Obstacles to Young Love Read online

  ‘I don’t play the mother,’ says Naomi. ‘I play the neighbour.’

  ‘But you’re regular,’ says her father. ‘You’re in it every week. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a start. You’ll be back at the Coningsfield Grand. “Starring Naomi Walls from…”. What’s your series called?’

  She doesn’t want to tell them. She still hopes the title may change.

  ‘It’s not quite decided.’

  ‘It’s a pity you boys couldn’t come over from Paris to see her in the touring production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Grand,’ says her father. She has never known him anything like so talkative.

  ‘She was wonderful,’ admits her mother. ‘She really was the Queen of Egypt. I couldn’t believe it was my little girl.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Well. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘The drama group from the school went. And most of the teachers,’ says her father.

  ‘She’s had her ups and downs,’ says her mother. ‘Her bits of bad luck. A broken foot when she was down to play a lady footballer. A play cancelled when the leading man dropped dead in the dress rehearsal. Casting directors, if I’ve got the title right, who couldn’t recognise talent if they fell over it. But she’s come through. She’s going to be a star.’

  ‘Mum!’

  Naomi is deeply embarrassed, not least because Emily is believing it.

  ‘Are you really, Mum? Are you really going to be a star?’

  ‘We’ll see, Emily. We’ll see.’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ says her father. ‘Modest to a fault.’

  No, Dad. I don’t think so.

  Over the apple pie and custard her father, who has undoubtedly drunk more wine than ever before, raises yet another new subject.

  ‘Do you ever see Simon at all?’

  ‘When he takes Emily and brings her back, on his days, if I can’t avoid him.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Still…still bitter, then?’

  ‘Dad, he’s Emily’s father. I don’t want to talk about him in front of her.’

  ‘I was on the stairs when you talked about him to Felicity the other day,’ says Emily. ‘I heard what you said.’

  ‘Oh, my Lord, what did I say? Or should I not know?’

  ‘You said when you went away on holiday he was…I didn’t really understand it ‘cause I didn’t know what it was, but you said something about he was a cornflakes adult.’

  ‘What? Oh! Oh, yes. Oh, Lord. I said he used to look round in hotels even during breakfast to see if there were any girls he could try to seduce later that day. I described him as a cereal adulterer. Cereal as in cornflakes.’

  ‘Yes, we did get it,’ says Clive.

  ‘I hope the jokes in your sitcom are better than that,’ says Julian.

  I hope so too. I ha’e me doots.

  ‘What’s an adulterer?’ asks Emily.

  ‘It’s a childerer who’s grown up,’ says Antoine.

  Emily giggles. Antoine can always make her giggle.

  ‘No, what is it really?’

  ‘It’s a person who’s married who goes off with someone else and spends time with them when he should be spending time with his wife,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Or husband, as the case may be,’ says Julian.

  ‘Was Dad an adulterer when he went to the gym then, ‘cause he went to the gym nearly every day?’

  Very probably he may have been, Emily, but we won’t go into that.

  ‘No. Not every time, Emily. Some of the times he was supposed to go to the gym. He works there.’

  Emily is still a bit puzzled, but William leaps up, rubs his hands together, and says, ‘Come on, Emily. I’ve got a job for you. Well, it’s a game really.’

  Immediately, Penny leaps up too and says, ‘I’ll make coffee. Coffee everyone?’

  Emily, William and Penny all leave the room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asks Clive.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Naomi, ‘but something is.’

  Penny enters with a tray of cups but no coffee. William returns from the garden.

  ‘I’ve got her collecting twenty different kinds of leaf,’ he says. ‘That should give us time. Sorry, everyone, I don’t want to spoil your day, and it’s a bad start to the year, but there’s no way of telling you this except very directly, and there it is, but…well…the fact is…er…’

  ‘I’ve got cancer,’ says Penny.

  There’s a shocked silence. It’s a remark that people hear all too often in their lives, but rarely when they are all wearing paper hats.

  ‘How long have you known?’ asks Clive.

  ‘About a fortnight.’

  ‘We didn’t want to spoil Christmas, especially for Emily,’ says William.

