Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  The café was still open, filled with muzak and the smell of frying. In the passage outside it a few tired men were playing with the Space Invader machines which squeaked and gibbered complainingly. Jenny sat in a corner, among empty tables. In the distance a Sikh family, the men in anoraks and turbans, the women with plastic macs over their saris, the children falling asleep among plates of egg and chips, were resting, on some endless journey. Nearer to her a grey-haired man and a girl who looked very young were talking in low voices and holding hands. Was it a father recovering his runaway daughter or two apparently ill-suited lovers escaping? Jenny knew she wasn’t the only one with troubles, a thought which seemed to clear her mind a little.

  She thought a lot about her grandmother Paget and the house in St Leonards where the sea muttered all night and the doors and windows rattled in the wind. With so much of her faith shattered and still needing someone she could trust, the small woman in the floppy shower-hat who plunged into the waves on Boxing Day seemed the only person capable of filling the role. Granny Paget had, like Tony Sidonia, been dead for a long time and the house in St Leonards-on-Sea had been sold, or Jenny might have turned her car southwards. She would have liked, more than anything now, to be battling against the wind with her grandmother along the prom. As she thought of it, she could feel her mind clearing further. She would have told the old lady the whole story. It would have been received, no doubt, without any particular surprise, and over the ‘slap-up tea’ in the sitting-room afterwards, when the fire was lit and the circulation starting to return to her toes and fingers, she would have got her answer.

  But what would the answer have been? She remembered Granny Paget’s contempt for lies and ‘fairy tales’ and the brusque way in which she had dismissed her mother’s failure to understand ‘the importance of sticking to things’. She could also imagine what her grandmother would have had to say about men who imported detectives into their married lives. Jenny sat for a long time in front of half a cup of cold coffee thinking about these things. When she left the motorway café it was already light. She now drove with some idea, at least, of where she was going.

  When she got to the Rapstone Valley there was a mist on the ground from which low hills and clumps of woodland emerged into the pink light of a landscape as in a Chinese painting. As she approached the road past the Nature Area, she heard an eerie sound which might have seemed, to a nervous ear, to be the lamentation of souls in torment. When she turned the corner she saw a surprisingly large crowd of people, some still holding candles which flickered in the daylight, surrounded by vans, cars and television cameras. Their banners and placards, fluttering in the breeze, read SAVE OUR VALLEY, SAY NO TO FALLOWFIELD and LISTEN TO US, TITMUSS. Blocked from going further, she stopped and rolled down her window. A man approached her, carrying pamphlets.

  ‘We haven’t all been here all night,’ Fred told her. ‘But they did a piece about us on the news and it’s extraordinary the number who’ve come. Students from Worsfield, Hartscombe people on their way to work. Almost everyone who lives in the valley. Are you sure you’re all right? You look exhausted.’

  ‘I look terrible.’ She remembered what Sue Bramble had told her. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been up all night.’

  When he had put his head through her car window, Fred had smiled at her and invited her to breakfast. With the window open she realized how hungry she was and how cold. There was no reason why she couldn’t stay a little and let more time cushion her from a final decision. She let him direct her into a lay-by and when she was parked he took her to a place where the landlord of the Baptist’s Head had brought out urns of tea and coffee, bacon rolls and piles of sandwiches. Now they had moved a little away from the crowd and she was warming her hands on a plastic cup.

  ‘If you were up all night,’ he said, ‘you should have joined us. You’d’ve had a marvellous time, singing “We Shall Overcome” with your teeth chattering. Oh, I forgot. You’re not allowed to do that sort of thing, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked down into her coffee cup. ‘God knows what I’ll be able to do now.’

  She had said too much, out of tiredness and loneliness, and a longing to speak to someone who was alive and would listen. Fred felt a sudden and irrational hope.

  ‘Why now?’ he asked. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Something, I suppose.’

  ‘With you and Leslie?’

  She was too tired to be careful. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘With me and Leslie. Last night.’

