‘Aren’t you hungry?’ He looked round and Agnes was there. She’d changed into a tight-fitting skirt and wore a cardigan improbably buttoned down the back. ‘I’ve kept you waiting.’ She sat on a stool at the bar beside him and picked up a menu. She lowered her head and he saw her thin neck and the ridge of her backbone vanishing under the cardigan buttons.
‘I didn’t mind.’ A group of boys in drainpipes and duck’s-arse hair-do’s, laughing and punching each other’s arms, invaded the dance floor. A waitress who looked about fifteen appeared to take their food orders. ‘Curry and chips,’ Agnes told her. ‘And draught bitter. A pint.’
‘Yes. All right.’ Fred had no other ideas.
‘Curry and chips twice. And two pints of Simcox.’
‘Is that the best?’ Fred asked when the waitress had left them.
‘The worst.’ Agnes sounded pleased. ‘The curry smells of the monkey house.’
‘Why do you like that so?’ he was bold enough to ask.
‘Like what?’
‘Things that are really ghastly.’ He felt angered by her expression of sad superiority. She looked as though she had been through experiences she was afraid he would never live up to and didn’t deserve to share. However she smiled now, almost timidly, and seemed to take him into her confidence.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My mother liked everything nice.’
‘You never talk about her.’
‘Oh, she was a great beauty. Anyway, you know she snuffed it. When I was ten.’ Fred had heard the story from his parents. The beautiful Mrs Salter saved up her coupons and went up to London to buy a dress in the sales and a stray buzz bomb caught her. It was a chance in a million of course but there were people in Hartscombe who still felt it showed a sad streak of flippancy to die for a new frock in Oxford Street.
‘Your father had to bring you up?’
‘We brought up each other.’ The curry came and Agnes pursued it gently round her plate with the back of the fork. ‘It was a shock for him.’
‘Is that why he doesn’t seem… well…’
‘Well, what?’ She took a few mouthfuls and then pushed the plate away with a look of gratified disgust. Fred was eating almost with pleasure. ‘Why he doesn’t always seem tremendously keen on curing people like my father.’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘Doesn’t he mean it?’
‘Does your father mean what he says?’
‘Yes. Yes, I quite honestly think so.’
‘A new heaven and a new earth? My father says that’s what yours is always talking about.’
‘He wants things to be better, yes. Not like before the war. Not with unemployment and dole queues and hard-faced businessmen in charge of everything. Nothing particularly wrong with that, is there?’
She didn’t answer, indeed she appeared to have lost all interest, not only in the conversation, but in him. He stumbled on, not caring if he was boring her. ‘You don’t want an H bomb dropping on Worsfield, do you?’
‘Worsfield?’ Agnes seemed to be thinking it over. ‘Well. Perhaps now if you’d said Hartscombe or Rapstone Fanner… Anyway, what’s he doing to stop it? What can he do?’
‘He’s marching. At least he believes in it enough to march.’
‘Shouldn’t we dance to the rotten music?’ As Agnes said it he thought she was giving him a last chance to stop being a bore. They finished their beer and as he followed her towards the spot-lit floor he thought he was going out for a test but felt confident that he could dance rhythmically and rather well. Agnes did a creditable imitation of the pony-tailed girls twirling round them. It had its own expertise but it was a parody of something she half envied, half thought ridiculous. She raised her eyebrows in mock admiration as Fred went through his repertoire of steps, collected her and sent her gyrating away from him like a yo-yo and then pulled her resolutely back again.
‘You’re quite good at this,’ she shouted at him.
‘Surprised?’
The music changed, quietened, began to pour out of the jukebox like treacle. He decided to hold Agnes and dance closely to her. She didn’t move away and he felt that her breasts were not at all supercilious and her thighs made no effort to patronize him. Suddenly elated by this discovery, and by the pints of Simcox Special that he had drunk with the curry, he began to sing along with the Platters,
Heavenly shades of night are falling,
It’s twilight time,
Out of the mist your voice is calling…
‘You must be better at dancing than you are at marching.’ Agnes’s voice was unexpectedly close to his ear.
