Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  Terry did his clarinet solo and then gave way to Fred, who went into a great burst of bravura drumming. When he was at the climax of his performance he saw Agnes step into one of the pools of light. His drumming quietened and finally died away, as though the sight of her, standing so quiet and unsmiling, had drained away his talents as a musician. Joe Sneeping, who was also looking at the new arrival, decided to stop the session and ask Glenys to get a brew on. Fred got up and followed Agnes into a quiet space between two cars. She said, ‘I’ve found someone.’

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘Yes. Someone a friend of mine knows about.’

  ‘Where? In Worsfield?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about where. All you have to worry about is getting hold of a hundred pounds.’

  ‘A hundred?’

  ‘Well, that’s not the difficult part, is it? In pound notes, apparently, and not too new.’

  Joe had lifted his trumpet and was blowing the melody of ‘Snake Rag’. Agnes seemed to be crying. Fred put his arms round her and told her that of course he’d get it. Agnes sniffed, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her duffel-coat and, suddenly saying, ‘Goodbye, Fred,’ released herself from him and walked away. He would have gone after her but the session was starting again. ‘Get on the skins, man!’ Joe called in his best New Orleans accent and Fred returned obediently to his drums and beat out the rhythm he had known so long, and which represented musical purity for the Stompers, with no taint of commercialism. A hundred pounds! He couldn’t remember ever having seen a hundred pounds, all at one time. He found himself envying his father, who had nothing to worry about except the future of mankind.

  Charlie and Leslie did not meet for some time after the disaster of the Young Conservatives dinner dance. She had found herself thinking of him often, as of a strange, intense creature, a foreigner in her small world, who had moved her by his unhappiness and anger. When she thought of how much she disliked the young men her mother had wanted her to go out with she found herself warming to the memory of Leslie Titmuss. One afternoon she had been to the cinema in Hartscombe on her own and sat down to a lonely tea in the Copper Kettle in the High Street, when a voice said, ‘No objection to my sitting here at all?’ Leslie didn’t wait for a reply but made himself comfortable and ordered the set tea. He seemed in a mood of high excitement, and to have quite forgotten the humiliations he had suffered when they last met. ‘I’ve been looking forward to telling you,’ he announced at once. ‘I’ve done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Got on the Committee.’

  ‘The Committee of what?’

  ‘The Young Conservatives, of course.’

  ‘You mean the people who pushed you in the river?’

  ‘Well, that was all a bit of fun, wasn’t it? I’d like to go for Secretary eventually. Do you think your father would put in a word for me?’

  ‘I don’t expect so. He’s awfully vague about that sort of thing.’

  ‘We can’t really talk here, can we?’ Leslie seemed prepared to accept the Chairman’s vagueness for the moment and was concerned with the grey-haired tea drinkers around them.

  ‘You seem to be managing all right.’

  ‘Those old girls are looking at us!’

  ‘Perhaps they know about you being on the Committee. I mean, you must be famous!’

  ‘Don’t ever do that,’ Leslie warned her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take the mickey.’

  His rebuke startled her so that she felt in no position to refuse his suggestion that they might go out some time, and their meetings became curious oases in the desert of her life at home with her parents. Leslie seemed anxious to be discreet and suggested dates in unfrequented pubs near to the railway station or back streets behind the Brewery. During such meetings Leslie would tell Charlie about his political plans and ambitions and explain to her that the office of Secretary to the Y.C.s would, in the course of time, help him to a place on the Committee of the more senior branch of the Hartscombe Conservative Association. Whatever happened, he told her, he was determined to make something of himself. When she asked him, as she often did, what he intended to make, Leslie would smile enigmatically as though he were about to enter a new world which she would never be able to understand.

  Sometimes he borrowed his father’s car to take her for a ‘run out into the country’. He always picked her up for these excursions at some neutral spot and explained that his parents didn’t know that he was taking Charlotte Fanner out.

