Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘The Rapstone Valley. It’s the Secretary of State’s back garden. That’s what’s so funny.’

  ‘His back garden? Leslie sold his place in the country, didn’t he? Doesn’t he have a flat in Waterside Mansions?’ Joyce made it her business to know most things. Leslie Titmuss had disposed of the big house he had bought at Picton Principal, where his mother had once cooked, shortly after Charlotte’s death. To have had a wife suspected of being an anti-bomb Worsfield Heath woman, coupled with farming interests, would have been, he felt sure, too much for his political career. So he had managed, with some skill and much expedition, to disown them both.

  ‘He’s still involved in Rapstone. His mother’s house is in the next village. And his old mother-in-law lives there. I wonder how they’d like to wake up next to Tesco’s in Fallowfield Country Town. It might be interesting to hand our Leslie a political hot potato. See where he drops it.’

  ‘You want to be a bit careful of Leslie,’ Joyce warned him. ‘He’s used to winning.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t know who handed it to him. It’ll come as a planning decision. Through all the normal channels. Anyway, there’s another excellent reason for laying down a bit of concrete on the Rapstone Valley.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s where that bearded lunatic made us get up off the grass.’

  ‘You mean,’ Joyce asked, although this was the sort of matter they hardly ever discussed at work, ‘when you were hot to trot?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ken Cracken wasn’t smiling. ‘That’s what I mean exactly.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘So you’re a widow?’

  ‘Well, not really.’

  It was a word Jenny Sidonia never used, not under any circumstances. The fact that Tony Sidonia with his sad, dark eyes – the eyes, his ex-girlfriend Sue Bramble had once said, of a lemur after a passionate weekend – his untidy greying hair and his untidier tweed suits and unbuttoned collars, his exhaustive knowledge of the Renaissance Popes, his long, anxious face and his rare smile, eagerly awaited, had left her never to return was something which, like most unpleasant facts, she chose to ignore. She didn’t forget it; she hid it away in some remote cupboard of her mind, like an unwelcome Christmas present, and couldn’t always remember exactly where she’d put it. Tony was with her because she thought about him constantly and she never thought about him as dead. Above all she’d never seen herself as a widow. A widow was a ridiculous figure, dumpy, dressed in black, sexually frustrated and on the look-out for another man. ‘The Merry Widow’ – that was something she would have hated to be.

  ‘Not really what?’

  ‘Not really a widow.’

  Her neighbour was pale and stared at her with colourless eyes. He had been asking her questions with great intensity but he didn’t seem to be interested in her as a woman. She was used to men looking at her hopefully as they went through their old routines or pretended to be fascinated by her in order to excite some sort of interest in themselves. The strange man on her left asked, ‘What sort of an answer is that?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It was something that Jenny said a lot, smiling, although she didn’t feel any need to apologize.

  ‘I mean about your husband. Is he dead or isn’t he?’

  It was, she supposed, a fair question. Tony had given her so much and most of all a sense of fairness. He had brought her standards of truthfulness and decency. Now that the question was put to her so bluntly she had, in all honesty, to answer it.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she admitted and was struck again, as she was whenever she allowed herself to be, by the bleakness of her situation. ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  ‘Well’ – the man beside her attacked his food, satisfied – ‘now we know.’

