Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  The result of these events was a further extraordinary increase in business at the Curdles’ hacienda and, as a sign of their new prosperity, Len Bigwell was seen driving a second-hand Porsche. He asked a Worsfield advertising agency to plan a new ‘promotion’ for the hacienda’s products and appointed Jackson Cantellow his solicitor with a view to forming a company which might, at some date, be floated on the Stock Exchange. Fred wondered how on earth this nonsense had started, and remembered that the only person who had seen Dot Curdle’s ‘perdition’ in his consulting room was Leslie Titmuss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Fred Simcox had only been in love twice in his life before he met Jenny and both times it was with the same woman.

  He had known his old partner’s daughter, Agnes Salter, since they were children. When he was a young man they had made love, passionately and often, in an old hut Dot Curdle’s father, Tom Nowt, the poacher, had built in the woods and which he made available to them in exchange for a few pints of beer in the Baptist’s Head in Rapstone. There, under the skulls of poached deer, among the shot-guns and snares and the skins of foxes and squirrels, under an army blanket on an iron bedstead which squeaked and rattled its complaints, warmed by a wood-burning stove which belched acrid smoke when the wind was in the wrong direction, Fred had made love with a white-skinned, red-headed girl in ways which he had the privilege of remembering all his life.

  When Agnes, in those days before the pill, became pregnant, Fred, then a medical student, had failed either to marry her or find the money for the abortion she subsequently had. She had married his brother Henry who finally went off with a young lady in television. Fred, of course, forgave Agnes but never himself. At last, when Henry was safely married to Lonnie, the television researcher, Agnes and Fred came together and he fell in love with her once again.

  Their second love was entirely different from their first. Although they didn’t live together it was much more of a marriage. Agnes had a flat in London and made her living cooking other people’s dinners. Fred had the house which went with his practice in Hartscombe. They stayed often in each other’s homes and, because they had inflicted such wounds on each other, they now behaved with almost too much consideration. Lacking any element of danger, their relationship finally lost its passion. It was as though they were so determined to be friends that friends, in the course of time, was all that they became. They still visited each other, confided in each other and, very occasionally, went to bed together to try and rediscover that ridiculous excitement they had known in a hut on a blanket that smelled of wet dog. Although it was never found again, Fred had loved Agnes for the second time. Because she was undoubtedly an original spirit, a woman who enjoyed the awfulness of life, laughed at loneliness and detested things like summer holidays and Christmas, he had found it hard to love anyone else better.

  Of course he had tried. He had taken girls driving across Europe; girls had stayed in the room over the surgery and listened to his old jazz records or even more devotedly sat at the bar while he played the drums with his old friends in the Riverside Stompers. He had liked many of them and thought there was no reason why they shouldn’t have become excellent wives for a local G.P., but the memory of Agnes as she had been somehow made them seem tame and colourless, and the duty he felt he owed to Agnes as she was made him reluctant to take on another life-long commitment. In his forties the turnover had been quite rapid; something, a toss of the head, a way of lighting a cigarette, a smile of derision at some pomposity, would prick his desire and set him off, believing he felt all the wild and breathless excitement he had known when he bicycled off to meet Agnes at Tom Nowt’s hut in the woods. But finally, when it became clear to him that he wasn’t going to meet Agnes or anyone like her, and when whichever partner it was felt her attention wandering because the Doctor’s was wandering also, they would part, usually without rancour. So Fred went to the weddings and looked after the children of old lovers who rarely thought about him now and he, with his mind still full of Agnes, found it hard to remember exactly when, or in one case even if, he had made love to them.

  Then he fell in love for the third time in his life, with Jenny Titmuss.

  Although he felt no older, and certainly no wiser, than he had been when he was first sent away to school, or when he disappointed his father by defecting from a C.N.D. march to meet Agnes. Fred had reached that time in his life when he knew where he had got to and was prepared to settle for it. He still went to London and had dinner with Agnes, enjoying her hilarious denunciation of all the things women of her age were meant to value most; but now he rarely sought out new companions. Most of the time he felt he would have liked to have been left in peace, without the demands of the Rapstone Valley protest or the lure of a slim back, a narrow waist, a cascade of red hair pushed back, swaying in front of him in the street. Now, if such a vision turned towards him he felt a sense of relief if the face didn’t touch him. He would be spared, at least, the long process of getting to know someone new, the dinners in country house hotels, the repetition of his old stories which had come to sound to him like the words of an actor whose play has run too long. But just as S.O.V. came to involve him in the affairs of the district and in the making of protests, however absurd, his sudden love for Jenny Titmuss shook him out of his contentment, bringing him an excitement which he had hoped never to feel again.

  He didn’t fall in love when he saw her at her wedding although he knew there was nothing in her face to save him from that predicament. He didn’t even fall in love with her when he called on her at Rapstone Manor and she had, he was sure she had, promised to join his organization. He only fell in love, suddenly and hopelessly, on the morning that Leslie Titmuss called on him in his surgery. This event occurred after Leslie had left and he felt sorry for Jenny. He thought she must be in distress and had been forced to change her mind about her membership by the domineering Titmuss. He found it hard to imagine anyone married to Leslie not being in distress and that, as well as her beauty, moved him almost unbearably. So his love for Jenny was, although he didn’t admit as much to himself, brought about by his lifelong dislike of Leslie Titmuss.

