Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  Doughty Strove, not a pretty spectacle this, as Mae West. Nicky also showed an interest in Grace’s old dresses, her Teddie Molyneux evening-jacket which was like a shower of gold coins and her Chanel sewn with pearls. Nicky said that in the Molyneux she looked like Danaë, a legendary figure who, it seemed, was someone he learned about at school. And then, just when they were enjoying themselves, Leslie had driven over, pushed his way past Wyebrow in the most loutish manner and sent his son home, with orders never to return again. He had also said things to her that could never be forgotten, told her, for instance, that Nicky had better things to do than spend his afternoons stuck in a bedroom going through Grace’s moth-eaten wardrobe. According to Leslie the Fanner family had brought him nothing but ill luck – even Charlie would never have gone off on her dotty causes and died if she’d really cared for Nicky. He said other things which Grace didn’t repeat to Fred, among them that she was a lonely old drunk with no one but a child to bore with her stupid stories about useless people and the scratchy records she had once danced to. But she did tell him that she and Nicholas had made his career by putting up with his spotty presence when a young man at their dinner parties and trying to ignore the appalling noise he made when eating soup.

  ‘I also remember him as a ghastly child screaming when the lights went out in our downstairs loo. He was scared out of his senses, perhaps that’s what he’s got against us. Anyway he told me that I was unsuitable company for young Nicky. Perhaps I was unsuitable company for old Nicholas too.’

  Fred had finished strapping the old and fragile ankle: ‘Rest and keep it up as much as possible.’

  ‘You look extraordinarily like your father sometimes,’ Grace told him.

  ‘I’ll give you some pain killers.’ He scribbled a prescription. ‘You mean I look mad?’

  ‘Why should I mean that?’

  ‘My brother wants to prove my father was insane. Your Mr Wyebrow’s going to provide evidence in support of the proposition.’

  ‘I shall give him the day off to go to court.’

  ‘Because you believe it’s true?’

  ‘Because we all want to do in Titmuss, don’t we?’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Of course. He wanted to join the family circle, we let him in and he kicked us in the teeth. He’s got my grandson, in fact he’s got it all. And your father’s money!’

  ‘How did he manage that, do you suppose, without any legitimate claim?’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Doctor Simcox. That four letter Titmuss hasn’t got a legitimate claim to more than a charge of shot up the backside of his awful little city gent’s off-the-peg suiting!’

  ‘I don’t think he gets them off-the-peg any more.’

  ‘Get that into your head, absolutely no legitimate claim of any sort. Is the operation over?’

  ‘Quite over.’ Fred was packing up his bag.

  ‘Then it’s time for the anaesthetic. You’ll find it in the bathroom. We’ll use toothmugs – Wyebrow looks disapproving when I ask him to bring up a drink It’s what I hate most about growing old, you’re so at the mercy of the servants.’

  ‘Most of my patients don’t have that problem.’

  ‘I shock you, don’t I, Dr Simcox?’ Grace was looking more cheerful. Fred went into the bathroom and came back with the bottle of champagne he found nestling in the washbasin. As he filled their toothmugs he happened to mention, ‘What did you have against Tom Nowt?’

  ‘Nowt?’ Grace took a swig of tepid Moët. ‘He was a poacher.’

  ‘Is that what you had against him?’ Fred was unconvinced.

  ‘He got above himself. He tried to interfere with other people. He was the first symptom of the national disease that spread alarmingly and became Leslie Titmuss.’

  ‘My mother got on well with him.’

  ‘Your mother got on well with the most extraordinary people. Before you go, would you mind putting on a record?’

  Coming downstairs, Fred saw Wyebrow waiting for him in the hall. The muted music reminded him of a children’s party, years ago, with nervous Charlie, the birthday girl, being pushed down the stairs, and musical chairs, two children anxiously circling an empty seat and the manservant switching off ‘You’re the Top!’ to decide the contest. When Wyebrow opened the front door, Fred paused to ask him a question, with no particular hope of an answer. ‘You don’t know why Lady Fanner quarrelled with Tom Nowt, do you? I mean, it can’t have just been the poaching?’

