The Complete Pratt (51 page)

‘An amazing run? How amazing!’ said Barry Frost. Norman Pettifer searched his face for signs of sarcasm. Barry Frost, Cousin Hilda’s most recent ‘businessman’, was a junior tax inspector from Walsall, with smelly feet and a talent for amateur operatics. He was a big-boned man with large features that were not quite rugged. Henry had once met his fiancée, a strikingly attractive PE instructor from Dudley, with smelly feet and a talent for amateur operatics. Henry hoped that they and their feet would hum together through a happy life, but he did wish Barry Frost wouldn’t sing the leading role from
The Desert Song
under his breath throughout tea, occasionally referring to the script at the side of his plate. Norman Pettifer spoke of the time he had seen the Lunts in the West End. Barry Frost searched his face for evidence of sarcasm.

It was warm and airless in Cousin Hilda’s basement room. A fire glowed merrily in the little blue-tiled stove, but there was nothing merry about Cousin Hilda. She was thin-lipped, thick-scowled. She gave Henry an extra large portion of spotted dick, so he knew that she was still displeased with him. Once he met her eyes, and
what
he saw there was pain, and it shrivelled him up inside. He knew, as he forced down his concrete pudding, that he loved Cousin Hilda very much, but that he couldn’t bear to live here much longer. He turned to page 8 of the
Argus
. ‘When Thomas Hendrick …’

‘Where are our manners, Henry? We don’t read at table,’ said Cousin Hilda.

‘Barry does,’ said Henry.

‘Barry is paying,’ hissed Cousin Hilda.

Barry Frost banged his copy of
The Desert Song
shut, and gave Henry a look that might have abashed a sizeable tribe of Rifs.

‘I offered to pay, Cousin Hilda,’ said Henry.

‘We don’t talk about money at table,’ said Cousin Hilda. They didn’t talk about money, sex, food, drink, pleasure, religion or politics at table. ‘Besides,’ she continued. ‘Mr Frost has his “lines” to learn.’ She sniffed as she said ‘lines’. Barry Frost had replaced Tony Preece, an insurance salesman who at night became a struggling comic called Talwyn Jones, the Celtic Droll. ‘What do people think my establishment is – a theatrical “digs”?’ said Cousin Hilda’s eloquent sniff.

Soon the three ‘businessmen’ were gone, and Henry faced his disappointed surrogate mother, across the corner table, among the debris of spotted dick, in the stifling basement room, with its smell of the water in which the greens had been overcooked, which Cousin Hilda, who hated waste, saved for her six sad, overwatered rose bushes.

Henry was determined to say, ‘I’m going to find a flat.’ He also felt that he should say, ‘I’m very sorry about last night.’ Why couldn’t he bring himself to say either of these things? Why did he say, instead, ‘Did you see my scoop about the cat?’

Cousin Hilda ignored this. Her mouth was working painfully as she prepared her words. ‘About last night,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t want any repetition.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled gracelessly.

‘All right,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘You were led astray. Journalists! If your poor parents were alive today to see you become a journalist, they’d turn in their graves. They’d blame me.’

‘No!’

‘It’s a responsibility.’

‘I don’t want to be a responsibility,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not ready for the responsibility of being a responsibility.’

‘Mrs Wedderburn thinks you’ve turned out so well,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Only yesterday I met her in the Co-op. I won’t use Cullen’s. I don’t like Mr Pettifer’s cheese counter, it’s no use pretending I do, I was never one for pretence, not like some I could mention.’ She sniffed twice, once for Auntie Doris and once for Uncle Teddy, with whom Henry had lived before Cousin Hilda. ‘So to save Mr Pettifer’s embarrassment it’s best I go to the Co-op, even if it is further from the tram. “Ee, Hilda,” she said. “Hasn’t your Henry turned out well?”’

‘She makes me sound like a cake,’ said Henry.

‘Now then, Henry,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘There’s no call to be rude about Mrs Wedderburn, who lent you her camp-bed in time of need.’

‘I really don’t see why I shouldn’t pay,’ said Henry, who didn’t want the burden of Mrs Wedderburn’s good opinion. ‘I’d rather not be indebted.’

‘Indebted,’ snorted Cousin Hilda. ‘“Indebted,” he says. If I charged you it’d put you on a footing with poor Mr O’Reilly. It’d put you on a footing with poor Mr Pettifer.’ Her voice developed an acid coating of disapproval. ‘It’d put you on a footing with Mr Frost. You are not my lodger. You are my son.’

