Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘You were splendid!’ Jenny told him.

  ‘I sounded like a diehard old Tory, didn’t I? Keep the world safe for peasants and game birds. That sort of thing. That’s the trouble with these people. We used to feel like young revolutionaries, now they seem to have turned us into the last defenders of the old regime.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which people is it the trouble with?’

  ‘Oh. I mean the new radical, tear it all down and start again, Conservative party …’

  ‘You mean people like Leslie?’

  ‘Well …’ Fred hadn’t wanted to say that, not knowing how Jenny might take an attack on her husband.

  ‘That’s who you mean.’ They were in a pub, cosy as an aircraft hangar and only a little smaller, opposite the council offices. Jenny took a gulp of the white wine she had asked for and pulled a face.

  ‘Is it all right?’ Fred was concerned.

  ‘Fine. Except that it tastes of slightly chilled, watered-down paraffin with a touch of vanilla essence.’

  He laughed at the accuracy of her description. ‘I’ll get you a beer. It’s probably safer.’

  ‘I don’t know what Leslie wants, quite honestly,’ she said when he came back from the bar. He looked at her with excitement, feeling that she was about to confide in him. Indeed, she was. She felt at home with Fred, as she had with Tony, and that she could tell him anything and he wouldn’t laugh at her, or make her feel an idiot, and probably, in nine cases out of ten at least, tell her something which would be a help. She was on the point of saying, I don’t know what Leslie wants. He’s started to ask me all sorts of questions about my first husband, a man who has been dead for six years now, who was as different from Leslie as chalk from cheese, who I couldn’t explain to Leslie if I sat down and talked from now to September but who, in some ways, which I feel is slightly unnerving, was a little like you, Dr Simcox. She might have said all that but she knew she would have regretted it. It would, after all, have been disloyal to Leslie. So she said, ‘I’m still sure he doesn’t want the new town.’

  ‘That’s encouraging. Let’s drink to that.’ So they raised two glasses of Simcox’s lager and clinked them together.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘Mr Sidonia? He’s been dead a long time.’

  ‘Of course I know that. But he was one of your most famous dons, after all, at St Joseph’s. I just wondered if you remember him?’

  ‘Remember him? Of course we remember him. Everyone except my colleague, that is, who was no doubt still in his rompers when Mr Sidonia passed on.’ The square-faced porter peered out of his cubby-hole at the college entrance; somewhere in the background his colleague, who wore a single discreet earring, was fitting letters into pigeonholes. Girls and young men surrounded Nubble, reading notices and holding hands or embracing so flagrantly, despite the freezing weather, that he felt soured by jealousy. He was also tired and out of breath, having walked from Oxford station so that he could make a small profit on the cab fare. ‘Mr Sidonia,’ the porter said, as though to close the conversation, ‘was a very nice gentleman. Very nice indeed.’

  ‘Popular with the students?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘You had girl students when he was here, didn’t you?’

  ‘If you’ve got an appointment with Sir Willoughby, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Through the arch and in the far left-hand corner. That’s the door to the lodgings.’ So Arthur Nubble was sent about his business and he crossed the quad, whipped by the icy wind from the cloisters which had frozen generations of undergraduates on their way to the bathroom. When the secretary showed him into the Master’s presence, Nubble reminded Sir Willoughby that he was writing a series on famous heads of colleges for the Fortress colour magazine, which was the cover story it had amused him to adopt. The Master, who knew the value of publicity in these tough, fund-raising times, received him with an effusive handshake and a small glass of the sherry he kept aside for students. He then talked persuasively about his own career, his remarkable insight into the life-cycle of the prawn and the essential part the Blane Biology Library would play in Britain’s future. The government had been amazingly short-sighted about it and he wondered if some great philanthropist, such as the proprietor of the Fortress, might perhaps be interested.

  ‘He might well be.’ Arthur Nubble considered the matter seriously. ‘Particularly in view of the distinguished scholars you’ve had at St Joseph’s. I was thinking of Anthony Sidonia, on history.’ This journalist said it, Sir Willoughby thought, rather as though history were a musical instrument in a jazz band. ‘He was very popular, wasn’t he, among the students?’

