Quite Honestly

by John Mortimer

  I can’t remember much about the food we ate except it was a big let-down and, on the whole, pretty disgusting. The idea of a good feed never seemed to have entered the mind of Jean Pierre or his kitchen staff. The starter was something to do with marinated seaweed, which wasn’t anything I’d have to eat again. The fish didn’t look much like any fish I’d ever met before and had a taste of meat about it, and a salad of plums and raspberries, with not a chip in sight. On the whole I think we did better, food-wise, in the Burger King in Notting Hill. Not much of that’s worth remembering, but what I’ll never ever forget is what happened when all this rubbish had been cleared away and all we had was two cups of coffee on the table. All we had, that is, until Lucy produced - well, I’ll have to tell you what she produced and perhaps it’ll surprise you as much as it surprised me.

  She’d been sort of excited during the meal with lots of ‘Mmmmm, this is delicious!’ which I think she did more out of politeness to me than because she genuinely enjoyed what we were eating. And then, when we got to the coffee part, she was, as I’ve said, excited.

  She opened her handbag and put something down on the tablecloth.

  ‘I got this for you,’ she said.

  What she’d got was a dirty old coin that might have been shiny years and years ago but was now a sort of dull green colour - I picked it up and I could just make out a bald head and some letters I could hardly read.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ I said. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. ‘Did you buy this for me?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and by now she was almost laughing. ‘I stole it for you.’

  ‘You did what?’ I was so surprised that I asked her while the waiter was hovering.

  She was a bit more cautious, she only said, ‘I told you what I did.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked her as the waiter moved away. It seemed like, well, like the whole world had turned upside down.

  ‘I suppose because I wanted to understand you properly.’

  ‘Understand me? Am I so peculiar or something?’

  ‘It was what you said about the excitement. You said it was the extraordinary excitement that made you do it.’

  ‘That’s part of it, of course.’

  ‘Part of it? It seemed to me the way you said it, it was the whole of it.’

  ‘And earning a living, of course.’

  ‘I suppose there is that,’ she seemed a bit disappointed, ‘but you said it was the excitement you’d miss.’

  ‘I may have said that.’

  ‘But you’re not missing it now, are you?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I’m working.’

  ‘Well, I want to work with you. To be together. That was what was wrong before. We came from separate worlds.’

  ‘Of course we did.’

  ‘You agree with me? That’s fine.’

  I thought of my world. According to the likes of my Uncle Arthur and Aunt Dot, a woman’s place was in the kitchen or looking after the kids if there were any, not out robbing banks and building societies, blowing safes or holding up security guards.

  ‘You see, it was like when I was being trained by SCRAP,’ she said. ‘We learnt all of what it was like trying to reform people, getting them cheap places to sleep and not very well-paid jobs. If you could do that you were a great success to SCRAP. They never taught us what it was like to live by stealing things. Nobody told us anything about the excitement.’

  ‘I wish I never had.’ I can’t say I really approved of what was going on.

  ‘No, Terry, I’m so glad you did. I feel we’ve come together. We can really bond.’

  I didn’t say anything to that, but she put her hand on mine on the table. I looked down at the greenish coin.

  ‘What did you say this was exactly?’

  ‘A Roman coin from the time of the Emperor Claudius. It was found in a field near St Albans.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do with it?’

  ‘Fence it,’ she told me, ‘through your usual chap. Where does he hang out?’

  ‘Brighton,’ I told her. She was getting to know some of the ropes already.

  I had to pull out a number of tenners to pay the bill. Lucy watched me doing this and said, ‘Ill-gotten gains!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I expect everyone’s paying with gains that are more or less ill-gotten. Faked expense accounts, pretending to be entertaining for business reasons, tax fiddles. It’s just that yours are more openly ill-gotten, aren’t they, darling?’

  It was the first time anyone had called me that for years.

  I took Lucy back to Notting Hill in a taxi. She seemed happy enough until we got to her flat, but she looked up and saw that the lights were on. Then she said, ‘Oh damn!’ and gave me a sort of fluttering kiss which just missed my mouth and landed on my nose. Then she jumped out of the taxi and ran away from me.

  Lucy might have gone a long way to understand me, but she was still a bit of a puzzle so far as I was concerned. I felt in my pocket. The old green coin was still there.

  14

  It happened. It finally happened. And I must say it was a relief, although it’s hard to explain and you probably won’t understand unless you’ve done it yourself, which I don’t for a second advise you to do, for reasons you’ll discover before this story ends. What I have to do is tell you how this part of it began.

  I’ve said how things began to go wrong, or right according to how you look at it, like when I began to have feelings for Terry which no praeceptor is meant to have for a client. Then I realized that I was shouting advice at him from another world entirely. In the world I came from, bishops and chaplains and praeceptors and probation officers, they all talked about sin and crime but they couldn’t really understand anything about it. Take Robert, for instance. He preached hours and hours of sermons about sin, but I don’t believe he’d ever committed the smallest sin in his life, not even been unfaithful to Sylvia, not even after she fell a victim to the G&Ts.