  ‘That’s all, as far as I know. Bridget was in the house when he came up and they had their disagreement. She never talked much about it.’

  ‘And Bridget’s in “The Meadows”,’ Fred remembered.

  ‘Oh yes. It’s my opinion Bridget always took her work far too serious.’

  ‘The Meadows’ was Hartscombe’s one small hospital, a modern glass and concrete square built in the expansive seventies, along the Worsfield Road, as an alternative to a theatre or an arts centre. It housed a few geriatrics and a labour ward. The Out Patients department came in useful for those who got kicked by their horses or maimed by chain-saws. Bridget, whose journey back to the hard days when she was first in service was now complete, had been there for almost a year. She was quite sure that the bleak and modern building was Picton House, where she worked as a young girl.

  ‘You come for the weekend, Dr Simcox?’ She smiled at Fred as they sat in the Day Room, among the potted plants, the reproduction Van Goghs and the old people inert in front of Play School or tottering round on their Zimmers. ‘I got up early to see to a nice bright fire in your bedroom.’

  ‘You like it here, do you, Bridget?’

  ‘Lovely old house, of course, but so inconvenient. The job I have finding the fireplaces! They’ve got to be done, you know. Mrs Smurthwaite’s that keen on her fireplaces and her stair-rods. Well, I’ve always been particular about my stair-rods. But it’s not too bad, I help with the silver in the butler’s pantry. We get a few laughs sometimes, when Smurthwaite’s up in her sitting-room.’ Bridget giggled like a young girl. ‘Having her little nap or is it her “nip”, we wonders. There’s rules though, and regulations. Everyone in by ten o’clock and no followers.’ A nurse came with cups of tea for both of them. Bridget whispered, ‘Old Smurthwaite doesn’t half keep her running.’ She sat smiling around her, her cup held closely under her chin.

  ‘I was going to ask you. You remember Tom Nowt, I’m sure. Old chap who had a hut in the woods.’

  ‘He doesn’t come here no more.’ Bridget sipped tea with great delicacy. ‘Ladyship sent him away. Well, he had no right to do that.’

  ‘Do what, Bridget?’

  ‘No right to come round asking her for money.’

  ‘You heard that?’

  ‘I was on the stairs polishing up. I couldn’t help hearing.’

  ‘Of course not. Of course you couldn’t help it. What did he want money for, do you remember?’

  ‘Something he’d noticed in the park.’ Bridget nodded.

  ‘The park?’

  ‘Tom Nowt’d seen something there and he wanted money for it. ’Course, Ladyship sent him about his business! Said she’d ruin him in the district. But it’s my belief he was ruined already. He never came to any good, did he?’

  ‘He died,’ Fred admitted.

  ‘There now! I knew he came to no good.’ She drank her tea with satisfaction. ‘Whatever made you think of Tom Nowt?’

  ‘You’ve got everything you want, Bridget?’ Fred didn’t answer her question.

  ‘It’s just not easy to find the fireplaces.’ Bridget shook her head. ‘And that Percy Bigwell! I just don’t want him to come here at all odd hours. Smurthwaite won’t tolerate followers.’

  Fred was shown out by the Matron. ‘She seems to have trouble finding the fireplaces,’ he told her. He breathed the air in the car park, free from the smell of old people.

  ‘Well, of course she does.’ The Matron was young, and kept resolutely cheerful. ‘Seeing we’re all cent
ral heating. Sometimes I think we ought to send her home but when I suggest it to her she cries and thinks I’m giving her the sack. How did you find her, Doctor?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Bridget’s memory.’

  ‘So far as it goes.’

  ‘Yes.’ Fred was thoughtful. ‘I just wonder how far that is, exactly.’

  A few days later, just as he thought he had finished his surgery, Miss Thorne told Fred of one last patient, and Simon Mallard-Greene came in, flopped into the patient’s chair and spoke as though he were in a position to put a bit of welcome work in the Doctor’s way. ‘You’re going to be my expert witness, aren’t you? You’ll be able to tell them about my childhood and all that.’

  Fred had been given the Mallard-Greene notes. ‘You come from a comfortably off, middle-class family and you got a good education. Isn’t that your background?’

