Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  About a week later he was having a lonely lunchtime beer in the Baptist’s Head in Rapstone and talking to Ted Lawless, the landlord and former Battle of Britain pilot, who kept his bar hung with photographs of Spitfires, parties in the mess and himself with his thumbs up as he climbed into the cockpit. Ted and his wife, Ivy, were starting to make ‘improvements’ in the saloon with checked tablecloths, knives and forks wrapped in paper napkins and chicken or scampi in the basket at lunchtime. Fred was listening, not for the first time, to Ted’s account of a New Year’s Eve party at R.A.F. Worsfield when he and Ivy, then a succulent W.A.A.F., had been having it away in the back of an old transport plane which suddenly took off on a night flight to Dundee. Then the saloon door opened and Agnes walked in wearing trousers and a military-looking mac.

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for you for days.’

  Fred bought her a drink and thought he did so too eagerly. He couldn’t imagine why he felt guilty, as though he were the one who had disappeared and left her no word. In a little while she said she wanted to go for a walk, a thing he’d never known her to do before, and he was afraid that she might want to use the occasion for a serious talk, to tell him that it had all been a mistake, an ill-considered moment which he must never expect to repeat. They walked across Rapstone Park in silence and he didn’t know what to expect when Agnes took his arm and led him towards the folly, a place which, because of its rotting staircase and bramble-covered approach, was always sure to be deserted.

  It was a stunted Gothic tower meant to give the casual visitor to Rapstone Park the deluded impression that he could see all the way to Worsfield Cathedral. Now Fred and Agnes heard the scuttle of birds nesting in the rafters and climbed unsteadily towards a patch of daylight, the open door on to the roof.

  ‘You told your father!’ She had said nothing about her visit to London and Fred needed to prove himself hard done by so he accused her.

  ‘What did I tell him?’

  ‘About us.’

  ‘What is there to tell?’

  ‘I should have thought, something.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘You told him about the car.’

  ‘Oh, about that!’ She seemed in no mood to take him seriously.

  ‘Everyone seems to tell about everything,’ Fred grumbled.

  ‘I’m not accustomed to lie to my own father.’ She had reached the top of the staircase and stepped out on to the roof of the tower. ‘Why’re we coming up here?’

  ‘Because it’s Rapstone folly.’ Fred followed her out.

  ‘I suppose so.’ She was looking out over the parkland, the trees each surrounded with a protective palisade, the herd of deer dappled in the shadows and the drive curving up to the house. Fred went on asking questions, as though the last week were a constant itch he couldn’t help scratching.

  ‘How was Henry Moore?’

  ‘Who?’ With Agnes, it seemed, the name rang no bell.

  ‘The sculptor,’ he reminded her.

  ‘So far as I know he’s perfectly all right. What ridiculous questions you do ask.’

  ‘And how’s Aunt Molly?’

  ‘Almost as well as Henry Moore, I suppose.’ She was laughing at him now.

  ‘What did you do in London?’

  ‘Oh, London? Hung about, went round the coffee bars in Soho; that sort of thing.’

  ‘Who did you stay with then?’ He thought he was mad to ask her the question and hoped she wouldn’t answer it.

  ‘Oh, just some people.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘People I was at college with, that’s all.’

  ‘Where do they live, these people?’

  ‘Well, aren’t you quite extraordinarily nosy?’ She was frowning now, no longer laughing.

  ‘You told your father you were staying with your Aunt Molly. I thought you never told lies. To your father.’

  ‘Well, honestly! No one could ever accuse you of not telling lies to your father.’

  ‘When you were in London…’ Fred started again patiently, but Agnes interrupted him, lifting up her arms and joining her hands behind his neck.

  ‘When I was in London I wasn’t here, was I? Now I’m here. Why don’t we try and make the best of it?’

  When she kissed him her eyes were closed. His were open and he looked past her, over the park to the driveway where he could see the minute figure of his father walking purposefully towards the house on some private errand or visit.

