David Nobbs - Obstacles to Young Love

‘I won’t be famous and if I am it won’t change me. “She comes in the shop and she’s just like one of us,” says attractive olive-skinned assistant Val Pogson.’

‘What?’

‘It’s what they say about nice actresses who haven’t let their fame go to their heads. She enjoys the glamour of filming in exotic places, but she’s always thrilled to get back to her modest terrace home in Battersea and her taxidermist husband .’

‘You won’t want children.’

She is silent for just a moment.

‘I can’t say I’ve thought about it, but…I think I’d really love to have your child. Honestly, Timothy.’

He leans across and kisses her. His tongue explores her mouth. He didn’t mean to do this, but he can’t help it.

The nun develops a sudden interest in pylons.

Let them be happy in their kisses. They have no idea of the storm that is about to break over their heads.

Timothy’s steps never quicken as he approaches number ninety-six, but today they slow even more than usual. His father is not an unkindly man, he does his best, but it is not a happy house for Timothy. It’s a square, stone, Victorian house on the gentle hill that takes the dual carriageway out of town in what was once one of the better areas of Coningsfield, but it’s an area that’s blighted by traffic and is slowly going down. Number ninety-four is a B & B called Ascot House. Number ninety-eight is lived in by an old man, Mr Lewis, and his wife, Mrs Taylor. Well, this is how Mr Lewis introduces them to people, on the increasingly rare occasions when he needs to introduce them. Timothy laughs because as the years pass and their health declines, Mr Lewis walks further and further behind Mrs Taylor on trips to the shops that are becoming slower and more hazardous by the month. Timothy’s father, Roly, rebukes his only son for laughing at the elderly.

Timothy walks past the shaved lawn of Ascot House – ‘Quality outside is the harbinger of quality inside, in the world of the B & B,’ says the proprietress, Miss de Beauvoir, whose real name is Mrs Smith. In fact, she says this all too frequently. Her remark does not impress Timothy. He has been inside.

The lawn of number ninety-six is long and dotted with dandelions and docks. Last month, after a good rain, a post was hammered into the ground, and a board was hammered onto the post, bearing a message that alarmed Timothy. It says, ‘ R. Pickering and Son – Taxidermists ’. Timothy’s heart does not swell with pride as his legs lead him leadenly past it. He has been Romeo on stage and in life. Now he is again the only son of a taxidermist whose wife ran off with a plumber when Timothy was two and has never so much as sent him a birthday card since. ‘A plumber!’ his dad occasionally says, shaking his head in disbelief, as if the man’s occupation is a greater blow to his self-esteem than his wife’s abandonment of him.

As Timothy sees the board, he recalls that moment a month ago when he came home from school and first saw it. As he stared at it, the front door squeaked open – his dad wasn’t exactly generous with anything, and that included WD40 – and his dad stood there, smiling.

‘I’m taking you into the business, son of mine. You’re ready now.’

Timothy had found nothing to say.

‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’

‘Yes, Dad. Sorry, Dad. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Timothy was too young to realise that by this his dad was trying as best he could to say, ‘I love you, son.’

They had gone inside and his father had made a pot of tea and produced a couple of scones – a rare treat, but treats came with strings at number ninety-six, and the string was that his future was going to be discussed, or rather announced, and fixed for eternity. Timothy liked Marmite on his scones: he had described the clash between sweet and sour as ‘orgasmic’ but that was before his weekend with Naomi. On this occasion he hadn’t dared get Marmite. His father disapproved. ‘Marmite on scones? What travesty is this?’

‘Well, lad, I saw you on stage and I’ll say this, you were good. Our Timothy, the product of my very own seed, playing Romeo, who’d have thought it?’ His father had his very own, idiosyncratic way of expressing himself. ‘As I say, you were good, but…but, Timothy, you weren’t that good. You are not an actor. The boards are not in your blood. The curtain has fallen on your brief career.’

‘No, Dad, I know, I agree, I don’t want to be an actor.’

‘Good. Good. That’s good. So what can you do? You’re not stupid, but…but, Timothy. We don’t want you ending up a plumber now, do we? Some say taxidermy is a dying art. Not so, my boy. Not so. More tea?’

‘Thanks.’

Timothy had never thought of not being a taxidermist, but only because it had never occurred to him that he was ever going to be one. His ambitions stretched only to avoiding certain careers. He didn’t want to be an actor, or a plumber, or a dentist, or a lavatory cleaner, or a teacher, or a racing driver. He expected that, being neither brilliant nor thick, he would go to one of the lesser universities, and if that didn’t work out there was always Coningsfield Polytechnic. In the course of his prolonged studies he might or might not discover his vocation, which might or might not be the Church. He’d had no idea that he would suddenly, even urgently, need to make a decision as to his future. He was therefore unprepared to make a decision. Therefore he made no decision. And so, on that dark afternoon in that dark house, he realised that he didn’t want to be a taxidermist five minutes after he had become one.

Later, when he looked back on that afternoon, he realised that there was no way he could have made a decision, because there was no way he could have told his lonely old father, with his failing eyesight and his sad, short marriage, that he was not going to join him and support him in his business.

‘I have a steady trade, good contacts with most zoos, sources of supply from some of the great shooting estates of Old England. I’ve done well.’

‘You certainly have, Dad.’

‘It’s not riches. Riches don’t last. The Good Lord knows that. But it’s steady. Very steady. The Pickerings are steady people, Timothy, and you, you too are, I think, steady.’

‘I hope so, Dad.’

‘Is plumbing steady? No, it isn’t. Three warm winters on the trot and they’re knackered. But the world will always need taxidermists. Youngsters aren’t going into it. Youngsters don’t see further than the ends of their noses. That Naomi! Juliet! You can bet your bottom drawer she’ll be wanting to be a film star, off to London before the frost gets into the parsnips. I’d take money on it if gambling wasn’t a sin. No, as a taxidermist, boy, you’ll be able to clean up very nicely.’

Timothy has not told his dad that he has walked out with Naomi. He has certainly not told him that he has been to London with her, fucked her, gone down on her, been sucked by her. In some ways Timothy and his father are alike, but with regard to Naomi there is a gulf between them that makes the Gulf of Mexico look like a village duck pond.

Timothy has time to recall this conversation in its entirety because he is walking up the garden path very slowly indeed. The house is dark. There is not a room in it, including the smallest room, that does not contain at least one dead animal or bird. In the smallest room it is, naturally, the smallest creature, a mouse that died of heart failure when startled by the Ascot House cat. There is stained glass round the front door, only slightly cracked. The floors are a monument to the past glories of linoleum. When he opens the front door Timothy feels that he is stepping back fifty years.