Quite Honestly

by John Mortimer

  I looked into it. Then I put the things out on the rug. I can’t remember it all now, but there was a silver cigarette case, a couple of snuff boxes which I knew, from working with Chippy’s experts, were quite valuable, an expensive Rolex watch, a gold pen and a pair of binoculars. It seemed to hurt her feelings when I laughed at this collection.

  ‘Where the hell did you get this lot then?’

  Lucy had stood up and was looking down at me and her collection, smiling proudly. ‘Stuff I blagged. For you.’

  ‘I told you I didn’t want you to do that.’

  ‘But I want to.’ She was kneeling beside me now. ‘You said it was exciting and it is. I could feel it. I could really understand.’

  ‘It’s different for me,’ I told her. ‘Quite different. I didn’t need you to understand me.’

  ‘But I want to, Terry. Don’t you know how much I want to? You don’t know how close I felt to you when I was doing it.’

  Well, all I can say is that it didn’t make me feel close to her. But she looked that much pleased with herself and proud of what she’d done, she seemed so bubbling over with it, that I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. Anyway I’d explained it to her before, thieving is for men. They may do it to help their wives and their girlfriends, I suppose, but they didn’t need their help when they were working. And then, just when I was wondering whether it was right to call her a girlfriend, even in my head, I suddenly found her mouth was on my mouth and her fingers were after the zip in my trousers.

  I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting for it, but I’m not going to describe what went on then in any sort of detail. The bits in the books I used to read in the Scrubs about sex were never very convincing and often quite embarrassing. I’d gone without sex anyway over those three and a bit years and managed to avoid the buggers on my particular landing.

  When I got out, I couldn’t break the habit of not doing it I’d got into in prison. I steered a bit clear of Diane, Leonard’s secretary, although she made definite signals she was available. Then I met Lucy and after a bit of a rough time at first, when she wanted to change me into someone else, we began to get on together and her face hung about in my mind. Although I suppose I could have picked up some of the brass that hung around in the Beau Brummell Club, I didn’t bother myself, and gradually it came over me that Lucy was the one I really fancied. I won’t say that I didn’t hope that something like this might happen when I got into the clapped-out Polo, but I wanted to make the suggestion and now there was obviously no need to do so.

  So there we were together on the rug and occasionally I caught sight of the things she’d stolen, the gold pen and the binoculars, but I tried not to think about them. I heard a car stop and then go on again on the road above us, but after that, apart from the birds twittering in the pointed trees, everything was quiet.

  That’s really all that has to be said about it, except that when it was over I felt different. As though my prison days were well over.

  16

  Well, there it is. Thank goodness, it worked at last. I knew he didn’t take it seriously when I gave him the Emperor Claudius coin. That could have been a bit of a joke after all. But then I showed him the things I’d picked up when some of us key workers were invited to dinner in Sir Carlton Pitcher’s house in Regent’s Park, and when Deirdre (you remember Deirdre? I was at school with her and she told me to join SCRAP) asked me and Tom Weatherby to dinner at her Uncle Charles’s spread near Ascot. Well, I told her it had all fizzled out with me and Tom, and he’d moved back permanently to live with his sister in Sidcup. So I went alone. On my way to and from the loo, I managed to pick up quite a few items, including the snuff boxes I knew Terry would think had a bit of value to them.

  In all this I was following the morality of the Youth Detention Centre and strictly confined myself to robbing from the rich without necessarily having to give to the poor. Well, as I say, I did get together these bits and pieces to show him, and I knew that was what I needed to bond with him.

  Mind you, even at the start of the day, before I showed him the new stuff, he was nicer than he’d ever been. When I said hop in the car, he hopped. He helped me buy the picnic and he seemed really pleased to drive out into the wilds of Hampshire. Of course he sighed a bit and gripped his seat when I drove round corners, but all men do that because they think women can’t drive. At least he didn’t whimper, ‘Please don’t kill me,’ like Tom Weatherby sometimes did.

  When I remember what Terry had been like when I first met him out of the Scrubs, the difference was extraordinary. We were no longer the reformer and the hard case. We were a criminally minded couple who more or less kept to the rules. The Emperor Claudius coin had, although I say it myself, paid its way.