‘I didn’t want to march especially.’
‘Why?’
‘I could think of better things to do.’
She stood still then, looking at him. ‘I think I’d like another drink.’
‘Are you sorry,’ he asked her when they got back to the bar, ‘that I’m quite good at dancing? I mean, would you feel better if I fell about and stood on your feet?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet.’
The beer, when it came, slopped over the pint mugs, drowning the change. Fred decided that he could cope with Agnes best if he were either drunk or dancing, preferably both.
When they left the Barrel of Biscuits a good many pints later, Fred put out his hand for the Doctor’s car keys. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said.
‘Are you good at that too? How appalling!’ But Agnes got into the passenger seat and he drove her out of Worsfield. They hadn’t met often since he went away to Cambridge and she went to a Worsfield university, but they had gone out on a few occasions to pubs or the Hartscombe Odeon. The first time she had kissed him non-committally on parting and, as he went home alone to the Rectory, he had decided that he was in love with her and that his success or failure with Agnes was a test on which the whole of his life would be judged. He put off any decisive attempt however because he wanted to postpone failure. But the night he deserted from the march he had decided was the time for winning or losing everything. Driving her home he knew that he had lost and that he had been unentertaining. Even his small skill at dancing would be held against him.
They drove to Rapstone first, where he would leave her, and parked beside the lychgate which led into the churchyard. He was about to give her the driving seat and to go home and pretend that the evening had been more eventful than it was. He might hint at great happenings and even lie about it to himself. Fred knew that he had a capacity for self-deception which could cushion many disappointments. He kissed her, as he had done after their other meetings, a tentative and token ‘good-night’, and was astonished at the strength, almost the desperation of her reaction. He felt himself dragged down, below the level of the windows, and was conscious of the taste of her mouth, a vague worry about villagers peering out from behind lace curtains and the inconvenience of a gear-stick in the groin.
After what seemed a long while Agnes surfaced for air. Fred looked at her, with a new sort of assurance.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her.
‘It beats butterfly kisses.’
‘So you remember Charlie’s party?’ He was pleased.
‘No,’ Agnes said decidedly. ‘I don’t remember.’ Then she kissed him again, it seemed endlessly. When she came up for the second time she said, ‘What do you call this then?’
‘Heavy petting?’ Fred suggested. ‘Seventy per cent of fifteen-year-old Americans pet to climax-point two to five times a week.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ She was looking at him with disapproval.
‘A boy called Arthur Nubble smuggled the Kinsey Report into school.’
‘How absolutely disgusting!’
‘Yes,’ he had to agree with her.
‘I hate heavy petting,’ Agnes now decided, pushing him away from her. ‘It’s Yank.’
‘Is it?’ Fred asked, feeling in a confused way that he was being blamed for the embarrassing researches of Dr Kins
ey, and that the evening was over.
‘Terribly Yank. Let’s get out of the car at least.’
Fred looked out of the window. A thin rain was blurring the moonlight. ‘Isn’t it a bit wet?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Agnes was losing her patience. ‘You didn’t mind marching in it!’
The pews in the church had been pushed aside and the marchers slept on the floor. Simeon was stretched out in a sleeping-bag, reading Human Society in Ethics and Politics by Bertrand Russell. He remembered that he had not seen Fred for a long time.
‘There’s a lot of beards and weirds with guitars about the place.’ Henry unstrapped his blanket and his sleeping-bag in an efficient and military sort of way. ‘Fred must be with them.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Trust young Fred to get himself lost. He’ll never get himself round to banning anything.’
In the graveyard, where he would come to stand over his dead father, in a dark corner under the wall, Fred lay on Agnes. Her clothes were pulled up, her long white legs were wrapped round him. He felt a great sense of triumph. It was a victory over Henry, although he would never tell him of his undoubted and unlooked-for success.
