‘If he thinks I’m going to leave this house to young Nick so he can plonk himself in it,’ she suddenly called out, ‘the toad Titmuss has got another think coming.’ She opened her eyes to see Kevin Bulstrode creeping, as though from the bedroom of a fractious child he hoped was now safely asleep, towards the door. ‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘You will excuse me.’ The Rector was stopped in mid-flight. ‘One has certain duties.’
‘Oh no, one hasn’t. Not until Sunday and they’re not exactly full-time then, are they? One sits down and one tries to think of something nice to say about me at my funeral.’
He obeyed her. In fact he had spent many unprofitable hours thinking of any kindly words that could be used at Lady Fanner’s obsequies without inducing cynical and incredulous smiles on the faces of the attendant mourners. ‘Positive’, ‘always knew her mind’, ‘a genuine character’, ‘one of the Old Brigade’: these were about as far as he had got. ‘Never one to suffer fools gladly.’ He reflected that on his duty-visits he always seemed to be cast as the fool who wasn’t suffered gladly.
‘The Titmuss family shan’t have a brick of Rapstone Manor. Not a stick of furniture. Not a lavatory-paper holder, if I have anything to do with it.’
‘Lady Fanner. Isn’t that a matter for your lawyer?’
‘Jackson Cantellow! That idiot who spends his time bawling out the Hallelujah Chorus with the Worsfield Choral Society. Of course not. It’s a matter entirely for me. You know what I’ll do?’ Her smile was suddenly girlish, set in a pale, skull-like face that had once been beautiful. ‘I’ll leave the whole shooting-match to the anti-bomb brigade. That should teach Titmuss!’
Chapter Three
The town of Hartscombe lay about five miles to the south of the Rapstone Valley. In the days when Grace Fanner was about to dispose finally of her property it had changed from the town it was when she was carried over the threshold of Rapstone Manor by her stumbling husband. This ceremonial was insisted upon by Grace, mainly for the purpose of impressing those of her former lovers who were present. It had also changed since the days when the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss had been a silent and deeply mistrusted boy at Hartscombe Grammar. It was then a small and sleepy riverside town. Streets of brick and flint houses, some half-timbered, a few square and Georgian with surprisingly large gardens, led down to the river where swans hissed at the children who threw bread to them, and punts and skiffs for hire were moored under the bridge. There were grocers’ shops where hams hung from the ceiling, a draper’s where the change travelled on an elaborate system of overhead railway, the Copper Kettle Tea-Room – a popular place of resort after visiting Boots Lending Library – and a cinema, built in the thirties, where the patrons were entertained by a magnificent organ which rose from the floor in a haze of purple light and played a selection of golden oldies. Double seats were available in the back rows for couples who wished to show extra friendliness. Hartscombe’s pride and main source of employment, however, was the building where Simcox ales had been brewed for generations. Its brick had worn to a dusty pink and dray horses used to stamp and jangle their brass on frosty mornings outside the yard gates. The cinema had now been torn down to make way for a pedestrian precinct through which the wind howled, blowing the cardboard remains of Chinese take-aways against the concrete plant-tubs. In it the shops sold life insurance, shoes, electrical appliances and such essential objects as scented and upholstered coat-hangers or His and Hers embroidered knicker-bags. A thriving business undertook to supply jacuzzis and gold-tapped bidets to converted barns and former labourers’ cottages. There was a health-food bar and a herbal cosmetic boutique. There was not a butcher, an ironmonger or a fish shop. Behind this disappointing market-place, an almost exact replica of those implanted into the hearts of hundreds of once-healthy towns in southern England, towered a huge supermarket and a concrete multi-storey car park, to enter and leave which required an advanced knowledge of computer technology. The brewery building had been sold and converted into flats for upwardly mobile executives and money managers who commuted on the motorways to London, a city which, when Leslie Titmuss was a boy, many Hartscombe inhabitants had never visited. Simcox ales were now brewed in a new factory in the industrial zone and their Fortissimo lager was held to be responsible for the youthful violence that brought some sort of life to the shopping precinct on Saturday nights.