  As soon as Leslie had gone about his business, Fred had explained to Mrs Vee that there had been some confusion and Jenny Titmuss wasn’t a member and had never agreed to become one. When he had arranged this matter Fred telephoned Jenny to set, as he told himself, her mind at rest. He chose to ring in the morning, when she was likely to be alone, but the voice that answered him was that of Leslie Titmuss in a hurry.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘Of course it’s me. You sound disappointed.’

  ‘Not at all. I just wanted to tell your wife I’ve made it clear to everyone here that she never agreed to be a member.’

  ‘You mean you told the truth? I hope it wasn’t too great an effort. I’ll let her know.’ The telephone clicked and then buzzed angrily. Fred put it down and set off on his rounds. He thought that ringing Jenny again might make life difficult for her and he didn’t want to encounter Titmuss. For their next meeting he would have to rely on chance. Until that happened he thought more often about Jenny and less about many years ago when he went to meet Agnes Salter in a hut in the woods.

  A few weeks later in the Badger in Skurfield, Fred sat behind the old drum set, got down from the attic, and in remembrance of things past underlined the deep, mournful and persistent beat of ‘St James Infirmary’. The Riverside Stompers had got together again. The group consisted of Joe Sneeping from the off-licence in Hartscombe on trumpet (he also supplied the vocals and tried to confine the band strictly to music played in New Orleans during the Prohibition era), Terry Fawcett from Marmaduke’s garage on clarinet, and Den Kitson from the Brewery who performed no better on the banjo than he did on the guitar or bass. They hadn’t played together for a number of years and now they had blown the dust off their instruments in the hope of blasting the developers out of the Rapstone Valley. Once, in the heyday of rock ’n’
roll, they had been shouted down by teenage tearaways in this same pub and had Coca-Cola cans thrown at them for singing that very blues number. Now the belligerent teenagers, filled to the brim with Fortissimo lager, were busy fighting more dangerous battles in the pedestrian walkways of Hartscombe and Worsfield. The audience for the Stompers’ jazz were elderly and respectable, the sort that, when Fred was young, had sat respectfully through Gilbert and Sullivan operas. They wore anoraks and Fair Isle sweaters and the girlfriends they had once taken to hear Humphrey Lyttelton or Chris Barber were now grandmothers who in some cases brought their grandchildren. This newer generation sat wide-eyed at music as remote from their times as Byrd or Monteverdi, amazed that its sadness should give such obvious pleasure to those who played it.

  And then, finishing a complex riff on the drums, Fred looked up and saw Jenny standing by the bar, ferreting in the depths of her handbag to pay for the half pint of bitter she had ordered. Looking dizzily down a precipice of years he saw himself sitting behind the drums in the garage where the Stompers used to rehearse, on the night when Agnes Salter walked in and stood, listening quietly until she announced her need for money because she was pregnant, a situation which he then proceeded to mismanage. Now, when Joe Sneeping, in the New Orleans accent he had learnt off countless records, told them they could take ten, Fred stepped off the platform and made his way towards Jenny. In her way, it seemed to him, she was in trouble and he didn’t mean to fail again.

  ‘It was good of you to come.’

  Jenny and Elsie Titmuss, in their new-found friendship, sometimes shared pub lunches. Jenny had seen a notice pinned up advertising the Stompers concert on a night when Leslie was the guest of the Euro MPs in the Midlands, an event which he had considerately spared her.

  ‘You like jazz?’

  ‘I’m not exactly an expert. My husband used to listen to it all the time.’

  ‘That’s odd’ – Fred turned from her for a moment to order himself a pint of the family bitter – ‘I can’t remember Leslie being so ecstatic about the brothel music of the Deep South. I mean, we were never offered Titmuss on tenor sax. Not so far as I can remember.’

  ‘Not Leslie!’ Jenny smiled. ‘My first husband. Who died.’ She was surprised by how easy it had become to say it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ She lifted the mug of beer which her wrist looked too thin to keep steady. ‘I ought to say I’m sorry. That silly muddle about me joining your group of protesters.’

  ‘I hope that didn’t get you into trouble?’

  ‘Not really.’ She was looking at him across the surface of her beer. Then she drank, put her mug down on the bar and said, ‘Of course, Leslie’s got his politics to look after.’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Did he? When?’

  ‘When he came to see me. To tell me you didn’t mean that about joining us.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood …’

  ‘No.’ Although she was looking away from him now and down at the bar, and though her face was hidden from him by a veil of dark hair, her voice was clear and determined. ‘You didn’t misunderstand. I told you I wanted to join.’

  ‘And now you can’t?’ It was as far as he could safely go in trying to form an alliance against the deviousness of Titmuss.

