Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘What?’

  ‘He did Secret Service disguised as a parson,’ Henry said to end all further argument. ‘And now I’m going to see if anyone’s unthawed the bogs.’

  There was an awed silence after he had left, until Maybrick asked quietly, ‘Simcox Mi. Why does your brother tell such amazing lies?’ During a sickening pause Fred again felt that public opinion might be about to turn against him. Happily a diversion was caused by Pusey hopping out of bed to pull the blanket off the sobbing heap in the corner.

  ‘What’s the matter with Nubble, has he got the screaming habdabs?’ The small boy looked down with clinical interest at the cowering bulk. ‘Of course he has,’ Fred told them when he was sure no one was listening. ‘Haven’t you noticed? This dorm’s just like being adrift in an open boat. Thirteen weeks among the ice-floes.’

  In the afternoons, even if they were not down to play in any particular game, the boys at Knuckleberries were ordered to ‘take exercise’. For Fred this meant changing into football clothes and running shoes and hiding in the sour-smelling ‘bogs’ or sprinting off to a neighbouring spinney where he would crouch in the bushes to read the Picturegoer or those novels, which Henry told him were an essential part of his education, by Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer. He kept these works stuffed up his football shirt and he was pounding along one afternoon looking vaguely pregnant when he heard a stirring in the undergrowth and stopped to discover Arthur Nubble, also in full running-gear, taking cover. Nubble looked up at Fred with plaintive, soft brown eyes; he had full lips and curling dark brown hair and was not so much fat as inappropriately overweight for a schoolboy, like an Italian tenor who has to squeeze into the costume to play a romantic lead.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Hiding from your brother.’ Nubble spoke in an accent which Fred’s mother would have described as ‘slightly off’ ‘He’s meant to be in charge of exercise. I seem to spend most of the time at Knuckleberries hiding from people. Bloody awful place, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty terrible, yes,’ Fred agreed.

  ‘My dad told me it’d be bloody awful. Ghastly grub and I’d be homesick and miss our mum’s cooking, but he said it was worth it all because I’d meet useful friends. You look like a nice sort of friend for me to meet, Simcox Minor.’

  ‘I’m not all that useful, really,’ Fred assured him.

  ‘Why?’ Nubble sounded disappointed. ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘I turn on people.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I lead people on to trust me and then I turn on them. I’m well known for being treacherous.’ Fred thought of his habitual behaviour in the dormitory.

  ‘Couldn’t you be a useful friend for me, just until you start being treacherous?’

  ‘We’d better get moving.’ Fred started to walk on, deeper into the wood, and Arthur Nubble trotted after him, panting, ‘Fond of a bit of brawn, are you?’

  ‘What?’ Fred began to run slowly and Arthur lolloped behind him, talking incessantly. ‘Ox tongue, peaches in a decent white wine syrup, chicken in aspic, liqueur chocolates off coupons. My dad says it’s shocking the rationing we’ve still got in England. He says for all we won the war, we might as well be bloody Germans. He puts it all down to us having a Labour Government. He says it’s ridiculous, us not being able to get a bit of brawn if we’ve got a fancy for it.’ Arthur Nubble stopped then, and looked at Fred appealingly. ‘Look, as long as we’re friends, let’s go down the music huts.’

  ‘Why the music huts?’ Fred stopped too. He hadn’t, after all, come out in exercise clothes to run.

  ‘Because,’ Arthur muttered darkly, ‘nobody here learns the double bass.’

  Music did not have a great following at Knuckleberries, which specialized in Latin, mathematics and rugby football. The music huts were long, low, prefabricated buildings at the foot of the kitchen gardens from which scales and arpeggios were infrequently heard. The cubicles containing pianos or other instruments became places of hiding for nervous boys or shelters for solitary love affairs inflamed by illicit copies of Reveille or Titbits. In one such room, furnished with broken chairs and rusty music-stands, Arthur Nubble showed Fred an old double-bass case which opened like a cupboard to reveal various tins of food. The two boys, still in their running clothes, sat on the floor and hungrily consumed sweets and savouries, serving themselves with Nubble’s pocket-knife, a weapon usefully equipped with a tin-opener and a corkscrew. Post-war austerity and the indifference of the school cooking left Fred permanently hungry. He tucked into the exotic fare with fierce concentration.

