The Complete Pratt (137 page)

‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘All happy together. A typical English family. Ugh!’ His face twisted into fury. ‘Don’t you realise that he hates us, Camilla? Mum can’t see it because she’s so besotted. Surely you can?’

‘I don’t hate you,’ said Henry in a voice which he hoped was cool, but which he knew had a crack in it, ‘but I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to Kate.’

Benedict put his cases down and moved towards Henry threateningly.

‘Benedict!’ cried Diana.

‘That’s right. Hit me. That’ll solve everything,’ said Henry.

Benedict stopped about three inches in front of Henry, and looked down at him. Henry had never wished for those few extra inches more.

‘I’m not going to hit you,’ said Benedict, suddenly loftily cool again. ‘I don’t hit wankers.’

‘Oh good,’ said Henry. ‘At least we know you won’t be punching yourself in the face, then.’

‘Very witty,’ said Benedict. ‘Why don’t you go and do another comic turn at Dalton? They’re just about your level.’

He picked up his cases and moved towards the door.

‘I’ll be back for the rest of my stuff,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?’ said Diana.

Benedict hesitated, looked as if he wanted to, then said, ‘Not just now, Mummy. When you’ve left Henry, big kiss then.’

He opened the door with dignity, tried to walk through it with dignity, got his feet caught round his hold-all, stumbled out onto the path, and slammed the door furiously behind him. The china tinkled in the display cabinet in the hall, and then there was silence.

About twenty stunned unhappy minutes later Diana said, ‘I hate to say this about my own son, but do you think we’re wise to trust him? Should we check with Nigel that he really is going there?’

‘Oh my God, of course we should,’ said Henry. ‘We’re panicking. We’re not thinking.’

Diana rang her ex-husband’s number. Henry sat on the settee, holding her hand and listening. Camilla watched them earnestly from an armchair, and Henry noticed how her new maturity had changed her face. She was almost beautiful, and might become so.

‘The Pilkington-Brick residence,’ trilled Felicity, and Diana made a face.

‘Hello, Felicity,’ she said. ‘Is Nigel by any chance in residence in his residence?’

‘I’ll fetch him,’ said Felicity coldly.

Camilla gave her mother a brief, fond grin.

‘Hello.’

‘Nigel, it’s Diana. Are you expecting Benedict?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Oh my God.’

‘What’s happened, Diana?’

‘He’s been here to collect his things. He says he’s coming to live with you.’

‘Oh. Well it’s all very well for him to say that, but I’m not sure he can. He hasn’t discussed it with us. I mean, truth to tell, he resents Felicity.’

‘He resents everybody, including himself, but don’t worry your
tiny
little mind about that, he isn’t actually coming, your lifestyles are safe, if he was he’d have told you. He’s lied to us and he’s obviously going off somewhere.’

‘Oh God. What’s he up to now?’

‘May I?’ said Henry, pointing at the phone.

‘Hang on, Nigel, Henry wants a word,’ said Diana.

She handed the phone to Henry.

‘Hello, Nigel,’ said Henry. It was too serious a moment to call him Tosser.

‘Hello, Henry. This is all a bloody bore, isn’t it?’

‘Listen, Nigel. Benedict left here about half an hour ago. Our only chance is to try the trains. I’m going to the station now. If I don’t catch him and a train’s gone that he might have caught, will you go to St Pancras and meet it?’

‘St Pancras. That’s miles away.’

‘I know it’s miles away but he’s your son for God’s sake.’

‘Yours is his home and you’ve made a mess of dealing with him, that’s the truth, isn’t it?’

‘There isn’t time to argue, for God’s sake. We must rush. Will you?’

‘It’s not as easy as that, Henry. I’m guest of honour at a dinner tonight. I’m Top Pensions Salesman of the Year.’

‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing. He’s your son!’

‘I’m not thinking of myself.’

‘Huh!’

‘Well, not only myself. There’s Felicity. There’s all the guests. The chap presenting the trophy’s coming all the way from our Cardiff office.’

