Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  And the Titmuss war, Fred reflected as he entered the stuffy bedrooms of the few remaining villagers, or tried to convince weekending television executives that there was no magic potion for avoiding death, could even be thought of as funny. It was comic, no doubt, that opposition to the best-laid schemes of Titmuss should have to come from a country doctor who wanted to be left alone, and from a Trotskyite shopping-precinct huckster who sold nettle tea as a cure for arthritis. No doubt it was entertaining for Titmuss to know that their forces were to be assembled at a buffet in the Hartscombe home of Mr and Mrs Vee, to which Colonel and Mrs Wilcox, representing the footpaths, and Kev the Rev. were also invited. What else, after all, could they possibly do? The more hopeless the battle against Titmuss seemed, the more intensely it had to be waged and the more completely did Fred feel he had to dedicate himself to it.

  Much of his feeling about Titmuss went back, as did his devotion to the Rapstone landscape, to the days of his childhood. It was Leslie Titmuss who had seen the young Fred skiving away from the C.N.D. march and who had informed the old Rector of his son’s lack of dedication to that, or probably any, cause. It was Leslie again who had figured so improbably as a beneficiary in the Reverend Simeon Simcox’s will, a matter which had only been explained, as a result of the Doctor’s painstaking investigation, by the discovery that Charlotte, Grace Fanner’s daughter and Leslie’s wife, had been a child of the old Rector’s passionate and unsuspected past. It was true that Simeon Simcox’s legacy had turned out to be financially worthless; the affair had split the family and caused the Doctor’s mother, a woman slow to show any feelings except dry amusement at the vulgarities of the world, a good deal of carefully concealed pain.

  Fred always thought of Leslie Titmuss as he first knew him, an irrepressibly cocky small boy with an unnatural pallor, short trousers and socks which concertinaed around his ankles, who used his nettle-cutting to ask endless questions of the Rector’s two sons and to worm his way into their father’s favour. At the end of every corridor which led into Fred’s past, on every pathway of that half-remembered landscape, that figure seemed to stand, causing unnecessary trouble. So, when the Doctor saw the Cabinet Minister’s picture now, in newspapers or on television, he remembered him as an intolerable small boy and hoped against all reasonable hope that Titmuss’s undoubted power would thereby be diminished.

  ‘We need an acronym,’ said Mr Vernon Beazley, who knew about such things, ‘and a logo.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Wilf Curdle whispered to his wife, and was immediately told to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘I thought we’d agreed to call ourselves the Save Rapstone Valley Society.’ Fred was already beginning to find his duties as chairman (Chair, as Daphne Jones insisted on calling him) unacceptably absurd.

  ‘S.R.V.S.? That doesn’t do anything for us. What we need are initials that make up a word you can say,’ the He Vee explained patiently to those unacquainted with the needs of charity organizations. ‘Like U.N.E.S.C.O. and S.C.R.A.P.’

  ‘Hands Off Our Valley?’ Daphne Jones was anxious to help. ‘H.O.O.V.’

  ‘Sounds like a vacuum, doesn’t it?’ Mrs Wilcox of the footpaths piped up unexpectedly.

  ‘What about Piss Off Out Of Our Valley?’ said Dot, who was surprisingly quick at crossword puzzles. ‘You could say that. P.O.O.V.’

  ‘Please, Mum, don’t be disgusting.’ Evie Curdle, tight-lipped and disapproving, thought her mother had a one-track mind.

  ‘P.O.O.V.?’ the She Vee said. ‘I’m not sure that’s what we’re looking for, is it?’

  ‘It doesn’t absolutely ring a bell,’ the He Vee agreed. ‘Hang about a bit. What about, Say No Over Fallowfield?’

  ‘That makes S.N.O.F.,’ Dot told them with quiet satisfaction, while Evie explained that the one thing she couldn’t eat was salad, probably, Fred thought, because she’d seen so many rabbits at it.

  ‘Save Our Valley,’ Mrs Vee said suddenly, and added with the authority Fred appeared to lack, ‘I think that has a quiet dignity. Don’t you, Chair?’

  ‘S.O.V.?’ Mr Vee tried the word out. ‘I rather like that. Well done, Vee!’

  ‘S.O.V.? Sovereign. What’s that meant to sound like?’ Barry Harvester was suspicious. ‘On Her Majesty’s bloody Service?’

