Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

‘It’s got some sort of pin up its bum,’ Sue discovered.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a corsage.’ Jenny made the appalling suggestion.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Well. Something you pin on. For going out to dinner. Don’t some men send them to some women? Before they take them out, I mean.’

  ‘Some men? I don’t think,’ Jenny’s friend said with certainty, ‘that Mr Sidonia would ever have sent a girl anything like that.’

  ‘Tony wouldn’t,’ Jenny agreed.

  ‘Well, who would?’

  Jenny said nothing.

  ‘Have you any idea?’

  ‘Some idea. Yes.’

  ‘Not that ghastly little politician?’ Sue, who was not easily shocked, sounded as though she would rather have heard that her friend was considering an evening out with a bisexual Californian drug addict with sado-masochistic tendencies.

  ‘Well, he’s not so little. Quite tall, as it so happens.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Why don’t you? I told you he telephoned. He said, would I like a bite of dinner?’

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “A bite of dinner”. How typical of him to say that.’

  ‘You can’t say it’s typical. You don’t know him.’

  ‘Aren’t I lucky!’

  ‘Probably.’ Jenny looked gloomily at the orchid lying in state.

  ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’

  Jenny nodded guiltily and Sue asked, ‘Why, in the name of God?’

  ‘It was that lunch at Oxford. They were laughing at him because he didn’t know about opera.’

  ‘There must be millions of people who don’t know about opera. But you don’t have to go out to dinner with all of them.’

  ‘I suppose I was sorry for him.’

  ‘But that’s the worst possible reason.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny admitted it, contrite.

  ‘What on earth would Tony have said?’

  ‘I suppose he’d’ve said it was a bit of a joke.’

  ‘He’d certainly have laughed. Tony would.’

  ‘But not to his face. Tony wouldn’t have done a thing like that. It was awful really. Poor Mr Titmuss was looking round the table and he had no idea he’d said anything wrong.’ Jenny was carefully removing the orchid from its box. Sue looked at her with growing incredulity. ‘You’re not going to pin that thing on you?’

  ‘Well. I suppose I’d better.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘I don’t want to seem rude.’

  ‘You take my advice. There are times when seeming rude’s the best possible thing to do.’

  Later, when Jenny Sidonia was changed and ready, Sue, looking out of the window of the flat, saw a large black car draw up.

  ‘Something’s arrived.’

  ‘He said he’d send a car for me.’

  ‘It looks like a hearse.’

  ‘I think it belongs to the government.’

  ‘That’s so much worse! Oh, Jenny, what have you got yourself into?’

  So, feeling apologetic, Jenny went off on her first and, her friend sincerely hoped, her last date with Leslie Titmuss.

  Chapter Seven

  Hector Bolitho Jones, warden of the Rapstone Nature Area and servant of the Society for Conservation, Rural and Arboreal Protection (S.C.R.A.P.), had not always been green. It would be true to say that he came of a shooting family. Hector’s father had been a gamekeeper on the Rapstone Manor estate; he was a large, gentle Scot who occupied a cottage which had been expanded after his death. Part of it now housed the Area’s audio-visual instruction material; the other half was used as living accommodation for the warden. When Hector was a boy, in the long-gone days of rabbit pie and outside lavatories, when many of the cottages were still inhabited by woodmen, gardeners and farm workers, he had followed his father about his work and at an early age he could name the wild flowers, identify the butterflies and predict the weather with astonishing accuracy. He had also assisted in the more bloodstained part of his father’s profession. He took strangled rabbits from snares, he baited rat traps, he hung up on a branch, like a gallows, those magpies which the gamekeeper had shot for poaching pheasants’ eggs and wanted displayed as a dire warning to other criminally minded birds. He would go out with old Jones on moonlit nights and stalk deer in the depths of the woods and, at that time, he had no objection to venison steaks or even a dish of deer’s liver for his tea. He helped beat the woods when the pheasants were old enough for execution and piled up the corpses of birds shot by the Fanner family and their guests. He was a stocky and unusually silent child who shared his father’s devotion to animals. The difference between them was that, while old Jones’s concern was to provide the wild creatures he cared for with a dramatic and splendid death, the young Hector wished above all to preserve their lives. It was this devotion to animals which had caused him to rage at Ken Cracken and Joyce Timberlake who had, when returning from a lunch in the country with Christopher Kempenflatt, felt the urgent need to be alone on a hillside.

