Chapter 46
Ludo
“Tell me again why you’re sitting on my chesterfield, in front of the television, instead of celebrating the coronation with your sweetheart?” Uncle Ben said, his words mumbled.
The thing about being eighty-eight is you tend to have zero patience for the kind of tiptoeing social niceties that govern these kinds of exchanges for everyone else.
Uncle Ben blew a ring of smoke and eyeballed me intently.
It was evening, and the velvet curtains were drawn.
Benjamin Britten was playing on the gramophone (yes, really), and the telly was repeating gilded scenes from the big day.
Bimpe Lasisi popped up on the screen, and I remembered regaining consciousness on a Shetland hilltop and momentarily asking myself if the Church of England had it completely wrong and God was, in fact, a Nigerian-born British woman.
I thought of Sunny and how wonderful he had been that day.
I thought about last night. Sunny was so incensed, so vehement.
Was he telling the truth? What if he hadn’t been using me to get to my father after all?
Would he really have turned down the job?
What if he really did just like me for me?
Had I made a bally pig’s breakfast of it all?
Uncle Ben blew a puff of smoke into my face.
“Wakey-wakey, dear boy.”
“I met this most tremendous couple down on the Mall,” I said.
“George and Philippa?”
“Bertha and Dave.”
“Let me guess! Union Jack hats and blazers? Commemorative tea towels to wave at the TV cameras? A thermos in their rucksack filled with mother’s ruin?”
I nodded. “That was the general vibe.” I felt a twinge of discomfort.
“They always look like they’re having so much fun, those people, when you see them on the telly.”
Uncle Ben meant no harm, but it would have felt disloyal not to defend my new friends.
“They were good company. Salt of the earth. They’d give you their last penny. Tried to give me their grandson, actually.”
Uncle Ben laughed.
“And you declined?”
“I did. But if their grandson is as loving and generous as his grandparents, some boy out there is going to be very lucky someday.” I smiled, thinking about Bertha and Dave, and sipped at my sherry.
“Honestly, Uncle Ben, they were proper in love. After more than forty years of marriage, they were still holding hands and sneaking kisses like they were in sixth form.”
“Proper in love, were they?” Uncle Ben said, eyebrows raised.
I hadn’t even realised I’d said it. Uncle Ben drew on his cheroot, not letting his eye contact drop for even a second, then blew the smoke out dramatically, like he was in an old Hollywood film.
“Did you pick up that kind of language from Bertha and Dave? Or is that the influence of that sweetheart of yours?” I decided to ignore this.
“I want someone I can be like that with, Uncle Ben. That’s all I want.”
“Someone to be barking mad with?”
“If that’s what love is, then yes! I want someone I can share the things I love with, like going to the theatre, or spending Sunday morning reading the newspapers and caffeinating a hangover into submission, or singing show tunes on a little trip to the seaside.”
“Can’t you do all that with that ginger bit of rough you abandoned on Hampstead Heath?”
Uncle Ben had seen me come back to the house the previous night, had seen the floods of tears.
He’d seen me slink along the fence line to avoid everyone at the party and shut myself in the summer house.
He’d knocked on my door, coaxed me out like a rat with cheese, and sat on my little porch with me, looking out over the firepit, listening to me pour my heart out.
“I’m through with Sunny, and you know why,” I said. I sipped my sherry. “He was using me.”
“Was he, though? I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, and for a journalist, you didn’t really present any ironclad evidence.”
“Evidence? My father was practically offering him a job right in front of me. Sunny told me he wanted to work for a paper like the Sentinel someday, and that he hated working for the Bulletin.”
Uncle Ben coughed and took a gulp of his sherry to clear his pipes.
“So, when you fell and he looked after you, that was part of some scheme to get a job at the Sentinel, was it?”
“Well, no—”
“And when he went all the way into Westminster on his day off to bring you coffee—two coffees, in fact—that gesture was just an elaborate job application, was it?”
“Well, I don’t think—”
“Has he actually, at any point, given you any real reason to doubt him? To not trust his motives in befriending you?”
“But Father—”
“That doesn’t count. That was on your father, not on Sunny.
What did you expect Sunny to say when the great Hugo Boche told him he’s wasted at the Bulletin?
Oughtn’t you be pleased for Sunny that Hugo has recognised his talent?
Have you ever known your father to give a job to anyone unless they were supremely well-qualified, whether you were dating them or not?
“But—”
“But? But? But nothing. You listen to your godfather, dear boy. Learn from the wisdom of the ancients. Why are all the men in this family such fools when it comes to love? For all that expensive education, not one of you ever seems to see what’s right in front of your eyes.”
That left me speechless. We paused while Uncle Ben had a coughing fit.
He picked up the sherry decanter to top up his glass.
His hands were shaking too much to pour, so I jumped up to do the honours.
With our glasses refilled, I slipped back into the brown leather of the armchair and asked Uncle Ben what he meant.
“Your father was a blethering idiot when it came to your mother.”
“Really?” This was the first I’d heard of this.
“Oh, yes. All I heard for weeks was Beverley this and Beverley that. She was working down in Hampshire at the time but was often up in London. He wouldn’t shut up about her.
He was absolutely devoted. Hopelessly in love with her.
Wouldn’t bloody well pluck up the courage to ask her out on a date, though. ”
This did not sound like the Hugo Boche I knew. A man so confident he could wear a three-piece suit unironically.
“Why not?”
“Oh, he had a million excuses. She’s too good for me. I’m not good enough for her. She’s all the way down in Southampton. I don’t dress snappily enough for a woman like that. She works for the BBC, and it could get complicated. Her parents are socialists.”
“Granny and Grandad are socialists?”
“They voted Lib Dem once. In a parish council by-election. So, we had months of this mooning. Then one Saturday afternoon, your father was sitting in the very chair you are sitting in now, dear boy, banging on and on about how beautiful Beverley was, how smart she was, how talented she was, and how she’d never go out with him.
And your uncle Michael was sick of listening to it.
He stormed out the door in a fit. Your father barely noticed, he was so absorbed in his self-pity, until Michael returned forty-five minutes later with a train ticket to Southampton for the following morning and said ‘For Christ’s sake, Hugo, either put up or shut up. ’”
My jaw was on the floor. How had I never wheedled this story out of anyone before?
“You make Father out to be a hopeless romantic.”
“He was certainly both of those things, dear boy.”
“But I’ve never so much as heard him tell Mummy he loves her.”
“My darling boy, there are many different ways to express love. You have no idea what happens once they close that bedroom door.”
“Ew. Ewww. Stop.”
Uncle Ben blew smoke theatrically towards the ceiling, once again.
“Will you listen to an old man who knows a thing or two about love and heartache and loss?”
“Of course I will. You know that, Uncle Ben.”
“I think this fight you had with Sunny was rather silly.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Uncle Ben lifted a finger to silence me.
“Listen. You’ve been triggered, as you kids like to say these days, not by something Sunny said or did but by something your father said to him.
If you look at what Sunny has done rather than what you’ve imagined he said or thought, he clearly cares for you as much as you care for him.
” He paused, letting his words sink in. This man had seen a lot of theatre.
He knew how to pause for effect. “You are being, if I might say so, darling boy, a blethering idiot.” He sucked on his cheroot, then blew out the smoke. “It’s time to put up or shut up.”
I put my glass of sherry down on the occasional table and stared blankly at it, processing what Uncle Ben had just said.
“Do you need me to call you a black cab, or…”