Going Gently

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Nobbs

  Title Page

  1. Nigel

  2. Gwyn

  3. Timothy

  4. Arturo

  5. Maurice

  6. Walter

  7. Elizabeth

  8. Heinz

  9. Doctor Ramgobi

  10. Dilys

  11. Lily

  12. Daniel

  13. Hilda

  14. Graham

  15. Barry

  16. Michael

  17. Glenda

  18. Enid

  19. Delilah

  20. Norman

  21. Angela

  22. Charlie

  23. Victoria

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Kate Thomas was beautiful, intelligent, witty, passionate and sexy. Now, at 99, she is paralysed by a stroke, and unable to speak. She escapes from the reality of a hospital ward full of sad, mad and bad old women by playing to herself the video of her life. What a life it has been. Her six marriages have ended in suicide, a husband’s adultery, another husband’s deportation as a dangerous alien, a union dispute, a murder, and a natural death. And then there was Gwyn. She slipped out of her sleeping family home at the age of sixteen on a Welsh Sunday for a night of passion with Gwyn. His love haunted her for the next eighty-three years. But Kate’s journey through the twentieth century is more than an escape. It is a search for the truth – about life, death, the acceptance of death, and which of her three sons murdered her fifth husbandThis is a novel rich in memorable characters, from Kate’s narrow but loving Welsh family to the wild members of an artists’ colony in Cornwall; from Midland piston manufacturers to an investigative journalist whose own life cannot bear investigation; from BBC executives to a ward run by two nurses with eating disorders and the amazing Doctor Ramgobi. This is David Nobbs’s most ambitious book, and his best.

  About the Author

  This is David Nobbs’s thirteenth novel. His previous books include the Henry Pratt novels and the Reginald Perrin novels.

  His autobiography I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today was published to great acclaim in 2003. He has also written many series for television, notably The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, A Bits of a Do, and Love on a Branch Line. He lives in North Yorkshire.

  Also by David Nobbs

  The Itinerant Lodger

  A Piece of the Sky is Missing

  Ostrich Country

  The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

  The Return of Reginald Perrin

  The Better World of Reginald Perrin

  Second From Last in the Sack Race

  A Bit of a Do

  Pratt of the Argus

  Fair Do’s

  The Cucumber Man

  The Legacy of Reginald Perrin

  The Complete Pratt

  The Reginald Perrin Omnibus

  I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today

  Going Gently

  David Nobbs

  1 Nigel

  ‘SHE WAS A very intelligent woman, in her day,’ said Nigel to the fat nurse with the eating disorder.

  How infuriating it was at that moment to have lost the power of speech. Kate longed to say ‘What do you mean – “in her day”? I still am.’

  ‘She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation,’ continued Nigel.

  Well, no, she couldn’t object to the use of the past tense in that context. She’d kept her looks well into her seventies. At the time of her sudden, unexpected rise to fame she had been dubbed ‘Britain’s most Glamorous Gran’ by the Daily Mail and ‘The Sexy Septuagenarian’ by the South Wales Echo. But then her beauty, like her fame, had faded.

  ‘Sexy too.’ Surely Nigel couldn’t have read her thoughts? It was decidedly not one of his talents. ‘Very sexy.’

  She wanted to smile. She wanted to acknowledge the surprising pride in her son’s voice. She wanted to exult in the memory of how sexy she had been. But she didn’t. She had no idea how badly the stroke had affected her facial muscles. Her smile might be a travesty.

  ‘She can’t understand what I’m saying, can she?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said the fat nurse. ‘The hearing is often the last sense to go.’

  The last sense to go! They think I’m on the way out, thought Kate.

  ‘I’d hate to hurt the old trout,’ continued Nigel.

  The old trout!

  ‘Well, you’d best not call her an old trout, then, had yer?’ said the fat nurse, very reasonably, Kate thought. She felt, very faintly, as if from a long distance away, the grip of the nurse’s plump hand, sticky like a doughnut, and she tried not to flinch. ‘We aren’t an old trout, are we?’

  We aren’t plural either, you silly cow, thought Kate uncharitably.