  Hector had worked hard at school and, to his father’s considerable pride, taken a degree in forestry at Worsfield University. When the Rapstone Nature Area was set up he seemed, as a local boy who had been born in these woods, an ideal candidate for warden. The public career of Hector Bolitho Jones was upwardly mobile.

  His private life was not so successful. Whilst a student he had met a girl named Daphne Bridgewater at the folk club. She had come from a large family, was naturally gregarious and studied sociology. She thought that Hector, with his large, perpetually anxious eyes, was deeply concerned about a number of causes. She was also, as she would have been the first to admit, the sort that went for beards and Hector’s had sprouted profusely since his first year at college. They went on several hunt sabotage expeditions together and for long walks in the country. When she suggested that they visited Rapstone Wood at bluebell time and lay down together on the misty blue carpet, however, he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘There’s wildlife there,’ he said, ‘and who are we to disturb it?’ At the time she liked him all the better for his caring nature.

  When they were married and living in the extension to old Jones’s converted cottage, and especially after their daughter, Joan (named after Joan Baez, a heroine of the folk club), had turned four and was old enough to play in the woodlands, Daphne became disenchanted with her lot as a warden’s wife. The trees seemed to grow rapidly and crowded round their home, shutting out light from the kitchen windows. Hector was away from early morning until long after nightfall, in the woods or clearing scrub on the grassland. In the shadowy kitchen there was always some animal recovering: a tiny fox cub, perhaps, that had to be fed milk from a baby’s bottle, or a young caged barn owl with a broken wing. Hector seemed more and more reluctant to leave the Nature Area and his passion for rain forests (everywhere felled to make way for beef cattle) ruled out a Whopperburger after the pictures at the multi-screen in Worsfield. Above all she grew weary of his conversation, which came to consist almost entirely of grim warnings of environmental doom.

  ‘That hair-spray of yours,’ he said. ‘Do you want to kill off all our oak trees, Daphne? Can’t you be made aware, dear, of the death and destruction you’re causing, penetrating the ozone layer like that?’

  ‘I don’t think your oak trees are going to drop dead because of one little hair-spray.’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is, we’ve got to set an example.’

  ‘Oh, have we? We don’t hardly see anybody to set an example to.’

  ‘It’s the attitude. That’s what I object to. There’s forests the size of Europe disappearing all the time. And what are you doing about it? Spraying your hair, that’s all. Adding to the terrible toll of destruction. Sometimes I wonder, Daphne. Don’t you care at all?’

  ‘Not when I can’t do much about it.’ Daphne took a gulp of the homemade wine which they drank to avoid chemical additives and longed for a long, cool gulp of
Fortissimo lager in the bar of the Olde Maypole in Hartscombe.

  ‘That is exactly the type of attitude’ – Hector sighed and looked up at the ceiling – ‘which is going to lose us the black rhino.’

  ‘Oh, bugger the black rhino!’ Daphne’s patience with her marriage was running out.

  ‘What’s that, Daphne?’ Hector spoke very slowly and softly; he sounded enormously calm, a sure sign that he was nothing of the sort. ‘What did I hear you say?’

  ‘I said, bugger the black rhino. And I shan’t be all that sorry to see the last of the whales, either.’

  ‘I took you, Daphne,’ Hector said, after a long and disapproving silence, ‘for a genuinely caring sort of person. It seems I took you wrong.’

