An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  It was only when he was back at his car, beside which stood a black-stockinged traffic warden, that he realised he had left his socks at the food checkout.

  “I am His Honour Judge Osgood.” He gave the warden the benefit of his smile which Caroline had referred to cynically as “turning on the charm”.

  “I don’t care if you’re the King of Lampedusa,” the warden said, slipping a ticket beneath his windscreen wiper. “You’re on a yellow line.”

  “I just popped in…” Topher indicated his shopping.

  “Nine five to nine forty-five.”

  “Good lord, is that the time?” Topher removed the offending piece of paper in its plastic envelope and attempted to hand it back to the warden, who looked as if she should have been in a caring profession, or at the very least taking in washing in a laundrette.

  “Couldn’t you just…” He was about to tell her that his wife had recently died, but the words stuck in his throat.

  “Not once they’re written.” There was no animosity in her voice. She looked at him sorrowfully. “You should know that.”

  Three

  “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the 14.50 King’s Cross to Bradford. The train will be callin’ at Doncaster, Wakefield Westgate and Leeds and is due to arrive in Bradford at 17.58. A buffee bar is available situated towards the centre of the train for drinks, light refreshments, freshly made sangwiches, hot bacon rolls, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages…”

  Topher had decided to accept Tina’s invitation to go to Bingley. An incident had taken place before the Easter recess, a ridiculous occurrence which had unnerved him, had disturbed the equilibrium he thought he was managing to maintain so splendidly. He had to get away to somewhere he could think clearly. This no longer seemed possible in the house whose every echo whispered Caroline.

  After three months he had got used to living on his own. Used, in the sense, that was, of being able to tolerate it. He had not thought at first he would be able to. Before Caroline had died he had found isolation positively enjoyable. He had shut himself away in his study with Heraclitus or The Odes of Horace, while Caroline, in the bedroom estimated the population of barnacle geese and choughs in the Inner Hebrides. He was a man not averse to his own company. He did not need people about him all the time. He could see now that there was a rider to his enjoyment of solitude. There had to be someone, another human being, in his case Caroline, waiting for one. The quality of his aloneness had changed. Hitherto he had been able to lose himself completely in the task in hand – his books or his music. Now, his concentration had a listening quality. He was conscious of the stillness in the house which would not be broken by the sound of his wife’s footsteps. He had to keep an ear open, even when he was in the bath in the mornings. For the delivery of envelopes too large for the letter-box; for the clatter of the milk-float; once for the gas man, when Topher had stood obtusely, dripping on to the mat, trying to think where on earth the meter was located. Fortunately the fellow had led him down to the cellar and pointed it out with his torch, between the Château Margaux and the Gewürtztraminer.

  Topher had never had trouble in sleeping. He liked to read in bed. A thriller or detective story. Anything which took him away from the real world. Sometimes he read the Bible, in particular the Creation. He had, since his student days when he had been inspired by Descartes, come to terms with the existence of God. He had accepted that the universe was the product of one supreme, directing Intelligence. That it had not come into being either as the result of a Big Bang, or at the whim of some stick, stone or crocodile, or other deity of ancient cosmogeny. He acknowledged the genealogists’ assertions that Monera begat Amoeba, and Amoeba begat Synamoebæ, and Synamoebæ begat Ciliated Larva (and so on through Single-nostrilled Animals and Primeval Fish) until Man-like Apes begat Ape-like Men, and Ape-like Men begat Man. Until such time, however, as the scientists came up with a reasonable explanation of how man became endowed with speech, mind, soul and personality, until they could account satisfactorily for his grasp of religion, morality and ethics (or indeed of the birth of life itself), Topher was quite content to believe that the entire process was divinely inspired.

