Titmuss Regained

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Titmuss Regained Page 8

by John Mortimer


  The rabbit hacienda was a matriarchy. Dot Curdle, a huge, astute woman who had in her youth, and indeed in middle age, called on the amorous services of most of the personable young men, and many not so personable, in Hartscombe and the surrounding countryside, regulated the affairs of her family and her business down to the minutest detail. She was up before dawn, cobbling together hutches, skinning, dividing and freezing small corpses, cutting angora, sending out bills and concealing her excess profits in a number of biscuit tins under the flooring of the mobile homes. She supervised the lives of her children and grandchildren with a benevolent despotism and if any task didn’t fit into her extended timetable (she rose at dawn and liked to wait up until Billy, at sixteen the youngest and least law-abiding Curdle, was safely home from the lager battles in Hartscombe) she would say, with an air of total confidence, ‘Wilf will see to it,’ and her diminutive husband Wilfred, a withered apple of a man who was always smiling, invariably did so.

  Dot was the child of the long-deceased Tom Nowt, a well-known Rapstone poacher who had fallen foul of Lady Fanner long before the war and had found himself before the magistrates for the offence of snaring rabbits in the Fanner woods. He had been imprisoned for a noisy week in Worsfield gaol, which institution he left to the enormous relief of the staff; his habit of using his cell as though it were some dark corner of the Rapstone woods had not made him a popular prisoner. Neither he nor his family had ever forgiven the Fanners for this humiliation and it was perhaps in tribute to her father’s memory that Dot had devoted her life to the proliferation of rabbits.

  One day, taking a quick meal on a copy of the Hartscombe Sentinel, Dot saw, for the first time, the full details of the Fallowfield proposals. She discovered that the hacienda was due to become a suburban supermarket area, architecturally adjusted to a hilltop position, with abundant parking facilities. She guessed that the farmer from whom they had, for many years, rented their field was proposing, if the plans received official blessing, to sell their home and business from under them. The whole life of the Curdles would vanish under an area of parked cars, piled groceries and supermarket trolleys.

  ‘Hang about, Wilf,’ she said. ‘This is not on!’

  ‘What’s not on?’

  ‘Dumping a bloody great town on our rabbit farm.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Wilfred, ever philosophic, seemed to regard the changes as inevitable and not worth discussing, like death or the weather. ‘After we’ve gone, perhaps. This place’ll see us out.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to stay here and stop their tricks.’ Dot was reading voraciously every inch of print on the subject of Fallowfield Country Town: ‘ “The scheme presented by Kempenflatts the builders,” she announced to Wilfred, “is likely to run into considerable opposition from rural pressure groups and other protesters.” ’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It means,’ Dot explained patiently but with considerable force, ‘that’s what we’re going to be. Our family. A rural pressure group and other protesters.’

  ‘What do we do then?’

  ‘We protests.’

  ‘How does it say we do that?’

  ‘It doesn’t say. Most likely because it doesn’t want us to know. It’s crafty.’

  ‘So what do you reckon?’

  ‘The old Rector would have known,’ Dot remembered. ‘The Reverend Simcox was one for protesting about most things.’

  Simeon Simcox, Kevin Bulstrode’s predecessor at the Rectory, had been a life-long Socialist to whom shares in the Simcox Brewery had given a secure vantage point from which to set right the evils of the world. Wearing his dog-collar, an old tweed jacket with leather patches and an expression of benign joy he had headed innumerable protests against the Bomb, against apartheid, against the war in Vietnam and in favour of low-rent accommodation in Worsfield. His younger son, Fred, had long worked as a doctor in Hartscombe, having taken over the practice of old Dr Salter who, diagnosing his own cancer, had sought death by attempting an impossible jump in the hunting field, had failed to find it and had lived on, paralysed, for several painful years. This was a practical joke of fate which he had been able, incredibly, to laugh at. Fred had been more attracted by the old Doctor’s acceptance of the immutable facts of life and death than by his father’s optimistic march towards a paradise which became ever more distant and unattainable. Unlike his elder brother, Henry, who had started out as an angry young novelist and had now become a crusty old blimp, writing articles for the newspapers, denouncing as dangerous illusions their father’s most dearly held beliefs, Fred had opted out of all political activity, being content with the quiet life of a general practitioner in the countryside where he had spent his childhood. Sometimes, but not often, he wondered how he had come to pass over half a century on earth and travelled so little distance from his home.

