Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘That’s my husband, by the way,’ the woman explained. ‘Everybody calls him Malley. I hope you will too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His name’s Mallard-Greene but everybody at the B.B.C. calls him Malley. We’re having our picnic in the garden.’

  ‘I suppose that’s all right.’

  ‘Well, thank you!’ Mrs Mallard-Greene assumed that Glenys was making some kind of a joke.

  ‘I mean, I shouldn’t really be here myself. It’s not all signed and sealed yet but I couldn’t resist coming in and making a bit of a start.’ Glenys looked hungrily round at the cleaning she still had to do; she wanted to get on.

  ‘It’s most tremendously keen of you and I’m sure we’ll get on like a house on fire!’ Mrs Mallard-Greene encouraged her. ‘We noticed that you’d brought your bicycle. How many hours are you going to be able to get up here?’

  ‘But I’m going to be here all the time.’

  ‘All the time? We weren’t thinking of anyone living-in.’

  ‘Living-in? Of course we’ll be living-in, me and my Terry. It’s going to be our cottage, isn’t it?’

  It was then that Mrs Mallard-Greene went to the window, pushed it open and shouted with surprising volume, ‘Come here, Malley. I think there’s been a tiny bit of a balls-up!’

  ‘Tom Nowt’s dead.’ Fred gave his brother the news in a Hartscombe bookshop, where Henry was signing copies of his new novel The Wrong Side of Sunset Boulevard. (‘A brilliant and savage satire on Hollywood by Britain’s brightest and angriest young writer’ – Guardian.) Fred had been walking down the High Street, wondering whether he’d end his life married to some plump nurse or eager female medical student he had met walking the wards, and then repeating the mnemonic, ‘On Old Manhattan’s Peaked Tops A Finn And German Picked Some Hops,’ a strange, unforgettable vision which never managed to remind him of the names of the cranial nerves. Then his thoughts had turned to Stan Kenton, whose big band arrangements were polluting the purity of jazz, not that Fred thought that music should ever remain as played by a blind negro pianist in Preservation Hall. His steps were arrested by the sight of his brother’s face repeated on the jackets of a pile of books. Through the shop window he was appalled to see Henry standing beside Mrs Niggs, the bookseller, drinking white wine which he didn’t offer to the customers, who seemed unreasonably anxious to acquire the latest Simcox. Fred pushed open the door and joined the queue.

  ‘Would you mind not signing this one? I plan to read it in odd moments, when Mrs Niggs isn’t looking. Anyway, aren’t you knocking on a bit for an angry young writer?’

  ‘I might have known you’d be in Hartscombe, Freddie. You never seem to be anywhere else.’

  ‘You will come over to the Rectory for dinner, won’t you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’ll expect it. Now they know you’re home. Anyway, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  It was then that Fred told him, ‘Tom Nowt’s dead.’

  At dinner at the Rectory, curried lamb – the positively last appearance of the Sunday joint – washed down with a limited amount of Simcox’s bottled ale, Dorothy received the presentation copy of Henry’s latest work: ‘To Mother and Father, without whom I shouldn’t have seen Hollywood, or indeed anything at all’, and looked with embarrassed amusement at the photograph on the cover.

  ‘It’s not at all like him, is it, Simeon?’ She held it up for her husband to peer at from the other end of the table. ‘It’s not at all like Henry.’

  ‘Not really, but then I’ve always found it quite difficult to remember what either of you look like,’ Simeon told his sons. ‘When you’re not here of course.’

  ‘Well, we’re here now,’ Henry pointed out reasonably.

  ‘I do wish you’d write a “whodunit”,’ Dorothy sighed, as though expressing the longing of a lifetime. ‘They do so awfully well in the library. Nowadays the library comes round in a van, such a strange idea, like milk.’

  ‘Who done what?’ Henry asked. ‘I don’t suppose anyone cares.’

  ‘Don’t you? People seem to.’

  ‘Henry’s written a satirical comedy,’ Fred explained, as his brother continued to smile bravely, ‘about how much he hates America.’

  ‘Hate it, do you?’ Simeon asked as though genuinely seeking information. ‘Why are you always going there then?’

