Pratt a Manger Read online

  ‘Henry, dear,’ he said. ‘I’ve come because I can’t come tonight, and I’m devastated.’

  ‘Come tonight?’ echoed Henry. ‘What to?’

  Lampo went pale.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Is the dinner a surprise?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Shit!’

  Henry didn’t think he’d ever heard Lampo do anything as crude as swear, and he didn’t think he’d ever known Lampo to commit a social gaffe.

  ‘We’ve got an important auction on,’ said Lampo. He worked for Christie’s, or was it Sotheby’s? Henry could never remember. There were streaks of grey in Lampo’s hair but even at sixty-two he still looked slim and sleek. Once he had said, ‘I was never young’, and it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been so. Now it was only just impossible to imagine that one day he would be old.

  ‘I came to bring you this,’ he said, getting an elegantly wrapped parcel out of his Harvey Nichols bag. ‘A prezzie!’

  ‘Take it back and get Denzil to bring it,’ said Henry. ‘Otherwise I can’t show it to Hilary without revealing that you gave away the surprise.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lampo reluctantly, ‘but I wanted to see your face as you opened it.’

  ‘Well you could always invite us to dinner and give it to me then.’

  ‘True. You think of everything.’

  ‘I try to.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m glad I came. I always like it here. Though where is everybody?’ His voice changed, becoming intimate and intense, ‘And …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Look after Denzil tonight. Try to make sure he doesn’t drink too much. He’s … he’s beginning to fail. He is very old. Just … just look after him. I love him very much, you know.’

  ‘I know, and of course I will. You didn’t need to say all that.’

  ‘As I get older, Henry, and time runs out, I’d rather say what I didn’t need to say than risk not saying what I needed to say.’

  ‘That’s good. May I use that?’

  ‘I’d be flattered.’

  ‘Now … are you eating?’

  ‘Please.’

  Lampo looked towards the blackboard, and just for a moment he gawped. It was a triple whammy, thought Henry – a swear word, a social gaffe and a gawp – three firsts for Lampo in one day.

  ‘Hake Lampo?’

  ‘I sometimes name my inventions after very special friends.’

  ‘Henry!’

  Lampo reached out and kissed Henry full on the lips. Nicky smiled. Peter Stackpool flinched.

  ‘It’s hake the way I did it for your birthday.’

  ‘It was delicious. Memorable. Gorgeous. I’ll have the fennel casserole.’

  ‘Not your hake, after I called it after you? Not so delicious after all?’

  ‘Denzil thinks he knows how you made it, and makes it himself. He’s a magpie. Besides, I feel vegetarian today.’

  ‘Nicky’s having the fennel. Ask her how it is.’ Henry called out, ‘How’s the casserole, Nicky?’

  ‘Delicious.’

  ‘Good.’

  Lampo ordered the fennel casserole. Henry wrote, ‘It’s better to say what doesn’t need to be said than risk not saying what needed to be said’ on a piece of card, and pinned it on the wall just above Nicky. As he did so, he couldn’t help getting a really good view of the tops of her breasts.

  A few more customers filtered in, but it was still the quietest lunchtime that Henry could remember.

  When Nicky came up to pay, he said, ‘This really has been the quietest lunchtime I can ever remember.’

  ‘I believe you,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s true,’ he said.

  ‘I said I believed you,’ she said.

  Just as Henry was wondering whether or not to charge Nicky, a very unglamorous couple came in, and the man said, ‘What would you like, Delilah?’ and the woman, who didn’t look remotely like a Delilah, said to Henry, ‘Have you got such a thing as a glass of white wine? Not too dry, not too sweet?’

  ‘Medium?’ suggested Henry.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Delilah.

  Henry’s eyes met Nicky’s, and when Delilah and her partner had moved to a table, she said, ‘What a master of your craft!’

  He decided, even as he smiled at her gentle mockery, that he didn’t want anything personal to enter into their relationship, so in the end he did charge her.

