Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘A rational explanation for the will of Simeon Simcox.’

  18

  The Partnership

  In the middle of the swinging sixties people in England were apparently under some sort of obligation to have a good time and most of them didn’t. A Russian and an American walked about in space to no one’s particular advantage. The Beatles received their British Empire medals and, so it was said, smoked cannabis in the lavatories at Buckingham Palace. American aeroplanes were bombing North Vietnam, but no one seemed to talk about the nuclear holocaust anymore. Even Simeon’s letters to The Times became rarer and more benign. At such a time Fred became a doctor. He had only a nodding acquaintance with the Hippocratic oath, but was somehow aware that he was committed to Apollo the Healer to look upon his teacher in the art of medicine as one of his parents, not to give any deadly drug to anyone, even if it was asked of him, and especially not to aid any woman to procure an abortion. He knew well enough to enter a house only for the benefit of the sick and to refrain from all wrong-doing and corruption and the seduction of male or female, bond or free.

  He got through his final exams without brilliance or disgrace. He was not especially proud of his results, although Dr Salter assured him that success as a healer of the sick had very little to do with being able to remember the names of the cranial nerves. He had, over the years, many of Agnes’s father’s definitions by heart, such as Bedrest: a slow and tedious introduction to death. Tell your patients to keep upright. And when they want to die, get it over quickly. In silence. Best of all is to die standing, like a horse; Check-ups: a process by which the customer is subjected to a minute medical examination at frequent intervals, in the faint hope of finding a fatal disease. Naturally the victim feels embarrassed unless he can produce some sort of interesting complaint to entertain the Doctor; Dieting: the only excuse for dieting is poverty. Voluntary self-deprivation invariably leads to a considerable increase in the original weight once the starvation period is over. By keeping this lore out of his examination papers, Fred achieved a celebration party in his room in Battersea and got moderately drunk in the company of a number of other medical novices, a few nurses, some of his guests’ girlfriends and Dr Salter, who had come up from Hartscombe for the occasion, and who, after attacking Fred’s more serious friends on the subject of smoking (‘Why not? Saves thousands of people from going potty. Anyway, who wants to live an extra ten years in a geriatric hospital in Weston-super-Mare? There’s no pleasure in the world worth giving up for that!’), issued the invitation, which Fred had half expected and half feared. ‘Let us raise our glasses,’ he said, having banged a beer bottle on the table for silence, ‘and drink to good health, coupled with the name of Dr Frederick Simcox, soon to be best part of Salter and Simcox, witch-doctors and medicine men of Hartscombe in the County of…’ Dr Salter looked down into his glass. ‘Look here, old cock!’ he said, ‘the tide’s gone down.’

  ‘Did you say “partners”?’ Fred filled him up and got him going again.

  ‘For God’s sake, cocky, what do you think I’ve been waiting for all these long years? I thought you’d never qualify.’

  So Fred saw his life spread out in front of him, like the Rapstone Valley seen from the Ridge, familiar and unsurprising, a life which he might never have undertaken but for Agnes and her father, which he might have shared with her and now would have to live without her. He had no idea that only a few years later he would become solely responsible for running the Hartscombe practice.

  The invitation to the partnership was not the only one that Dr Salter had issued. Fred had thought for a long time about inviting Henry and Agnes to his party, doubtful how tolerant either of them would be in the company of young medics whooping it up on bottled beer. Now there was a ring at the front door and Fred went down to find not only Mr and Mrs Henry Simcox, but also their friend Mr Bugloss, holding a magnum of champagne, and his friend Mrs Wickstead, wrapped in fur and looking as pale and perfect as a rare china object.

  ‘Is this where you live?’ Henry asked, amused. ‘Wonderfully handy for the Battersea Dogs’ Home.’

  ‘Of course I asked her. Didn’t you want her here in your moment of triumph?’ Dr Salter said, when the party had gone upstairs. Fred offered Agnes champagne from Mr Bugloss’s huge bottle but, as he expected, she preferred warm light ale taken with soggy crisps. ‘Salter and Simcox,’ she said. ‘You’re really merged into him now, aren’t you? What does your father say about married people. One flesh?’