  ‘When Dad shot hisself,’ Dot told the world in general, ‘we found five gold sovereigns sewed up in the lining of his best breeches. Worth a fortune today, they’d be. We got rid of them to some bloody Scotsman who kept a stall in Worsfield Market. Wet behind the ears, we was, in those days.’

  ‘Save Our Valley. Save Our Souls. That has, to me, the right note of urgency about it.’ Kev the Rev. spoke excitedly, a plate balanced on his knees, eating as though his life depended upon it.

  ‘I propose S.O.V.,’ Mrs Vee said, ‘and the Reverend Kevin Bulstrode seconds me. Will you be kind enough to put the motion, Chair?’

  Chair was kind enough, and after a short and heated debate, and despite Dot’s insistence that their logo should be an artist’s impression of ‘our hacienda bunnies’, it was decided that a drawing of one of the valley orchids should adorn all their communications.

  Fred listened to this with half his attention, thinking that the suggestions for protests and fund-raising and publicity, the printing of leaflets and the approaches to the Great and the Good and, it was to be hoped, the Generous, would end in the inevitable contest with Leslie Titmuss. It was Titmuss they must be prepared to fight, Fred decided, and Titmuss who would have to be defeated before the valley was out of danger and he could resume his normal life without the necessity of further buffet do’s with the Beazleys. Meanwhile the voices around him rose and fell, coming to no definite conclusion.

  ‘They can’t just do away with the footpaths,’ Colonel Rudolph Wilcox said. ‘They’ve been there since the Middle Ages.’ He and his wife, fearless devotees of rights of way and wearing similar types of tweed trilby in winter and white cotton billycock hats – of the sort well-off children used to play in at the seaside – between May and September, would tramp uncompromisingly across lawns, even through french windows and across carpets, to keep open what they knew to be ancient rights of passage. They don’t know Leslie Titmuss, Fred thought, if they believe he’s going to pay the slightest attention to anything that happened in the Middle Ages.

  ‘When Doughty Strove tried to put a grass court across the bridlepath at Picton,’ Mrs Wilcox said, ‘Rudolph and I threatened to get a couple of hacks and ride across it every tea-time. That put a stop to his tennis.’

  Ten thousand houses, Fred thought, wouldn’t be so easily moved by an elderly couple on horseback. In the respectful silence that followed, he saw Hector Bolitho Jones, still wearing his anorak as though he didn’t mean to stay long, staring at him over his encroaching beard. ‘Perhaps we should hear from Mr Jones,’ he suggested, ‘as the expert on the wildlife in the district.’

  ‘I don’t see all that harm,’ Hector surprised them by saying. ‘I read as how the Nature Area’s going to be preserved. They’ve given their word about that.’

  ‘But as a park! In the middle of a town?’ Fred argued.

  ‘If they keep people that come into the area in order, I’m not so concerned what they put around it. Perhaps it’ll be all the better for a strict enforcement of the by-laws. As it is, there are those who think they can take all sorts of liberties.’ Hector turned his bright, hostile eyes on his wife and the herbalist, of whom he entertained well-justified suspicions.

  ‘You mean, you don’t want human beings to have the same rights as your badgers?’ Daphne Jones challenged him, and the group felt uneasily that they were in the presence of private grief. Fred knew that they had all formed only an impermanent and uncertain alliance to defeat the stolid determination of his old enemy.

  In spite of everything, S.O.V. acquired a good deal of support in the locality, although it was not universally welcomed. Some of the doctors looked forward to the influx of patients a new town wou
ld bring; many lawyers had, like Jackson Cantellow, clients anxious to invest in the development; many shopkeepers said they would profit, and the Mayor felt that his high office required him to remain neutral in the matter (he had managed to acquire a small patch of woodland in the Rapstone Valley and hoped, when Fallowfield was triumphant, to sell it and build himself a lavish retirement home on the Costa del Sol, to which he would retreat with his long-time mistress, the manageress of a local chemist’s, and finally ditch the Mayoress). Some teachers in Hartscombe dreamed of promotion to a huge Fallowfield comprehensive and the local undertaker welcomed the idea of a steep increase in deaths.

