Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘It’s a brewery.’

  ‘What?’ Mr Bugloss puffed on his cigar and frowned.

  ‘He works in a brewery.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, I wrote it!’ Henry felt he had to remind him.

  ‘So you did, my dear. And if I had my way you’d have sole writing credit. Of course, I have a partner.’ Mr Bugloss went to the window and stood looking out over Park Lane. After a considerable silence he spoke, slowly and impressively. ‘In our business,’ he said, ‘our names are written, Mr Simcox, on the sands of time. But there is one project, just one perhaps, by which someone hopes to be remembered. My dream is that your Greasy Pole should become a major motion picture.’

  ‘That’s marvellous.’ Henry welcomed the news.

  ‘I can give you certain things, Mr Simcox. I will fly you to the Coast. I can put a limo at your disposal. There will be a reception given in your honour. Subject to the views of my partner, my thought is that you should participate in profits. I should like to see you with a percentage, Mr Simcox.’

  ‘Well, yes. I mean, so would I.’

  ‘A percentage, after the deduction of my reasonable living expenses. Plus a small contribution to the cost of my boat, used for entertaining and general promotion. What’s the title of your property again?’ Mr Bugloss slumped into an armchair and sat smoking, thoughtful and anxious.

  ‘The Greasy Pole,’ Henry explained brightly, trying to cheer Mr Bugloss up. ‘It’s a game they used to have at regattas. A pole’s covered with grease and you have to try and climb it but of course you can’t. You keep sliding and falling into the river.’

  ‘In the States they don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Have such things at regattas.’ Mr Bugloss was positive. ‘And a title like that might give serious offence to an ethnic minority. I have a great idea.’ He got up, apparently cheerful. ‘And I will present it to you as a gift with no strings attached. How do you like our title, Indiscretions?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘And another thing, my dear’ – Mr Bugloss ignored his doubts – ‘how does your storyline end? Remind me.’

  ‘Well, he could marry the girl, of course, and live in the big house.’

  ‘The big house! I like it. Cute girl too, as I remember.’

  ‘But he decides to stay in his job at the Brewery. Well, I suppose in a way he feels he has to be true to his class.’

  ‘Then he’s a schmuck!’

  ‘You don’t like the ending?’

  Mr Bugloss went to the sofa and sat by his author, putting his arm round him. Henry tried not to look at the expanse of hairy stomach now exposed beneath the dressing-gown.

  ‘I find it moving! I find it very artistic. I find it strikes a deep note of truthfulness, even if that makes him a bit of a schmuck. But who the hell’s going to pay two dollars together with what it costs for a simple meal out and parking the car and a babysitter nowadays to see the story of a schmuck? I think my partner would have problems with your present ending. Some people think solely of finance.’ Before Henry could reply Mr Bugloss went to the telephone and growled into it, ‘Room service.’ At which moment the bedroom door opened and a rather beautiful, nervous young woman, dressed like a Hampstead housewife, came out. ‘Mr Simcox. This is an old friend of mine. Mrs Wickstead. You read Mr Simcox’s great novel?’

  ‘Never.’ Mrs Wickstead sat down, sighed and pushed back her hair. She was not only beautiful but appeared to be English.

  ‘I gave it to you. How come you didn’t read it?’ Henry noticed how strangely Mr Bugloss’s accent varied. Most of the time he was American; when, as at that moment, he was irritable he sounded German; when he changed again and smiled with genuine charm he might have grown up in the London suburbs. ‘You two will get on, I can see that. I can sense an empathy. We shall arrange a lunch at the Green Giraffe. Are you room service?’ He spoke into the telephone he was still holding and then looked up at Henry. ‘You don’t care for any champagne to celebrate our association?’

  ‘Well…’ Henry thought he might care for a little.

  ‘No champagne,’ Mr Bugloss said firmly and spoke to the telephone. ‘We’ll just take some of your fresh orange juice. Make it three. And a coffee. And I’ll take one of your hot bread rolls, with just a little butter for the sake of energy. Do you have some nice butter?’ He put down the phone, blew out smoke and said in a voice now hushed with reverence, ‘Peck wants to do a picture with me.’

  ‘Gregory Peck?’

