‘Does that mean you’re against us?’ Henry was frowning, trying to do his brother the credit of assuming that this anecdote, although apparently pointless, had some sort of relevance to the topic under discussion. But Fred assured him that it didn’t mean that at all, in fact it meant that he was on his side.
After the encounter with his father-in-law in Hartscombe Town Hall, Leslie was daily expecting a summons from Grace. For a long time she left him and Charlie in peace. But one day, when he was walking from his old office in the Brewery, where he still helped his father at the time of the annual return, to the new office of Hartscombe Enterprises, the large black Daimler slowed up beside him, the back door opened, and his mother-in-law invited him in with all the cordiality of a hitman of the prohibition era inviting a rival mobster to take a ride. Leslie obeyed politely and looked at Grace with deep sympathy.
‘I know you must have been worried, mother-in-law. Of course, Charlotte and I are enormously keen on starting a family as soon as possible.’
‘You lied to us, you both lied!’
‘Yes.’ Leslie’s answer so startled Grace that she was silent for at least ten seconds, and then he began a long, confidential explanation, carried on in a hushed tone of voice that at first angered, then embarrassed her. Before he had altogether finished she was finding the pale and by no means apologetic Titmuss strangely appealing. Did she want to know why they lied, he asked her. Because he knew it was the only way she would agree to his marriage. And because he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life working in the Brewery, coming up to the Manor once a year for tea in the garden and the tombola at the Conservative fête. It was because he wasn’t going to settle for the life his father had worked out for him, nine to five in the accounts department until he was old enough to draw his pension. He was not only going to make something of himself, and of Charlotte also. He was going to become someone his parents-inlaw would be proud of. In fact he was going to represent the constituency one day when Doughty Strove retired, which event might not be so long delayed as everyone might think. He, Leslie Titmuss, was embarking on a long-term programme for the development of his career and he had to start somewhere, didn’t he?
‘So you started with us?’ Grace noticed that the window which separated them from Brooks, the chauffeur, had been left open, and slid it to, sharply, and much too late. ‘Well, at least you’re honest, I suppose.’ She looked at him and recognized, in a surprising moment, something almost like a fellow spirit. ‘What you’re telling me is, you would have said anything in the world to get into our family?’
‘Said or done anything. Of course there’s no reason to hide the facts from you now. The point is, if I’m going to do any of the things I’m planning for me and Charlotte, I’ve got to begin with the people I’ll meet in your dining-room. I mean, where else is there?’
It was the language that Grace understood and she invited Leslie to dinner for the following Thursday night. It was an invitation Charlie heard about with horror. If she’d wanted to eat meals with her mother, why on earth, she said, had she gone to all the trouble of leaving home? Finally she yielded to her husband’s persuasion but only on the condition that he wouldn’t leave her to be dragged upstairs by her mother while he stayed to drink port and tell dirty stories in the dining-room. To this condition Leslie, who could see no possible political advantage in telling a dirty story to Nicholas, readily agreed.
It was, she remembered afterwards, the first of his broken promises. When Grace threw down her dinner napkin and called on Bridget Naboth, Honor Kempenflatt, Jennifer Battley and Mrs Fairhazel to follow her upstairs, Charlie first looked pleadingly at her husband, then uttered the words ‘You promised’ in a resounding whisper. It was a cry from the heart which Leslie ignored, being busy telling Magnus that it would have been interesting to have had his father’s views on an autumn election.
‘Come along, Charlie. Let’s leave the boys to their politics.’ All the boys, Leslie and Magnus, Christopher Kempenflatt, Lord Naboth, the ‘Contessa’ and her father, had their heads turned away from her and their eyes averted, as Charlie went off as though to half an hour on the rack.
‘I’m afraid Doughty had something on in London.’ Nicholas apologized for his old friend.
‘I expect you think he’s got nothing on in London, don’t you, Leslie?’ Magnus was laughing. ‘I mean nothing but an iron mask?’
‘I’m only sorry,’ Leslie replied with dignity, ‘that your father has so little time for constituency matters.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’m sure that Doughty would tell us we’re going to win the next election, whenever it is.’