  There’s another moment of silence. Naomi can’t bring herself to speak.

  ‘What’s the…er…the diagnosis?’ asks Julian.

  ‘Terminal, I’m afraid, Julian.’

  Julian blushes, regretting his earlier joke, though there is no reason for him to.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ says Antoine. ‘With a family like yours, and a medical service like yours – Coningsfield General has a good reputation, no…?’

  No. Everybody thinks it, but nobody says it.

  ‘…And with a spirit like yours, I’m sure you can prove this diagnosis wrong. Come on. You are British. You are fighters.’

  Emily enters with a bunch of leaves.

  ‘Twenty-two different leaves,’ she cries, with proud excitement.

  Her innocence bruises their souls.

  Maggie has been up since six o’clock, cleaning. She does two rooms every morning. There are fourteen rooms in the house if you include bathrooms and lavatories, so this means that she cleans each room once a week. That might not sound too bad, but this is no ordinary clean. This is a spring clean every week. Maggie has slowly become obsessive over the years. From her first waking moment – at six, with the alarm, meaning Timothy wakes up too and never drops off properly again – she is planning her battle against germs. It’s May, a lovely spring morning, the first morning of the year on which none of the good people of Coningsfield, or indeed the bad people, of whom there are plenty, dream of being on the Algarve or in Southern Spain. Maggie goes round the house opening windows, letting the stale air out, but she doesn’t have time to pause to breathe in the scents of yesterday’s first mowing of the ragged lawn at number ninety-two and of the massed daffodils which are not yet quite dead all along the central reservation of the main road. Maggie never has time to smell the flowers.

  Timothy reaches out sleepily and runs his hand gently over Naomi’s soft, sleepy, still-slender body. His prick is as stiff as a dead curlew. But this can’t go on. It’s wrong. It’s an invasion of her privacy, even though she will never know. He drags himself out of bed, kneels at the side of the bed, and prays to God to save him from his desires. O Lord, I know it’s wrong. And, as you know, because I’ve told you, which of course I didn’t really need to do, because you know everything, I must not covet my neighbour’s wife or Simon Prendergast’s wife. Prendergast. How can his precious Naomi now be Mrs Prendergast, which is what he assumes she still is. Oh, blow. He’s lost his place in his prayer. Where was I, Lord? The Lord doesn’t prompt him. Maybe Tuesday mornings are busy. Oh, yes. Not coveting her. Please, O Lord, give me the strength to have only clean thoughts, for I am ashamed of my wickedness.

  He wishes he could just get dressed and go next door straight away, past the board which actually still says ‘R. Pickering and Son – Taxidermists’, for they are keeping up the pretence that his father still takes a major part in the work. Yes, they are living in Ascot House, formerly a B & B run by Miss de Beauvoir (Mrs Smith). Charlie Smith ran off eighteen years ago after falling head over heels for a physiotherapist. This has long been a sore point with Timothy’s father, who regards it as less disgraceful than being abandoned for a plumber. Mrs Smith decided that Mrs Smith was no sort of
name for the owner of a B & B with pretensions towards being select (she hated the word ‘posh’), and became Miss de Beauvoir. She sold up five years ago. ‘I’m getting out while the going’s good. Mrs Percival at the Mount has been forced to take in people sent by social workers. She’ll end up with immigrants, you mark my words. I’d hate to be young. What chance have the young got of running select B & Bs?’

  But first there’s the kids to be got ready. Sam is seven and Liam five. Why on earth did they call him Liam? Everyone will think he’s Irish. Oh, well, too late now, and he doesn’t seem to mind. Liam is cheeky, a bright spark, freckly, could almost be mistaken for Irish. Sam is dark like his father, serious like his father, showing real promise at his lessons, like his father. Maybe in his case the promise can come to fulfilment. His teachers think Sam could be clever. He isn’t as quick as little Liam, but there’s a solidity there, an understanding of all his subjects, which is rare in a boy so young. Timothy in truth doesn’t know either of his boys very well; he loves them, of course, loves them utterly in their good and bad moments alike, but he leaves them mainly to their mother; he isn’t awfully good with smaller children, his time will come when they are stronger and they can play football properly together and play card games and board games and go to visit beautiful places together. That is when his time will come, when he can show them the world.