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose if anything’s serious this is. I’ll drink my coffee and go. I don’t want to bore you.’

  ‘Of course you won’t bore me. Anyway, you can talk to me. People tell me things. I’m a doctor.’

  She looked up at him hopefully. He knew she wanted to tell him her story. But no longer as a friend, still less, he was afraid, in spite of all his fantasies, as a potential lover. He had put a professional distance between them. If she confided in him now it would be for medicinal purposes only.

  ‘I might want to tell you, sometime,’ she said. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Please do.’ Now he thought the best thing he could do for her was to entertain her. ‘I’ve become a bit of an expert on marriage guidance.’

  ‘Marriage guidance?’ She repeated his words in wonder.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve discovered it’s a most powerful aphrodisiac. I had a patient. I can’t tell you who it was but …’ Like many doctors and lawyers, those to whom confidences are given, Fred found it hard to keep a secret. He started to tell Jenny about Evie and Len Bigwell.

  Leslie Titmuss had got up early as usual and found Jenny’s car gone and although he went all over the silent house looking, he discovered no note, no message, nothing. He stood for a moment, uncertain, and then he told himself that she would be back. Of course she would. Where else, after all, had she to go? He went through the scene of the night before and saw nothing unreasonable or untrue in what he had told her. He had, he thought, scored a notable victory and freed her from an old deception. Of course she would return and they would be closer to each other because he would now have no rival. This is what he told himself as he waited for his driver. By the time he got into his car and started for London he was convinced that he was right.

  On the road past the Nature Area he met the crowd of protesters. Their candles were out and they had stopped singing. The Hartscombe herbalist thumped the black bonnet of the Rover as it slowed to get past and there were a few shouts. Someone called, ‘Don’t be the valley vandal!’ and he gave them a pale smile and an almost royal wave of the hand. The demonstrators were too polite, or too much in awe of him, to stop the car, which accelerated past the last banner and a platoon of Curdles, who were cheering ironically.

  He was now travelling too fast to notice the couple drinking coffee under the shadows of the trees. Had he done so he might have been perturbed to see his wife with Fred Simcox. For the first time during that long night Jenny was laughing. By making her laugh Fred had given her courage for what she knew she must do next.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  INTERVIEWER: Mr Titmuss. You’ve announced that you’re prepared to give planning permission for a new town called Fallowfield to be built near Hartscombe, where you have a home?

  LESLIE: Yes. I said I’d leave the decision to the inquiry. That’s the democratic way we do things in this country.

  INTERVIEWER: It’s going to cause a bit of an upheaval for you, isn’t it? The town’s going to be built all over your back garden.

  LESLIE: You might say I’m used to upheavals. We caused a bit of an upheaval when we came to power, didn’t we? Anyway, what do you want me to do? Change our free enterprise policies just because they might cause me a bit of personal inconvenience?

  INTERVIEWER: Well, no. Of course not. But –

  LESLIE: That was the old Socialist way, wasn’t it? Preaching one thing and practising the other. Won
derful old clergyman I used to do odd jobs for when I was a boy –

  INTERVIEWER [who knows this bit by heart]: Cutting nettles –

  LESLIE: Cutting nettles was the easiest part of it! Cutting nettles was a holiday task compared with the other jobs that I had to do. Anyway, he never stopped his sermons about equality and the evils of capitalism. He could afford to do that on the private income he got from shares in the local brewery. Let me tell you this, my lad. Scrape a Socialist and you’ll find a member of the privileged elite.

  INTERVIEWER: Will you and your wife be moving, perhaps to somewhere more rural?

  LESLIE: And you can say what you like about the present government. We’re not a collection of hypocrites. We don’t vote one way and live the other. No, I don’t suppose I’ll be moving. My roots are in that part of England. That’s where my father was born, and my old mother of course. I expect I’ll stick with it and see it dragged into the twenty-first century. There’s a lot of wonderful opportunities ahead of us, you know.

  INTERVIEWER: Does that go for your wife also?

