Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘Nothing.’ Fred tapped his drums impatiently. ‘I don’t want a sermon at all.’

  ‘About the march…’ Simeon began, but his son interrupted him. ‘Don’t tell me I made the slightest difference to the march. No one could’ve noticed whether I was there or not.’

  ‘Don’t be modest, Fred, don’t feel you’re grand enough to be modest. I expect you think all that marching is quite futile. Perhaps the good it does is to those who take part in it, it makes them feel they’re not simply leading dull, materialistic lives, perhaps…’

  ‘It all sounds extremely self-indulgent.’ Fred was longing to be left alone, to play his drums and think about Agnes.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re not pure enough for you,’ Simeon smiled.

  Fred continued his attack. ‘Perhaps you can achieve the same result with Simcox’s Best Bitter, and it’s not half so hard on the feet, or with any inexpensive pleasures like…’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, never mind. How did you find out I left the march, did Henry tell you?’

  ‘No. No, it wasn’t your brother.’ The question apparently caused Simeon some embarrassment. He fumbled for a pipe and started to fill it clumsily, dropping shreds of tobacco on the carpet. ‘It was Leslie who told me.’ He seemed apologetic.

  ‘Leslie?’ Fred enjoyed sounding incredulous.

  ‘Young Titmuss.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’ Fred was now able to feel betrayed and was surprised at how defensive his father had become.

  ‘He saw you getting a lift, early in the morning.’

  ‘Leslie Titmuss! I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You know he works at the Brewery now,’ the Rector said, as though it explained something. ‘Well, he bicycles in early even at weekends. He’s studying for a degree in advanced accountancy, his father told me that. I believe he’s anxious to take up some sort of public service.’

  ‘Like spying on my movements?’

  ‘That’s not charitable, Fred. Leslie’s had absolutely none of your advantages. He wants to make something of his life.’

  ‘And something of mine too?’

  At lunchtime Simeon asked Dorothy if she had been away from the house on the last day of the march and she said that she had been in the garden all day and at home in the evening. She had seen nothing at all of Fred. Her husband held a green apple in one bony hand and, with the other, he peeled it carefully. Not for the first time he felt the simplicity of the great issues, he knew exactly what should be done about South Africa and urban poverty and the bomb. It was the small events, those nearer home, that seemed to him forever shrouded in mystery. He bit into the apple with sudden determination and a small wince of courage, like a swimmer who plunges briskly into the sea on a cold day.

  Leslie Titmuss would have stayed in the office at lunchtime, with the sandwiches and Thermos his mother had prepared for him, if he hadn’t had some business to attend to. He never liked crossing the Brewery yard; the wide expanse smelled of sour beer and horse shit from the four great stamping Suffolk Punches Simcox’s still kept to advertise the Brewery and enter for the County Show. Huge lorries were always backing in and out of the gates and he had an irrational feeling that the barrels which were rolled on to them might bound away out of control, trundle across the yard like huge cannonballs and snap his thin legs like matchsticks. As he picked his way across this danger zone in his dark suit and white detachable collar, older men in aprons, enjoying their free beer in the shadows under shed roofs, would call out at him, asking him questions about his uneventful sex life, which he pretended not to hear.

  That day he had got safely to the gates without being shouted at or coming to any harm. He was about to set out on his mission when he heard his name called in a peremptory, not to say hostile manner and turned to see Fred standing in the road outside the Brewery entrance, waiting for him.

  ‘Mr Frederick.’ Leslie meant to appear casually surprised. He was conscious that his voice sounded startled and ingratiating.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Leslie. Don’t bother about the “Mr Frederick”. You’ve been speaking to my father.’

  ‘Yes. He lets me. I’m very grateful.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Shouldn’t one speak to the Rector?’ Leslie spoke in a hushed, almost reverent tone which Fred would have found funny if he hadn’t been so incensed. ‘If one has spiritual problems?’

  ‘Am I one of your spiritual problems?’

  ‘No, “Fred”, of course you aren’t.’ Leslie tried another cautious smile. ‘I just happened to mention I saw you up early. I thought your father’d like to know that.’

  ‘When I ought to have been with him, banning the bomb?’

  ‘I don’t agree with that, exactly.’ Leslie Titmuss was quick to state his position.

