Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

‘Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!’

  ‘Now I suppose you’re going to scream?’

  ‘No.’ Although Charlie was controlling herself with difficulty. ‘I’m not going to have to scream any more. I’m going to leave you, Leslie. I’m going to live in London. We’ll find a flat somewhere.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Nicky and I. He can go to school on the state. Just like you did. He’ll be like you, a mother’s boy. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not staying here, living with a nothing who can’t hate any more.’

  ‘Breakfast meeting with the Americans.’ Leslie stood up and stretched. There was a little chocolate stain on his top lip; his tongue emerged and licked it away. He had behaved, he knew, with perfect manners and considerable restraint. ‘Isn’t it time we both went to bed?’

  When Charlie went into Nicky’s room, she found his light on and that he was fast asleep wearing his glasses and holding Vanity Fair. She took his glasses off gently and put his book away, being careful not to lose his place. She switched off his light and closed the door, full of hope for the future.

  During those long summer holidays, both Grace and her daughter came in contact with the law. A detective sergeant and constable were summoned to the Manor. ‘No one in Rapstone ever locked their doors. Ever!’ Grace stood in the hall in her dressing-gown and lectured the two bewildered young officers on the decline of civilization as she knew it. ‘And all we had was one bobby, Harry Jimpson. He had an old push-bike, of course, not some luxurious motor with flashing lights like you’ve parked out there. But nothing ever got stolen when Harry Jimpson was our bobby!’

  ‘You say it was a box with some pieces of jewellery?’ The sergeant looked at such notes as he had been able to take, and wondered why the old bag wanted to get him back on a bicycle. ‘And there’s no signs of a break-in?’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? They must have been far too clever for you. Yes, a mother-of-pearl inlaid box. Locked. With some jewellery and other personal things.’

  ‘No very costly pieces you say? Sentimental value only.’

  ‘And that’s exactly why I want them back.’

  ‘We’ll do our best, your Ladyship.’

  ‘Your best may not be good enough!’ Grace squared her small jaw. ‘My son-in-law’s in the Cabinet you know. He sees the Prime Minister every day. Law and order’s very much her thing, isn’t it? I don’t suppose she’d like to discover she’s being let down badly by the police in the Rapstone Valley.’

  Charlie met the law in the shape of a Mr Rattling, a tall, grey-haired and dignified man, the sort of solicitor who acts for Cabinet Ministers. Rattling had walked through the garden at Picton and she first saw him as he stood, a dark and alien figure, beside the croquet lawn, where she was being ruthlessly defeated by her son.

  ‘Mrs Titmuss? I’m Ted Rattling, by way of being your husband’s solicitor.’

  ‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ she told him, squinting in the sun.

  ‘If we could just have a word in private? Before anyone takes a step they’re going to regret.’

  ‘You play, Nicky.’ Charlie crossed the lawn and stood looking up at the strange man who seemed to have grown in height as she approached him.

  ‘You’ll take independent advice, I’m sure. This is just to get the position quite clear.’

  ‘Mr Rattle…’

  ‘Rattling. Ted Rattling.’

  ‘Mr Rattling.’ She paid no attention to the ‘Ted’. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Have you not? It seems that in conversation with your husband, you suggested a parting of the ways. Look, shouldn’t we discuss this indoors?’

  ‘Where are you going, Mum?’ Nicky called after her as she allowed the man to lead her across the terrace and in by the french windows. ‘Won’t be long,’ she told him. Indeed, it was not to be a lengthy interview, just a preliminary sniff round the problem as Ted Rattling described it, just so Mrs Titmuss could know what her husband’s present ‘thinking’ was, just so she could ‘take on board’ his probable reaction.

  ‘I don’t really care what he thinks. I’m going to London and taking my son with me. Has my husband got any objection to that?’ From the living-room window, Charlie could see Nicky working out several devastating shots with mathematical precision. ‘If you embark on that course,’ she heard Rattling tell her, ‘your husband’s instructed me to take divorce proceedings, based on your intolerable conduct.’

  ‘That’ll suit me down to the ground.’

