Quite Honestly

by John Mortimer

  Leonard McGrath said he felt that the time had come for him to ‘give back to society something he had taken out of it’ and he looked forward to doing his best for SCRAP. In a long business career he had always taken a considerable interest in the causes of crime and in particular in young criminals. He had been pleased to give shelter to Terry Keegan when he came out of prison and delighted that this young man was now in regular employment. If he was to be offered the chair, he could ‘only say I’ll do my best’.

  Alex Markby proposed and Peter Bethell seconded ‘that Leonard McGrath should be appointed chair of SCRAP’. The proposal was passed nem. con.

  There was no other business so the meeting ended and tea was served at 4.45 p.m.

  19

  ‘It’s in the Guardian,’ I told Terry at breakfast. ‘Leonard McGrath made chairman of SCRAP. That couldn’t be anything to do with your friend in the maisonette, could it?’

  ‘It is my friend in the maisonette - Chippy reckons he’s in with the chance of a knighthood.’ Terry was buttering toast. He wasn’t laughing. He had told me all about his old friend Chippy McGrath, who had managed to follow a career in crime without ever being caught and had now emerged as Leonard McGrath, head of the organization for which Terry worked at nights, head of Environmentally Friendly Investments and now of SCRAP.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it is. Very ridiculous.’ But he still wasn’t laughing.

  ‘Do you think SCRAP ought to be told?’

  ‘I don’t think Chippy would like that.’

  ‘I suppose we needn’t take SCRAP seriously any more,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, we needn’t take it seriously.’

  This was a kind of relief, but then Terry changed the subject. He said he’d been to see Mr Markby, his probation officer.

  ‘Routine visit?’ Quite honestly, I didn’t have a whole lot of time for Mr Markby.

  ‘Not quite routine.’ Terry looked unusually serious. ‘I told him how worried I am.’

  ‘I think life’s taken a distinct turn for the better.’ I poured more coffee. ‘What are you worried about?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told him I was worried about you. Of course, I didn’t say you by name. I called you a friend.’

  ‘Well, I certainly am that.’ I could have said I was a friend who didn’t want to be discussed with Mr Markby.

  ‘I said I’d got a friend who’d taken to thieving.’

  ‘I think you’ve got lots of friends who’ve taken to thieving.’

  ‘I said it was my girlfriend. He advised me to tell you that it would land you up in prison like it did me.’

  ‘But you explained it to me. Isn’t that why it’s so exciting? The risk, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want you to take no risks, Lucy.’

  ‘Why not? I’m not objecting to you taking risks. Not at the moment anyway.’

  ‘I’m different,’ Terry said. ‘Completely different.’

  ‘Because you’re a man?’ I’d got Terry cooking but I still couldn’t get rid of the male chauvinist side of him. I was pretty irritated by the fact that he’d looked at the things I’d managed to steal lately with something like contempt.

  ‘Not that I’m a man, Lucy. Because I grew up to it. And because I do the big, serious jobs. The bits and pieces you bring home aren’t either here or there.’

  ‘Not even the snuff boxes?’

  ‘Well, the snuff boxes might bring in a bob or two,’ he had to admit.

  ‘Stop doing that male superiority thing then. Anyway, you know I’m only doing it to understand you. To be near to you. To be at one with you. You know that, don’t you, Terry?’ I don’t think I could have put it more nicely. But I was not altogether pleased by his reply.

  ‘You’ll never be like me because you don’t do serious jobs. It’s just a sort of game to you, isn’t it, Lucy? But it’s not to me. It’s how I earn a living. That’s why I want you to stop doing it.’

  ‘You mean you want to reform me.’ I’m afraid I rather snapped at him.

  ‘Something like that, I suppose,’ he had to admit. So then I left him to put the dishes in the washing machine and went to work.

  When I came back that evening I dialled 1571 for my messages and immediately got the high-pitched sound of Robin Thirkell, a voice which would make you think he was gay if you didn’t happen to know, as I did, that he was rather a shady form of heterosexual.

  ‘Lucy, darling!’ Robin was carolling down the line. ‘I’m inviting you to no end of champagne and caviar and I hope it’s going to be an amusing evening. Come alone, if you don’t mind. I really want to enjoy your company far away from that tedious little criminal who pissed off out of the Intimate without a single word to me, darling, despite all I’d done for him. It would be the loveliest thing if you could arrive at God’s Acre around 7.30 Saturday. See you then, darling. I’m so excited.’

  I pressed three to erase the call and when Terry came home I told him that Robin had invited me to a rather grand dinner party in the country. ‘But you’ll probably be too busy to come.’ I didn’t bother to tell him that the invitation was only for me, because I knew he wouldn’t fancy it anyway.

  ‘Yes,’ Terry said, ‘I probably will be busy.’

  After that he cooked supper and we watched something unwatchable on the television.