  ‘That’s absolute rubbish.’

  ‘Oh, no it’s not. You’ll both do the same things, know the same things and be absolutely out of bounds, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Then she turned to speak with considerable animation to the most boring young doctor at the party. Mr Bugloss approached Fred softly murmuring, ‘Dr Simcox.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Fred sounded hesitant, unused to his title.

  ‘Do me a favour will you? Get your brother off my back.’

  ‘He writes about you?’

  ‘Not about me, no. He writes about some Hollywood producer, some schmuck. He blames me for the Vietnam War. It’s entirely my fault, it seems, that there are now bombing targets in the North. Did I give the orders?’

  ‘It’s a bit thick.’ Mrs Wickstead inserted a potato crisp between her small white teeth. She looked surprisingly young and defenceless, Fred thought, still snuggled into her coat as though likely to be on the move shortly. ‘Poor Benny’s not even American.’ And when Fred looked surprised, she explained quietly, almost as though she didn’t want Mr Bugloss to overhear, ‘You know he was born in Brixton.’

  ‘Not Brixton. Mrs Wickstead has been misinformed. Whitechapel. You know the area?’

  ‘Not intimately,’ Fred had to admit.

  ‘It has changed, it was once a deeply caring community. My father owned property there, of course.’

  ‘But you speak fluent American!’

  ‘Have to, dear boy, in our business. However else am I going to get close to the Vice-President in Charge of Product at Galaxy International?’

  The party ebbed and flowed. Music was playing and the doctors started to dance as amorous nurses dragged them to their feet. Henry told his brother that sometimes he couldn’t understand Agnes.

  ‘Sometimes?’

  ‘She’s picked out the most tedious of your fellow medics and won’t speak to anyone else.’

  ‘Aren’t you used to her doing that?’

  ‘I suppose so. Why is it?’

  ‘Don’t you know her? She chooses the worst bar, the most horrible meal, the most tedious man in the party. Then she knows she won’t be disappointed. Do you think you can manage it?’

  ‘Manage what?’

  ‘Living up to her expectations.’

  In a corner, Dr Salter had started to sing, an ancient and obscene ballad remembered from his distant past as a medical student. Someone put on a Charlie Parker record and Fred was called to do his act of accompaniment. He sat at his drums in a corner of the room and joined the rhythm section behind the Great Bird’s soaring alto saxophone. He saw that Agnes was dancing and that her father and Henry had discovered one of the few bottles of whisky left under the table.

  ‘You do that rather well.’ Fred looked round. Mrs Wickstead was sitting beside him, judging his performance.

  ‘Yes.’ Well, he’d practised long enough.

  ‘I’ve never tried a doctor.’ This was what he thought she said but she spoke very quietly. He reduced his playing to the swish of wire-brushes and a diminished thud. Mrs Wickstead seemed to be telling him about the people she had tried.

  ‘Film people, producers and all that, you’re something they want to have sitting next to them to impress the Executive Vice President. You’re meant to smile and say, “Great idea, Jack,” and that’s all you’re meant to say. Of course you get trips. But it’s having to smile all the time, the muscles of your face begin to ache.’

  ‘You think I could treat that, medic
ally?’

  ‘Ring me some time, if you want to. I’m not in the directory.’ Then Mr Bugloss called from across the room. Fred stopped drumming and tried to hear the whispered figures.

  ‘Two four six, eight oh two six. Did you get that?’

  ‘No.’ He couldn’t be sure. But all she said was, ‘It seems we’re going now,’ and wandered away, leaving Fred lonely at the drums.

  Drain the Worthington out of my kidneys

  Get the whisky fumes out of my brain,

  Get the night nurses out of my bed boys

  And start up the motor again…

  So sang Dr Salter as Fred took him down the stairs to his car. He made his senior partner move over and announced that he was going to drive him back to Hartscombe.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you are pissed out of your mind.’

  ‘So early in your career, Doctor,’ the patient murmured obediently. ‘And you have come to a completely accurate diagnosis.’

