Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  In the most expensive areas of the country town the roads had been privatized and the householders who lived behind locked gates had men from security firms always on the beat. ‘The Spruces’ didn’t occupy such an area. The old house had stood for a long time at the end of a row of shops in Babcock-Syme Boulevard and, while she lived, Elsie Titmuss had worked doubly hard to keep it clear of dust from the construction work going on around it. Elsie died before the house was finally pulled down to be rebuilt according to the architects’ specification for that part of Fallowfield.

  During the period of rebuilding, Leslie Titmuss travelled a good deal, going to America, Canada and Australia, partly to promote his book of memoirs which he had called, summing up his childhood labours and what he still felt to be the daring and radical nature of his political career, Grasping the Nettle. He never saw Jenny and although his solicitors had offered her a large settlement she refused it. When he moved into the newly built ‘Spruces’, he was photographed crossing the threshold with a smile which might have been ironical.

  Jenny and Sue Bramble shared the flat again and lived together almost as they had in the days before Leslie Titmuss sent his gift of the orchid. Jenny, wishing to find a reason for forgiving her friend, came to the conclusion that she wouldn’t have known the truth if it hadn’t been for Leslie’s unacceptable way of finding it out, and facts unearthed in that manner were far better buried again. For a while Sue’s guilt made her treat Jenny with exaggerated politeness and consideration, as though she were suffering from a fatal disease. At last Jenny told her to come off it and be in a bad mood if she felt like it, and their lives returned to normal. Sue went on working for Mark Vanberry at the art gallery and Mark, through the good offices of the lover of one of his ex-wives, found Jenny a job as a picture researcher. She advised publishers and magazines on illustrations and she found a good deal of satisfaction in tracking down paintings and drawings with some meaning to them, leaving the Abstract painters to Sue, who almost never rested her eyes on their work.

  For Jenny, the past seemed to have vanished. Remembering Tony, her first husband, had for long been her main occupation. Now he had left her because she no longer knew quite what to think of him. Her time with Leslie seemed insubstantial also, a dream which began with their first dinner and ended when he awoke her with the truth about Tony. So, in her new existence, she spent very little time remembering things.

  When Sue announced she was going to marry Mark Vanberry, Jenny was, at first, appalled. ‘How can you? He’ll get you muddled up with all those girlfriends and the wives who’re always hitting him and making scenes and, honestly, Mark of all people! He’s just got no talent for marriage.’

  ‘Oh, dear, do you really think so?’ Sue looked as though she might be dissuaded. ‘I used to say exactly the same sort of thing about your Mr Titmuss.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Jenny said. ‘Exactly!’ However, she knew that Sue wouldn’t take her advice and, in point of fact, it didn’t turn out badly at all. Sue was pregnant and Mark, as is the way with fathers in their fifties, became besotted with the baby. During the next four years she presented him with two other children, of whom he was also intensely proud. Mark began to look younger and less haunted. He was determined to stay alive in order to see as much of them as possible. He also put himself on an unusual diet of marital fidelity.

  So the Vanberrys became Jenny’s family. She stayed in their house and looked after the children when they went out or at times when Mark took Sue to America in search of more Abstract art. Jenny remembered the children’s birthdays, worried when they were ill and took them on expeditions into what was left of the countryside. On such trips she never went near the Rapstone Valley and she had no idea what Fallowfield Country Town looked like.

  It would be wrong to say that Jenny was unhappy but, although she had one or two discreet affairs, she never fell in love again. Like Fred Simcox she had loved two people in her life, and that was as much as she could manage.

  Fred thought that he had found a great value in Fallowfield; it reconciled him to death.

  A benevolent providence, he thought, or told himself he would have thought if he had believed in such a thing, mercifully allowed everything to deteriorate during one man’s lifetime. The summers got worse, the music noisier and more senseless, the buildings uglier, the roads more congested, the trains slower and dirtier, governments sillier and the news more depressing. Good things, glow-worms, barn owls, farmland, fish shops and girls who enjoyed being called beautiful, were slowly withdrawn. The process was no doubt a merciful one because, when he came to the end of his allotted span in a world so remote from the one he had grown up in, the average citizen was quite glad to go.

  When he thought like this Fred realized what had happened. Titmuss and his colleagues had done what he would never have believed possible. They had made him a conservative.