  ‘Are you going to tell them?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Of course. Eventually.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘Oh, they’re old-fashioned. My mother used to work for the Stroves. She worked in the kitchen. It made her very class-conscious. Me going out with the daughter of Rapstone Manor! She’d find that very shocking. Here, sit on this. You don’t want to spoil your skirt.’ He had driven her up to Picton Ridge, from where they looked down the valley and had a view of both villages and the factory chimneys around Worsfield on the distant horizon. He had taken a neatly folded tartan rug out of the back of the Prefect and was doing his best to insert it under Charlie.

  ‘What would they do if they found out?’ she asked him, raising herself for him to spread the rug beneath her.

  ‘My father’d probably make a respectful call on yours and tell him to put a stop to it. He’s quite capable of that.’

  ‘Poor Leslie.’

  ‘Oh no, don’t feel sorry for me. In the end I’ll bring them all round to my way of thinking. I say, I like your hair. In the sunshine. You’re very beautiful.’

  She hadn’t screamed for a long time, not really since she had seen him, like a long black seal, slither out of the water in evening-dress. Now, however, she felt an awful upsurge of anger. ‘Don’t say that! You promised never to say that again!’

  ‘But what would your father and mother say?’

  The anger subsided and she felt a return of happiness. ‘Mother’d be as sick as a dog but she’d have to lump it, wouldn’t she?’

  It was then, kneeling beside her, that Leslie Titmuss, after a slow courtship, took Charlie by the shoulders and kissed her. It was a carefully thought out, long-term move, to which she reacted with unexpected enthusiasm. To his surprise he found her kneeling in front of him, pulling at his belt as though such things were part of her everyday experience and not some long-cherished dream. Whatever fantasy it was it remained unacted. Leslie finally steered her hands to less controversial areas and, though he kissed her for a long time with concentration and zeal, it was clear that further developments still lay among his plans for the distant future.

  While Leslie Titmuss and Charlie Fanner were spread out high above the Rapstone Valley, Fred sought an interview in the Rector’s study. He went into the room to find his father sleeping, his long legs stretched in front of the fire, the report of a Royal Commission open and face downward on his chest. This retreat from the problems of the world, and in particular those of Frederick Simcox, irritated him. He banged the door shut and said, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Always. Always feel that you can.’ Simeon opened his eyes and looked tolerant.

  ‘About money.’

  ‘Ah. Then I don’t see that there’s very much to discuss. I’m prepared to continue your modest allowance during the lengthy period it seems to take you to learn how to cut up frogs and…’ he searched for a suitably dismissive phrase, ‘pill-popping, bone-setting, and so on.’ He stifled a small, remaining yawn. ‘I know nothing of these mysteries.’

  ‘They’re not mysteries really.’ Fred felt called upon to defend his chosen profession.

  ‘To me, they are mysteries.’

  ‘They’re perfectly sensible, useful bits of information.’

  ‘What a chameleon you are, my boy. You spend your days with the Salters and bring home all the Doctor’s “sensible” expressions. It’s like an infection.’

  ‘I want to be sensible f
or a moment.’ Fred sat down at the fireside also, opposite his father. ‘Look, I’d be glad if you didn’t tell Mother this.’

  ‘Not tell her what?’

  ‘You know what she is. She worries.’ Fred fell silent and, when he thought it could be put off no longer, said, ‘I need a hundred pounds.’

  ‘And you shall have it!’ Simeon leaned forward and put his hand on his son’s knee, a gesture which Fred was too relieved to find embarrassing.

  ‘Well, thank you very much.’

  ‘Over the next five months, at the rate of five pounds a week.’ Simeon got up, selected a pipe from the mantelpiece and began to fill it. Fred suspected that his father only smoked a pipe in order to irritate him at these interviews.

  ‘No. No, that won’t do. You see, I do need it now. In cash. You’ll have it back. We’ve got a few gigs.’

  ‘Gigs?’ Simeon looked puzzled. ‘You’re talking about a kind of conveyance?’

  ‘Jobs. With the band. Dances and… Well…’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want you to neglect your medical studies and take to full-time on the kettle drum, for the sake of paying a debt to me.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back when I qualify, but I need it now. In one-pound notes.’

