‘This girlfriend of yours seem extremely tidy.’
‘She works. She’s frightfully well organized.’
Mrs Wickstead, sitting up naked in bed, put down her tea and stretched her arms towards him. Fred asked no more questions about the girlfriend.
Sometimes he didn’t see his new-found friend for weeks, even months at a time. After their long partings she would turn up suntanned and murmuring about Nassau or Gstaad or the Greek Islands, but she never showed him snaps or recounted her adventures on these holidays, apparently preferring to hear him talk. Sometimes, when he had tried to telephone her for weeks without reply, she would call the surgery and leave a message. On his next day off he would wait for her in a big, gloomy pub by Notting Hill Gate tube station and she would arrive smiling, always in a rush to get there a quarter of an hour late. They had given up restaurants now, bought rolls, pâté and cheese in a delicatessen, together with bottles of champagne, which Mrs Wickstead insisted on paying for. When they got to the flat they would make love at once, she apparently as eager as he was after weeks of separation. Then they had a high tea, always washing up and leaving the flat as tidy as they found it. She had, of course, he discovered, other names but he always thought of her as Mrs Wickstead, because that was how she had been introduced to him, and because his use of her Christian name, Virginia, didn’t make him feel that he knew any more about her.
So on and off, punctuated by long intervals and enthusiastic revivals, secret, simple and satisfying, Fred’s friendship with Mrs Wickstead continued. The surgery receptionist got used to leaving notes with her name on them and Dr Salter asked no questions. One Christmas in the flat they opened their presents to each other. Her gifts to him had been lavish: cufflinks, a shirt from Harrods, a pair of shoes which fitted, because he never bought shoes for himself, and LPs, old recordings of Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five with the original crackle.
‘There you go. Have you got everything you want?’
‘Except for one thing.’
‘What’s that?’ It was the most anxious he had ever seen her look.
‘I’d like to show you where I live. I mean I want you to see Rapstone and all my country.’
‘Well.’ She looked relieved, as though she had been expecting an impossible claim. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Mrs Shelley’s in the clear.’ The lab tests had arrived and were on Dr Salter’s desk in the surgery. Fred had come in to his senior partner’s room to learn the secret constituents of his patients’ blood, and was considerably relieved about a young mother in a sudden panic about the cause of her exhaustion.
‘That’s very good.’ Dr Salter was slitting open an envelope. He glanced at the report it contained and, as his partner was searching for the names of his other patients, slid it under the blotter on his desk.
‘This weekend…’ Dr Salter began, but Fred, who had been waiting for a chance to mention it, interrupted him. ‘Oh, I was going to ask you about this weekend.’
‘Were you?’
‘I’ve got… Well, a friend of mine’s coming down from London.’
It was a weekend when Fred would normally be on duty, and the only one when Mrs Wickstead could make an expedition to the English countryside.
‘I think, I rather think I shall have to go hunting.’ Dr Salter lit a cheroot and blew out smoke. Fred felt a great wave of disappointment, like a child who had been suddenly deprived of a long-promised treat.
‘Oh, well. In that case…’
‘Yes. I feel the time has come for a brisk ride to hounds. Don’t worry though, old cock. Young Hardison can look after the shop.’
After Fred had gone, Dr Salter took the report out from under his blotter. He read it again carefully, although he knew quite well that there had been no mistake. Then he tore it into strips and set fire to them in his ashtray.
The hunt met at Rapstone Manor on a Saturday morning when the trees were still black lines across a grey sky and spring was a faint hope for the future. Nicholas came out to chat, Dr Salter took a stirrup cup from Wyebrow, and Grace shivered as she viewed the proceedings from her bedroom window. Fred, standing on Hartscombe station, telling himself not to expect too much, was amazed when a train arrived, a door opened and the single passenger not going on to Worsfield was Mrs Wickstead. She stepped out, looking puzzled, as though she had arrived in a strange country and didn’t expect to hear English spoken.
‘I’m glad you came.’
‘I do think it was quite brave of me.’