  ‘And immediate proceedings for the custody of the child of the marriage. Nicholas George, is it?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Charlie turned towards him, full of contempt.

  ‘In the normal case, of course, one would expect an order of custody to the mother. However, it seems that you, Mrs Titmuss, were a student and later active in the social services.’

  ‘Is that some sort of crime?’

  ‘Not in itself. No.’ Rattling could sound very judicial, indeed many judges behaved more like common or garden solicitors than he did. He prided himself on being able to see at least two sides to every question. ‘But what your husband has instructed me to allege, in any proceedings, would be “intimacy” on quite a sizeable scale, as I understand it, with the young males who happened to be in need of the social welfare services. Your husband used the words “rough trade”, Mrs Titmuss. Of course, all custody cases are distressing, but when it comes to an incident, which the child himself might be asked to recollect…’

  ‘What incident is that?’

  ‘I’m sure you remember, Mrs Titmuss. When your husband was up in London and a young person “on probation” came to spend the night here. When the child was in the house?’

  It was then that Charlie remembered Percy Denham from Wandsworth. He had been one of her special cases and he still telephoned her occasionally. Percy had been after a job in Wors-field and seeing friends, he explained, ‘in the area’. She asked him to visit Picton and gave him a meal, and, to Janet’s silent disapproval, a bed for the night. Some time during that night, Charlie, long ignored by her husband, had visited Percy in one of the spare bedrooms. She had felt healthy for about two weeks afterwards, and yet it seemed to her that one night had lost her the battle. Now, she thought, it was all inevitable, the endless sewing on of name-tapes, the sorting-out of clothes’ lists, shirts blue, shirts white and shorts running, the bleak farewell at the railway station, the tea out at Half-Term, when they would neither of them know what to say. She had come to the centre of a maze of loneliness and there was no escape except by the way she had come in

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr Rattling,’ she said, ‘but there isn’t going to be a case.’

  Leslie was able to get away from his Ministry in time to join Charlie and Nicholas at Liverpool Street station. Father and son said goodbye to each other with distant politeness, although Nicky treated his mother with unusual consideration. When the train had gone, the Minister said he hoped Charlie would be responsible for writing the letters. He had, after all, so little time. They parted then, and she went back to Picton.

  She couldn’t stay in the house that night, and, after a lonely dinner, she took the car and drove down to the Baptist’s Head, planning to buy cigarettes. She was sitting alone at the bar, when someone spoke to her.

  ‘Hear you had a friend of mine down to visit you. Percy, wasn’t it? He said you were very hospitable.’ She looked round at Gary Kitson.

  ‘Yes.’ Charlie saw a well-nourished young man with black ring-lets and brown eyes, dressed in jeans, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. ‘I expect you’d like a drink.’

  ‘Large rum and black, please, Ted.’ Gary held up his empty glass. ‘And the lady’s paying.’

  28

  Just Like Old Times

  ‘Sovereignty is not negotiable. We’ve made that perfectly clear. What we have is ours, and nobody else’s.’

  ‘There may only be a few of t
hem, but they’re our sort of people, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are you a sheep farmer, Contessa?’

  ‘No, my dear. But I am Scottish, somewhere in the dim and distant past.’

  ‘Are they Scottish then?’

  ‘Bound to be. Nobody but the Scots would think of going to live in a place like that.’

  ‘I wish someone would make it clear to me exactly where the Falkland Islands are.’

  ‘It’s going to be quite a problem with combined ops. It’s going to be quite a party.’

  ‘Not a garden party?’ Charlie had been drinking a good deal and the dinner-table conversation stopped for a moment around her.

  ‘I mean more like a D-Day party, Mrs Titmuss. On a far smaller scale of course. But it’ll be quite like old times.’