  On the whole, S.O.V. could count on the support of the remaining villagers, who knew that Fallowfield houses would be more than they could afford, and the recent immigrants who had paid up to half a million pounds for cottages they had assumed would be in the countryside. A Mr Peregrine Lanfranc, who had opened a ruinously expensive hotel in the old Strove country house at Picton Principal, became hysterical at the thought of his clientele compelled to consume their marinaded duck and Château Latour between Safeways and the Doner Kebab House in Fallowfield High Street. He offered to raffle a free weekend for two in aid of S.O.V., but when the prize was won by Evie Curdle’s fiancé, Len, she rejected the opportunity with disgust. Many other well-wishers organized coffee mornings, Bring and Buy sales and recitals in local churches and from these small contributions Mr Vernon Beazley’s charity organization company took 25 per cent. ‘It’s the name of the game in giving nowadays,’ the He Vee explained. ‘You can’t just sit outside the Cash & Carry with a begging-bowl, you know. Appealing to people’s better natures is part of the new technology.’ Fred Simcox, becoming aware of the Beazley commission, created a row he found enjoyable until the She Vee, taking his part against her husband, kissed him clandestinely and moistly in the ear after a stormy meeting. The Beazley take was reduced to 10 per cent, only to be paid on the basis of work done, and Fred tried to avoid lonely moments with the She Vee.

  And he became aware of a momentous event which seemed likely to alter the whole future of the Rapstone Valley. One of the numerous small Bulstrodes ran a soaring temperature and the Doctor was called out to the old Rectory that had once been his home. He passed through the familiar rooms full of unfamiliar clutter and sat on the bed of a little, feverish girl who seemed to be facing, with admirable courage, the difficulties of being a child of the clergy, an experience which Fred remembered as like a lifetime of uneventful but emotional Sunday evenings. When he had diagnosed the measles and prescribed for her, and as he was moving into the damp air of the churchyard, he asked Kev the Rev. about the builder’s lorries he had noticed at the gates of Rapstone Manor.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ Kevin Bulstrode, swollen with inside information, shared it proudly. ‘Leslie Titmuss has taken it over. He’s coming to live. Isn’t that marvellous news?’

  ‘Is it?’ Fred was doubtful.

  ‘Well, he’s hardly going to allow a new town to be built in his own back garden now, is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Fred thought this over. ‘There’s one thing I have learned, over the years. You can never trust Titmuss.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope and pray that that’s all over now. I don’t know how I could face Mr Titmuss in church while I’m campaigning against him as an active member of S.O.V. That’ – Kevin looked proud of his interesting dilemma – ‘would be so very embarrassing.’

  ‘I can’t see why you’ll have to face him in church. Titmuss hasn’t taken to God, has he?’

  ‘I can’t think Mr Titmuss is an unbeliever. You see, and of course I tell you this in the strictest confidence, he’s asked me to marry him.’

  For an absurd and entertaining moment Fred supposed that the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss had proposed to Kev the Rev. Then he said, ‘He’s marrying who?’

  ‘Ah, that’ – the Rector had run out of information – ‘remains to be seen. But Rapstone Manor, no doubt about it, is going to see a bit of life again. Perhaps the old place will see children …’

  A long line of Titmusses, stretching out into the future? It was a thought Fred found hard to tolerate.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jenny Sidonia had been going out with Leslie Titmuss for a long time before anything in particular happened. ‘Going out’ was the expression she and her friend Sue Bramble used for staying in, in particular for staying in bed with someone; but when it came to Mr Titmuss ‘going out’ meant exactly what it said. They met for dinner almost once a week in one or other of the small restaurants near her flat, places she supposed he liked because they never saw any of those he insisted on calling his ‘colleagues’ there. These colleagues, presumably other members of the government, were shadowy figures whom Leslie spoke of, if at all, with undisguised contempt. Jenny, who had little interest in politics and to whom the names of the colleagues meant little, listened to his revelations of life in government, which seemed to consist mainly of internecine strife, without any particular attention. Then she asked him, because she supposed it would be polite to do so, what had made him wish to enter so strange and unrewarding a world in which people never seemed to wish each other well.

  ‘I got pushed into the river,’ he said – something which he hadn’t spoken about for decades.

  She felt an irresistible urge to burst out laughing and then she looked at him and realized that he was about to make a painful and intimate revelation.

  ‘At a Young Conservative dinner dance, in the old Swan’s Nest at Hartscombe. It was a formal occasion!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she could hardly trust herself to say, ‘I bet it was.’