  ‘Henry’s not always going there,’ Fred told him. ‘He’s always coming back.’

  ‘Anyway, those ghastly film people.’ Henry decided to shut his brother up with an anecdote. ‘Agnes and I were being bored by one at lunch. You know the sort of lunches they have there – three-storey sandwiches and lethal cocktails and iced water.’

  ‘Iced water!’ Dorothy laughed. ‘It’d make my teeth ache!’

  ‘Agnes and I looked at each other in the middle of lunch and hit on this scheme, by sort of telepathy. We both went to the loo and climbed out of the window to freedom.’

  ‘Both?’ Fred raised his eyebrows.

  ‘We walked back to the hotel,’ Henry went on, ignoring his brother. ‘Laughing all the way. You know, you don’t walk in Hollywood, no one walks in Hollywood, it’s a sort of blasphemy.’

  At the end of this story Henry laughed a little on his own and Fred felt a moment of sympathy for him. Whether or not he was telling the truth he was doing his best to entertain their parents, who could be hard to please, particularly their mother. She turned big, mournful eyes on Henry, as though he had recounted a tragedy.

  ‘Poor man!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The poor man who was buying you lunch.’

  ‘He’s not poor at all. He draws the most enormous expenses.’

  ‘All the same, you probably hurt his feelings.’

  ‘Impossible! I put a literal, word-for-word portrait of Benjamin K. Bugloss in my book. I made him the complete comic, dotty Hollywood producer. I thought he’d sue me for libel, or at least never speak to me again. Do you know what? He thinks it’s a “great piece of material” and he’s bought an option on it for a movie.’

  ‘Your Mr Bugloss,’ Dorothy told him, ‘sounds something of a saint.’

  After dinner, when Dorothy and Simeon had retired to the double bed they still shared, Henry brought in a bottle of whisky from the car and the brothers sat in Simeon’s study. ‘Do you think Our Father and the Reverend Mother were getting at me slightly?’ Henry swirled his drink round the tumbler and looked, with a wounded expression, at the bust of Karl Marx.

  ‘They get at me a lot more,’ Fred told him.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Probably because I’m here a lot more.’

  ‘Our father’s an extraordinary being. Do you ever get the feeling he’s not connected with us at all?’

  There was a silence and then Fred told him again, ‘Tom Nowt shot himself by accident apparently. I can’t imagine Tom shooting anything by accident.’

  ‘Wasn’t he some kind of poacher?’

  ‘The point is, no one wants to admit knowing him very well, or his hut in the woods. You remember how angry our father was when I went there, years ago?’

  ‘No one wants to admit knowing him?’ Henry frowned.

  ‘Dr Salter doesn’t. Or Mother. I had an idea.’

  ‘Try not to, you’re not used to it.’ What Henry said wasn’t really an insult, only an echo of their schooldays.

  ‘I had a strange thought that she and Dr Salter might have gone there together once, years ago perhaps.’

  ‘God, Frederick!’ Henry embarked on an outraged aria. ‘They accuse me of inventing! You think Sunset’s an invention? I tell you. It was all exactly like that only more so. Writers are the only reliable witnesses. We know about the world, young Fred. We’ve got our feet firmly on the ground but people like you, the middle-class professional men like you’re going to be, doctors, lawyers, bank managers, you’re all lost in a world of fantasy! Or is your life so dull tha
t you have to invent mysterious secrets about our family?’

  ‘You’re middle class too, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s hardly the point.’

  ‘And professional.’ Fred gave himself another drink out of Henry’s bottle. ‘Anyway, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now Tom Nowt’s dead.’

  Disappointed of the cottage which he believed to be destined for himself and Glenys, Terry Fawcett called at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Present during his interview were a Miss Carew, in charge, and Charlie Titmuss, née Fanner, who was there as part of her training in social welfare. Miss Carew, who was caring for the row of potted plants, ferns and succulents, which stood on her window ledge, snipping off dead leaves and applying water from a long spouted can, interviewed Terry. She told him that Doughty Strove was entitled to do what he liked with his own property, that the old cottage no doubt needed more money spent on it than he and Glenys could afford, and that they could put their names down for one of the new council flats being planned for Worsfield in a couple of years’ time, although priority would naturally be given to married couples with families. At which point Terry, who had been smoking with fierce concentration, deliberately applied a lighted match to the pile of case notes, pamphlets on Help for the Aged, Baby Care, Rent Tribunals and How to Register a Death, which lay on the table in front of him. Miss Carew swung round from her plants to see her small world alight and burning furiously. Unexpectedly she cried, ‘What the shit, Mr Fawcett?’ and doused the flames with her watering-can.