  When I drove into the yard of God’s Acre that Saturday at 7.30, Robin’s Mercedes and his Range Rover were littered about the place but I saw no other cars. I knew that Robert and Sylvia hadn’t been invited but I didn’t know who had, or where they might have got to. As I climbed out of the Polo I got the usual long hysterical barks from the four bull terriers, who bared their teeth and seemed about to attack me until I called them by their names, Judy, Greta, Marlene and Virginia, then they calmed down, started licking my hands and had to be shoved away when I reached the front door.

  The door was opened by Max, Robin’s sort of butler, who wore a short white jacket which was never entirely clean and showed the ends of his braces. Max had ginger hair and had never shaved adequately at the top of his cheekbones. ‘His nibs is in the living room, Lucy,’ he told me, then returned to the kitchen, to finish the large whisky he’d no doubt been drinking before I rang the front-door bell.

  Robin had done up God’s Acre Manor like a homage to Cecil Beaton. There were a lot of heavy curtains held back by ties with massive gold tassels, statues of marble cherubs and black boys on marble columns and a selection of gold-framed photographs on top of the grand piano, many of them of Robin as a winsome child. There was a smell of lime-and-lemon-flavoured air freshener mixed with a whiff of incense, and Frank Sinatra was singing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ on the hi-fi. I remembered a time when I found Robin’s decor rather grand and exciting, but that was before I met Terry. Now I thought it just poncey.

  ‘Where’s the party?’ I asked him.

  ‘There isn’t a party. Just me.’ Robin was wearing a blue velvet smoking-jacket thing and offering me strips of toast with caviar on them.

  ‘But you said . . .’

  ‘What’s it matter what I said?’ He gave me that roguish little-boy look that I now found mildly irritating.

  ‘So why did you say it?’

  ‘Well, I thought you wouldn’t come if it was just me. Isn’t that true? Not now you’ve taken to rough trade from Her Majesty’s prisons.’

  ‘I can’t stay tonight,’ I told him quite firmly.

  ‘What a pity! Got to get back to tempting little Terry, have you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I’ve got to get back.’ At which he said nothing but offered me some more caviar and quail’s eggs, and that was just for starters.

  We were soon alone in the dining room, being served by Max, who winked at me over the roast pheasant as though he knew exactly what I’d come for. I was almost moved to shout at him, ‘I’m going home tonight!’ But then Robin was being quite bitchily funny a
bout all the neighbours, so I decided to ignore Max and merely disappoint his expectations later. Towards the end of dinner, when I’d had the champagne and a good deal of red wine, Robin suddenly said, ‘I’ve got a Bonnard.’

  Now, quite honestly, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m not really up in the world of art. At that time I didn’t know what a Bonnard was. It might have been a brand of dog, or a vintage car, or a type of Italian suit. Then Robin said, ‘My Uncle Everard left it to me in his will.’

  ‘That was nice of him, I suppose.’ Really I had no idea whether it was or not.

  ‘He wasn’t really my uncle, of course. Everard Egglington. He was a close friend of my mother. We always called him “uncle”. An old queen who’d made pots of money out of Egglington cigarettes and ran this art gallery as a kind of hobby. I know he fancied me when I was young but he never got to first base. All the same he left me this wonderful picture. You should see it.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘After dinner?’

  Well, of course, after dinner it became clear that the great Bonnard picture was upstairs and, of course, in his bedroom. However, I felt so completely attached to Terry and so confident of my powers of refusal that I let Robin take me into the familiar room with the big four-poster bed with carved wooden leaves at the top of each column and a shield on the crossbar with some sort of coat of arms which was certainly not Robin’s.

  But there was something new. There on the wall a slim, pinkish youngish woman was drying her thighs near a big white bathtub. She looked utterly uninterested in what was going on anywhere else in the world, totally absorbed in what she was doing. I rather envied her.

  ‘I like it,’ I told Robin. I really did.

  ‘I like it too. Of course she’s not in the bath. It would go for millions if Mrs Bonnard was in the bath. But that little thing’s worth 400,000.’

  ‘Really?’ My interest in the picture increased.

  ‘That’s what the gallery told me.’

  I examined Robin’s ‘little Bonnard’ more closely, and I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of burglars.

  ‘Not a bit. The dogs would just fly at anyone they didn’t know. They’d wake up Max and he’s a match for any burglar.’

  ‘Why do you keep it up here?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll find a place for it downstairs some time. Meanwhile I like to wake up and gloat over it. And last thing at night I remind myself I’ve got it. Shall we go to bed now?’

  ‘Go to bed? Whatever for?’ I asked him, looking innocent, although I knew perfectly well.

  ‘Sex, of course. With all the trimmings.’

  I remembered what the trimmings were with Robin and knew I no longer wanted them.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you turning me down?’

  ‘Flat!’

  Robin looked thoughtful and then said casually, ‘What did you do with the Emperor Claudius coin?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do. What did you do with Christopher Smith-Aldeney’s Emperor Claudius coin after you put it in your back pocket?’

  ‘I still don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I mean either we go to bed now or I tell the neighbourhood, including the dear bishop.’

  ‘That’s blackmail.’ I was profoundly shocked. ‘It’s a crime.’

  ‘I know it is. Almost as bad a crime as thieving.’