  Leslie was entertaining the neighbours, regulars like the Naboths and the ‘Contessa’, Mrs Fairhazel and the Kempenflatts, the Erskine girls and a few members of the Committee of the local Conservative Association and their good ladies. As they ate their Black Forest gâteau, the British Navy was steaming off to the South Atlantic, to take part in a war which brought back irresistible memories of the Empire, maps on classroom walls, largely coloured pink, and newspapers full of distant campaigns which didn’t put them in the slightest danger. A dozen miles away Worsfield Heath had become an American Air Force base in preparation for a different sort of war entirely. It was left to Lady Naboth to draw the parallel. ‘When I think of our fellows steaming out there. To the Arctic? It is the Arctic, really. And those ghastly women in bobble hats and smelly anoraks camped round the Heath. Deserting their husbands and talking about peace as though they’d only just invented it. Peace! I’d like to see them doing it in Russia.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Charlie wanted to know.

  ‘Camping in their horrible bobble hats. I really don’t know what they’re thinking about.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re thinking about Nicky.’

  ‘I say. Your lady isn’t one of the disarmers is she, Leslie?’ Mrs Fairhazel was alarmed.

  ‘I am.’ Leslie spoke with the sort of quiet conviction that Charlie had discovered he adopted when he didn’t altogether mean what he said. ‘I’ve got a certain amount of respect for the women of Worsfield Heath, but I’d go a lot further! I want the whole world to disarm at the same time. That’s all. Not just us. Not just the Americans. Not just the Russians. All of us. Until then, of course, we must keep up our defence capability. I’m sure that’s what Charlie has in mind.’

  ‘Oh well.’ Mrs Fairhazel looked relieved. ‘I suppose that’s all right then.’

  His wife might have said more but Leslie looked at the clock above the large painting of dead game on the dining-room wall. ‘Perhaps it’s about time, Charlotte.’

  ‘About time for what?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to take the ladies upstairs?’

  ‘Take them upstairs?’ Charlie pretended ignorance of a ceremony she detested.

  ‘People usually do it,’ Leslie explained patiently, ‘after dinner.’

  ‘Do they?’ Charlie didn’t move. ‘I thought people usually had a nice cup of tea and went to sleep in front of the telly after dinner.’

  ‘Well, shall I lead the way?’ Mrs Fairhazel took command of the situation.

  ‘Lead the way? Where?’

  ‘Upstairs, of course. The ladies want to go upstairs.’

  ‘Well, of course. Up you go.’ Charlie gave her permission. ‘If you’re absolutely bursting for a pee.’

  In the weeks that followed Leslie had no chance of coming home to Picton. He sat, with his Cabinet colleagues, in remote control of a distant war which came flickering on to the television screen in the saloon bar of the Baptist’s Head. There was news of Marine casualties at a beachhead and of Argentine Sea Hawks shot down. Ted Lawless stood behind the beer handles, backed by photographs of Spitfires, of himself with a silk scarf, sheepskin jacket and Brylcreemed hair, and of Ivy, his wife, as a W.A.A.F., and felt young again.

  ‘A drink for the lady, Ted. They can get on and capture Goose Green without you.’ Gary Kitson shouted for the landlord’s attention; Charlie had just come into the Head to join him for the evening.

  ‘An estimated forty aircraft took part in the attack, and some got through the missile defences to drop their bombs on the ships below. The Argentine planes were finally driven off by the Navy’s Sea Harriers, flying almost continuous combat patrols.’ The television set in the Rectory described the victory at Goose Green. ‘Shall I turn the machine off?’ Dorothy wondered.

  ‘If you like.’ Simeon was looking depressed.

  ‘If I’d known it was going to have that sort of thing on it I’d never have let it in. Now what exactly do we do to quieten it?’ She could never remember so Simeon got up and found the switch. ‘I told Fred we were going backwards. That’s not exactly right. What we’re doing is going round in circles. I mean, is this where we came in?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We used to go to the pictures at the Hartscombe Odeon.’

  ‘Did we do that?’ Dorothy went back to her mending.

  ‘Of course, even before we had the children. And we were always late.’

  ‘You were always late.’ She remembered that.

  ‘Yes. So we’d sit on and watch until we said, “This is where we came in.” Films used to go round and round in those days. First attraction. Second attraction. Then start all over again.’

