Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘That’s what I say to all the young Jacks and Jills, the Harrys and the Doreens, the Leslies and the Charlottes,’ Simeon assured them, although he seemed to be speaking mainly for the benefit of himself. ‘The consequences may be quite unforeseen. You throw a pebble into a still pond and who knows where the ripples will end? They will end up far away, generations later, when you and your little stone will be quite forgotten. I know what you’re going to ask, you’re going to ask, where does God come in all this? Is God the ripples? Is God the pebble? Is God, as our Eastern friends would have us believe, simply the surface of the pond? Or are you God? Leslie and Charlotte. Are you creating a future which you have chosen not to control? Difficult, isn’t it? Terribly difficult. We can only hope to do justice. Hope to…’ Simeon’s voice died away, apparently discouraged. He looked at Charlie and had to admit that no one could have called her beautiful; he turned back to Leslie Titmuss, and the task in hand. ‘Of course, it’s easy for you now Leslie, easy when Charlotte is in the bloom of youth. But when she’s older, when she’s tired of life, when she starts to be afraid of death, when her looks are vanishing it’ll be difficult for you then, terribly difficult! That’ll be the test.’

  There was a prolonged and not particularly cheerful silence. Then Simeon knocked out his pipe with relief.

  ‘Well now, at this stage, I usually offer my young couple a bottle of Simcox’s light ale, or would you rather we strolled across to the pub for a pint of wallop?’

  Nothing in the subsequent ceremony was to be as painful to Leslie and Charlotte as this act of preparation. In fact the day, when it came, appeared for both of them, and in their separate ways, to be a moment of triumph. Having made her mind up, Grace behaved as though her daughter’s marriage came as the fulfilment of some long-held ambition. Nicholas greeted the guests with unfailing cheerfulness, and the ‘friends of the bride’, who filled most of the church, were delighted by the source of so much future speculation. Fred, who was spending long, penniless days and nights in his old room at the Rectory studying anatomy and human biology, had received a surprise visit from Leslie Titmuss, who was without a best man. ‘Say you’ll do it,’ Leslie had begged him. ‘For the sake of old times. Remember how we used to play together.’ Fred couldn’t recall many games with the infant Titmuss, but he had agreed to stand beside Leslie and hand him the ring. Apart from anything else, it was the only party he seemed likely to be asked to for the rest of that year.

  So Leslie had everything he had stipulated, including a tent. During the course of the celebrations, Nicholas, looking across at the bride and hoping as always for the best, said he thought Charlie looked really quite handsome in his grandmother’s lace.

  ‘Do you, Nicholas?’ Grace asked him with exaggerated patience. ‘I’ll tell you one thing she doesn’t look.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Pregnant.’

  14

  The Coast

  Henry took Agnes to the Coast not once but on several occasions before and after the making of The Greasy Pole. They travelled first class at the expense of the various production companies with which Mr Bugloss was connected, and were met at Los Angeles airport by a limousine long enough and black enough to accommodate, Agnes thought, a lengthy coffin and any number of mourners. They were put up at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the telephone operators instantly knew their names and the staff constantly told Agnes to have a nice day, an instruction she received with an ironic smile. Henry lay in the sun, bought ‘leisure-wear’ in the hotel man’s shop and looked to Agnes as if he were always dressed for a cruise. He telephoned his agent a good deal from the side of the pool, and, from time to time, looked anxiously at Agnes, wondering if she found the place awful enough to be enjoyable.

  ‘It’s the wonderful thing about writing,’ he told her defensively, ‘you can write a little novel about Simcox’s Brewery, and it’ll transport you to the other side of the world.’

  ‘I know it’s a miracle.’ And Agnes gave him the smile which seemed to him to say, I’m awfully sorry that you can’t see the joke.

  On one of their visits, Mr Bugloss took them to lunch at a then fashionable restaurant on the Strip. All around them producers and agents rose from their tables like surfacing sealions to greet each other with loud honks of recognition, embraced each other with their flippers, and then sank back, gurgling towards their lunch.