Henry blushed and Cousin Hilda looked embarrassed too.

‘Well you are … now … you are.’

He was pleased, of course. He was moved, of course. He was also appalled. How could he say he was looking for a flat, now?

He had to tell her about the weekend.

‘Er … by the way …’ he said. ‘I’m … er… going away for the weekend.’

‘Away? You’ll only have been at work a week.’

‘I have alternate Saturdays off.’

‘Where to, “away”?’

‘London.’

‘London?’ Cousin Hilda couldn’t have sounded more surprised if Henry had said ‘Outer Mongolia’. ‘London? What do you want to go to London for?’

‘I’m going to spend the weekend with Paul Hargreaves.’

‘Oh.’ Cousin Hilda was rather ambivalent about Paul, the brain surgeon’s son, the friend from public school days who had visited Thurmarsh briefly in the summer of 1953. She had disturbingly contradictory feelings about private education, since she believed strongly in standards but despised people who put on airs. ‘Well, I’ve met worse boys, even if he didn’t think we were good enough for him.’

‘That isn’t true,’ said Henry, knowing that it was. ‘One of the boys I used to fag for, at Dalton, is making his début for England at rugby.’ For a moment, Henry wished he really was going to watch Tosser Pilkington-Brick versus Wales, rather than lie naked with Lorna Arrow in the Midland Hotel. But only for a moment.

‘Rugby!’ said Cousin Hilda, as if it were the apogee of human absurdity. ‘I don’t know!’

‘I feel the same,’ said Henry. ‘If God had meant us to play rugby, he’d have given us oval balls.’ It was out before he could stop it. To his relief, Cousin Hilda didn’t seem to understand it. ‘I have to go out now,’ he said.

‘Out?’ Cousin Hilda sounded astonished at his geographical profligacy.

‘Yes. I have to develop my contacts.’

‘Contacts?’

‘That’s what we journalists call the people in places of influence who can put stories our way,’ explained Henry airily, with all the experience of twenty-four hours.

‘And what people in places of influence are you seeing tonight?’

‘Tommy Marsden.’

‘Tommy Marsden!’

‘Ace goal poacher of the Third Division North.’

‘Aye. Well … don’t be “late”.’ For ‘late’, read ‘drunk’. Her mouth was working again, with the tension.

‘I won’t,’ he said, and gave her a quick kiss, which astounded them both. ‘
Did
you see my scoop about the cat?’

‘Cats!’ said Cousin Hilda scornfully. ‘Scoops!’

They sat in an alcove in the bar of the Conservative Club, of which Tommy was an honorary member. Above them was a
portrait
of Sir Winston Churchill. The carpet was blue. They could hear the occasional clunk of snooker balls from the back room.

They talked about the Paradise Lane Gang. ‘Those were the days,’ said Henry. He didn’t remind Tommy that it had all broken up in fighting and bitterness when Henry and Martin had gone to the grammar school. He wanted Tommy in a good mood.

‘Aye,’ said Tommy. ‘Does tha see Martin at all?’

‘We have a jar every now and then. We sup some lotion,’ said Henry. ‘It isn’t the same. I think becoming a sergeant’s made him take himself very seriously.’

‘It’s age,’ said Tommy Marsden. ‘I’m twenty-one.’

‘I’m twenty. It’s frightening. Are you married or engaged or owt?’ His dialect was returning, in Tommy’s company.

‘Chuff me, no,’ said Tommy. ‘Mr Mackintosh says many a promising career’s been nipped in t’bud because a player’s shagging himself to death. Same again?’

No, thanks. I must remain sober for Cousin Hilda. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Same difference wi’ supping,’ said Tommy, as the waiter brought them two pints, and Tommy discovered that he had no money, and Henry paid. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later.’

Henry judged that the time was ripe. ‘Tommy?’ he said. ‘Will you be my contact from the world of sport?’

‘Tha what?’

‘Will you put stories my way?’

‘Stories? What stories?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever happens. Transfers. Disciplinary suspensions. Dressing-room arguments. Whatever happens. Stories.’

‘What? And be known as Tommy “The Leak” Marsden?’

‘No. No one’ll know where they come from. Us journalists never reveal our sources.’

‘Will I get paid?’

