Unfaithfully Yours (13 page)

All those years ago it may be that I struck you as rather left wing. I think I was rather left wing in those days. I was one of those comfortably off BBC producers who saw Mrs Thatcher as the enemy. I think ten years of Tony Blair cured me of all that. With his guitar and his ghastly wife and his keenness to go to war in Iraq, he finally demonstrated that socialism is simply a word people use to make them feel smug and compassionate.

More and more, these days, I see our society as simply another animal community dominated by the need to survive and moderated by the undoubtedly practical benefits associated with co-operation. I like to think of myself, these days, as someone who attempts to be compassionate in an honestly selfish way.

Gerald Price is, ultimately, not a survivor because he will always alienate those he dominates so thoroughly that there will come a point when they combine together to get rid of him. Even
Leptothorax curvispinosus
ant slave workers were observed by Hölldobler and Wilson (or maybe it was just Wilson – they did not do everything together!) to attack the mother-slavemaker-queen-of-
L. duloticus
and bite at her head and thorax. And, somehow or other, people like you and I will, in the end, expose Mr Price for what he is. A crude, self-satisfied bully who may well have murdered my wife. I might think that murdering her was not entirely a bad idea, but if anybody was going to dispose of Pamela, I would have liked it to be me.

I wonder if you would ask your private detective if he would be interested in meeting up to discuss the possibility of his investigating what happened to Pam? If you could bear it I would love you to be there at the meeting. I am not very good at asking for what I want and I suspect, somehow, that you are. There I go again!

I would like to able to tell you what happened to Barnaby but it is still just too painful. Maybe one day I will manage it. I feel that if I could talk about it to anyone, you would be that man. And, yes, I would love to go out on your boat – 12 October would be fine. I am pretty much free every day for the next ten years. Will I need to buy any special equipment? What should I wear?

All the best

Mike Larner

From:

Samuel Dimmock

Dimmock Dentistry

‘Because Teeth Matter’

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

9 October

To:

Mike Larner

24 Lawson Crescent.

Putney

Dear Mike,

Wear a mini skirt and a tank top!

Only joking. Jeans and a warm sweater would be perfect. I thought the one you were wearing the other night was very attractive. It brought out your figure very well indeed. You are quite a well set-up lad, aren’t you really? Although you are always putting yourself down I think you are an extremely good-looking fellow.

Let’s meet up for a drink to finalize arrangements next week and – well – yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, me old shipmate!

Your friend,

Sam

PS I will fix up for us to meet Mr Gibbons in the next week or so. It sounds as if what happened with Pamela may well have been murder. If it turns out to be that, and if Gerry Price was involved in any way whatsoever, we have to do something about it.

PPS I had amazing fun in the Sea Scouts and look forward to telling you all about it when we meet up. But you will have to pay attention. I can dish out stiff punishment when at sea and everyone says I become a completely different person!

From:

Barbara Goldsmith

101 Fellen Road

Putney

25 October

To: John Goldsmith, Mike Larner, Sam Dimmock, Mary Dimmock, Gerald Price, Elizabeth Price

Dear Former Villa Inmates – John, Mike, Sam, Gerald, Elizabeth and Mary,

Think of this as one of those round-robin letters of the kind that used to be sent out by more than usually complacent suburban families so that everyone knew how well they were doing and what tremendous things they had all achieved over the last year. I even got one once addressed to the idiot who lived in our house before we got there. I opened it, of course, and spent days cackling over the writer’s attempt to sound positive about the fact that little Thomas had failed his A levels.

Maybe some idiots are still sending such things out although I am told no one apart from the Gas Board writes letters, these days. Apparently at least sixty million of them are posted in the UK every year so someone out there must still be trying to do a Madame de Sévigné; but if they are, they are certainly not practising on me. The only letter I have received in the last few months was from the man next door, asking me to turn down Bach in the early evening.

What is that awful word? Retro – that’s it. This is a communication as retro as Black Forest Gâteau.