  ‘She’s been one hell of a mother,’ said Nigel. ‘She’s been one hell of an act to follow.’

  Kate sensed the departure of the fat nurse. She heard the scraping of a metal chair on a hard floor, and she realised that her eldest child had settled down to sit beside her. Child! He was seventy-four. She pictured him as she had last seen him. His great round face was looking too big as his body shrank. There was a large bald patch in the middle of his snow-white hair. He needed a hip replacement. And he was twenty-five years younger than her!

  She longed to sleep. She wished he’d go. It had been such a shock to wake up and find that she couldn’t move her legs or arms. She’d felt as if some maniac had encased her in plaster of Paris. She’d tried to cry out, but no sound had come. She’d broken out in a hot sweat which had cooled and dried disgustingly on her shrivelled old body. She had discovered, to her great relief, that she could open her eyes, and had found herself staring at a cracked and peeling ceiling, dimly lit by a barley-sugar night-light. There had been a smell of disinfectant and stale cabbage.

  How had she got there, wherever she was? Her last memory had been of sounding off in the Golden Glade Retirement Home, getting worked up as usual about the state of the world. She could see them now, a circle of pale frightened old women leaning on their zimmer frames and gawping at her with their mouths open like a nest of young thrushes waiting to be fed, Dorothy Pearson because her mouth was always open, the rest because they had been astonished and terrified by her fervour. Then blankness, blackness, confusion. What had happened?

  A reassuring voice, disembodied, cultured, slightly stilted, had provided the answer, an answer that had not been at all reassuring. ‘You’ve had a massive cerebro-vascular accident,’ it had said. ‘What you would call a stroke. You’re in hospital. You’re in good hands. There is nothing to fear.’

  There is nothing to fear? Only boredom, discomfort, pain, humiliation, death. Hardly anything else at all. So, it had happened, the one thing she had dreaded, the stroke.

  Nigel was holding her hand now. She could feel the pressure of his huge hand on hers.

  ‘I don’t know if you can understand what I’m saying, Mother,’ he said, ‘but I’ve contacted Timothy and Maurice and they’re both making arrangements to fly over. Timothy’s in Majorca and should be here tomorrow. Maurice has some urgent loose ends to tie up in St Petersburg, so it may be the day after. They were both coming the week after next for your hundredth anyway, so they’ll just come a bit sooner.

  ‘Elizabeth must be away, but I’ve left a message on her answer-phone, asking her to ring me. I didn’t say why. I didn’t want to alarm her. I mean, there’s no cause for alarm. You’ve survived. You’ll pull through. You’re going to be blowing out those hundred candles all on your own. Your will-power’s legendary.’

  She slept on and off after that, and only woke properly when she felt a
distant squeeze of her hand, and he said, ‘I’m off now, Mother dear. I’m going to the Caprice. I’m going to have the eggs Benedict and the sea bass. Timothy will come tomorrow.’

  She felt his stubbly cheek against her lined old face, and was grateful, knowing how difficult physical contact was for him. She almost choked on his aftershave. For more than fifty years she’d been irritated by his aftershave. He always used too much. He floated through life in its sickly embrace, in the hope that it would hide from the world the suspected sourness of his breath. Uncharitable to think of that now. For shame, Kate Copson.

  Alone at last! Oh, the relief. So alone. Oh, the fear. Come back, Nigel darling. I’m so alone. Not really alone. There were other women in the ward. She didn’t yet know how many.

  She opened her right eye cautiously. She couldn’t move her neck, but she could move the eye just sufficiently to catch a glimpse, to the right, of a window. There was daylight. The sky was angry. So was she. For a moment she felt relieved at this sight of the great world outside. Not for long. There was a whole universe out there, and here she was, separated from it, probably for ever. No more Venice. No more Peru. Not even Barnet High Street ever again. Impotent fury swept over her.

  She closed her eye hurriedly as she heard footsteps approaching. Another nurse spoke to her, not as cockney as the first. This second nurse pulled at Kate’s mouth, but not roughly, and managed to open it sufficiently to insert a cool, thin, round tube. Of course. A thermometer. Records must be kept.