  ‘Oh, don’t you?’

  ‘We need the bomb.’ Leslie looked nervously back at the Brewery yard, as though he were thinking of his personal protection.

  ‘You might need it,’ Fred told him with some contempt. ‘It might come in frightfully handy for you in the accounts department at Simcox Brewery. It may be absolutely vital for your daily cycling to work from Skurfield. But I don’t know why anyone else has the slightest need for it.’

  ‘Think of England.’ Fred was surprised to find Leslie looking at him with a kind of pitying sincerity.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Think of England, “Fred”, and the defence of freedom.’ This came out in such a new, carefully modulated and confidential voice, so far removed from the squeaky and complaining tones of the old Leslie Titmuss, that Fred asked, ‘What on earth’s happened to you?’

  ‘You should learn about that.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the defence of freedom. You going to be at the Swan’s Nest on Saturday night, are you?’ The question seemed so irrelevant to the cause of freedom that Fred was at a loss for an answer. ‘Dinner dance of the Young Conservatives,’ Leslie told him. ‘Dress is formal.’ And as Fred stood looking at him Leslie started to retreat hastily, saying as he went, ‘You want to join the Y.C.s, Mr Frederick. You want to make something of yourself.’

  Fred might have followed Leslie Titmuss in order to protest further, or to make an appropriate reply to his invitation to join the Young Conservatives, but he was himself summoned to account by an insistent voice calling him from the other side of the road.

  ‘Come here, young Fred!’

  Dr Salter had emerged from a terraced house where he had been visiting one of that class of people whom he considered pampered and overprivileged, the sick. He was clearly glad to be out of the bedroom and was gulping in fresh air mixed with smells from the Brewery and standing beside his cherished antique sports car, which Fred couldn’t help noticing, as he approached it guiltily, had a buckled bumper and a dented rear-end.

  ‘I positively approve of your battering down Rapstone Church,’ Dr Salter said, ‘but I would be obliged if your lust for destruction stopped short at the backside of my old Alvis.’

  ‘Oh,’ Fred affected surprise, ‘is it damaged at all?’

  ‘Get in,’ said Dr Salter, and opened the car door.

  Faced with the crop-headed, unsmiling, square-shouldered Doctor, Fred felt like those characters in the gangster-movies he most enjoyed who were hustled into cars by mobsters with bulging pockets and taken to a cement overcoat in the East River. ‘I’ll buy you a couple of pints in the Badger at Skurfield. Dora Nowt’s just about to drop her fifth. She’s a reasonably cooperative patient, usually manages to pull it off before lunch. Agnes has gone up to London,’ the Doctor went on, interrupting Fred, who seemed about to make some excuse, ‘so don’t pretend you’ve got anything better to do.’ They drove for a while in silence, but when they reached the place where the road divided at the signpost which pointed one way to Rapstone and the other way to Skurfield, Fred, who hadn’t stopped thinking about it, asked, ‘Where did you say Agnes had gone?’

 
‘To London. She went to stay with her Aunt Molly. Wanted to admire the holes in the latest exhibition of stone carving, some such fascinating occupation.’

  ‘She’s gone to the Henry Moores?’ Fred felt reassured.

  ‘If that’s the fellow’s name. At least, that’s what she told me,’ Dr Salter said, not being reassuring at all.

  So they drove on and into Skurfield, an entirely different sort of village from Rapstone Fanner. Although only three miles distant it has a different climate; it’s higher, colder, and even when the sun shines on the brick and flint cottages of Rapstone there seems to be a continual dark cloud over its concrete out-buildings and pebble-dash walls. Skurfield is a great place for corrugated-iron sheds, greyish washing flapping in the wind and chickens roosting in the abandoned and rusting bodies of Austin Sevens through which nettles and willow herb are growing. The front gardens of Skurfield cottages are unweeded dumps which accommodate prams, bicycles, motor-bikes under constant repair and defunct paraffin stoves. Flowers are rare and seem to have seeded themselves by accident and in spite of their surroundings. The village exists shortly on either side of a fairly wide road which looks determined to go on to Worsfield as rapidly as possible.

