An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  He was reading a snippet about a fellow judge who had been stopped by the police on his way home in his Volvo at three o’clock in the afternoon, found to have blood alcohol levels two-and-a-half times over the legal limit, and fined and banned from driving, when Squeers sidled once more into the room. Sergeant Bullock had arrived.

  “I suppose we shall now have to wait while he makes his statement,” Topher said impatiently, hoping that by keeping his nose clean he would never find his way into Private Eye.

  “I’ve told counsel that the judge in Court Six is about to blow his top,” Squeers said.

  Topher, who was about to do no such thing, let the exaggeration pass. He looked out of the window at the grey rigging of HMS Belfast which was moored beneath it.

  “Tell the jury we won’t be long.”

  It was eleven o’clock before Squeers preceded Topher, in his scarlet sash, into Court Six and called imperiously for silence. In his nasal monotone, on a single breath, he opened the proceedings.

  “AllmannerofpersonswhohaveanythingtodobeforetheQu eens Justicedrawnearandgiveyourattendance. God Save The Queen.”

  The case concerned the alleged attempt by the accused to steal a lady’s handbag from a public house in Covent Garden. Harry Andrews, in his defence, said that he had taken a mini-cab from his home in Acton, to a pub in Covent Garden, in order to meet a girl who was to give him some clothes to take to a friend in Ashford Remand Centre. When the girl did not show, he had stayed in the bar for only two minutes before returning to the mini-cab. Before he could reach it he was – to his complete astonishment – not only arrested, but assaulted, by Sergeants Bullock and Quinn. They nicked him for “doin’ ’andbags”, a misdemeanour for which he had, on his own admission, been sent down on two previous occasions.

  The girl, who also lived in Acton, declared on oath that she had arranged to meet Andrews in Covent Garden (rather than pop round the corner with the clothes) because she thought it “would be nice”. She failed to turn up for the rendezvous because she was watching television and “forgot”.

  Sergeant Bullock described in ponderous detail how he had observed Andrews take up his position against a pillar in the Public Bar. How he had placed a hold-all (covered by his raincoat) on the floor next to a lady’s handbag. How he had been about to draw the handbag into the hold-all when he spotted the police officer (whom he recognised) and hurriedly left the premises.

  Andrews’ own description of the incident was decidedly more graphic.

  “…what ’appened then. ’e pushed me against the wall, right? Grabbed me bag out of me ’and, right? ‘Bollocks,’ ’e said, ‘there’s nuffin’ innit.’ Wiv that, ’e grabbed me scarf and started to strangle me. ‘I know you,’ ’e said, ‘I’ve nicked you before, for car ’andles.’”

  Andrews’ additional complaint, that he had also been roughed up by the police – “’it on the right eye and me arm twisted” – for smoking in his cell at Wormwood Scrubs, held up the case considerably. A statement taken from the prison doctor concerning his injuries was agreed and, instructing the jury to return promptly at two o’clock, Topher adjourned the case for lunch.

  By the time he arrived on the second floor, wearing a black silk mess jacket over his bands, most of the other judges (a few of whom he knew well, some by sight, and others not at all) were assembled. He collected a tomato juice (he did not like to drink in the middle of the day) and helped himself to a handful of peanuts. He nodded to Roger Sopforth, an active campaigner against jury challenges, and “Killer” Kershaw, renowned for the severity of his sentences, and gravitated towards the window where grey gulls glided gracefully over the grey sky towards the Belfast. Arthur Critchley, who had been up for his circuit judgeship at the same time as Topher, appraised Topher’s drink then looked at his own glass.

  “Wish I could keep off the stuff.” He followed Topher’s gaze towards the swooping gulls.

  “Your wife, is it not, Osgood, who’s the authority on birds? I recall reading…”

  Topher recalled freezing winters watching the white-fronts at Slimbridge. Bewick’s swans on the Ouse Washes. Bean geese in an unmentionable part of Norfolk. Brent at Wells-next-the-Sea.

  Critchley was waiting for an answer.

