Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  Not for the first time she wondered how on earth her father had persuaded the children to call him ‘Gamps’ and decided that he had done it for the sole purpose of driving her mad. With the same end in view, no doubt, he called her ‘Molly Coddle’ — a name he had never thought to use when she was a child — and he insisted on changing the sex of his grandchildren so that Henrietta became Henry or Hal, Samantha was naturally Sam, and the three-year-old Jacqueline ‘Jack the Lad’. So far as her father was concerned, Molly didn’t know what to call him. She had never responded to his embarrassing invitation, made to her during the permissive sixties, to use ‘Haverford’, his Christian name. Now that he was in his mid-seventies he signed his rare letters to her ‘Daddy’ or even ‘Pops’. When they spoke she did her best to avoid calling him anything.

  ‘That was my toast soldier and you took it,’ said Jacqueline.

  ‘I’ve been brushing up on my Italian,’ Molly’s father went on, ‘with the aid of an extremely sexy-sounding signorina I got on a tape from the Fulham Public Library. We have spent some passionate evenings together changing traveller’s cheques and looking for medicine to cure stomach disorders. Each night I try to memorize a spot of Dante. I have it in English down one side of the page and in Italian on the other.’

  ‘It was mine!’ The child’s voice rose in righteous indignation as Molly bit desperately into another toast soldier.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Molly said, ‘and don’t be so selfish.’

  ‘Selfish?’ Her father’s voice protested. ‘I haven’t said a single word about joining you in Italy.’

  ‘I was talking to Jacqueline.’ She restrained herself from pinching another soldier. She always found the supper she cooked for the children irresistible and when she gave them bacon and baked beans she would swoop down on their plates like a vulture on a battlefield. She didn’t like herself for it. ‘I wasn’t talking to you, of course.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I had taken it for granted that you wouldn’t want a boring old fart like me trailing after you round Siena.’

  ‘I never said that. You know I never did.’ She resented the guilt she felt because the thought had crossed her mind.

  ‘Believe it or not, Molly Coddle, I rang up quite simply to wish you arrivederci.’

  ‘It’s not until August. We shan’t be going until then.’

  ‘And where shall I be in August? Set out on the Great Package Tour of the Skies.’ It was her father’s habit to refer to his approaching death as a sort of cosmic joke. ‘I suppose I might have liked one last lunch in the Piazza del Campo.’

  ‘Don’t do that, please!’ Molly shouted. Jacqueline, starved of toast soldiers, had slid from her chair and, having circled the table, was starting to de-gut the loaf of bread.

  ‘Don’t do what?’ the old voice crackled down the telephone. ‘I suppose you’re accusing me of trying to manipulate you.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘I’m not manipulating you at all. I’m merely stating facts. I shall not be with you much longer and I may well not see Italy again.’

  ‘I told you. I’m busy. It’s Jacky’s tea-time.’

  ‘What a full, rich life you lead! Could you just look in your diary. Let me know when it’s not bath-night and you can have a few minutes’ chat with your aged Pops.’

  ‘I’ve got to go now.’ She meant it.

  ‘Don’t sound so serious. You know me better than that, don’t you? I was only teasing. Only having that quaint old thing, a joke. So out of fashion nowadays. I shall be perfectly happy at home this summer, having a very meaningful relationship with Signorina Berlitz. You know old Nancy Leadbetter lives the spit of an olive stone from Mondano? Remind me to kit you out with a letter of introduction…’

  ‘Please! Leave the bread alone!’

  ‘Of course, if I were with you, Nancy would have us all over to dinner.’

  He rang off then, before she had a chance to reply. As Molly put down the telephone, she saw Jacqueline, her mouth full of dough, staring at her with the large, accusing eyes of an Oxfam poster.