‘And are we all absolutely sure that would be in the best interests of the Party?’
Faces were turned to Leslie, showing more embarrassment and shock than if he’d told the dirtiest joke Charlie had ever managed to collect from the brightest of her juvenile delinquents.
‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’ Lord Naboth was looking profoundly disturbed.
‘I’m not sure we don’t need a time to re-think.’ Leslie smiled in the pleasantest way. ‘I don’t think we can afford to go on being amateurs.’
‘You mean being gentlemen?’ Nicholas’s mind turned to cricket. ‘You want us to be players?’
‘I’d like us to be serious. If we lost in the autumn, it might give us time to sharpen up our image.’
‘Sharpen up what, Titmuss?’
‘Our image, sir.’
‘Is that a phrase that has some meaning for you, Archie?’ Nicholas turned to Lord Naboth for guidance.
‘I’m not sure. I’ll tell you one thing though. I bet Alec Douglas-Home isn’t in the least worried about the result of the election.’
‘I bet Harold Wilson is, perhaps that’s the difference between them. Don’t worry, Magnus, will you?’ Leslie was now positively affable. ‘Of course we’re all going to work twenty-four hours a day to get your father re-elected.’
Upstairs, in the drawing-room, Grace knew that Mrs Fairhazel was longing to be gently poisonous on the subject of Leslie Titmuss and got her oar in first. ‘I think Charlie’s really found something in her Mr Titmuss. He knows exactly where he’s going and, give him full marks, I honestly believe he’s going to get there. At least he pays us the compliment of wanting to join us.’ Unfortunately Charlie didn’t hear this generous tribute. She was seated in blissful solitude in the downstairs loo, a refuge where her husband had, many years before, been found screaming. She was reading the back numbers of Country Life with which the dusty table beside the seat was supplied, and when she came across a photograph of her mother enjoying a joke at some long-past hunt ball, she tore it out carefully, and then, even more carefully, ripped it into even smaller pieces and flushed it down the pan.
The election was held in October. Fred drove his father’s elderly Austin and Henry came down the lanes too fast, brushing the hedge-rows against the sides of his second-hand Jaguar. They were both there to ‘get out’ Labour voters, so they found cottages on remote commons, or went down rutted tracks to unknown farms, or ransacked blocks of flats and Old People’s Homes. Some of the voters came willingly, having been ready since dawn and regarding the whole occasion as a day out; many thought the election an unwarranted intrusion into their private lives and most couldn’t be home until the evening. So, while the Simcox brothers were driving cars plastered with pictures of Harold Wilson, Leslie Titmuss knocked on doors, called on the residents of caravans and barges on the river and drove Conservative voters in the spruce black Rover Christopher Kempenflatt had lent him for the occasion.
Simeon and Dorothy crossed from the Rectory to the schoolhouse, wearing red rosettes, to register their votes. Dr Salter, riding by, called from the saddle to ask them if they were about to start another revolution. ‘He’s only teasing us,’ Dorothy explained, but Simeon waved the hand with his pipe in it and called back, ‘A revolution. Of course! Guillotine all the aristocrats and their d
octor.’ It was a threat which was clearly heard by Grace and her chauffeur, Brooks, who had come down in the Daimler to cast their votes. By the early evening Fred had seen more village halls and schools than he knew existed, had found Hartscombe housing estates he had never visited and had helped old ladies out of bedrooms and transported babies their mothers couldn’t leave. He met Ben Leverett, the Labour candidate, his grey hair blowing in the wind and his rosette flapping, as he drew up with a small catch of Labour voters outside the Town Hall.
‘Hartscombe’s pretty solid Tory and a lot of the villages,’ Ben Leverett said. ‘But we’ve got South Worsfield and the housing estates. If we can get all our voters out we might just be in with a chance.’
So, in the faint hope of securing the Rapstone Valley for the People’s Party, Fred drove to Worsfield with another crumpled list and inadequate information. He stopped at a traffic light on the edge of the city and looked out at sodium-lit windows on the chance of spotting Mr Wilson’s photograph peering back at him. Then he heard a bleep on the horn of the black Rover parked next to him and saw the window being rolled down. In a moment he was in communication with Leslie Titmuss.