  ‘I never got on with my father, know what I mean?’

  ‘It’s not a particularly obscure remark.’ It was what Fred’s father used to say.

  ‘He was totally orientated to his career at the B.B.C. He was unsupportive to my mother and to us as a nuclear family.’ Fred looked at the pale, unsmiling Simon, whose fair lashes and eyebrows gave his face a curious look of nakedness; he seemed perfectly qualified to act as his own social worker. ‘I suppose, looking back on it, I was doing it all as a challenge to my father.’

  ‘Buying bits and pieces of stolen hi-fi equipment in a pub in Worsfield?’ Fred was trying to understand. ‘To rival his telly programme on The Arts in Our Time?’

  ‘Basically, I did it that way because I wanted to get into trouble.’

  ‘Well, at least you’ve had one resounding success.’

  ‘It wasn’t really a crime at all, you see. It was more of a…’ He looked suspiciously at Fred, who didn’t seem to be paying him serious attention. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I thought for a moment you were going to say a “cry for help”.’

  ‘We’re not having you on the National Health, you know.’ Simon frowned. ‘We’re doing this private. I don’t think my father cares what you charge within reason.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not a psychiatrist.’ Fred stood up to terminate the interview.

  ‘All the same, I do reckon you’d better help me, Doctor.’ Simon smiled in a chilly and unattractive manner. ‘I don’t think it’d do your family any good if you didn’t.’

  ‘My family?’

  ‘Gary knows all about your family.’

  Fred went back to his seat, and looked at the young receiver of stolen property. ‘Gary Kitson? What does he know?’

  But Simon wasn’t giving anything away. ‘Things I don’t suppose you might like to have said around, that’s all. He didn’t tell me the whole story. He would though. He’s a good friend is Gary.’ The young Mallard-Greene was no longer giving instructions to his medical man – what he said came out as a threat. ‘I think you ought to take Gary Kitson seriously, Dr Simcox. And you’d better be there to help me, on my day in court.’

  Fred finished the interview by promising to think about it and then he drove over to Rapstone. He stopped at Gary Kitson’s cottage and saw the For Sale notice in the front garden. Then he went over to the Baptist’s Head, where Ted Lawless told him that the Kitsons had cleared out suddenly and no one knew their address. ‘Did he owe you money too, Doctor?’

  ‘No.’ Fred took a gulp of Simcox bitter. ‘Information.’

  31

  Neverest

  The Probate Action ‘In the Estate of Simeon Simcox deceased, Simcox v. Titmuss’ was fixed for a date in the spring and estimated to last two weeks. Leslie told his lawyers that there could be no question of a compromise – winning outright and getting possession of the Brewery shares was something he felt he owed his son. Henry was also prepared for a fight to the finish. Whatever the Brewery shares might be worth, and they had not yet had a final valuation, he was determined to see they remained in the Simcox family. Their attitude was extremely welcome to the lawyers on both sides, who saw a profitable piece of litigation ahead. Roderick Rose, Henry’s junior counsel, was so sure of the number of refresher or daily fees that the case would provide that he organized a little dinner party in his Kensington house to which he invited his leader, Crispin Drayton, Q.C., their instructing solicitor, Jackson Cantellow, and, almost as an afterthought, their client, Henry Simcox. ‘An informal get-together for your legal team,’ Rose told Henry. ‘Just so we can have the picture quite clear and get our “act together” as no doubt you show-folk would say.’ The only ladies present were Roderick Rose’s wife, Pamela, and Lonnie, who became enthusiastic about the food provided.

  ‘Super sort of herby taste! Provençal?’ she suggested. ‘Well, I don’t know. I can’t help you about that actually.’ Mrs Rose was vague on the subject, and offered no further information when Lonnie guessed, ‘Oregano! You must have relied heavily on oregano.’

  ‘And not a bad drop of Beaujolais either.’ Henry sniffed at it. He had lately taken up the study of wine and could be quite boring on the subject.

  ‘I thought something light’ – Rose refilled his glass – ‘if we’re going to go over our plan of attack.’

