At which point a crusty bread roll, thrown by Magnus, whizzed past Leslie Titmuss’s right ear.
‘He’s such a fool!’
‘Sir Nicholas?’ Magnus was puzzled.
‘No, Magnus, you idiot! He’s my boyfriend, you know. Such a cretin! I say, are you going to eat that roll?’ Jennifer seized it without waiting for his answer and, with a strong throw learned on the cricket field at Benenden, hit Christopher Kempenflatt on the forehead.
‘Of course,’ Leslie said, paying no attention to the fusillade but looking at the guests on the top table, ‘that’s Sir Nicholas’s daughter, Charlotte. You know her? I must say she looks awfully left out.’
‘Oh, bull’s eye!’ Jennifer couldn’t help clapping as another bread roll, hurled by Magnus, got Leslie on the cheek. He stood up quickly, looking very pale. ‘I say.’ Jennifer tried to stop laughing. ‘You’re not miffed, are you?’
‘No. Not at all. Of course not. It’s terrifically good fun Would you mind excusing me a moment?’
‘Of course not. Take all the time you want,’ Jennifer told him and Leslie was still smiling as he set off towards the top table, and continued to do so when another roll struck him on the back.
Charlie was sitting alone. Her neighbour had gone to dance with the girl on his other side. Nicholas and Doughty Strove had joined a group at the bar, and Grace had suggested a dance to the President of the Young Conservatives, an offer which he had not felt able to refuse. So Charlie was bored to despair, sitting alone and talking to no one. She kept her head down and stared at the pattern she was making with fork lines on the white tablecloth, wanting at all costs to avoid catching a glimpse of her mother steering an apprehensive young man round the floor with relentless charm. She didn’t raise her head when Leslie glided up to her and spoke. ‘Frightfully jolly party, isn’t it?’
‘You think so?’
‘Rather! You wouldn’t care to dance, would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t care to.’
‘Then shall we?’
She looked up at him and saw a look of extraordinary determination. Astonished and a little alarmed by his pale intensity she put down her fork and stood up, her arms held out in what looked like an attitude of self-defence rather than an embrace. He put a hand on her waist and manoeuvred her towards the floor where they moved awkwardly, self-consciously and without great skill or enthusiasm. Fred tried to embark on an ambitious drum roll, met a warning look from Joe Sneeping and returned obediently to the straightforward rendering of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.
‘Good fun, these do’s, aren’t they?’ Although he found that it required great concentration to talk and dance at the same time, Leslie felt that Charlie looked so ill at ease that he was bound to divert her. His hand at her waist felt very warm, as though he were touching a radiator. When she didn’t answer he repeated, ‘I said these do’s are pretty good fun.’ And added, ‘Of course, there’s a serious point behind them. I mean, I don’t suppose I’d be here at all if I didn’t want to get on in the Party.’ He danced on in silence, waiting for a comment that never came. Christopher Kempenflatt hove up behind them, shunting a tall girl backwards. Magnus was in front, dancing with Jennifer.
‘I say, Titmuss. I say, old boy,’ Kempenflatt shouted as he approached. ‘Who’s your tailor?’
‘Like your tie, old fellow.’ Magnus steered alongside. ‘Bet it took simply hours to get such a perfect butterfly.’
Leslie looked at them, puzzled. Holding the solid, embarrassed Charlie he came to a slow halt as Magnus’s hand snatched the clip-on tie from his collar. He gazed after it and saw it settle, a black bow in Jennifer’s hair.
‘You old cheater!’ Magnus’s voice was high-pitched, accusing. Leslie seemed to be surrounded by young men, healthy-faced, loud-voiced, and Charlie had abandoned him as the music stopped.
‘Where did you get that suit, Titmuss?’ Kempenflatt asked, and Magnus was pulling open Leslie’s jacket, searching for the label. ‘Savile Row, is it? Huntsmans?’
‘Better than that,’ Magnus announced. ‘Please see this garment is returned to Henry Pyecroft, Gents Outfitter, River Street, Hartscombe.’