I have written it out on the word processor. You are all getting the same letter, as I do not really have anything different to say to each of you. I began to think, as last night’s performance ground on through the October night, that you are all, really, the same person. And if, as Caligula dreamed of doing with the Roman people, I could behead the lot of you with one swift stroke of a sharpened axe, I would do just that.

There is nothing like a bad evening in the theatre for concentrating the bitterness of one’s thoughts. Don’t you find?

Except, of course, I am talking about the last twenty or thirty years. The subject of this communication is the Goldsmiths and what has happened to them since the early 1980s. So, do not expect too much optimism. I am enclosing no photographs and am not about to tell you all about how wonderful Jas and Josh’s weddings were, or how much I’m enjoying the grandchildren. Because I am not. They are about as much fun as the two sets of parents-in-law my two oafish boys have acquired. Sidney and Betty – a truly ghastly duo from Birmingham who pronounce ‘broccoli’ brockle-aye – are only mildly worse than Billy and Pat from Taunton, who do not seem to know any three-syllable words, even if those words belong to things you can eat. Although food is about their only topic of conversation. Very like the rest of Britain, these days. Has anyone seen those ghastly cooking programmes on television where idiots get marked out of ten for what they have done to Boeuf Bourguignon?

But, in case you all think I am going to confine myself to what has happened to John and Barbara and Jas and Josh – not to mention daughters in-law Melanie and April (yes, April) or grandchildren February, October, July and June – I shall try to give you all a progress report on how I think my other villa companions of yesteryear are doing, based on my, admittedly brief, sighting of you all at the sensationally lacklustre production of
Hamlet
mounted by the Putney Thespians at St Jude’s Church Hall last night.

My God, I thought the Goldsmiths had problems!

I know that during the six or seven years when we were all seeing each other – before the children went their separate ways – I was generally reckoned to be the Group Bitch. It is a title of which I am mildly proud. At least I wasn’t the Group Wet or the Group Fatty or the Group Oaf. Or, God help us, the Group Dentist or the Group Doctor. The rest of you know who you are. Do not try to deny it. These titles do not really do justice to the full banality of your various characters. Any more than the Group Bitch, who is giving you documentary evidence to support your conclusion by writing this letter, really does justice to
moi
. As Miss Piggy used to call herself.

At least I never bothered to pretend. I may be a bitch but at least I am an honest bitch. The pitiful displays you put on for each other! The drinks from six to eight, the foursomes at tennis from eleven to one on Saturday morning, the God-awful dinner parties from eight thirty to eleven forty-five on Saturday nights! The girly lunches and the boysy drinks and those frightful cycle rides out to Box Hill where the women would drive along behind, like camp followers behind a medieval army. The phoney playground bonhomie that masked the endless competitiveness over the children and, later, presumably, things like reading groups or grandchild chitchat. I missed those, thank Christ. Maybe John didn’t but communication between us is at such low ebb I really wouldn’t know if he had been having an affair with, say, Elizabeth Price – hi, Elizabeth! – since he always used to try to sit next to her at dinner, about the only overt sign Dr Goldsmith ever gives of sexual interest in anyone or anything.

Who was the obvious pervert playing Horatio? And why was he wearing jodhpurs for most of the proceedings? And why, at the ghastly drinks afterwards, did he keep giving furtive glances in the direction of Mrs Price, who resolutely ignored him? Are
they
having an affair? Someone told me he was a private detective – can this be true? If he is a private detective, wouldn’t he make more effort not to look like one? Did Laertes fall over deliberately every time he entered? Had there, at some stage, been a plan to have Fortinbras sing – and is that why he was carrying a guitar? What was the strategy behind Gerald Price’s accent? Given that he went ahead with it, could not some form of primitive subtitling have been devised to assist the audience’s comprehension?

There we all were, though – were we not?