  ‘I imagine you can get it all back on expenses,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not if I have nothing to show for it,’ she said, ‘but I am going to have something to show for it, aren’t I?’

  He couldn’t understand why he didn’t say, ‘No, Nicky. You are not. Stop wasting your time.’

  But he didn’t.

  He fetched her leather coat, and tried hard but unsuccessfully to avoid peering down her cleavage as he helped her on with it almost suavely. He also couldn’t help admiring her pert, taut backside as she walked out. Then he couldn’t help catching sight of PS, who also couldn’t help admiring her pert, taut backside, and he thought, ‘What a horrible, dirty old man he looks.’

  Somehow the Café seemed duller after Nicky had left.

  But it seemed more interesting again after PS had left.

  When he’d finished his fennel casserole, Lampo came up to the bar for an espresso. You couldn’t imagine him with a cappuccino. There was nothing sweet or milky about Lampo, unlike Nicky’s breasts. Stop it!

  ‘She’s pretty,’ said Lampo, as if he could read Henry’s mind.

  ‘In a hard, media way, I suppose,’ said Henry, trying to persuade himself.

  ‘You on TV, though, that would be priceless.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘My little fatty faggy chops, my inelegant Northern hick, a star.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Fun, though. One in the eye for Tosser.’

  Tosser Pilkington-Brick had been Lampo’s study mate at Dalton College.

  ‘One in the eye for Davina Foulkes-Effingham.’

  ‘Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. Oh God, did I tell you about her?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  Belinda Boyce-Uppingham had been the girl from the big house in the village in which Henry had spent the war. Her great-grandfather had tapped Henry, as if he was a barometer, and said, ‘So you’re our little town boy, then. Well done.’ The memory of his patronising gesture had stayed with Henry for fifty years. It would be nice to get his own back, but no, the old man was long dead, there was no point, what was he thinking of? There were no more ghosts to lay.

  Belinda had married a great tree-trunk of a farmer called Robin, who’d wanted a male heir but had got Tessa and Vanessa and Clarissa and Marina and Davina and Petunia, five beautiful girls, no less than three of whom had become frontispieces for Country Life, and one plain girl, for life is cruel. It would be rather gratifying for her to see him as a star and wonder what she’d missed by … no! Don’t even think about it.

  ‘I’m not even thinking about it,’ said Henry. ‘I want my life to be simple from now on.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Lampo. ‘Well, have a good evening. Be very nice to Denzil tonight. I do love him, you know.’

  When Lampo had gone, Henry realised that he had a great opportunity to find out once and for all whether Lampo worked for Sotheby’s or Christie’s. He rang Sotheby’s.

  ‘What time is your auction tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘We have no auction tonight.’

  That settled it.

  So why did he ring Christie’s as well? Because of something in Lampo’s attitude, something very un-Lampo like in his repetition of how much he loved Denzil.

  ‘What time’s your auction tonight?’ he asked Christie’s.

  ‘We have no auction tonight,’ they told him, as he had known they would.

  Oh Lampo. Who are you seeing?

  Oh Henry. Why did you steal swift glances at Nicky’s crotch and backside?
/>   The light began to fade early that afternoon. Was it going to rain, or was the sky filled with pots calling kettles black?

  2 And So Say All of Us

  HE STOOD AT the gate and looked at their house as if he had never seen it before. It was still a surprise to him, every day when he went home, to realise that he, Henry ‘Ee By Gum I Am Daft’ Pratt, was the owner of a substantial, five-bedroom, Victorian house off Clapham Common in South London.

  He swished through a yellow carpet of last year’s leaves – they really did need to find a gardener – and entered the house very quietly by the side door, so as not to disturb Hilary. She would be busy on her novel, her fifth, and it wasn’t coming on as quickly as she’d hoped.

  He walked across the large, rather dark hall, with its large, rather dark paintings of two of the things he liked most in the world – Siena and coq au vin.

  He peered round the door of the large, rather dark panelled dining room. The long oval table wasn’t laid.

