Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘ “Thanks ever so”. Lonnie doesn’t say things like “thanks ever so”.’

  ‘ “Lonnie”,’ Agnes said with deep contempt, ‘that’s who she is. “Lonnie!” ’

  The door opened to admit Mr Bugloss in his overcoat, carrying his case. ‘I’m sorry about this. It’s been a most moving occasion. A great experience…’ And when no one answered him he ended with a heartfelt ‘Happy Yuletide!’ and left. There was a short, unhappy silence before Agnes burst out again.

  ‘You know what Lonnie is? She’s your easy option. You won’t have anything difficult in your life now, will you? No demonstrations. No fights. No me! You can sit for ever in a warm bath, soaping yourself with mysticism and little Lonnie’s adoration, until you get old and pink and your skin begins to pucker. How comfortable for you. How horribly comfortable!’

  Henry went to the door, opened it and stood looking at her. ‘Bugloss has gone.’

  ‘What on earth’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I can sleep in my own bed.’

  ‘How wonderful! Henry can go to sleep in his own little bed again. Henry Simcox who was going to change the world and ended up with Lonnie!’

  He was gone and the door banged after him. She lit a cigarette and blew out smoke, then she heard Francesca crying.

  Woken by the banging door, Francesca had discovered that she was not in her favourite parrot room and staggered out on to the landing to protest loudly. Mrs Wickstead, who had not undressed, came out of the bathroom to see a child seated at the top of the stairs with Agnes trying to comfort her. At the same time Fred was coming up from the kitchen.

  ‘What’s the tragedy? I know so little about children.’

  ‘It’s nothing really. Just that she wants to sleep in the room with parrots on the wall.’

  ‘The one I’m in?’

  ‘That’s what I told her.’

  ‘Then we’ll swop. Not a problem. I’ve been far too cold to unpack.’

  ‘It’s incredibly kind of you.’ Agnes looked up, genuinely grateful, and when Fred reached them, and asked if they were all going to spend the night on the stairs, the situation was explained to him. So Agnes and Francesca climbed together into the big bed in the parrot room and, to some extent, comforted each other. Mrs Wickstead went into the pink room and Fred retired up the stairs to the old servants’ quarters. Henry lay on his back in his small bedroom, staring at the photograph in which he appeared as head boy at Knuckleberries.

  When he tapped on Mrs Wickstead’s door and pushed it open, after what he judged to be a discreet interval, Fred found her with the fur coat still fastened on like a life-jacket, sitting by a small and ineffectual electric heater, looking nervously at the white bed which stood like a glacier in the middle of the pink room. She looked up regretfully. ‘I daren’t go to bed with you.’

  ‘Because of my parents?’

  ‘Because it’s freezing.’

  He held her, warmed her. At last they dived between the sheets like crazy swimmers who break the ice on Christmas Day. They were stung by the first frosty moments into frenzied activity, zealous, enthusiastic and hungry after a long separation. Then, as their movements became slower, as they searched for, and finally found, a corner of warmth in the draughty house, Fred saw Mrs Wickstead looking over his shoulder, her eyes wide, her expression startled, as though she had just seen a ghost enter the room. He turned his head and saw, by the dim light of the pink-shaded bedside lamp, not a ghost but his father, the Reverend Simeon Simcox, Rector of Rapstone Fanner, white-bearded and fully tricked out as Father Christmas, advancing stealthily towards them with a stocking full of Francesca’s presents.

  Early on Christmas morning, Fred went into the kitchen to make tea before driving Mrs Wickstead to Worsfield Junction so she could catch one of the few trains back to London. He found Simeon seated at the table, warming his hands on a mug of coffee, all ready, in his cassock, for the day’s business. It was the first chance they had had to speak since his father backed hastily out of the pink room. Fred thought it best to dive in at the deep end.

  ‘Did you manage to deliver Francesca’s stocking?’

  ‘Oh yes. I guessed she must have got her way about the parrot room. It’s the one she always wanted.’ There was a silence, then he said, ‘Mrs Wickstead seems to be a very pleasant person.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know Mr Wickstead at all?’

  ‘Not at all. No.’

