For Charlie, Leslie’s great attraction was that he was undoubtedly one of the young men her mother would approve of least. She knew she had been a perpetual disappointment to Grace. She was never beautiful. She never wanted to spend a day in London buying hats and having tea in Fortnum’s. She never discussed boyfriends with her mother, so that Grace could become, once again, a vicarious débutante. The fact that her mother disliked her had for years been a misery to Charlie, but now she revelled in it. She only wanted to feed the flames of her mother’s hatred, and for that Leslie Titmuss would come in very handy. She had also, and rightly, come to the conclusion that her mother was a snob, and such a person, in Charlie’s view, thoroughly deserved all the social embarrassments that Leslie was so well-fitted to provide.
But Leslie was not only a marvellous irritant for her mother; Charlie saw him as a way of escape. Rapstone Manor, the old rambling house with its draughts, its tweed hats, gumboots and shepherds’ crooks in the downstairs loo, its guns and family portraits, its domineering servants and the endless emptiness of its long afternoons, was literally, from time to time, making her scream. The dinner parties for the few inhabitants of the local big houses, or the Committee Members of the Hartscombe Conservative Association, or withered ladies who wore jewellery and cardigans and who had ‘come out’ with Grace, were worse than loneliness. Once settled with Leslie Titmuss, Charlie thought she might fly to a wonderful world of sauce bottles and meat teas, of gossip in saloon bars and holidays on the Costa Brava, of days out in the car and of Leslie’s fiercely concentrated copulation on the hearth-rug in front of the electric fire, among scattered pages of the News of the World on Sunday afternoons. It was a romantic dream of working-class delights which showed how little Charlie knew of the world at that time.
Her longing to escape was frustrated by Leslie’s initial determination to keep their love-affair a secret from George. But then a change came and he invited her to meet him, not among the dark scrub on Picton Ridge, but in the full glow of the cocktail bar at the Swan’s Nest Hotel. Whether he had gone there to exorcize the memory of his great humiliation, or merely to mark a change in his plans, Leslie was even more pallid and intense when they met. His father, it seemed, had found certain personal possessions of Charlie’s in the glove compartment of the Prefect, and their great secret was a secret no longer. Even Nicholas had been told. They could either retreat in confusion, or go into the attack, and Leslie had no doubt which course they should take. One way would lead to a lifetime’s separation, the other might take them to the altar of Rapstone Church. As Charlie burrowed into the chaos of her handbag to pay for their gin and tonics, Leslie outlined his masterplan.
‘Tell her,’ he ended, ‘this evening.’ And he added, as though in an attempt to temper the blow, ‘After they’ve had their evening meal.’
So Charlie was able to save up the revelation, as a child leaves the largest strawberry or the cherry on top of the cake, until the end of dinner. She sat, for the most part, in silence, hardly answering Nicholas’s well-meant inquiries or Grace’s criticism of her dress and the tedious nature of her company. She knew that she had the power, once the long meal was over, to produce a most satisfactory explosion. She waited patiently until Bridget had brought the coffee tray into the drawing-room and then lit the blue touch-paper and announced that she planned to marry Leslie.
‘Marry Leslie Titmuss!’ Grace showed that her lungs, when called upon, were quite as strong as her daughter’s. ‘You’re bloody well not going to marry Leslie Titmuss!’
‘Why not? Tell me one reason why not.’
‘Why not? The idea’s obviously ridiculous. You’re not even going out with Leslie Titmuss again and that’s absolutely all I’ve got to say on the matter. Your father will tell you exactly the same thing.’
In fact Nicholas said nothing. He was sitting in a chair at the fireside, his knees pulled up, his long legs folded in the attitude of an aeroplane passenger anticipating a crash. He had noticed that Charlie had been looking unusually contented at dinner and had rightly interpreted the fact as a danger signal.
‘Why do you have to care who I marry?’ Charlie’s question was triumphant. ‘You can forget me! When I’m married to Leslie you can absolutely forget me. Don’t even come to visit us!’
‘Where do you think I’d come to visit? In some little semi-detached on a council estate in Worsfield?’ Grace had picked up Vogue and was turning the glossy pages as though the subject was no longer worth discussing, when her husband told them that George Titmuss had paid a call on him, a fact which he had, up until then, decided not to mention in the interests of family peace.
