Ultimate Prizes

Willy said: ‘I’m going to the off-licence to buy some whisky.’

Emily said: ‘I’m going to make tea.’

Recognizing their desire to offer comfort I was soothed by their careful avoidance of emotion, and after a while I thought I was strong enough to drag down the curtain again. But I was wrong. I was so weak that I glanced at the stage first, and there waiting for me in 1909 was Uncle Willoughby, rich, robust and ruthless as he hitched up his coat-tails to warm his backside at the parlour fire. ‘… and I’ll not say one word against your father, poor miserable idle stupid fellow that he was, because it’s not right to speak ill of the dead, even when a weak selfish thoughtless fellow with a wife and three children has the intolerable effrontery to the in penury. So all I’ll say is this: if you two lads want to save yourselves from hell and damnation –’

‘Here’s your tea, Nev,’ said Emily in 1942.

‘– if you two lads want to save yourselves from hell and damnation,’ bawled Uncle Willoughby, outshouting her in 1909, ‘and save yourselves from the miserable fate of winding up a failure in a coffin before you’re forty, you’ll work and you’ll work and you’ll work until you’ve dug yourself out of this shameful black pit, and you’ll never forget – never as long as you live – that there’s only one road to salvation and that’s this: you’ve got to go chasing the prizes if you want to stay out of the coffin – you’ve got to go chasing the prizes if you want to be happy and safe – you’ve got to go chasing the prizes in order to Get On and Travel Far …’

‘Poor Nev,’ said Emily in 1942. ‘You can shed a tear if you like. I’ll look the other way and afterwards we can pretend it never happened.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted and blundered out of the kitchen into my study. Willy arrived five minutes later with the whisky and banged on the door until I let him in.

‘Em driving you round the bend? How her husband stands all that tea I don’t know. What a mystery marriage is, but of course I’m just a bachelor schoolmaster who observes society’s mating customs from afar … Do you remember when you said to me on the beach at St Leonards all those years ago: “I’m going to marry the perfect girl and have the perfect family and live happily ever after”? I’d never even considered getting married, and yet there you were, seventeen years old, with that misty look in your eyes, the look of the dyed-in-the-wool romantic, the look Father always wore when he read us “The Charge of the Light Brigade” –’