  Charlie caught up with Terry as he left the counselling service and persuaded him to come for a pint or two of Simcox’s. She commiserated, condoled and joined him in reviling the name of Doughty Strove. She was late getting home to her husband, and bought fish and chips for their supper.

  ‘Not again!’ Leslie in his shirt-sleeves rose from another file of accounts and looked at the warm, damp sheets of the Hartscombe Advertiser unfolding to reveal the cooling, yellow fish and limp chips. ‘I must set them out properly.’

  ‘On a poncey little dish?’ Charlie, without removing her mac, had sprinkled vinegar and was eating with eager, well-licked fingers.

  ‘I can’t imagine what your mother would say if she could see us.’

  ‘Oh, I can. Mummy would think we’d got dreadfully common. Screw her!’

  ‘It’s not something I’d personally undertake.’ Leslie picked up a chip, stared at it with distaste and took a determined bite.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Charlie looked up from her portion of rock salmon. ‘You’ve started to make jokes.’

  Leslie ignored this and gave her the news. It was time, he had decided, that they moved on. Hartscombe Enterprises needed a national centre, and London might suit Charlotte very well. It was, after all, absolutely teeming with social problems. Charlie was doubtful and reluctant.

  ‘I don’t see how I can leave Terry Fawcett and Glenys. They haven’t got anywhere to live.’

  ‘There’s a plan for new flats in Worsfield.’

  ‘They don’t want Worsfield. They want Rapstone. They were both kids in the village. Why should they have to move to Wors-field?’

  ‘Upward mobility.’ As Charlie showed no signs of making coffee, Leslie plugged in the kettle.

  ‘Up a bloody tower block, you mean! In about ten years’ time.’

  She lit a cigarette, dropping the spent match into the paper which had contained their supper. Leslie made the coffee carefully, filtering it and setting out small after-dinner cups with a milk jug and sugar bowl on a tray. Looking at Charlie he thought that what she was was a snob. She’d been brought up deprived of fish and chips and strong tea and bottles of sauce. He remembered his daily routine at ‘The Spruces’. His father always came home at exactly the same time and always said, ‘Is tea ready, dear?’ When he had eaten he would push his plate away with the usual words ‘very tasty, dear. That was very tasty.’ If anyone in the family became ill, it was a point of honour not to bother the Doctor, and all deaths were known as ‘a blessed release’. At half past nine every evening George Titmuss dropped asleep in the leatherette chair on the right side of the fireplace, his mouth fell open, his breathing became soft and regular and his wife and son would have to sew and read in silence. At ten-thirty exactly Leslie’s father would wake up with a start, say, ‘Time for Bedfordshire!’ and lock up. All hope for a different sort of life was known as ‘living with your head in the clouds’, all ambition had to be confined to keeping the Prefect in running order, ‘The Spruces’ front garden the tidiest in Skurfield and the payments to the Prudential regular. Whatever his wife might feel about the glamour of the sauce bottles on the table at tea-time, Leslie knew exactly what the world he came from was like and he was not going back there ever, not as long as he lived.

  ‘There’s not a lot I can do about Terry Fawcett’s problems yet.’ Leslie carried the tray to the coffee table in front of their sitting-room fireplace.

  ‘What do you mean, yet?’ Charlie was not following him.

  ‘Well,’ Leslie told her modestly. ‘For that sort of problem, he’d have to go to his local M.P.’