‘And I suppose he’s tickled pink with the idea of his son marrying into the Fanners.’ Grace sniffed. ‘Probably put the boy up to it.’ She pretended to make a close study of a photograph of a model wearing a fur coat and sitting in a dustbin.
‘Not at all, he’s violently opposed to it. I’m afraid Father Titmuss is a terrible old snob.’
‘Thank God there are a few of us left!’ Grace murmured piously.
‘Tell her she’s wrong! Tell her to mind her own bloody business. Tell her it’s my own life. Go on, tell her!’ Charlie had moved to sit on the arm of her father’s chair.
‘So far as I’m concerned, you may marry exactly whom you want.’
‘Tell her then!’
Nicholas seemed to be apologizing for his beliefs as though they were begonias, a rather ridiculous sort of hobby. ‘But I believe, well, I do believe it’s up to us not to cause embarrassment, unhappiness even, to people who’re not quite so lucky as ourselves.’
‘Lucky? You think I’ve been lucky?’
‘You’re born into a certain family, Charlie. We have certain responsibilities, you might say.’
‘To her?’ Charlie looked with loathing towards the screening cover of Vogue.
‘I was thinking more of the Titmuss family. It’s going to be jolly awkward for them, Charlie, you do see that don’t you? Now I’m sure young Leslie Titmuss is a perfectly decent…’
‘Decent?’ The description was too much for Charlie’s mother. ‘Decent! Have you seen him? Hair oil and a row of pens in his breast-pocket. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you dancing with him, Charlie, at the Y.C.s’ ball. Poor child, I thought, she must be pushed for a partner.’
‘You see,’ Nicholas went on courageously, ‘it really would rock the boat in the Titmuss household. He’s an only child, just as you are, Charlie, and his mother won’t want to visit here. I know that for a fact. You’re going to cause a frightful lot of embarrassment, old thing.’
‘Embarrassment!’
‘You can’t change people, Charlie. They’ve been going on too long.’
‘All this quarrelling!’ Grace slapped her magazine shut, a sure sign of bedtime. ‘It’s making my head ache and it’s quite unnecessary. I’m going up now. You can forget all about it, Charlie, forget all about marrying Leslie Titmuss.’
‘I can’t forget it,’ Charlie told her. ‘Neither can you. I’ll have to marry Leslie.’
‘What do you mean?’ her mother asked and Charlie’s answer was as Leslie had planned it, although not in his exact words.
‘Surely you know, don’t you, mother? Isn’t it the sort of thing you and your dried-up old girlfriends meet to giggle about in Fortnum’s?’
After Henry had decided to contest his father’s last will, he called on his daughter, Francesca, at the flat which she shared with her boyfriend, Peter. He had rarely visited that address, taking the view that anyone setting out for Tufnell Park would need a map and a compass, together with native bearers who could speak the local dialect. When he got there, after a taxi ride of no particular difficulty, he was surprised and a little shocked to find Francesca’s living-room so warm and cheerful. A coal fire glowed in the grate and the place was decorated with Victorian relics, pictures and jugs depicting the Queen and Prince Albert, and Imperial battle scenes hanging on the walls. Although he sniffed
cautiously, he could not detect that pungent odour of burning carpets which he always associated with the young. Henry had also come to denounce the loud and cacophonous music Francesca must surely like and he was put out to hear only a little gentle Telemann tinkling from the record-player.
‘Is this really the sort of music you like?’
‘Yes, Father. Don’t you?’
Francesca was then twenty-one, only a couple of years younger than Lonnie had been when Henry had married her, a pretty, serious girl whose look of anxiety in no way reflected her firmness of purpose.
‘I’m sorry Peter’s not here.’
‘I’m not,’ Henry assured her.
‘He’s going into a new business.’
‘Furniture removal?’
‘No, of course not. Computer programming.’ Francesca felt a pang of guilt, remembering the morning when she had found the Rectory empty, and only noticed the group of mourners in the churchyard after she and Peter had loaded up the van. She was prepared for an attack from her father but he was looking at the real object of his visit, Simeon’s old desk which had been stripped to a naked buff colour and used as a stand for potted plants.