  8

  The Pastoral Visit

  The manservant Wyebrow opened the front door, gave a quick look to assure himself that the Rector was not on all fours, and crossed the hall to knock on the drawing-room door and so produced a sound which was lost in the mounting crescendo of screams which came from the other side of the door, an outcry which had been audible in the driveway and had sent the rooks clattering out of the trees on the other side of the kitchen garden.

  When he went into the drawing-room Simeon found Grace was seated at a small, photograph-laden desk writing letters, apparently unconcerned. She lifted her head from the scrawled handwriting on mauve crested paper and nodded wearily towards the hearthrug where eighteen-year-old Charlie stood, her hair awry, her eyes closed, her face purple with indignation, her clenched fists beating against her tweed-covered thighs, kicking up this extraordinary hullabaloo. The effect might have been weirdly comic, like the sight of a fully grown comedian acting the part of a baby screaming in its pram, if the anger behind the outcry had not been so obvious. The Rector only glanced at the mother and approached the deafening girl. He took her arm and said, ‘Now then, Charlie. Isn’t it time I took you up?’

  There was a moment’s silence and then the girl, with another howl, tried to shake Simeon off, but the laying-on of hands had been accompanied by unexpected strength. She found herself gripped firmly by the Rector, who had apparently been sent for to perform a miraculous cure, or at least minister to her spiritual needs, and propelled to the door, through which she went still screaming. She was still doing so when Wyebrow came out of his pantry and, looking up from the well of the stairs, saw the ill-assorted couple disappear into Charlie’s bedroom. Bridget Bigwell, sweeping the upstairs corridor, saw it too, paused, clicked her tongue in mild disapproval and then continued her work with renewed determination.

  The bedroom door closed; the intervals between the screams increased in length. Then the cries died away, turned to low irregular sobs and finally to silence. Wyebrow returned to his pantry and continued with his letter to an old wartime friend, now an officer in the New York City police. ‘Dear Chuck,’ he wrote. ‘Thrilled to bits to hear about your new leisure-wear and wish I could see you in it. I haven’t bought anything exciting in the way of trousers lately owing to the shops in this part of rural England being distinctly below par.’ Grace also sent her pen scurrying across the paper, writing to those distant members of her husband’s family she suspected might be divorcing, or sick, or even dead, always avid for news to relieve the heavy monotony of life in Rapstone Park.

  Charlie lay silent, fully dressed under the warmth of the eider-down. Her sensible shoes had been removed and put side by side in front of the fireplace. Her face was red, her eyes swollen but she was silent now, gently sucking the knuckle of her first left-hand finger as the Rector turned to the bookshelf. From among her childhood favourites including The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women and Five Go Adventuring he selected one from which he started to read to soothe her anger. ‘ “A propeller, set behind two exposed seats, revolved slowly.” ’ Simeon used the voice he kept for the lessons. ‘ “Beside it stood a tall, thin man in flying-kit; his leather flying-coat, which was filthy beyond description with oil stains, flapped open, exposing an equally dirty tunic, on the breast of which a device in the form of a small pair of wings could just be seen. Under them was a tiny strip of the violet-and-white ribbon of the Military Cross. ‘You one of the fellows on the new course?’ he asked shortly.
‘Er – er – er yes, sir,’ was the startled reply. ‘Ever been in the air?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Bigglesworth, sir. I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mouthful, but that isn’t my fault. Most people call me Biggles for short.’ A slow smile spread over the face of the instructor. ‘Sensible idea,’ he said.” ’

  ‘ “All right, Biggles, get in.” ’ Charlie supplied the words, quite calm now.

  ‘What did you say to her!’ Simeon was angry by the time he got downstairs to Charlie’s mother.