  He thought about this for a while and then told himself to stop indulging in such thoughts. Fallowfield Country Town was there and the Rapstone Valley was gone for ever. People in Fallowfield would continue to fall in love, give birth, play with their children, lie in bed together on Sunday mornings, make up quarrels, come home singing from the pubs and enjoy occasional happiness. Sometimes, seeing its familiar glow in the sky as they crawled home along the eight-lane motorway, they would think of Fallowfield as home and perhaps find it beautiful. He told himself all this, but was not entirely convinced.

  ‘Just as well they make these changes or no one would ever want to die.’ Fred was explaining his ideas to his old friend Agnes, who had cooked him dinner in her flat in London. It was a pleasantly untidy room which smelt of her perpetual French cigarettes. It was the only place Fred knew that smelled as France did when he was young, Calais now being as odourless as Fallowfield Country Town. In this room Agnes lived, cooked, wrote letters, and often, after going out to prepare a directors’ lunch or a Hampstead dinner party, stretched herself out on the hearthrug and fell asleep. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you really are cheerful tonight.’

  ‘Although Leslie Titmuss lives bang in the middle of the Country Town, he seems to enjoy it. He doesn’t give any sign of wanting to die.’

  ‘And Mrs Titmuss?’

  ‘Nothing more’s been seen of her. Nothing.’

  ‘You still think about her?’

  ‘Not as much as I think about you,’ Fred assured Agnes. ‘I mean, I have so much more to think about when it comes to us. But sometimes she does cross my mind. Mainly, I suppose, because of the mystery.’

  ‘What mystery?’

  ‘Why she ever took up with Leslie. And why she left him. I don’t know how he did it, but he had a few years of her life.’

  ‘Does that make you jealous?’

  ‘It gives him more of her to think about. That is, if he ever thinks about her at all.’ He had no idea of what went on in the mind of the old back-bench M.P. who had once again become his patient. But then Fred had never entirely understood Leslie Titmuss. Even in Leslie’s comparatively harmless old age the Doctor could only look on the politician as some sort of natural disaster, at which people would always shake their heads and wonder.

  Of course Leslie Titmuss thought about Jenny.

  When he told Ken Cracken, long before, on an aeroplane bound for Luxembourg, that he had been mistaken, he didn’t only mean that he’d been mistaken about Fallowfield Country Town, although it was his defeat in that particular battle which had made him decide that the time had come for him to fire at his colleagues from the back benches. He meant that he had been, more deeply and importantly, mistaken about Jenny. He had thought that, bound together by the accident of their love, he had found an ally, a supporter, someone he could rely on for loyalty; but she had done the one thing which, if she had thought about it for a moment, she must have known would make their lives together impossible.

  He was prepared for almost any other reaction to his fair and necessary destruction of the Sidonia legend. He expected her to be
hurt, for a while. He thought she might be angry, again for a little while. She might have been desolated at the destruction of her past, until their lives together, starting again on a realistic basis, more than made up for anything she might have lost. But when she turned on him and forgave him, as though all the damage had been done by him and not Sidonia, he realized that she was, like Christopher Kempenflatt and his friends who, in their arrogance, had pushed him into the river, one of the enemy. As such she could never be trusted again.

  But of course he thought about her and memories of her, seductive and appealing as she had been, flitted across his mind. He was defended from them, as an anchorite might be by his vows of chastity, by his perfect certainty that he had been in the right. And perhaps, although he had resented Ken Cracken teaching him the lesson, he had been right about Fallowfield when he made his speech, so long ago, to the building trade. No doubt it was just that the green welly brigade, the complacent and comfortable country-dwellers, should be defeated. He had always believed in the future, provided it was built on competition, free enterprise and consumer choice, and if the consumers chose Fallowfield, who was he to set himself up as a superior being with purer tastes than all those good people queuing at the supermarket check-outs who, at regular intervals, obliged him by voting Titmuss? So he often left his elderly housekeeper at home and did the shopping himself, pushing his wire wheelbarrow and comparing the prices carefully before he committed himself to an investment in frozen vegetables or washing powder. He was widely recognized and people would stop and ask him his views about all the problems that beset the world. He was never at a loss for an answer.