  Orlando Wathen, Gwenny and Mr Markby all set themselves up as experts on crime, but, as Mr Wathen confessed, he couldn’t understand the first thing about it. He hadn’t had Terry explain the excitement. It was what turned a dull party at the Smith-Aldeneys into the most exciting turning point of my life.

  When Christopher was showing me his collection, something he’d done many times before, the thought of doing it hadn’t crossed my mind. It was when he was called away to get Sylvia a gin and left the Emperor Claudius out lying on the table that the sudden irresistible urge came over me. I suppose I could say it was all Sylvia’s fault for wanting her own sort of drink that gave me the chance, but I won’t. It was what Terry had told me and the sudden feeling of understanding him and being near him, closer to him than I could ever get in any other way. Oh well, I don’t have to explain any more, do I? I felt everything had changed when I picked up the Claudius coin and put it in the back pocket of my jeans. So it was mine, and down in Aldershot they’ve never solved the mystery.

  I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, ‘What happened to that Lucinda Purefoy who wanted to do a bit of good in the world?’ And I suppose I’d find that a hard one to answer, at least to your satisfaction. I suppose I might say that what I was doing was trying to do some good to Terry by understanding him and being on his side, and I think that’s what I told myself. It sort of made sense to me at the time.

  I tried to explain some of this to Terry. I wanted to get him to come out with me to some good, cheap place where we could eat dinner, but poor sweet, he insisted on taking me out to the most expensive restaurant in London run by the ghastly Jean Pierre O’Higgins, who does those wretched television programmes about how rude he has to be to the customers who criticize his awful cooking. The worst thing about it was that I had to pretend to be thrilled to be there and oooh and aaah over the crystallized seaweed with roasted pâté and oysters vinaigrette and the spiced cod in a veal sauce and, most horrible of all, the steak and kidney ice cream!
It was at the end of this gastronomic nightmare that I did what I’d been longing to do. I produced the Emperor Claudius coin and told Terry I’d stolen it for him.

  Honestly, I found his reaction disappointing. Let’s say I’d expected more. I thought he might have congratulated me on what I’d done, although it couldn’t possibly have been easier. I thought he might have welcomed me into his exciting world of thieves, where we could sink or swim together. I have to admit I felt really let down when he didn’t welcome me into it at all.

  Of course they’d warned us at SCRAP about this male chauvinist thing that criminals have, like they don’t want women committing crimes, or sitting on juries or, especially, trying to reform them. Gwenny told us that was one of the hurdles we had to get over. It’s the same thing again, isn’t it? I mean, Tom Weatherby, soon to become my ex-boyfriend, for reasons I’ll explain later, thinks that him writing scripts for documentaries no one in television seems to want is a serious business whereas my job in advertising at Pitcher’s is just a sort of hobby, like Pilates classes or painting in watercolours. Robin Thirkell always thought my sincere ambition to do a bit of good in the world was a joke, and even my dad, for all his liberal views, seems a good deal more enthusiastic about gay marriages than he is about women bishops.

  All I can say is that if being a woman is a hurdle in me getting closer to Terry, it’s one I’ve got to get over as soon as possible.

  In all this, Tom was no help at all.

  I was particularly glad when Terry suggested Thursday because that was when Tom planned to do some late-night research on his underground project and spend the night with his sister in Sidcup. So I thought the flat would be empty and I could invite Terry up after dinner, and cook him scrambled eggs if the food had been disgusting, or we could do whatever we wanted to do. I was sure he’d be in a pretty good mood after I’d shown my solidarity with him by handing over the coin. I was really angry with Tom when I found his plans had changed and all the lights were on in the flat when Terry took me home in a taxi. All we could manage was a quick frustrated kiss and then home. I suppose we could have gone on to the maisonette, but then I didn’t fancy waking up to that crook and his awful secretary and, what’s more, Terry never invited me.

  Of course, Tom had some feeble excuse, it wasn’t convenient for his sister to have him to stay, and nothing much was happening on the underground, as though that was a big surprise. Then he said, ‘I suppose you wanted to bring the little thief up here?’

  ‘Terry’s not particularly little,’ I reminded him.

  ‘But he is a thief. I know you find that tremendously exciting. I’m terribly sorry. I do apologize! I’ve got no criminal convictions! ’

  I suppose if I’d listened to Tom at the time, I might have saved myself a great deal of trouble; but of course I didn’t want to listen. All I knew was that our relationship, such as it was, had definitely fizzled out.

  15

  A few weeks went by after that dinner (I never dreamed seaweed could come so expensive), when I didn’t see Lucy and I never rang her. I suppose I was a bit shocked when she told me she’d stolen something, like I was shocked when she told me to ‘fuck off’ all that time ago. Of course, you’ll say I stole things and said fuck off, which is true, but it just didn’t seem to me to be in Lucy’s character. She’d shocked me again, I suppose that’s what it was. For whatever reason, I never fenced that old green coin she gave me, but I kept it on the table by the side of my bed, to make sure she hadn’t really become part of our business.

