Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, of course.’

  Mr Titmuss took the statuette in his hand and stood looking at it with deep suspicion. ‘Rector,’ he said, ‘can I ask you to explain the presence of this ornament on your mantelpiece?’

  At this point Simeon became entirely vague. ‘No, I don’t think I should. That is to say… I don’t think I can at all. It’s a matter of confidence,’ he said, and felt that he had explained nothing.

  ‘Then you would have no objection to my removing this from your possession?’ Mr Titmuss, without waiting for further permission, put the statuette into his pocket.

  ‘No objection in the world.’ Simeon laughed a little. ‘In fact its removal might come as a considerable relief to my wife.’

  ‘Would it indeed?’

  ‘Oh yes. I dare say it would.’

  ‘Then I’ll say goodbye to you, Rector. From now on it will be formal communication only on the business of our joint Parish Council.’ He went to the door. ‘Fine words on the subject of Socialism may come to you very easy, but they hardly excuse the acquisition of the other person’s little ornaments.’

  Simeon was left looking at the closed door in surprise and bewilderment.

  After his father’s funeral Fred returned to the practice he carried on in the old house in Hartscombe, which had once belonged to Dr Salter. It was a busy time, for which he was grateful, and he avoided thoughts of the past, failing to return a number of calls he had from Jackson Cantellow, the family solicitor. Driven to desperation by this conduct Cantellow called at the surgery, where Miss Margaret Thorne, Fred’s strict, grey-haired receptionist, made him sit for a while in a row of sick people, reading back numbers of Punch and Good Housekeeping or staring into space. ‘I’m not ill,’ he protested, ‘it’s a matter of urgent business!’, when a staggering four-year-old offered to show him her colouring book. At last Miss Thorne relented and said, ‘Doctor will see you now, Mr Cantellow.’

  ‘I’ve got to talk to one of you, and I can’t get a word of sense out of your mother.’ Fred looked up at the red face hovering over him above a purple bow-tie and wondered if he should suggest taking the patient’s blood pressure. ‘A word of sense about what?’

  ‘The position! You realize of course why the Rector could afford to be so independent, why he could cock so many fine liberal snooks at the Bishop and Synod and the Parish Council? The stipend at the Rectory could hardly have kept him in pipe tobacco or bought your mother’s little pieces of china. It was his shares in Simcox Ales, that’s what Dorothy might have expected to depend on.’

  ‘Might have?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to explain it to her. Of course it pains your mother to talk about money and you can live a pure and unselfish existence writing out chitties for days off work and tending to the slightest whims of your National Health patients.’ Jackson Cantellow, a pillar of the Worsfield Choral Society, was accustomed to give way to such arias. ‘Oh, it’s all very fine and elevated, no doubt, to be perfectly uninterested in money when you’ve got plenty of it. But you haven’t now, Dr Frederick. Your family hasn’t.’

  ‘I never expected any.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘I supposed Simeon would leave it all to Mother.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you what’s happened.’ Cantellow sat down and went on with the relish of a man who has bad news to impart. ‘For years I’d been urging your father to make a will, but he never gave me instructions. Now I hear from a little firm in Worsfield who do police court business, that sort of thing, and it seems…’ Jackson Cantellow looked deeply shocked. ‘It seems that your father went to them entirely without my knowledge and made a will, quite recently. He left none of the Brewery shares, which must be worth about two million nicker, if I know anything about it, to your mother, or to you, or to your brother, Henry.’

  ‘Well, who did he leave them to?’ Fred was growing bored, as he sometimes did with a long list of patients’ aches and pains.

  ‘He left the whole bloody shooting-match’ – Jackson Cantellow came to the point at last – ‘to the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss, M.P., absolutely and for ever.’

  On the day after this meeting Henry and his second wife, Lonnie, drove down to the Rectory and saw Fred and Dorothy in what the older brother called a ‘Council of War’. ‘Of course we’re going to fight it!’ Henry said, pacing the study in considerable anger.

  ‘I don’t see why “of course”.’