  ‘Jack Polefax, I don’t believe it!’ Mr Bugloss stood and grabbed a very small, grey-haired man who was about to join a similar man waving to him from another table. ‘I just want you guys to meet Jack, who is Galaxy International.’ Mr Bugloss’s American accent, hardly noticeable in Shepperton Studios or the Dorchester Hotel, flowered and darkened in the sun. ‘Henry Simcox wrote The Greasy Pole. My last picture.’

  ‘You a writer?’ Polefax spoke, with a sort of pity, a line which caused Mr Bugloss intense amusement. ‘Don’t let him kid you! Don’t kid him, Jack. Everyone knows Henry Simcox, or they will after the next one. He’s just come up with this terrific idea.’

  ‘My God! Can you believe who’s here? Julie. Julie Salario. Isn’t that incredible?’ Mr Polefax had spied a corpulent and balding man semaphoring desperately from a distant table, and Agnes wondered why the sight of their old friends, whom they had presumably known for years, should fill Hollywood producers with such amazement. ‘I just have to go over to greet Julie. Great to meet you, Mr Simcox.’ He nodded towards Agnes. ‘Like to have you both come up to the house for Sunday brunch. Laurel Canyon. Get Benny to bring you.’ And he was off, hallooing, ‘Julie! Long time no see you at all.’

  The waiter hung with chains and silver tasting-cups was hovering now, and Mr Bugloss greeted him as warmly as though he were a film producer. ‘And right now, Charles,’ he said, ‘we could use one of your great vodka martinis.’

  ‘I’d like some wine.’ Agnes knew that if she didn’t get a word in early she’d be condemned to a cocktail and iced water.

  ‘A couple of vodka martinis, Charles.’ Benny Bugloss knew that Henry had taken on the customs of the Coast. ‘And bring us some nice wine.’ As the waiter retreated, he went on, without drawing breath. ‘You know, I’ve always been pretty close to Jack. When I visit the Galaxy lot, when I’m in the Commissary there, Jack will invariably come up and take me by the arm.’

  ‘What’s that a sign of?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘It’s a sign that if we play our cards correctly we may get Galaxy International to distribute Henry’s next movie.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard about his next movie.’ Agnes looked at Henry, who wasn’t giving away the fact that he hadn’t heard about it either.

  ‘Why do you think I brought you two over here again? Henry and I, my dear, are about to cook the perfect hamburger.’

  ‘You’re going in for catering?’ Agnes sounded innocent, and Henry frowned.

  ‘I speak in metaphor of the American dish that all the world loves to eat. Pole was fine. Good business in Britain. O.K. critical reception here. But what did it do in Tokyo? And in South America we couldn’t give it away. What we need is the hamburger. We cook it right here in town and they pay to eat it in Japan and Rio and Iowa and Hong Kong – all those territories. I tell you, my dear, I have the title of the perfect hamburger. And I have had the foresight to bring it with me.’

  At which Mr Bugloss put his hand in his pocket and proudly brought out a paperback edition of The Canterbury Tales.

  ‘That’s the perfect hamburger?’ Agnes was surprised.

  ‘I want it updated,’ Mr Bugloss told Henry. ‘I want you to bring out the erotic aspect. And I want these pilgrims to come from all over: Rome, Paris, New York, Tokyo. You see, each territory has its own story. That way we get the international appeal.’

  ‘And they all end up in Canterbury?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘That is not necessary. Henry should feel free. There are people in this town who have no idea where the hell Canterbury is.’

  ‘You mean they’re all engage
d in some sort of quest?’ Agnes’s tone of serious inquiry brought Henry no comfort.

  ‘You’ve got it! A quest!’ Benny Bugloss looked triumphantly at Henry. ‘You see, Agnes likes the idea.’

  ‘Well, they’ve always been good stories,’ Henry said, and Agnes turned on him, still asking as though for information, ‘You mean, you think it’s a good idea, Henry?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with them as stories,’ Henry repeated as Mr Bugloss gave the idea the final accolade.

  ‘And it’s in public domain! Canterbury Tales is our hamburger!’

  ‘What’s Henry have to do? Put on the ketchup? Will you excuse me a moment?’ Agnes stood up and smiled down on the producer.