  LESLIE: I think you’ve had your interview now, haven’t you?

  At which the Secretary of State stood up, not before the tactful director had switched back to the presenter. Leslie, frowning and dangerous, marched out of the studio ignoring his interviewer’s stumbling apology and inquiries from an anxious girl about his waiting car. Once safe in the back of the official Rover and on his way home, he realized his mistake. They had no reason to know of the quarrel and Jenny’s disappearance. He had been foolish to get angry, and all he had done was to make an innocent question look damaging. ‘I expect, my lad, she’ll go where I go. That’s what she usually does.’ If he’d said that with the well-loved Titmuss chauvinism it would have stopped all rumours. In fact, at the mention of his wife, he had felt a rising panic. Suppose he had been wrong. Suppose Jenny had been foolish enough to refuse the challenge of adjusting herself to the truth about Sidonia. Suppose she had simply run away somewhere to hide from him and the uncomfortable facts he had been forced to tell her. Suppose that Jenny, unfairly and unjustifiably, was lost and gone from him for ever, just as Sidonia was lost and gone from her? As he peered into a bleak and lonely future, Leslie felt something which was unusual for him. His hands were sweating and he was afraid.

  So, when he reached his gates and saw, at the other end of the avenue of lime trees and in front of the green-grey walls of the house, Jenny’s small, shining Fiat, a huge weight of anxiety seemed to be lifted. As had happened so often in his life he had taken a risk and the gamble had paid off. He had refused to compromise or keep silent. He had taken the positive – he would like to have said, the bold and dangerous – action and he had been rewarded. Jenny had come back. No part of her, he was now sure, would have to be shared with the dissolute and deceiving Tony Sidonia.

  He dismissed his driver and went into the house. It was very quiet but the doors and windows were open. There was a fresh wind blowing through it as though someone had been trying to air the rooms after a long illness or a death. He called in all the downstairs rooms but got no answer. He went up the stairs. Perhaps she was asleep and hadn’t heard him. He opened the bedroom door gently but he needn’t have troubled. The room was empty. Then he crossed to the window and looked down on to a patch of lawn sheltered by tall yew hedges. And there she lay on her back, her arms and legs stretched out as though she had just fallen from the sky. He turned quickly and ran down the stairs to find her.

  Jenny had slept for a while where she lay on the damp grass, grateful for the silence. She heard him call her name and she sat up blinking. He thought how pale she looked and how exhausted. ‘I thought you’d be back,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I came back. There’s no point in not forgiving.’

  ‘Forgiving?’ He couldn’t believe it. ‘You don’t mean you’ve forgiven Sidonia?’

  ‘That’s not important. I mean forgiving you. I was going to make some tea. Do you want some?’

  She got up quickly and left him. He stood still for a while, trying to make sense of what she had said. When he knew that he was angry he followed her.

  She was in the kitchen when he said, ‘What the hell have you got to forgive me for?’

  She had her back turned towards him, filling a kettle. ‘What you did to me. I don’t suppose you could’ve thought of anything much worse. I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  ‘Well, I do!’ He was sure of himself, of course, and sure he was in the right. ‘I suppose you kidded yourself I was all wrong about your late husband. You think I’ve slandered his blessed memory!’

  ‘No. Not that. I went to see Sue.’

  ‘And I suppose she lied to you?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid she told me the truth.’

  ‘So. What am I supposed to have done wrong?’

  ‘I don’t see that there’s any point in talking about it.’ She put the kettle on the hotplate of the Aga, where it began to spit and rattle. She tried not to hear him shouting, ‘I see the point! I’ve a right to know what you’ve got against me!’ She felt him grip her wrist to hold her, so she couldn’t escape. She thought he might free her if she told him. ‘I had a life,’ she said. ‘It was mine until I met you. I was in love with a man. He might have tricked me. I don’t know why he should have but I suppose he did. Anyway, I loved him. He’s dead now. So there’s nothing to be done about it. But to pay someone money to pry and peer into everything that happened to me! Behind my back …’

  ‘Sidonia did things behind your back, remember.’