‘Lovely bit of schmutter, isn’t it?’ Kempenflatt said in a stage-Jewish accent, feeling the cloth between his finger and thumb, and Magnus went on reading the label to announce, ‘ “All clothing impeccably clean”. Ugh!’
‘Look here. I know it’s just a bit of fun but…’ Leslie smiled round at the strange faces, anxious to enjoy the joke. As he did so he felt a jerk behind him and Kempenflatt was pulling off the jacket. Magnus was saying persuasively, ‘Take it off, Titmuss. You don’t know where it’s been.’ Leslie began to panic, wondering where this unsolicited undressing was going to end.
‘ “Impeccably clean”! Strong smell of mothballs.’ When it was off, Kempenflatt sniffed the jacket and chucked it to Magnus, who said, ‘As last worn at the Municipal Sewerage Workers Ball,’ and did a quick pass to Jennifer, who held it uncertainly in front of her in a dark bundle.
As they stared at him Leslie said, ‘Can I have it back, please?’ After that the silence seemed endless and then Fred, who had been watching with interest from behind his drum set, started to whistle and tap out the rhythm of ‘Always’. The other Stompers joined in. Jennifer looked at Magnus and then handed the jacket back to Leslie. He thanked her and turned away towards the glass doors that opened on to the hotel garden, walking as quickly as he could, but he still heard Kempenflatt boom, ‘I say, Magnus. Do you actually know that fellow?’ And the answer, ‘Of course I know him. His mother was our skivvy.’
When they had begun to gather round her partner and attack his clothing, Charlie had gone out into the garden. It was still early in the summer and the night wind soothed her burningly embarrassed skin. She crossed the grass and stood on the old landing-stage, looking down at the moored punts which had been put out during the Easter holidays. The water rattled the boats at their moorings, dangerous-looking swans glided by about their business and she heard Leslie say, ‘It was all good fun.’ He was still smiling, wearing his jacket now, but not his tie.
‘Was it?’ She couldn’t accept his description of an evening which had come so close to making her scream.
‘They’re all right really,’ he told her. ‘Just excited.’
‘My mother wouldn’t have let them behave like that.’
‘No.’
‘My mother would’ve given them one look and they’d all have knelt down and kissed her hand.’ She spoke with contempt. ‘Like slaves! They all fell in love with her at dances. They’d have obeyed her breathlessly.’
‘I expect she was very beautiful.’
‘That’s what she keeps telling me. You’ve lost your tie.’ She seemed to notice it for the first time.
‘Yes.’
‘My mother hates me, because I’m not beautiful. I don’t suppose she cares very much for you either.’
‘But your father?’ Leslie, who wasn’t in the least interested in Grace, asked anxiously.
‘My father’s sorry for me. You know what he’s president of, apart from the Conservatives? The All England Begonia Society. And you know why he chose begonias?’
‘No. I don’t know.’
‘He says they’re such ugly little flowers. He feels sorry for them.’
‘Sorry for begonias?’ Leslie Titmuss was out of his depth.
‘Such ugly and vulgar little things! He says somebody has to look after them.’
There was a silence, and then Leslie tried to cheer his partner up. ‘I think you look jolly nice in that dress.’ It wasn’t a remark calculated to give offence, but Charlie was offended.
‘Isn’t it horrible? Please. Tell me it’s horrible. She made me wear it.’
Further down the landing-stage Leslie saw Young Conservatives and their girlfriends climbing into punts, shouting, laughing, pushing away from the bank.
‘Look. Would you like to have a go on the river? It might be a bit of fun.�
��
Charlie didn’t say anything, but after the boat containing Leslie’s tormentors had got clear, and the splashing and laughter had died away in the darkness, she allowed him to help her into a punt. He stood up stiffly and remembered the lessons in poling the Simcox boys had given him once, long ago, when they all went on the river. He was cautious at first but soon gained confidence and threw up the pole between his hands and steered them away from the willows which overhung the bank. Charlie sat on a cushionless seat, trailing a hand in the welcome chill of the water, wondering what she thought she was doing, but glad to be away from the dance floor and to hear the music of the Stompers fade as they drifted away from the hotel. She would have been quite calm if Leslie hadn’t felt the need to pay her compliments.