  Well, then I showed him the other things I blagged and I think he was pleased. What I hadn’t quite thought through was what we should do once we’d bonded. I suppose I still thought that we might have a chance of reforming ourselves together. And then all that was put on hold, in a manner of speaking, because I took one look at him and you know what I said to myself, and this may surprise you, I said, ‘Heathcliff.’ Well, I knew he’d read Wuthering Heights in the Scrubs and I’d read it at school (another sort of a link between us) but there he was, my favourite character, who was irresistible but dangerous to know, sitting on the rug with the wind in his black curly hair, finishing off a chocolate bar, the spitting image of the love of Cathy’s life and, well, mine too, by the way.

  Of course you can guess what happened next. I really don’t want to go into it, because although I think sex is great to do it’s quite boring to read about it, more still to watch it in films or on the telly, with people’s white bottoms going up and down to lots of overdone gasps and gurgling. All I can tell you is that we didn’t do all that gasping and sound effects. In fact it all seemed wonderfully still and quiet round Folly Hill. I heard a car stop once and start again on the road above us, apart from that we bonded, Terry and I, in what seemed like a great quietness.

  I’d promised Robert we’d have dinner at the palace (so called) before we drove back to London, and during the shepherd’s pie (Dad and Mum have always been strong supporters of nursery food) my father came out with what I imagined was going to be his next ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4.

  ‘God gave the joy of sex,’ he said, shaking the tomato ketchup bottle sharply over his shepherd’s pie, ‘to our forefather and mother in his garden of Eden. We must assume from all we can read in the book of Genesis that our common ancestors enjoyed the heavenly gift of coitus in the open air.’

  ‘Why?’ Terry asked in surprise, a forkful of potato about to enter his mouth.

  ‘Why what?’ Robert said tolerantly, only a little impatiently at the interruption.

  ‘Why must we assume that it took place in the open air?’

  ‘Well, that’s a very good question.’ I thought my dad sounded a bit patronizing at this point. ‘I’m glad you asked me that intelligent question, Terry. Because we don’t read of Adam and Eve having built any sort of home or indeed shelter in the garden. We must assume that the climate was always favourable in those far-off days.’ Robert’s thoughts seemed to me to be getting a little too close for comfort. ‘I said that to Charlie Fawcett today. We’d met at an inter-diocesan conference on “Spreading the Word” in Basingstoke and I was giving him a lift back to his Farnham rectory and we’d just got to Folly Hill when he suddenly said, “Stop the car!” I thought he’d heard the exhaust drop off or something so I stopped, but all Charlie said was, “Look at that! Isn’t it disgusting?” Well, I looked down from the road and all I could see was a couple stretched out on a rug apparently enjoying God’s great gift of sexual intercourse al fresco under the arch of heaven.’

  ‘Did you see who they were?’ I had to ask him.

  ‘Certainly not! I just took a quick look and drove on, but Charlie Fawcett went on and on about people using the English countryside as though it were their own private bedroom. And h
e talked about some white bottom going up and down. He said it was disgusting.’

  I looked at Terry. He was chomping away without any expression at all. So it was left to me to say, ‘Disgusting!’ as though Charlie Fawcett had a point. Of course it was quite disgusting, but wonderful as well.

  ‘So, no one need be ashamed.’ Robert was completing his ‘Thought’ of enjoying the gift God has given us in all weathers.

  Sylvia, who’d brought her gin and tonic into dinner, made no comment. I wondered if she and Robert had ever done it ‘al fresco’, but then quickly dismissed the idea from my mind.

  17

  ‘Quite honestly, I’m worried about her. Seriously worried.’

  ‘And she is . . . ?’

  ‘My good friend.’ After the picnic I felt I was justified in calling Lucy that.

  ‘And what is it that worries you about her exactly? Has she got what I suppose you’d call “a bun in the oven”?’

  Mr Markby gave me a rare Scottish sort of a smile which flickered only for a moment.

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s her thieving.’ I’d taken a deep breath and told him. ‘I’m worried about her thieving.’

  I’d called to make my routine visit to my probation officer. I sat opposite him and we talked across the desk in a cold office with a big filing cabinet, a pot plant that looked as if it hadn’t got long to live and, on his desk, a framed photograph of a determined-looking woman and a cross-looking small boy who was a Markby lookalike without, of course, the moustache.