  ‘My dad knows why there’s no brawn available,’ Arthur Nubble told him in a knowing way. ‘It’s because of that Attlee and Ernie Bevin and Sir Stifford Crapps. They keep all the brawn and peaches and white wine to themselves. And the same goes for the liqueur chocolates when they can get their sticky fingers on them. Like ox tongue, do you? Better than the muck you get here, eh?’ As he watched Fred eat, Arthur Nubble had all the pride of a society hostess laying on an elaborate dinner party. ‘Our headmaster ought to get himself in the Cabinet. Bet your father says the same thing about the Labour Government?’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ Fred told him between mouthfuls.

  ‘Doesn’t he?’

  ‘My father’s a Socialist.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Arthur clapped a hand over his mouth. ‘Dropped a brick.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. You must be bloody poor, if you’re a Socialist. Come here on a charity place? Well, we can still be friends. You’ll probably depend on me for a bite to eat.’

  ‘I thought you said Socialists were rich.’ Fred was working on a tin of marrons glacés.

  ‘Not Socialists,’ Arthur explained. ‘Not the rank and file. Just the Cabinet. The Cabinet get all the tinned stuff off points. The rank and file’d be better off as Germans.’

  ‘My father’s not especially poor,’ Fred admitted.

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘In fact I think he owns most of a brewery. Simcox Ales. You know. All that sort of nonsense.’

  ‘He owns best part of a brewery and he’s a Socialist?’ Arthur Nubble was laughing as he passed the chocolates. ‘Have a Tia Maria centre. He must be bloody crackers!’

  Nubble didn’t have long to wait before he had more material on which to judge Simeon Simcox’s sanity. As an old boy and a priest who often got his name in the papers, the Rector of Rapstone was invited by the Headmaster to preach at Knuckleberries, and to his sons’ horror he accepted. Fred sat, his nails dug into his palms, his fists clenched with embarrassment, and Henry listened stony-faced, giving nothing away in the icy, sham-Gothic school chapel. As soon as he heard the text, Revelation, chapter 21, verse 2, Fred’s heart sank, feeling sure that his father was going to preach about the Labour Government. ‘And I John saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, come down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’ A few of the smaller boys giggled at the word ‘bride’, but Simeon beamed down upon them all. ‘What’s the great virtue of an English public school?’ he asked them. ‘What did I, for instance, get out of Knuckleberries? A great deal. I mean, it’s no use having a sensible education. No. What we all need is something to rebel against. The ridiculous importance attached to football, the absurd rules about which side of Coppers Piece you can walk down after two years with your hands in your pockets, the Armistice Day sermons I’ve heard from this very pulpit about the Christian virtues of blowing each other up, wonderful stuff; thank God it all made a revolutionary of me! I mean, if Our Lord hadn’t heard a lot of rubbish preached by the Pharisees, he’d never have been driven to write the Sermon on the Mount.’ There was a sharp intake of breath from the Headmaster, but Simeon continued undeterred. ‘Perhaps my belief in a Just City, a New Jerusalem, an equal society, was born out of intense boredom on the playing-fields of Knuckleberries. Really I have only this advice for you all. Be rebels when you’re young
or what on earth will you have left for your old age?’ No one answered his question, and Arthur Nubble, hunched against one of the few radiators at the back of the chapel, bit into a liqueur chocolate.

  Sunday evening was always a bad time in the dormitory and Fred went upstairs with dread. He was not surprised to find a hostile crowd round Henry and to be greeted by a low murmur of mistrust.

  ‘Was that your father, Simcox?’

  ‘Of course.’ Henry was perfectly calm. ‘He’s keeping up the disguise. The war’s not really over, you know. We’ve still got lots of enemies.’

  ‘What’s he need a disguise for?’

  ‘Perhaps for when he goes to Russia.’ Henry sighed, as though having to explain himself to idiots. ‘He needs some sort of cover, doesn’t he?’