It was into this new Hartscombe, which had been dragged, without too many screams of protest, into the age of prosperity, that the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss was driven a week or two after his former mother-in-law had told Kev the Rev. what she thought of her former son-in-law. He felt, he could never help feeling, like a king returning to his own small kingdom. Had he not, a despised and laughed-at boy, who earned his scant pocket-money cutting down nettles and doing odd jobs in the Rapstone Rectory garden, fought his way up and over the Hooray Henrys, bank managers and country gents in his local party to become the M.P. for Hartscombe and Worsfield South, which seat he had held by an impregnable majority for twenty-five years? Was he not the candidate who had first preached the gospel, learnt, he used to say, from his father, a clerk in the Brewery, of respect for thrift, a constant appreciation of the mystical power of money and a deep suspicion of those who wished to hand it out to the undeserving poor? Armed with this simple creed, which had since become the accepted doctrine of his party, Leslie Titmuss had helped to change the face of England. After years of toil he had cut the ribbon that threw open the shopping precinct and had given planning permission for the new trading estate. And if the old-fashioned landlords in his local party complained that the new motorway cut across their fields, or that lorries on the way to the trading estate blocked the lanes and frightened the laying birds, so much the worse for them. They had been, some of them, those whooping little snobs who had pushed him into the river for wearing a hired dinner-jacket, redolent of mothballs, at his first Young Conservative dinner dance in the Swan’s Nest Hotel.
He walked by the river, having sent his driver to cope with the mysteries of the car park. Hartscombe Bridge was as yet unaltered, although another four-lane span would soon have to be built to accommodate the increase in traffic. The big pink and white, gabled Edwardian riverside villas still looked raffish – places where long-forgotten actresses and retired army officers had once lived in decorous sin; their windows still stared out at the island, flooded each year, with its bungalows and tangled gardens. The footpath, after the boat-houses, still led past flat meadows where cows stumbled down to the water. It was part of the scene of Leslie Titmuss’s youth but as he walked he didn’t think of standing barefoot in the squelching mud among the rushes or trying to catch tiddlers in a jam-jar. His childhood was a prison from which he had long escaped. Once over the wall he had wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and that place of confinement. Although he made much of his father’s values for political purposes, the memory of the old man’s life filled him with horror. The complacent acceptance of a job with no prospects, the self-satisfied assurance that the good things in life were not for the likes of him or of young Leslie, the nightly routine of polishing off his tea, telling his wife that it was ‘very tasty’ and falling asleep in the armchair – this was the expected fate the young Titmuss had escaped by courtesy of a head for accountancy and the voters of Hartscombe and Worsfield South.
So he walked, a man now in his fifties, with a long, dark overcoat flapping round his knees in spite of the spring sunshine. He strode energetically, with no particular pleasure, as though always late for a vital meeting. His hair had receded, leaving an expanse of bony forehead; he was pale with a pallor inflicted by overwork. He rarely smiled, although he was known to make unexpected, often wounding remarks which were thought to be jokes. Although he walked rapidly, his pale eyes missed nothing of the riverside scene. The area, he saw, was ripe for development. There would have to be some pretty radical changes made if Hartscombe were to meet the challe
nge of Europe. In Leslie Titmuss’s world nothing was allowed to stand still for very long. Having made that decision without difficulty, he rang at the door of one of the older riverside houses which bore the brass plate of Cantellow & Bagley, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.
‘I am afraid Lady Fanner is not well, not at all well. You will be dropping in to see her, I suppose?’
‘You suppose wrong,’ Leslie answered.
Jackson Cantellow was a man who had conducted a long love-affair with his own voice. So delighted was he with its rich and rumbling tones that his account of his client’s ill-health came out as a recitative. ‘Skin and bone,’ he intoned with apparent enjoyment. ‘Skin and bone, I’m afraid. And that’s the best that can be said of her condition. I’m told she eats nothing.’
