The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [122]
"Mmm . . . ?"
"One doesn't keep the prize. Doesn't look good . . ."
"Looks bloody awful," Gerald muttered; then boomed considerately, "I don't feel I should snatch victory from my own constituents." Shy cheers were sounded. "Barbara—can I persuade you . . . ?"
The lady mayor seemed to register at least three insults in this proposal: to her status, to her taste, and to her well-advertised abstinence. Nick had a hunch too that she wasn't called Barbara. Wasn't she Brenda Nelson? The bottle lay for a moment in Gerald's hands, as if tendered by a mocking sommelier. Then he passed it hastily back to the trestle table. "Give someone else a treat," he said, with a nod.
Still, the feeling that he ought to be allowed to win something had clearly taken hold of him. Seeing his chance, craning round as if he'd lost someone, he struck out by himself through the crowds. Penny trotted patiently after him, clutching the marmalade, and then Nick, some way behind the wake of laughter and agitation that followed Gerald's passage.
The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of Gerald's youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with country friends. But at Barwick, which still had a regular livestock market and loose straw blowing in the street, the welly, black, leaden-soled, loose on the heel, was an unembarrassed fact, and whanging it a popular pastime. Gerald approached the flimsy archway made of two poles and a banner, beneath which a white chalk crease had been drawn. "Put me in for a go!" he said. He had the expression of a good sport, since he was new to the game, but a glint of steel showed through.
"That's 25p a whang, sir, or five for a pound."
"Ooh, give us a quid's worth," said Gerald, in a special plummy voice he used for slang. He groped busily in his pockets, but he'd spent all his change already. He got out his wallet and was hesitantly offering a £20 note when Penny stepped forward and put a pound coin on the table. "Ah, splendid . . . " said Gerald, observing a couple of teenage boys who weren't making an effort—the boot plonked to earth a few feet in front of them. "OK . . . !"
He took the boot and weighed it in his hand. People gathered round, since it was something of an event, their MP, in his bespoke pinstripe and red tie, clutching an old Wellington boot and about to hurl it through the air. "Know how to whang it, then, Gerald?" said a local, perhaps kindly. Gerald frowned, as though to say that instruction could hardly be necessary. He'd seen the ineffectual lob of the boys. He took his first shot from the chest, in muddled imitation perhaps of a darts-player or shot-putter, the sole to the fore. But he had underestimated the weight of the thing, and it landed between the first two lines. "You've got to really whang it," said a sturdy but anxious-looking woman, "you know . . ."—and she made a big arcing gesture. The boot was handed back to him by a little boy and he tried again, with a barely amused smile, as if to say that taking advice from working-class women in headscarves and curlers was all part of being their MP. He dutifully imitated her windmilling gesture, but perhaps because of the restriction imposed at the top of the arc by his tightly tailored jacket, he let go of the boot in a twirling spin—it turned over two or three times in the air before thudding to the grass. "Now that's a bit better," someone murmured "Now you're getting there!" Another man called out hectically, "Up the Conservatives!" Nick realized with a soft shock that there was a lot of goodwill for Gerald among the crowd, as well as the common sense of delight at seeing a famous person perform even the simplest task; and Gerald seemed to draw on this for his third attempt. He unbuttoned his jacket, an action which itself was greeted with approval, and sent the welly in a vigorous underarm lob, still wastefully high, but landing beyond the twenty-yard mark. There was applause,