‘Leslie Titmuss!’ Agnes refilled her glass and, because she was used to living alone, forgot his. ‘He’s a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I’m a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?’
‘About the will.’ Fred felt it necessary to explain his visit.
‘I never knew your father had such a sense of humour.’
‘Well, about the will. I want you to stop Henry.’
‘What?’
‘Stop him blundering about, trying to unearth secrets, attacking everyone. He’s coming out with the most ridiculous ideas about my father.’
‘What makes you think I’ve got the slightest influence on him?’
There was a silence. He wondered how he was going to control his rogue brother. ‘Has Lonnie any influence?’ he asked.
‘Of course not. He married her for her remarkable talent for agreeing with absolutely everything he says.’
‘Francesca? Would he take any notice of your daughter?’
‘Strangely enough, I think he’s afraid of Francesca. She’s young, you see. Young people alarm him now.’
‘You see her?’
‘Sometimes.’ She smiled and this made her look unhappier than usual. ‘She was coming tonight, actually. I was going to cook her supper.’
‘What happened?’
‘She chucked me.’
Fred got up, refilled his glass and wandered round the room. He smelled herbs and spices and started to read about how to make a simple, classic blanquette de veau. It was like a tone-deaf person reading a musical score. ‘Are you comfortable here?’
‘Quite.’
‘Not lonely?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘No.’ Fred put away the recipe book he’d taken from the shelf. ‘Sometimes I wonder why not.’
‘You’ve got all those ill people to keep you company.’ She said it seriously, not as a joke, as her father would have said it. Then she asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’ and gave him no hint as to whether it was a general inquiry about his remaining years or an invitation to stay the night.
‘I suppose…’ Fred found the question difficult. She gave him no help. ‘I suppose I shall drive back to Hartscombe.’
‘Well. That’s that then.’ She stood up and threw her cigarette end at the fireplace in a business-like sort of way.
‘Yes.’ He moved to the door. ‘Thanks for the wine.’
‘Any time.’ But before he went she said thoughtfully, ‘Leslie Titmuss! I wonder what on earth your father really liked about him.’
9
A Formal Occasion
Elsie Titmuss was a maid at Picton House, in the employment of Doughty Strove, when George Titmuss, already a clerk in the Brewery, met her at a Skurfield church-outing and they entered into a prolonged engagement and a ferocious programme of saving money. This culminated in marriage and the birth of their only child, the young hopeful, Leslie. Elsie was a surprisingly beautiful young woman with a calm and untroubled expression which survived her long and demanding life as a wife and mother in the Titmuss household. On the evening of the Young Conservatives dinner dance she was fussing round her son with obvious pride, dabbing at him with a clothes-brush and arranging a white handkerchief in his top pocket, as he stood in his hired dinner-jacket in front of the mirror over their sitting-room mantelpiece, his hair neatly combed and slicked down with brilliantine, his face industriously shaved and lightly dusted with his mother’s talc.
‘You use the handkerchief for display purposes only, Leslie,’ his mother instructed him. ‘Don’t go and blow your nose on it, will you?’
‘Mother. I do know.’
‘Stop finicking with the boy, Elsie.’ George Titmuss sat under a relentless overhead light at the dinner table, his jacket hung on the back of his chair, and he wore sleeve-grips to keep his cuffs high and his bony wrists free. The green velvet cloth was spread with files and papers. He was working late on the Simcox Brewery accounts.
‘Or you can have it in your sleeve.’ Elsie took the handkerchief from her son’s top pocket. ‘When I was in service a lot of the gentlemen carried the white dinnertime handkerchief in the cuff.’
‘I’ll have it in the display pocket.’ Leslie, who was always firm with his mother, returned the handkerchief to its previous position.
‘I don’t know why the boy has to be sent out looking like a tailor’s dummy,’ George grumbled as he added up a column of figures.
‘When I was in service with Mr Doughty Strove at Picton House. Pre-war, when I was in service…’
‘Yes, Elsie,’ George said. ‘I think we’ve all had our fill of when you were in service.’ Neither of the men in her life wished to hear about Elsie’s past in the Stroves’ kitchen.