  Which was growing all the time. I mean our business was. Chippy had taken on more part-time workers, who did the smaller odd jobs for us, and a character known as ‘Screwtop Parkinson’, who, Chippy said, drove a getaway car so fast no one would ever catch it. It may be that this talent came from the fact that he was slightly mad, as his name indicated, but Chippy said he could rely on Screwtop to get us out of any nasty situation and not stop to argue about the questions on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  Chippy, as head of a successful organization, was quite cheerful and continued to let me stay at the maisonette. He also told me what he thought was a good joke about another organization.

  ‘They want me to be chairman of SCRAP. You know what that is, don’t you, Terry?’

  ‘Of course I know what it is.’

  ‘They help young cons go straight. Do you think I’d be good at that?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d be good at it at all.’

  Chippy gave me his one-sided smile. As I say, he was in a cheerful sort of a mood. ‘Do you not?’ he said. ‘I think I know a good deal about young cons, like you yourself, Terry. Anyway, the lady from SCRAP’s coming to call on me. She wants me to help in her drive for funding.’

  ‘You mean she’s coming here? To the maisonette?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘I’ll be concentrating on the environment that morning. I’ll make sure all the criminal elements are out on business.’

  That’ll include me, I thought. I couldn’t sit in the maisonette and tell some unknown woman that Chippy had persuaded me to choose the straight and narrow. I really couldn’t. And then Chippy further amazed me by saying, ‘Reckon if you do a job like that you get made a “sir” in the end. Play your cards right and you get knighted by the Queen.’

  I couldn’t get my mind round it and so I left Sir Leonard to his dreams.

  I don’t really know why but this chat with Chippy made me reluctant to ring Lucy. Although part of me wanted to, another part didn’t want to have to tell her that her precious organization was going to be taken over by Sir Leonard ‘Chippy’ McGrath, one of the master blaggers of our times. So although my hand went to the phone in the maisonette from time to time, I didn’t lift it up, as though it was something too hot to hold. But then, once again, everything changed.

  It was a Sunday and I’d got up late. I was in my bedroom in the maisonette and I was wondering what I’d do that particular sunny morning, when I heard a furious hooting in the square below my window. I looked out and there she was, standing beside this clapped-out Polo, with her hand through the window beeping away on the horn.

  ‘I ought to go down and see my dad,’ she told me when I joined her in the square. ‘And I thought we might have another picnic on the way down. Dad would be thrilled to see you.’

  I told her I couldn’t think why the bishop would want to see me at all.

  ‘Because you’re the one sinner that repented,’ she told me. ‘Of course we both know that you haven’t repented at all, but we needn’t tell Robert that. Hop in. We’ll go and buy the picnic.’

  She seemed very cheerful and as though she didn’t expect any trouble from me. I had nothing much to look forward to except a long and boring Sunday with Sir Leonard in the maisonette. So I hopped in. We went round a Greek shop that was open in Queensway and bought kebabs and pitta bread, taramasalata and hummus and all that stuff including olives, all things Lucy knew about. Then we found an off-licence and got a bottle of Rioja like we’d had at our first picnic. Lucy said we were off to Folly Hill, where we went for the last picnic. ‘But this one’s going to be better than ever.’

  So we got round the M25 and turned off down the M3 towards woods with spiky trees and sandy soil. Although I’d been driven by Lucy before, I hadn’t remembered that the experience was, well, I’ve got to admit, frightening. Lucy’s idea of driving was to put her foot down on dangerous corners, although she did slow down a bit when the road was clear. When the road wasn’t so clear she not only raced into corners but passed fast cars and lorries without any clear idea of what was going on ahead. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying, ‘Hang about! You’re not Screwtop Parkinson in the getaway car, let’s go a bit slower and admire the scenery.’ Of course, I didn’t say this. I didn’t want to spoil her day. All the same, I thought to myself, I’m the one who’s meant to live dangerously with Leonard and his gang of blaggers, and yet Lucy’s the one who’s taking all the r
isks on the M3.

  So it was a bit of a relief when we turned off on to the country roads and we got to this spot looking out over woods and fields. She parked the Polo not far from a farm gate and she set off, with a rug, plates and glasses. She called out at me to bring the lunch and follow her. What was she like? For a moment I remembered the way the screws would tell you to come out and take exercise, but I didn’t mention that to Lucy. As I say, I didn’t want to spoil her day.

  Lucy had laid out the rug not far from the road, where an occasional car or a van did pass by. Once again it was her day and I didn’t argue. I joined her and we sat down. I opened the Rioja and we took big swigs out of plastic cups and I agreed that the Arab stuff we bought tasted much better in the open air than marinated seaweed or whatever. The sun was shining and there was a bit of a breeze stirring the pointed trees and lifting Lucy’s hair occasionally. She was smiling and laughing, chewing and gulping wine and looking happier, I thought, than at any time since we met.

  When we’d finished eating Lucy produced another plastic bag from somewhere, this time it had ‘Tesco’ or ‘Waitrose’ written on it, I can’t remember. It was heavy and clinked a bit as she handed it over to me with a big smile and she said, ‘It’s for you, Terry.’