  Topher nodded.

  “My wife died.”

  “Good Lord,” Critchley said, “I say, I am sorry. I had no idea. Put my foot in it.” He raised his empty glass. “Can I get you another?”

  “Not for me, thank you.”

  Topher watched Critchley’s retreating back.

  At luncheon, at the long table presided over by Doughty-Smith, he found himself sitting next to the only female in the room. She introduced herself, as she picked up the roll on her side-plate, as Jo Henderson, a stipendiary magistrate.

  “Topher Osgood.” He passed her the saucer with its foil wrapped squares. “Would you care for some butter?”

  Topher had always considered lady magistrates (from whom he didn’t exclude the professionally trained “stipes”) all to be cast from the same mould. Jo Henderson, with her boyish black hair, her black dress buttoned seductively at the rear and set off, quite charmingly he thought, by her white bib, made him revise his opinions.

  “I do like it at Southwark.” She fixed Topher with a pair of large green eyes and leaned away from him as the waitress set a dull-looking salad, topped with a dollop of mayonnaise, before her. “It’s so civilised. Sadly this is my last day here. Next week I shall be sitting in a Sunday school, and will have to robe in full view of the court.”

  “I would like it here too –” Topher inclined towards her, receiving the full blast of her perfume, while his plate of mushroom soup was positioned “– were it not for the diabolical inefficiency of the Crown Prosecution Service.”

  He recounted the morning’s contretemps which had tried his time and patience, not to mention the time and patience of the jury. Overhearing his comments, Their Honours on the right of him, and opposite him, and even further along the table, joined the discussion. The consensus seemed to be that if the Civil Servants who manned the CPS were adequately remunerated they might be more attentive to their task.

  “If we had to work forty years before we saw our pensions,” Doughty-Smith said, looking down upon the company from his high-backed chair, “we mightn’t be so enthusiastic about manning the department either.”

  He removed a smoked mackerel bone from his mouth and leaned across the fruit bowl.

  “Splendid letter in The Times this morning, Sopforth. When I was called to the Bar no-one would have even dreamed of exercising the right to challenge the members of a jury. The situation is getting quite out of hand.”

  “If I had my way,” His Honour Judge Sopforth said, “I’d do away with peremptory challenges altogether. A jury, after all, is supposed to be twelve good men and women chosen at random. Once you begin to argue about who is qualified and who is not, you diminish the random quality.”

  His Honour Judge Godber rolled bread-crumbs into grey pellets. “The whole business of challenging anyone who looks in the least well turned out – or even marginally intelligent – is based on the misconception that important human truths come only from the mouths of the socially deprived.”

  “Surely one peremptory challenge would cover the remote chance that someone might have a grudge against the defendant?”

  The speaker was His Honour Judge Barley-Brown who was known not only to read the Guardian but to ally himself with the Social Democrat Party.

  Further discussion of the challenging system was prevented by the arrival of the main course, to which the company, with a proper concern for priorities, turned their attention.

  The advent of the pudding separated the men from the boys. As Topher tucked into his plum duff, Jo Henderson, who had helped herself to three grapes and was peeling them, looked at his plate and said: “Bet you don’t get that at home!”

  Topher thought of the individual puddings, composed largely of chemicals, which h
e spooned each night from their plastic pots.

  “No.”

  Tired of pity, he refused to expand further. He glanced at Jo Henderson’s elegant pink-tipped hand, on the fourth finger of which was a gold wedding band. She was too quick for him.

  “I’m a widow.”

  Surprised into confession by her honesty, Topher said: “So am I.”

  Jo Henderson had been a solicitor. Her husband, a judge, had drowned in a yachting accident at Cowes. Topher remembered reading about the tragic incident in the newspaper. He recalled that the wife, trying to save her husband, had almost drowned herself.

  It was after Henry’s death, Jo said, that she had decided to become a stipendiary magistrate. It kept her out of mischief. Looking at her, Topher had his doubts.