  ‘And this snotty little gang of old Etonians pushed me in. Because I was wearing a hired dinner-jacket. They said I smelt of mothballs. Oh, and I had a ready-made bow-tie. You ought to tie it yourself, but I didn’t know that. Bastards!’

  His look of hatred was so intense that she could no longer stop the laughter bubbling out of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she made a breathless apology. ‘I really am most terribly sorry.’

  He looked for a moment as though he were going to strike her, as she felt she probably deserved, or at least rise up in fury and slam out of the restaurant. Instead he stared at her in bewilderment and then, very slowly, smiled. At last a low, rasping sound emerged from him, which she found difficult to identify as a laugh.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it is funny.’

  ‘Not really,’ she gasped. ‘Not really, at all.’

  ‘I never laughed at it before. Not ever.’

  ‘You can now?’ She was able then to become serious.

  ‘Well, yes. I suppose I can.’

  ‘So that’s what made you take up politics?’

  ‘Oh, I wanted to before that. But then, well, I knew just what I had to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take it away from those old-school twits. That’s what I set about then. If you want to know the truth.’

  ‘You mean, make the world safe for people with rented dinner-jackets?’ Now he seemed not to mind being mocked.

  ‘Anyway, I wanted to prove it wasn’t enough to be able to tie your own dicky-bow. That didn’t entitle you to a seat in Cabinet.’

  ‘But you got one.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I knew I’d manage it. In the end.’

  What an extraordinary thing to know, she thought, for anyone sinking into the mud and clinging rushes, with the water ruining his first rented tuxedo. And she became aware of Leslie Titmuss’s determination as though it were a pungent smell.

  ‘There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

  She was sure she knew what was coming, but she was wrong.

  ‘Take me to the opera.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You go there, don’t you? I don’t want them to enjoy any more little sniggers at my expense. Like that day at Oxford.’

  These were the things that drove him on, she thought, being thrown into the river and being laughed at
by a collection of elderly academics. They forced him to seek things that might have been thought unattainable to the young Titmuss – a Ministry and perhaps, well, this was such an enormous perhaps that she hardly admitted the possibility to herself, the lonely widow of Tony Sidonia. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll take you, if you promise me one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He looked wary as he always did when asked for promises.

  ‘That you’ll wear a rented dinner-jacket.’

  ‘What’s on next week?’ Jenny telephoned Sir Willoughby Blane, who was on the Board of the Opera House, as he was on many boards dealing with subjects as diverse as prawns and Puccini.

  ‘Give me a minute, Jenny darling.’ Sir Willoughby felt for his folder. ‘Simon Boccanegra. Rather a heavy evening. Do you fancy that?’

  ‘I might do. Wasn’t he a politician?’

  ‘A pleb politician in Genoa. Of a rather ruthless variety.’

  ‘That’ll do fine, then.’

  ‘Wonderful. You’ll be my guest, of course? I’ll see if I can scrounge the Royal Box. Anyone you’d like to sit next to, apart from me?’

  ‘Sorry. But I’d love you to get me a couple of seats. Somewhere in the back of the Grand Circle’d do fine.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re being taken by a young man?’

  ‘He’s not all that younger than you are. I’ll pay for the tickets.’

  ‘Won’t he?’

  ‘I won’t let him. This is entirely my treat.’

  A politician, Sir Willoughby thought to himself as he put down the telephone. The word led him to a wild speculation, which he dismissed as impossible after he had laughed out loud and for a considerable time.

  ‘Go out and get me,’ Leslie said to his secretary, ‘a tape of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. And the words in English. Oh, and for God’s sake, make sure the bloody thing’s not a ballet.’

  Jenny Sidonia enjoyed taking Leslie Titmuss to Covent Garden. The marble staircase up which she could see them climbing in a welcoming mirror, the buzz in the Crush Bar where she ordered a bottle of champagne to be put ready for them, in the interval, under the bust of Sir Thomas Beecham, as Tony had always done when they could least afford it – these things excited her as they had before. What added to her entertainment was the fact that she was standing Leslie a treat; he clearly found this confusing. By now long accustomed to command, being under her orders as to where they were to go, where they should sit and when they should have their first drink didn’t come easily to him, and he was confused by not being the one who paid.