  ‘You think you need it.’ Simeon was exhausting his usual quota of matches. Fred knew, with a sinking of the heart, that they were about to drift away on a tide of moral philosophy.

  ‘I know I do.’

  ‘I’m not asking you what you think you need this money for. I shan’t ever ask you that, Fred.’ Tolerance was always one of Simeon’s most effective weapons.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It’s your own life, and you must lead it as you feel it is most fitting. If you feel that it’s in any way seemly to come and ask me for a hundred pounds…’

  ‘Used notes. They don’t have to be new at all.’ Fred sounded as though he hoped that would make it easier.

  ‘I’m not asking what you think you need it for and I don’t want to know. But I will tell you one thing, Fred, it’s not the answer.’ He began to pace the room, as though in the early stages of composing a sermon. ‘Money is never the answer! They think it is, don’t they? Our new masters! Oh, they think money’s the answer to everything. “You’ve never had it so good”. Put a refrigerator in every cottage in Rapstone and a family runabout at every door.’

  ‘I’m not asking for a refrigerator.’ Fred felt the argument slipping away from him. ‘Or even a family runabout.’

  ‘And there’ll still be a great longing, a great emptiness at the heart of the people.’ Simeon was standing, looking at his son with quizzical sincerity. ‘Because they do, they really do long for what money can’t buy. Justice, equality, caring for those who aren’t born with our advantages. I don’t suppose you want this sum of money for any charitable purpose?’

  ‘Not exactly charitable,’ Fred had to admit. ‘No.’

  Simeon sat at his desk then, knocked his pipe out in the waste-paper basket and gave some hardly welcome advice. ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, Fred, that’s a pretty good rule for life. I think you’ll find a greater peace of mind, just living within your allowance. Used one-pound notes, did you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fred felt a small stirring of hope but his father was, unbelievably, chuckling. ‘You’ll find they’re just as hard to get hold of as the nice, crisp, crackling new ones.’ He ended on a serious note, ‘I’m glad we had this talk, Frederick. I’m sure you’ll come to agree with me when you think hard about it.’

  After Fred had gone Simeon put out his hand to one of the small wooden columns that separated the little drawers and cubby-holes on the top of his writing-desk. At the touch of a spring the pillar slid forward revealing a narrow, hidden compartment from which the Rector took a long, brown envelope. He didn’t open it, or read its contents, but he made a short note with his fountain pen on the back of the envelope, initialled and dated it, and after a short pause when he might have been praying, or simply doing mental arithmetic, he returned it to its hiding-place.

  Fred decided against telephoning his brother; instead he took an early train to London and prepared to take him by surprise. Henry, always lucky, had been able to find three rooms at the top of his publisher’s house in Islington at a minimum rent. The publisher’s wife looked after him, fed him whenever he looked plaintive and put his washing into her machine. His rooms, the servants’ quarters of the tall Victorian house, were small, basically furnished by his landlord, but full of Henry’s books, his old Russian political posters, stills from silent movies and the general clutter of his bachelor existence. He was pleased to have the hard task of writing interrupted by a visit from his younger brother and was amused by Fred’s blurted-out request.

  ‘A hundred pounds! Dear little Freddie. Did I hear you say a hundred pounds?’

  ‘It’s not a terrifically complicated sum.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you were listening that night in the coffee bar, young Fred, but I’ve saved my soul.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Fred couldn’t honestly see what his brother’s soul had to do with it.

  ‘Yes. “That”, as you so lightly dismiss it, means that I am absolutely skint. Broke. Down to the bare bottom of my overdraft. I have rejected the appalling Bugloss and his thirty pieces of silver.’

  ‘I don’t want thirty pieces of silver,’ Fred tried to explain. ‘Just a hundred pounds.’

  ‘Poor Fred, how little you understand the life of an artist.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I do.’

  ‘Look. Let me put it to you in words of one syllable. I have given up money for Lent, or at least until I finish my next novel. I have taken money off my diet sheet. I live almost entirely on cold ham and tomatoes and Algerian cow’s piss which I get in litre bottles from the off-licence.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound too bad.’

