“You’re good for me,” Topher said, when they were resting amicably, side by side.
“We’re good for each other. Don’t tell me you haven’t realised that?”
Forbidding Topher to move, Lucille had gone down to the kitchen for a tray of tea and hot buttered toast, over which he had told her about his trip. She wanted to hear every little bit. He started with the Temple of Six Banyan Trees in Canton and did not stop until he’d reached the Forbidden City.
He had left Lucille cooking dinner for them both while he went to his court to fetch some notes. When she opened the front door to him in her scarlet kimono, framed in the light from the hall, it was as if the house, which had been inanimate for so long, had sprung into new life.
He had been looking forward to going down to Badger’s, but when he opened the curtains on Saturday morning, he was greeted by an ominous quiet. The view from his window was transformed by a deep blanket of newly fallen snow.
“You’re not to attempt it, darling,” Jo said on the telephone. “The roads are treacherous and we’re completely cut off.”
His house was echoing once again now that the girls, together with Charlie, had gone. He had spent most of the weekend with Sally, who had smiled wryly at his dilemma but had good-naturedly taken him in.
By the time he saw Jo, the pavements in Lowndes Square were ankle-deep in slush. Jo was not yet home. The porter let him in to her flat. He helped himself to whisky and switched on the television to watch the disaster pictures which a few days ago had been of snow ploughs rescuing stranded cars, but were now of floods. When Jo swept in, in her fur coat, about which Penge (who campaigned against mink farming and the killing of Pilot Whales) would have had something to say, her cheeks were flushed and her nose red.
“Sorry, darling.” She shed briefcase, handbag and umbrella as she came towards him. “I had to wait for a taxi. It was Wally Matheson’s goodbye party – he’s been posted to Brussels – you don’t know anyone who wants a Barbican flat?”
Topher waited until the end of the evening before giving Jo the necklace. Over dinner – it was so long since he had seen her that he had almost forgotten how much he enjoyed just looking at her – he discovered that she knew a great deal more about China than he. She knew about the Sui and the Tang, the Boxer rebellion and the fall of the Qing; that it was the melting snows of the Tibet-Qinghai plateau that fed the Yangtse and the Yellow rivers, and about the hundred-year life cycle of the bamboo.
She even knew, when he fastened his gift around her neck, that jade was the Chinese symbol of nobility, beauty and purity; that it was a guardian against disease and evil spirits; that it had once been used to plug the orifices of a cob to prevent the life force escaping.
“It’s beautiful, Topher.”
He stood behind her as she fingered the green of the beads against her black sweater, admiring them in the Chippendale mirror.
Topher cupped his hands round her firm, strong breasts.
“So are you.”
She turned to face him. Seeing that she was surprised by his gesture, he said: “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
She looked at him.
“I know.”
There was something in her voice.
“What do you mean?”
Jo sat down in the armchair.
“One night, at Badger’s, the door was open. I heard you call out in your sleep.”
“What did I say?” Topher sat down opposite her.
It was a moment before she spoke.
“Lucille.”
Topher could not think of anything to say.
“I presume the lady is the reason I haven’t had an answer to my proposal. I’m not used to being turned down.”
Topher could not explain that Lucille was only one of the reasons that Jo had not had her reply. He was not ready to tell her of the decision he had made, the revelation which had come to him in the shadows of the Ming Tombs.
It was through Jo that he had found the flat in the Barbican, but it was April who was dying to get her hands on it. She wanted to enlarge it with a trompe l’oeil (a column set in a pedimental niche), to drag the woodwork, and rag-roll the walls. The decision to move had not been made all at once. Out of curiosity he had agreed to see the flat. He had dropped into the local estate agent’s on his way home one day to get an opinion as to the market value of his house. The estate agent had arrived post-haste in his white Porsche. A property developer had arrived hard on his heels. He was not interested in the fact that from Chelsea’s window, when the trees were bare, you could just see the Heath. Or that you could bang away in the Piano Room to your heart’s content without disturbing the neighbours. Or that in the conservatory, created by Caroline at the back of the house, the sliding doors could be opened to admit the birds. He made Topher an offer so astronomical that he was hard put to refuse. Encouraged by Marcus and April (despite the fact that they would miss him desperately), by his daughters, keen to see him make a new life for himself, and by Tina (on the telephone from Bingley) who thought that until he got away from her shade he would not get over Caroline, he had, with more than a little trepidation, agreed to sell the house.
He refused either to be hurried or to allow anyone to help him as he sorted out his lares and penates, the testimony in porcelain and in glass, in blankets and in linen (Caroline must have accumulated a hundred pairs of sheets), to his married life. He had had many offers of assistance. He did not want Marcus telling him which pictures he must keep. Penge and Chelsea’s opinion as to a piece of Wedgwood, which to them was nothing but a fruit-dish but to Topher was a poignant reminder of a weekend in the Fens. He spent the winter evenings, not unhappily, going through a lifetime of papers and sorting out his books.
