Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

‘Oh, yes. Mr Titmuss and Mr Sidonia aren’t as entirely different as you think. There’s a sort of honesty about both of them.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I do.’

  ‘All right, Jenny.’ Sue Bramble smiled in her most irritating and grown-up way. ‘I just hope you go on believing it. That’s all.’

  This question of honesty was an important one to Jenny. Her mother, from whom she had inherited her looks but not her character, moved naturally in a world of lies, where the climate suited her. When she was a child Jenny thought that lying was a sort of game her mother played in the car, like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral or I Spy. She gave, Jenny soon realized, totally inaccurate information about where she’d been, what she’d bought, where she’d left her handbag and who had telephoned. She lied, it seemed, out of pure high spirits or for the pleasure of exercising her undoubted talent for invention. She would tell her husband, who was something in engineering and travelled a lot, that she had been shopping in Tesco’s where there was this extraordinary crowd of Japanese tourists holding them up at the check-out, when they had gone to Sainsbury’s and hardly been kept waiting at all. Jenny had heard her mother say to her father, when she was meant to be asleep but could hear them talking in the next bedroom, that she had taken their daughter for lunch at the zoo when she had, in fact, been left to play with her friend Sheena Dalrymple. She even heard some of the comical things she was alleged to have said about the animals she never saw. For a moment she wondered if she had gone mad and had never been in Sheena’s house playing tedious games of Mothers and Fathers but had actually been staring at a camel and saying brightly, ‘A horse with a house on its back!’ Then she supposed it was one of her mother’s peculiar games. Not until she was older did Jenny deduce that these games had some connection with the constant sounds of her parents quarrelling, the slamming of doors, cars driving away and then returning to further shouted accusations, denials and footsteps on the stairs. Then her father’s travels seemed to last longer and her mother often met her from school in a strange car, driven by a man in a fawn overcoat who smelt like the hairdresser’s and offered Jenny, to her intense embarrassment, curiously strong mints which he kept in his waistcoat pocket.

  This was also a time when her mother began to go on travels and Jenny was sent to stay with her grandmother in St Leonards-on-Sea. Granny Paget was a small, bright-eyed woman who swam in the coldest weather, picking her way barefoot across the frosty beach to flop into the grey water, wearing a one-piece woollen bathing-suit and a pink plastic shower-cap, large as a tam o’shanter, propelling herself afloat by thrashing her arms in a sort of windmill motion which she called ‘the crawl’. Then she and Jenny would walk home across the shingle, the wind blowing so strongly at them that they were hardly able to move and stood for a long time poised for the next step, with Jenny’s hair and her school mac billowing out behind her. When they got home they always had what Granny Paget called a ‘slap-up tea’ to recover from the swim and Jenny was allowed as many scones and as much anchovy toast as the old lady, although she never entered the water because of her intense fear of the cold. At these teas they would sit together and Jenny would go through the events of the day to be sure that all she remembered had actually occurred.

  Granny Paget would also give Jenny Sidonia details of life in Hong Kong, where her grandfather had been stationed when in the army. Jenny was glad to have it confirmed that her mother’s general account of life in that city was accurate, although when she got down to details the evidence became more shaky. ‘Mummy says her nurse took her out for a walk and then pulled her into this terrible low den where Chinamen were sitting round smoking opium and playing cards. She said you had to pay a lot of dollars to get her back.’

  ‘Fairy tales!’ Granny Paget said with impatient scorn as she brushed crumbs off her lap and smeared another scone with raspberry jam. ‘The nurse took her to Sunday School and I didn’t want her to go because she was far too gullible already. So far as I remember, your mother believed in Father Christmas until puberty! And I never paid a penny to get her back.’

  Once they received a faint telephone call and Jenny’s mother, sounding as though she were under water, announced that she had travelled to Tenerife but would be back on Thursday morning and come straight down to St Leonards. She said, ‘I can’t wait to see you, darling.’ Although they laid on extra supplies of scones and Jenny had a new dress, her mother never came. A week later a postcard from Malaga told them, ‘Stuck here longer than I expected, darling. Just can’t wait to see you.’ ‘Fairy tales!’ Granny Paget said, as though she had never expected anything different. From that time truth-telling seemed to be more important than ever to Jenny.