  He has to supervise their dressing and get their breakfast and make them eat it and make sure they clean their teeth because Maggie has been so busy cleaning that she only just has time to get herself dressed and tidied and ready for school.

  At last she’s ready and the kids are ready and she leaves the house with them. It’s a short walk across the park, and she passes the junior school on her way to the senior school where she still teaches, so it’s all very convenient.

  The most wonderful sound in the world is that bang of the front door closing. She has gone. The house is his. He knows he should go next door. He’s got a fox to finish. But first he goes right round the house, opening the door of every room, savouring the emptiness of every room.

  Now Timothy is at peace. Now he can face his work. At weekends and during the long, long school holidays he loves his work, it’s an escape, but during the week he resents every moment that he cannot spend in his gloriously empty home.

  He enters number ninety-six. The front door no longer squeaks. He has bought ample supplies of WD40.

  He is surprised, as he is every morning, by the darkness of the house. Roly is standing in the cold vault of a kitchen, waiting. Whatever time Timothy enters in the morning, his father has had his breakfast and washed up and is standing in the kitchen, waiting.

  ‘What are we doing today?’

  The ‘we’ is royal, though Roly doesn’t realise it.

  ‘There’s the fox to finish, and then I thought we might tackle Mrs Lewington’s lurcher.’

  ‘Righty ho. Anchors away.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Roly won’t do much except fetch a few things that Timothy has deliberately left in the wrong place so that his father can fetch them and think he is useful. He can still see to move around the house, in which no piece of furniture has been moved for at least twelve years, but he can’t see to do useful work any more. He has a blind stick for when he goes out on his own, but he never uses it, because he never goes out on his own. Maggie is a treasure, taking him to do all his shopping for the week at Tesco’s every Saturday.

  Timothy’s spirits droop at the thought of Mrs Lewington’s lurcher. He has tried to turn the business more in the direction of wild life taxidermy, but the location is against him. People knock on the door and buttonhole him in the street. ‘He’s seventeen, Mr Pickering. We’ve had him seventeen years. If Cecil hadn’t been taken by the good Lord I know he’d want me to keep him. I’m going to put him where he always loved to sit, in his old basket, just to the left of the grate.’ Timothy hates doing pets, asks three times the normal price, and the silly people accept the estimate without a tremor, in the hopelessness of their love.

  ‘I’ll be out for an hour or so late morning,’ he hears himself say.

  His father looks surprised, and so does he. He hadn’t known he was going out. But suddenly the urge is irresistible.

  ‘I’m sure there was nothing in the diary.’

  His father can’t actually read the diary any more, but he can see enough to know if a day is blank.

  ‘No, it’s not in the diary. It’s just cropped up.’

  It’s not the sort of thing you can put in a diary. ‘12.15. Drive past Naomi’s house. 12.20. Drive back past Naomi’s house.’

  For that is what he is going to do. It’s something he has never done before, and it’s a serious escalation of what could easily become an obsession. Maybe he needs an obsession too, to challenge Maggie. The thought of driving down Lower Cragley Road, past L’Ancresse, in both directions, excites him. It’s naughty. It’s dangerous. It’s blissfully futile.

  It’s the sitcom what’s done it, he thinks. Seeing her, every Thursday, on BBC1, in his lounge. Awful to see. Nappy Ever After is a stinker. A stinker full of jokes about stinking, as the critic in his paper gleefully pointed out. How many jokes can there be about potty training? Hundreds, according to the writers of Nappy Ever After. And what a dreary part. What miscasting. The neighbour! Always coming round to borrow sugar, but really to hear the latest gossip and to drool over the babies because her own life is so sterile. Naomi, sterile, drooling, using baby talk, silly. How dare they? He’d use a very naughty word to describe them if he wasn’t religious. The humiliation of watching it. The impossibility of not watching it. No wonder his thoughts have turned to her.

  The fox is finished all too soon and he has to make a start on the lurcher. At ten to twelve he can bear it no longer and breaks off.

  ‘You’ll be back for your sandwich?’

