Nev wiped his brow, looked at Will Lee, and said: ‘What makes you say that?’
‘The Lees have invited us to a dinner party,’ said Mum, who was attempting to decipher Hugh Lee’s scratchy handwriting, written in fountain pen on the back of a self-portrait by Duncan Grant. ‘It’s in two Saturdays’ time. I think.’
‘Bugger,’ puffed Nev from underneath the kitchen countertop, where he was trying to plug in a new dishwasher. As a gush of water poured out of the wall and onto the floor, Mum continued, ‘Hugh Lee may be irascible, but at least he’s fun, unlike most old men. What happens to men when they reach sixty? It’s like they are wiped clean of what little personality they once had.’
‘I wouldn’t say that about your father,’ said Nev, emerging from the recesses of the kitchen with soaked beige trousers and a spanner.
‘In his case it could only be an improvement.’
Since returning from the boat holiday, the arguments between the parents had died down. Now they treated each other with cold civility. Nev got a promotion and Mum moved to the Sun. She cooked a little – she had learned how to put lamb chops in the oven – and they sat around the table and talked about work, colleagues, politics, newspapers, religion … anything as long as it didn’t reveal how they felt about each other. It took me years to realize most families only talked about the weather. Meanwhile, Tom held forth on his new privileged life at Westminster School.
‘The head boy has the right to drive a flock of sheep across Westminster Bridge,’ he said, bouncing his fork off a rubbery lamb chop. ‘And we have a massive pancake fight called The Greaze. The cook throws the pancake up in the air and we scramble for a piece of it. The person who gets the most wins a gold sovereign and we all get a half-day, and if the cook fails to throw the pancake up high enough we’re allowed to throw our Latin books at him.’
‘What’s the point in learning Latin?’ I asked. ‘It’s not like you’re ever going to go to Greece.’
Meanwhile, I was concerned that the topic of that lunch break’s conversation at school had been the various animals my classmates had. Everyone apart from me seemed to have a faithful dog, an entertaining guinea pig or, in the case of Christopher Tobias, a parrot that could say ‘bollocks’ every time it saw an elderly person. There was a tabby cat who padded about in our kitchen every now and then, but that was it. I was feeling particularly miserable after scoring one out of ten in a mathematics test, so the lack of an animal in the house contributed to a wave of melancholy I believed it was the duty of the parents to do something about.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, thumping the bottom of a bottle of tomato ketchup until a tiny globule landed on my chop, ‘can we get a pet?’
‘No!’ screeched Mum. ‘What a horrible thought. What has an animal ever done for me?’
‘Provided you with a lamb chop,’ offered Tom.
‘Pets are a suburban indulgence. It’s not for the animal’s sake that you have it, is it?’
‘What about the smallest pet going, like a hamster, or a gerbil?’
‘Not even an ant.’
The following weekend we visited Nev’s parents. Min and Pop, as Nev called them, lived in Minehead in Somerset, in a 1930s house along a street so quiet you felt conspicuous walking along it. Before that they had lived in a similar house in Tadworth in Surrey. They moved to Minehead, on Granny’s insistence and against the wishes of Grandpa, after he retired as a tax inspector. He had stayed in the same job, in the same office, in the same chair, for forty years. He would have stayed in the same house too, had he been allowed.
‘Say what you want about Pop,’ said Nev, as we drove down to Minehead, ‘at least he sticks to his guns.’
Grandpa wasn’t one for change. He only ate two things: bananas and baked beans on toast. He only liked one piece of music (the Hallelujah Chorus). His chief reason for wanting to stay in Tadworth, beyond his conviction that change of any kind could only ever be for the worse, was that he liked his garden. Granny, however, was resolute, pointing out that the house in Minehead still had a garden big enough to grow all the fruit and vegetables he wanted. Not that he ate them. Neither did Granny. She only trusted food if it came out of a tin. A few years later she found a house with a smaller garden. Then she made him move into a first-floor flat. Then he died.
On that trip, however, he was still going strong. He pressed 50p coins into my and Tom’s palms, with the sense of occasion with which he had been doing it since we were four and six.
‘Thanks,’ said Tom, tossing the coin in the air. ‘I’ll open a Swiss bank account.’
‘Good idea,’ said Grandpa, tapping his nose with his index finger. ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.’
Sunday lunch consisted of cold meats and tinned vegetables in the pathologically neat dining room, among paintings of horses and scenes of rustic splendour, which was the closest Granny and Grandpa got to seeing the countryside; they didn’t actually appear to like it despite living in it. If they did go for a rural outing it involved driving to a National Trust car park, sitting in the car, eating sandwiches from a Tupperware box, and driving home again. Mum mentioned we were thinking of going abroad for our next holiday.
‘Wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Grandpa, cutting up his beans on toast into neat little squares.
‘Why not?’
He stopped cutting his toast for a moment and looked up. ‘Went to France once. Won’t be doing that again.’
I decided to attempt to alleviate the mood with a joke. The one about the hairy bum had got a big laugh at the fireworks party.
‘So she said …’ and I held out my arms for the killer line, ‘“… I’ve looked all over my Hairy Bum but I can’t find my Willy.”’
Granny made an indistinct humming noise. Grandpa poked bleakly at a tinned carrot. Tom shook his head. Eventually Granny held up a plate and said to nobody in particular: ‘More Spam?’
For the rest of the afternoon we sat in front of the television, as Granny chewed on an endless stream of toffees from a bowl on a side table and Grandpa dozed off in an armchair. Eventually I asked Granny if I could have one of her toffees. She turned to Mum and said: ‘May he, Mummy?’
They watched football. Granny complained about the way the players all hugged each other when they scored a goal. They watched Coronation Street, and Granny wondered why television always had to be accompanied by such awful pop music. (I think she was talking about the theme tune.) Mum got her talking about newspapers for a while. Granny told us she didn’t approve of the way men in the news wore their hair so long, but then journalism was not a place that attracted the right sort of people. Nev would have been much better off sticking to accountancy.
It was the night of the dinner party at the Lees’ house. Hugh Lee answered the door in a cravat and jumbo cords, clutching a dusty bottle of wine, while Penny could be spotted in the kitchen, briskly moving from oven to hob. As Mum and Nev, looking young and garish against the muted colours and matured sensibilities of Hugh and Penny Lee, drank wine downstairs and talked loudly about how awful their parents were, Will and I disappeared into the attic. I looked through the stack of records leaning against the record player. Most of them were jazz and classical but there were a few interesting ones in there too, not least Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
‘Wow. They’re a bit rough,’