kitchen, making fish pie and feeling that she never wanted to eat again.

At last he came in, her lovely man.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’ he said.

‘How did it go?’

‘It was all right.’

She shivered. Sometimes, nowadays, it was as if a curtain had come down between them.

Every morning the Assistant Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed) caught the 7.48 from Thurmarsh (Midland Road) to Leeds City Station, crossed City
Square
, with its sculpture of the Black Prince, walked up Park Row, turned left into South Parade, and entered the sombre brick building that housed the Cucumber Marketing Board.

Every morning, he walked along the uncarpeted corridor of the ground floor, past the offices of the Head of Services (Secretarial) and the Assistant Heads of Services (Secretarial), took the shuddering lift to the first floor, where the gloomy corridor was carpeted, but not as expensively as was the second floor, walked past the offices of the Head of Gherkins and the Deputy Head of Gherkins, and entered Room 106.

If an estate agent had been selling Room 106, he would have said that it was compact, enjoyed central heating and afforded substantial opportunities for improvement. He would not have pointed out that it had a splendid view over a courtyard on which the sun never set because it never rose on it either, and offered an unrivalled opportunity for the study of the changing styles of drainpipes over the last sixty years.

Henry was the proud possessor of a heavily scratched desk with three drawers, a telephone, adequate supplies of basic stationery, an in-tray, an out-tray, a pending-tray, and precious little else.

On that first morning, about which he had told Hilary so little, Henry had been in the process of discovering that all the filing cabinets were empty, when his telephone had rung with shocking shrillness.

‘Assistant Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties (Excluding Berwick-on-Tweed),’ he had said. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Henry Pratt?’ a pleasant female voice had asked.

‘Yes,’ he had admitted cautiously.

‘I’m Roland’s wife.’

‘Roland?’

‘Roland Stagg. Regional Co-ordinator, Northern Counties.’

‘Ah!’

‘Roland has flu.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘He asked me to welcome you, and to ask you to take his messages and generally hold the fort.’

‘Right. Right, I’ll … I’ll hold the fort.’

‘Splendid.’

And so, for a week, little Henry sat in his little office, growing even paler than usual, and held the fort in almost complete isolation. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. Approximately five times a day the phone rang, and it was almost always a re-routed call for Roland Stagg. Of the twenty-five messages which Henry took down, eleven related to meeting people for drinks and only seven contained any reference to cucumbers. But he looked forward to taking these messages. They gave him something to do.

He went to the library, got out books on vegetables, and wrote down all the information he could find about cucumbers. He brought in five postcards from various friends, and pinned them to the wall beside his window. He bought photo frames and put two photographs of Hilary on the desk.

The rest of the time he sat at his desk, with pen, paper and reading glasses at the ready, so that he could pretend to be busy if anyone came in.

Only two people came in all week, but the first, the whistling post-boy, did come in four times a day, bringing no mail, peering at the empty out-tray, nodding pleasantly, and leaving the door annoyingly ajar. In the end Henry grew so ashamed of his empty out-tray that he sent letters to Cousin Hilda, Auntie Doris, Uncle Teddy, Lampo and Denzil, Howard and Nadežda, Ted and Helen, and Ginny Fenwick. The post-boy looked at him in surprise and almost said something.

The other visitor was a pleasant, matronly lady, who introduced herself as ‘Janet McTavish, Head of Services (Secretarial). I should have called on you on Monday. I didn’t realise you’d started.’

‘Well there’s not been much sign of it,’ said Henry. ‘Do sit down.’

‘Oh no thank you!’ said Janet McTavish fervently, as if horrified at the thought of such intimacy. ‘I just wanted to welcome you.’