Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘You thought…’ Henry couldn’t believe it.

  ‘It made Simeon feel better, about all the wrong he imagined he’d done to Charlie. It was such a little thing, after all. He knew you’d be all right. “Henry’ll be all right,” he said. Only that character you put on, I suppose it’s some sort of reaction against your father, pretending to be a crusty old English blimp; Simeon was afraid that’d grow on you and you’d be trapped in it for ever – if the wind changed or something. But he always said, “Henry’s got the gift of the gab. He’ll be all right.” And you…’ She looked at Fred. ‘ “Fred’s indestructible,” he said. He thought Leslie was the one who needed help. Poor Leslie. He loves money and power and all that sort of thing so much, he’s bound to lose them in the end. These things only stay with those who have a certain contempt for them. Simeon was afraid for Leslie’s future. He was afraid for the future of poor dead Charlie’s child.’ Suddenly she had had enough of talking, the explanations were over and she hoped they’d all go away. ‘It’s such a long story,’ she said, ‘and it was all so long ago.’

  ‘I really don’t see what it’s got to do with our case.’ Henry was still determined to look on the bright side. ‘After all there’s absolutely no proof that any of it ever happened.’

  ‘Only the letter our father sent Grace when Charlie was born. It was something she kept with old gramophone records, bits and pieces of jewellery, scraps of her past. I don’t suppose she really cared if Nicholas found it or not.’ Fred took the blue sheets out of his wallet, looked at them, but didn’t unfold the letter.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Henry stood up and crossed the room in a purposeful way.

  ‘It was being offered for sale, more or less on the open market.’

  Henry put his hand out for the letter, but Fred returned it to his wallet. ‘The case is over. Leslie Titmuss knows just why our father left him the money. At least, he can prove it wasn’t insanity.’

  ‘Prove it?’ Henry was contemptuous. ‘What can he possibly prove?’

  ‘Oh, most of it.’ And then Fred told him. ‘You see, I sent him a copy of the letter too.’

  There was a cry of agony from Lonnie. ‘You’ve lost our case!’

  Henry, of course, told them that it wasn’t over at all, not by a long chalk. He was going to see the lawyers, he wasn’t going to let Fred’s treachery do any of them out of their legal rights and he doubted whether the precious letter was evidence of anything. And yet, as he and Lonnie left, Fred knew that it was over, and that Henry knew it also. After a while they would meet again, in a world where their father was not demonstrably insane, and they were the two half-brothers of Charlie Titmuss.

  When Henry had gone Fred tried to explain himself to Dorothy. ‘It was the only way, Mother. I had to stop him somehow.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She withdrew her interest from him. ‘I suppose you did.’ She stood up then and went to lock the back door, ready for bed. ‘Just don’t expect anyone to love you for it.’

  33

  The Simcox Inheritance

  When they had all gone, and the story had been told, Dorothy took the cold, untouched Instant coffee Lonnie had made and poured it away down the sink. As she washed the cups she thought of the big Rectory kitchen on a day at the end of the summer, early in the war. She had evacuees, she remembered, three small boys who had come to escape the bombs on Stepney. They were copious bed-wetters who looked at a field of cows with more terror than they had ever felt for the Luftwaffe. Simeon had put himself out for them, taking them on long country walks which they disliked, or playing ‘Beggar My Neighbour’, at which they cheated, with them in the evenings. Dorothy found little to say to them but they followed her about the house with extraordinary devotion. She remembered the events which came on them as suddenly as the black-out curtains, the sound of bombers droning through the sky towards Worsfield, or the three prematurely aged children with their luggage labels pinned to their jackets. ‘I don’t think anyone else knows,’ she told Simeon as they stood in the Rectory kitchen. ‘Only Tom Nowt.’

  ‘I can’t explain it.’ He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t explain it at all. I’ve always, really always, tried to believe in fairness and equality, all the things she finds completely ridiculous!’

  ‘I don’t think it’s about politics this time.’ Dorothy was looking for something in the larder.

  ‘And she’s selfish and spiteful and trivial as well,’ he admitted. ‘Quite funny, I suppose. A woman who paints her finger-nails purple and wears pyjamas in the day-time and enjoys the Blitz, God help her. She’s everything I most despise and I found her irresistible.’ He seemed to be faced with a mystery darker than any he’d met in his profession. ‘How can that happen?’