‘I can’t. I’m only on seven pounds ten a week.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Tommy Marsden.

‘Hey!’ said Henry, judging it unwise to press the matter at this juncture. ‘I’ve only been on the paper two days, and I’ve had my first scoop.’

He showed Tommy page 8. Tommy grabbed it, and began to read aloud, to Henry’s embarrassment, especially as he read very loudly, and very slowly, as if he had only a passing acquaintanceship with words.

‘“When Thomas Hendrick, aged 37, self-employed plumber, took a stray cat to Darnley Road police station yesterday,”’ read Tommy Marsden, to the surprise of the assembled Conservatives and social-climbing Liberals and socialists, ‘“little did he suspect that it belonged to his sister.

‘“The amazing 5,000 yard journey of Tiddles, aged 5, from the Bagcliffe Road home of his owner, Mrs Doris Treadwell, to the Hendricks’ abode in Dursley Rise has puzzled both parties.

‘“‘I can’t think how he came to find my brother,’ Doris, aged 36, told our reporter. ‘I’ve only had him ten days and Tom hasn’t even seen him as he’s been off with his chest. Tiddles can’t even have met Tom,’ she added,”’ read Tommy.

‘“And Thomas Hendrick? ‘I didn’t even know our Doris had a cat,’ he said, ‘but it certainly must be an animal with a family sense!’

‘“A police spokesman commented, ‘This is a most unusual case, unique in my experience.’

‘“Joked Mr Hendrick: ‘I hope Tiddles doesn’t try to visit our brother. He lives in Canada!’”’

Henry smiled modestly at the stunned listeners in the bar of the Conservative Club.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Tommy Marsden. ‘Call that a scoop?’

‘It
is
a scoop,’ said Henry indignantly. ‘A scoop is a story that no other paper has printed. No other paper has printed that story.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Tommy Marsden.

Next morning, in the bustling newsroom, nobody praised Henry’s story, but this wasn’t surprising, in that hard world, where men were men and Helen Cornish wasn’t and had deeply disturbing bulges in her pale sage-green sweater to prove it. Terry Skipton asked Henry to do a ‘Voice of Thurmarsh’ that afternoon, and Henry’s heart sank.

No scoops attended his rounds of the hospitals and police
stations
. The weather was milder, and he felt clammy with sweat. His self-assurance, that occasional visitor who never took his coat off, had hurried away, and he couldn’t face them all, in the canteen or the Lord Nelson, witnessing how absurdly nervous he was about his ‘Voice of Thurmarsh’. So he lunched alone in the Rundle Café, in Rundle Prospect, next to the Polish barber. It was drizzling, and the cramped little café smelt of damp clothes. The
Light Programme
blared out constantly, and Henry ate his meat pie, chips and beans to the strains of the Eric Delaney Band. His rice pudding with jam was accompanied by
Listen with Mother
. Bank clerks and gas board salesmen pretended not to be listening to the tale of Tommy the Tortoise. Henry wished he were Henry the Hedgehog, and could curl up in a ball that afternoon, after making love, very carefully, to Helen the Hedgehog. In two days and five hours he would be making love, not carefully but with great abandon, doing the only thing in the world he was good at, with Lorna Arrow, his childhood sweetheart. Stop thinking about it, Henry. You’ll go blind.

He felt absurdly selfconscious, standing ankle-deep in slush outside W. H. Smith’s, his hair lank with sweat and the faint, raw drizzle. He hoped none of his colleagues would pass by. He wished Alec Walsh, the hard-bitten, overweight photographer, wasn’t standing there, trying not to look too obviously scornful.

He approached an extremely burly man, whose extreme burliness he hadn’t noticed until he’d approached him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m from the
Argus
.’

‘Oh aye?’ said the extremely burly man.

‘Yes, and … er …’ Why did he think that there were ghosts from his past, watching him from the surrounding windows? Uncle Teddy, Auntie Doris, the slimy Geoffrey Porringer, Diana Hargreaves, Tosser Pilkington-Brick and his effete, ascetic, aesthetic, homosexual friend Lampo Davey? The scornfully superior Belinda Boyce-Uppingham from the big house at Rowth Bridge? All peering at him from the windows of Cockayne’s and Timothy Whites and the Thurmarsh and Rawlaston Cooperative Society? ‘We … er … we do a weekly feature which we call “Voice of Thurmarsh”.’