  At the end of the last century a simple-minded Nowt, who had hitherto spent most of his life sitting at his cottage’s gate on an old kitchen chair paring his nails with a pocket-knife and muttering to himself, considered he was suddenly crossed in love, poured a gallon or two of lamp oil into the vestry cupboards of the old parish church and set fire to the building. What remained of the early English structure was restored by old Magnus Strove, ever a parsimonious landlord, with a strict eye to economy. The result was said by the then Sir Nicholas Fanner to look like a public urinal built for a community lost to God. The outside has yellowish bricks and a slate roof, the interior, echoing like an old fives court, is ornamented only with a stained-glass window in which Magnus Strove, wearing a frock-coat and surrounded by pallid cherubs, is to be seen receiving the freedom of the City of Worsfield, and a white marble plaque on which are written the names of the depressingly large number of local inhabitants who fell in two world wars. ‘Sons of Skurfield’, reads the inscription above it, ‘Not lost but gone before’.

  Such cheer as there was at that time in Skurfield was dispensed by Ned Gower, the usually surly landlord of the Badger. However, the Simcox Extra was as good there as it was at Rapstone and in the evening a particularly brutal game of bar billiards was played by the regulars for minimal stakes in the white glare of a hissing kerosene lamp. Licensing hours were elastic in Ned Gower’s time and the Hartscombe police avoided the Badger with studied disdain. The village also boasted a small shop with a fly-blown window which displayed a sleeping tom cat, a few tins of corned beef, boxes of biscuits and yellowing knitting patterns. The shop had been run by an elderly couple who entered into a suicide pact and died in a state of desperate confusion because they were unable to cope with the system of sweet rationing during the war. There was, however, one small house in Skurfield which stood out like a gleaming porcelain crown in a mouth full of crumbling and nicotine-stained teeth. It guarded the entrance to the village from the Rapstone crossroads, a neat red and white box, striped like bacon and built by a local jobbing builder in the thirties. ‘The Spruces’ had a trim, low privet hedge, a tirelessly mown patch of front lawn and never, in any circumstances, displayed washing – articles of great privacy which Mrs Elsie Titmuss, Leslie’s mother, dried on a clothes-horse in the kitchen. Net curtains kept all prying eyes away from the windows of ‘The Spruces’ and such precautions were wise because, with both male Titmusses employed in the accounts department at the Brewery, there was certainly property inside, a refrigerator, a handsome electric clock, a set of china ornaments kept in a glass-fronted cupboard, which would have excited the envy and possibly the greed of the Skurfield inhabitants. There was also a small garage, heavily padlocked, which contained the meticulously polished Titmuss runabout, a Ford Prefect, kept only for Sunday driving and ‘days out’ during the summer holidays.

  Admiring the Skurfield landscape was all Fred had to do as he sat in the passenger seat of the Alvis outside Tom and Dora Nowt’s cottage. Agnes’s father had forbidden him to go in (‘You’ll only faint or something unhelpful’), but the punctuality he had predicted was fulfilled. There was a faint cry behind the sealed-up, curtained windows, and when the Doctor emerged, accompanied by a respectful grandmother wiping her hands on her apron, he opened the car door and said, ‘All right. Let’s go over to the Badger. I don’t suppose you’re any bloody good at darts.’

  ‘Success?’ Fred asked him.

  ‘Who knows? The nipper may turn out to be an unmitigated disaster. Most people are.’

  During the same lunchtime, in Hartscombe, the young Magnus Strove, by then a good-looking but still boyish twenty-two, whose curling hair and soft, candid eyes concealed the fact that he was as tough as old boots and had a strongly developed money sense, came out of the bank with a giggling cousin, a not-too-distant neighbour called Jennifer Battley, and five pound notes which he was tucking into his wallet. Magnus was constantly aware of what he called his ‘cash-flow situation’, which meant that he carried as little money as possible and relied on his Oxford friends and Hartscombe neighbours to pick up the bills for his drinks and dinners. Jennifer, who was very stuck on him, usually agreed to ‘go Dutch’ anyway, which meant that she paid, because at a vital moment at the end of dinner Magnus would slap his pockets in a fruitless search for his cheque book, which he kept always under lock and key in Picton House with all the counterfoils neatly filled in.