  ‘It’s over now.’ She found the big basket in a dark, cluttered corner of the larder floor and pulled it out of its hiding-place.

  ‘I suppose I’m back to some sort of sanity.’

  ‘I hope you don’t regret it.’

  ‘The affair with Grace?’

  ‘No. Getting back to sanity. Come on, let’s pick the crab apples.’ It was something they always did at this time of the year, so they went down to the trees together.

  ‘He let me marry his little by-blow, his wrong side of the blanket. He let me have one of the Simcoxes, and I didn’t know a damn thing about it!’

  A copy of Simeon’s letter had arrived on Leslie’s breakfast table at Picton House. Before embarking on the long day ahead (opening a Worsfield Job Opportunities Centre, a flight to a speech at the Euro-Computer Exhibition in Birmingham, a five o’clock meeting at the Ministry and dinner at the Worshipful Company of Breeches Makers) he stopped his ministerial Rover outside Rapstone Manor, and found Grace in her dressing-gown, submitting her face to the filtered sun in the conservatory.

  ‘I can’t imagine how Charlie ever came to marry you,’ was her answer to his opening volley.

  ‘I must seem very disagreeable to you. I don’t know anything about lying and cheating and saving up traces of old adulteries as though they were something to be proud of! That’s not the way people carried on where I was brought up.’

  ‘Your family had extraordinarily dull lives, I’ve always thought so.’

  ‘Just let me tell you this. I’ve got my lawyer coming out to meet me and if Henry Simcox goes on fighting this case I’ll drag you to court on a subpoena and make you spit out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

  ‘The truth? We had nothing in common, Simeon and I. Absolutely nothing. I suppose, when all’s said and done, it was some sort of challenge.’ She gave a small and satisfied smile. ‘I made him fall for me, you know.’

  ‘God help him.’ Leslie looked at his watch because he was working to a tight schedule. ‘Who else knew about this? Did his wife know?’

  ‘The long-suffering Dorothy? Of course she knew everything.’

  When Leslie had gone Grace felt nothing but hatred for him, and yet his visit had been an event at a time when life produced few surprises. It brought back memories of a past which had once excited her. Perhaps she would call on Dorothy. They would have something to talk about now, even if it were only Simeon’s guilt about Charlie, and its expiation in showering favours on the appalling Titmuss. She told Brooks to get the car ready.

  ‘I’m going out, Dora.’ Dorothy in a mac and headscarf found Mrs Nowt washing the kitchen floor in Sunday Street. ‘I’m going up to the Manor.’

  ‘To her Ladyship?’ Dorothy had told Grace’s story. She had spoken of something she had thought never to have to speak of again, although it hadn’t been her intention to give away Grace’s secret. Surely she should explain that to the woman? Well, perhaps, after all, not. She sat down on a kitchen chair. ‘I don’t think’ – she undid her scarf – ‘that there’s any more to be said.’

  ‘You’re not going out?’

  ‘No, Dora. I’m not going out at all.’

  Grac
e, walking a little unsteadily, reached the car door which Brooks held open. She also had second thoughts. She looked up at a sky which threatened rain and gave further instructions. ‘Put the motor away, Brooks. Really, I have nothing at all to say to Dorothy Simcox.’

  As soon as he got Fred’s letter, and even before his visit to Grace, Leslie Titmuss, puzzled but triumphant, had telephoned his lawyer with the good news and ordered an immediate meeting. The problem was finding a free half hour of the Minister’s valuable time, so he suggested a car to bring Rattling to Worsfield’s minute airfield where they could discuss the new evidence before the helicopter took off for the Birmingham Exhibition Centre. So, in the airport building, which was little more than a collection of huts, with his secretary and a man from his Ministry hovering in the background, Leslie gave his solicitor the copy of an old love letter. ‘That wraps it up surely? A perfectly clear, rational explanation for wanting to benefit my family. They won’t go on with it now, will they?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose they will,’ Rattling agreed.

  ‘So we’ve won!’ Leslie was a little irritated by the lawyer’s look of embarrassed gloom. He hadn’t expected the man to cheer loudly but there was surely cause for a good deal of quiet satisfaction.

  ‘The question is’ – Rattling wore the expression he kept for the funerals of important clients – ‘what have you won exactly?’

  ‘The Simcox estate. We know what that is don’t we?’