  ‘Listen, Hector. There’s men sleeping in cardboard boxes by the canal in Worsfield. There’s old ladies with all their worldly goods in plastic bags, kipping down in the bus shelters in Parkinson Avenue. There’s a couple turned out of their home for being behind with the rent as are sleeping rough in the pedestrian walkways. What use is the black rhino to them? That’s what I’d like to know!’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be any use, Daphne. It’s a form of wildlife and has rights which we have to respect. I think I’m off out now. I might get a sight of the badgers. At least they’re creatures you don’t catch polluting the atmosphere with hairsprays!’

  ‘Sod badgers!’ Daphne Jones said after her husband had gone out. And then she did something which she had promised to confine to Christmas and her birthday. She lit a cigarette.

  People, Hector Bolitho Jones reflected as he walked through the woods in which fallen branches were left undisturbed as a home for a variety of insects, people, no doubt about it, were what caused all the pollution in the world. People drove cars with lead-filled petrol and felled rain forests. People, unless watched incessantly, dug up orchids and primroses, they frightened the foxes, lit fires in the bracken and threw plastic bottles into the undergrowth. He emerged from under the tall beeches to the top of the downland and, looking down towards the stream, he saw two more of them, no doubt also intent on intruding on to the gentle privacy of the animals. His boots thudded through the brambles and scrub as he strode to the attack. The man wore a city suit and looked older than the small, fragile woman, elegant in black and white. They were townees, he felt sure, who once again would have no respect for the nesting birds. And as he tramped forward he began to call, hoarsely, so that his voice sounded, from a distance, like the calling of rooks.

  Hector Bolitho Jones saw them turn away and stood still, triumphant, his feet planted firmly and apart on his patch of uncultivated downland. He had been too far away to recognize a local boy made good and thought that whatever polluting activity they wanted to get up to they now had to do it somewhere else.

  Jenny Sidonia’s first dinner with Leslie Titmuss had been an occasion of some embarrassment. They had gone to an expensive restaurant where minute quantities of monkfish and prawns, accompanied by a wisp of dill and a small puddle of pink sauce, decorated the octagonal plates. (The Secretary of State had asked his Junior Minister to recommend somewhere to eat; he now decided that it was the last time he was going to take Ken Cracken’s advice on anything.) Jenny felt that the orchid, pinned to her dress, hung there like a dead weight. The conversation was equally heavy and when they had talked about the lunch in Oxford, and failed to mention the confusion about the Ballo in maschera, it was apparently exhausted. In the long silences Jenny wondered how soon she could ask for a taxi home, but whenever she glanced furtively at her watch the hands scarcely seemed to have moved.

  ‘Your job,’ she tried desperately, ‘must be very interesting.’ She hoped this trite remark would switch on an endless speech during which she could retire into her own world and close the door.

  ‘So far to go,’ he said, ‘before they grow up.’

  ‘Who grow up?’

  ‘People.’ Leslie looked morosely down at his plate. She wondered if she were to be numbered among the un-grown-ups and thought such a description of herself might well be justified.

  ‘They expect the government to wipe their noses, see they wear their vests in the winter. Do everything for them.’

  ‘I don’t think I expect that.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Oh, and make sure they have a nice view of empty fields from their bedroom windows. So they can pretend there’s no one else in the world except them. They’re very keen on the rights of Patagonian Indians but they won’t allow the right of an English builder to put up a few houses within ten miles of their view. That’s what’s got to change. Am I boring you?’ He asked the question perfectly seriously, without a smile.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, of course not.’ If only, she thought, I had some talent for being impolite. If only I could say, Naturally you’re boring the pants off me, Mr Titmuss. For God’s sake, pay the bill and let’s get out of this dimly lit place where the waiters pad reverently up and serve out these plates of nothing very much as though it were some religious ritual. Please, Mr Titmuss, let me go home and make myself toast and marmalade and go to bed. Aloud she said, ‘It’s very interesting.’

  ‘I don’t think it interests you at all.’ He managed to make her feel guilty. She resented this, even though she tried to look fascinated as she said, ‘Planning and all that sort of thing. I know so little about it.’

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s something we want to get rid of.’

  ‘But perhaps’ – she felt she owed him a little discussion, for politeness’ sake – ‘you can see their point.’

  ‘Whose point?’

