The Complete Pratt (148 page)

I thought it extraordinary that you could be so self-sacrificial and then I realised how conceited that was and how probably it’s no sacrifice for you after what I did to give up all further chance of a relationship with me.

Anyway, I discovered with extraordinary force how deeply I love you, and here I am stuck in Peru for two years. It’s awful to feel stuck here because from the little I’ve seen so far it’s a breathtaking country. I flew here from Lima over the Andes, feeling very safe in my first Third World plane, perhaps because of the free
pisco
sours, the delicious national drink of Peru, made of brandy, egg white and lemon.

Cajamarca is a flat, predominantly Spanish town, full of Quechua Indians. It gleams white in the mountain sun. It’s set in a beautiful, broad valley, studded with irrigation channels and rich in eucalyptus trees. Indians in plaits and sombreros lead donkeys along the roads, and the majesty of the high sierras is all about. There’s great poverty by English standards, but it’s not a hopeless place, and the street scenes are very lively. I have a lovely shady apartment built around a patio in a beautiful old Spanish villa in
the
best part of town. As a British government official I’m important at last, which I find hilarious. Everything in the apartment is lovely, except for a picture of a rather fat Madonna, who looks as though she has wind, holding a rather fat baby, who definitely has wind.

This could be the most amazing experience of my life, yet all I can think of is that I’m not with you. Every crowd has an empty space at its centre, where you would have been. At every meal – and the food’s good – there’s an imaginary chair for you, my darling. I love you and would like to marry you again. I believe that I’m a better person now and that I could make you happy this time. Writing these words has given me an erection. Henry Pratt’s libido is alive and well and living in Cajamarca.

Tomorrow work begins in earnest. I’ll have my six English staff under me for the first time. ‘Under me’! I’m a boss for the first time!

I hope you and your father are well. Please send him my best wishes and to you I send my deepest love,

Henry

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (One for every year that we have been apart)

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

December 5th, 1981

Dear Cousin Hilda,

This is to wish you a very happy Christmas and New Year. It’ll be strange to be so far from Thurmarsh at the festive time and you’ll be very much in my thoughts, and I’ll have lots of memories of Christmases past, and all the fun we had with the crackers and paper hats and jokes and of course the delicious food. I hope you won’t feel lonely and will be comforted by the memory of all the merry times and also by the fact that I’ll be thinking of you.

Well, I’m busy setting up the project, and Peru will soon be covered in English cucumbers. Peru does have quite a lot of
cucumbers
already, which is a bit disturbing, and they don’t rate them very highly. In fact there’s a Peruvian saying, ‘
Me importa un pepino
’ – ‘I couldn’t care a cucumber.’ However, their cucumbers are short and stumpy, so maybe they’ll like our long, firm English ones.

We’re busy trying to find land. The Cajamarca valley is very fertile, but the best land is already in use. Still, we won’t need the best land, as we’ll be growing our cucumbers under glass. We’ve begun interviewing Peruvians for jobs, and have met some very interesting people of high calibre.

Our office is in Baños Del Inca, a village a few miles away. It has hot springs, and is the place where the Inca leader Atahualpa was having a nice hot bath when the Spanish invader Pizarro called on him the day before the Spaniards slaughtered his army in the main square of Cajamarca. I saw these events described once in a play called
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
by Peter Shaffer in London, so that is very interesting.

I look forward to hearing from you and will write again soon.

Happy Christmas and much love,

Henry

Sarajevo

Rua de Matelos

Altea

Costa Blanca

Spain

14th December 1981

Dear Henry,

I was astonished to get your letter and even more astonished that it came from Peru! My heart raced terrifyingly when I read that you love me, and it races now, as I sit on the terrace on a sunny, but rather windy December afternoon.

Yes, it’s true that I made up about there being somebody else. There has never been anybody else and never will be.

I love you still, Henry darling, and feel no anger towards you
after
all these years, and I certainly won’t accept that all the blame was yours. If only I’d not been such a brittle reed and so hopelessly perfectionist. If I could have accepted that love is irrational and nobody is perfect, and tried to help you through your jealousy, how different things might have been.

I’m quite happy here, although I suppose my life isn’t exciting. I look after Daddy, who is slowly growing old, and is missing England and all his political life dreadfully. We never found anywhere at the right price, prices have leapt in England, and we’ve left it too late. We’re trapped in exile, and neither of us like it. This is not a criticism of Spain. I would love it if we were
of
Spain, we are only
in
Spain, and that’s a horse of a very different complexion, as Mr O’Reilly might have said if he’d been a more loquacious kind of Irishman!

We’re in the middle of doing a big jigsaw, and Daddy loves to do them together as he’s really very lonely, so I must stop now.

Write soon.

With love,

Hilary

PS I nearly forgot. Happy Christmas!

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

Jan 2nd, 1982

Dearest Hilary,

I was delighted to get your letter, which didn’t actually arrive till after Christmas. I’m absolutely thrilled to hear from your own pen that you still love me and always will. In fact reading your letter led to a solitary activity which has to be indulged in not too violently at this altitude! But your letter also puzzles me and worries me. You talk about our relationship as if it was all in the past. Surely, as we both love each other, we should be thinking of the future?

I want to ask you two simple questions. I’ve gone on bended knees to write the first one, so my writing may not be very clear.
Will
you marry me? And the second question is equally simple. Will you come and live with me in Cajamarca? Please say ‘yes’, my darling.

You’ll love it here, the landscape is on a grand scale. The valley throbs with vitality and fertility. The great hills are arid but steeped in melancholy beauty.