‘But makes up for it by drinking?’
‘Her bills for champagne at the Simcox off-licence. Phee–nominal!’ Cantellow hit a low note and then pursed his lips and put a finger to them. ‘Tales out of school.’ He seemed tempted to slap his own wrist.
‘I expect you will tell me what I need to know.’ The politician did not stoop to remind Jackson Cantellow how many of his clients were gambling on getting planning permission for various expensive projects, still less to hint at how many of such applications might be looked on favourably by his department.
‘Lady Fanner, I’m told, eats nothing.’ Jackson Cantellow’s conversation proceeded by constant repetition, like an oratorio.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means that I wouldn’t expect her to last until …’ He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Until September.’
‘September’s a long time ahead.’
‘Well’ – the solicitor had chosen the month more for the resonance of its syllables than for any medical reason – ‘she may go, of course, at any moment, but she always had this extraordinary energy.’
‘For destruction?’
‘As one of the family you knew her, of course, as well as anyone.’
‘I’m not one of the family. I never felt one of the family. I suppose my son is, though. What’s going to happen to the house?’
‘The house?’ Cantellow did his best to look innocent, as though he had never heard of Rapstone Manor.
‘It’s about all she has left. I suppose she’s made a will of some sort?’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t expect me’ – Cantellow looked down modestly, as though he had been propositioned – ‘to divulge the contents of any testamentary document of a client who, in spite of being a shadow, a shadow is how I would describe it, of what she was, after all a great beauty, rather before your time, of course, is still, to all intents and purposes, alive, so they tell me. The Rector visits regularly, although I believe he finds the task painful and sometimes humiliating. You wouldn’t expect me to divulge anything further, would you?’
Leslie Titmuss didn’t answer but kept his eyes fixed on Cantellow in the pale stare which he used to send his permanent staff out of the room in terror.
‘Of course you would assume she had made wills. Various wills. In fact in her later years will-making has come upon her as a sort of disease.’ Cantellow looked at his visitor. Surely he had now said enough, more than he should have, to satisfy his curiosity? But Leslie still stared at him and said nothing.
‘Some of the wills were notably eccentric. Perverse, I might say. Particularly the last. Let us devoutly hope it will be the last.’ Jackson Cantellow felt he had to fill in the silence and immediately regretted it.
‘Now you’ve told me she hasn’t left the house to my son, Nick.’
‘I didn’t say that!’ Cantellow retreated in a panic. ‘You mustn’t put words into my mouth. I didn’t say what she had done. The question, at any rate, is purely academic. It’s really quite pointless to speculate. It’s always a pleasure to see such a distinguished member of the Cabinet in the constituency, Mr Titmuss. But now if you’ll excuse me …’ He looked, in vain, for some important papers on his desk.
‘Did you say academic?’ Leslie pounced on the word and worried it as a terrier might worry a rat. ‘Why did you say academic?’
‘Well, shall we say not of enormous practical importance, in the circumstances.’ Cantellow now knew he had said too much.
‘The circumstances being, I suppose, that the whole caboodle is in hock to the bank. She’s drunk away the equity and they’ll foreclose as soon as her Ladyship is boxed up.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Cantellow looked pained at the idea that he could possibly have used words so brutal.
‘You never could hold your tongue.’ Leslie stood up now that the meeting was over. ‘You’ve told me exactly what I needed to know. I’ll find my own way out, Cantellow. All I can say is, thank God you’re not my lawyer. I might as well conduct my private business on the “News at Ten”.’