  ‘Go ahead, my dear. You want to powder your nose?’

  Before she went through the door marked ‘Señoritas’ Agnes had no fixed plan of campaign but when she was safely locked in the hispanically tiled cubicle, breathing in carbolic and air freshener, she decided that she must at all costs avoid returning to Mr Bugloss’s table. She couldn’t bear to see Henry mutely accepting some great storyline for Chaucer’s hamburger and she was afraid of the pieces of her mind that she might be tempted to throw at Mr Bugloss. She couldn’t go back and yet her only way of escape lay through the restaurant. Suddenly, in need of air, she pushed open the window of her cubicle and saw, only a few feet down, the lot used for Valet Parking. Without a moment’s thought she climbed on to the seat and was out of the window and walking to freedom.

  Walking was, of course, an unknown folly on the Sunset Boulevard of the early sixties. As she passed the Body Shop and the Cock and Bull, as she walked under the huge signs advertising the latest movies and the most lavish burial grounds, people stared at her from car windows, and cops regarded her with deep suspicion. Agnes walked unconcerned, as though she were in the woods round Rapstone, unconscious of the office towers and the palm trees with the rustle of rats among their high, grey leaves. A vista of hills, as beautiful as the background of an Italian painting, could be seen hovering above the smog, and Agnes’s eyes were stinging and her feet aching as she set out for the pink and green palace which had become her improbable home.

  While she was walking her desperation evaporated. Alone she felt safe, as she had once felt with Henry when he took over her and her problems, told her, with comforting certainty, exactly what she was going to do and arranged for her to do it. Henry had found the softly spoken German doctor in Belsize Park who had ended her pregnancy like a common cold. When she was then afflicted by an extraordinary loneliness, as if, single-handed, she had unpeopled the world, Henry had suggested journeys, aeroplane tickets and flights to the sunshine at the expense of Benjamin K. Bugloss. She had been pleased to be with him, and glad to put the greatest possible distance between herself and her old home, the surgery, the woods, Tom Nowt’s hut and even Arturo’s coffee bar, which seemed to her now to belong to a world of disappointment and death.

  What surprised her was the amount of time that passed before Henry made love to her. She had assumed that she wasn’t going to be taken abroad merely for the sake of friendship, but for a long while Henry booked separate bedrooms, kissed her goodnight at her door and talked to her about everything but themselves. It was as though her progress through so many airport lounges and hotel lobbies was a sort of process of churching and he was waiting for her to recover and be purged from the ministrations of not only the doctor in Belsize Park but his brother Frederick also.

  As time and distance separated her increasingly from home Agnes became more confident, less dependent on Henry for the organization of her life and, strangely, fonder of him. He wasn’t, she noticed, half so self-confident as he liked to let on. He would arrive unnecessarily early at airports (Agnes had a distinct taste for catching everything by the skin of her teeth) and as he checked in she often noticed that his hands were sweating. He had an initial lack of confidence about his writing, and would only feel secure when it had been enjoyed by someone. It didn’t seem to matter who praised it and Agnes, who at first enjoyed voicing her views, found that the good opinions of a secretary who re-typed the first draft were equally consoling to Henry. When she told him, as she thought, that The Greasy Pole was much better as a book than it ever became as a movie, he flew into a defensive rage and shouted at her in a way which she found almost touchingly helpless and quite unalarming. It seemed that Henry had pinned all his faith on Mr Bugloss as the first principle and guiding spirit of their new way of life and all his anti-Bugloss stories, of which he had many, were like jokes made by devout Catholics about the Virgin Birth. In his favour it should be said that Mr Bugloss had finally produced a sensible and well-received adaptation of The Greasy Pole which greatly enhanced Henry’s reputation throughout the world.