  ‘I suppose not. What a ridiculous position to be in. I just didn’t want you to think I’d, well, lied about anything.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t think that.’ But he had thought that she had, or had been forced to do so by her husband. That moment, when she looked up at him and seemed to be on his side, was the most splendid that the Save Our Valley Society had yet produced. Then he heard Joe Sneeping call him from the platform and he had to go back to open the second half with ‘St Louis Blues’. He played with a new vigour and, it seemed to him, a return of youth. In the middle of ‘Slow Boat to China’, introduced into the Stompers’ repertoire despite the purist protests of Joe Sneeping, Jenny left quietly to go back to her house and wait for her husband. She lifted her hand to Fred on her way out and he felt that, in returning her salute, he was waving goodbye to a small soldier off to the front line of battle.

  Chapter Twenty

  Leslie Titmuss couldn’t find a photograph of Tony Sidonia.

  What he now felt about Jenny’s first husband was something different from the vague and jealous unease which had come over him in a Roman square during their honeymoon. Now it was as though Sidonia had entered their marriage, deliberately challenged him and made him look mean and dishonest. When he had dealt with the matter of Jenny’s sudden adherence to S.O.V., and had arranged it in the way he was accustomed to settle countless small difficulties in the course of his working life, Leslie felt that Sidonia was observing him, looking down with amused contempt at the way he rearranged the facts to suit his own purposes. And in this conflict between two men, one of whom was dead, he was afraid that he knew which side his wife was on.

  Thinking about it, as he found himself doing a lot of the time, Leslie came to the conclusion that he couldn’t believe in Tony Sidonia and the thought brought him much comfort. On the whole, and in spite of the comfort and reassurance of power, Leslie still held a simple view of human nature. Mankind, it was his considered opinion, was motivated by greed. The carrot was money, the stick failure, bankruptcy, ‘jobloss’ (as he liked to call unemployment) or, in the most obstinate cases, a cardboard box to sleep in by the Worsfield canal. This was the simple mechanism by which people moved forward, obtained a larger share of the market, built tunnels and motorways, erected new cities and gutted and rebuilt old ones. Money was to be found, not in building ships, tilling the land or mining for coal but in countless ‘service industries’, selling computers to revolve money, peddling insurance policies, advertising more and more different varieties of indistinguishable washing powder, lager or cigarettes. By and large, it might be said, and even was said by Leslie when in a more than usually caustic mood, England had become a nation of hairdressers. But if they were happy hairdressers, well supplied with cars and videos and a large variety of undemanding television channels, if, above all, they were hairdressers who were content to go on voting for Leslie and the ‘colleagues’, he had no particular objection to them. What he couldn’t stand, what enraged him and made him mutter ‘Humbug!’ and ‘Hypocrite!’, although not at present in the hearing of his wife, were people who suggested that human behaviour could be attributed to motives other than a laudable desire to ‘do well’ and provide a decent home for the children. Such a one, he saw quite clearly, was Sidonia.

  And yet, in spite of his high moral attitudes, his unreasoning addiction to telling the truth, his bloody air of uncalled-for superiority, what had Sidonia done in the world? He had died leaving nothing but a still mortgaged house in Oxford. He had devoted his life to digging up unsavoury details about the lives of long-dead Princes of the Church, work which created no jobs and trained no one to survive in the harsh world of the marketplace. Sidonia, for all his pretensions, had achieved nothing. And then he remembered that his rival had achieved something which was very precious to Leslie, he had achieved Jenny.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what he looked like.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sidonia.’

  ‘Why should you want to know?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘I see.’

  But Sue Bramble didn’t see. Neither did she have any idea why Leslie had asked her to lunch. Having seen him with Jenny, and been startled by his obvious pride in her, and the intensity with which he seemed to look only at her, it never occurred to Sue that there was anything even mildly flirtatious about the invitation. And yet she believed that Leslie, like God, did nothing without a purpose, however obscure his aims might be to ordinary mortals. So they sat together in the restaurant where he had once dined with Jenny, near the flat which Sue now had to herself, and she was nerv
ous, not knowing what precisely was going on, and afraid for her friend. She said, ‘You will look after Jenny, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you know that’s all I want to do?’

  ‘Yes. I do know that.’ Although she couldn’t bring herself to trust him entirely, she was prepared to take his word about looking after her friend. She also, in spite of herself, felt flattered to have been chosen to receive the politician’s confidence.

  ‘The odd thing is that Jenny hasn’t got a picture of him at home. Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘You’ve asked her?’

  ‘No. I’ve looked.’

  ‘I see.’ Sue felt a chill at the idea of him choosing some moment when Jenny was out shopping, or in the garden, to quietly open drawers and peer into possible hiding-places, putting things back so that his search shouldn’t be discovered. And then the head waiter interrupted them to ask Leslie to sign a menu for some admirers at the next table. Men in suits and grey-haired women were smiling at them and Sue couldn’t help feeling important in the politician’s company.

  ‘I’ve looked and I can’t find any trace of him at all,’ he said when he had signed with a flourish.

  ‘She left behind all the traces when she moved in with you. You should be flattered.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Of course. So you don’t have to think about it really, do you? Just go on as if Tony Sidonia never existed.’

  ‘But he did, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And I don’t suppose anyone who knew him will forget him.’