  As he drove home, the numbers were arranging and rearranging their series in Fred’s mind: eight oh two, two four two six. No. Two four oh, eight six two? Or was it two oh six? The more he thought about it the more endless the possible combinations became. But the next morning he began to dial hopefully.

  ‘Eight oh six two,’ said the voice on the telephone. ‘Excelsior Meat Importers.’ After six or seven calls like that he decided to file his conversation with Mrs Wickstead away in his archive of missed opportunities.

  *

  So the partnership began and Fred, whose own life was in some disarray, became clothed with the magic of his profession and, calling on his patients with his black bag, made them feel alarmed or instantly better and turn to him for guidance although most of them were wiser and a great deal more experienced than he was. Giving coherent advice, trying to fathom the complexities of other people’s lives, saved him the trouble of understanding his own or laying down any particular treatment for himself. When he started he was excited by being a doctor. On the whole, his customers liked him, and although he had by no means discovered how to live, he became, in time, able to reconcile those he treated and their families to death.

  The partnership prospered and in time took on another young doctor, Geoffrey Hardison, who was extremely serious and satisfyingly shocked by everything that Dr Salter had to say on the subject of bedrest, check-ups, diets and smoking.

  While Fred lived unnoticed by the world in Hartscombe and Simeon spent more time in the garden and less dictating manifestos to Glenys Bigwell, Henry took on the task of public pronouncement. He signed letters to The Times, he sat on the platforms, he read poems and went to rallies, protesting about the Greek Colonels and the continued war in Vietnam, mourning the blacks killed in Detroit riots and the death of Che Guevara. Simeon, listening to his portable wireless while Dorothy weeded, frequently heard his elder son sounding off on Any Questions and wondered why people who once took the advice of statesmen and priests now seemed so anxious to be guided by writers of fiction.

  Henry, Agnes and their child, Francesca, moved to a flat just off the King’s Road, an area where Arthur Nubble had opened a boutique called Sam and Samantha, which did well for a time. Henry was often to be found having lunch in nearby Italian restaurants, meeting-places for models and agents and film directors, where he would sit among the gleaming white lavatory tiles, the low-slung lights and tall dark wooden chairs, wearing a white polo-neck sweater, drinking Verdicchio and holding forth on the injustices of the world.

  Charlie was taking a new course in Social Administration at the London School of Economics, an institution made the more exciting for her by the large number of strikes, sit-ins and student protests. In the evenings, when Leslie was dining with clients in the Caprice or the Mirabelle, his wife would meet student activists, for whom she bought many drinks, and would sit on the edge of the group, listening and saying little. On some nights she would go out with young men whose hard cases formed part of her practical training. She found herself in big, noisy pubs, round King’s Cross or in the East End. She went drinking in Soho clubs which were open all the afternoon, and, on certain occasions, she was made love to in the students’ rooms or in the backs of borrowed cars.

  At such times she believed herself to be happy in a world far away from Rapstone and the small, neat London house, forever humming with the carefully controlled chatter of property developers, which was Leslie’s home in London. When she came in, her husband didn’t ask her where she’d been, nor was he interested in her explanations about late seminars or committee meetings. He went to sleep quickly, tired out by his business dealings. He didn’t seem to care that their worlds had divided and, to her great relief, never expected her to join him and Christopher Kempenflatt in their working dinners in Mayfair.

  In time Mrs Mallard-Greene became discontented in Tom Nowt’s old cottage. Her children were away at boarding school and Malley left at six o’clock each morning for his job in the B.B.C. She never quite knew what he was doing there although she suspected that he was taking his secretary out to long lunches where they gloated over the sweet trolley together and then what? He always came home exhausted and never hungry, and obliged her by going to sleep in front of the telly at half past nine. Left in the country Mrs Mallard-Greene attacked the earth over the buried deer bones, bought a lot of plants from the Hartscombe Garden Centre but finally surrendered to the weeds. She made the acquaintance of a few similarly abandoned wives and had coffee and nips of brandy with them in the mornings, quarrelled with them and had difficulty keeping a cleaning lady. In the afternoon she often sat watching the rain on the hedgerows, the mounting willow herb and the blossoming cow parsley. She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Look out there, that’s the trouble! It’s so green and quiet and it’s always bloody raining.’