He put his arm round her, trying to keep her as warm as possible on their way to the car park.
The hunt was moving off down the lanes and across the fields away from Rapstone as Fred drove up to the ridge and showed Mrs Wickstead the view down the valley. He felt he was letting her into his childhood. ‘It hasn’t changed,’ he told her. ‘Not really very much, ever since I can remember it. Some of the cottages have been converted, of course. And the summers don’t seem so hot now. That’s Skurfield over there. We think of it as full of rather glum, short people who keep chickens in clapped-out Austin Sevens. You know the sort of thing?’
‘Not really.’
‘What do you think of it?’
‘Cold.’
The hunt was fanning out now, across a stretch of open country. Dr Salter was up with the leaders riding the big hunter he had first seen at Worsfield Show on the day that Leslie Titmuss announced his engagement. He was smiling, taking jumps easily, as though enjoying the best day out in his life.
Fred had no intention of taking Mrs Wickstead to visit his parents at the Rectory. He wanted to spare her Simeon’s Olympian curiosity and Dorothy’s amused unconcern. However he risked a visit to the church. ‘It’s Norman basically,’ he told her. ‘Of course it’s been added to a lot. There’s some Victorian bits.’ He opened the door of the vestry, breathing in the familiar smell of mice and hassocks. ‘When I was a child, I used to sit in here with my father. Cutting up bread for Communion. What’s so funny?’
‘Englishmen.’
‘Why?’
‘Once they start going to bed with you, they always want to take you into churches.’
The hunt had walked round a square of ploughed field and was now moving again, the hounds following a straight line towards a copse on a hillside, the riders spreading out, the leaders galloping with mud flying, others struggling to keep up. By a hedge the protesters shouted, blew whistles and waved their banners, angered by the bright coats, the beauty of the horses and the concentrated and elaborate pursuit of death. Fred and Mrs Wickstead lay together, warm at last, in his bedroom above the butcher’s shop in the Worsfield Road. Later they planned to eat the food he had bought and drink a celebration bottle of champagne.
Those in the lead at the hunt remembered Dr Salter moving away from them. He left the line and galloped diagonally across a stretch of pasture, pounding the thin grass so that black earth was thrown up by his horse’s hooves. He was riding at a high, an impossibly high hedge with a gate leading to a road. But he swerved from the gate and went straight for the huge hedge, faster and faster for a jump which his horse took bravely, hopelessly, into a tangle of dark wood, and below the dim light of the sky.
‘Don’t answer it, please!’ Mrs Wickstead said when the telephone rang, but Fred got out of bed and stood naked in his living-room while Hardison told him the news. And then he was dressed and walking down a rubber-smelling corridor in the Wors-field General with a white-coated houseman. The walk seemed endless, but at last they swung open a pair of doors and were in a room where Dr Salter lay flat on his back with his eyes open.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered when Fred looked down at him. ‘I seem to have made the most almighty cock-up!’
Some months later Simeon called on Dr Salter, whom he found in a room above the surgery, somehow diminished in size, and seated in a wheel-chair in which, from then on, he would spend his waking hours. Simeon entered the room with an expression of serious concern and was a li
ttle taken aback to be greeted by a burst of laughter, nothing like the sound made by the old Dr Salter, but all the same, the patient seemed to be enjoying a joke.
‘You can laugh?’
‘About all I can do. I’m still alive but unfortunately not kicking. He’s got quite a sense of humour, your old practical joker.’
‘Mine?’ Simeon declined to be identified with whatever power had prescribed the Doctor a broken back.
‘The old gentleman you claim as such a close acquaintance. The one with the beard and the irritable expression. A great prankster, apparently. No doubt time hangs heavy on his hands, waiting for you to lecture Him on the joys of the Welfare State every Sunday from Rapstone pulpit. Probably longs to get hold of a bit of fire and brimstone and smite a few backsliders for idolatry.’
Simeon waited for the Doctor’s speech, which he clearly relished and had, possibly, rehearsed, to be over. It took a little longer.