Henry sat down in front of it and went through the drawers methodically, telling his daughter that he was looking for anything that would spike the guns of that abominable little creep, Leslie Titmuss. At first he found nothing. The drawers had been cleared out, it seemed, and all their contents left at the Rectory. He had almost given up the search when he felt the wooden columns that supported a shelf at the back of the desk and a spring opened a secret and hidden drawer. From it he rescued a long folded paper on the back of which the words ‘Last Will and Testament’ were printed in archaic script.
At first Henry was enormously excited, for the newly found document in fact benefited Dorothy and the Rector’s two sons. But when he took it to Jackson Cantellow it was clear that the homemade will, dated before the war, was revoked by the later, Henry thought insane, testament, made as late as 1983 in the office of a small Worsfield firm, whom, it seemed, his father had never used before.
‘At least this shows what his true intentions were,’ Henry said, when he called at Cantellow’s office, interrupting his lawyer in a little solitary practice for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah in the Worsfield Free Trade Hall.
‘What his intentions were in 1939.’
‘Before he went mad,’ Henry said firmly, ‘and decided to benefit the appalling Titmuss.’
‘I agree, it’s a little strange that he should have left his money to Mr Titmuss as late as 1983, when the Minister was presumably quite comfortably off. But if that will had been made earlier, when the beneficiary was starting out in life, when he got married for instance… Now when was that exactly?’ But Henry thought he had been away on the Coast, so the marriage of Leslie Titmuss passed without him noticing it at the time. He also refused Jackson Cantellow’s offer of tickets for the oratorio Elijah, so their meeting was, on the whole, satisfactory to neither party.
After the initial battle between Charlie and her mother over the marriage question, there was a period of uneasy truce at Rapstone Manor. Nicholas spent as much time as he could walking round the home farm, smiling in a good-natured manner at the pigs, or he took a gun out to distant woodlands. Charlie stayed in her room a good deal and, at mealtimes, preserved a sort of triumphant silence which her mother found especially irritating. Grace’s mind fluttered desperately between a number of plans which included a trip to Switzerland where Charlie might learn French and visit a discreet clinic, an accouchement in some remote nursing-home followed by immediate adoption and the wild hope that, when her immediate problems were solved, her daughter might undergo a religious conversion and become a nun. She put all these plans to her husband whenever she caught sight of him.
Grace also managed to capture the Rector after church on Sunday and, having rounded up Nicholas, imprisoned them both in the library and announced that she was seeking the help of her spiritual adviser because ‘Charlie was in pod by the appalling Leslie Titmuss’. To her dismay, Simeon seemed to find the news less catastrophic than she had expected.
‘I suppose people are always telling you the most ghastly things, but there can’t be anything much more horrible than this! Where could we send her, somewhere quiet in the country?’
‘This is somewhere quiet in the country,’ Simeon told them, it seemed unhelpfully, and added, ‘Young Leslie Titmuss is going to make something of himself.’
‘I don’t care what he makes of himself.’ Grace was positive. ‘I don’t want him making little bastards with Charlie.’
‘It might just be that Leslie Titmuss is the future.’
‘If he is I’m not waiting for it. I never want to think of Leslie Titmuss again, so long as I live.’
‘But there is someone you’ll have to think about.’
‘Who?’
‘Your grandchild.’ And Simeon asked her seriously, ‘Have you considered a really desperate remedy?’
‘Of course.’ She was glad to have the Church’s approval.
‘I mean marriage.’
‘Over my dead body! I’m not having a grandchild, and Charlie’s not having a wedding. I thought I’d made that perfectly clear.’ And that appeared to be Grace’s last word on the subject.
Simeon came away from his meeting with the Fanners curiously cast down. He became more cheerful when Leslie Titmuss called at the Rectory and requested a private audience in the study. It turned out that he wanted to book the church and, of course, the Rector’s services, for a wedding. He couldn’t yet name the date but it was bound to be quite shortly after the Worsfield Show. The bride’s name was Charlotte Grace Fanner and, although she was under age, he had no doubt that her parents would finally give their consent.