  ‘Let’s say,’ Rattling sounded a note of caution, ‘we thought we knew.’ And then he took a deep breath and explained. ‘When the Simcox family business was reconstituted, back in the early twenties, in a certain Pym Simcox’s time, the Reverend Simeon was given a large number of B shares. They carried no voting rights whatsoever. They should have produced no income.’

  The windows rattled at the sound of the helicopter landing. Leslie looked confused by the noise and the information.

  ‘But he was always paid, every year.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Rattling looked as grave as if he were describing some hitherto undetected murder. ‘It seems at the time the family realized the Rector had no means of support other than a pretty miserable stipend. So they doled him out a comfortable voluntary income. As he was paid regularly, it came to be assumed in the accounts department that he had A shares, producing regular lolly. So – Rattling coughed nervously – ‘a bit of a mistake crept into the annual returns.’

  Outside on the landing strip, the helicopter fell silent. The building was quiet and airless, the only sound that of a distant telephone ringing unanswered. Leslie looked at his feet and seemed to find them, for some time, objects of interest. When he raised his head his habitual air of jaunty self-confidence had left him. He looked his age.

  ‘Worthless? The shares worthless?’

  ‘An old fellow who used to work in the Brewery Accounts spotted it. It’d been on his mind. The Brewery rang Jackson Cantellow this morning, and Cantellow got on to me before I left London.’

  ‘I think I know who the old fellow is.’ And then Leslie asked again, ‘Worth absolutely nothing?’

  The telephone had stopped ringing. There was the squawk of an announcement on the tannoy, and the two men with briefcases told the Minister that the chopper was at his disposal. They were puzzled when he looked at them and repeated, ‘Nothing!’ Then he walked out of the building, the wind ruffling what remained of his hair, to go about his business with no benefit whatever from the Simcox estate.

  In Cantellow’s office the same news was given to Fred. ‘Shares with no voting rights. Paying no dividends. Producing no income.’ Jackson Cantellow rolled the words round his tongue like a lament from an oratorio. ‘Of course they’d been wrongly entered for years. A gross piece of negligence.’

  ‘All you lawyers and Q.C.s from London have only just discovered that?’

  Cantellow asked, ‘What on earth’s the matter, are you quite well?’ for Fred, sitting back in the client’s chair, seemed to be overcome with laughter.

  There was no laughter, however, in ‘The Spruces’ when Leslie called on his parents. George sat in his armchair after tea, feeling, for the first time in his life, frightened of his son although, to be fair, Leslie hadn’t blamed him for anything and agreed that the truth would have had to come out in the end. Elsie also looked nervously at the silent figure who stood in front of the fire, suppressing his anger. She didn’t know why he had come except to blame them and she wished he’d do that and go back to Picton House where she felt he belonged. ‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘The truth had to come out.’

  ‘He had nothing to give us.’ Leslie picked up the lady in the red bathing-dress, who had been for years in the act of diving off a rock. ‘I wanted to give him that,’ he said. ‘It was all I could think of. And he gave us nothing.’

  ‘Our ornament!’ Elsie cried out as her son sent the object crashing against the opposite wall. And then she was down on her hands and knees, carefully picking up the pieces.

  None of these events were completed. All had life left in them and continued to stir and trouble their participants, although, with time, strength was spent. Like the pebble in Simeon’s well-used pond, they produced diminishing effects. Simon Mallard-Greene, defended by an expensive barrister, was fined by the Magistrates, and his mother told Fred that they had decided to sell up and move to London. ‘We’re getting rid of what you call Tom Nowt’s old cottage,’ she told him. ‘I’ve always known that there was something evil about the place.’

  Christopher Kempenflatt, without any particular difficulty, got hold of a list of members of the Worsfield branch of the C.N.D. and sprung a surprise under Any Other Business at a Conservative Association committee meeting to which Leslie was invited. He startled the members by charging the Minister with lying to the Press, having categorically denied that his wife was ever a member of the organization when her name was clearly listed in a document which had conveniently fallen into Kempenflatt’s hands. Of course there was nothing illegal about C.N.D., but a Member for Hartscombe must have an unimpaired reputation for veracity. Did they not all remember, in the distant days, a certain Minister for War…?

  ‘Of course I lied,’ Leslie interrupted sharply, cutting off what seemed to him Kempenflatt’s pathetic attempt to be revenged after the collapse of Hartscombe Enterprises.

  ‘You admit it?’ The accuser was disappointed. He had wanted to see his old partner wriggling on the hook.