  The comfy sitting room, with its unmatching sofas and chairs picked up at auctions, lacked its usual lived-in air. There were no newspapers strewn about. It was suspiciously immaculate.

  The kitchen, too, that higgledy-piggledy room, planned by Hilary to resemble a French kitchen but not so formally that it could ever be photographed by House and Garden, was disturbingly tidy. Usually there were little bowls of left-overs covered in foil. He would lift the foil and eat a little unplanned afternoon treat – a dessertspoonful of cold ratatouille, perhaps, or a couple of wickedly salted anchovies. Today there was nothing. Not a crumb.

  Outside, the South London traffic rumbled and grumbled, but inside the rambling, crumbling house there was total silence and complete good order.

  He looked in both ovens. Nothing. He peered in the larder fridge and the food centre. Nothing new. Nothing for a surprise dinner party that was no longer a surprise.

  Yet Lampo didn’t get things wrong.

  Perhaps they were all going out to dinner. A private room at Bartholomew’s, across the common, possibly. That must be it.

  He wanted to kiss Hilary. He wanted to do more than kiss her. He wanted to prove that one wasn’t remotely old at sixty, not these days.

  He went to the loo, had a careful pee, aiming at the side of the bowl so that there was no noise. He didn’t pull the chain. He didn’t want to disturb his beloved’s work. All jealousy was long gone.

  He washed his hands in the tiniest trickle of water, then stared at himself in the mirror. His old friend Martin Hammond had once said that he looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Why am I shaving my father?’ Henry could never have thought such a thing. He didn’t remember his father well enough. He had only been twelve when his father hanged himself, and only eight when his mother was run over by a bus. He didn’t think about them very often, but now, on this milestone of a day, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of loss. It was a strange feeling. He was aware that he was missing the memory of his parents even more than he was missing them. The loss of all those times that other people had with their parents swept over him. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he mouthed to the mirror. ‘Oh, Dad, I wish you could see me now.’

  He examined himself again. Martin had always looked old, even as a member of the Paradise Lane Gang, when he’d been four. Henry had never looked old. He didn’t look his age now. Did he? Well, not quite, surely?

  It couldn’t be denied that he looked at least fifty-five, and that was bad enough. It was ridiculous. He felt young and silly still, unformed, immature, developing slowly. He felt twenty-five going on twelve. Sixty! It was just too too absurd.

  He went back into the kitchen, made himself a mug of builder’s tea, watched a blue tit bravely resisting a great tit’s bullying on the bird feeders. The back garden looked sad and sullen as the light faded on that grey afternoon. Spring had not yet touched it.

  Why was he so reluctant to entertain the possibility of being on TV? A little fame would be very pleasant, surely? He could handle it, could he not?

  No, Henry, he told himself sadly. No, Henry Ezra Pratt, son of a parrot strangler, you couldn’t handle it.

  How far you have come already, Henry Pratt, from the false paradise of Paradise Lane, with its shared midden and its tin bath taken down off its hook every Saturday. Do you need to go any further? Are you not happy, Henry Pratt, as you are?

  He longed to see his darling. He imagined how much her beauty would surprise him when he did see her, even though he saw her every day. He didn’t dare disturb her, though, so he did what he sometimes did when he wanted to be with her. He slammed a door, to show that he was home. That gave her the option of ignoring it, if work was too pressing.

  She came into the kitchen, smiling broadly, smiling that momentous smile of hers that had at last become as free and trusting as it had been in the early days of their first marriage.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

  They kissed. They kissed each other’s lips, very gently, then explored each other’s mouths very gently with their linked, slurpy tongues. Henry grew slightly embarrassed at the intensity of the feeling, and broke the kiss off.

  ‘I’ve booked us in at Bartholomew’s,’ said Hilary.

  So it wasn’t Bartholomew’s.

  ‘Just the two of us. It’s the way you said you wanted it.’

  That put him in a difficult position. If he said, ‘Absolutely. I couldn’t bear to share the day with others’, she would be crestfallen about her surprise. If he said, ‘Absolutely not. What an anti-climax’, she’d be pleased about her surprise but hurt that he didn’t think her company enough.