  He still read at night. Without Caroline’s presence, without the regular cadence of her breathing (they had been married for so long that sometimes he mistook it for his own), he found concentration hard. He would become aware of an emptiness in the bedroom which was filled not only with chairs and tables and bibelots acquired over a married lifetime, but with memories. They imposed themselves between his eyes behind the half-glasses and the printed page. The most persistent and disturbing of these was the image of Caroline, with Fisher, or Huxley, or Audubon propped up on the bureau, amending some text or absorbed in her notes. At times Topher believed that she was actually in the room and had to restrain himself from getting out of bed in order to touch her. The prospect of encountering nothingness, as in some hideous game of Blind Man’s Buff, deterred him. He would apply himself with increased diligence to the reading matter at hand, only to be distracted by the gurgling of the night-time pipes, a passing car, or his own obsessional ruminations.

  There was no doubt that the house was now too big. Its reverberations had nothing to do with its size. Chelsea had suggested that he employ a housekeeper. She had offered to advertise for one. Topher could not tolerate the idea of a stranger sharing his roof, touching his things, breathing his air.

  After the first Marks & Spencer débâcle, during which he had lost both his cool and his socks, he had replenished his larder daily at the mammoth supermarket near his County Court. The effort of keeping house had, at first, appalled him. It was not so much the physical energy involved but the options which must be faced. His life was spent making decisions. Whom to send to prison, whom to evict, to whom to award the custody of a child. These resolutions were as nothing compared with having to make up his mind between the long grain and the pudding rice. It was Chelsea who suggested that he make lists of his household requirements with the result that now he was as often writing “polyunsaturated marge”, and “washing-up liquid”, as noting points of law to be incorporated in his summing up. He marvelled at what Caroline – besides bringing up the children, and lecturing, and writing, and serving on committees – had done apparently so effortlessly, and certainly without complaint, for years.

  Chelsea had often told him how far the judiciary was removed from the actual world. How little Topher knew of the man in the street, the man on the Clapham omnibus. In the past months the suspicion had dawned upon him that his daughter might be right. After much trial, and frequent error, his life was now running more or less smoothly. As he battled to maintain the house in some semblance of order, Arthur, who had for years looked after the large garden, had come to his rescue.

  They were having their customary Saturday morning coffee in the kitchen. At the sight of the unwashed dishes, the accumulation of damp tea-towels, the drooping plants on the window-sill, Arthur – who kept his spade and his fork and his hoe polished as if they were silver – shook his head.

  “I’ll ask my Madge to come. You can’t carry on like this.”

  Sometimes Topher thought that he could not carry on at all. It wasn’t so much the chores which bothered him. It was getting up in the morning to an unresponding house, a tasteless day. Returning at night to a silence so tangible that sometimes he had the desire to shout in order to fragment it.

  “Doesn’t seem possible she’s gone,” Arthur said, referring to Caroline, whom he had worshipped and who had served him tea in the best china cups, like Royalty. “She never said where she wanted the dahlias putting.”

  He opened the bag at his feet.

  “I fetched some wall-flowers. She liked wall-flowers.”

  He looked despondently at the newspaper parcel. “Hardly seem worth planting.”

  Topher knew exactly what Arthur meant. It hardly seemed worth getting up in the morning, going to bed at night. Hardly seemed wo
rth dressing, undressing, eating, sleeping, sitting in court, where it was sometimes with the greatest difficulty that he managed to keep his mind on the case before him. He rose from the table and fetched the whisky bottle from the top of the fridge. Arthur did not protest when Topher poured him a generous measure.

  “Move, will you?”

  Topher shook his head. The thought of estate agents and furniture vans filled him with horror.

  The house in Hampstead, with its three floors and its gables, had been a wedding present from Caroline’s mother, Lady Eskdale. Before moving to it, he and Caroline had lived in a rented shoe-box in Cheyne Walk, where Caroline had become pregnant.