  ‘You’re almost normal. Well done, Kate,’ said this second nurse. Her hands were bony. Kate liked the fact that she referred to her in the singular, although she did rather spoil it by asking, ‘How are you feeling?’ and supplying the answer herself. ‘A little better! Good!’

  Almost normal. She liked the ‘almost’. She wouldn’t mind that on her gravestone. ‘Kate Thomas, 1899–1999. She was almost normal.’

  1899–1999. It came as a shock to her to realise that she didn’t expect to survive to the end of the year. That wouldn’t do. She wasn’t ready to die yet.

  She was distracted from these thoughts by the return of the nurse, with a doctor.

  ‘Doctor Ramgobi’s here to see you, Kate,’ said the nurse.

  ‘How is she?’ asked Doctor Ramgobi in that cultured, slightly stilted voice that Kate recognised from earlier.

  ‘Doing all right. Doesn’t seem to respond, though.’

  ‘I see.’ Again, she could only just feel the fingers as Doctor Ramgobi prodded and probed. She hoped he’d washed his hands. They were gentle fingers, though. Respectful. No more intrusive than they had to be. Then he almost repeated his earlier words. ‘Well, Kate, you’ve had a major cerebro-vascular accident.’ He spoke the medical words with precision and a dusting of pride. She noticed that he had scaled down ‘massive’ to ‘major’. Perhaps he’d thought ‘massive’ tactless. ‘What you would call a stroke.’ There was just a faint disapproving tone in his voice, which was a bit rich, since it was he who was using the layman’s term, not she. ‘You’re in Ward 3C of Whetstone General Hospital. You will be cared for as well here as anywhere, Kate, so you mustn’t give up hope.’

  As he walked away, Kate heard him say, ‘She’s the Kate Copson, you know, Helen,’ and the second nurse said, ‘Sorry, doctor. Not with you,’ and he said, ‘Ah! The fleeting quality of fame.’

  The Kate Copson. Not just a Kate Copson. She felt absurdly pleased. And she suddenly realised, as she reflected on the doctor’s visit, that her mind was working as well as ever. She’d been analysing his every sentence. Good God, she might be trapped and paralysed and helpless, but she wasn’t a halfwit yet.

  She opened her right eye again. The clouds in the sky in her little window on the world were turning gold and silver and pearl, great feathers of cloud lit by the setting sun. Below them were smoky, puffy, wispy, angry little clouds that the sun couldn’t touch. The light was fading. The darkness was coming.

  Kate closed her eye and returned to her new dark world. Was her light fading? No! It mustn’t! She was a fighter. She would astonish them all. She would not go gentle into that good night, to quote a fellow child of Swansea. Not while she had her brain. She wasn’t ready. She had one last task to perform. She had a murder to solve.

  The boldness of this thought took her breath away. It almost killed her there and then. How could she, almost a hundred years old, solve a murder, lying in a hospital bed, unable to question anybody, unable to examine any of the evidence, unable to write anything down, almost forty years after it had happened? What hubris to think that she could succeed where Inspector Crouch, thoroughness his middle name, had failed.

  But she was the Kate Copson, not a Kate Copson! She could do it. She had to do it. For almost forty years she had avoided the subject, for fear of what she might find. Now the fear of not knowing was greater than the fear of knowing. She dreaded the thought of dying without knowing which of her three sons had murdered her fifth husband. Or should that be, strictly speaking, her fourth husband? Or, to be even more strict, not a husband at all? It was a fine point of linguistics. She almost laughed. To be thinking of such linguistic distinctions now!

  It wasn’t so much that she needed to know which of her sons was the murderer as that she needed to know which two of them weren’t. She couldn’t bear to die suspecting all three.

  Of course, the fact that the murderer had left a note saying ‘Sorry, Ma’ didn’t necessarily mean that it had been one of her sons. Elizabeth could have done it, although Kate didn’t seriously entertain that theory. Poor Elizabeth would never be capable of doing anything as extraordinary as murdering someone. It could even have been one of Graham’s many enemies trying to implicate her sons. She had managed, long ago, to persuade herself that it was probably so. She knew now, in the intensity of her darkness, that she had been fooling herself.