  ‘Tony?’ Sir Willoughby looked suitably distressed. ‘Tragic early death, of course. So many of our older dons wouldn’t have been missed half as much. Yes. Of course he was popular with the students. Not quite so popular with other history teachers.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Nubble opened his notebook for the first time during the interview. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Well, he spoke about his subject on television. He did it rather well and looked quite attractive. A lot of less photogenic historians felt rather sour about it. Touch of the showman, they said, about Tony Sidonia.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think so.’ The Master liked nothing better than to relay old gossip. ‘They suggested he only got the job because his then girlfriend worked in television. But she was only a researcher, I believe, and I don’t think that had anything to do with it. Anyway, the programmes were very popular. Academics hate that.’

  ‘Of course they were extremely interesting,’ said Nubble, who hadn’t seen them.

  ‘Indeed, yes.’ Sir Willoughby hadn’t seen them either. ‘I’m sure the criticism wasn’t justified. Although I believe Tony never really got to grips with Savonarola. Not that I’d know. I’m only a poor biologist.’

  ‘I think I might have met the girl who worked on those programmes. What was her name again?’

  ‘Briar, was it? Something decidedly prickly. No. Bramble. Sarah, or perhaps Susan, Bramble. She turned up at a secretarial college here and then she found her way into the B.B.C. Most girls seem to, in the end.’

  ‘I suppose he met her before he married.’

  ‘Oh, yes. He knew La Bramble long before he met Jenny. Moved her out, I believe, before he proposed anything so outrageous as matrimony. Not that Jenny isn’t an absolutely super girl. You’ve spoken to her, I suppose?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘I’ve never known what mental aberration led her to take up with that appallingly common Cabinet Minister. We had a sweet, gentle fellow here who taught Anglo-Saxon, and he fell passionately in love with a most disagreeable Detective Inspector who used to treat the poor old dear just like a criminal, interrogate him and so on … By the way, that’s not for publication.’

  Nubble, scribbling energetically, looked up sharply at the Master’s description of his employer. Sir Willoughby wondered if he had gone too far; the Fortress, after all, was not a paper to look sympathetically on critics of the government.

  ‘Who was the chap you say Tony never got to grips with?’ Nubble was frowning at his notebook. ‘Savannah something?’

  ‘Savonarola.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting him, if he’s still around.’ History had never been Nubble’s strongest suit and he had soon left the public school he attended with the Simcox brothers to open an espresso coffee bar.

  ‘I’m afraid not. They burnt him in Florence quite early in the sixteenth century.’ The Master tried to be fair and tell himself that no doubt persons with no particular claim to education now wrote on academic matters for the quality papers. He decided to give the dubious candidate one more chance.

  ‘Tony wasn’t the only distinguished St Joseph’s man. You know, we did have Isaac Newton.’

  ‘Of course.’ Nubble, who had heard of Isaac Newton, nodded wisely. ‘I’ll remind my
readers of that, Sir Willoughby.’ But the Master, feeling that every schoolboy should know that Newton went to Trinity, Cambridge, fled to his secretary’s room where he telephoned Tim Warboys, another St Joseph’s man who had achieved stardom, and discovered that nothing was known of Arthur Nubble in the Fortress features department or, indeed, of any article on famous heads of colleges. He didn’t reappear but the secretary told Nubble that a crisis in the marine biology lab had brought the interview to a premature end.

  Despite this sudden conclusion the sleuth felt reasonably satisfied with his morning’s work. He was getting closer to Tony Sidonia and although he had as yet learned little to his subject’s disadvantage he felt that his employer would admire his persistence and the ingenuity of his various disguises. When he got back to London he started to make inquiries of the B.B.C., becoming an independent film and television producer interested in a reissue of Tony Sidonia’s brilliant programme ‘In the Shadow of the Triple Crown’, and perhaps speaking to some of the people who had worked on it.