  ‘Who else? Mrs Wickstead knows that, don’t you, my dear?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘She knows. Greg Peck can’t wait to do a picture with me. I see Greg in Indiscretions.’

  ‘The Greasy Pole.’ Henry remained firm on the point.

  ‘I think this is one Greg Peck will really go for. If we get the script right.’

  Henry, suddenly determined, rose to his feet. It was about to become his finest hour. ‘Mr Bugloss.’

  ‘Oh, please. Benny.’ Mr Bugloss smiled modestly.

  ‘Benny. Have you considered that the leading character in my book is a twenty-three-year-old Englishman who works in a small country town? I don’t see how he could be played by a middle-aged American actor.’

  ‘Peck can’t help that, don’t hold his years against him.’

  Henry started to move out of the room. He knew how Michelangelo might have felt when the Pope suggested cutting Adam out of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. ‘And I’ll never agree to change the ending.’

  ‘Middle age will come to you too, my dear, eventually.’

  ‘I don’t think I want anything to do with your trade.’

  Henry had reached the door. ‘Nothing but visual tricks. No depth. No feeling. A few superficial snapshots of life and nothing but glamour and emptiness and using the whole wide world as a sort of stage set for inflated fantasies! I don’t want any part of it, thank you very much.’

  When Henry had gone Mr Bugloss turned to Mrs Wickstead and said thoughtfully, ‘There goes a young man who’s absolutely hooked on the movies.’

  *

  Benny Bugloss rose to power in the film world at a rare moment in history, when life in England was thought to be interesting to the American public, and when American producers found that costs and taxes were lower on the other side of the Atlantic. He was ‘close to’ the heads of various Hollywood studios, who liked to buy their suits in Savile Row, their pipes at Dunhill, to rent houses in Eaton Square and in general behave like their idea of an Englishman. From this position they could produce films about North Country boys whose old grandads kept racing pigeons.

  ‘Where to now, girl?’ Fred said in a Yorkshire accent, coming out of a cinema showing one such film. He and Agnes were on a rare outing to London. Agnes knew how impressionable he was – he had been speaking French when they came out of Hiroshima Mon Amour. They started one of their frequent discussions about where they should go and Fred suggested her coffee bar.

  ‘My coffee bar?’

  ‘The one you say you hang about in when you come up to London. I mean, the one where you meet your friends.’

  ‘Arturo’s? Why not?’ She led the way down the street from the cinema. ‘I knew I’d end up by deciding.’

  ‘I decided,’ Fred protested.

  ‘You decided that I should decide.’

  So they sat in a dimly lit jungle of rubber plants, among a lot of people wearing duffel-coats, scarves and beards, listening to the muted music of Cliff Richard and the Shadows, with the photographs of stars on the walls, Tommy Steele, Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine, and drank ‘froffy’ coffee out of see-through cups.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ Fred held Agnes’s hand across the table. ‘I mean, from here?’

  ‘Back to Hartscombe on the train.’

  ‘What about the friends in London you’re always talking about, hasn’t one of them got a room we could borrow?’

  ‘No.’ Agnes removed
her hand. ‘None that would be suitable. You’ll go back to the Rectory, and drop me off at the surgery.’

  ‘Not even go to our country place?’ He smiled at her. ‘Nowt Hall.’ When desperate for accommodation they had been known to borrow Tom’s hut in the depths of the wood where no one ever came.

  ‘You like all that. It makes you feel grown up.’

  ‘Enormously. I couldn’t go back now.’

  ‘Back to what?’

  ‘Back to doing without you.’

  ‘Please.’ She sounded distressed. ‘Don’t say things like that.’

  ‘I think we ought to go now,’ Fred told her. ‘We’ll miss our train.’

  ‘Why do you want to go suddenly?’

  The reason was sitting alone, smiling and slightly drunk at the other end of Arturo’s coffee bar. They had to pass Henry on their way to the door and he called out, ‘The country cousins! My little brother, stumping round London with manure on his wellies. Hullo, Agnes.’

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ Fred told him.