  She sensed, rather than heard, one of the other women in the ward walking towards her bed. The woman came up so close to her that she could smell the madness on her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s such a pretty little baby. Oh, bless his little cotton socks.’ How did anybody get as mad as that? How could you see babies where none existed? Kate shrank from her. The woman moved off, to her great relief, but the incident had brought home to her just how weak she was. She wasn’t ready yet to solve a murder. She wasn’t even ready yet to live in the reality of this ward.

  Well, she didn’t need to. Her great-grandson Ben was deeply into virtual reality. It was the coming thing. Soon you’d be able to spend a fortnight in Majorca without leaving Basildon, or, if you were a masochist, a fortnight in Basildon without leaving Majorca.

  Majorca! That was where Timothy lived. Could Timothy murder someone? No! Too soon to be thinking such thoughts! Spare yourself this pain, Kate.

  Ben had been very patient with her, teaching her how to use the video machine. He’d been four at the time. She hadn’t used it much. There wasn’t much she wanted to watch once, let alone twice. She would use it now. She would escape from the ward, from her paralysis, from her humiliation, by replaying the video of her life. She wasn’t ready yet to become the Sherlock Holmes of the Bedpan. She needed to be a child again first.

  What a life she had led. Now she could lead it again, and again, and again. Play the best bits endlessly. Fast-forward through the dull bits (though there weren’t many of those). Who could begrudge her her escape? And it wouldn’t, perhaps, be entirely escape, for some of the clues to the identity of the murderer might lie far back in the past: a psychiatrist would expect them to, not that she trusted psychiatrists, but it was good to think that maybe she could combine an escape from reality with a confrontation of reality. It would be what Ben would call ‘a double whammy’.

  The thought of Ben disturbed her deeply. At sixteen he reminded her so much of Gwyn. He had those same dark, florid, jowly, sultry, sensuous good looks. Oh Lord, she was going all adjectival at the memory. He had no right to remind her of Gwyn. It wasn’t as if they were
related.

  Gwyn! Her first love! She shuddered, inside herself, far behind her face, where there was no paralysis and therefore no protection against pain. Gwyn! The memory still hurt, eighty-three years later.

  Rewind, and play.

  2 Gwyn

  SHE WAS BORN Kate Thomas, preceding her identical twin Dilys into this world by almost one and a half hours. People said later that it was typical of her to be so eager to enter into the vast excitement of life.

  Her father, John Thomas Thomas, was headmaster of a small school in the poorest quarter of Swansea. Every day, he took a horse-drawn tram from their posh new home in Eaton Crescent to the school. Electric trams were introduced in 1900, the year in which Kate said her first word. It gave little indication of the originality and invention that would follow. It was Daddy.

  John Thomas Thomas was a tall, handsome man with a thick but not luxuriant moustache which lent gravitas to a face that didn’t need it. In his brown Celtic eyes, contradiction reigned. Severity twinkled. Humour wore a frown.

  Her mother, Bronwen Thomas, née Davies, was a twinkly little pharmacist’s daughter from up country, beyond Carmarthen. She had a petite beauty, a perfect complexion, a wonderful voice and inexhaustible energy, all of which she attributed to the love of a good man and the eating of laverbread every morning. She might have been a singer, if she hadn’t fallen in love with John Thomas Thomas. She might have become one of the first stars of the steam radio, and been known as the Welsh Nightingale. She might have visited Venice and tasted wine and been kissed on the promenade deck of a Cunarder by a charming rotter with white whiskers, if she hadn’t met John Thomas Thomas and borne him six children. But she wouldn’t have been as happy.

  Kate and Dilys were followed by Enid, who was timid and frail, and by Myfanwy, who was loud and lusty. It seemed that Kate was to live in a house dominated by femininity, but then, in 1906, along came Oliver, the apple of everybody’s eye. Fair, warm, extrovert, charming, life and soul of the party, more of his mother in him than his father. And then, two years later, Bernard was born, dark, intense, questing, querulous, nervous, delicate, short-sighted and shy. That completed the family. John Thomas Thomas believed that Bronwen had suffered enough.