  ‘Oh no, Fred. You wouldn’t. You never fought anything. You never even cared about winning when we played games.’

  ‘I always thought that life was rather too short to care about losing to you at ping-pong.’

  ‘Then you’ll be a great help in defeating the abominable Titmuss!’

  ‘Such an unattractive child,’ Dorothy remembered. ‘I always thought that must have been very hard for him to bear. As a boy he always smelled, as I remember it, of lead pencils. I pitied him for it.’

  ‘Well, no need to pity him any longer,’ Lonnie said. ‘He’s got all our money.’

  ‘Mother’s money,’ Fred corrected her, and Henry gave him an unfriendly look. ‘Such an extraordinary thing for your father to do!’ Lonnie went on undeterred. ‘Do you think he meant it as some sort of joke?’

  ‘Did he mean many things as a joke?’ Dorothy asked.

  ‘Perhaps only his profession.’ Fred smiled, but Henry looked extremely serious. ‘Our father, perhaps you need reminding, was a priest of the Church of England.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t know. He never told me he thought being a parson was funny. He never said it in so many words.’ Dorothy started to collect their teacups.

  ‘Well, I’m going to fight it if nobody else is,’ Henry told them. ‘Quite clearly our father was out of his head.’

  ‘He was a saint,’ Fred reminded him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard what Kev the Rev. said at the funeral. We have lived in the presence of a saint.’

  ‘Or a complete raving lunatic?’ Henry asked, and answered, ‘That’s what we’re going to have to prove.’

  After Henry and Lonnie had gone back to London, Fred left his mother and drove into Hartscombe. He saw the sights of his childhood, the bridge and the broad river made for pleasure, the moored punts and canoes and white launches, the willows and pubs by the water. He passed the long, red-brick brewery buildings and the sign of ‘Simcox Ales’. He came to the rather shabby Victorian house where he lived and worked and parked his car in the space marked ‘Doctor’.

  The working day was over. He looked in on Miss Thorne, who was putting away the patients’ cards, and went up to the top floor. His room was untidy, it was a bachelor’s living-room with piles of books, records and his old drum set. He found a 78, wiped the dust off it and put it on the record-player. Then he gathered up the plate and cup and saucer which he had used at breakfast and carried them out to the kitchen as Benny Goodman started to play ‘Slow Boat to China’. He sat at the drums and began to accompany the record, singing softly also,

  Get you and keep you

  In my arms evermore,

  Leave all your lovers

  Weeping on the faraway shore.

  Out on the briny,

  With a moon big and shiny,

  Melting your heart of stone,

  I’d love to get you

  On a slow boat to China,

  All to myself alone…

  As he played the years vanished. He thought of nothing very much, except, for some reason, the sound of wire-brushes on an upturned chamber-pot, and wondered, not for the first time, why their father had sent them so far away from home.

  Part Two

  Let’s be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good. Go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed ever in the history of this country.

  Harold Macmillan

>   Bedford, July 1957

  6

  The Deserter

  Fred had seen them again on a yellowing newspaper photograph he found in an old tea-chest of Simeon’s belongings which he was going through after his father’s death. There was the Rector marching along as proud as a field marshal, swinging the stick he took out on country walks and smiling for the camera beneath a huge black banner which proclaimed ‘March from Aldermaston, Easter 1958’. Beside him was Ben Leverett, once the Labour M.P. for Hartscombe, and his wife, Joanie. Behind them young men and women marched with the seriousness and dedication of soldiers in a war they had missed. Many of them held up circular C.N.D. signs or slogans such as ‘Ban the Bomb or the Human Race’. Behind the leaders the trailing procession included men with caps and macs, for it was a miserably wet Easter, playing trumpets, trombones and penny whistles. And among them Fred saw, looking absurdly young, the faces of himself and Henry. His elder brother was frowning, clearly taking the matter extremely seriously. It seemed as though Fred had made a joke and Henry hadn’t laughed.