  ‘That’s England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I’m afraid there’s no known cure for it.’

  In the last months of her pregnancy, Glenys and Terry Fawcett were at last moved into a two-roomed flat at the top of a Worsfield tower block. Glenys thought they could make it quite cosy once they got the curtains up, and they would be able to put the pram out on the narrow walk-way overhanging the precipice on which they were perched. Far below was a small patch of green where dogs were not allowed and, on a section specially railed off, their child might be allowed to play. As Glenys outlined her plans for the future, Terry assembled his clarinet and began to play ‘Ain’t Misbehavin”, even before he had laid the carpet.

  About six months after he qualified Fred stopped for a beer in a pub on Picton Ridge and made a final attempt at dialling Mrs Wickstead’s number. Up, like a row of cherries on a fruit machine, came her voice apparently not in the least surprised. If he ever came to London she would certainly have lunch with him, dinner wasn’t so simple, nor was it sensible to ring her in the evenings, she was usually out. Fred named his next day off and a restaurant in Jermyn Street that Henry had often talked to him about.

  He arrived almost twenty minutes early for their first lunch together and Mrs Wickstead was exactly a quarter of an hour late. He was in a state of near despair when he finally saw a waiter, a man who had been studiously avoiding his eye, escort her proudly over to him. He had bought a new shirt and tie, and taken what had seemed an immense sum out of the bank and realized in a panic that fifteen pounds was only just going to cover their lunch.

  When she was sitting beside him, Fred forgot about the money; he staked everything on Mediterranean prawns, grilled sole and a bottle of Chablis. Mrs Wickstead ate exactly what he had ordered and she listened to him talking about his patients, and the extraordinary views of Dr Salter, wide-eyed and enthralled. When it was over she said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t have spent out on all those Mediterranean prawns. Quite honestly, I’d rather have had the money.’ She was smiling and he was sure it was a joke. ‘The trouble with lunch is thinking where to go afterwards.’<
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  ‘Where do you live exactly?’ He had put his hand on hers as they sat side by side on the plush bench, under the red satin walls and shaded electric candles which imparted a pink glow to Mrs Wickstead. ‘Couldn’t we go there?’

  ‘Oh I don’t think you’d like that. I don’t think you’d find that at all suitable.’ Then she was laughing at his look of disappointment. ‘I do have a girlfriend though, with a sort of a flat. It’s in Notting Hill Gate. For God’s sake, next time, don’t spend so much on lunch. We could bring sandwiches.’

  ‘Are we going to have a next time?’ Fred continued to hold on to Mrs Wickstead, conscious that his hand was hotter and probably damper than it should be for the accomplished luncher-out and boulevardier.

  ‘Oh, I think so, don’t you?’

  ‘I was wondering.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Mr Wickstead.’

  Only then did she remove her hand. ‘Mr Wickstead,’ she said, ‘is entirely my business!’

  Fred took the train back to Hartscombe, feeling that fate, which hadn’t been very generous to him since he parted from Agnes, had handed him a huge slice of luck on a plate. He began to ‘see’ or ‘go out’ (which really means staying in) with Mrs Wickstead. Three weeks later they met in a small Italian restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, lunched hurriedly and walked to the flat for which she had a key. Making love to Mrs Wickstead was a far simpler, even more innocent experience than Fred had expected. She was laughing as they undressed, then enthusiastic, and finally sleepy. As she closed her eyes, Fred, who had become domesticated during his bachelor life, put on one of the two towelling dressing-gowns that hung on the bathroom door and made tea. He wondered a little about Mrs Wickstead’s girlfriend who seemed to have left few traces of her personality on her home. He could see no pictures or books, no photographs, and only half a bottle of milk and a bottle of champagne in the fridge. He wondered if the fitted cupboards in the bedroom were full of her clothes but before he had a chance to investigate, Mrs Wickstead opened her eyes, sat up and put out her hand for a cup of tea.