  On the other side of the table the Master of St Joseph’s, in whose lodgings the carefully calculated lunch-party was taking place, looked at the couple with glee. It had been a brilliant idea to sit the Secretary of State next to Jenny Sidonia. She had, above all things, a talent for making men feel that they had her entire attention, even though her thoughts were far away in some private and distant country of her own. Although fragile, she always managed to look healthy, her eyes shining, and she appeared to be continually amused, even when her thoughts were sad. Sir Willoughby Blane wasn’t above squeezing the knees of many of the ladies he sat beside at lunch and he sometimes received unexpected encouragement; but he had never dared lay a straying hand on Jenny. Her good looks were awe-inspiring, even to a marine biologist who had made a lifetime’s study of the prawn and who regarded human beings as only a little more developed than the minor crustacea. Jenny had been invited to that sunny Sunday lunch-table not to be flirted with by the Master but to charm the Secretary of State and later, when they were strolling round the great mulberry tree, the Master might do a little trade with the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss on the matter of government support for an addition to the college, to be christened – whatever else? – the Willoughby Blane Biology Library. Politicians like Leslie were, so Sir Willoughby felt, alien beings, creatures from outer space, far from the crumbling walls and the soggy lawns of Oxford. Some heads of colleges would flinch at the name of Titmuss; they would mutter despairing imprecations and hastily change the subject as though the topic were somehow obscene. Not so the Master of St Joseph’s. He prided himself that he could do business with a potentate so foreign, rather as the government boasted it could do business with the Soviet President. Whatever our differences, he was prepared to say, we’re both practical sorts of chaps, aren’t we? No doubt the transaction would be easier after Mr Titmuss had spent luncheon in close proximity to Jenny Sidonia.

  ‘Why do you get asked here?’ Leslie was interrogating her as though she were under suspicion; but, away from the subject of her personal tragedy, Jenny seemed to find the experience comic. ‘Are you anything to do with this lot?’ The people round the table – Hector and Gudrun Lessore, an ex-ambassador and his wife, a Liberal peer, someone in publishing, her Honour Judge Phyllis Durst and her silent husband, a smattering of dons and their wives – were all older than Jenny and yet, when she came to look at them, she supposed they were her friends.

  ‘They’re my friends,’ she said.

  ‘They don’t look your sort.’

  ‘What do you think my sort is, exactly?’

  ‘A bit better than this, I should have said.’

  Their fellow guests deliberately avoided looking at the Cabinet Minister, rather as people avoid staring at those disfigured or in some way maimed. Before Leslie arrived they had been denouncing his government, but now he was among them they talked about books, or the theatre, or the heads of colleges who weren’t present.

  ‘It must be terrific to be the wife of a head of college,’ Judge Durst said. She was a highly perfumed lady whose flat, pink face emerged like a cutlet from an elaborate, white ruffled collar.‘You get put next to all the male heads at dinners.’

  ‘And what if you’re a male head of college?’ Willoughby Blane asked her in his old aunty’s posh Edinburgh accent, his bald head on one side, his hands clasped across his stomach.

  ‘That must be terrible. You get put next to their wives!’

  ‘Willoughby often asks me to his lunches. And Tony … That’s my husband. Of course, Tony taught here,’ Jenny explained patiently to Leslie Titmuss.

  ‘Was your husband.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You mean Tony was your husband.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ For once it seemed simpler to say it.‘When he was alive.’

  Leslie nodded and for a moment they sat silent. Jenny wondered whether to turn to the ex-ambassador on her left, but he was involved with the Lady Judge and it didn’t seem altogether right to abandon her pale neighbour, who looked lost. To leave him now, she suddenly felt, would be like ditching a blind man you have helped half-way across the street.

  ‘Why’re you here?’ she asked him. �
��Apart from the obvious reason.’

  ‘What’s the obvious reason?’

  ‘Well. Willoughby’s always on the look-out for someone who’ll help the college.’ Jenny was in no way a party to the Master’s ploy; he had used her as an attractive antelope tied up to lure the tiger within range of the rifle. ‘And I’m sure you have terrific influence and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’m here because of my son,’ Leslie Titmuss said. ‘Young Nick is up. About to do his finals, in fact. And I didn’t have to offer to build another wing on the place to get him in here, either.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t. About to do his finals? That must be exciting.’

  ‘Finals in English? I don’t think that excites me much.’

  ‘Perhaps it excites your son.’

  ‘He knew English before he got here. Even I know English. I don’t know why he can’t learn something that’ll help him get on.’

  ‘Get on where, exactly?’

  ‘Well, to where I’ve got. Somewhere near it. Nothing wrong with that for an ambition, is there?’

  ‘No. No, I’m sure not. Nothing wrong at all.’ Jenny was used to men who begged her for reassurance and, if possible, praise. She gave it generously, knowing what was expected of her, so that at the end of such a lunch as this, she felt physically tired and her arms seemed to be exhausted from massaging so many egos. The man beside her clearly needed no such therapy. He was convinced that where he had got was everybody’s distant, usually unattainable, goal in life.

