It Had to Be You by David Nobbs

into the soup to weaken the mixture, and poured it down the sink.
    Sardines. He had a craving for sardines. A bit strong for the Brouilly, but this wasn’t an evening for purists.
    Halfway through the tin he suddenly felt absolutely disgusted by the taste of tinned sardines. He chucked the tin into the elegantly concealed waste bin.
    He began to feel very uncomfortable in the kitchen. It was Deborah’s room, friendly, lived-in, foody, attractive but unpretentious and rather higgledy-piggledy.
    He remembered that there was a box of chocolates in the living room. It was up to him to finish them now.
    No need now to defer to Deborah’s wants. He chose the marzipan one from both levels, chewed them greedily, not popping them into his mouth whole as Deborah insisted. Manners hardly mattered now.
    Half a tin of tomato soup, half a tin of sardines, two chocolates filled with marzipan. It was not the best three-course meal he had ever eaten.
    He went to the phone. He would ring Helen, go straight round, fuck her most tremendously.
    He dialled her number, then put the phone down hurriedly.
    He decided to make a list of everything he had to do tomorrow. That calmed him. That brought a bit of instant order into his life.
    He sat at the mahogany table in the small dining room with the burgundy walls which were just a little darker than the Brouilly, and there, where they had hosted so many little dinner parties over the years, he began his list.
    Vicar. (Never met him. Will he be cross because I never ever went to church?)
    Funeral Director. (The Hutchinsons used Ferris’s Funeral Services.)
    The Hutchinsons. (Were Ferris’s Funeral Services any good?)
    Marcia. (Tell her the bad news. Cut her off if she offers help i.e. her body.)
    Vernon and Ursula Norris. Tom and Jen…
     
    Oh, sod it. Do it tomorrow.
    He dropped the list into the waste bin.
    He switched the television on, flicked though the channels, saw a pathologist cutting out the left eye of a middle-aged man and dropping it into a bottle, a panellist in a panic as he thought of the ridicule he was going to get from his workmates after he’d failed to name the capital of Hungary, a C-list fashion designer eating leeches in a mangrove swamp, an audience roaring as an overpaid chat show host held out a box of chocolates to a pretty actress and said, ‘Can I give you one?’, a pathologist cutting up a pretty girl, a celebrity chef cutting up a bulb of fennel, blood pouring from the stomach of a woman in a crypt, an ugly twenty-two-stone man with a horrendous paunch throwing a dart at a board, a lion eating a cheetah, a pathologist cutting up a gay young man, a manly Rock Hudson trying to seduce a virginal Doris Day, a pathologist cutting up a very obese man, a celebrity chef cutting up a loin of pork, and two sloths copulating very … well … slothfully.
    He switched off, poured himself another glass of Brouilly, went to the waste bin, rescued his list, went back to the dining room, stretched the list out on the kitchen table, trying to iron it with his hands, added one more name, Mike … Oh God, should he invite Mike, how would he behave? … He began to think about Mike, once his best friend, now a wreck. Memories of happier times with Mike. Lots of drinking. He took a couple more sips of the Brouilly. His head dropped.
    He woke suddenly, to find himself face down on a crumpled piece of paper covered in traces of tomato soup and sardine oil. He had no idea where he was. At first he felt that Deborah’s death was part of a dream. Then he was wide awake and standing up and knocking his red wine all over the carpet.
    ‘Oh, shit,’ he shouted to nobody.
    What did you put on red wine? White wine? Salt? Lavatory paper? He tore off some toilet rolls and stamped around on them, watching them go red. Then he remembered that Deborah had some stuff that worked wonders. He rummaged around under the sink, found the stuff, stood up, bashed his head on the edge of the cupboard door,