  ‘Of course, Dad. Wouldn’t miss my sandwich.’

  ‘That’s my boy.’

  Roly makes them a sandwich every lunchtime. It’s his task. Just occasionally Timothy has lunch with a client. ‘Lunches with clients! I don’t know! What’s next? Buckingham Palace?’ exclaims his father. But this is rare. Nineteen times out of twenty, his dad makes a sandwich for him. It’s his task. It’s his life.

  ‘Well then, off you go, boy, if you’re going. Chocks away.’

  Timothy drives along the route of the twenty-eight bus. He’s so excited that he has to take great care not to cause an accident, whether on the road or in his trousers, or both. This is madness. He knows it, and loves it.

  He turns into Lower Cragley Road. Bliss. And nobody is following. He can drive really slowly.

  There it is, across the road on his right as he slips slowly down the hill. L’Ancresse. Solid. Really rather attractive. Serene. So serene. There’s the bay window of the lounge. That’s where the curlew was, on top of the chaise longue. He wonders if she still has the curlew, if it’s still in the house, or if she has taken it away with her. He wonders if she is still in their flat in…West Hampstead, was it? Strangely, it doesn’t cross his mind that she might no longer be with Simon. When he watches her in Nappy Ever After he feels jealous of Simon, so Simon remains, in his eyes, a part of her life.

  He wishes that he could go back and have her eighteenth birthday again because this time he wouldn’t be nervous about the curlew, this time it would be simply the most wonderful evening of his life. But of course you can’t go back.

  But he can go back up Lower Cragley Road, and he does. It doesn’t look as if there is anybody in L’Ancresse. It’ll be quite safe.

  There’s no traffic at all this morning. Well, afternoon now, let’s be pedantic. What a lovely day. Words come into his mind in Ken Dodd’s voice. ‘What a lovely day for looking up an old lover.’ Careful. He doesn’t want to sound like Nappy Ever After.

  He becomes very bold and pulls up right outside the house. His heart is racing. Supposing she’s there. She might be visiting. There’s
no sign of a car, but maybe she hasn’t got a car. Actresses are probably funny that way. Maybe she can’t afford a car.

  He is safe. Nobody goes in or out. He should leave. It would be better to leave. But he doesn’t.

  He thinks about the last time he spoke to her, nine years ago, in Iquitos. He thinks about the last time he saw her in the flesh. A year ago, at the Coningsfield Grand, as Cleopatra. He’d had to go with Maggie. It had been a dreadful evening, because suddenly, seeing her on the stage, he had realised that he no longer adored Maggie, he had only been pretending to do so for a long time now, she had become obsessive about cleaning, she bravely tolerated occasional sex, it was her duty, and she lived for her thirty-four children, the two that were her own and the thirty-two that were her duty.

  He had thought, as they had sat waiting for the curtain to go up – well, not the curtain exactly, he could remember every detail, they hadn’t used a curtain – as they had waited for the lights to go down, he had realised that it would be very difficult for him to break away from Maggie, present himself at the stage door, and say, ‘I’d like to see Miss Walls, please. I’m an old friend and I want to tell her how marvellous she was.’

  But that had been the worst thing of all about that awful evening. She hadn’t been marvellous. She hadn’t been bad, of course she hadn’t, in fact she’d been quite good, but it was no good being quite good, not as Cleopatra; she had never for one moment been the Queen of Egypt, she had been Naomi Walls bravely portraying the Queen of Egypt. The stillness, the power that she had shown as Juliet, it hadn’t been there. Of course she was as good an actress as ever, you couldn’t lose abilities like that; there must have been some other explanation, anything, a dislike of the actor playing Antony, an unsympathetic director whose vision had clashed with hers, an illness perhaps from which she had only just been recovering, or perhaps, even for the best of them, in long runs, there were performances where you’d got it, and performances where you hadn’t. It had let his emotions off the hook about going round to see her, because he couldn’t have gone if he couldn’t have told her that she had been marvellous, but it had been terrible to witness. At the end, the applause had risen when Antony had come on for his solo bow. It hadn’t dipped for her, but it hadn’t risen further, and it should have done, and she had known it, and he had known that she had known it.