  ‘Not know Mr Wickstead at all!’

  Fred sat at the table with his father, who was carefully considering the matter. ‘It’s a case of acting up to your responsibilities,’ he said at last. ‘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.’ Fred supplied the words for him.

  ‘You knew what I was going to say?’

  ‘It’s what you said to all those married couples.’

  ‘I never told you.’

  ‘We used to listen at the door.’

  ‘You wanted to find out what we used to call “the facts of life”?’ Simeon was almost laughing.

  ‘We wanted to find out if you knew them,’ Fred told him. ‘I was just thinking about the beard and the Father Christmas uniform. Francesca would have been asleep. She’d never see it. Was it honestly worth it?’

  ‘I don’t see that it matters in the least whether she saw it or not.’ Simeon finished his coffee and spoke with some pride, ‘Even if she saw absolutely nothing, I have played my part.’

  ‘Patients and nurses. That’s how you can divide the world,’ Dr Salter said when Fred called on him on the afternoon of Christmas Day. ‘I was a nurse who got conscripted into the Patients’ Brigade. Your father’s definitely one of the patients. We always had to look after him.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Your mother and I. Can’t say I noticed you or your brother putting in much time at the bedside.’

  ‘You looked after my father?’ Fred was puzzled.

  ‘I helped your mother, it was a bit too much for one nurse, however devoted. What’s that you’ve brought me?’

  ‘I know you’ve got it.’ Fred handed over the wrapped gramophone record, the Enigma Variations.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve got it. I don’t want to embark on new music.’ He was in his wheel-chair, a small grey shadow of himself, exhausted by the effort of tearing at the wrapping paper.

  ‘Yours had got a bit scratchy.’

  ‘I rather enjoy playing the scratches.’

  Then the door opened and Agnes joined them. Her father looked at her, unsmiling. ‘You’ve come over from Rapstone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes. Alone.’

  Dr Salter looked from one to the other of his visitors, judging them.

  ‘And you two are both nurses. That’s true.’

  ‘What about my husband?’

  ‘Yes. What about Henry?’

  ‘Oh, I’d say one of the world’s natural patients, wouldn’t you?’ Then he smiled and asked Fred to put on his new, unscratched record.

  ‘Are you going to throw me out again?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Then she knelt beside him, putting her arms round her father, as the musical variations, whose basic theme is never stated, played and Fred stood watching.

  23

  And a Happy New Year to You, Too

  Grace had invited the in-laws, George, Elsie and Leslie Titmuss, to lunch that Christmas Day at the Manor. It was a small party – the cook had gone off to her family and Bridget managed the turkey and plum pudding. They sat now, with the food eaten and the crackers pulled, round the table. Grace, Elsie and Leslie were crowned with paper hats, Nicholas, Charlie and George were bare-headed. The talk didn’t flow freely and, after George had told them that he planned to spend his retirement digging a small lily pond in the garden of ‘The
Spruces’, silence fell. Then Grace asked what on earth there was to do on the afternoon of Christmas Day.

  ‘The Queen,’ George told her. ‘We usually watch the Queen.’

  But Grace was away, on a flood of reminiscence about Christmas afternoons in various country houses in the golden days pre-war. ‘Of course we used to do all sorts of things. Charades. Treasure hunts. Or we’d roll up the rugs and have dancing. Private, private dancing from tea-time to breakfast. Come on!’ She looked at their somnolent faces. ‘Why don’t we have a bit of fun, why don’t we roll up the carpet in the sitting-room? I’ve still got my records.’

  Only Leslie smiled politely. Charlie sighed and said, ‘Oh, please, Mother. For heaven’s sake!’

  ‘What’s wrong, Charlie? You’re always the same, when you were a child you were a most terrific spoilsport!’

  They moved into the sitting-room and Grace put Leslie to work on the carpet, while she opened a cupboard and took out her old pile of 78s. She found what she was looking for at last, and smiled round the room with delight, not noticing that Nicholas had slipped off unobtrusively to the conservatory.