  ‘Nothing very much. I mean, nothing to cause all that fuss. I think I was saying that at her age all my friends were thinking of parties and dances, being presented at Court. It was just the time when we were all being “brought out”. “But with you, Charlie,” I told her, “there’s nothing at all to bring.” ’

  ‘How did you expect her to react?’ He spoke with some contempt.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. When I was Charlie’s age we didn’t have a brass farthing. Daddy had pushed off and taken most of his miserable army pension with him. I used to fill my handbag with bits I scrounged from cocktail parties. That was my lunch.’

  ‘How the poor live!’

  ‘All the same I managed to not wear the same party frock too often.’ Grace was looking in a succession of alabaster and mother-of-pearl boxes for a cigarette. ‘I was typing letters for old Lady Naboth’s dreadful charities and dancing until three o’clock most mornings. Can you see any of your precious trades union members working hours like that?’

  ‘Their night-shift probably doesn’t entail much dancing.’

  ‘You’re angry just because I tell Charlie what I think! Don’t you want me to be honest with her?’

  ‘It might be better to be kind, or at least take an interest in her?’

  ‘Oh, you think everyone’s interesting. That’s because you’re a Red. I don’t. I believe that quite a lot of people were just manufactured when God was thinking of something else.’

  ‘Like the next cocktail party.’ Simeon seemed to despair of the woman, and she also looked at him with genuine disapproval. ‘Don’t be blasphemous, Simeon,’ she said piously. ‘Please, do try not to be blasphemous!’

  That afternoon Nicholas Fanner had also been out visiting. Percy Bigwell had been a skilled and expert woodman and an elegant dancer and so won the love of Bridget Bigwell, then only one of the Fanners’ housemaids, when they were both in their teens. In middle age Percy still worked in the woods, felling trees and sawing them into lengths suitable to be taken into the furniture factories in Worsfield. A few months before, Tom Nowt, felling an old elm in a brutal and inexpert manner (all his skills were for shooting), caused the accident in which Percy’s legs were broken. After this incident Tom Nowt was rightly blamed, shunned and became more isolated in the village and spent more time in his hut in the woods.

  Nicholas, with his comfortable, well-meaning smile and his baggy clothes, wandered into the stuffy back room of Percy’s cottage and urged the crippled man not to get up. He was sure that Percy would soon be out again, beating on the next shoot that Nicholas shared with Doughty Strove of Picton Principal. Percy told him that Dr Salter didn’t hold out much hope for that and added, ‘And Doctor says the worst of it is, I’ll probably last like this another thirty years. I’ll be a creaking gate, he reckons, and they goes swinging on for ever.’

  ‘Dr Salter never has been terribly keen on keeping his patients alive,’ Nicholas admitted. ‘He’s a bit of a gloom merchant, quite honestly, Bigwell. No need for us to listen to all that doom and gloom now we’ve got rid of the Socialists.’ He rose to go on his cheerful way. ‘We’ll be together again this autumn, you’ll see. You putting up the birds with your old ash stick and me and Mr Strove bagging them high on the wing. You get well, old man. We can’t do without you.’ As he went Nicholas decided to send Bridget home with a box of biscuits for Percy. He didn’t know, because they had never told him, that the Bigwells didn’t like Worsfield biscuits and had a cupboard full of Mrs Bigwell’s employer’s presents.

  When he got home Nicholas found that the Rector had come to tea and that Charlie was upstairs resting. Grace told him that she had sent for Simeon because of another of the girl’s ridiculous tantrums. ‘It’s the excitement, I expect,’ Nicholas said, noticing that Simeon had polished off all the buttered toast. ‘She’s excited about the Young Conservatives dinner dance. Well, Charlie doesn’t have many treats.’

  ‘Take sex, for instance.’

  ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.’

  Dinner at the Sheridan club was over and Fred was hoping that the meeting with his brother, and another indignant and frustrating discussion of the Rector’s will, would soon be over also. He thought of the last time he had seen his father, an old, dying man in pyjamas who smelled faintly of the inside of linen cupboards. Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. ‘It’s something I’d rather not think about,’ he said. ‘We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which we find impossible to imagine.’

