The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [257]
Gerald’s family nobly went on munching corn flakes, but when he told them he wanted to build a whole town—Kellogg’s positively, final offer—it took nearly all his friends in the fifth grade at Hull Grammar School to assist him in consuming enough breakfast cereal to complete his ambition.
Walter Ramsbottom refused to be of assistance.
Angela Bradbury’s help was never sought.
All three continued on their separate ways.
Two years later, when Gerald Haskins won a place at Durham University, no one was surprised that he chose to study engineering and listed as his main hobby collecting medals.
Walter Ramsbottom joined his father in the family jewelry business and started courting Angela Bradbury.
It was during the spring break in Gerald’s second year at Durham that he came across Walter and Angela again. They were sitting in the same row at a Bach cello concert in Hull Town Hall. Walter told him in the intermission that they had just become engaged but had not yet settled on a date for the wedding.
Gerald hadn’t seen Angela for over a year, but this time he did listen to her opinions, because like Walter he fell in love with her.
He replaced eating corn flakes with continually inviting Angela out to dinner in an effort to win her away from his old rival.
Gerald notched up another victory when Angela returned her engagement ring to Walter a few days before Christmas.
Walter spread it around that Gerald only wanted to marry Angela because her father was chairman of the Hull City Amenities Committee and he was hoping to get a job with the council after he’d taken his degree at Durham. When the invitations for the wedding were sent out, Walter was not on the guest list.
Mr. and Mrs. Haskins traveled to Multavia for their honeymoon, partly because they couldn’t afford Nice and didn’t want to go to Cleethorpes. In any case, the local travel agent was making a special offer for those considering a visit to the tiny kingdom sandwiched between Austria and Czechoslovakia.
When the newly married couple arrived at their hotel in Teske, the capital, they discovered why the terms had been so reasonable.
Multavia was, in 1959, going through an identity crisis as it attempted to adjust to yet another treaty drawn up by a Dutch lawyer in Geneva, written in French, but with the Russians and Americans in mind. However, thanks to King Alfons III, its shrewd and popular monarch, the kingdom continued to enjoy uninterrupted grants from the West and non-disruptive visits from the East.
The capital of Multavia, the Haskinses were quickly to discover, had an average temperature of ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit in June, no rainfall, and the remains of a sewage system that had been indiscriminately bombed by both sides between 1939 and 1944. Angela actually found herself holding her nose as she walked through the cobbled streets. The People’s Hotel claimed to have forty-five rooms, but what the brochure did not point out was that only three of them had bathrooms, and none of those had bath plugs. Then there was the food, or lack of it; for the first time in his life Gerald lost weight.
The honeymoon couple were also to discover that Multavia boasted no monuments, art galleries, theaters, or opera houses worthy of the name, and that the outlying country was flatter and less interesting than the fens of Cambridgeshire. The kingdom had no coastline and the only river, the Plotz, flowed from Germany and on into Russia, thus ensuring that none of the locals trusted it.
By the end of their honeymoon the Haskinses were only too pleased to find that Multavia did not boast a national airline. BOAC got them home safely, and that would have been the end of Gerald’s experience of Multavia had it not been for those sewers—or the lack of them.
Once the Haskinses had returned to Hull, Gerald took up his appointment as an assistant in the engineering department of the city council. His first job was as a third engineer with special responsibility