  ‘Peaceful demonstrations!’ Henry said that Easter as they trudged out of London. ‘I mean, what peaceful demonstration ever altered the course of history? Do you honestly imagine that the October Revolution could have been brought about by a few people tootling on penny whistles and a couple of vicar’s sons carrying sandwiches?’

  ‘There are more people here today.’ They had started off as a few hundred from Trafalgar Square and had lunch by the Albert Memorial. Even then a number of their better-dressed supporters had defected at Turnham Green and taken the tube home. As they marched along the Great West Road there was a flurry of snow and somewhere a man had run out of his house to tell them that Cambridge had won the Boat Race. Somewhere a woman advised them to get back to Moscow, but there were new recruits, men carrying rolls of blankets and sleeping-bags for the nights they were to spend in churches or village halls, and mothers pushing prams. In one section the marchers played and sang protest songs, they were those whom critics of the enterprise would call the ‘beards and weirds’. It was the first of such expeditions, the small start of a period which would be marked by an uncontrollable escalation in bombs and demonstrations.

  ‘Do you really think,’ Henry asked, ‘that Marie Antoinette would have gone scooting out of Versailles at the approach of a few students strumming guitars and a couple of overweight M.P.s? The idea’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Why are you here then?’

  ‘Well, I think, in my position, I should stand up and be counted,’ Henry said in all modesty.

  ‘I’ll count you then.’ Fred looked at his brother and said, after some calculation, ‘One!’

  ‘Oh, really! At times you are excessively childish.’

  But they were children no more. Fred was then twenty-three and had done his National Service, unheroically in the Pay Corps. He was still at Cambridge, Simeon’s old university, where he found himself reading politics and economics with a growing lack of interest. Henry was twenty-six, his National Service had taken him to Malaya, so he had a travelled and somewhat world-weary air. He read English at King’s, joined the university Labour Party, had three of his plays acted by undergraduates, engaged in several notable love-affairs and was the subject of a profile in Granta. When he came down he got a job in a publishing firm where he wrote scathing reports on the novels of middle-aged and established authors.

  Will you see your children die?

  Men and women, stand together,

  Do not heed the Men of War!

  Make your mind up – now or never,

  Ban the bomb for ever more…

  The song, taken up and then let go around them, drifted away over the wet hedgerows and soggy fields. Some sang full-throatedly, and quickly gave up with the effort of marching; others, adopting the more professional nasal whine of the transatlantic protest singer, kept it up longer. The children joined in, guessing at the words or breaking into giggles when a group of adults changed it to ‘Ban the bum’.

  ‘What is your position, anyway?’ Fred asked.

  ‘Well, with the book just coming out,’ Henry explained patiently, ‘it’s obvious that an artist should take a stand.’

  Henry’s first novel, The Greasy Pole, had just been accepted for publication by a rival and more go-ahead firm than his own and he was nervously awaiting disaster or life-long fame. In fact the book was to get some good notices and moderate sales. Although The Greasy Pole might have appeared as the latest word in the new style of comic, social and sexual realism introduced some years earlier, it was about the tenth re-write of the work which Henry read to Fred and Arthur Nubble by the playing-fields at Knuckleberries.

  ‘Which artist?’ Fred asked, a question so foolish that Henry did not bother to answer it. By the time they had stopped for lunch Fred had decided that, although he was prepared to take all reasonable steps to save mankind from self-immolation, sleeping with his brother on the floor of a church again was an act over and above the call of duty. A plan began to form itself in his mind, but he knew himself well enough to doubt whether he would ever have the courage to put it into operation. They sat outside a pub. Ben Leverett, who made a good thing out of journalism and liked more than an occasional glass of champagne, a tipple which it was his avowed intention to spread evenly among the labouring classes, was panting and wiping his forehead with a red-and-white spotted handkerchief. His wife, Joanie, made of sterner stuff, was still singing, ‘Ban, ban, ban the bloody H Bomb!’ to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’ with a group of Worsfield women. Simeon reacted with smiling detachment to a request for prayer from a group of Christian Pacifists. It was when he said, ‘I think at the moment I’d rather have a pint of wallop,’ and, ‘Today we’re praying with our feet,’ that Fred felt driven to go into the saloon bar and make a telephone call. His hands were hot and smelled of the pennies he had been clutching; he waited as the number rang and had almost decided to go back to the marchers when the ringing stopped and he heard a voice say, ‘Yes? Who is it?’ As usual she sounded desperate, as though the house had caught fire and she was trapped at the head of a blazing staircase with no possibility of escape.