  ‘Did you want me to give a boost to the pacifists? Think of the publicity they’d’ve got out of that: “Minister’s Wife One of the Worsfield Women”. Did you honestly want that sort of headline?’

  ‘The point seems to be…’ Lord Naboth looked at the photo-stats of the old press-cuttings Kempenflatt had unexpectedly tabled. ‘There does seem to have been a lack of frankness…’

  ‘You’ve told us you lied.’ Kempenflatt would allow no euphemism. But Leslie, with his look of patient sincerity, smiled round at their worried faces. ‘And wouldn’t you lie, Mr Kempenflatt, wouldn’t every man in this room lie to protect the honour of the dead wife he had loved above all things?’ It was not much of a tight spot, but Leslie had got out of it, as he would get out of many in the years to come. ‘Never apologize for winning,’ he told Nicky, when his son came home for the holidays. ‘Never apologize and never explain. And when you win, you’re entitled to feel triumphant.’ But the boy seemed uninterested in this advice. He left the dinner table because, he said, he wanted to get on with his book.

  ‘Our father was deceiving us all those years,’ Henry told Francesca. ‘He let us think he was well off.’ Peter, Francesca’s boyfriend, had been converted to high-tech and the flat in Tufnell Park was now filled with black metal shelves, chromium lights, canvas deck-chairs and banks of stereo equipment. She was wearing a white boiler-suit, and Simeon’s old desk, empty of all wills, had been painted black and, with its top drawers removed, was fitted with chrome handles. ‘It’s you I’m thinking about,
Francesca,’ her father told her. ‘I was planning to do something for you.’

  ‘Do what? Give me money?’

  ‘Don’t you undervalue it. I’ve had to work for every penny.’

  ‘Down the film studio, every morning. Hacking scripts out of the coalface.’

  ‘Sometimes you look exactly like your mother,’ Henry noticed. ‘Sometimes you sound exactly like Agnes.’

  ‘You never got to know much about me, did you?’ Henry didn’t answer. ‘You might have quite got to like me. I ought to have told you that I hate loud music, I’ve never taken drugs and, here’s another thing, I absolutely don’t give a damn about whales.’

  Pilgrims was being filmed at last, and vans were parked outside Rapstone Church, together with camera cars, a catering wagon for the incessant procession of sausage butties, cakes and tea, and a generator from which a complicated system of cables snaked across the churchyard and in at the west door. None of this activity was visible to Dorothy as she walked across the fields to do her flowers. She had been cutting willow and beech sprays to go with the flowers she had brought. Inside the vestry, she put her basket on the table, unconscious of the activity in the church, where silence had just been called for. She filled a bucket from a tap outside, plunged her flowers in the water, and then opened the door which led into the church to collect the vases.

  Light, white and almost blinding, struck at her. Perhaps, in the shadows, there were a good many people. All she could see was the back of a stooping figure in an old tweed jacket, who turned towards her. He was smoking a pipe, wearing a dog-collar and had the look of a rather bothered eagle. In a moment of extraordinary, unreasonable hope, she called out, ‘Simeon. Oh, my dear!’

  From the darkness, the director shouted, ‘Cut.’ The actor sighed, knowing that he would have to start the scene all over again.

  Whether it was because the audience at the Badger had grown more tolerant, or because the Stompers were less relentlessly traditional and gave their own jazz versions of such popular numbers as ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘As Time Goes By’, the gig was an unexpected success. Joe smiled in a superior manner during the rendering of these tunes, as though he had chosen them as a sort of private joke against himself. Den, who had been delighted to discover no sign of his young brother in the bar, slapped the double bass he had available for the night with the enthusiasm of a man enjoying an evening of dubious delight. Terry Fawcett played his clarinet with new invention, having had long and empty days to think about it. Only Fred, with a nervousness which he despised in himself, was drumming with moist hands and a dry mouth, waiting for something to happen as though he were a young doctor again setting out for his first lunch with Mrs Wickstead. They played ‘St James’ Infirmary’ for the sake of auld lang syne, and no one threw a Coca-Cola tin. So, as a reward to the audience, Joe Sneeping nodded to signal that he was going to permit the piece of commercialism which Fred had played since childhood. ‘One, two, three, four. We know what we’re waiting for,’ Joe murmured in his deep South Hartscombe accent, in order to give it some sort of style, and then he went into the first bars of ‘Slow Boat to China’. The Stompers played a chorus together, and Joe sang.