  Sue Bramble was in low spirits. She felt something she had not experienced before. She was lonely. Naturally high-spirited and gregarious, she thrived on variety, changing her jobs as frequently as she changed her lovers, and greeting each new arrival with the enthusiastic certainty that she had hit upon the perfect answer to her problems. She had not found work or love difficult to come by. When she was doing her secretarial course at Oxford she had been a constant figure at undergraduate and indeed graduate parties. She’d worked in bookshops, as a waitress in a succession of restaurants and in a shop full of exotic second-hand dresses in the covered market. When she parted from Tony and he married, she moved to London and got her job at the B.B.C. She progressed rapidly from secretary to researcher to the director’s assistant during Tony’s programme on the Renaissance Popes. Later, working on a documentary about the turf, she met her trainer, helped out in his office for a while and made many new friends. When her situation with him grew complicated she came back to Oxford and wrote stories for various racing papers. When Tony Sidonia died, she and Jenny seemed to be drawn more closely together by the disappearance of the man they had both loved. So they had decided to share a flat in London.

  Now she was alone in the flat. Teddy Blaze, the Newbury trainer, whom she had urged for so long to leave his wife and marry her, and who had so often promised and failed to do so, rang to say that he was to be divorced. He was now free and available. He drove up to London at great speed and knocked at the door of the flat, loaded with champagne and roses. As Sue saw him standing there, flushed with his belated achievement, she felt the excitement drain away from their relationship like cooling bath-water. Not only could she no longer marry him, she could hardly bear to be taken out by him. In the restaurant they went to she sat mostly in silence, only criticizing him occasionally. At last she had to beg him, for his own protection, not to ring her or try to take her out again. When he wrote to tell her that he was engaged to marry a girl groom some twenty years younger, who lived in Didcot, she felt nothing but relief.

  Since her friend had got married, Sue had taken over Jenny’s job. She sat all day, dazed by the white walls and bored by the abstract paintings, trying her best not to become involved in the disastrous private life of Mark Vanberry, the gallery owner. In this she succeeded but, far too often for her own self-esteem, she came home to an empty flat to wash her hair and watch the television. On many such evenings she wanted to ring Jenny and laugh and gossip as they once did. What stopped her was not just Jenny’s marriage – her amazed disapproval of Leslie had never come between them – but she had felt, curiously enough, more remote from her friend as she had come to find Leslie Titmuss more bearable. And now there was another reason: she had shown him Tony’s photographs, she had had what amounted to a secret lunch with him. She had been manoeuvred, against her better judgement, into a conspiracy and she had promised to say nothing to Jenny about it. It was that small act of treachery that made Sue uncomfortable at the idea of telephoning. And Jenny didn’t ring her. She was reluctant to tell Sue about Leslie’s curious questions about Tony, and yet she didn’t want to keep this latest development a secret from her friend with whom she had always discussed everything. So the shadow of Leslie Titmuss fell between them, and Sue was left wondering why on earth she had done what he asked her.

  So, when the telephone rang one lonely evening, she half hoped it was Jenny and dreaded that it might be Mark Vanberry. In fact it was a somewhat husky male voice who made sure she was Miss Bramble and then announced that Atmos Films Limited was going into the production of historical and artistic documentary films. Would she be interested in joining the team? ‘I was much impressed by the work you did on that beautiful programme “In the Shadow of the Triple Crown”. Might I have the pleasure of taking you to lunch? Shall we say tomorrow, if you’re free, at the Groucho Club? The name’s Nubble. Arthur Nubble … Oh, and by the way, can you put me in touch with anyone else who worked on that magnificent production?’

  The snow turned to slush which was washed away by incessant rain. Hector Bolitho Jones slid and skidded around his woods, shrouded in a yellow waterproof cape. He shook the drops from his beard as a dog shakes itself dry. The badgers emerged at night into a cold monsoon and scuttered back into their setts. Although there were signs of buds on the branches and specks of green pushing through the black earth, Rapstone Nature Area was then no place for lovers. Through that month and the next Gregory Boland sat in the spare bedroom of his concrete-block house, surrounded by piles of maps, documents and transcripts of evidence, and wrote his report on the future of that particular countryside. During the bad weather Arthur Nubble completed his inquiries.

  When the sun returned, making the soaked grass steam, two men in overcoats were to be seen walking past the great mulberry tree in the garden of St Joseph’s College.