  When her parents were divorced, Granny Paget said, ‘Your mother never found out the importance of sticking to things.’ Jenny’s father travelled to Oakwood, California, where he sired a large new family. Photographs of new half-brothers and sisters dandled by a strapping blonde at some distant poolside were posted to Jenny, almost annually, accompanied by the briefest of notes from her father: ‘Peter (or Barbara Joy or Hepworth) begs to be introduced and can’t wait to meet his/her big sister.’ Like her mother, these siblings seemed able to contain their impatience and she spent more and more of her holidays in St Leonards watching the pale, blue-veined body of her grandmother sink into the water and walking home along the wind-torn promenade. As she had little else to do she worked very hard and got into Oxford.

  There, as a student, she was at first lonely and then, when word of her beauty was put about, much sought after. She embarked on a few love affairs with young men she expected to prove unreliable and in this, at least, they didn’t disappoint her. It wasn’t until her last year at the university that she was taught by Tony Sidonia. ‘History,’ he told his students in his first lecture on the Roman Church during the Renaissance, ‘is an account of the way our ancestors lied to each other because they were too evil, or ambitious, or manipulative, or simple-minded, or cowardly to face the facts. Our great advantage over them is that we are able to tell the truth and that’s the justification of our existence.’ These words appealed greatly to Jenny and she copied them carefully into the front of her notebook. She was surprised, as Tony continued his lecture, to discover that the Borgia Pope was even less truthful than her mother.

  Tony Sidonia rented, at that time, a cottage about ten miles to the north of Oxford and, in the summer, he used to invite his friends for Sunday lunch. Jenny came out in a car with some other students and felt privileged. She lay in the sun on the long matted grass of a ‘lawn’ which apparently had never seen a mower. She helped wash up and peel vegetables and she thought she had been invited to make herself useful. Tony was clearly attached to Sue Bramble, who was always there, and Jenny thought they trusted each other far too much to get married in the sense in which she understood the word.

  Towards the end of her last year she was seeing Tony Sidonia more often – at dinner parties or visits to the movies, or when opera companies came on tour – but they were always with other people, for Tony had a wide circle of friends, ranging from white-haired Euro-Communist scientists to old Etonians from Christ Church and their girlfriends. For one thing Jenny was grateful; she was always invited on her own and no attempts were made to pair her off, as happened after Mr Sidonia’s death. One Sunday, just after she’d done her finals, Tony arranged to pick her up and drove her to his cottage where she found that they were alone together and that the table, with bread, cheese, wine and pâté, was laid with two places only.

  ‘Where’s Sue?’ she asked as she went, as usual, to wash the lettuce.

  ‘She’s not coming here this weekend. I told her it had to be over.’

  ‘You quarrelled?’ Jenny couldn’t believe it. ‘You never quarrel.’

  ‘We didn’t quarrel. I just told her I had something to do, and I couldn’t do it with any honesty while we were living together.’

  Jenny was silent. She had no
idea of what was to come.

  ‘Anyway, she agreed it was much better we told each other the truth. Saves an awful lot of mess. She said she hoped that you and she would stay friends. I said I hoped so too.’

  ‘Friends? Why shouldn’t we be friends?’

  ‘That’s exactly what Sue thinks.’

  She was washing the lettuce now, keeping her hands in the cold water with the tap running. She discovered a slug sleeping in a pale-green bed and dislodged it with a fingernail. Then she imprisoned the lettuce in a wire censer and went to the door where she swung it briskly through the air, producing a fine rain which glittered in the last of the year’s sunshine.

  ‘So now you’ve done your finals,’ he said. ‘Now we’re free.’

  ‘Free of exams.’

  ‘Well, free of having to behave ourselves, like a teacher and a pupil. It’s no good getting that relationship tangled up with emotions. No good at all. It always leads to a complete mess. I’ve always made that a golden rule.’

  ‘Have you?’ It was true. He hadn’t given her a hint of what she now knew he must be talking about.

  ‘So now,’ he said, ‘I can do what I’ve wanted to do for such a long time.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Proposition you. I suppose you’d call it that.’ He laughed then, as she had discovered he always did at the things he took most seriously.