  Henry’s second novel, which came out four or five months after their first visit to Los Angeles, was, inevitably, less well-regarded and, after a scene which left him almost speechless with despair, Mr Bugloss announced that he didn’t see it as a movie property. It was then that Agnes and Henry began to make love, and if she knew she was, perhaps, only second best to a rave review, she felt pleased to repay the debt she was sure she owed him. Everything about going to bed with Henry surprised her, his gentleness, his curious lack of invention, something she hadn’t expected in a writer, and his obvious need of her. It was a need she found touching but it left her, at times, remote. When she thought of Fred, which she did as little as possible, she remembered their love-making as a silent voyage of self-discovery. In bed with his elder brother she was discovering almost all there was to be known about Henry, for he was rarely silent before, during or after the act of coition. Listening to him and sensing the insecurity beneath his most extravagant boasting she fell into a trap which she thought afterwards that she of all people should have avoided. She wanted to improve Henry.

  So she began to resent his trips to the Coast, his adaptations for Mr Bugloss which earned money but rarely got made into films, and Henry felt himself subject to her judgement which became the more intolerable as he came secretly to agree with it. So their quarrels started, because she couldn’t resist saying what she thought and he couldn’t forgive her for it. They were tempestuous quarrels, for which Henry showed a dramatic talent, and sometimes she thought they brought them closer to each other. She couldn’t remember a time when she had seriously quarrelled with Fred.

  As she walked she remembered the awful evening at the Barrel of Biscuits in Worsfield which she had enjoyed in Fred’s company, and wondered why the awfulness of the Hollywood restaurant gave her no pleasure. She wanted to be alone, to sleep, not to have to make conversation or pass judgement any more that day.

  ‘Having a nice day?’ the hotel doorman asked when she arrived and she told him, ‘No, not particularly.’

  In the restaurant, Benny Bugloss said, ‘She’s missing her wine.’ Henry looked towards the ‘Señoritas’ with a kind of desperation, fearing that Agnes’s failure to emerge was not due to illness or any natural cause but merely to contempt.

  ‘I walked.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. No one walks here.’

  ‘Somebody does.’

  ‘You were a great help! You left me looking ridiculous.’

  ‘You were looking ridiculous before I left. Agreeing with all that rubbish.’

  Henry had found Agnes lying on a chair by the pool with her eyes closed. He thought she was pretending to be asleep. Around them on the towelling-covered day-beds, or under the yellow canopies of their private tents, lay men in bathing-trunks and women in flowered bathing-caps who were pursuing the great poolside sport of making telephone calls. One old fellow shouted greetings into the phone cupped in his shoulder, while his hands kneaded suntan oil into a woman’s back. The tannoy announced names wanted for other telephone calls: ‘Mr Irving Lazar, Mr Richard Zanuck, Mr Ed Pringle, Miss Gwenda Grammercy… to the telephone, please.’

  Henry had told Agnes that some actors paid their agents substantial retainers to make thes
e calls so that their names might be heard regularly around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Agnes thought of them going on remorselessly long after the actor had given up and left the profession, perhaps after he was dead.

  ‘It’s very easy for you, isn’t it?’ Henry told her. However angry he was he still kept his voice down so as not to disturb the half-naked telephoners around them. ‘Oh yes. You can be so prim and superior and despise Benny Bugloss from a great height! You don’t have to pay the bills.’

  ‘You don’t have to pay them like that.’

  ‘I have to pay them.’

  Agnes swung her legs off the side of the day-bed and sat up. As she spoke the twittering of telephone calls subsided, the sunbathers had begun to listen.

  ‘Pay them by creeping and crawling to old Benny, my dear, by turning Chaucer into a hamburger, by having your arm squeezed by Jack Baby? You know what? I’d rather die than go to lunch in Laurel Canyon with a lot of old men in necklaces and women with heads covered in rubber flowers.’

  ‘Why do you have to be so difficult?’ Henry sounded genuinely puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know why I have to be.’ She stood up, snatched at her towelling dressing-gown and put it on. ‘What did you honestly think when you took me on, that I was going to be easy?’

  She ran away from him, past the now silent telephoners, past the puzzled Swede who was carefully folding yellow towels, past the dusty, luxuriant flowerbeds and past the great banana leaves on the wallpaper of their bedroom corridor. And Henry came after her with what dignity he could muster, moving as quickly as he could without looking as though he were chasing a woman from the pool. Once in the shadows of the hotel he made up speed and was able to put his weight against their bedroom door just as Agnes was trying to push it shut.