Pratt a Manger Read Free Page B

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