‘It was dress for dinner every night,’ Elsie continued happily. ‘Except Sundays. Sundays it was casual dress and cold cuts, naturally, with beetroot and a lettuce salad. But any other day of the week it was one gong for dressing and then half an hour later the second gong for dinner.’
‘Yes, Elsie. We do know all about it.’
‘Can I borrow the Prefect?’ Leslie asked his father over his mother’s head.
‘Oh, go on, George. All the other Young Conservatives’ll be there with their own transport.’ As always Mrs Titmuss supported her son.
‘I suppose it’ll stop people talking.’ Mr Titmuss gave the matter the careful consideration he bestowed on the agenda at the Parish Council. ‘At least you won’t be hanging round the bus stop dressed like a waiter.’
‘He looks handsome.’ Elsie stood back in admiration. ‘Doesn’t our Leslie look handsome, George?’
‘I’d rather see him looking handsome at eight-thirty in the morning when we’ve got our annual audit at the Brewery,’ George grumbled.
Elsie, giving the collar of her son’s jacket a final brush, noticed his ready-made bow-tie clipped on to the front of his starched white collar. With the knowledge she had gained in service she was shocked. ‘Oh, Leslie. They didn’t give you one of them!’
‘One of what?’
‘Ready made! They ought to have given you a tie-your-own. They always wore tie-your-owns when I was in service.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Not for the first time Leslie found his mother irritating. ‘No one’s going to know, are they?’
‘I suppose not.’ Elsie was doubtful.
‘I bet it cost enough, whatever sort of tie it is.’ George was still muttering over his columns of figures.
‘Well, you didn’t have to pay. I said, you didn’t have to pay, did you, George?’ Elsie asked as she gave the spotless dinner-jacket its last brush.
‘You’re always spending out your money on the boy.’
‘Well, you ought to be grateful. I put by enough for all his little bits and pieces. You ought to be grateful for what I put by.’
A twisted gilt and china clock on the mantelpiece struck metallically. Leslie escaped from his mother’s clothes-brush. ‘I’m going to be late. It’s seven for seven-thirty.’ He went to the present from Cleethorpes and found the car key under it. As he went out into the hall his mother called after him, ‘Goodbye, Leslie. It looks so well on you.’ But he was gone in silence and his parents heard the front door slam. Elsie looked at her husband and smiled happily. ‘Don’t you feel proud of him, George, seeing him go off like that?’
Mr Titmuss looked up from his figures. They were clear signs of a steady increase in the consumption of beer, but he wasn’t smiling. ‘Why should I feel proud?’ he asked.
Fred was also on his way to the dinner dance, as part of the band. It was almost a year since he went to a Chris Barber concert in Worsfield and met Joe Sneeping, who worked at the off-licence in Hartscombe market place and devoted his spare time to the trumpet and the work of the New Orleans musicians recorded in Chicago during the prohibition era. Fred also knew Terry Fawcett, who worked at Marmaduke’s garage and had played the clarinet since
his schooldays, and through Joe he met Den Kitson from the Brewery, who could double on banjo and guitar and even play the bass when one was available. Together they formed the Riverside Stompers and they’d played in pubs up and down the river. They owed their present gig to Fred, who had cashed in on his old acquaintance with Magnus Strove. At least, he had said, they’d be cheaper than the Swinging Romeos from Worsfield. Joe had agreed to sully the purity of the group with dance-hall numbers, Terry had got hold of a saxophone to double on and they had rehearsed ‘Always’ and fallen about laughing.
The Swan’s Nest at Hartscombe is a pleasant, low, brick and weather-boarded building by the river. Its untended garden stretches down to the water, where a few punts and rowing-boats are moored for the pleasure of visitors, and swans glide in a ghostly fashion over the dark water. In the twenties and thirties the name of the Swan’s Nest was synonymous with adultery and illicit weekends. It figured in society divorce-cases and it achieved that somewhat raffish reputation which it cannot quite shake off, although the Guards officers and debutantes, the dubious foreign Counts and undependable married ladies no longer trail their fingers in the water from its punts or order champagne in its bedrooms. At the end of the 1950s it was a respectable, rather down-at-heel hotel living, like Grace Fanner, on memories of more eventful days. In the course of time it would be taken over by a motel chain, re-christened Ye Olde Swan’s Nest and given piped music, colour T.V.s in every bedroom, Teasmades instead of discreet rustic chambermaids in black bombazine, an enlarged car park and the Old Father Thames Carvery.