‘When you’re next on your knees tell Him it was very funny but hardly worth His while. I mean, hasn’t He got enough on His hands with wars and earthquakes and famines without spotting one ageing G.P. on the hunting-field, a fellow out with the sole purpose of getting his neck broken, and turning him into a useless sort of lump that can’t even walk to hounds?’
Silence fell between the two men, and then Dr Salter thought to ask, ‘I say. Do you think the Almighty’s a member of it?’
‘Of what?’
‘The League Against Cruel Sports?’
‘Of course not. Why should He be?’
‘Well, according to you, He’s a paid-up member of the Labour Party.’
Simeon smiled patiently, and asked the Doctor a question. ‘Did you say you went out with the sole purpose of getting your neck broken?’
‘Of course. I always told you they did you a decent death on the hunting-field.’ But then the joke was over and he said seriously, ‘Tom Nowt did it far more efficiently.’
‘What did Tom Nowt do?’
‘We get these little verdicts you know.’ Dr Salter gave what he seemed to feel was the obvious explanation. ‘Decisions. Lab tests. Quite simple. They either condemn you to death or let you off provided you promise to be of good behaviour and not get ill. Tom Nowt and I were found guilty of the serious crime of carcinoma for which there can only be one penalty. He mitigated the sentence with a shot-gun; on the hunting-field I simply added a few minor disabilities to the final judgement.’
‘Tom Nowt shot himself?’
‘I was never a shooting man.’
‘You told the Coroner that Nowt’s death was an accident.’
‘Didn’t want any rubbish talked about unsound mind. Box of cheroots on that table by the gramophone, mind passing them? Might as well assault the lungs as well as everything else.’
Simeon stood up and moved across the room. He felt guilty, a tall, walking man in his sixties, looking down at the helpless Doctor who had been forced to surrender to illness, his life-long enemy.
‘Would you like me to come and sit with you? I’ve plenty of time now.’
‘No.’ Dr Salter selected a cheroot from the box Simeon held for him. ‘I don’t think I should like that at all.’
So Fred took over the running of the Hartscombe practice, with the help of young Hardison and occasional advice from the wheel-chair in the room upstairs. When Agnes called to see her father, Dr Salter said he didn’t want visits to the sick, then he told her to go back to London and look after her child. It was as though he were ashamed of his condition and didn’t want his daughter exposed to such an obscenity. Mrs Beasley cooked for him and did the housekeeping, otherwise Dr Salter was looked after by the District Nurse. Smoking, drinking brandy, listening to his records and disliking the District Nurse were now his occupations.
Part Four
Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star;
from In Memoriam
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
19
Leslie’s Long Weekend
Leslie Titmuss came down for breakfast at Rapstone Manor and almost fell headlong over Bridget Bigwell, who was frantically polishing the brass stair-rods.
‘Oh, do mind yourself, Leslie!’ Then she remembered that he was a guest. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Titmuss. Once a week we have to get all our stair-rods up.’
‘You were always thorough, Bridget, I always heard that, when you were at Picton House.’
‘Twelve bedroom fireplaces to be done when the visitors were down for their breakfast and coal scuttles to be polished so you could see your face in them.’
‘My mother told me a lot about when you were in service with Doughty Strove.’
‘Mr Doughty! He was more or less a young lad then.’
‘Well, yes. Exactly.’
And Leslie was off to join his host and hostess at breakfast. Nicholas was hidden behind The Times and Grace was opening envelopes, reading the scrawled handwriting of friends she had ‘come out’ with, bringing her news of death, disease and divorce. Leslie, having helped himself to a full plate of eggs, sausages and bacon, was determined to chat.
‘Mother-in-law…’
‘Do try not to call me that.’ Grace didn’t look up from her correspondence.
‘What would you like me to call you?’
‘Call me Grace. Call me Lady Fanner. For heaven’s sake call me Mother Teresa if you want to.’
‘But not mother-in-law?’ Leslie was anxious to get it right.
‘It’s the sort of expression that might be used by Mr Harold Wilson.’