  As you know, I never liked Mr Markby, not since he robbed me of my parole, but I was stuck for someone to come to for advice and the fact I’d come to him seemed to be an unexpected point in my favour.

  ‘You’re worried about your friend’s thieving and you’ve come to tell me about it?’

  ‘I didn’t know who else I could tell.’

  ‘Quite right, come to the professional. I don’t suppose that girl from SCRAP’s any help at all in this situation.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s not.’

  ‘Just as I thought. Now, let’s see.’ He turned over his notes. ‘You’re still living in Leonard McGrath’s accommodation?’

  ‘I’m still in the maisonette, yes.’

  ‘And working for Environmentally Friendly Investments?’ Mr Markby sounded far more friendly than usual.

  ‘I’m still working with him, yes.’

  ‘He’s a good man, Terry. He’s been a good man to you.’ Mr Markby was looking extremely serious, and I did my best to give him a serious look back.

  ‘He’s been a help to me.’

  ‘A force for good in the world. Gwendolen Gerdon was looking for a new chairman and I gave her Leonard McGrath’s name. I told her he’d shake the SCRAP organization up a bit. Don’t you think so?’ Mr Markby’s shoulders were now shaking as though he found this funny, although he had no idea how funny it really was. Then his shoulders calmed down as he said, ‘You’re really concerned about this friend of yours, aren’t you?’

  ‘Most concerned.’ I really was.

  ‘That shows how much the Probation Service has done for you. You were a comparatively young offender?’

  ‘Since I was a kid.’

  ‘Since childhood, yes. And now you’re genuinely concerned about your friend. What does she steal, by the way?’

  ‘Bits and pieces. Old coins. A gold pen. Snuff boxes she got. They might be worth a bit actually. Sort of glasses you take out racing, a good watch.’

  ‘The menopause?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It happens to women of a certain age. Is she of a certain age, by any chance?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘Then the menopause has got nothing to do with it. Nor has kleptomania. I don’t call it an illness, Terry. Just plain, simple crime. And greed. That’s what it was, wasn’t it, Terry, when you used to do it yourself?’

  ‘When I used to do it, yes.’

  ‘Well, you can point this out to her. Where did it get you, all that thieving you did? Into prison for a long time, that’s where it got you.’

  ‘Got me in for a much longer time because of you,’ was what I didn’t say. Instead I told him, ‘I’ll try all that.’

  ‘Yes, you try all that. Make her think about it seriously. Really scare her. Tell her she wouldn’t enjoy Holloway, would she?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t think so either. Be gentle with her of course. Gentle and understanding. But be perfectly clear. She’s committing crimes and she’ll end up in prison. Will you do that?’

  ‘I’ll certainly try it.’

  ‘Tell her that if you could give up stealing which had been going on since you were a young child, surely she can.’

  I didn’t say I’d told Lucy that. I didn’t make any promises.

  ‘Oh, and stay close to her. Keep an eye on her. If she’s going to go straight and resist the temptation to steal things, she’ll need continued support.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ I told him.

  Then he looked at me, sort of sizing me up. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘you’ve ever thought of joining the Probation Service, have you?’

  I could quite honestly tell him that I hadn’t.

  ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘We could do with lads like you.’

  Because Mr Markby had told me to keep an eye on Lucy, I agreed to move in to her flat in Notting Hill Gate. Anyway, I’d got a bit tired of the maisonette, what with Diane’s long suggestive looks and the future Sir Leonard ‘Chippy’ McGrath becoming more and more pompous after his name had been mentioned as the possible future chairman of SCRAP.

  In the flat (All Saints Road, up a couple of floors) I could still go out on any of the big jobs when Chippy needed my help. Apart from that, I saw that Lucy got up in time for work and left thieving to the professionals. During the day I did the shopping, cleaned up and read some of the books Lucy had on the shelves in the lounge. In the evenings, Lucy either got me cooking with her or we went out locally for a Chinese or an Indian. Looking back, it was about the best time of my life, but nothing much happened in the story I’ve got to tell. Except perhaps I ought to just mention the evening Lucy said she was getting a bit bored with the Beau Brummell and she’d take me to ‘her club’, which was the Close-Up in Soho. Anyway, she said it was her club but it seemed that her ex, Tom Weatherby, was the member and she told the girl on the desk we were waiting for him, which of course we weren’t.