When Leslie Titmuss went there for his first formal occasion he caught the hotel between its notorious past and its bleak future. Up to the end of dinner the occasion was uneventful. Prawn cocktail, chicken, ice-cream and pineapple slices had been served. The carafe wine had been supplemented by those Young Conservatives prepared to pay for their own drinks, and the buzz of their voices had risen to a pitch of excitement which had more to do with extra bottles of champagne and brandy than the immediate prospect of a few words from Sir Nicholas Fanner, Bart., in his role as Chairman of the Hartscombe and District Conservative Association.
At the top table the Chairman beamed about him with his usual amiability. He was sitting next to Doughty Strove, then the Hartscombe M.P., who was known as a dependable Party member and had greatly assisted the proceedings in Parliament by rarely opening his mouth. So far as his political opinions went he was known to be in favour of capital punishment, corporal punishment and large subsidies for those landlords who were doing their best to grow sunflower seed in bulk. He was also greatly in favour of severing diplomatic ties with France, a country which he regarded with particular horror and suspicion. At Doughty’s right hand sat Grace, who made no secret of the fact that she thought him both unattractive and dull; indeed she was flirting outrageously with the Young Conservative President on her left, a serious-minded junior stockbroker, who was finding the fluttering of Grace’s middle-aged eyelashes unnerving, her jewelled hand on his sleeve alarming and her low, gravelly purr inaudible. Charlie was sitting on the other side of her father and was wearing a green dress made of some shiny material which did nothing for her. She was frowning and the fact that she did not scream or burst into tears was of little help to the nervous Young Conservative beside her who had vainly tried to arouse her interest in cricket and the idea of a European Free Trade Association. In time he gave up and concentrated on the toothy girl to his right.
The President beat on the tablecloth with a spoon. Nicholas rose slowly to his feet and began a low-key, somewhat inaudible address which was more like random jottings from the diary of a Conservative gentleman of the old school than a speech.
‘I look around this room at you,’ he began, ‘and I see young, some very young, Conservatives. You know, there was a time when to be young meant that you were sure to have one of those sort of red tweed ties. Do you remember what I mean?’ The question was clearly rhetorical, and no one answered it. ‘If you were young you wore a corduroy jacket and you were,’ his voice was shrill in comic and pretended fear – ‘a Red! a revolutionary!’
Around him the Young Conservatives, most of whom belonged to the organization for the same reason that they joined the Hartscombe Amateur Operatic Society, to meet each other and fall in love, smiled faintly. There were a few more serious faces. Leslie Titmuss looked pale and intent, concentrating fiercely on Nicholas’s ramblings as though the way to the future might be revealed in them. He was sitting, by some quirk of the placement, next to Jennifer Battley, who was not delighted to have him as a dinner companion. At a table opposite them young Magnus Strove was sitting with a party of pink-faced young men and braying girls, the junior members of the Hartscombe Hunt who had brought their own drink and cigars. Prominent among the group was one who looked plumper and even more prosperous than the rest. His name was Christopher Kempenflatt, heir to the Kempenflatt family building firm, a young man whose eyes always seemed to be popping with carefully simulated surprise and whose moist lips were now open to admit a large Monte Cristo cigar. He was responsible for the fact that the group around him were mopping up more old brandy than the rest of the Young Conservatives and getting more rapidly out of control.
‘Looking round this fine old room’ – Nicholas looked around it – ‘and after a dinner well up to the Swan’s Nest’s high standards…’
‘Kitty Kat and soggy potatoes!’ Kempenflatt had unplugged his cigar, and was greeted by a salvo of giggles from the girls around him.
‘It wasn’t so bad,’ Magnus Strove told them. ‘I actually found a prawn in my cocktail.’
‘Probably got in there to die,’ was Kempenflatt’s opinion.
‘Looking around me,’ Nicholas went on, ‘I see that to be young is to be Conservative. To be on… on the “other side” is, if I may say so, distinctly “old hat”.’
‘Well, he should know about old hats,’ Kempenflatt told the girls.