Later Agnes and Fred, more or less composed, were standing hand in hand by the car. They spoke in whispers. Agnes had to drive back to Hartscombe and, confident now that he could do anything, Fred insisted on turning the car round for her. He reversed in a fine arc and backed into the wall by the lychgate, producing a bang which might have wakened the long buried inhabitants of Rapstone and the sleeping Fanners in the nave of the church. He stood with Agnes and examined the dented bumper.
‘What will your father say?’
‘Nothing much. I’ll drive it now.’ She got into the car and left him standing.
‘Shall we go dancing again?’ he called after her.
‘Possibly.’ She let in the clutch and drove away from him.
After she’d gone, Fred let himself into the Rectory. The light was still shining under his mother’s bedroom door but he went silently, with his shoes off and still feeling triumphant, into his own bedroom. He was delighted with himself the next morning also when he left the Rectory before his mother was awake and walked up the long road to the signpost which pointed to Rapstone in one direction and Skurfield in the other. Then he thumbed a lift from an early morning farmer’s van which came rattling out of the mist. Another young man was bicycling up the road from Skurfield to get on to the Hartscombe road; he was wearing a cheap, dark, gent’s suiting, bicycle clips, and a row of pens in his breast-pocket. He was Leslie Titmuss and he saw Fred board the van, but Fred didn’t see him.
The newspapers had ridiculed the well-known supporters of C.N.D. for not turning out on the march, so a number of journalists and politicians, some of whom would live to attend Simeon’s funeral, joined on the last stage as did a lot of less well-known faces, so the numbers were swollen to thousands. Fred found them on the heathland of gorse and pines round Aldermaston and he saw a crowd listening to Simeon, who was making a speech by the high wire fence round the atomic research establishment. ‘Peace through fear! God had a similar idea once… Goodness through the fear of hell fire… Not one of his most brilliant notions.’ Fred heard his father’s words blow away across the waste-ground, projected towards the anonymous huts behind the wire. ‘I can’t remember the fear of hell stopping much slaughter…’
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ Fred told his brother when he found him.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘With a band. We found an old van to sleep in.’
‘Dear little Freddie.’ Henry looked at him, almost with kindness. ‘You’re such a hopeless liar!’
7
The Informer
‘I’ve taken counsel’s opinion,’ Henry said.
‘What about?’
‘You know what about. Our father’s alleged will.’
Some months after their father’s death the two brothers, one just on the wrong, the other still on the right side of fifty, were having dinner together in Henry’s club. The Sheridan is a meeting-place for lawyers, actors, writers, publishers and the more presentable type of advertising agent. Its premises are somewhat dusty, its carpets worn but its pictures of past novelists, vanished players and dead judges are famous and its brand of nursery food (overdone roasts, mashed potato and jam roly-poly) is very popular with the sort of Englishman who has never totally recovered from an emotional relationship with his nanny. Henry was proposed for membership of the Sheridan by his second publisher, having left the firm who had accepted The Greasy Pole because of what he thought were disappointing sales.
‘ “Alleged”?’ Fred asked. He was already regretting the rare visit to London and the meeting which his brother had told him was of such urgent and secret importance.
‘Well, it’s not his real will, is it?’ Henry explained with carefully simulated patience, as though Fred were still in his first term at Knuckleberries and needed instruction on the harsh rules about undoing buttons. ‘Simeon couldn’t have meant to ignore his entire family in favour of that jumped-up little sod Leslie Titmuss.’
‘I always found it difficult to discover what he really meant, quite honestly.’
‘The thing’s perfectly obvious!’ Henry was visibly allowing his patience to wear thin. ‘That ridiculous will’s either a forgery…’
‘A forgery by a cabinet minister?’