Perhaps Leslie had hoped for a greater reaction from the Rector, a more considerable surprise or a burst of congratulations. Instead Simeon looked as though things were turning out much as he expected. He found a pencil, made a note in his diary and asked an entirely practical question.
‘Where are you going to live? When you get married, I mean.’
‘Sir Nicholas’ll give us one of his cottages.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘He’ll have to, won’t he?’
Simeon looked up at the young man sitting opposite him and wondered, not for the first time, what it must be like to have been born without a sense of doubt. Would that be a blessing or a curse or a mere physical deprivation, like being born without a sense of smell? He failed, for the moment, to make up his mind on the question.
13
Putting Up a Tent
The Worsfield Show is one of the more pleasant occasions connected with that unattractive city. It takes place on Worsfield Heath, not far from the by-pass. (It can be said in favour of Worsfield that it is surrounded, and to some extent immunized, by the countryside.) It is true that the factory chimneys, now almost hiding the Cathedral tower, are visible from the site, but once a year they are fronted by sideshows, showing-rings, horseboxes and sheep pens. The beer tents are open all day, and there farmers mix with commuters. Girls from Tesco’s and the biscuit factory mingle with pigmen, stockmen, bingo-callers, fortune-tellers and dedicated showjumpers. Huge quantities of Simcox ale are drunk and great rivers of bubbling urine course down the troughs in the flapping lavatory tents and manure the common. Children in jodhpurs and hacking-jackets are mounted on midget ponies and forced over jumps by relentless parents greedy for rosettes. Worsfield Show is a place where you can still bowl for a pig, buy a horse or a pound of homemade marmalade, and watch a calm girl in a fringed cowboy suit being picked out by quivering knives hurled by her nervous and chain-smoking husband.
The show in the year of the Titmuss wedding was held in golden summer weather. The air was full of lowing, grunting, shunting, barking and the starting of reluctant horseboxes. Leslie was walking with his mother and father towards the Women’s Institute bring-an
d-buy stall, when he saw his old adversaries, Magnus Strove and Christopher Kempenflatt, both dressed in precociously aged tweed suits, both with pinched trilby hats set on their foreheads, enjoying taking potshots at a number of ping-pong balls, which were dancing elusively on jets of water. Far from turning their guns on Leslie they hailed him with considerable goodwill and thanked him for the moving speech he had made at the local Party’s meeting, supporting, in the name of go-ahead political thinking, their plan to tear down the old High Street grocer’s and substitute a new Easy-Bite eatery.
‘It was my duty,’ Leslie said in answer to their thanks. ‘I feel it’s up to us in the Party to encourage business initiative among young people.’ Both being a few years older than young Titmuss, they looked at him in some surprise, and Kempenflatt, still genial, offered to send him round a dozen bottles of the best bubbles. Leslie chose another reward, a loan of the blue and gold cardboard shield – the passport to the Steward’s enclosure – which dangled from Magnus Strove’s lapel.
‘I’ll bring it back in half an hour,’ he promised, when his wish was granted. ‘By the way, if you’re acquiring the Garthwaites’ site, have you thought about buying through a Bahamian partnership, with shares at a no-par value?’
Leslie had been reading the Financial Times, and taken advanced accountancy at evening classes. Kempenflatt thought he wanted to borrow the Steward’s enclosure badge so that he could put on side to the other clerks in the beer tent.
In fact Leslie did as he had always planned, and went straight to the Steward’s enclosure. If he hadn’t been able to gain a badge he was prepared to resort to any extreme, even to forcing an entry into the back of the reserved lavatory tent and emerging, zipping up his flies and appearing nonchalant, on the hallowed ground of the ‘Steward’s’. As it was he walked unchallenged past the show of hunters in the ring and, crossing the grass where elderly men in bowler hats and riding macs sat perched on their shooting-sticks, he strolled into the Steward’s tent. He saw the group he was looking for immediately, laughing together over champagne and sandwiches, by the banked hydrangeas at the far end of the marquee. He walked steadily towards them and, once in earshot, said like some Shakespearian messenger bringing glad tidings from the battlefield, ‘I’ve fixed things up with the Rector.’
Paradise Postponed Page 16