  ‘Or you’ll turn back into a pumpkin. I have news for you, young Freddie. I’ve saved my soul. That’s what I’m celebrating, and you’ve got time for another froffy before you go back to vegetate in rural Rapstone. You don’t seem to be very interested in the state of my soul.’

  ‘Did you say you’d saved it or something?’ To his disappointment Fred saw that Agnes was sitting at Henry’s table. He sat beside her and refused all refreshment.

  ‘I’ll tell you.’ Henry was looking at Agnes. ‘I’ll tell you both. Mephistopheles appeared to me in the shape of an overweight monstrosity called Benjamin K. Bugloss. He lured me to the Dorchester. He offered me everything! A trip to Los Angeles, massage by starlets. He promised to deliver me champagne and Gregory Peck, all I had to do was to change my ending. Oh, and he wanted a new title for my book. Can you believe it? He called it a property. The Greasy Pole a property, like a tasteful home in Esher or something. He offered me all that, plus a dinner with a Mrs Wickstead who has beautiful frightened eyes and is clearly looking for ways of escape from Benjamin K. And what did I do?’

  ‘Signed the contract?’ Fred looked ostentatiously at the clock surrounded by brass sun-rays on the wall.

  ‘You misjudge me, Frederick. I spurned his offer! I shook the dust of the Dorchester off my feet. I shall never see Los Angeles. I shall never meet Greg Peck. Mrs Wickstead will remain a closed book to me. I have preserved my integrity!’

  In the corner of the carriage Agnes slept with her head on Fred’s shoulder. The train shuddered to a halt at the small, ill-lit station, there was a sound of doors banging and an elderly guard shouted ‘Hartscombe! All change, please!’ Agnes opened her eyes. ‘What on earth was Henry talking about?’

  ‘His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.’

  II

  Borrowers and Lenders

  After Simeon’s death Henry and Lonnie were looking through the big cardboard boxes of family photographs that were kept in a cupboard under the Rectory stairs. There were pictures of the family dressed up for various entertainments, Henry as a pirate, Fred as a girl. ‘Pity he never married, make a good wife to someone, old Frederick would,’ Henry said. There was even a picture of Leslie Titmuss cutting down nettles. In the photographs it always seemed to be summer. Dorothy appeared rarely but Simeon was a sort of star. He was to be seen digging, greeting the Bishop, holding babies he had recently christened or upstaging the bride after various wedding ceremonies he had performed.

  ‘Your father always looked so serene,’ Lonnie said. ‘So saintly.’

  ‘It’s perfectly easy to look serene if you happen to be completely off your head. Haven’t you noticed that dotty people always have that wonderful saintly expression.’

  Henry picked up a photograph and examined it closely. It was blurred, yellowed with age, but once in the Rectory garden a man in an old torn jacket was holding up a pair of dead rabbits which hid most of his face. Simeon Simcox was looking at the man, smiling broadly and accepting the rabbits as a gift. Dorothy was smiling in the background of the picture. Now, having taken out the coffee tray, she returned to the living-room.

  ‘Who’s that extraordinary man holding up rabbits?’ Henry gave the picture to his mother who took it over to the window and examined it closely.

  ‘That’s Tom Nowt.’

  ‘Tom Nowt the poacher?’

  ‘A poacher? Well, I suppose he must have been, although we didn’t like to say so. He used to bring us rabbits sometimes, and I used to make pâté with them, although I expect he got them from our bit of woodland.’

  ‘Tom Nowt, who used to have that broken-down hut in Hanging Wood?’

  ‘Did he? I may have heard something…’ Dorothy became vague. ‘I can’t exactly remember.’

  ‘But he and our father look perfectly friendly.’

  ‘Your father always got on with everyone.’

  ‘Not with Tom Nowt, he didn’t!’ Henry remembered. ‘He disapproved violently of Tom Nowt, for some reason. The only time I saw him angry was when Frederick had been hanging round Nowt’s hut.’

  Dorothy shook her head. ‘With Fred? No, really, I’m sure you must be mistaken.’ She put the photograph in her cardigan pocket and when Henry held out his hand, asking for it back, she refused, smiling. ‘Whatever do you want it for? An old photograph.’

  ‘It just might become useful evidence.’

  ‘Of what, on earth?’

  ‘Father’s irrational prejudices.’

