The Complete Pratt (157 page)

As they approached London, the knot in his stomach tightened. He was almost paralysed with fear.

He gathered his belongings together slowly, and left the train reluctantly. Above him, the huge majesty of St Pancras station was shrouded in scaffolding.

He walked slowly along the platform, trying to calm himself, and entered a tunnel that led down to the underground station. He didn’t know why he was entering the tunnel, but he knew that he must.

A tattered figure was walking towards him. He saw a flicker of recognition in the tramp’s bloodshot eyes, and a gleam of anger. Henry’s blood ran cold even before he saw the knife.

Benedict advanced on him with the knife held high. Henry grabbed his arm and tried to bend the wrist to release the knife, but Benedict was astonishingly strong considering his unkempt, emaciated condition.

Henry missed his footing, fell against the wall of the tunnel, and crashed to the ground on his back. Benedict loomed over him and raised the knife. Henry wondered where the rescuing crowds were, but there was nobody there at all. Maybe they’d all melted away in fear. He’d read about that being a common occurrence in 1990s Britain.

It is said that at the moment of death one’s whole life flashes before one. Luckily for you, horrified reader, since you’ve been right through his life already, this did not happen to Henry. Instead, images of the future that was being snatched from him flashed through his mind – English spring mornings, Hilary bent over her latest book, gentle mornings at the Café Henry, Hilary kissing him, grandchildren playing happily.

Suddenly he felt no fear of dying. His last wry thought, as Benedict made to lunge at him, gripping the knife fiercely in both hands, was that at least he was being killed by a member of the privileged classes, whose rich father had sent him to public school. He might not have led a good humanist’s life, but he was achieving a politically correct death.

He stared bravely at Benedict, showing no sign of pleading for mercy. Benedict raised the knife above his head, gave a wild cry of despairing aggression, and lunged forward as he began to bring the knife down. Suddenly he slipped sideways, overbalanced and crashed into the side of the tunnel. The knife slid from his grasp.

Henry was up in a flash, and he grabbed and pocketed the knife before Benedict could get up.

But Benedict didn’t get up. He lay concussed, glassy-eyed, his brief mad strength gone. Henry, who had once dreamt of a career as a stand-up comedian called Henry ‘Ee by gum I am daft’ Pratt, had been saved by a joke even older than the ones he had made at school. At the crucial moment, Benedict had slipped on a banana skin.

I should have remembered that my premonitions are always unfounded, thought Henry.

He took a photocopy of a recipe for sea bass on a bed of green lentils out of his wallet, crossed through the recipe, and wrote
‘PTO’
in large letters. On the back he wrote his home address and phone number and the message, ‘There’ll always be a place for you at our table, son.’

He kissed Benedict’s filthy forehead. The glassy eyes blinked.

Henry felt an overwhelming urge to get away, but he couldn’t just abandon Benedict. He went back into the station concourse, and told a member of the transport police about the tramp lying in the subway. He asked for a contact number, so that he could find out what happened to the tramp. The transport policeman gave him an odd look, and the number.

Henry waited until he was sure that Benedict was being seen to, and then he hurried off into the late spring sunshine of a London afternoon. He felt a deep joy that was probably entirely selfish, because Benedict was still in terrible trouble and there was no knowing whether he could be saved.

When he got back to the café, Henry would stick another motto on the crowded walls. ‘
Until you are no longer frightened of dying, you cannot enjoy life
.’

He would enjoy life. Maybe he would remain content to dispense happiness in his café. Maybe even at fifty-nine he would find some useful role in the battle to save radical and humane ideas from the humourless arrogance of political correctness.

As Henry walked along Marchmont Street, he saw a man carrying an ice-cream cornet mount his bicycle, and set off, holding the handlebars with one hand. The bicycle wobbled, the man grabbed the handlebars with his other hand, and all the pistachio ice-cream fell out of the cone onto the road. He gave Henry a rueful smile and said, quite cheerfully, ‘Worse things happen at sea.’

Thank you, unknown cyclist, thought Henry. I shall always console myself with that. I shall become Henry ‘Worse Things Happen at Sea’ Pratt.

He turned right into Tavistock Place, and set off, in tranquillity at last, in maturity at last, to relish the astonishing richness of everyday life.

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Published by Arrow Books 2007

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Copyright © David Nobbs 1998

David Nobbs has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

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Omnibus edition first published in Great Britain in 1998 by Arrow Books
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first published in Great Britain in 1983 by Methuen London;
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first published in Great Britain in 1988 by Methuen London;
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first published in Great Britain in 1994 by Methuen London

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