  ‘I told him, I can’t see how reading English is going to be the slightest help to the economy. It’s not going to produce jobs. It’s going to do damn all for the prosperity of the country. Isn’t that what these places should be for?’

  ‘Is it?’ She looked at him, smiling, feeling that she owed it to Tony Sidonia’s memory to take some sort of a stand. ‘I’m not absolutely sure about that. My husband spent his life with Renaissance Popes. I don’t suppose that did much for the economy.’

  ‘Renaissance Popes?’ Leslie looked at her, incredulous.

  ‘Of course, they behaved appallingly, but for some reason he felt able to forgive them. He was awfully good at forgiving people. He said you had to do a lot of that, when you took on ecclesiastical history.’

  ‘Ecclesiastical history,’ Leslie said with disgust. ‘What luxury!’

  ‘Luxury!’ Jenny was suddenly angry, as she had it in her to be. The accusation was absurd and entirely unfair to Tony. The extraordinary man beside her spoke as though her husband had devoted his life to fast cars, drugs and exotic women and hadn’t spent his holidays in the Vatican Library in order to produce Humanism or Indulgence? The Papacy 1492–1534. ‘What’s not a luxury? Learning how to operate some sort of giant computer so we can all have our bank balances flashed on the screen every moment of the day and get precooked Thai dinners sent round without even having to go down to the shops? Is that how Tony ought to have spent his life? Well, I’m sorry but I really can’t agree with that.’

  ‘I don’t expect anyone round this table would. Not until they wake up to the world we’re living in.’

  ‘Jenny!’ Sir Willoughby called to her like some disapproving nanny who has spotted two children, invited to make friends, about to pull each other’s hair in a corner. ‘Will you be at Covent Garden on Monday?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What is it?’

  ‘Placido. In a brand new Ballo. This Greek producer woman,’ the Master remembered, ‘has set it all in Stalin’s Kremlin. Should be rather fun.’

  ‘The love duet!’ The Lady Judge sighed unexpectedly on the Cabinet Minister’s left. ‘Don’t you simply adore Un ballo in maschera?’

  ‘Never seen it,’ Leslie told her. ‘I’m not a great one for dancing.’

  ‘Dancing?’ Gudrun Lessore, the ex-ambassador’s wife – a large, glacial woman Sir Hector had met when posted to Iceland and had brought home rather to everyone’s regret – was the only one daring enough to ask.

  ‘Yes. I know nothing about your ballet, In maskera.’

  ‘The garden!’ The Master stood, as though announcing the treat for which they’d all been longing. ‘What about a small, digestive turn around the mulberry tree? It really is looking rather fine.’

  Then, as they trooped down the narrow, dark staircase of the lodgings and out into the sunshine, Jenny, walking beside Leslie, took his arm. What did it matter if he couldn’t tell a Verdi opera from a ballet, even if he confused Traviata with Les Sylphides? She had seen him surrounded by faces which just, only just, concealed their owners’ mockery and contempt. They had a story to tell, which would be laughed at in all the country houses and at all the high tables they visited, about the incredible Philistines in control of their government; but then government was, perhaps, always a matter for Philistines. She put her arm into his as a sign that she disapproved of their cruelty and because she imagined, wrongly as it so happened, that Leslie had been made to feel awkward and miserable by it. Her sense of fairness was outraged and she lavished the sympathy on him which her late husband had even been able to feel for the Borgia Pope. It was a moment, as they went down the dark staircase together, which was the start of all their troubles.

  ‘You and I –’ The Master now had his hand on Leslie’s arm, a contact which he found, unlike the gentle touch of Jenny Sidonia, irritating and which he wished to shake off as rapidly as possible. ‘We both look at education in the same way, from an entirely practical point of view.’

  ‘Practical? I thought you specialized in shrimps?’ Leslie Titmuss was nothing if not well informed.