  ‘You know Henry’s starting a court case,’ Lonnie explained.

  Dorothy stopped smiling. She stood, still firmly holding the photograph in her pocket. ‘I think it’s disgusting.’

  ‘It’s to help you, Mother,’ Lonnie went on, ‘as much as anyone.’

  ‘I can get on perfectly well without help, thank you.’

  ‘We’ve got to get at the truth.’ Henry did his best to control his rising irritation. At this his mother, who had decided to go out and snip off a few dead heads, turned on him instead. ‘The truth! I’m not sure you’d know the truth if you found it. I mean, all those stories and films and things you’re always working at. They don’t have much to do with the truth, do they?’

  ‘I suppose I could say that there’s a deeper sort of truth which can only be reached by fiction.’ Henry had said that often on television arts programmes.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that, Henry. You wouldn’t be so silly!’ Dorothy was laughing at him now.

  ‘Henry’s been to see a lawyer, Dorothy,’ Lonnie was explaining, as though to a child. ‘So if Leslie Titmuss goes on claiming Simeon’s money… Well, there’ll have to be a case in court.’

  ‘You mean I’d have to stand up in public and answer questions?’

  ‘It might have to come to that, mother. Yes.’

  ‘We’d hope it wouldn’t,’ Lonnie assured her.

  ‘You wouldn’t be frightened, would you?’ Henry tried to sound reassuring.

  ‘Frightened? I’d be humiliated!’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘To stand and talk about our family, about Simeon, in front of a lot of total strangers, to have it all written up in the paper, for Glenys Bigwell to read, and Grace Fanner at the Manor, wouldn’t that be humiliating? It’s just like you, Henry, to arrange that. Just like those awful film stories you sent us to read, and your father and I were so embarrassed! We didn’t know how you could bring yourself to do such things.’

  Before Henry could reply his mother had gone off into the kitchen where she opened the Aga and dropped Tom Nowt and his rabbits, in the company of her smiling and departed husband, on to the burning boiler nuts, where they were quickly consumed. Then she forgot about the past, and thought of her immediate future. Now Simeon was dead she would have to leave the Rectory and move into somewhere much smaller.

  Fred was lying naked under a damp blanket on the old iron bedstead in Tom Nowt’s hut. Agnes, wearing nothing but Fred’s shirt, lifted the kettle
she had put on the paraffin stove and stooped to light a cigarette from the flame. On the walls the antlered deer skulls and the pin-ups were expressionless. They had bicycled down to the hut an hour earlier, skidding on wet, fallen leaves, and Fred had laughed and shouted. Now he was quiet, it was time to ask the question he dreaded every month.

  ‘No curse?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s just late.’

  ‘Nearly three weeks.’ She made tea for them both and then came and sat on the bed beside him. ‘What would you do, Fred?’

  He looked at the shadow where the shirt divided, at her long white legs, and avoided her question. ‘It’s awful having to start from scratch. If only I’d done science at school! Science was considered a bit common compared to Latin.’

  ‘And now you feel a little science might come in handy?’

  ‘If I’m going to be a doctor.’

  ‘Oh, for that. Yes.’ She drank her tea.

  ‘You know I shan’t make any money for years. I mean, I can’t make plans or anything.’

  ‘No. I do understand. It’s cold in here.’ She stood up, shivering. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

  He didn’t say anything more then, feeling that he would never say anything right.

  Ten days later Fred had persuaded himself that he had nothing to worry about. It was a Friday night when, as usual, the Stompers met for a session at Marmaduke’s garage in Hartscombe. They were playing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin” on an oil-stained concrete floor, under naked electric light bulbs, among gutted Ford Populars and behind a jacked-up Daimler. Glenys Bigwell, a fair-haired, strong-minded girl, daughter of Bridget and Percy, was sitting on a wooden box looking starry-eyed at Terry Fawcett with whom she had been walking out since her schooldays. Glenys worked in a Hartscombe stationers and did part-time secretarial work for the Rector. Although her typing was enthusiastic, her spelling was weak and Simeon, too much in a hurry to correct it, sometimes signed letters to the Bishop protesting about ‘apartaid’ or racial ‘descremination’.