  ‘Perhaps for love.’

  ‘Why do you think I did it?’

  ‘How can I tell? I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Because it was my right, that’s why. I always came second.’

  ‘You came afterwards. Did that give you a right to spy on me?’

  ‘Not on you. On him!’

  ‘On someone dead?’

  ‘Not dead to you. That’s what I told you. I’m not ashamed of what I did. Why should I be?’ He looked at her, as though for reassurance, but she gave him none. Instead she pulled away from him and he let her go.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be ashamed for you.’ She found the teapot, warmed it and put two spoonfuls of tea in carefully, as though these small actions deserved her full attention. Then she started, as calmly as she could, to explain. ‘I’ve thought about it all as much as I can –’

  ‘And talked to your friend Sue Bramble, who cheated you?’

  His voice was full of contempt and at once Jenny felt as protective of Sue as she had been of Tony. Blazing with unusual anger, she heard her voice, from what seemed a long way off, shouting, ‘I think you did something awful. So awful that I still can’t believe it. No one had the right to do that to me. No one! But I took a risk when I married you. A deliberate risk. I didn’t really know what you’d be like. You’ve turned out to be like this. It’s who you are.’ She was quiet again now. ‘All right. We’ll try and forget this happened. Perhaps we can.’

  ‘You want to forget about Sidonia?’

  ‘About what you’ve done. If we’re going to live together.’

  He looked at her for what seemed a long time in silence. Then, ‘You want to live with me?’ He said it like a challenge.

  ‘I want to stay with whatever we’ve got left. I don’t want to run away.’ The kettle was boiling and she made the tea, pouring it out through a strainer. ‘It’s important to stick to things. Not like my mother. I don’t want to be like her.’

  ‘You want to forgive me.’

  ‘Please’ – she had never felt so tired, she thought, in all her life – ‘there’s nothing else to say.’

  ‘Did you go to the Doctor?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you tell Fred Simcox your troubles?’

  ‘Perhaps … I started to.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Leslie looked suddenly triumphant, as though he had found out something else unpleasant. ‘And d
id he tell you to forgive me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just the sort of bloody patronizing thing he would do. Tell him that when you next see him. I don’t want to be forgiven.’

  ‘I won’t tell him. No one else has got anything to do with it.’

  ‘Not by you. Not by him. Not by anyone. You understand?’

  ‘Perhaps forgiven’s the wrong word.’ His fury seemed, she thought, to come from suffering and she wanted, now that they were to stay together, to console him.

  ‘What’s the right word? Overlook? Make allowances because I don’t know any better? Maybe my feelings aren’t quite as delicate as yours and your friends’. Oh, Leslie Titmuss, he wears the wrong tie and the wrong suit, but you’ve got to make excuses. He was tactless enough to tell the truth in a common sort of way. The poor bastard doesn’t know any better, so we’ll have to forgive him. You think I want to spend the rest of my life being forgiven by you? Do you think I’m going to sit here being tolerated?’

  ‘You won’t be,’ she promised. ‘We won’t ever talk about it.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We won’t talk about it because we won’t be together. We can’t be now.’

  ‘Why not?’ She was almost too tired to ask him.

  ‘Because I’m not prepared to forgive you for forgiving me. That’s why. For God’s sake, can’t you understand?’

  He opened his hand then and, quite deliberately, dropped the cup and saucer he was holding. He moved to the table and sat, apparently calm. Jenny said nothing but fetched a dustpan and brush and swept the pieces up from the stone floor, grieving for the china that was broken.

  ‘There’s going to be a new town,’ he told her. ‘That’s decided. You won’t like it. Your friend the Doctor’s going to hate it. I can’t be sure I’ll like it much myself. I tried to stop it for you, but in the end I couldn’t. Perhaps that’s the best that can happen. Things can’t stand still, can they? It’s no good being in love with the past all your life. That’s what we’re in power to tell people.’