‘You were my hero once. I’m off to the station. Here’s Diana.’

Henry handed the phone to Diana and hurried out of the house.

He drove to Thurmarsh (Midland Road) Station like a maniac.

The London train had gone five minutes ago. He tried the bus station without luck, and then drove along Commercial Road towards Splutt, which was Benedict’s most likely route if he was hitchhiking. There was no sign of him.

When he got home he phoned Tosser again.

‘He might have got the 4.12,’ he said. ‘It gets to St Pancras at 7.57.’

‘Look,’ said Tosser. ‘I see no reason why I should go, he’s seventeen, he knows what he’s doing, I’m not sure if it would do any good if I did go, though I hasten to add that I would go any other night despite that, but this whole event is about me and not to be there would be an enormous insult to a lot of good people, who’ve paid a lot of money.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Felicity is not a very strong or stable woman emotionally. Having Benedict here is not an option. I know it sounds brutal, but I have to think of Felicity’s health. She’s my ultimate responsibility.’

‘Goodbye, Tosser,’ said Henry.

‘I want to change my name to Pratt,’ said Camilla Pilkington-Brick.

There was still some hope for Henry and the world as 1974 drew towards its close. Life in 83, Lordship Road proceeded smoothly and the mattresses had finally been removed from the front of the Gleneagles. In Portugal, a bloodless military coup had overthrown President Tomas and Prime Minister Caetano, had seen the Socialist leader Mario Soares return from exile, and the end of censorship and the disbandment of the secret police. In Greece the long night of the colonels was over. Democracy returned joyously in a fizz of fireworks and a cacophony of car horns. ‘What a fragile and precious gift democracy is, and how carelessly and apathetically we guard ours,’ Henry told John Barrington in the pub one lunchtime, and John Barrington made his point perfectly without knowing it, saying, ‘True. Better get those sandwiches ordered if we want a decent choice.’

There were clouds of course. The IRA bombed two pubs in Birmingham, killing nineteen people. And Benedict didn’t return to collect the rest of his things. He didn’t return to Dalton College either. The school heard nothing. Henry and Diana heard nothing. Tosser heard nothing. Camilla heard nothing and was very hurt. The police heard nothing and had more serious concerns on their hands.

Henry’s contempt for Tosser was modified, during those winter months, by his knowledge of the way in which he himself salved his conscience with the thought that Benedict’s absence was a good thing for every other member of the family.

Kate recovered from her experience slowly but steadily. The news that she had got nine O levels had boosted her ego at a vital time. She met a nice lad called Brian, who worshipped her, and she kept him at arm’s length without being cruel. She would survive.

Jack was doing very well at football, was unlikely to do well in his exams, was known to frequent the Golden Ball in Gasworks Road, although he was more than two years under age, relished being the only boy in the house, and remained good-natured and cheery.

Camilla wanted to leave boarding school and join Kate at Thurmarsh Grammar School for Girls. Tosser resented this. ‘I want her to have the best. I’m happy to pay. I did everything for Benedict.’ In the end it was decided, democratically, in line with events in Western Europe, that she should stay at Benningdean until the end of the school year and then go to Thurmarsh Grammar if a) she was accepted and b) she still wanted to. She was becoming much more interested in boys and correspondingly less interested in horses.

Henry dreaded the end of winter. The conviction that he’d been lied to about his suspect cucumbers seeped out of the storage cavern of his subconscious. He knew that he’d find it difficult to live with himself if he ignored the issue, but he was nervous of the problems he might face if he didn’t. Is this the fighter who learnt to laugh at himself and performed a comic act to the whole school at the age of fifteen? you ask most reasonably. Do not forget, gentle reader, that since that day Henry had experienced a failed career in newspapers, a rocky career in cucumbers, a failed marriage and a failed step-fatherhood. His confidence was low. Fighting wasn’t so easy now.