  His health remained excellent. This fact didn’t stop him calling in Fred from time to time, mainly for the purposes of argument. He also enjoyed making the Doctor drive out to the end of Babcock-Syme Boulevard and would always apologize for the pain it must cause a nicely brought up member of a wealthy Socialist family to see how the other half lives. Leslie Titmuss became white-haired and seemed, as the years passed, to have found a way of life that suited him. His blood pressure remained constant, although his teeth gradually deserted him. During his years without a wife he managed to recover his son.

  Nick wrote soon after his father’s resignation from the Cabinet. It seemed that he felt he could make contact again once Leslie was free of the embarrassment of power and there was no danger of him helping the librarian in his career. Leslie went to visit his son and Nick came to stay in ‘The Spruces’ for part of his holidays. On one such visit he brought a solid girl in spectacles called Margaret, a devout Christian whom Leslie enjoyed shocking by recommending that village churches should be leased out as bingo halls and leisure areas when not needed for divine service. Nick married Margaret and she gave birth to two extremely aggressive small boys in whom Leslie found traces of the characteristics of his distant self, in the years before he started cutting down nettles. Fred, to whom these infants were shown proudly when he visited, felt his worst fears confirmed. There would be a long line of Titmusses, stretching out to the crack of doom.

  Billy Curdle and Sharon Wellings found it difficult to know exactly where to go. Her home was forbidden to him and although Dot Curdle welcomed all lovers enthusiastically at the Manor, Sharon dreaded the old woman’s eagerness to discuss the details of each encounter. She also disliked being taken to the Mine Host Motel on the big roundabout outside Fallowfield, the place of assignation for many of Billy’s former girlfriends. Sharon, except at the high point of love-making, embarrassed easily and one of the girls who operated the computer at the motel reception desk had been in the form above her.

  ‘Where do you want to go then?’ Billy asked her one night, anxious to get the matter settled.

  ‘I don’t know really. Couldn’t we drive out to the country?’

  ‘The country’s here!’ Billy told her in what he thought to be a moment of inspiration. ‘No need to drive out. I’ll show you where I used to go when I was a kid and watch the old badgers.’ He didn’t tell her that he used to capture them with terrier dogs and organize badger fights on the rabbit hacienda, as he had put that part of his life far behind him. So Sharon finished up her lager and lime and they walked together, past the huge computer sales and insurance company offices, down the shopping malls and through a middle-range housing estate to the road which ran round the Nature Area. They found a gap in the fence beside the stream where, it was rumoured, kingfishers used to nest.

  Avoiding the official Nature Trails and Senior Citizen Rambles, they climbed in the moonlight across the chalk grassland which was still, in that carefully preserved environment, the home of gentians, several varieties of orchid and many unusual snails. They moved, hand in hand, up towards the beech wood which was murmuring in a small wind. Billy led his girlfriend to the place where he remembered the badger setts used to be, but soon their interest in wildlife dwindled. They lay on a soft bed of decaying leaves and began to undress each other.

  On that night Hector Bolitho Jones had also been out to look for the remaining badgers, but these retiring animals stayed aloof. He was armed, as always, with his father’s old shot-gun. He had never used this weapon; he hadn’t troubled to renew the shot-gun certificate when his father died, and not even his wife had known of its existence. Now he walked quietly, carrying it in the crook of his arm, a man living in a small prison of countryside, who had almost forgotten his wife and daughter and who certainly had no friends. His eyes shone out over his beard in alarm, as though he feared that the surrounding buildings would close in on him.

  Walking through the woods he heard a sudden sobbing cry which he knew came from no bird or small animal. It was a sound he remembered his wife had made, in their distant days of love-making. Standing still and looking through the trees, he saw something which filled him with cold rage and grim determination. He slid in two of the cartridges he carried, raised the shot-gun and he had, in his father’s sights, two gently moving white bodies who were breaking all the rules and regulations of the Nature Area.

  What became known as the Fallowfield Double Murder was never solved. The Warden gave the police every assistance but they never found where the shot-gun was buried. Most of the newspapers blamed local lager louts, of unknown identity, on the rampage. Others thought it the work of a sex murderer who might strike again. It was generally agreed that the Nature Area had become a health hazard and a place far too open to crime. Sir Christopher Kempenflatt, acting on behalf of his company Greener Than Green Ltd, received planning permission to turn it into a Space Age theme park. Hector Bolitho Jones still presides over it with his beard trimmed and wearing moon boots and a suit of silvery clothing. No one has been caught making love there again.