  ‘You talk exactly like he did.’ Henry was impatient.

  ‘We all assume we’re the result of our own particular immaculate conception. You mean, I talk like our father?’

  ‘No. I mean like Dr Salter. My dear Frederick, that ludicrous will can’t have been an isolated incident of complete irresponsibility. Our barrister wants further examples of eccentric behaviour.’

  ‘Is sex eccentric behaviour?’

  ‘If you happen to be a vicar. I’ll have to ask Mother.’

  ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Fred became serious.

  ‘I’ll have to.’

  ‘I don’t believe that those are the sort of questions our mother would care to answer.’

  ‘I’ll have to make systematic inquiries.’

  ‘Why? Are you such an expert?’ Fred resented his brother adopting the role of detective.

  ‘On sex?’

  ‘No.’ Fred looked at his brother. ‘On fidelity.’

  Henry let the accusation go by, as though it were a sneaky and underhand ball thrown at him which it would be beneath his dignity to touch. He sipped his brandy and said, ‘Another thought occurs to me.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Of course you know our father was a Commie.’ Henry said it as though he were stating the obvious. ‘A raving Red, quite clearly. I mean, suppose he was spying for the Soviets and Leslie Titmuss got wind of it. Suppose it was a simple case of blackmail!’

  ‘My God, Henry!’ Fred laughed. ‘You mean he was selling the secrets of the Parish Council to Russia? Brilliant! Good enough for one of your movie scripts.’

  ‘Seriously. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’ve got to a dangerous age.’ Fred stood up. His brother looked up at him inquiringly, no doubt thinking their conversation was again going to concern itself with sex. ‘The age when you sit in the Sheridan club drinking too much brandy and dreaming about spies.’

  On his way out Fred passed a telephone in a glass box by the front door. He lifted it and dialled a number. The voice which answered him sounded, as usual, as though it was trapped in a burning building with no possibility of escape.

  ‘Agnes? It’s Fred. Freddie Simcox. Well, could I come round and talk to you for a moment?’ When she asked him what he wanted to talk about he said, ‘Well, of all things, Leslie Titmuss.’

  Fred found Agnes in her rent-controlled flat at the far end of the Fulham Road. She had turned herself, since her divorce from Henry, into a one-woman organization called the Flying Kitchen and cooked, alone or with occasional help from unemployed actresses, for dinner parties, directors’ lunches and such-like functions, work which she carried out efficiently but without many smiles. As she spent so much of her time cooking she had knocked her kitchen and living-room together, the resulting space being a dark but workmanlike
cavern with a lot of shelves, wooden surfaces, cookery books, yellowing recipes pinned to the walls, pots and pans well scoured, bunches of herbs hanging up to dry. Agnes was wearing trousers and canvas shoes, smoking industriously and with a litre bottle of red wine beside the old rocking-chair in which she had been sitting.

  ‘You should have rung earlier. You could’ve had the remains of an oxtail I had left over from a ghastly dinner party I cooked in Highgate last night.’ She shuddered at the memory and poured him a glass of wine. ‘Rag trade!’

  In the dim light the shape of her face seemed unaltered; for all her cooking she had remained thin. Her smile was, as always, one of rueful courage against enormous odds. Fred thought that what he had loved was her unhappiness, although it was a quality which made him feel uneasily inferior to her. He had thought she knew of great cosmic causes for discontent of which he, in his mundane way, was cheerfully unaware. This unhappiness, which she gave off like a rich and potent smell, had been, for the years, the decades he had known her, the secret of her sexual attraction.

  ‘Are you doing a lot of cooking?’ He knew it seemed a trivial question in the face of so much heroically borne grief.

  ‘Henry doesn’t like me doing it. He’s dead scared of showing up at some film mogul’s house with La Lonnie and finding me slaving away in the kitchen.’

  ‘Look. About Leslie…’ Fred started when they were sitting beside her small but genuine and smouldering fireplace.