‘There’s a few of your voters up in Attlee Crescent. They haven’t been picked up yet.’
‘You’re telling me that?’
‘I thought it would be fair.’ He glided off in the Rover, an unexpectedly parfit and gentil Knight of a Leslie Titmuss, and when Fred at last found Attlee Crescent he discovered that it wasn’t even a hoax.
The result, when the Mayor as the Returning officer announced it in Hartscombe Town Hall at around one o’clock in the morning, was greeted by cheers and boos and came out as follows: Leverett, Benjamin Arnold (Labour), fifteen thousand and six; Prusford, Michael Charles (Liberal), four thousand six hundred and twenty-four; Ramsden, Michael Matabele (Anti-Vivisection and Free Toilet facilities), sixteen; Strove, Doughty Picton Percival (Conservative), fourteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven. And so the said Benjamin Arnold Leverett was duly elected to serve as the member for the Hartscombe and South Worsfield constituency. They had, Fred calculated rapidly, a majority of thirty-nine and he wondered just how many Labour voters he had got out of Attlee Crescent, thanks to the unexpected chivalry of Leslie Titmuss.
Mr Harold Wilson went to Buckingham Palace with his wife, his two sons and his father, to become prime minister at the age of forty-eight. Doughty Strove went back to full-time farming and Leslie Titmuss worked hard for Hartscombe Enterprises. Agnes gave birth to Francesca and became mysteriously happy with the baby. Henry felt he was the only normally discontented person in the household. Fred went on learning more about the human body than he thought it safe for anyone to know, and Simeon became concerned about the military government in Bolivia.
One morning, by the woods in the Mandragola Valley, Doughty Strove’s gamekeeper found Tom Nowt lying beside his shot-gun. Tom had bled copiously from a jagged wound in his chest. He was quite dead.
17
The Wrongs of Man
‘Let her go. Let her go. God bless her, Wherever she may be,’ sang Joe Sneeping, trumpet in hand, fronting the rehearsal session in Marmaduke’s garage, and Fred, on drums, heard murmurs from the other musicians. ‘Accident?’ ‘ ’Course, Doctor, she said it was an accident!’ and ‘Some it suits quite well, Tom going like that.’ Those speaking were Den Kitson on banjo and Terry Fawcett on clarinet, who was resting with his instrument on his knee.
‘She can look this wide world over, She’ll never find a sweet man like me…’ Joe stopped singing and looked rebukingly at Terry Fawcett who raised his clarinet to his lips, and Fred was able to overhear no more about the death of Tom Nowt. All he knew was the finding of the coroner who had heard the evidence of Dr Salter. Death was due to an accident which probably occurred when the deceased stumbled while out shooting at night. He might well have tripped over some low branch or bramble and his shot-gun, with the safety-catch off, discharged accidentally.
The cause of Tom Nowt’s death brought less speculation than the future of his cottage on the Strove estate. His children had all left home and his wife, Dora, went to live with a married daughter in Hartscombe. There appeared to be available a rare commodity, an empty cottage in the Rapstone Valley, and no one, they were sure, deserved it more than Terry Fawcett and Glenys Bigwell who had been walking out for six years with nowhere to lie down together but the woods or a bed and breakfast on rare summer holidays.
Glenys could entertain Terry at her parents’ and Terry could have her to tea at his mother’s, but neither home afforded them permission of a bed or a space to marry. When they discussed the prospect, Bridget said Tom Nowt’s place had been kept like a monkey house, and her husband was doubtful about his daughter taking over the home of a man who had crippled him by his habit of letting the sodding trees fall anywhere. Tom Nowt’s cottage seemed to Percy Bigwell to be the sort of place which could bring no one any luck. However, Glenys’s mind was made up. The cottage would suit them perfectly, and Terry could use the old hut in the woods for repairing his motor-bikes. She mentioned all this to the Rector one morning when she went up to type for him, and between congratulations to members of the new Government, stern warnings to the Bishop of Worsfield, drafts of letters to The Times on the subjects of integrated schools in the southern states of America and the situation in the Dominican Republic, Simeon composed a strong note to Doughty Strove on the justice of Terry and Glenys’s claim to Tom Nowt’s old cottage. He was sure that a wise and fair landlord would immediately grant them a lease. As Glenys saw the words take shape under her fingers and bite blackly into the paper, she believed that the matter had been decided by the Rector and it would only be a matter of time before she and Terry moved in together. On the same morning as she typed the letter, she booked a date for her marriage.