  So the Mallard-Greenes took possession of Tom Nowt’s cottage, and the young Titmusses moved up to London, at first to a company flat in St John’s Wood, and later, when Leslie was made a director, to a small company house off the Cromwell Road. Before they left, Charlie told her father to transfer the lease of their Rapstone cottage to Terry Fawcett, but he was surprised to discover that she didn’t know that the cottage had already been sold to Hartscombe Enterprises, a deal he’d agreed to because Leslie had told him that having the place owned by the company would mean ‘a bit of security’ for Charlotte and himself. ‘Really, Charlie,’ Nicholas asked, ‘doesn’t your husband tell you anything?’ Tackled by his wife on the subject, Leslie said that Magnus and Christopher Kempenflatt had insisted on the purchase, and they wanted to resell to a young chap from Hambros, who needed somewhere to pop down to for occasional weekends. He had managed to get a bit of commission on the deal which would help them in their move to London. Leslie explained all these things very reasonably and Charlie said little at the time. She felt she had failed, however, and was anxious to get away to London, where she could take a course at the L.S.E. and help such other Terry Fawcetts as she might find, without having to seek favours from her father or permission from her husband.

  Some time later Mr Mallard-Greene, wearing corduroy trousers and an anorak, carrying a large tin of paraffin, walked down into the depths of the beech woods which he now owned, with his two children, Simon and Sarah. The young Mallard-Greenes followed him, somewhat reluctantly, not having been anxious to turn out on a chilly afternoon and resenting being wrapped up in gloves and mufflers by their mother. When Simon asked his father about their mission he was told, ‘We’re getting rid of an eyesore. It’s not only because it’s ugly to look at, it’s because it’s not what this woodland’s meant for. It’s meant for wild life. It’s meant to be a home for the badgers and all sorts of birds and butterflies and for squirrels, of course.’

  ‘And for worms,’ Sarah suggested.

  ‘Well, of course, for worms.’

  ‘And for woodlice.’

  ‘And for bluebells,’ Mr Mallard-Greene summed up firmly. ‘There’s nothing spoils a natural bluebell wood more than having a sort of rural slum dumped down in it.’ They reached Tom Nowt’s hut, a scene of considerable activity. Two woodmen with a tractor and trailer, rented for the day, had loaded up all such non-inflammable objects as the cooker, lamps, pots and pans and the big, creaking, brass-knobbed iron bedstead. A couple of walls had already been knocked down and reduced to a pile of timber in the middle of the wooden floor, but the front of the hut had been left standing, with broken windows and a door which opened inwards into the silence of an ancient beech wood. Mr Mallard-Greene, known as Malley in the B.B.C. and a closet pyromaniac, told his children to stand well ba
ck and sloshed paraffin in through the front door. Then he struck a match, threw it in and retreated with the fearful delight of a child who has just lit the blue touch-paper of an enormous banger on Guy Fawkes night.

  There was a wonderful whoosh, a wind of flame and then a slower crackling as what was left of the hut burned down. The damp afternoon became sultry, lit by showers of sparks and the steady burning of wooden planks and battens. So, as Malley beamed with pride, the workmen looked on without expression, and the children danced with delight and, greatly daring, darted up to throw sticks and fallen branches on to the blaze, Tom Nowt’s hut, hunting-lodge and meeting-place for secret lovers vanished as his deer skulls, crowned with antlers, fell from the wall of fire and blackened on the burning floor.

  Many years later, and a year after Simeon’s death, Henry sat in a room in Lincoln’s Inn and tried to explain his case for upsetting his father’s will to a couple of barristers and his solicitor, Jackson Cantellow.

  ‘There was an old hut in the woods,’ he said. ‘My brother, Frederick, once had a strange idea that our mother used to meet the local Doctor there. I really don’t know what he was driving at. Perhaps that there was some sort of mystery about his birth, or mine?’

  ‘I don’t think we need be in the least concerned, Mr Henry Simcox, at what your brother, Frederick, was driving at.’ Crispin Drayton, Q.C., Henry’s leading counsel, was a tall, nobbly and abstemious man, married to a lady magistrate. In court he was renowned for his high moral tone and the brutality of his cross-examination. ‘Let others speculate, if they feel so inclined. You do understand, I’m sure, that if you or your brother were not the “lawful children” of the deceased Rector, we might get the one thing we don’t want in this case.’

  ‘What’s that exactly?’