  “What on earth do we want such a big place for?” Topher had asked. Struggling at the Bar, he could not afford even to pay the rates. Caroline, who had inherited a considerable sum of money from her father who had died when she was a child, had taken care of everything. The house had given him stature, status. After Chelsea was born – they had christened her nostalgically after the manor in which she was conceived – Caroline had entertained anyone who could be of the slightest use in the advancement of her husband’s career. Her parties, like those of Lady Eskdale, a between-the-wars hostess of some repute, became legend. Topher’s name was much bandied around the Inns of Court. By the time Penge was born (“Hampstead” as an appellation being out of the question, they had stuck a pin in the map of Greater London) Topher was more or less established at the criminal Bar. Caroline turned her attention to the proper rearing of her daughters.

  She was not to blame for Chelsea’s only brief flirtation with Cambridge – Girton, following in her mother’s footsteps – and her subsequent involvement in the media world where she had met her married man. Penge too had been recalcitrant. Insisting upon indulging her small talent for the stage, she had ended up living in a Hackney commune, with an extremely minor poet, while she waited for the ever elusive work. Caroline, grateful that her offspring were not into drugs or other excesses, accepted her daughters as they were. Their failure to conform to the pre-conceived notion he had of them had made Topher less cheerful about their chosen lifestyles.

  “See that programme on telly?” Arthur said, dunking his gingernut into the coffee.

  When Caroline had been alive Topher had rarely watched the television. He did not care for the reiterations of the news bulletins, the canned laughter, the inane panel games, the interviews and discussions with inarticulate “spokespeople”. He found the medium inimical to conversation and that it kept him from his books. Recently he had found himself turning on the set for company.

  “Which programme would that be?” Topher said, in answer to Arthur’s question, although he knew perfectly well.

  He had been scarcely able to believe his eyes when he had tuned in to a show inspired by the panic over the HIV virus. A middle-aged woman had stuck two fingers into a contraceptive to demonstrate to a studio audience how to put on what she referred to as a condom. He had been saddened to discover that sex among the teenagers present (many of whom appeared to be scarcely more than children) was indulged in as regularly as visits to the local pizzeria and with about as much passion.

  “With the French letters.” Arthur said. “The boy was with us. Madge didn’t know where to put herself.”

  “Fugaces labuntur anni,” Topher said.

  “Wassat?”

  “‘You wake up one morning and find you are old.’ I’m beginning to wonder if I belong any more in this world.”

  “Some of them as was on the telly won’t be much longer for it, if you ask me,” Arthur said. “Not with the way they’re carrying on. I’d be scared stiff meself.” Arthur laughed at his unintentional joke.

  “When one is young,” Topher said, “one is inclined not to think of consequences.”

  “That’s what the boy said. ‘When you’re pullin’ a bird you got other things on your mind!’”

  “Precisely.” Topher divided the remaining whisky between the glasses.

  Looking round the train taking him to Bingley, he wished that he had bought a First Class ticket. The carriage was full. He was wedged into his seat between the window and an individual encased in an anorak which rustled irritatingly each time he moved, seemingly turned into a pillar of salt by page three of the Sun. Topher surveyed the plastic-topped table before him on which were the remains of a congealed bacon sandwich, a polystyrene cup of some ferocious-looking orange liquid, and an empty chewing-gum wrapper. Facing him, a ludicrously young mother who wore a crucifix over her tee-shirt but nothing beneath it, licked a dummy and stuck it into the mouth of her grossly overweight son. The child’s tubbiness – he looked, Topher thought, like a miniature Michelin Man – was scarcely surprising given the number of potato crisps he had consumed between London and Doncaster. That the Michelin Man’s name was Darren, Topher had learned before they had left King’s Cross. The child had been held to the window and urged to wave to Nanny and Grandad who stood dotingly on the platform.

  In order to spare himself from regarding either the dummy-faced child or its gum-chewing mother, Topher turned his attention to the incident that had taken place at the Gordons and which had precipitated his flight to Bradford.