Both Glenys and Simeon had reckoned without a new force in the Rapstone Valley, Hartscombe Enterprises, which body, through its representatives, Magnus Strove and Leslie Titmuss, was taking a close look at Tom’s old cottage in the company of Doughty Strove. Leslie had the figures Hartscombe Enterprises would pay the Strove estate – £10,000 for the property including the bit of woodland leased to the late Mr Nowt with the cottage. The cash would be immediately available and the purchasers would be responsible for all repairs and renovations.
‘There’s only one difficulty.’ Doughty looked troubled.
‘What’s that, Father?’
‘Had a note from the Rector, the Bigwell girl is marrying young Fawcett. As they’ve been walking out together for years, he seems to think they’ve got some sort of natural right to the place.’
‘With all due respect to the Rector’ – Leslie was almost apologetic – ‘I wonder if he’s really thought this one through. Of course Glenys Bigwell is an extremely attractive girl.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Doughty’s eyes, set like dark currants in a wide expanse of bun, became somewhat beady.
‘Well, if you did that sort of favour for one particular local girl, mightn’t it start old stories again?’
‘Old stories?’ Doughty looked round furtively, as though there might be whisperers in Tom Nowt’s dilapidated cottage. ‘I think all Leslie’s trying to say, Father,’ Magnus came in with the voice of reason, ‘is that it would be much better to offer it to someone outside the neighbourhood. That’s all you were trying to say, wasn’t it, Leslie?’
‘That’s all, Magnus. That is absolutely all.’
Although she got no formal confirmation from the Strove estate Glenys assumed that the Rector’s letter had done the trick. Accordingly she hung a basket full of scourers, scrubbing brushes, floor cloths, rags, Mansion polish and Gumption on to the handlebars of her bike and rode over to Skurfield one afternoon when Simeon and Dorothy had gone off to a concert in Worsfield Cathedral, and the world was let off, for the afternoon, a single letter of protest.
When Glenys arrived at the cottage she leant her bike against the hedge, fo
und the spare key where she knew Tom and Dora had always kept it under a loose brick, went in and, after clicking her tongue a little at the state of the floors, put on an overall and rubber gloves and started to work. An hour later she was gumptioning the sink with such concentrated intensity that she didn’t hear a car stop in the lane outside, nor did she hear the woman who came in at the back door.
‘The door was open.’ Glenys turned to see a well preserved forty-year-old, wearing trousers and a sweater, with a bulging handbag slung across her shoulder, glasses on the end of her nose and a look of amused desperation at all the problems with which life presented her. ‘You must have seen the advertisement.’
‘What advertisement?’ Glenys went on scrubbing.
‘We put a card up in that funny little sell-everything shop. You know, paraffin lamps all mixed up with bacon and butter and old fly-papers. But,’ and the woman peered at Glenys, pushing her glasses up, ‘if you didn’t see the advertisement how on earth did you get here?’
‘Everyone knows about it now Tom’s passed over.’
‘Of course!’ The woman sounded relieved. ‘News travels fast in this little community. Well, we’re delighted to see you however you got here.’
‘Oh, the Rector fixed it up.’ The sink was gleaming white now and Glenys looked at it, contented.
‘The Red Rector of Rapstone! We haven’t touched base with him yet but we hear he’s perfectly charming, in spite of the funny politics. So he suggested you came along?’
‘He wrote a letter to Mr Strove and I think that’ll do the trick.’
‘Well, I must say, it’s extremely thoughtful of them all.’
It was then that Glenys looked out into the little patch of back garden where Tom grew a few vegetables and a good many nettles, the proliferation of which was due to the burial there of the inedible parts of much slaughtered game. A balding man had spread a rug on the unmown grass and was setting out a picnic for the benefit of two fair-haired and carsick children.
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