  Fred had once, many years before, joined a march for nuclear disarmament, which he had deserted in order to meet a girl with whom he was in love. He didn’t expect to be involved in any similar demonstration for the rest of his life. However his consulting room was invaded during one morning surgery by the huge and urgent presence of Dot Curdle. He was pleased to see her, for although he despaired, like most people, of the mess the hacienda made of the field above Rapstone, Dot’s great bulk had long been a familiar feature of his landscape. As a small boy he had greatly admired her father, Tom Nowt, and he had watched the old poacher bait fish-hooks with raisins soaked in brandy to catch pheasants, and ridden with him at night when he shot deer dazzled in the headlamps of a car. Until his father suddenly forbade this friendship he had spent much of his school holidays in Tom Nowt’s hut in the woods, listening to tall stories of drunken nights and unlikely seductions. He had heard the amorous cries of Tom’s caged calling-bird, which lured the game from the Strove and Fanner woods into his traps. His predecessor in the practice, Dr Salter, had brought Dot Nowt into the world and had given her, as he always said, ‘a slap on the bottom and told her to get on with it, which is the most you can do for anyone embarking on life’. On the whole, Dot had made the most of this encouraging start and Fred had seen her children and grandchildren born, treated them when they were ill, which was seldom, and tried, without any success, to worry her about her huge weight which seemed to have no adverse effect on her health whatsoever.

  ‘I want to talk to you, Dr Fred. Urgent.’

  ‘You’re not ill?’

  ‘Not me. No.’

  ‘Or any of the family?’

  Dot seemed, suddenly, shy of embarking on the non-medical subject of her visit.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There is my Evie.’ She mentioned a pale, sullen thirty-year-old who was always known as the brightest of the family and who had supplied the foreign words used in the hacienda advertising. ‘I think the girl’s sick,’ she added with undisguised contempt.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘She says she can’t fancy her sex.’

  ‘Her own sex?’ Fred Simcox speculated wildly.

  ‘She says she can’t abide doing it, Doctor.’

  ‘And that’s a worry to you?’ Fred heard his doctor’s voice and wanted to burst out laughing at its concerned pomposity.

  ‘It’s a worry to Len Bigwell, seeing as he’s her intended. We’ve got a big wedding planned for the autumn time. What’s the matter with young things today, Doctor?’ Dot settled back in his creaky patient’s chair and seemed prepared to enjoy a trip down memory lane. ‘We never had any trouble not fancying it, from what I remember. Looked forward to it, more or less, as I still manages to this day.’

  Fred tried to picture the diminutive Wilf climbing aboard this great old steamer and said, again in the doctor’s voice with which he was becoming bored, ‘You want me to speak to her?’

  ‘Wouldn’t do any good. She can’t bear talking about it either. She reckons it’s the rabbits what put her off.’

  ‘A marriage guidance counsellor from Worsfield comes to
the Town Hall once a week.’ Fred said this with little conviction. Old Dr Salter had always taken the view that the only possible marriage guidance was contained in the sentence, ‘If you like it, enjoy it; if you don’t like it, piss off out of it.’

  ‘Marriage guidance.’ Dot appeared to think this over. ‘That might bring her to her senses. To be honest, Dr Fred, and I’ve got to be honest, that’s not the reason I dropped into the surgery.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was.’

  ‘Your dad. He used to protest. Organized a few demos and that, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, all the time.’

  ‘He knew how to stop things happening that didn’t ought to happen.’

  ‘He thought he did.’

  ‘And he put a stop to them?’

  ‘Well, not very often.’

  ‘But he had a go?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He had a go.’

  ‘And he might have won the day, like. If he’d gone on persistent.’