  All that happened almost exactly fourteen years before she was propositioned again, this time by Leslie Titmuss.

  As he had suggested they went to Rome for their honeymoon.

  She felt, not as though she had embarked on a perilous future, but as though she were flying back to a familiar past when she had always been looked after. In fact the looking-after was even more efficient than it had been in the days of Tony Sidonia, who often missed buses, was late for meals or forgot about aeroplanes in his constant preoccupation with trying to point out the truth to long-dead and self-deceiving pontiffs. With Leslie Titmuss the small details of life were reliably looked after, the car was waiting at the airport and a man from the embassy was there to dispense with any tedious formalities at the hotel reception. As she opened the windows and looked down on to the Spanish Steps where she and Tony used to sit among the sleeping students and guitar-players and sellers of cheap belts and costume jewellery, and eat their lunch-time paninis, Leslie Titmuss said, ‘There’s only a day and a half of meetings and one lunch and a boring dinner we’ll have to go to. For the rest of the time you can educate me. I’ve never been to Rome before. Have you ever been to Rome?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she told him. ‘Rather often.’ The last time had been when Tony came nearest to popular success. The B.B.C. had asked him to make a historical documentary called ‘In the Shadow of the Triple Crown’. They had been here with a film unit and stayed in the unusual splendour of the Eden Hotel.

  Now Leslie was eager to learn the Italian phrases Tony had taught her, which she still wasn’t entirely sure how to spell when he insisted on writing them down in his Filofax. They stood with their faces upturned among the crowds that filled the Sistine Chapel as though it were an airport in high season, and Jenny took her husband down the familiar corridors to the Vatican Library. They walked among the plane trees and statues in the Borghese Gardens and he found the white naked figure of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, carved in marble to be alluring. ‘It’s you,’ Leslie Titmuss told her. ‘Absolutely. It makes me think of you.’ And Jenny remembered that, although they were as different as chalk and cheese, Tony Sidonia had said almost the same thing.

  Nor were the one formal lunch and the official dinner a particularly high price to pay for Rome. She sat beneath painted ceilings smiling enchantingly as German and Dutch representatives, delighted to be free for an hour from the appalling tediousness of their jobs, flirted with her ponderously. On their last night Leslie asked Jenny to suggest somewhere for dinner and she took him across the river to a place she remembered.

  The streets leading to the square of Santa Maria in Trastevere were darker and dirtier than when she had last seen them. The young people lurking in doorways, astride parked Lambrettas or sitting on the bonnets of other people’s cars, were no doubt up to no good, dealing in noxious substances or worse. Leslie strode through them bravely and held on to her as tightly as if she had been his wallet. But the square, the fountain and the golden mosaic front of Santa Maria were unchanged. ‘We’ll go in here before we eat,’ she said, and led him into the church built on the spot where a stream of pure olive oil flowed during the whole day of Christ’s Nativity. ‘Give me some lire,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy us a couple of candles.’ ‘Why? Are you religious?’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘Not at all, but you can’t be too careful. Not when it comes to luck.’ They lit their candles together and speared them on spikes next to the guttering flames lit by those in fear of death, or the police, or pregnancy, or failure in examinations, or the general nerve-racking anxiety of getting through the day.

  They sat in front of Sabatini’s, protected by dusty shrubs through which children peered and thrust hands clutching for lire or cigarettes. And when she tasted the pale white wine and the metallic flavour of the spaghetti vongole Jenny was overcome with a terrible longing for the husband she had lost and in whose honour she had just lit a candle.

  ‘You’re crying!’

  ‘No, really.’

  Leslie Titmuss touched her cheek with his knuckles, and then withdrew his hand as though her tears had scalded him.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it? You used to come here with him. You’re crying for Tony Sidonia.’

  ‘Of course I’m not. Honestly. It’s just that I’m tired. That’s all. Tired, after all the excitement. You do like this place, don’t you?’