  ‘I’ve found Pinky’s record! The one he gave me. “You’re the Top!” ’

  ‘Pinky?’ Leslie was on his knees, rolling up a long strip of Turkey carpet revealing the naked floor. ‘That’ll have to be polished again when you’ve done standing on it,’ Bridget warned when she came in with the coffee tray. And Elsie, enthroned by the fireplace, said, ‘First-class meal you put on, Bridget. You did really well.’ ‘Very tasty,’ George added, from the edge of sleep.

  ‘Pinky Pinkerton,’ Grace explained. ‘A simply enormous spade in full evening-dress, killingly funny! Sang at the old Café de Paris, before the bomb got it. Voice like black treacle poured out terribly slowly. Surely you remember Pinky, George?’

  ‘Don’t think we ever visited the old Café de Paris, did we, Mother?’ George Titmuss was enjoying a joke.

  ‘Leslie’ – Grace handed him the record – ‘we simply have to dance to this.’

  ‘Please don’t!’ Charlie was on the edge of despair but Leslie told her that it was Christmas and surely if her mother wanted it…

  ‘ “You’re the Top!”, and Pinky put in some words for me.’ Grace sang them in a surprisingly high, girlish voice:

  You’re the top!

  You can trump the A-ace.

  You’re the top!

  You’re the Lady Gra-ace…

  ‘I remember dances too.’ Elsie was still wearing her paper hat. ‘When Mr Doughty was a young man there was always a dance at Picton House, New Year’s Eve. Of course they’ve stopped all that since the war.’ Grace wasn’t listening, she was looking ecstatically at the strip of dance floor. ‘Oh, well done, Leslie, awfully well done! All that shining parquet for us to glide about on, just like the old Café de Paris before the Jerries got it.’

  ‘I’m not going to be able to stand this.’ Charlie was convinced.

  ‘Of course you will, Charlotte,’ Elsie reassured her. ‘Your mother’s only having her bit of fun.’

  And then the music started. The dark velvety voice of Pinky Pinkerton emerged above the scratch and hiss of the old record to pay its tribute and Charlie was faced with the awful spectacle of her husband dancing with her mother. She heard Grace carrying on a long, staccato monologue directed at Leslie’s right ear. ‘Nicholas was away at the beginning of the war. Where was it? Bognor? Some such nowhere. Doing something tremendously heroic in Army Intelligence. And I used to go up to London by train. In the black-out, to the Café de Paris! The bombs didn’t worry me at all. Not at all. There was something so exciting about the sound of broken glass. And in the mornings, after the all-clear, the streets were so wonderfully quiet. Such times! Now it hardly seems worth the trouble of going up to London.’

  It was then that Charlie clenched her fists, stood up and screamed, filling Rapstone Manor with a sound not heard since her marriage. Eventually she let her husband take her upstairs and she lay on her bed sobbing, while he read her the chapter of ‘Biggles’ with which Simeon used to calm her nerves before Leslie Titmuss came into her life.

  In the dead days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve events happened to Nicholas which he didn’t entirely understand. He received a visit from Tina and Gary, who told him that they had been to see Maggie Fawcett in hospital, where she was likely to remain for some time. It seemed she was very worried about losing her cottage during her long absence, and it would take a great weight off the old girl’s mind if the rent book could be put in Tina’s name. Of course Nicholas agreed to this reasonable request, and sent them off to his estate office for the change to be made. Later he was able to tell Simeon that he had put his Midnight Mass sermon into practice and secured low-rent accommodation for the villagers of Rapstone.

  During that week also Nicholas went on a shoot, and had a conversation with Doughty Strove, during which he wasn’t sure that he quite followed the old boy’s drift. They had stopped for lunch, which was laid out on trestle tables in the farmhouse at Mandragola. As they munched cold steak and kidney pie and drank cherry brandy, Doughty admitted that he was looking forward to New Year’s Eve.

  ‘Paper hats? Singing “Auld Lang Syne”? I’ve never cared for it personally. You having a party, Doughty?’

  ‘Not a party. Service to the Party, you might say. I mean it should be published by then, shouldn’t it? Our little secret.’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘When it’s announced, perhaps you’ll join me for a dinner. In another place.’

  ‘What other place?’