  ‘I suppose he might. About some things.’

  ‘So you’ll remember how he used to do it.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember quite well.’

  ‘You’re the one that’s got to undertake it then.’

  ‘Undertake what, exactly?’

  ‘Stop them dumping a bloody great town on my hacienda.’

  Even Dot Curdle’s call to arms might not have immediately moved Fred into activity had it not been repeated by a number of his patients and fellow citizens after the full account of the Fallowfield plans appeared on the front page of the Hartscombe Sentinel. Crossing the road on his way to a lunchtime sandwich in the entirely rebuilt Olde Maypole Inn (it now had all the advantages of muzak, one-armed bandits and the Seafood Platter which had ousted Dr Salter’s favourite beef and pickle sandwiches), he was hailed by a Mrs Virginia Beazley, the wife of Mr Vernon Beazley who took the long journey to London each day to work for a prosperous firm of charity organizers. Mrs Beazley called them the Two Vees and often said they worked as a team for the humane concerns which, in less enlightened times, an idle populace had left to its government. Virginia had taken on the Worsfield Drug Therapy Unit, the Safe Sex Advisory Service and a growing organization called Help the Homeless to Help Themselves. ‘All I want to do,’ she often said, ‘is to get people off their backsides and into the tough old business of “love thy neighbour”.’ She often added that she and the other Vee ‘got their kicks’ from such work. She was a tall, handsome woman of great energy and a commanding presence, and Fred sometimes had the unnerving suspicion that she was in love with him.

  ‘Hi there, Dr Fred!’ she called to him from the pavement as he was trapped on a traffic island. ‘Who’s going to get Hartscombe up off its bottom now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He did his best to make his answer inaudible.

  ‘Well, you are, of course!’ she shouted, and when a lull in the traffic forced him to her side she explained, ‘Vee and I are forming the Save Rapstone Valley Society and I can’t think who the hell else we should ask to be chairman.’

  ‘Chairman? I’ve got my practice –’

  ‘But you’re here all the time! Not like poor old Vee, who has to travel a hundred and fifty miles backwards and forwards to work every day. Anyway, Vee says you’re just the chap we ought to scrounge for the job. He thinks you’d look quite reassuring on local television if only you’d invest in a few new shirts and not cut your hair as though you’d just come home from National Service. Also he’d like to give you a bit of advice about your specs.’ And she invited the Doctor to buy her a large Kir in the Olde Maypole Inn.

  While there they met Daphne Jones, who had escaped from her husband, Hector Bolitho Jones, and the Nature Area on the pretext of her monthly visit to the Hartscombe Cash & Carry. She was drinking Fortissimo lager with Barry Harvester, the young proprietor of the herbal boutique in the pedestrian precinct, who had a witch’s knowledge of country remedies for all ailments and smiled in a particularly embittered manner whenever he saw a registered medical practitioner.

  ‘Hullo, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Still poisoning people with penicillin?’ Fred resisted the temptation to answer, ‘Whenever I get them out of your clutches.’ Instead he offered to buy them all a drink, thinking that the female Vee was safest when lost in a crowd.

  ‘It’s not as though it’s going to provide any low-rent council houses,’ Daphne Jones said, with justice. ‘It’ll just be more homes for well-heeled business people like your old man, Virginia, commuting up to London.’

  ‘It’s another battle in the class war’ – the herbalist was a one-man cell in the Hartscombe Workers’ Revolutionary Party – ‘and this one we’ve got to win.’

  ‘It’s a matter of preserving our national heritage,’ Mrs Vee said. ‘I don’t see why we have to drag politics into it.’

  ‘You try dragging politics out of it.’ Barry Harvester fixed her with his most unfriendly smile and bit noisily into a radish. ‘I don’t think you’ll find we get very far.’

  ‘It’s Titmuss we’re up against in the end.’ Daphne Jones was a great deal better informed than her friend Barry on matters of political reality. ‘He’s the one who wants to concrete over the South of England. For yuppies to live in it.’