There was a pause while Grace opened more letters and Leslie got stuck into his breakfast. Then he said, apparently seriously, ‘If I say anything like that again, Grace, anything that irritates you in any way, I’d be very glad if you’d let me know.’
‘Don’t you worry.’
‘We’re sorry Charlie couldn’t come with you.’ Nicholas peered round the edge of his newspaper.
‘Charlie’s studying.’ Grace knew.
‘Yes. They’re keeping her pretty busy at the L.S.E.’ Leslie was now at work on the toast and marmalade. ‘So I thought someone should come down to give the parents all the latest news from the big city.’
‘To give your parents?’
‘Well, no. I meant the Fanner family. You, Grace and Nicholas, of course.’
‘In my day a young wife wouldn’t think of studying.’ Grace harked back to an earlier deception. ‘She’d think of babies. And real ones, this time, if you please.’
‘Well, not yet, Grace, not until the business really gets established. Magnus Strove and I are hoping to pull off the big one. The Tasker Street development.’
‘What on earth’s Tasker Street?’
‘It’s a row of little shops at the moment, not far from Liverpool Street station. We’re hoping to develop it.’
‘You make it sound like a photograph.’ Grace went back to her post.
‘Offices for people to sit in while they plan to build more offices.’ Nicholas was not convinced. Nor, when Leslie suggested it, did he want to come in with them. He remembered Magnus Strove as a small boy: ‘Every time I saw him he seemed to be able to make me part with ten bob! Some story about collecting for disabled seamen, or poor children in the East End. He could be very convincing.’
‘Well, he’s managed to persuade the bank. It’s our first, our only, real gamble. If we can pull this one off we can have everything, babies, anything you like.’
‘I didn’t say I liked them exactly.’ Grace was gathering up her letters, resigning from the task of keeping her son-in-law entertained until Monday morning. ‘I suppose you can amuse yourself this weekend?’
‘I was wondering, Nicholas,’ Leslie asked as though for the realization of a childhood dream, ‘if there would be any chance of having a look round the farmyard this morning?’
‘My
dear boy, of course. We’ll go now. Finish up your coffee.’ The world was surprisingly short of people who actually asked to see Nicholas’s pigs.
‘How absolutely super!’
It was in the farmyard, picking his way through the cowshed in a pair of borrowed wellies and admiring the new milking-machine, that Leslie delicately approached a subject which lay considerably nearer to his heart than a conducted tour of the home farm. He didn’t, of course, come at it head on, but in a circuitous fashion, by way of the lack of support the politicians of the day were giving to the Great British Breakfast. Speaking for himself, Leslie didn’t remember Doughty Strove asking a single question in the House about bacon.
‘You may be right. More of an oil-seed rape man is Doughty.’
‘Of course the old fellow’s done yeoman service for the Hartscombe constituency.’
‘I seem to remember some suggestions you made about the purple past of Doughty Strove.’ Nicholas saw no reason why one of his contemporaries should be called ‘old’.
‘Rumours! I was only reporting on some rather damaging tittletattle. Personally I don’t believe there was a word of truth in it. I’m sure we all want to see Doughty reap his just reward.’
‘Glad to hear you say so.’ They had arrived at the sties and Nicholas was mollified, not only by Leslie’s retraction, but by the sight of the well-fattened animals with small intelligent eyes snorting with contentment. Those with red crosses on their rumps were destined for an early visit to the abattoir. ‘But what sort of reward are you talking about exactly?’
‘His elevation.’
‘The elevation of Doughty.’ Nicholas laughed, having a sudden vision of his stout neighbour levitating mysteriously, and in a bad temper.
‘To another place,’ Leslie explained patiently. ‘The Upper House. Well, they’re bound to offer Doughty the Lords, aren’t they? He’s been the member here for so many years, off and on.’
‘You mean they’d give Doughty a peerage?’ Nicholas raised his eyes reluctantly from his pigs. ‘I never heard any talk of that.’
Paradise Postponed Page 24