  ‘Well, well, I see you’ve got a new friend.’ A tall woman with a sort of commanding voice, bright red hair and permanently raised eyebrows came straight up to us with her hands in the pockets of her floppy trousers. She was with a thick-set, grinning man who I put down as Caribbean. Lucy said, ‘This is Deirdre,’ and told her that I was her new friend, Terry Keegan. Then Deirdre asked if Lucy had picked me up at SCRAP. When Lucy admitted it, Deirdre said that was where she’d picked up Ishmael. She seemed very proud of him. ‘He’s a terrific rap singer, you know.’

  Then Deirdre went on to tell us that after the dinner at her Uncle Charles’s spread it was discovered that a few little things were missing, including two or three of his precious snuff boxes. The funny thing was that Deirdre’s uncle suspected Ishmael, although he was busy entertaining them all with his rap and never went off around the house on his own. They still suspected him - pure bloody racism.

  ‘How ridiculous!’ Lucy was saying, cool as a cold beer. At which little Ishmael started laughing until he shook all over. ‘Yes, it was. Very ridiculous!’ he managed to splutter out through his laughter.

  I thought that another reason why Lucy should stop thieving was that professional blaggers like this Ishmael shouldn’t get blamed for all the crimes she committed.

  18

  EXTRACT FROM THE MINUTES OF THE COUNCIL,

  SOCIAL CARERS, REFORMERS AND PRAECEPTORS

  Meeting held at SCRAP offices, King’s Cro
ss

  Present:

  GWENDOLEN GERDON, Executive Director (ED)

  LADY DOUGHBERRY, representing the Bunyan Society for

  Prison Reform

  PROFESSOR MAXWELL HEATHERINGTON, Reader in

  Criminology at the University of East Surrey

  CAMPBELL DYSON, Chair of Dyson Soft Furnishing

  IVY SINCLAIR, BBC Today programme

  PETER BETHELL, partner in the firm of Bethell, Sherman and

  Pensotti, Solicitors

  THE REV. HARVEY TYLER, Rector, St Barnabas,

  King’s Cross

  ALEX MARKBY, representing the Probation Service

  LEONARD MCGRATH, Chair of Environmentally Friendly

  Investments

  The ED told the meeting that they all very much regretted that Orlando Wathen, after many years of distinguished service as chair of SCRAP, had tendered his resignation as his views on the treatment of offenders had changed considerably and he no longer felt comfortable with our standpoint on crime and the reform of criminals.

  Peter Bethell told the meeting that as Orlando’s close friend and legal adviser he knew that Orlando was sad to leave but that he had, in all honesty, to make way for a chair who would share the traditional SCRAP belief in the seed of essential good, in even the worst offender, which could be nurtured and nourished.

  Lady Doughberry wished her regret at Mr Wathen’s new stance to be minuted but proposed a vote of thanks to him and SCRAP’s best wishes for his many years of service. Peter Bethell seconded and the motion was carried nem. con.

  The ED then told the meeting that in casting round to find a suitable successor as chair we were grateful to Alex Markby, representing the Probation Service, for his kind assistance. He had a proposal to put before the council.

  Alex Markby told the meeting that, given the recent report on the organization’s finances, he felt SCRAP stood in need of a well-known businessman who would have experience of fund-raising to work with Campbell Dyson on the money side. He had been recently most impressed by the generosity of Leonard McGrath, the head of the well-known firm Environmentally Friendly Investments. Leonard had given a job to a young man, Terry Keegan, recently out of the Scrubs, and even put him up in his own maisonette. Alex Markby said he didn’t want to dismiss the well-intentioned efforts of the girl Lucy Purefoy from SCRAP who was in charge of Terry Keegan’s case, but he wasn’t convinced that she took her work entirely seriously. On one occasion, she had misinformed him about Keegan’s address; she seemed to imagine he was working on some sort of farm in the country when he was in fact being cared for and housed by Leonard McGrath, who had become his true praeceptor, counsellor and friend. In his (Alex Markby’s) view, Leonard McGrath would make a perfect chair for SCRAP and ‘would raise our profile in the business world’. He said that Mr McGrath was prepared to say a few words.