  Fred said nothing, thinking of yet another stage in what felt like a lifetime’s battle against Leslie Titmuss, the boy who had once come in on Saturdays to cut his father’s nettles. Mrs Vee said, ‘The important thing is we all have to pull together. Us and our little group of founding fathers. Now, who are we going to be? Apart from us four – and Vee, of course, to deal with the charitable aspect.’

  ‘We ought to ask the Curdles,’ Fred told her.

  ‘Really?’ Mrs Vee was unenthusiastic.

  ‘They stand to lose their rabbit farm.’

  ‘Best reason I heard yet for the new town.’ The She Vee giggled and punched Fred lightly on the upper arm. ‘No, pax! Don’t slap me down. I suppose it’d be democratic to ask the Curdles, or a representative selection of them.’

  ‘Yes! Try being democratic,’ Daphne advised her quite sharply. ‘It doesn’t hurt much.’

  ‘Oh, and I think we should invite the Mayor, as a matter of courtesy. And the Head of the Hartscombe Grammar.’ Mrs Vee ignored Daphne’s advice. ‘And Colonel and Mrs Wilcox for the footpaths. And the Church ought to have a place.’

  ‘The Church has got no place. Not in the world today,’ the herbalist told her, but in the end they decided that Kev the Rev. would be invited to serve on the committee. ‘For our first meeting’ – Mrs Vee was in a generous mood – ‘I don’t see why Vee and I shouldn’t lay on a buffet. That is, providing everyone is willing to chip in, of course.’

  ‘And I hope you’ll be serving out the Armalite rifles and the ammo with the quiche, Mrs Beazley.’ The herbalist, who had nothing whatever to do with firearms and who was prominent in animal welfare, downed his Fortissimo. ‘I reckon we’re going to need them to stop this lot in the end.’

  ‘I’m prepared to take that remark entirely as a joke,’ Mrs Vee said. ‘I think fifteen quid each would cover a reasonable selection of salads and, let’s say, one glass per head of carafino rosé. After that I’ll put Vee in charge of a small cash bar.’

  So, at this historical moment, an organization was formed to deliver a small part of England from subjugation by the Kempenflatts and the dangerous domination of Leslie Titmuss.

  Chapter Ten

  Driving through the Rapstone Valley, along hedged lanes which he could have negotiated in his sleep, past the patches of bracken where he had hidden and built shelters when he was a child, the diminishing ponds in which he had squelched and hunted frogs, the common where, at night, he had found glow-worms and occasionally made love, and through the tall beech trees, thin and grey as elephants’ trunks, where he had ridden shot-gun with Tom Nowt, Fred Simcox was filled with anger. What had his patients done, what offence had they committed that their small world should suddenly be taken from them? Death, he knew, wo
uld deprive him of the hills and woodlands which had been for so long a part of his existence; death was the great, the accepted, robber but he saw no reason in the world why he should be so deprived by Kempenflatts the builders or, and here his rage, an emotion to which he was usually a stranger, rose to a level which was almost as intoxicating as Fortissimo lager and perhaps as likely to lead to violence, by the shadowy but apparently infinite power of Leslie Titmuss.

  Fred had read reports of the now famous Titmuss speech at the Construction and Developers Association dinner. The Fortress had welcomed it, as it welcomed all his utterances, as a refreshing blast of common sense and plain speaking. Henry Simcox, writing what he called one of his ‘Why, oh why?’ pieces, had said it was time country dwellers stopped regarding it as their inalienable right not to have to look at their fellow citizens and were dragged, green wellies and all, into the glories of Britain’s new industrial revolution. People who lived in the country, together with farmers, school teachers, hospital nurses and social workers, formed that group of mendacious malcontents of which Fred’s brother, Henry, especially disapproved; and the fact that he spent his life in the gentle confines of South Kensington and found his rustic pleasures in a villa in Tuscany meant that he didn’t have to bump into many of them. ‘Why, oh why,’ he wrote in a much-quoted article, ‘if these pampered people want to live so close to nature don’t they move to the Outer Hebrides and leave us to our prosperity?’

 

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