‘It’s been known. Or Titmuss leaned on our father in some way. Blackmailed him, I mean. Or the old man had simply gone stark-staring mad, which to judge from his behaviour is, in our barrister’s opinion, by far the most likely explanation.’
‘Our barrister’s?’ Fred had never met this adviser.
‘Of course I’m protecting your interests as well, Fred. We’re all in the same boat, you know. As a family we sink or swim together.’
‘Simcox!’ Henry had been hailed by a tall, florid-faced old man with white hair, a dark suit and a Sheridan club tie, who was ambling past the table. He was a judge, Mr Justice Mervyn Haliburton, who sat in the Chancery Division and happened to be expert on the trying of will cases. Knowing this, Henry rose in his seat with exaggerated respect. After having directed him to sit down the Judge said, in that tone of mild self-congratulation which people always use to an author whose work they have endured, ‘Saw that old film of yours last night on my telly box.’
Henry waited for judgement. Instead Haliburton explained to him, in case he might have forgotten, what the work was about. ‘It was the one where the lad from the Brewery rogers the girl in the punt.’
‘The Greasy Pole.’
‘Oh, I dare say. I liked the snaps of the countryside. I don’t suppose you took the snaps, did you? I suppose they have special fellows for that.’ Henry made no comment. Fred was pleased, and a little surprised, that his brother took no credit for the camerawork. The Judge said, ‘You haven’t introduced me to your guest.’
‘I’m sorry. My brother, Frederick. Mr Justice Haliburton.’
Fred didn’t rise. He wanted no part of this sudden involvement with the legal profession. The Judge was looking curiously at Henry, as though he not only needed telling his own plots but was inexplicably forgetful of his closest relations.
‘We don’t hear about your brother, Simcox. Never read about any brother in those thumbnail sketches of you we always get in the Sunday supplements. Perhaps your brother doesn’t like to get himself into the papers.’
‘I’m a country doctor,’ Fred explained.
‘Oh well. I suppose that might account for it. Do carry on. Don’t let me stop you having food.’ The Judge wandered off, beaming as though he had trapped an unwary witness, and Henry laughed, Fred thought, a little nervously.
‘There’s nothing like the Sheridan,’ Henry told his brother, who wished he were far away, in the Badger at Skurfield, playing a session with a middle-aged jazz group who were still tolerated at occasional gigs. ‘You meet actors, judges as y
ou can see, wonderful old characters, and the occasional bishop.’
‘Just a typical cross-section of British society in the eighties?’
‘You do agree, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes. It’s fascinating.’ Fred only wanted to stop his brother talking. He longed for the company of the ageing trumpet-player from the Imperial Wine stores in Hartscombe with whom he could exchange quotations from old Louis Armstrong records they both knew by heart.
‘You do agree that the conduct of our father’ – Henry persisted – ‘over the years, showed every sign of complete insanity?’
‘He was credulous. He believed in causes.’
‘That hardly explains his entering other people’s houses on his hands and knees, trumpeting like an elephant.’
‘There was a reason for that.’
‘You’d find a reason for everything! I don’t know why you should make excuses for him. He cut you out of his will too.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t think I needed the money.’ Fred stole a glance at his watch. It was still lamentably early.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Henry looked hard at his brother. ‘You never quarrelled with him, did you?’
‘No,’ Fred answered quickly, not giving himself time to wonder if he were telling the truth.
‘Never. On any occasion?’
‘No. Never.’
‘May I come in?’ Fred stopped helping out King Oliver on the drums as his father came into his room after they were all back from Aldermaston. ‘Is it the noise, are you trying to write a sermon?’
‘Are you expecting one?’ Simeon moved a pile of records and sat on the end of the bed. ‘Odd, this need people seem to feel for sermons. I could never understand it. You know, often on Sundays, I look down at those upturned faces and I feel an irresistible urge to say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake go home to lunch. Don’t flatter yourselves by feeling that you’ve sinned.” What do you want a sermon about?’
Paradise Postponed Page 8