  ‘Do I really have to spell it out for you, old fellow?’ Doughty’s voice sank to a confidential whisper and he looked round nervously in case the beaters should overhear. ‘The House of Lords.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not expecting anything like that,’ Nicholas said modestly. ‘Not for a local chairman of the Party. We don’t get a leg up to the Lords. Besides, it’s a terribly dangerous place, Bob Naboth was telling me.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘You can’t get into your seat without tripping over fellows’ crutches. Bob Naboth tells me that in the corridors you’re likely as not to be run over by a peeress in her own right, driving a self-propelled invalid chair. The House of Lords! Believe me, it’s a place to be avoided.’

  ‘But it’s not you that’s going there, is it?’

  ‘I suppose it’s not.’ Nicholas looked at Doughty and chewed thoughtfully. ‘What are we talking about?’

  ‘My dear old Nicholas.’ Doughty Strove was laughing as he cut himself another slice of pie. ‘You do play your cards remarkably close to your chest.’

  Fred was also looking forward to New Year’s Eve. The Riverside Stompers had been asked to provide the entertainment at the Badger which had become bigger and brassier under new management. They rehearsed their favourite standards in Marmaduke’s garage and decided to give the inhabitants of Skurfield a whiff, as genuine as they could make it, of the brothers of New Orleans in the great days. ‘What do we do if they request “White Christmas”?’ Den asked.

  ‘Ignore it!’ said Joe Sneeping. The Christmas rush had made him sick to the teeth of paper streamers, Santa Claus wrapping paper and ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Once upon a Winter Time’ which his employers wanted to emerge from a record-player in the off-licence to stimulate the sale of cut-price spirits. ‘The only concession we make is “Auld Lang Syne” at midnight. Otherwise we stick to the stuff we’ve always wanted to play. Who knows? They may even like it.’

  Both Joe Sneeping and Doughty Strove were due for a disappointment. Unable to contain himself any longer, Doughty rang the Daily Telegraph on the night before the Honours List was due to be published. He sat in his study and asked for the news desk. He told a reporter who had just come back from the pub that he was the ex-Conservative member for Hartscombe and, although apparently unimpressed, the young man was full enough of the spirit of goodwill to read out the list of peerages announced in the ne
xt day’s paper. ‘Is that all? You’re sure that’s all? No mention of Strove? That is s, t, r, o… No? Well, it’s extremely decent of you to let me know. Yes. And a happy New Year to you too, of course.’ When he had put down the receiver, Doughty sat for quite a long while, staring at nothing very much.

  On New Year’s Eve, Gary Kitson, Tina and a group of their friends called at the Mallard-Greenes’ cottage and collected young Simon, who, though under age, was tall enough to be accepted in pubs and had enough money to pay for a good many rounds of drinks. Malley was up in London, doing a B.B.C. Arts Review of the Year, and his mother was prepared to let Simon go on the promise, which she knew wouldn’t be kept, that he be home before midnight.

  The big, gloomy Badger had been redecorated in the age of affluence, but not improved. It now had fake beams, plaster basreliefs of porridge-coloured horses and pictures of tearful clowns and pool-eyed children. The bar was full. There were still a few jazz fans, now growing middle-aged, and wearing duffel-coats, who had travelled to hear the Stompers, but most of the clientele were buying drinks, chattering or trying to dance to unfamiliar rhythms. Simon, free with his Christmas present money, was buying a good many rum and Cokes, snowballs or vodka and blacks. His party agreed that the music was depressing, got you down, made the place sound like a bleeding funeral parlour and needed livening up.

  ‘Ssh!’ Glenys had come to hear Terry play and wasn’t going to have his evening spoiled by Gary and Tina, even though she sometimes felt her husband should move with the times.

  ‘Council flat all right, is it, Glenys?’ Tina challenged her.

  ‘Course it is. We were lucky to get it,’ Glenys whispered back against the din of the bar.

  ‘My Gary wouldn’t consider no council flat in Worsfield.’

  ‘Well, your Gary may have to.’

  ‘I don’t reckon he will. He’s going in for window-cleaning. Setting up his own business. If he wants something he gets it. Not like your Terry. My big brother don’t think about nothing but tootling his little clarinet.’