  ‘Agnes!’ He had pressed Button A and now he was committed to at least try for an adventure.

  ‘Where on earth are you?’ She asked the question as though she felt no real need to know the answer.

  ‘By a road somewhere. I’m doing something with my father,’ he insisted on telling her, ‘but I might be able to get away this evening. I mean, would you like to do something? Or something,’ he ended lamely.

  ‘I wanted to go to Worsfield tonight.’ Agnes was standing in the hall of the Doctor’s house in Hartscombe. Down the passage the living-room door was open and she spoke quietly, not wishing to be overheard. ‘To go dancing,’ she told Fred. ‘Is that an extraordinary thing to want to do?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so. Where?’

  ‘There’s an absolutely horrible club where they have the most repulsive food. I thought that might be a good place to go.’

  ‘Oh. All right then.’ It had to be better than the night with Henry in the church and he now felt that if he didn’t take her out he would be a failure in Agnes’s eyes for ever.

  ‘I can get over in my father’s car, but not if you don’t want to. How will you get over?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll hitch a lift or something. What’s it called?’

  ‘What’s what called?’

  ‘The awful place.’

  ‘Oh. The Barrel of Biscuits, isn’t it ghastly? It’s in West Street, so far as I can remember. But honestly don’t bother.’

  ‘Yes. I want to. You know I want to. About eight o’clock?’

  ‘Just don’t expect anything much.’ When Agnes put the telephone down she walked along the passage, past the half-open sitting-room door. She didn’t go in as her father was there with a lady. She was Mrs Dorothy Simcox, Fred’s mother, for whom he was pouring a second glass of lunchtime sherry.
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  ‘Guilt,’ Dr Salter was saying, as he often did, ‘is a most malignant disease.’

  Fred wasn’t discouraged by Agnes’s description. That afternoon he told Henry he was going to march with the musicians; he was doing so, he hinted, out of professional interest. So he fell behind his father and his brother, and when the guitar players passed him he loitered behind them also. When the whole procession had vanished up the road he thumbed a lift from a passing lorry.

  Worsfield, home of the biscuit and an ailing furniture industry, is a place which seems like a grim northern town set down unexpectedly in a south-west riverside landscape. Its cathedral is a barrack-like red-brick 1930s building, its university a series of concrete blocks specializing in engineering and its streets glum and ill-favoured. Fred arrived there about two hours early for his meeting with Agnes. He went into the Railway Hotel lavatory and washed with liquid soap and wondered if he needed a shave. As he saw no way of getting one he brushed his clothes, cleaned his shoes on the machine provided and checked, without any particular optimism, the continued presence of a single french letter in the corner of his wallet. When he thought about it sanely he couldn’t imagine that Agnes who, although beautiful, had not a good word to say for all the other pleasures in life, would have much time for sex.

  He had no difficulty in finding the Barrel of Biscuits, a converted warehouse in West Street, and no difficulty at all in becoming a life member. As he sat at the bar and waited, drinking slowly to preserve his money, Fred began to tell himself that Agnes wouldn’t have wanted to meet him unless… Well, after all, it had been entirely her suggestion. He’d been dragged away from a most important protest march at her insistence and what else could that mean? When he got out a pound note to pay the barman he felt the circular ridge in the inner pocket of his wallet and thought it might come in useful after a long period of inactivity. And then she was half an hour late and he decided she wasn’t coming at all. Well, perhaps it was all for the best. He looked towards the dance floor, at the girls in huge circular skirts, rustling petticoats and ankle socks. They seemed to be totally unaware, he thought, of the coming destruction of mankind.