But I suppose it was accident that brought us all together. If it weren’t for that loathsome Church of England school we would never have had the misfortune to meet each other in the first place. We all stood round in a circle and watched Head Oaf Jasper and Assistant Oaf Joshua run and jump and play with Mad Conrad, Dim Julia, Mediocre Molly – or was it Milly? – Larner, Assistant Oaf to Assistant Oaf Leo and the distinctly sinister Barnaby. Whatever did happen to him by the way? Tragically Vague Elaine is, presumably, in a mental hospital by now.

Back then I suppose we thought they had a chance of growing up into mildly interesting people. As we listened to little Barnaby lisp his way through the part of the donkey that carried Baby Jesus all the way home, some of us almost certainly thought, ‘Oooh! He’ll be an Actor!’ Although I suspect a far more complicated future lay in wait for little Barnaby. I do recall Sam Dimmock telling me, in all seriousness, that he thought Conrad was ‘a naturally witty child who will do great things in science’. Conrad???? I never open a newspaper without expecting to find reports of his trial and conviction for some hideous sequence of crimes.

But, you see, we are, and were, a pretty mediocre bunch. None of us was ever likely to stumble over the contemporary equivalent of Maxwell’s field equations. Some of us were almost criminally ordinary. I was amazed to see you at the play, Sam Dimmock. Do you know who Shakespeare is? I more or less assumed someone would have murdered you by now, or at very least put you into an irretrievable coma. No one can talk for so long and in such detail about teeth without being punished for it in some way. But there you were at the back, sniggering with little Mike Larner, as if you two had been best buddies for years.

Well – I will give you all your marks out of ten later in this round robin – but I should probably start by keeping you up to date with the Goldsmith family, since, as you all probably noticed, last night I was reticent on the subject, i.e. I didn’t really talk to any of you, even at those ghastly drinks afterwards. John, what on earth were you talking about with Mary Dimmock?

Here goes, on the subject of my children anyway. I am sure you do all want to hear about darling Jas and darling Josh, don’t you? So that then you can jump in with your ten minutes’ worth about Cute Conrad or Beezer Barnaby.

We managed, somehow, to get them both into public school. I think their size helped. The headmaster at Sir Roger de Folnay had clearly never seen a nine year old who, even if he could only just read, was clearly capable of throwing him across the room. They got on rather well there. That being said, neither of them has really gained anything in language proficiency, calculating skills, manners or cultural awareness since they were six. But – yes – they have got bigger.

‘Jasper got into Oxford!’ is the sentence you often find in about the third paragraph of the softer version of this kind of letter and I can, with pleasure, tell you all that Jasper did just that, but he got booted out of it pretty damn quickly. Partly because he is incredibly stupid, as are many people who go to Oxford, but also because, like his father, he is incurably idle. He is very good, like John, at kicking, catching and hitting balls of all shapes and sizes, which was how he got into Oxford in the first place, but his only real interest since the age of sixteen has been in sinking pint after pint of beer and, to use his own expressive phrase, ‘cocking the old leg and blowing one off’.

I am surprised that more parents do not own up to disliking their children but at least, in my case, I can argue that I am only following the general drift. The
on dit
about Jas has always been that he is the Lout Basic and I see no reason to disagree with that judgement. Early on – as I am sure you will not be surprised to learn – he showed pretty clearly that he had no aptitude whatsoever for medicine and so, of course, he decided to go into it. His father, as any of you who had the misfortune to be one of his patients will know, had – and has – no talent for it either. And that has not stopped him. But when it came to Jas, not even a public-school education and a father in the profession could save him. These days, they do actually ask awkward questions about things like the precise location of the pancreas, and if you can’t answer them you are shown the door.

And Joshua? He was always supposed to be the sensitive one. I suppose, next to his brother, he was. Next to Jas, Attila the Hun would look sensitive. He also, according to his father and one or two of his teachers, ‘showed some talent for English’, which was probably why he ended up at Exeter reading French. He had no talent for English. He could hardly speak it. He can’t really manage it now. His spoken output never amounts to more than a few dozen repetitions of the word ‘whatever’.