  ‘In the last war at least we only had wireless.’ To Dorothy that seemed to have been a mercy.

  ‘And we sat glued to it for the latest news of people killing each other,’ Simeon reminded her. ‘So much enthusiasm. So much hope. Where do you think it all went to?’

  ‘I was never all that concerned about the New Jerusalem.’ Dorothy attacked another sock. ‘I suppose I’ve always had far too much to do in the garden.’

  ‘It’s going to go round and round, like at the old Hartscombe Odeon.’ His pipe had gone out and he started to strike matches to little effect. ‘Is that all that’s ever going to happen?’

  ‘Probably.’ Dorothy sounded reasonably cheerful about it.

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Only what we have to.’ She looked at her husband and repeated more positively, ‘Do what we have to, that’s all. And hope for the best.’

  On the night when Goose Green was captured Charlie and Gary Kitson entered the Rapstone Cricket Pavilion by forcing a window. After a long evening’s drinking at the Baptist’s Head they made love on a bed of towels in the middle of the floor. When it was over, Gary zipped up his jeans, buckled his belt, did up a few shirt buttons and combed his hair carefully before putting on his leather jacket.

  ‘You don’t really like me, do you?’ he asked Charlie, who was sitting naked in a patch of moonlight, ransacking her handbag for a cigarette. ‘I don’t suppose I like you,’ she told him. ‘No.’

  ‘What is it then?’ Her nakedness irritated him. ‘You lonely?’

  ‘That must be it.’

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘Up in London. Winning the war.’

  ‘He’s done pretty good for himself then, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Charlie was sitting under a plaque on the wall which announced that the Pavilion had been donated to the village by the Rt Hon. Leslie Titmuss, M.P., in memory of Sir Nicholas Fanner, Bart.

  ‘What about your kid?’

  ‘He’s away too.’

  ‘So you’ve just got your mum?’

  ‘Oh, no. I haven’t got her.’

  Gary finished work with the comb, cleaned it with his fingers and stowed it in his back pocket.

  ‘I know a bit about your mum. It might surprise you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, just things. Things I heard about her, I mean.’

  ‘I can’t believe you heard anything interesting.

  ‘I’d say it was pretty interesting, yes. I mean, perhaps it’s
something you really ought to know.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘All right. But for God’s sake, get your clothes on.’

  She looked at him for a moment, then she obeyed him. Later, he told her something which she kept as a secret, entirely to herself.

  To understand his father’s will, Fred told himself, he had to understand Leslie Titmuss, but nothing that he had learnt from Magnus Strove, nor while examining the larynx of the Minister himself, seemed to throw much light on the problem. Simeon was beyond questioning. To whom should he turn next? He had been to visit a patient on the ridge, and was driving back along a narrow road through a wood near Rapstone, when he saw a familiar grey-haired figure, wearing an old mac, stooping to fill a plastic sack with kindling wood. He stopped his car and went to help his mother, although she said, ‘Really, shouldn’t you be caring for the sick or something? I’m perfectly capable of getting my own kindling.’ All the same, he picked up dead and fallen sticks for her, snapped them and loaded up her bag in silence until he felt able to raise her least favourite subject.

  ‘All this business, about father’s will.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, doesn’t anyone remember anything about Simeon except his wretched will?’ She whacked a branch against a tree to break it. ‘Firelighters are so expensive nowadays.’

  ‘I know what you want is to stop the case coming to court.’

  ‘It takes no time to get a bag of kindling.’

  ‘I can stop it. I think I can stop it if I can tell Henry the truth.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s a treat coming out to Rapstone Woods, much better than a trip round Tesco’s.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about Leslie Titmuss.’ Fred tried to make it clear that he hadn’t stopped to discuss firewood. ‘I mean, who is Leslie Titmuss?’

  ‘Isn’t he the Minister of something or other? I thought everyone knew that.’ Dorothy moved further into the wood but her son followed her.

  ‘Is he… I mean, it would make father’s will understandable at least.’ Fred tried to put the suggestion as tactfully as possible. ‘Is he related to us?’