  ‘You can tell who you like,’ I told him. ‘I’ll deny it and no one’s going to believe you.’

  ‘Let’s stop talking.’ Robin had given up the threats for the moment and turned on the charm. His shirt was now wide open, his face lit up with a smile. ‘Hop into bed, why don’t you? You know you want to.’

  I was up against the wall as he tried to embrace me. I felt his arm round me and the overpowering smell of his Roger et Gallet eau-de-Cologne. All I could do was to bring my knee up smartly, a gesture met with a cry of pain. I did win the fifty-yard sprint at school and, in less time than it takes to tell, I was out of the house, across the yard (I didn’t even have time to call the dogs by their names) and in the Polo. Luckily the key was still in the ignition and I left God’s Acre at around sixty miles an hour.

  On the way home I drove along Folly Hill. It was then I remembered how good life could sometimes be. I was also thinking about a picture worth £400,000.

  20

  I didn’t think I was getting anywhere. Mr Markby didn’t seem to want to have a word with Lucy. Nothing I said to her about the danger of ending up inside stopped her from lifting small bits and pieces of other people’s property and giving them to me, with the sort of proud look I used to see on my Aunt Dot’s cat when it brought in a dead bird and laid it on the carpet.

  Whenever I told Lucy what I thought about it she said she was doing it for my sake ‘so we could share a common experience’. I tried to tell her that we weren’t really sharing anything. What I did was serious business which brought in a decent wage that paid the rent and would take us on holiday to Ibiza later, while what she did wouldn’t keep us in hot dinners. She just went away with a smile and stopped listening. It seemed to me I only had one place to go and there was only one person who might have a bit of clout with Lucy. She went to work on the bus every day, having nowhere to park in Oxford Street, so I took the Polo from its resident’s parking place and headed off in the direction of Aldershot.

  I found Lucy’s mum in the palace, about one of the smallest palaces in the country I’d say, wandering vaguely from room to room, but when she asked me to join her in a ‘snifter’ I had to refuse politely and ask where my girlfriend’s dad might be found. It turned out he was in the cathedral, preparing for a special service on ‘Family Values’ to be broadcast over the radio next Sunday.

  I’d never been in a cathedral before, never much in a church if it comes to that. The one in Aldershot seemed to be very cold and grey and there were rows and rows of empty chairs. Around the walls were statues of dead people lying on marble boxes with their legs crossed, sometimes with their feet on little dogs. Up at the far end there were lights and a bit of activity. Some man was fixing up a mike and others were having a conversation. An organ somewhere stopped and started and a row of young kids was going through a song, over and over and bit by bit in a way which would drive you bananas if you had to listen to it too long.

  I stood blinking in the shadows for a minute and then I spotted Lucy’s dad in the back row of the chairs. He was wearing a sort of long black skirt arrangement and scribbling away in a notebook as though there was no tomorrow.

  ‘Terry!’ I have to say he gave me a great welcome as I made my way towards him down a row of empty chairs. ‘You’ve come to church! There’s more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth - well, I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?’

  ‘Actually I haven’t come to church.’

  ‘You’ve come to cathedral. It’s just another house of God. What’s the matter? Are you afflicted by any sort of doubt?’

  He was smiling a lot, a good-looking older guy with very white teeth and a strong smell of aftershave.

  ‘I haven’t come to church really,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find you.’

  ‘And here I am.’ The bishop spread out his arms as though he’d performed some sort of miracle just by being there. ‘With God’s help I’m here for you today, Terry. What’s your trouble?’

  ‘It’s not my trouble exactly. It’s your daughter’s.’

  ‘You mean Lucy?’

  ‘Yes, I do mean Lucy.’

  ‘What sort of trouble? Overdrawn at the bank? Can’t find the rent? Lucy’s always been a little vague about money.’

  ‘She’s not vague about it now. In fact she’s been stealing some of it.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ He was still smiling, as though I’d made a joke.

  ‘Money and other things. Snuff boxes. Bits of silver. One time it was a pair of binoculars. That’s what I came to tell you, Mr Purefoy.’


  ‘Bishop Purefoy.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter. Now what is it you’re trying to tell me?’

  ‘That your daughter’s a thief, Bishop Purefoy.’

  ‘How very interesting.’ He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward as though he didn’t want to miss a word of what I was saying.

  ‘She steals things and I’m afraid she’s going to get caught because she’s had no training.’

  ‘And you say she’s just started.’

  ‘Just recently, yes.’

  ‘Classic!’ he said. ‘It’s a classic situation!’

  ‘You mean a lot of bishops have thieving daughters?’

  ‘No. Not that. Not that at all. God sent Jesus down to redeem our sins and then sent Freud down to explain them. Oh, I’m sorry,’ Lucy’s dad seemed suddenly embarrassed, ‘I don’t suppose you know much about Freud!’

  As a matter of fact he was wrong. Not having spent what seemed like years in a cell reading books, he made the usual mistake of thinking I didn’t know much about anything. I knew enough about Freud to be sure he had nothing to do with our present discussion. All I said was, ‘I don’t think it takes much explaining.’