  She dried her cheeks carefully with her table napkin and, for the first time since their marriage, she felt miserable. The question of honesty meant a great deal to her and she had just lied and, in lying, betrayed Tony.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Leslie Titmuss met Jenny Sidonia at lunch in St Joseph’s, Oxford, he had achieved all but two of his ambitions. He had reached high office in a government which had ruled the country for so long that most young people could not remember another. And he had survived some temporary embarrassments, such as the death of his wife in the anti-nuclear protest at Worsfield Heath, to become a national figure. He was respected, enjoyed, if not liked, as a sardonic wit, a card, a man who gave honest utterance to the feelings of all ordinary citizens and who didn’t give a damn for what the liberal intellectuals thought of him. Liberal intellectuals were responsible, after all, for most of the ills of the modern world, from drug abuse to the BBC. Some of his phrases had become part of the language, as when he called the welfare state ‘The Scroungers’ Charter’, or the opposition ‘The Ageing Hippies’ because their principal concern seemed to be free hip-replacements in a population annually growing older. ‘One chap’s plastic hip,’ Leslie Titmuss had been fond of saying when he was at Health, ‘is another chap’s crippling taxation.’ The man who promised the Archbishop that he’d guarantee not to preach in Canterbury Cathedral provided that cleric kept his nose out of politics, who referred to barristers as ‘wallies in wigs, wrapped in the tattered gowns of class privilege’ and who had called the unemployed ‘ladies and gentlemen of leisure’ was always sure of a headline or a place on any chat show. He was then at the height of his power and his popularity – and the England that had grown up in the last decade had been born in the image of Leslie Titmuss.

  At the time of the lunch at St Joseph’s all this had been achieved. Leslie was like a climber who scrambles up, with bleeding hands and boots lodged in precarious toe-holds, to the top of the apparently unassailable mountain and then has nothing to do but sit down, eat his sandwiches and admire the view. Although the first flush of triumph may have gone and the excitement of the ascent is over, it is still far too early to think about the way down.

  Looking about him he saw only two m
ore peaks to conquer. He would, what politician wouldn’t, have liked to be Prime Minister, but only death, it seemed, would part the present incumbent from that office. He also wanted, he positively longed, to obliterate the memory of a failed marriage; and the only way he could think of doing this was by a marriage which would be a resounding success. He was tired of the sympathy hostesses bestowed on him for his widowerhood, as though it were some sort of physical deformity. His loneliness, he felt, put him back among the underprivileged, the no-hopers he had devoted considerable energy and talent to leaving far behind him. He wanted to marry but none of the ambitious personal assistants or party workers who were granted, for an occasional night, the freedom of his mansion flat came near to the idea of the sort of wife he thought his position demanded. He wanted a wife who would make him the envy of his few friends and, more satisfactorily, his many enemies. He wanted to hear the likes of his Minister of State Ken Cracken whisper, ‘My God, how did old Leslie manage it?’ Even, ‘What the hell can she see in him?’ would have been music to his ears. In the pursuit of matrimony he wanted to bring off something as seemingly impossible as the young nettle-feller from Rapstone Rectory earning a place in the Cabinet. When he found himself next to Jenny Sidonia for the first time, he was presented, he thought, with the ideal challenge. He could hear the voice of his long-dead father, George Titmuss, who had no ambitions beyond being an accounts clerk at Simcox Brewery, saying, ‘She’s got class, boy. Undoubtedly class. Girls like that are not for the likes of you.’ To which Leslie, calling over the gulf of the years, would have answered, ‘Get stuffed, Dad, and just watch me.’

  No doubt he overestimated the difficulties of capturing Jenny; he never understood her loneliness and consequent vulnerability. She was never that glacial and unscaleable peak he imagined her to be when he first took up the challenge. He thought, and this was perhaps Leslie Titmuss’s most serious weakness, that people would never do what he wished unless they were bribed or threatened. There could, of course, be no question of threatening Jenny Sidonia, so some sort of inducement had to be offered to her. He guessed, quite rightly, that his political success meant nothing to her, for as soon as politics were mentioned her gaze would wander round the room as though seeking means of escape. She would never have dreamt of allying herself with a man simply because he was in charge of the Department of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning; indeed, such a position might well have an offputting and anaphrodisiac effect upon her. But he must have something she wanted because Leslie Titmuss, for all his apparent confidence, couldn’t bring himself to believe that such a girl as Jenny Sidonia would love him for himself alone. And the perfect bribe, he came to convince himself, was Rapstone Manor.