  ‘I don’t go out, Frederick. I simply never go out; have people round, of course.’ He got up and went to inspect the view from his window. ‘It’s Agnes, isn’t it? Agnes with what we used to call a bun in the oven. You must feel tremendously proud of yourself.’

  ‘I’m not really.’

  ‘I think you should have the little one. I think you owe it to the world to see what a small Frederick would be like, your one tiny hold on posterity.’

  ‘Well, it’s true I haven’t written a novel.’

  ‘No, you haven’t, Fred, have you?’ Henry turned away from the window and asked, quite casually, ‘Do you think of what Agnes must be feeling?’

  ‘I don’t think she wants it, particularly.’ Fred found the question unexpected and, coming from his brother, unfair. ‘Obviously she doesn’t. She asked me to find the money.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Can’t you see? It’s impossible now I’m going in for medicine.’

  ‘Well, I always thought that was remarkably selfish of you.’

  ‘I mean, our father…’

  ‘Who art in Rapstone?’

  ‘Father allows me five pounds a week, that’s about all I’m going to earn for years. I mean, how could we possibly…’

  ‘Dear old Fred. I always knew you were the ruthless one of the family.’ Henry came and put a hand on Fred’s shoulder, behaving more like an elderly uncle than a brother. ‘It’s impossible!’ Fred was conscious that he was sounding plaintive and hated himself for it. ‘I’ll pay you back. I mean, you can’t be short of a hundred pounds. You’ve only got to write a film script.’

  ‘Write a film script?’ Henry dropped his hand in mock horror, as though any contact with his brother might prove fatal. ‘Are you trying to corrupt me? Get thee behind me, Frederick!’

  In the days to come Fred scraped the bottom of the barrel. He found his mother rolling out pastry on the kitchen table and when he asked her if she had any money she wiped her hands on her apron, got her handbag off the dresser and said she had two pounds twelve and six. Asked if she could possibly lend him a hundred pounds, Dorothy smiled tolerantly
. ‘What silly things you come out with sometimes,’ she told him.

  As a last resort Fred walked the three miles to Picton House where he found Magnus circling a nearby wood with a gun and a spaniel. He remembered the young Strove’s talent for making money at Knuckleberries and that Magnus had come into something under his grandfather’s will. As they tramped through the brambles together the latest Strove told Fred of his plan to buy up Garthwaite’s, the old family grocer’s in Hartscombe, and start what he hoped would become a chain of Easy-Bite Dining-Parlours. ‘Do an all-in evening meal, steak or scampi and French fries, cheese-board and half a bottle of Mateus Rosé for three quid all in. Of course, my partner and I are having a bit of trouble with the Council. They keep going on about “preserving the Georgian character of the High Street” and all that type of balderdash. I expect we’ll win in the end.’

  ‘So you’ll make a lot of money.’

  ‘Bob or two, I hope.’

  ‘So you could afford to lend me a hundred pounds. I mean, I’d pay you back.’

  A rabbit came scuttling out of the bushes, death blew it into the air for a second until it fell and the dog panted off to retrieve it. Magnus smiled charmingly. ‘Sorry, old boy, not with all this going on. We’re fully stretched, you know what I mean, absolutely fully stretched.’

  When Fred telephoned Agnes she was busy, washing her hair, or going over to Worsfield to see a girl she had known at university, or having to entertain some cousins from Canada. However, she agreed to meet him at Tom Nowt’s hut the next Saturday afternoon. They could do all their talking then, she told him.

  In spite of his failure to solve their problem, to come up with the money in used notes, or any sort of notes, Fred bicycled down through the woods with excitement. At least he was going to see Agnes again and he could lie down with her and share her secrets. Perhaps, after all, the situation wasn’t so desperate. Perhaps it was all a false alarm, or, he imagined in some way that would still need working out, they could have a child and marry and live together without dry-mouthed telephone calls and having to borrow Tom Nowt’s to go to bed together. He arrived five minutes before the appointed time, but when she was not already there he knew that she was not coming.