You’d get on well with the team. They’re a fine bunch of blokes. I can hear you laughing at me. Yes, maybe in this far-off spot the public school ethos has got to me at last. We had a good Christmas. I even got a turkey and made my own crackers, which is what my lovely maid Juanita (sixty-six years old – no rival!) thinks I am. I thought of you constantly, and could only half enjoy myself, so thirsty was I for your reply. I’d promised Cousin Hilda to lay aside a moment to think of her, but I forgot. I did think of our dear, dear Kate and Jack and lovely Camilla and poor Benedict. I wish I believed in God, so that I could pray for him.

Other countries have aid schemes here. There are Belgians trying to plant trees everywhere, and a German is making German sausages. We all know him as Bratwurst Bernhardt, and I understand I’m known as Cucumber Henry!

Only two shadows darken my life. The Range Rovers haven’t arrived and, more importantly, I don’t have my beloved with me.

I should have said earlier that, if you can come, it will be fine for you to bring your father. I’m sure we can get you both on the payroll somewhere. Baños Del Inca is a long way from Whitehall.

With deepest love,

Henry

X (One kiss from you is worth a thousand from anyone else)

66, Park View Road

Thurmarsh

South Yorkshire

4th January, 1982

Dear Henry,

Thank you very much for your letter. Thank you for your good
wishes
for Christmas and the New Year. I had a very enjoyable Christmas, if solitary. I did myself very well, but I avoided ‘over-indulgence’. I were a bit badly over the New Year, but then I don’t see the New Year in, believing that one year is very much like another. So did Mrs Wedderburn, incidentally.

Your news is very interesting. I have never had experience of ‘foreign parts’, finding the North York Moors a very satisfying run, so I cannot imagine the Andes. Are they at all like the North York Moors?

I were right touched to hear that you would be thinking of me on Christmas Day. I must admit I do feel a bit quiet at times, now that the Good Lord has taken Mrs Wedderburn and Mr O’Reilly, and the gay days of my gentlemen are gone for ever.

I were interested to hear that you are busy setting up your project, and that Peru will soon be covered in English cucumbers. I’m sorry the Peruvians have lots of cucumbers already, but interested to hear that theirs are short and stumpy, and pleased that you think you can do well with long, firm English ones. It were interesting to me that the Cajamarca valley is very fertile. Parts of the North York Moors are very bare. It’s funny the way places differ. It was interesting that you had met some interesting Peruvians of high calibre. I were brought up to believe that there were very few foreigners of high calibre, and now it seems that the reverse is true. I pray to God for guidance.

It was interesting about the play by Peter Shaffer. I saw
The Desert Song
with you at the Temperance Hall in Haddock Lane, but I don’t think it was by him. Mr Frost were in it and you went to the pub afterwards with that journalist and milk bottles were later knocked over. I don’t hold with the theatre. It leads to bad behaviour. Mrs Wedderburn did take me twice to the Playhouse, but neither play was by Peter Shaffer. They were both by Agatha Christie, and they were both very good, and I didn’t guess who had done it. Nor did Mrs Wedderburn, incidentally.

A lorry delivering electrical goods swerved to avoid a dog and completely demolished the bus shelter at Thurmarsh Lane Bottom yesterday, but otherwise we have had no excitements to match
yours
, so I will close now, hoping you are well and not catching any of those foreign diseases which those poor foreigners have to contend with.

With love,

Cousin Hilda

Sarajevo

Rua de Matelos

Altea

Costa Blanca

Spain

19th January 1982

Dear Henry,

Thank you very much for your letter, and I must say straight away that my answer to your first question is ‘not at the moment’ and to your second question, ‘no’.

I didn’t mention the future because I’ve learnt to live in the present, it’s the way I get by, and I talked about our relationship as if it was in the past, because it is. Of course we may have a relationship in the future, but I’ll only find that out a step at a time. I’d like to meet you on your return to England, and see if we can cope with a return to normality together. I lived for a very long time in a world more sombre than you are capable of imagining. Nobody knew. Not my father, my psychiatrist or, above all, my mother. I feel now that I’m sitting on a green lawn, but the lawn juts out over that sombre chasm and it would be all too easy to fall back into it. I couldn’t cope with seeing you again in somewhere exotic like Peru. It’d be make or break, and I’m not brave enough for that.

Please treat me as a pen-pal and send me lovely descriptions of your times in Peru. Then, when you return, and you will return, we’ll meet like pen-pals. It’ll be exciting and terrifying, but if you’re truly patient and loving I believe we may have a chance.

Sam made a flying visit last week. He’s a cheery bachelor. He lives in Luton and devises recipes for tinned soups. ‘Well, somebody’s got to,’ he says.

Dad and I are off to our local English bar now. I’d prefer a tapas
bar
but the English bar has fish and chips on a Friday, and once a Yorkshireman …

I think of Benedict often and with despair.

With love and hope,

Hilary

Apartado 823

Cajamarca

Peru

Feb 2nd, 1982

Darling Hilary,

Do other people feel conflicting emotions about seven hundred times a day, or is it just me? I’m so depressed at knowing that I won’t see you for almost two years. (I won’t stay here when my option comes up. Without you, I feel as though I’m doing my National Service all over again.) But I’m thrilled that you want to see if we can make a go of things and that you love me still, and believe we may have a chance. (I sound like Cousin Hilda, who went through my letter paragraph by paragraph.)

Progress on the project is a bit slow. The really good Peruvians don’t seem interested. Two or three accepted posts and simply didn’t turn up. Apparently, they hate to disappoint you, so they tell you what they think you want to hear: ‘I will start next Monday.’ Lots of big smiles, lots of bad teeth, nobody starts next Monday!