  ‘Crustacea. The whole range from the lobster to the woodlouse. Not forgetting the minute pelagic copepods, useful little blighters, who swim in mile-wide shoals and guide whalers to the most profitable fishing-grounds.’

  ‘Didn’t you read my Birmingham speech? We’ve come out in favour of the whale.’

  And your concern for the larger cetaceous mammals, Sir Willoughby thought, may, I suppose, distract attention from your plans to concrete over the South of England. It is the smallest possible concession you can make to the growing, and irritating, army of greens. What he actually said was, ‘There’s scope for a study of labour-intensive prawn cultivation. On a strictly commercial basis, of course. Now there’s a valuable food source for you!’ He was one of those who believed that Leslie’s political supporters never entered a restaurant without ordering prawn cocktail, followed by steak ‘and all the trimmings’, to be topped off with a liberal helping of Black Forest gateau. Delighted by his private gastronomic joke, he giggled in his most aunty-like way. ‘Labour-intensive food production. Isn’t that the name of your game? Now, all that know-how needs proper technological back-up, which is why we at St Joseph’s feel that the Blane Library is going to be so enormously cost-effective. Most of the information would be computer-stored so it won’t have to be an enormous building.’

  ‘I saw my son this morning. We had a drink together. In the Randolph.’

  ‘Did you? Oh, good. Now we know, you know, I know, that enough food can be produced to feed the ten thousand by a couple of men and a computer. Particularly in coastal waters. Farming land is just a luxury nowadays. And I’m sure you chaps have plenty of other uses for it.’

  ‘Getting on all right, is he? Nick doesn’t tell me much.’ Across the low wall which bounded the Master’s gardens was the wider territory open to the undergraduates. They lay together, kissing, rolling over like baby seals, pretending to read their notes, pretending it was summer, listening to their ghetto blasters. Leslie couldn’t see Nick among them. Where was he? Shut up in his room doing – what exactly? He had boasted, around the corridors of power, when Nick had got into Oxford. No doubt his boy would join the Union and the Conservative Association; the political and business contacts which Leslie had made with such difficulty would come easily to his son. He expected to hear in the mutter of conversation before Cabinet meetings, ‘Your Nick’s invited me to come down and speak
at Oxford. Suppose I’d better keep in with a new generation of Titmusses.’ He had prepared speeches, apparently half angry and envious, in reality proud and even adoring, which he would make to Nicholas: ‘I never had a head start like I’m giving you, Nick. I had to fight my way up, every inch of the way. I’d’ve saved years of hard work if I’d’ve had your chances. You’ve got it with jam on, son, and don’t you ever forget it.’ But because Nick showed no sign whatever of taking advantage of his position, as he seemed to have joined nothing, made no speeches, invited no Cabinet Ministers, these carefully prepared sentences seemed inappropriate. So they had sat that morning in the hotel bar with Leslie, determined to be one of the boys, nursing a pint of bitter, and Nicholas staring, secretly smiling into a Coke, and they had shared long periods of silence.

  ‘I may have some good news for you soon, Nicky.’

  ‘What sort of good news?’

  ‘Something you may be coming in for. A house.’

  ‘A house?’ Nick looked at his father, amazed, as though he were offering him something totally impractical, like an ocean-going yacht or a chateau on the Loire.

  ‘It’s somewhere you always liked. Somewhere you were always taking off to. On your bike.’

  ‘I don’t think I need a house.’

  ‘Not yet awhile. But in time, of course. Well, there’re not many better investments.’

  ‘What would I do with a house? I don’t know where I’m going to be. I don’t know that at all.’ Nick still smiled.

  ‘You never know what you’re going to need. I wanted you to know. Something’s going to come your way. That’s all I can say about it.’

  ‘I don’t know what this place is doing for Nick,’ Leslie told the Master of St Joseph’s later as they walked across the garden. ‘Hardly what I expected.’

  ‘I’ve made inquiries about him, of course.’

  ‘I hope you’ve found out more than I have.’

  ‘He’s a hard worker. I do hear that about him. And well liked. Everyone seems to agree about that. Young Fanner is very well liked.’