  The boys looked puzzled but they slunk away and later threw their slippers at a boy called Catchpole, who wore shiny pyjamas. He made a change from Nubble.

  It clouded over after lunch on the day of Simeon’s funeral. Fred and Henry and Henry’s second wife were drinking coffee in the living-room of the Rectory when Lonnie said that she thought it was coming on to rain. To check his wife’s forecast Henry went over to the barometer on the wall and found that there was nothing to tap. When Dorothy came into the room with a note in her hand he looked at her with suspicion.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘Father’s old barometer’s gone.’

  ‘She must have taken it,’ Dorothy answered vaguely, and asked, ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Who on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Francesca. Your Frankie.’

  Lonnie winced slightly at the name, as though she had taken a mouthful of ice-cream and awakened a dormant toothache. She had tried, she often told herself that no one could have tried harder, to get on with Francesca, Henry’s daughter by his first wife, the child of Numero Uno. She had been quite prepared to take Francesca on. It was clearly no life for the girl in a poky flat down the wrong end of the Fulham Road, having to put up with Agnes’s smoking and great flashes of gloom. But since the age of six Francesca had, she thought, whenever the child was compelled by the terms of the divorce settlement to come for the weekend, consistently disapproved of her. So Lonnie pursed her lips when she heard who was responsible for the theft, as though she had suspected it all along.

  ‘Francesca took my father’s old barometer?’ Henry made it sound an unnatural crime, like patricide.

  ‘Well, I gave it to her.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I said she could have it.’

  At this Lonnie thought it right to intervene, purely in the interests of justice and her husband. ‘I think Simeon would have liked Henry to have the barometer. As the eldest son I think he’s entitled to have it.’

  ‘Why?’ Fred asked. ‘Is Henry starting out on a career as a weather-man?’

  ‘Henry was always to have the barometer and the clock,’ Lonnie answered with dignity, ‘and as the only writer in the family he has to be entitled to the desk. That was to be Henry’s.’

  ‘She left a note when they took the things.’ Dorothy put on her glasses and read without expression from the paper she was carrying, ‘ “Darling Gran. Came this morning for the stuff. Didn’t want to disturb you but it was the only day we could get the van.” ’

  ‘Came this morning when we were what?’ Henry’s voice rose in outrage.

  ‘Well we were in church, weren’t we? I think she must have forgotten the date. I mean, she says she didn’t realize until she got here and by then, of course, it was too late.’

  ‘Not too late to loot the place. Who did she come with?’

  ‘Oh, I think Peter,’ Dorothy told him.

  ‘So my daughter and her boyfriend raided the Rectory during my father’s funeral and took away his furniture!’

  ‘Only the desk and the barometer. Oh, and the little kitchen clock.’

  ‘What on earth did they want the little kitchen clock for?’

  ‘How about telling the time?’ Fred suggested, it seemed unhelpfully, because his brother glared at him and started his tirade. ‘Brutes! Robbers! Barbarians! Francesca the Hun!’

  ‘I’d told her she could,’ Dorothy assured him. ‘And they’re young.’

  ‘Young and with all the tact and delicacy of a crowd of drunken mercenaries.’

  ‘It’s appalling,’ Lonnie chipped in. ‘You’ll have to speak to her, Henry.’

  ‘Just a few things’ – Dorothy was understanding – ‘so she can remember Simeon.’

  ‘A barometer!’ Henry was working himself up into a thoroughly enjoyable rage. ‘What do they want a barometer for? They don’t have weather in Tufnell Park.’

  ‘The young have no sort of consideration,’ Lonnie agreed.

  ‘Consideration! All Francesca’s consideration’s reserved for South American guerrillas, under-privileged Eskimos and one-parent lame lesbian families living in Greater Manchester.’ Listening to him Fred began to think how remarkably his brother had inherited their father’s habit of preaching. ‘Oh, I forgot,’ Henry went on. ‘And whales! Huge bloody whales swimming about in the sea, spouting and suckling their young and never even realizing that all the concern that normal girls lavish on their parents, all the reverence that decent-minded daughters might feel for a death in the family, is entirely concentrated on their bloated, inarticulate, blubbery bodies. We were never like that.’ He looked at Fred and added, less certainly, ‘Were we?’