  Molly’s father awoke the next morning with a start, a dry mouth and an erection for which he had no need. His first feeling as he emerged from the short but deep sleep which came to him at the end of every restless night, was that he was bloody glad to be alive. But then why, as he lay there pink and rested in his striped Viyella pyjamas feeling no older and certainly very little wiser than he had when he used to open his eyes in his prep school dormitory over sixty-five years ago, should he not be alive and kicking? The answer came in a sudden cramp in his left leg which caused him to roll out of bed yelling as though the flat were on fire and stamp away to the bathroom as the bones and muscles slowly settled into a position to cause him only moderate discomfort. What had he to look forward to during the day ahead? What girls could he telephone? What gossip might he learn in the old Nell Gwyn pub down the end of the King’s Road? Above all, what mischief might he get up to? He considered the matter as he might have done when he was only half a century old in what he still called the ‘swinging’ sixties, when lunch for two might be had at Alvaro’s for a five pound note and his column ‘Jottings’ by Haverford Downs in the weekly Informer had been described on the wireless as ‘Max Beerbohm with a social conscience’. This was an assessment with which Haverford, in all humility, felt bound to agree. It might not be a bad day. He could call in at the Informer office in Chancery Lane and use the telephone to arrange a suitably stimulating lunch. And then he caught sight in the bathroom mirror of the collapsed features, the swollen neck and ragged grey hair of the old man upon whom he still looked as a stranger. He also remembered with a sense of humiliation and disgust that the pages of the Informer were now given over to articles on gay rights, the ‘politics of feminism’ and peer pressure towards glue-sniffing in the inner cities. ‘Jottings’ had not quite been pushed overboard; it was clinging by its fingernails to the edge of the raft, to be found, often seriously cut, between the competition and the personal column at the back of the paper.

  The feeling of gloom persisted as he bathed and dressed slowly, having particular difficulty with his socks. He made many a false attempt, standing on one leg tottering like an overweight stork before he could trap a dangling foot and pull the wool over it. And then, when both feet were clothed and he sank into a chair exhausted, he suddenly remembered Italy and felt cheered. In the end Molly would have to take him. She owed that to him at least for having been, over the years, such a disappointment to her father. And if he could put up with humourless Hugh for three weeks in the sun, the family, who couldn’t have many jokes to look forward to, would be glad of a running commentary on their holiday by the well-known author of ‘Jottings’.

  It was not that he had never loved his only child. She was a girl, which greatly predisposed him towards her. When she was two years old she had seemed to be of a cheerful disposition and laughed obediently when he made a witch out of his knotted handkerchief or cast a swan’s shadow against her bedroom wall with his fingers. Molly’s mother, married for her beauty, had turned out to be a solemn and conventional woman, alternately angry and exhausted. He and his daughter, he imagined, would form an alliance based on shared jokes and secret indulgences against a lonely and often disapproving wife. But then Molly grew up to be serious and, what was worse, she grew up to be big. As some girls suddenly look too tall to be ballet dancers, she became too large for her father’s devotion, for Haverford always preferred smallish women with what he had once described in one of his more personal ‘Jottings’ as the ‘tip-tilted noses of impertinent page-boys’. And then, as a schoolgirl, Molly had further distanced herself from him by being good at mathematics. After he had separated from her mother and when she was away at boarding-school, he would drive down to visit her, often accompanied by some rather mature page-boy in jeans or a mini-skirt and Molly would sit with them in silence at an endless tea in the local Trusthouse Forte. ‘The young have become so puritanical,�
� Haverford would explain to his companion on the way home. ‘I get to feel more and more like some splendid Regency buck surviving sadly into the horrible reign of Prince Albert the Good.’

  To do Haverford justice, he wasn’t altogether happy about his lack of rapport with his daughter; at times he came as near as he ever could to feeling guilty about it. He had therefore decided to be as charming as possible to her during the summer holiday in Italy — as soon as he had managed to persuade her to let him join the family there. Meanwhile, he shuffled off towards the tube station and Chancery Lane.

  The girl behind the desk in the untidy and cluttered reception area of the Informer, sitting below a poster protesting about Eskimo rights and an original cartoon showing the American President as an ageing cowboy astride a Cruise missile, had certain page-boy qualities, although her tip-tilted nose supported a pair of granny glasses and she was working hard at her chewing-gum. Haverford Downs, dressed now in a tweed jacket, grey flannels and a white polo-necked sweater, holding an ivory-topped walking-stick in a plump hand on which a single green-stoned ring — alleged by him in his wilder moments to have been worn by Aubrey Beardsley — winked malevolently, gave her his full septuagenarian charm.