On March 13th, 1975, actress Viviane Ventura won her court battle to prove that millionaire financier John Bentley was the father of her love child, Schehezerazade. Mr Bentley, seemingly ignorant of British politics, said, ‘I was considering joining the Conservative party before this came up – now perhaps I ought to
join
the anarchists.’ Seven-foot-tall US actor Rik Van Nutter opened a warehouse to sell off the spoils of his broken marriage with Anita Ekberg. Henry Ezra Pratt celebrated his fortieth birthday in modest fashion with a meal at the Taj Mahal restaurant with Diana, Kate, Jack and the Blair family.

Did life begin at forty for our hero? No. It merely continued.

Early in May he went up to County Durham again, and asked Mr Wilberforce, happily recovered from his kidney problems, if he could take a ridge cucumber and a hot house cucumber for analysis, ‘Just to monitor the situation.’ Mr Wilberforce, anxious to avoid further black stem rot, raised no objections.

That evening, Henry met Martin Hammond in the Pigeon and Two Cushions. There were still bells round the walls of the gleaming little black bar, but Oscar had long gone. During his forty years Henry had seen eras end as quickly as the promises of Prime Ministers. Golden ages had died like hares at harvest time. Halcyon days had disappeared like dissidents in Argentina. Now another golden age had gone. Another era had ended. The halcyon days of waiters in northern pubs had gone for ever. And, to add insult to injury, there was a fruit machine.

‘Awful news about Tommy Marsden,’ said Henry.

‘Dreadful. If I’d said to you, twenty years ago, when he had the world at his feet, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up driving his car into a gravel pit outside Newark while blind drunk,” you’d have thought I was mad.’

‘I went to the funeral. It was a bleak little affair really.’

‘I’d have liked to. It clashed with an absolutely vital Highways and By-ways Committee.’

‘No idea what happened to Ian Lowson and Billy Erpingham, I suppose?’

‘Ian Lowson emigrated to Australia. I’ve not heard a word about Billy Erpingham.’

‘That’s it then. The Paradise Lane Gang. It’s just thee and me now.’

They recalled the good, bad, indifferent old days in silence for a few moments. Then Henry broached the matter in hand.

‘Martin? Do you, with your industrial contacts and your political contacts, know of a laboratory where I could have something very important analysed in secret?’

‘I might,’ said Martin Hammond cautiously. ‘What is it?’

‘Two cucumbers.’

‘What??’

They waited while a fruit machine repairer and his fiancée walked past to the far corner. The fruit machine repairer gave the fruit machine a nervous glance, as if fearing that it might go wrong and spoil his evening out.

Henry lowered his voice to a whisper.

‘They were grown near a nuclear power station. I want them tested for radiation. You could be helping to uncover a web of corruption and deception in which the great British public are cast in the role of suckers yet again. You could help rock a major industry and embarrass its leaders.’

‘You’re speaking my language,’ said Martin Hammond. ‘Can it be that your political consciousness is waking up at last?’

Henry scoffed, but Martin was right.

On Monday, May 26th, 1975, head teachers demanded protection from angry parents, Evel Knievel retired after crashing while riding his motor bike over thirteen London buses, and Henry discovered that the cucumber grown outdoors in County Durham contained more than five times the amount of radiation permitted by Government regulations.

That night, after Kate and Jack had gone exhausted to bed, Henry and Diana talked long and hard in the old-fashioned kitchen of number 83, with its battered free-standing dresser picked up cheap at auction.

‘I think I’ll have to resign,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t think I’ve any option.’

‘Well, there’s no more to be said then, is there?’

‘You don’t sound pleased.’

‘I’m not, but does it matter? Your mind’s made up.’

‘Diana! I didn’t say that. Obviously I want to talk it over with you, or we wouldn’t be sitting here.’

The kettle was boiling. Henry expected that Diana would go to it, but she showed no sign.

‘What do you think I should do?’ he asked.

‘I think you should make a real, hard, long, thorough effort to find another job, and then resign.’

The kitchen, damp enough at the best of times, was filling with steam. Henry hurried to the kettle.