  Having his brother at school seemed no sort of advantage to Fred. Henry’s presence reminded him of home but offered none of its consolations and as Henry moved steadily up the school, driven by an ambition Fred could not understand to be head boy, he chose different friends and became contemptuous of his younger brother’s association with Arthur Nubble. ‘Do stop hanging around with that fat spiv.’ Henry knew nothing of the feasts in the music huts. ‘Can’t you see you’re letting the family down?’

  Separated at school the boys remained apart during the holidays. Henry wrote in his notebooks, went to stay with school friends and joined the village cricket team. Fred went on solitary bicycle rides. On one of these he made a discovery and a friend who was to prove, it seemed, as much of a let-down to his family as Arthur Nubble.

  He was riding down a path in the woods when he heard a pheasant calling – the sound seemed near to him and close to the ground. He got off his bicycle, dropped it, left it ticking in the leaves and went to investigate. A little away from the path he found a cage in which the calling bird was imprisoned. He knelt down and had some idea of liberating the cock pheasant from the trap when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘You let him be. He’s happy enough in there.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Calling out to all the ladies in the neighbourhood. With a bit of luck they’ll all be round to see him shortly, they find his voice very attractive.’ The man was fat, dressed in an old flannel vest and shapeless trousers; he had a sharp nose, bright eyes and an expression of considerable glee, particularly when he was carrying, as he was at that moment, a shot-gun under his arm. ‘Aren’t you the Rector’s boy?’

  Fred admitted it.

  ‘Grown, haven’t you?’

  Fred admitted that also.

  ‘Tom Nowt. Used to come up and see your father a bit in the old days, used to bring him rabbits. Mother keeping well, is she?’

  Fred supposed his mother was well.

  ‘All right then. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  The man set off through the bushes and down a rutted cart-track until they reached a haphazard sort of building that looked as though it had been cobbled together in odd moments out of old planks, bits of hardboard, asbestos and corrugated iron. Inside it was warm, damp and stuffy. There was a paraffin stove and as the man made tea, sweetened with sugar and condensed milk, for both of them, Fred looked round and saw an old brass bed, assorted chairs, a broken sofa leaking horsehair and another shot-gun and a rifle in the corner. Deer skulls hu
ng among the pin-ups on the walls, fleshless heads with dark eye-sockets and proud antlers. It was the first of many visits he was to pay to Tom Nowt’s hut.

  In time it became the first place he would make for when he came home for the holidays. He came to know more about Tom, that he lived in a cottage at the edge of the wood with his wife, Dora, and a number of children, that his hut was merely his shooting-lodge, and that he was mistrusted in the village since a tree he was felling had dropped wrongly and permanently injured old Percy Bigwell’s legs. Although he undertook casual farm labour it was said that his real occupation was the secret shooting of deer that, having escaped from the Fanners’ park at Rapstone Manor, bred freely in the woods. He also took pheasants by various means and shot over other people’s land. None of this mattered to Fred, who sat, when he had got to know Tom Nowt better, nursing yet another warm mug of tea and condensed milk and said, ‘How did all those die, Tom?’

  ‘Some say they was got quietly by cross-bow bolts,’ Tom told him solemnly. ‘Some say they was dazed in an old car’s headlights and a rifle did them. Those particular ones, I am prepared to take my oath, passed over peaceful, in their sleep.’

  Fred had been suppressing laughter. Now it erupted. ‘Been eating a lot of venison have you lately, Tom?’

  ‘Breakfast, dinner and tea.’ Tom sat down beside Fred and gulped tea. ‘Nothing better than a deer’s brains on toast for breakfast. How they been treating you, Fred?’

  ‘Oh. Badly, Tom. Terribly badly.’ Fred chose to look pathetic.

  ‘What do they do to you, boy?’

  ‘At school? Half starve us, make us sleep in a dormitory where the bogs freeze, hit us quite often for silly reasons, teach us Latin poetry so slowly you can’t ever understand what it’s about. And do cross-country runs where you have to break the ice and wade through streams. I cut my legs on the ice this term.’