  Wisely – yes, even he could sometimes be wise – he said nothing.

  The merciful darkness hid the soft London rain from them as they washed each other’s sexual juices away with pineapple and almond soap, in their en-suite Jacuzzi.

  Hilary rinsed his thinning hair with the shower attachment. All thoughts of Nicky were forgotten.

  ‘We haven’t ordered a taxi,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ she said.

  By this time he genuinely believed that Lampo had been mistaken and they were going to a restaurant and meeting nobody. Then he heard one or two slight noises from downstairs, and he saw that Hilary was beginning to look rather tense.

  The moment he got out of the bath, Henry feared that he would begin to sweat and would need another bath. He soaked his flannel beneath the cold tap and squeezed it urgently down his front.

  Then he phoned the Café to make sure that Greg was coping and that Michelle, his manageress, was managing.

  As Hilary began to put her dress on, he gasped with desire and ran his lips up her thighs, under the dress.

  ‘All that money spent on clothes,’ he said, ‘and you look best with nothing on at all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be allowed into Bartholomew’s like that, unfortunately.’

  She smiled, saw there was still some life in his penis, and said, ‘M’m. Not bad for sixty.’

  He wished he could be sixty every day, if it made him feel as sexy as this.

  ‘My God, you’re putting on the full works tonight,’ he said, as she got out her ruby and diamond necklaces, her only real extravagance. ‘I cannot believe you’re doing all this just for little old me.’

  That was stupid. There was no point in teasing, since he could never let her know that he was teasing. She gave him a searching look. For a moment he was worried that he might blush.

  ‘Phew, I am hot,’ he said, in case his face had gone red, using the words a girl called Mabel Billington had used to him once, when he was still a virgin, more than forty years ago.

  ‘I’ve laid out your smoking jacket,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit OTT for the two of us?’

  Henry! Stop it!

  ‘I love you in it.’

  She had laid out his clothes on the bed in the biggest guest bedroom. She made all the decisions in such matters. She was his style guru.

  She dried his
hair and brushed it.

  ‘You’ll be the most handsome man at the party,’ she said.

  ‘I thought I was the only man.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  They laughed. As they left their bedroom he ran his hand along the inside of the cheeks of her buttocks. She removed it and gave it a little smack.

  ‘Shall we have a quick drink in the sitting room,’ she said, ‘while we’re waiting for the taxi?’

  ‘Great.’

  The moment they entered the room, all fourteen guests clapped. Henry hadn’t needed to worry about managing to look surprised when he witnessed the surprise that wasn’t a surprise. They stood there, all with glasses of champagne in their hands, like … like a human autobiography. Henry Pratt, we are your life.

  Two charming and very smart waitresses handed Henry and Hilary their glasses of champagne.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ the fourteen guests yelled.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his beloved daughter Kate with fervent tunelessness. She was small and slim, but despite this she stood out in that gathering. All the other guests were wearing their party best, but she was in tattered jeans, an old green T-shirt and a frayed denim jacket. Her smile, though, was the broadest and warmest in the room.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his builder son Jack lustily and lovingly. Beside him, his earth-mother wife Flick, comfortable and comforting, sang equally lustily. They both loved Henry. In fact, they had named their first child after him.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang James and Celia Hargreaves, the parents of his best friend at school. They sang with slight Hampstead embarrassment, letting their hair down bravely, showing the common touch like minor royalty.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang their daughter Diana, Henry’s second wife, her body thickened by happiness and Swiss food. Behind her, her dentist husband Gunter opened and closed his immaculately maintained mouth, but no sound emerged. He didn’t know the words.

  ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow,’ sang his step-daughter Camilla, daughter of Diana and her first husband, Nigel (Tosser) Pilkington-Brick. As a child, with her slender neck and long face, she had resembled the horses she loved so much, but in adulthood the equine echo had become faint and rather appealing. She had become a painter of horses, and she was a great deal prettier than Stubbs or Munnings.