  The fruit bowl did its rounds. Over what passed for coffee, Jo Henderson surprised Topher with the news that she had a son in his twenties. He was down from Oxford and desperate to find work in television. Topher suggested that Chelsea might be able to help. Taking a card from her handbag, Jo Henderson gave it to Topher. She lived in Lowndes Square.

  “It might be better if your son contacted Chelsea direct…” Topher searched his pockets for a piece of paper.

  Jo took out a slim black aide-memoire.

  Handing her his gold pen, Topher gave her the telephone number of Little Grove studios and Chelsea’s extension. He looked at his watch. The lunch had gone quickly.

  “I have to be getting back to my chappie who has been accused of attempting to ‘nick ’andbags’.”

  “Was he nicking handbags?”

  Topher chuckled and pushed back his chair from the table.

  “Without a shadow of a doubt.”

  Nine

  Harry Andrews was found not guilty of attempting to steal a lady’s handbag from the public house in Covent Garden. The verdict was unanimous. Topher could only surmise that the jury had been swayed by the allegations of police brutality made by the defendant. By and large, officers of the law were honest. When they were convinced, however, that a defendant was guilty (no matter how trivial the offence), they were quite capable of bending the rules.

  Judging by the police officer’s expression as Harry Andrews left the dock, Topher felt sure that it would be only a matter of time (and a little leg-work on Sergeant Bullock’s part) before the two of them met again.

  He had been sitting at Southwark for a month when he was woken one morning by the doorbell from a deep sleep in which he had been dreaming of Sally Maddox. Sally, draped in marble, had usurped Pauline Borghese from her couch in the Villa Borghese and was holding out her stone arms to him.

  Opening the front door to an unfamiliar postman, Topher wondered if the dream had been significant and whether there would be word from the still silent Sally.

  “Recorded delivery. Parking fine.”

  “Not me,” Topher said smugly.

  “Osgood?”

  Taking the stub of pencil, Topher signed where requested. He guessed that a mistake had been made. Chelsea was always taking chances in her Renault 5.

  The name of the street where the alleged offence had taken place meant nothing to him. The registration number of the offending car was his own. He cast his mind back to the expedition to Marks & Spencer from which he had returned minus his socks. He had always prided himself on the efficiency with which he dealt with his correspondence. He couldn’t think how the ticket, issued by the traffic warden, whom he now recalled quite clearly, had been overlooked. He wondered what he had done with it. It was certainly not in the car.

  Padding across the parquet in his bare feet, he looked for his winter overcoat in the closet at the back of the hall. Caroline’s wellingtons, her parka, and her ancient leather gardening jacket had been missed by Chelsea and Penge. There had been times lately when Topher did not think of Caroline. When the intimacies of their life together seemed to belong to an earlier civilisation. At moments such as the present one, he was assailed by a trenchant recollection of things past. The leather jacket, an unusual extravagance for Caroline, took him back – an archaeologist with a forgotten shard – to Paris, and the wedding anniversary (he could no longer remember which one) for which it had been bought. It had been pelting when they left London and they had worn their raincoats. It wasn’t until they were flying over the English channel that Caroline discovered she had left her new jacket on the bed. The incident had coloured the weekend. Caroline would not be mollified. The celebration had been only a qualified success. Topher had done his best to understand her disappointment, to reassure her that she looked fetching in her macintosh. She refused to be placated and they had, he remembered, almost come to blows in the Jeu de Paume.

  Perhaps there had been a kernel of truth in the words of Lucille from Bingley. Marriage, even to Caroline, had not always been a moonlit trip down the Grand Canal in a gondola. Searching through the pockets of his winter overcoat, he thought that even at its very worst, when the waters had been turbulent, and the moon decidedly skulking behind a cloud, matrimony was, without question, preferable to the arcane existence he was now leading. Extracting from his pocket nothing but a half-eaten packet of Polo mints, a soiled handkerchief, and a fistful of silver which he kept for the evening newspaper, he put the oversight of the parking ticket down to his equilibrium having been so savagely shaken by Caroline’s death.