Sally had thought his decision a healthy one. Lucille was a bit sorry. She had grown to like the big house. It made no difference to Jo.
There were, inevitably, adjustments to be made. Instead of leaving his car in the garage beneath the house in the evenings, pausing to smell the lilac or the roses on his way back up the path, Topher would have to leave it in the underground car park where the attendant, darting from his glass booth, greeted him with “Your Honour this” and “Your Honour that”. His obeisance reminded Topher of Mrs Sweetlove, who was appalled at how he would manage without a garden and thought he must be out of his mind to move.
The flat was ridiculously small. He refused to let April touch it. He would see to it himself in his own good time. There was no room for a study, but he would line every wall with books. To reach his possessions in the single living room (the concert grand from the Piano Room was going to Wapping), he would have only to stretch out his hand. The kitchen was no more than a cupboard, the bathroom little larger. He would not need an Arthur – with his never-ending demands for slug pellets and fertiliser – to make inroads into his whisky. There was scarcely need for a Madge. He would at first, he had no doubt, miss the commodiousness of his old home. Lucille had pronounced the new flat “ever so cramped”. But the spacious house and the green sward of its garden had been designed to accommodate a family. If he wanted fresh air he had only to step out on to the windswept balcony, on which he now stood.
The Ming Tombs, where the Emperor Wan Li was buried together with his royal spouses, had been a disappointment. Topher thought he might just as well have visited a bank vault. Standing in the semi-darkness he had experienced a surge of homesickness, and wondered once again what on earth he was doing in this underground cavern, surrounded by strangers, on the far side of the world. The feeling of alienation had been followed immediately by one of exhilaration. He was aware of a glorious sensation of what he could only describe as liberation, as the pieces of his life, fragmented by Caroline’s death, cavorted suddenly into place.
Chen, huddled into his anorak, was explaining with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, that it had taken the Emperor half a million workers, a heap of silver, and six years to construct his necropolis. Topher, stunned by
the vision which had come to him, was not listening. He was repeating, in his head, the words on the record which Lucille had given him, the song from Cats.
“Daylight, I must wait for the sunrise./I must think of a new life,/And I mustn’t give in./When the dawn comes, tonight will be a memory too, and a new day will begin.”
It was paradoxical that the long night, in the shadows of which he seemed to have existed for so long, should end so abruptly in the murky resting place of the Emperor Wan Li. That the nightmare – in which he denounced all responsibility for his actions – was finally over. It was as much as he could do not to take Delilah in his arms and dance her round the sarcophagus.
If the particles of his existence had come together in the catacombs, his decision had been made as they emerged into the sunlight from the subterranean tomb.
“If you touch me you’ll understand what happiness is./Look, a new day has begun.”
He would be like the swan, the Cygnus melancoriphus, the Chenopis atrata. He would not take a second mate.
The melody of a skylark, ascending almost vertically over the city – recalling spring days on the downs of southern England, moors and peat bogs alive with the self-same sound – brought him back from the Ming Tombs to his balcony. He had no need of Caroline’s binoculars to see Wordsworth’s “ethereal minstrel”, to follow the flight of his “pilgrim of the sky”. With his naked eye he could make out the white tail feathers, the streaky brown body, the small crest along the trailing edge of the wing. The bird, in full-throated song, hovered high in the bright morning air, poised motionless for a moment, then with a flap of its wings, soared confidently away into the distance.
Topher laughed aloud.
About the Author
Rosemary Friedman has published 25 titles including fiction, non-fiction and children’s books, which have been translated into a number of languages and serialized by the BBC, while her short stories have been syndicated worldwide. She has also written and commissioned screenplays and her stage play Home Truths and An Eligible Man toured the UK. She writes for The Guardian, The Times, The TLS and The Author.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ALSO ON EBOOK BY ARCADIA BOOKS
THE COMMONPLACE DAY
THE FRATERNITY
THE GENERAL PRACTICE
GOLDEN BOY
INTENSIVE CARE
THE LIFE SITUATION
THE LONG HOT SUMMER
LOVE ON MY LIST
A LOVING MISTRESS
NO WHITE COAT
PATIENTS OF A SAINT
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
PROOFS OF AFFECTION
ROSE OF JERICHO
A SECOND WIFE
TO LIVE IN PEACE
VINTAGE
WE ALL FALL DOWN
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
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First published in 2001 by House of Stratus
This Ebook edition published by Arcadia Books 2013
Copyright © Rosemary Friedman 1989, 2001
Has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–909807–11–2
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An Eligible Man Page 22