  ‘How are you, darling?’

  ‘Was you wanting something?’

  ‘Only to lay my “Jottings” on you, my dear.’ He reverently produced two folded typewritten pages from an inside pocket. ‘I deal this week with the innate puritanism of the young. Although you look far too pretty to suffer from the present malaise, you might find it means something to your generation.’

  ‘What was the name again?’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I’m meant to ask all the names like.’ The girl, on a youth training scheme, was waiting sullenly for an opening in a hairdresser’s.

  ‘Haverford Downs, my dear. And I think you might remember that my “Jottings” have been in the paper since long before your grandmother had her first G.I. in the War. I’ll take it through to the Editor.’

  ‘I think he’s just slipped out,’ the girl said, as she had been instructed to do if ever Mr Downs presented himself. At which moment, the Editor, a young man from Glasgow, who seemed to bear on his narrow shoulders guilt for all the sins of the Western world, emerged from his office and was off to lunch with a left-wing Labour M.P. in the Gay Hussar. He moved towards the door with his head down but Haverford laid an ancient mariner’s hand on his arm and detained him.

  ‘The “Jottings”, Stuart. I have an idea for the “Jottings”.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Stuart, the Editor. ‘We’ll have to give the future of your column some thought. Considerations of space, you know, and the advertising ratio…’ In fact, he would have elbowed the ‘Jottings’ long ago had not the Chairman of his Board reminded him that Nye Bevan had once found them ‘bloody civilized’.

  ‘How would you like, my dear boy’ — Haverford appeared to be offering his Editor a unique opportunity — “‘Jottings” from Italy this summer?’

  ‘Random thoughts on Botticelli? Not for us, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The hell with Botticelli.’ Haverford, moving forward in a conspiratorial manner, almost had to stand on tip-toes to reach the ear of the pale Scot. ‘I thought more of pieces on the lines of “Whither Euro-Communism?”, “The Scandal of the Vatican Banks”, “The Common Market and the Black Economy”, “Child Prostitution”… He ended hopefully — “On the Appian Way”?’

  Haverford was not entirely a fool. He knew his market and the Editor appeared partially hooked. ‘We couldn’t possibly pay your travelling expenses though.’

  ‘Of course you won’t have to. Have no fear.’ Haverford reached up and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘It won’t cost you a penny, you dear old thing. Except, of course, for my usual modest fee.’

  Before he was allowed to escape, the Editor had muttered his agreement, and his heartfelt wish to supplant the ‘Jottings’ with a regular feature on ethnic cooking, written by his live-in companion, was once again postponed.

  ‘We’re trying Italy this year. Managed to find a villa for the children’s holidays.’

  ‘Oh, I know about them. School holidays are when all the men suddenly disappear.’ The woman having lunch with Hugh Pargeter opened her eyes to an almost impossible extent. ‘I’m going to get desperately hungry in August.’ Her name was Mrs Tobias and Hugh had met her when he handled her divorce case, successfully, because Mr Tobias had made a determined rush for freedom, scattering alimony lavishly as he went. Now their lunches were a regular event to which Hugh looked forward with a certain amount of trepidation. Mrs Tobias was kept thin by regular visits to Forest Mere and she dressed expensively. To Hugh she seemed beautiful and he delighted, somewhat guiltily, in having her eat opposite him. When not at Forest Mere, her appetite was more than usually healthy.

  ‘Do you have to go?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He gave her one of his martyred looks. ‘I can’t disappoint the children, you know. Anyway, I have organized this holiday.’ In fact he had worried about it so much that he felt now that he had done it all.

  ‘Is it a nice house?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Actually I sent my wife to check up on it. You can’t be too careful.’

  ‘You didn’t take a look?’

  ‘I’ve been rather too busy here.’ He frowned, wondering whether they could recoup the entire cost of the holiday by letting the house in London to an American. But Americans had been rather thin on the ground lately, fearing such Libyan terrorists as might haunt the dark streets round Notting Hill Gate.

  ‘If you’re so busy can’t you tell her that you’ve got to stay here? Then we could still have lunch.’