  ‘We have to face up to the fact’ – Crispin Drayton as the Q.C. in charge of the case put an end to the gourmet chatter – ‘that the burden will be on us to prove your father’s insanity.’

  ‘Did he honestly dress up in drag to give marriage guidance?’ Pamela Rose was giggling with delight. ‘Of course, I suppose that might be considered quite trendy nowadays.’

  ‘I’m sure we all understand’ – Drayton looked at his junior’s wife with disapproval – ‘that the late Rector’s extraordinary behaviour must have been deeply distressing to his family.’

  ‘Or is it a touch of tarragon I’m detecting?’ Lonnie stared thoughtfully upwards as she masticated her coq au vin.

  ‘Of course it was extremely embarrassing for all of us. My mother always tried to cover up for him,’ Henry told his leading counsel. ‘I think that’s why she’s refusing to get involved.’

  There was a short, almost reverent pause of understanding, and then Rose struck a cheerful note. ‘I think our medical evidence is pretty clear. Monomania, or an insane aversion to members of his family.’

  ‘Or an insane affection for Leslie Titmuss?’ Lonnie suggested.

  ‘It went deeper than that,’ Henry told them. ‘What he suffered from was an insane optimism about the future of mankind.’

  ‘With respect, we want to avoid generalizations.’ Drayton struck a note of caution, but Henry launched yet another attack on the myth of happiness. ‘He suffered from the great insanity of our times. The pathetic fallacy that we’ll all get better and better, nicer, kinder, more concerned about each other, more disinterested, more enthusiastically against fox hunting, capital punishment and nuclear war. These idiotic beliefs took hold of him like a disease. They haunted him like strange hallucinations. In the end they corrupted his judgement and addled his brain. He became terrified of his own wealth and decided to unload it on the most undeserving object he could find.’

  ‘You mean, he wished to leave you the gift of poverty?’ Drayton was afraid they might be finding a motive.

  ‘It sounds appropriately idiotic.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I like that.’ Drayton shook his head. ‘It might have some sort of sound religious basis.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the eye of the needle?’ Rose suggested.

  ‘We’re safer with psychotic monomania, and the specific acts of insanity we’ve pleaded in our defence,’ Cantellow said firmly, and Drayton, who had formed the view that Henry would have to be kept on a tight rein in the witness box, found himself in complete agreement with his instructing solicitor.

  ‘Can anyone manage a tiny bit more?’ Pamela Rose invited them all, and Lonnie asked whether it would be frightfully piggy of her. Piggy or not, Mrs Rose took Mrs Simcox’s plate to the service hatch, slid it open and sai
d to whoever was on the other side, ‘Just seconds for one, could we? If that’s at all possible.’

  Agnes knew that it would have to happen some time. She had been cooking for years in houses which Henry and Lonnie might have visited, doing dinner parties for publishers and actors, television producers and literary agents. She hadn’t expected any such accident to occur when she was rung up and asked to cook by a barrister’s wife, who insisted, much against Agnes’s better judgement, on avocado with prawns and coq au vin, the whole to be topped up with chocolate mousse. She stood by herself in the kitchen full of knotty pine and blunt knives, a place which seemed to have been used merely for providing scrambled eggs to be eaten in front of the television, and tried not to listen to her ex-husband’s voice which came booming through the open hatch as she spooned out another plateful for Lonnie.

  ‘My brother Fred is either a natural traitor, or he’s inherited our father’s insanity. I can’t really figure out his game. Apparently he’s going round asking questions, behaving like some ridiculous kind of amateur sleuth.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ Pamela Rose took the plate, the hatch door was shut, and Agnes could hear no more. In the dining-room, Lonnie tucked in gratefully. ‘I really must ask you for the recipe.’

  ‘To be brutally honest,’ Pamela confessed, ‘the recipe is the Flying Kitchen.’

  ‘Oh really.’ Lonnie seemed to have gone off her food.

  ‘The person out there does rather look as though she despised our fitted cupboards, but she leaves it all surprisingly tidy. I can give you the telephone number, if you want it.’

  ‘That’s very kind, but I don’t think we need it, do we, darling?’ Her husband, in a voice of doom, agreed, ‘We don’t need it.’