  So Magnus and Jennifer, arm in arm, went off down the street and, for not much reason, Magnus stopped at the dusty window of a small local outfitter called Henry Pyecroft – ‘Ladies and Gents Bespoke and Ready-made – Evening-Wear for Hire by the Occasion at Reasonable Prices – All Garments Impeccably Clean’. He pulled Jennifer to a stop and they looked in. What they saw was Leslie Titmuss being fitted for a hired dinner-suit. Mr Pyecroft, in his shirt-sleeves with a tape-measure round his neck, looked with irritation at the giggling young couple on the other side of the window. Leslie was too busy admiring the image of the fine, sombre suiting with glistening lapels and a wide trouser stripe in the long, tarnished mirror to notice and, in a moment, Magnus and Jennifer had gone laughing on their way.

  ‘I’m sorry. About the car, I mean.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all the damage you’ve done.’ Fred and the Doctor were sitting in the draughty interior of the Badger, demolishing Simcox bitter with bread and cheese and breathing in the smell of wet dog.

  ‘Of course, I expect to pay.’

  ‘With your father’s money? It’d be a miracle.’

  ‘If you could take instalments.’

  ‘Getting a bit of ready cash out of a wealthy Socialist in a dog-collar would require the talents of Moses striking the rock in the desert,’ Dr Salter said, ignoring his offer. ‘Charity, according to your reverend father, begins in other people’s homes.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very fair.’

  ‘You want to argue with me?’ The Doctor looked at Fred, his blue eyes cold and his face set.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Pity. It’s becoming a damn dull lunch.’ Dr Salter sounded disappointed. He stood up, collected a handful of darts and took aim. Saying, ‘Middle for diddle,’ without the hint of a smile, he threw a dart plumb into the centre of the board. ‘Did Agnes tell you?’ Fred stood up and collected some darts. He had no confidence in his ability to score against the Doctor.

  ‘Tell me? Tell me what?’ The Doctor pulled out his dart and then threw again.

  ‘About the car.’

  ‘Oh, about the car. Of course. She told me all about the car.’ He removed his darts and chalked up his substantial score.

  Fred started to play, unable to get a double or throw a dart into the centre of the board. ‘Everyone seems to tell everyone everything.’ He sounded
resentful and younger than his years.

  ‘Only secrets. The only things people tell are secrets. Foolish to have them. Your family are rather given to secrecy though.’

  ‘My family?’

  ‘Must be the religion that does it.’ Agnes’s father threw again, scored satisfactorily and scrawled his figures on the board, as illegibly as though they were on a prescription. ‘Secret sort of business, religion. All that whispering to God behind other people’s backs. Damn funny though! Old Simeon leading the multitude into the promised land of peace and all that sort of nonsense and you playing truant in order to bust up my motor.’

  ‘Do you think he’s wrong?’ Away from home Fred always felt protective about his father.

  ‘I don’t deal in right and wrong. I deal in collywobbles and housemaid’s knee.’

  ‘Do you think he was mistaken, though, to go on the march?’ Fred threw and started his game modestly. Dr Salter stood watching him, his legs apart, as though sizing up some not particularly promising piece of horse-flesh. ‘You can’t change people. You know that. You can’t make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it. Isn’t that enough?’ He threw a dart and asked, ‘You love my daughter, don’t you? It’s really not my business what else you get up to. It might be healthier, if you didn’t fall in love.’

  It was Fred’s turn. His shot went hopelessly wide, struck a tankard on a shelf and knocked it to the ground with a clang which echoed in the empty bar.

  ‘I knew it!’ Dr Salter was laughing. ‘I knew you’d turn out to be a bloody awful darts player!’

  Before his game with Dr Salter Fred had felt his love-affair with Agnes to be a sort of protection, an insurance of privilege and pleasure which kept him apart from less fortunate beings. Now it became a mysterious complaint which brought the familiar ache of doom into the pit of his stomach. It also made him quite unable to think of anything but why she had gone to London. He looked in The Times and found that there was an exhibition of Henry Moore’s sculpture. This comforted him for a while, until he realized that she couldn’t be spending twenty-four hours a day gazing at faceless and reclining people. He rang her number two or three times but she wasn’t back from London and her father answered him shortly, as though afraid Fred might start telling him the symptoms of his disease and expect a visit.