  ‘Of course, I’d love to. But I’m afraid I’m fully committed.’ He looked noble, as though he were saying goodbye before catching a troop ship to almost certain death on some foreign front. Indeed he treated his children’s holidays and an uninterrupted period of married life as a stern duty for which he was prepared to make the supreme sacrifice. In this solemn moment they both gazed abstractedly at the sweet trolley. ‘I’m sorry!’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ She also was looking brave at the prospect of three weeks in the summer without their regular Thursday table at the ‘Dolce Vita’ near his office in the City. ‘A girl learns to get used to school holidays.’

  ‘I really am sorry,’ he repeated and wondered why it was that these lunches, designed as an escape from responsibility, had begun to weigh on him with the weariness of marriage itself.

  ‘Not your fault.’ She was giving her doe-eyed look to a pile of profiteroles. ‘At least I can indulge myself when you’ve gone.’

  ‘Actually, I hope you don’t.’

  ‘Indulge in dessert?’

  ‘Oh, pudding,’ he said. ‘I shan’t worry about pudding.’

  ‘Just as well.’ Marcia Tobias was now disposing of a plateful of chocolate-coated balls with discreet efficiency. To his mind, she represented the sort of rare treat to which he was entitled, sixteen years after he married Molly. Or rather, he often thought, Molly had married him. He had been carried along by his wife’s extraordinary power of making decisions, from the time when she had walked into the offices of Glebe and Pargeter, when his old father was alive, and told him that her great-aunt had left her some money and she had decided to invest it in a London house.

  At the end of the protracted negotiations with her great-aunt’s executors, and the vendor’s solicitors, Hugh and Molly had been out to several dinners in bistros, for which she insisted she paid her share. He arranged bridging-loans and a mortgage to make up the price of the tall house with the basement into which she had decided he should move as a lodger, abandoning his awful little bed-sit in Chepstow Road.

  Since then, looking back on it, there had been too many children’s holidays and not nearly as many lunches with girls in the ‘Dolce Vita’ as a man deserved.

  ‘Good grief!’ Mrs Tobias turned her wrist which
was fettered with a thin and glittering watch. ‘Such a load of things to do. It’s impossible.’ In fact she had a heavy date with a lady who undertook to slim thighs with ultra-sound.

  ‘But we’ll meet again before you go?’ She smiled at him over the table napkin, which was removing a minute trace of profiterole.

  ‘Of course we will. Thursday week?’

  She nodded. ‘And you’ll send me hundreds of postcards from Italy?’

  ‘I promise.’ He felt safe, now lunch was over, to put his hand consolingly on hers.

  So they left the restaurant and Hugh got a taxi for Mrs Tobias before he walked back to his office. As they parted, she pursed her lips and lifted her well-attended face, which didn’t look quite so young as it had in the restaurant. Hugh gave her its regular after-lunch kiss, and as he did so he saw, out of the corner of his wary eye, the extremely unwelcome figure of his father-in-law coming down Chancery Lane, carrying a walking-stick and an armful of newspapers. Hugh urged Mrs Tobias into her taxi and walked off smartly in the opposite direction.

  ‘Three weeks! You mean three whole weeks?’ Henrietta’s voice mounted tragically. She looked at Molly as though she had just sentenced her to a lengthy and quite undeserved term of imprisonment.

  ‘Three weeks in Italy. In the sun.’ The kitchen table was covered with homework, dictionaries, ring notebooks and ‘All you Need to Know about the Russian Revolution’ pulled out of the huge pieces of luggage Henrietta took every day to school, books used to erect tottering towers wherever the family was next about to eat.

  ‘Honestly! I don’t believe this. I simply can’t believe you’d do it to me!’ Her daughter’s outrage had turned to half-amused incredulity. Where had the long silences gone, Molly wondered, into which she used to retreat in the company of her parents?

  ‘Do what to you?’

  ‘In August!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you remember anything?’ Henrietta started to explain patiently, as though to a child. ‘That’s when both parties are — and the Ball at Hurlingham — and when we were all going to the Muckrakers Club for a really good evening. And then we were going to have a day shopping in Ken. High Street and sleep at Rachel Koo’s flat. And I told you Mrs Koo knows all about it.’