‘You’ve got nice hair, too. That was the first thing I noticed about you this evening. The niceness of your hair.’
‘Don’t say that!’ She thought his voice had sounded extraordinarily loud, echoing across the water and alarming the swans.
‘I never noticed your hair. Not when we were kids.’
‘Please. Don’t say things like that to me.’
Then they heard the shouting and the laughter again. The punt paddled by Christopher Kempenflatt and a crew of girls had turned and was being driven fast towards them. Magnus Strove was standing in the prow holding the huge pole like a lance at a medieval tilt-yard. He gave a wild cry of triumph as his weapon struck Leslie Titmuss in the chest and sent him and his dinner-jacket, with his arms and legs waving helplessly, into the dark, brackish water of the Thames.
George Titmuss worked on his accounts and Elsie sat up knitting, determined not to go to bed until Leslie was safely home. They had the wireless on, playing late-night dance music, and she thought of her son, so immaculate and debonair, floating round the dance floor with a girl in a white dress who was smiling up at him. Then she heard the car arrive and the garage door shut. She went into the hall to meet him.
She heard his step on the gravel and opened the front door. He was still soaking wet, the starch gone out of his shirt and his brilliantined hair standing up in spikes because he had tried to rub it dry with his handkerchief. He stepped into the hallway, leaving a small puddle on the linoleum, and came very near to his mother to whisper, ‘Bastards!’
10
The Temptation of Henry Simcox
After her visit to London Fred never felt entirely secure with Agnes, but that was nothing compared with the rising panic he felt at the thought of being without her. He had left Cambridge with no clear idea of what he wanted to do: except that he was certain that he wouldn’t be a parson. Agnes was finishing her course at Worsfield University and spent her weeks in a hall of residence and her weekends at home. Fred found that he thought about her always and when they weren’t together he was spending more and more time with her father.
His habit of joining Dr Salter on his rounds, which had started with the birth of Dora Nowt’s fifth, grew as Fred tried to fill his uneventful days, waiting to see Agnes at weekends or on occasional evenings. He took to going into the cottages the Doctor visited and learned to change a dressing or turn an old woman in bed. Dr Salter’s methods were a continual source of amazement to him. He could quieten a child with a broken arm or a woman with a crushed finger by producing what he called ‘a special pain-killing pill flown in to me from America’ which he kept in a small paper in his waistcoat pocket. When Fred asked him what it was he said, ‘It’s a rare drug known as an Extra-Strong Mint.’
‘You’re an old fraud,’ Fred told him.
‘Of course, I’m just like your father. It’s faith, that’s what we’re both after.’
Dr Salter told Fred that when he was a young man he also had joined an old doctor on his rounds. ‘Alfie Dawlish. Invented all sorts of imaginary ailments for the family at the Manor so he could rob them and treat the village for nothing. It was his primitive version of the Health Service. Finally old Lady Fanner, Nicholas’s mother, sacked him for giving her an uncalled-for enema and charging ten quid. She didn’t mind the money but she couldn’t look Alfie in the face again. After that infant mortality in Skurfield rose considerably. I was a bit like you in those days. You know what Alfie Dawlish called me? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’
Simeon, although far too liberal to do anything about it, didn’t approve of the hours that Fred spent with Dr Salter and this disapproval did nothing but increase his son’s respect for the medical profession. After all, he argued with relief, doctors weren’t concerned with the reform of the world, or spiritual values, or protests about some faraway injustice it was impossible to remedy. A doctor’s concern was entirely practical and had nothing whatever to do with the patient’s soul. When Fred asked Agnes’s father if that was why he had wanted to become a doctor he got a short answer. ‘Balls! I had no choice. I couldn’t pass the bloody exams to be a vet.’
But Fred had chosen his profession. When he told Agnes she looked at him quite nervously and said, ‘Not because of me! Don’t do it because of me, I couldn’t take the responsibility.’ He told her that of course it wasn’t because of her, but he wasn’t altogether telling the truth. The house in which Agnes was the only woman, the fact that she had become, apparently so easily, his lover, and her father who laughed at ideals, wished to die on the hunting-field, approved of backing into church gates and showed so little concern for his patients except when he was treating them, these things acted as an irresistible magnet to a young man brought up in the rarified atmosphere of Rapstone Rectory.
