Obstacles to Young Love. David Nobbs

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