  ‘People who live in the country. After all, that’s what they went there for. Peace and solitude. You can understand that.’

  He looked at her in silence and she nerved herself for the impact of another public address. Instead he said, ‘Is that what you’d really like, Jenny?’

  In the short time she had known him she couldn’t remember his having used her name before. It was as though he had moved one step nearer her and it made her nervous.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Peace and solitude. Living in the country all the time.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said truthfully. ‘Sometime, perhaps. That’s what I’d like. Tony and I were always planning to do it. When he lived by writing and didn’t have to teach any more.’

  Leslie Titmuss seemed to be thinking this over carefully and the silence grew to a disconcerting length until relief flooded over her as he said, ‘What do you think we have to do to get a bill here? Drop dead?’

  When it came she saw that he was adding it up, checking the items, even making an inquiry about a minute plate of scarcely cooked vegetables, the price of which was finally deleted by the head waiter with a pencil stroke of unutterable contempt. Tony Sidonia had never read a restaurant bill in his life; he used to go on talking, teasing her gently, making her laugh as he dropped money on to the plate with the bill on it. ‘Waiters have got to live,’ Tony used to say. ‘Anyway, it’s the duty of people who can afford restaurants to be cheated a little.’

  When the argument about the bill was over and Leslie had left a tip of punitive size, he smiled at her and said, ‘You look hungry.’

  ‘Well, yes. As a matter of fact, starving.’ She was angry about the fuss over the bill, irritated by the restaurant, annoyed with herself for having been weak-minded enough to accept this bizarre invitation. She thought that by being uncharacteristically rude she might nip what looked like becoming a most unsuitable acquaintance in the bud.

  ‘Good. Then we ought to go on somewhere.’ He seemed delighted by what she had said. ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘I really need an early night.’ It was true. The strain of dinner with Leslie Titmuss had exhausted her.

  ‘I told you. It won’t take long at all. The car’s outside.’

  Sitting behind his driver, she cursed her own fatal tendency to agree. What did ‘going on somewhere’ mean? A terrible club, perhaps, with hostesses and
a cigarette girl in fishnet tights where he’d buy sweet champagne and go on talking about town and country planning until her eyes closed and her limbs ached with tiredness. He couldn’t think for a moment that she’d go back to his flat with him, somewhere, he’d told her, extremely convenient on the Embankment, with a porter who’d smile knowingly as they got into the lift. It was true that he had made no move towards her, leaving as much space as possible between them in the back of the car, but could that be because he was sure his opportunity would come later? Was he arrogant enough to think that? Was he not arrogant enough to think anything? Well, if he imagined she’d put one foot into the entrance hall of Waterside Mansions, or whatever it was called, he was suffering the strangest of illusions. However much ruder would she have to be, she wondered with some dread, before she was shot of him for ever? Then she saw that they were not at the entrance of any mansion flats, but surrounded by the bright lights of a street running into Leicester Square. She hadn’t heard his muttered instructions to the driver and now the car stopped.

  ‘Wherever … ?’

  ‘At least we’ll be sure of a decent helping!’

  It wasn’t dark, like the unmentionable club she had imagined, but brilliantly lit, decorated with bright pink plaster pillars and murals of scenes on the Costa Brava, which made her eyeballs ache. Piped music and the fairground smell of frying oil pervaded the place. They sat at a table with a fully loaded ashtray and Leslie asked her, ‘What would you say to a couple of eggs and a large go of chips? We might as well live dangerously.’

  ‘I think it’d be wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘It was the worst thing he could do.’ Sue Bramble looked horrified when Jenny described the evening to her. ‘It made you like him.’

  ‘Well, it did almost. It was so sensible.’

  ‘Jenny! How could you have done it?’

  ‘Easily. You know it doesn’t matter what I eat. I mean, I don’t get fat or anything.’ This fact, Jenny knew, was one that Sue, who often dined on white wine and cigarettes, found intensely irritating, but then she was beginning to get tired of her friend’s grim warnings about the disaster of Mr Titmuss.