‘You mean that amazing tweed thing he wears with the flies in it?’ Magnus increased their helpless laughter.
‘There was a moment of aberration’ – Nicholas seemed not the least disconcerted by the hunt members – ‘some of you may be old enough to remember, when Hartscombe itself went Socialist. That was as unfortunate as the time when Oliver Cromwell’s levelling soldiery occupied Rapstone Manor!’
‘Some of us may be old enough to remember that!’ Kempenflatt raised his glass to the Chairman.
‘But now England has come to its senses.’ Nicholas beamed at them all in a mildly congratulatory manner.
‘Charles the Second’s back!’ Magnus announced.
‘Boffing the girls.’ Christopher Kempenflatt filled in the details. Leslie Titmuss looked angrily at the claque opposite him and led a scattered volley of clapping.
‘And my old friend Doughty Strove is back where he should be’ – Nicholas continued with the good news – ‘in the House of Commons. Thanks to your tireless canvassing.’
‘Hear! Hear! Give your dad a hand, Magnus.’ Kempenflatt was puffing out smoke and clapping with his cigar in his mouth.
‘Good old Dad! The silent member for Hartscombe.’ Magnus was not applauding. ‘I don’t know why they don’t replace him with a cardboard cut-out.’
‘But you’ve heard enough from me,’ Nicholas said and got, from the Kempenflatt table, the warmest applause of the evening. ‘Unlike the doom merchants of the Socialist Party we can enjoy ourselves. There will be dancing too… Who will there be dancing to?’ He stooped to hear the Secretary whisper to him, ‘Joe Sneeping and his Riverside Orpheans.’ The Secretary whispered again, Nicholas again bowed his head and came up smiling. ‘Oh, Riverside Stompers,’ he said. ‘I stand corrected. And the bar will remain open until midnight.’ The Secretary whispered again. ‘I understand it’s a question of “buy your own” from now on. “Let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet”.’
‘I do wish Nicholas wouldn’t do that,’ Grace sa
id to the Young Conservative President. ‘He does make such a fool of himself when he quotes poetry.’ Nicholas sank back into his seat to the apparent relief of everyone including himself. The Stompers began to play the music that the Young Conservatives liked to dance to, selections from South Pacific. They were parodying ‘Bali Hi, They Call It’, grinning at each other over their instruments and raising their eyebrows in despair at each syrupy swoop of the music. Then they did their own jazzed-up version of ‘I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’ and felt more at ease. Den Kitson, wearing a tartan dinner-jacket he had borrowed for the occasion, slapped the bass and wondered what the chances were of picking up a bit of Conservative crumpet. Joe and Terry both wore dark suits with black bow-ties and Fred the dinner-jacket he had spent out on in his first term at Cambridge. None of the guests seemed to look at the band, and neither Leslie nor Charlie had shown him a flicker of recognition. Nicholas and Grace were both unaware of his presence. He began to enjoy being overlooked, a pleasure which would grow on him in the years to come.
‘You know Doughty Strove, of course?’ Leslie Titmuss broke a long silence to ask his neighbour, Jennifer Battley, this unenlivening question. He looked with a certain awe to where the square-faced member for Hartscombe, deserted by his neighbours in favour of the dance floor, sat nodding out of time with the music.
‘Oh, yes. He’s my uncle.’
‘I say. Is he really?’
‘His son Magnus is over there. He’s my cousin, actually. Do you know Magnus?’
Leslie looked to where Magnus Strove and Christopher Kempenflatt, surrounded by girls, were enjoying a joke.
‘Well, I don’t really know him,’ Leslie admitted. ‘Of course, my people know the family.’
‘Your people?’
‘My mother.’
‘Oh, really?’ Jennifer was laughing at the sympathetic yawns Magnus was performing for her at the table opposite. Leslie, who hadn’t seen Magnus’s mime, asked her, ‘Do you know who puts up the nominations for the Y.C. Committee? Does Mr Doughty Strove have a voice in these decisions, in your view, Miss Battley? Just the General Committee, you understand. I’m not looking as far as the F. and G.P. yet. It’s early days, of course, that’s understood. Or would Sir Nicholas, the Chairman, be the fellow to contact?’
Paradise Postponed Page 11