Fred had done classics at school. He needed A-levels in science before he started his medical studies, so he lived at home, drew five pounds a week from his father and set to work on chromosomes and enzymes and the biology of the newt. Agnes got her degree but she showed no signs of leaving Hartscombe. She said she thought her father needed looking after, she didn’t want to go anywhere else much, particularly not to France. Doing modern languages at Worsfield had apparently spoiled her for France. So she stayed at home, a state of affairs which suited Fred perfectly. In his happier, more optimistic moments he thought she would stay until she became the new local doctor’s wife and then they would both live there for ever. Dr Salter said, ‘Someday someone’s going to have to come and take her off my hands.’
‘You used to tell me not to fall in love with her.’
‘It was excellent advice. She was a child who grew up too quickly. It gave her a great deal of character. No one but a fool wants a wife with a great deal of character. I suppose you disagree?’
Fred said yes, he supposed he did.
England entered into the 1960s.
In the great world of politics sixty-nine Africans were shot at Sharpeville and Simeon Simcox wrote far more than sixty-nine letters. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was adjudged suitable reading for the English people, an event which had no noticeable effect on the love-affair of Fred and Agnes Salter. In the Hartscombe Conservative Association there was a general feeling that Mr Macmillan was in his heaven and all was more or less right with the world. Attendance at the Y.C. evenings began to fall off in this somewhat complacent atmosphere, but Leslie Titmuss never missed a meeting. Christopher Kempenflatt, who became the Secretary, was often in London ‘getting to know the ropes’ of his father’s firm. Leslie Titmuss offered to lend a hand by taking the minutes, which he did industriously and in great detail. When Kempenflatt became totally immersed in his father’s business Leslie let it be known that he was prepared to take on the office of Secretary and, one afternoon when the Committee were anxious to get home early, he was nodded through. He was always pleasant, usually quiet and the President of the Young Conservatives began to depend on him to draw up the agenda.
The first year of the decade was also a historic one in the life of Henry Simcox. It was when he first came into contact with that brave new world where he would make his money, achieve success and finally enjoy the pleasure of disillusion. Almost two years after the publication of The Greasy Pole he
received a letter on heavily embossed writing-paper from Atalanta Film Productions to inform him that Mr Benjamin K. Bugloss, Executive President in Charge of Artistic Enterprises, would be fulfilling a cherished ambition if he were able to meet with Mr Henry Simcox for a working breakfast in the Dorchester Hotel and would 8 for 8.30 a.m. be convenient?
Henry judged it right to present himself at the suite at 8.15 and it was some considerable time before his ring was answered. Finally the door was opened a chink and a gravelly voice said, ‘Just leave it outside there, will you?’
‘I’m Henry Simcox.’
‘You’re not room service?’ The voice sounded suspicious.
‘No. I’m Henry Simcox. I wrote The Greasy Pole. You asked me to breakfast.’
‘Mr Simcox! This is a very great honour. Come in, why don’t you? We were expecting room service.’ The door was thrown open to reveal a large, suntanned man of indeterminate age who wore nothing except a white towelling dressing-gown on the breast of which was embroidered the simple inscription ‘Hotel George V’, and a pair of Gucci slippers. Looking round the suite Henry saw magazines, copies of Variety and a number of novels, so new that they appeared unread, including The Greasy Pole, which he picked up and admired, not for the first time, the photograph of the young, smiling author Henry Simcox. ‘You really like it?’
‘I don’t like it.’ Henry put his book down, disappointed. ‘My dear, I love it! Tell me quite frankly. You must have become a lover at a very tender age. At what precise moment was it you first became a lover?’ Mr Bugloss wandered to a bureau and discovered a cigar box. Don’t worry, my dear. Tell me later. Do you care for a cigar?’ He opened the box and discovered that it only contained one, which he took out and lit thoughtfully. ‘That guy who works in a flower shop. Isn’t that a hilarious conception?’
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