  The day at Southwark was uneventful. The novelty of HMS Belfast beneath his window was beginning to wear off. Squeers, with his obsequiousness, was getting on his nerves.

  In order to defer the onset of the prolonged evening at home, he had taken, after court, to going to his club. No sooner had he arrived, however, than he was assailed by a profound disinclination to enter into conversation with anyone who might address him.

  He had adopted several ploys to fill the arid hours at the nether end of the day. Sometimes he thought that they would never pass. He had tried the commercial theatre. It not only frequently disappointed, but entailed the tedium of finding somewhere to park, a descent into the bowels of the Soho earth, and the necessity of bobbing up and down from one’s seat every few minutes to allow latecomers to pass. The National Theatre was more rewarding, but when the mailing list arrived he found himself unable to commit to far-off dates and times and preferred parts of the auditorium, and let the whole exercise go by default. The programmes were stacked up on top of the fridge beneath the whisky bottle.

  He had tried the films, both alone and with Penge, but the cinema seemed to address a culture with which he did not associate himself. Music, as therapy, had come out tops. He preferred to listen in the comfort of his own home.

  A reading of the poetry of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, on Radio Three, heard by chance when he was timing his boil-in-the-bag kipper, had recently given him a new interest. With Latin as his first love he had no knowledge of, and thought he had no interest in, the Russian language. Listening to The Covetous Knight, read in the original, followed immediately by the English version, made him realise what he might be missing. Through his battles with Horace, he had always been aware of the pitfalls of translation, He decided, nonetheless, to dispose of an hour each evening, with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar, getting to grips with Pushkin. When he succeeded in reading the lyrical Pyeryedo mnoy yavilas ty, “Before me didst appear thou”, he almost danced for joy. As the evenings progressed he became convinced that no British horse ever galloped as poetically as did Peter the Great’s – kak budto groma grokhotanye – and that no lovelorn English maiden’s heartache could match her Russian counterpart’s tryepyetanye.

  He was struggling with Autumn when the telephone distracted him.

  Hearing the unfamiliar voice of a woman, his first thought was that Sally Maddox had returned from Ireland.

  “Sally?”

  “This is Jo…”

  He was about to tell the caller that she had the wrong number.

  “Jo Henderson. We met at Southwark.”

  “Of course. I’m so
sorry. I was expecting… How did you…?”

  “Squeers gave me your number. I went off with your pen.”

  A Gold Cross. Initialled. A present from Caroline. He had thought it lost.

  “I found it in my handbag. What would you like me to do?”

  While Topher was considering the matter she said: “Look…”

  She meant listen, Topher thought.

  “…why don’t you come over here for a drink?”

  There was no reason at all why not. Topher did not need to consult his diary. A day a week ahead was fixed. Six o’clock at Lowndes Square.

  “By the way,” Jo Henderson said, “how long did you give your fellow for nicking handbags?”

  Topher remembered his assurance that Harry Andrews would be condemned “without a shadow of a doubt”.

  “The jury found him ‘not guilty’.”

  Hearing a laugh from the other end of the phone, he realised that there had not been too much laughter lately in his life.

  He had settled down again with Pushkin when the telephone rang for the second time.

  “Hallo?”

  “Hallo.”

  A woman’s voice. He was not going to make a fool of himself again.

  “Christopher?”

  There was only one person who called him Christopher.

  “This is Sally. Sally Maddox. I did ring from Ireland but your cleaning lady told me you were in Yorkshire. Then I got bogged down with work. Are you alone?”

  “Apart from Pushkin.”

  “Is that your cat?”

  Topher disillusioned her. Sally Maddox asked him how he had been keeping. She sounded as if she cared. The author of An End to Dying seemed less threatening than the Sally Maddox who had groped him at the Gordons’. He found himself accepting, even with some enthusiasm, her renewed invitation for tea in Kentish Town. His diary began to look less boring. When Sally’s call was followed by that of Tina, on the line from Bingley, he was able to reassure his sister, in all honesty, that he was very well thank you and that he had plenty to occupy him.