  ‘It isn’t so much a moral question,’ Sir Willoughby was explaining. ‘It’s more a problem of educational technology.’

  ‘You mean, dons shouldn’t go to bed with their students?’

  ‘It’s not the bed part so much. It’s what it leads to. A warping of the pupil–teacher relationship, favouritism in tutorials, sexually induced marking, and then, when it all busts up, tears in lectures and feelings of rejection that may seriously impair the performance at finals. That’s why we don’t find bed-hopping with pupils acceptable conduct at St Joseph’s. Of course, there have been exceptions.’

  ‘What exceptions?’

  ‘Well. I can’t remember exactly.’ The Master became vague and avoided Leslie Titmuss’s pale and persistent stare. ‘But there must have been exceptions.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions about one of your dons. Sidonia.’

  ‘Well, he does seem to have become the flavour of the month. The last few months, anyway.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘I had a most extraordinary fellow here asking about Tony. This man said he was working for the Fortress. I suspected that was a lie.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘You know about him?’

  ‘He was working for me.’

  The Master thought it best to conceal his astonishment and to say nothing.

  ‘He was making certain inquiries for me about Sidonia.’

  ‘This Mr Nobble?’

  ‘Nubble. I suppose he made a prize idiot of himself, didn’t he?’

  ‘He knew absolutely nothing about Savonarola, and very little about Sir Isaac Newton.’

  ‘He had his uses, filling in the background. I’m relying on you to complete the picture.’

  In a moment of wild speculation Sir Willoughby guessed that Tony had been a crypto-Communist, a spy, a traitor, the fifth man, or sixth, and now, after his death, the subject of government inquiries. He was not to know that his crime was to have been the first man in Jenny Sidonia’s affections.

  ‘I don’t see how I can help. I really didn’t know a great deal about Tony’s private life.’
<
br />   ‘Nonsense! You know all about the private lives of everyone in your college.’ Leslie stopped on the spongy lawn, apparently not feeling the east wind which was making the Master long for tea and anchovy toast by the fire in his lodgings. ‘Is that where it’s going to stand?’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘The Blane Biology Library.’ Leslie was looking at a great expanse on which, he had reason to suppose, planning permission might be given. ‘I’ve made some inquiries, the D.E.S. has a certain fund for educational developments of special value to industry and commerce.’

  As in a dream the Master saw the tasteful building in Cotswold stone. In the hallway there would be a statue, wouldn’t there, or at least a bust, of his good self? It would be, as he had no child, his single, magnificent claim to immortality.

  ‘Secretary of State. Is there really any hope –?’

  ‘I shall have, of course, to talk to colleagues.’ Now Leslie gripped Sir Willoughby’s forearm and turned to more immediate matters. ‘For the moment I have just a few more questions about Sidonia. Number one. I expect you remember a girl who was a friend of his called Susan Bramble?’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gregory Boland worked long and tirelessly on his report. He tabulated the evidence and classified and reclassified it under various headings, ‘Sewage’, ‘Traffic Volume’, ‘Rail Access’, ‘Population Density’ and ‘Commercial Opportunities’. He looked again and again at the beguiling drawings of children playing in the pedestrian precincts and he remembered the walks he had taken on the site, the cathedral hush in the middle of beech woods soon, perhaps, to be broken for ever and to be broken by him. And yet, he told himself, being a reasonable man as well as honest, neither life nor architecture could stand still. The English, sooner or later, must face up to the fact that it was a myth that they lived in a series of delightful villages, strung like jewels across some rustic landscape. They would have to wake up and realize that they lived along motorway routes and by service stations in some vast and anonymous suburb which stretched from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, punctuated by theme parks and shopping malls. If that was the future, was it after all so terrible? It meant jobs for many people, including architects and town planners as well as policemen, sewage workers and girls at supermarket check-outs. The country needed houses which, like motor cars, were a sign of healthy prosperity. Those who wished to spend their days in uninterrupted contemplation of the great crested grebe could, as Counsel for Kempenflatts had ventured to suggest in a peculiarly acid final speech, move to the Highlands of Scotland. Gregory Boland, who had come from the Highlands, had no intention of going back there, however the English landscape developed.