After his visit to the lawyer’s office Leslie Titmuss was driven out of the reconstituted Hartscombe and deeper into his past. The car turned towards the Rapstone Valley. It passed the gates of the Manor but didn’t stop. The next village was Skurfield, an untidy collection of houses strung out along the road, a grey place of corrugated-iron sheds, chickens roosting in the wreckage of old motor cars, pebble-dash walls and bungalows built with concrete blocks. Isolated from its neighbours stood ‘The Spruces’, a small, detached house with a scrubbed appearance, its privet hedge neatly trimmed and white paint shining against its red brick walls. Although there was no plaque to record the event, this was the house where, bellowing his lungs out in the upstairs bedroom, the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss had first seen the light of day. It was the home of his mother Elsie, now over eighty, who spent her days dusting and polishing the labour-saving devices her son sent her and which she never used. She had resisted all his attempts to move her into larger and more luxurious accommodation.
‘This place was good enough for your father,’ Elsie said as she poured tea for her son, ‘and it’s good enough for me to end up in. Shouldn’t I take a cup to the poor man outside?’ She looked out pityingly towards the driver of the waiting Rover.
‘He’s used to waiting. I wanted to talk about something.’
‘If you’d told me you were coming, I could’ve done you a steak and kidney. I know how you love your steak and kidney.’ Elsie Titmuss had been in service as a cook with the Stroves of Picton Principal. Her pies had been the delight of the neighbourhood shoots.
‘Old mother Fanner, it seems, is on her way out at last.’
‘You never had no time for her, did you, Leslie? May God forgive her.’
‘God can do what he likes. I see absolutely no reason to forgive her. Ever. But if we manage to get hold of her house for Nicky …’
‘Rapstone Manor? Whatever would young Nick do with that?’
‘I don’t know. Live in it, I suppose. Eventually. Anyway, that family owes my son something. I suppose you’d agree with that?’
‘His mother should never have gone out with those bomb women. Not when she had a child to think of.’ Elsie lifted the teapot, snug in its knitted cosy, and refilled her son’s cup. They sat in silence for a moment, in comfortable agreement on the subject of the wickedness of Mrs Charlotte Titmuss, now long dead.
‘Anyway, when Nicky gets it …’
‘You seem quite sure of that.’
‘Oh, yes. Absolutely sure. Well, there’s rooms there. Floors of them. We could make a nice little conversion for you, Mother. There’d be a place for someone living-in, to look after you.’
‘Living-in!’ She spoke with contempt. ‘I’ve done enough living-in not to want anyone else doing it for me. Livers-in take advantage. I know that. I’ve taken advantage in my time.’ The memory clearly caused Elsie Titmuss satisfaction.
‘We could make it very comfortable for you. Living in the Manor. Isn’t that what you’d like?’
‘Leslie Titmuss!’ In her days as a cook, Elsie had been greatly desired by all the male inside- and outside-workers and, it was
said, by members of the Strove family also. When she looked at her son she was a still pretty and flirtatious octogenarian. ‘I’m not going to have it. Not from her Ladyship or from you or anyone. And I’m not leaving this house, not till I join your father in Rapstone churchyard. Don’t move me out of here. Will you promise me?’
Leslie wasn’t smiling but he thought, at the time, that he meant it when he said, ‘I promise you, Mother.’
So the immediate future of the big house at Rapstone remained unsettled, which was what gave Leslie Titmuss his great opportunity, and also what brought him more trouble than he had had since the days when he first entered politics and was pushed unceremoniously into the river during his first Young Conservative dinner dance.
‘Fallowfield Country Town. A proposed development of ten thousand houses. It will entail a new commuter high-speed rail-link and the construction of a spur to the motorway. Architect-designed town centre, with civic buildings, sports and leisure complex. Multi-storey shopping facilities with extensive car parking. Pedestrian walkways and traffic-free zones. Site: between the towns of Worsfield and Hartscombe, making use of hitherto undeveloped areas such as the village of Skurfield and the Rapstone Valley’ – Ken Cracken was laughing as he read out these specifications in his room at H.E.A.P.
At a desk in the corner Joyce Timberlake, his political adviser, wearing a neat black suit and glasses, was evolving a scheme, to be discussed with her opposite number at the Home Office, for the sale of specified National Trust houses for use as privatized youth custody centres.
Titmuss Regained Page 2