Of course a dead curlew is not an easy thing to wrap, the beak has proved a nightmare, but he still feels that he should have done better. The paper is crumpled. Pieces of tape hang from it like plasters left too long unchanged on cuts and warts. He has never been a dab hand at wrapping presents. Paper is never obedient under his fingers. Tape never sticks properly. String simply refuses to be tied. God knows what struggles he will have in his slow mastery of the art of taxidermy. Well, God knows everything, or so Timothy thinks.
‘It’ll just be a quiet little supper party,’ Naomi’s mother Penny has told him. ‘Just us and you and Naomi’s best friend Isobel, and her brothers and their girlfriends. That’s all. She’s having her own party on Saturday.’
Timothy likes Naomi’s mother and he quite likes her father but is utterly tongue-tied in his presence. He has good reason to be wary of Isobel, and the thought of meeting both of Naomi’s brothers and their girlfriends for the first time all at once terrifies him. Oh, please, please, God, if you love me, as you say you do, move the clocks on and let it all have happened already.
God does not respond. Maybe Wednesday is his busy night. Timothy has to force himself to turn right into the garden of L’Ancresse. He has forgotten that yesterday he was a man. He is in psychological short trousers today.
He rings the bell. The door opens and Naomi stands before him in all her assumed purity. She is dressed in white, and has a pink bow in her hair.
He kisses her awkwardly, mumbles, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and thrusts the parcel rather too firmly towards her. She fumbles for it and almost drops it.
‘You squashed my breasts,’ she says.
‘Sorry.’
A bad start. Don’t panic, though.
‘What on earth is it?’ she says, examining it with, it has to be said, an element of disbelief.
‘Open it,’ he says.
He has hopes of getting this bit over in private, but his hopes are dashed.
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘We’re having presents later.’
He has spent ages getting ready. He has brushed his hair five times. He’s wearing his best suit, which is also his only suit. Luckily, he is unaware that his tie clashes with his shirt. Unfortunately, he has no colour sense, and unfortunately, he has no sense that he has no colour sense.
Naomi leads him into the living room. A log fire is burning brightly. The family stand in front of it like a firing squad. Above them is a painting of a heavily reefed sloop in high seas off Harwich. On the chaise longue in the bay window there is a pile of elegantly shaped presents, all wrapped in attractive gift paper, most of them tied with gossamer knots. Naomi places Timothy’s parcel on top of the pile. It sits there like a deformed weathervane.
‘We’ll have the presents after supper,’ explains Naomi.
Introductions are made. Timothy meets Naomi’s elder brother Julian and his fiancée Teresa. Julian is solid and smiling. Shaking hands with him is like holding a sweaty sea bass. Teresa is tall, cool and beaky. Her handshake is wristy and malevolent. They both look at Timothy as if he is an interruption. He then meets Naomi’s other brother Clive and his girlfriend, who turns out to be a boyfriend, named Antoine. Clive is slight, boyish, wry. He presses Timothy’s hand sympathetically. Antoine is tall and good-looking in a rather stately way. He is wearing a thick bottle-green corduroy suit and is the only man in the room without a tie. His handshake is brisk. Timothy runs his hand down his trousers in an involuntary gesture of shock. He has never shaken hands with a homosexual before.
Timothy also shakes hands very warily with Isobel. No one else in the room, and certainly not Naomi, knows that Isobel once leant across and pinched his prick with savage envy during geography. He has never felt quite the same about glacial moraines since. Or indeed about Isobel. Perhaps it’s the name, he thinks. Isobel is not a suitable name for a child. You’d have to spend the first thirty years of your life waiting to grow into it.
He feels very uneasy. He’s sure that his suit is badly cut. He worries that, even though he has chewed so much gum that his jaw aches, his breath may be tainted by fear. He is certain that he is unshapely, drab, ugly, the human equivalent of his parcel, which will sit on top of the pile on the chaise longue like a stinging rebuke all evening. If only he knew, if only Naomi could tell him, that, while her engagement to a taxidermist’s son who has helped her lose her virginity in a cheap hotel in Earls Court is not the stuff of her parents’ dreams, it is as nothing compared to their first meeting with Antoine this evening. They’d had no idea that Clive’s girlfriend was a boyfriend. They’d not been told that he was French. They’d had not the slightest inkling that he was a struggling artist with no money who sometimes rode a bicycle over pools of paint to achieve his unruly effects. In the Undesirable Partner Stakes, Timothy is an also-ran.
And all the time, the badly wrapped curlew sits there, impossible to ignore.
‘What on earth can it be?’ asks Julian.
‘Something with a spout?’ suggests Teresa.
‘A teapot, perhaps. Though why should Timothy give Naomi a teapot? Unless…’ Clive smiles. ‘Unless they are about to set up home together. Has a date been fixed?’
‘Hardly. They’re very young,’ says Naomi’s father hastily.
Naomi looks across at Timothy and smiles uneasily. Something about her smile worries him, but he soon forgets it because he has a far greater worry. He’s terrified that someone will successfully guess the parcel’s secret.
Luckily, before this can happen, they are called in to supper, which is served in the rather bare dining room. It smells of not being used often enough. The oblong table is simply laid, with the usual National Trust mats and no tablecloth. The meal, too, is simple – melon, roast chicken and trifle. Naomi’s parents do not have sophisticated tastes. But the melon will be juicy, the chicken tasty, the trifle first rate. There is also wine – a rarity at the Walls table. Only white, no red. Timothy refuses to try it. Julian takes a sip, looks at Teresa, then at the label, and nods. Antoine comments, in his almost showily immaculate English, that if he painted blue nuns the bourgeoisie would have kittens. Timothy remembers the nun on the train and catches Naomi’s eye. She smiles. There is a brief moment of complicity across the table. But then she turns to talk to Clive. It is clear that she adores Clive.
Timothy is sitting between Julian and Antoine. He wishes that he was next to Naomi, but he understands that her brothers must have that privilege. He’s relieved that he’s not next to Isobel. The vicious little cow might squeeze his balls in mid-trifle. He sometimes wonders if Naomi is a good judge of character.
Julian turns to him with the air of a man dispensing charity, but his words are bombs that will explode if Timothy understands the subtext.
‘I have to say, and this will probably amaze you, that in the whole of my life I have never met a taxidermist,’ he says, smiling deceptively.
‘Oh. Well, perhaps you could come and meet my dad some time,’ says Timothy.
‘An offer it would be hard to refuse,’ says Julian. ‘Tell me, I’m intrigued, is your house full of stuffed birds and animals or does your father see as much as he can stand of them during his working hours?’
Timothy understands enough to realise that this is one person who will not go into raptures of delight at the unveiling of the curlew.