  The Gordons and the Osgoods had moved in to the same street within a few weeks of each other and the two families had been friendly ever since. Marcus was a psychiatrist, and April an interior designer (not decorator, she wouldn’t have that). While Caroline had given birth to daughters, April had been delivered of four sons. It had been the fond hopes of their parents that there might be some intermarriage. The hopes had not materialised. The Gordon boys (three of whom were now scattered about the globe) seemed no more interested than did the Osgood girls in either permanent relationships or their parents’ cosy expectations of them.

  Since Caroline’s death, Marcus had been Topher’s lifeline. It was to Marcus that he confessed his anger that all about him less deserving men were holding their wives in their arms; his belief that life had been dispossessed of its meaning; his conviction that he wanted to die too. Other well-meaning people had pointed out to him the universality of his experience. The capacity of time to heal. The futility of self-indulgence. Only Marcus had appreciated that his despair was a discourse to be understood, rather than a pathology to be corrected. That he stood before a mirror in which there was no reflection. That he had no self to indulge.

  While he spent many evenings with Marcus, who was helping him to put together the shattered pieces of his life, Topher had avoided the Gordons as a couple. The sight of them both evoked memories of happy times together with their respective children, which he was as yet unable to confront.

  When Marcus had suggested that he come to one of April’s dinner parties, Topher had been shocked.

  “Only a few close friends,” Marcus said, aware of the hermit-like existence which Topher had recently been leading. “You have to face up to it sometime.”

  It was not so much the company that Topher wished to avoid. It was the sympathy which washed over people’s faces when they heard of his bereavement, to which he had no idea how to respond. Women were the worst. They wanted to mother him, smother him.

  “The longer you leave it, the harder it will become,” Marcus said. “Look upon it as testing the water. If you want to go home early, April will quite understand.”

  The appalling thing was that, despite what happened, Topher had not wanted to go home. It was this which had upset him. Which had precipitated his acceptance of the invitation to Bingley, towards which the train was now accelerating.

  Four

  Topher had stopped on the way home from court to buy flowers for April. He rejected the daffodils which reminded him of happy times in the Scilly Isles with Caroline, looking for the grey-cheeked thrush. He found the irises unappealing. He had never considered blue an appropriate colour for flowers. The tulips were equally unattractive because of the egg-like configuration of their heads. He settled upon gerbera, imported Dutch blooms
in pinks and orange, as sufficiently grand for the hearth in April’s sitting room where, in huge, hand-thrown vessels, she habitually massed her floral arrangements.

  After so long on his own, the prospect of the evening had made him apprehensive. He felt like a small boy forced to go to a birthday party, or as he had when, on his very first day in court in his newly acquired robes, he had been obliged to find his voice. By the time he rang the Gordons’ bell, clutching the gerbera, he had stiffened his resolve with more than one nip from the new bottle of whisky on the top of the fridge.

  The door was opened by John, down from Cambridge. From years of habit, as honorary uncle, Topher might have been tempted to embrace the youngest Gordon had he not been reminded of the passage of time by the boy’s recently acquired beard. This luxuriant growth was a topic of conversation soon to be eagerly seized upon to dispel the awkwardness engendered by Topher’s presence in the drawing room. The assembled guests had been suitably primed. Their smiles of welcome (after which they contemplated the Chinese carpet or their shoes) had obviously been vetted for the least sign of commiseration.

  Marcus effected the introductions: Robert Holdfast, a fellow psychiatrist whom Topher knew well, whose wife Barbara was a psychotherapist; Inez (with an unpronounceable surname which she had inherited from the last of her three husbands) who was April’s business partner; Peter Gordon, a cousin of Marcus’ from Edinburgh, in London for a conference; and Sally Maddox, short and dumpy – a condition exacerbated by the brown, shapeless two-piece she was wearing – a fiction writer of whom Topher had not heard. Clearly anxious that any ice be broken, they exclaimed over the flowers which Topher had brought and which April was now cradling.