Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  All the same he waited for an hour and a half and then bicycled into Hartscombe and found Dr Salter alone and having tea. The Doctor looked at Fred with pity and asked if he really didn’t know that Agnes had gone to London.

  ‘Where in London?’ Fred suddenly realized how little he knew of her friends there, or where he could telephone to find her.

  ‘I believe she said, the usual places. It seems that she doesn’t tell either of us very much.’

  So Fred caught a train from Hartscombe and that evening found himself sitting alone in Arturo’s coffee bar with no very clear idea of what he was going to do next. At last he tried asking the waitress who brought him his third espresso if she happened to have seen a girl with long hair who answered to the name of Agnes and smoked a lot.

  ‘Sounds like everyone. I’ll ask Arturo. Arturo! Do you know anyone called Agnes?’

  The proprietor approached them and Fred looked up and saw him for the first time. His hair was slicked down, he had a small moustache and a sort of pallor as though he rarely saw the light. Arturo was wearing an Italian silk suit, a gold bracelet and pointed, patent leather shoes. He said, ‘Hullo, Simcox Mi. Haven’t seen you since the good old days at Knuckleberries.’

  ‘Arthur Nubble! What on earth are you doing, posing as an Italian?’

  ‘Nothing to it, old boy.’ Arthur sat down with a sigh of relief, as though his shoes were killing him. ‘It’s all they want nowadays. An Italian name. A few rubber plants. Take enough black coffee to cover a postage stamp and blow a cloud of steam up its arse, add a bit of froth and charge ninepence. I’m just providing a service.’

  ‘The last time you did that you got the sack.’

  ‘I resigned. I’d had far too much education. Did you say you were looking for a girl? There’s one working the steam pump I’m anxious to dispose of.’ Fred looked at a plump girl pulling the handle of the hissing espresso machine. ‘Your waitress?’

  ‘No,’ Arthur told him gloomily. ‘My wife. You look as though you need a drink. Abandon that ink and candy floss. Let’s go to a party!’

  ‘You haven’t seen Agnes?’

  ‘Who’s Agnes?’

  ‘The girl I’m looking for.’

  ‘You want one in particular?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were always a difficult customer to please, Simcox. Probably comes of you being Labour.’ He stood up, wincing at the tightness of his shoes. ‘Come to the party! There’s bound to be some of Arturo’s regulars around there. They may have seen your Agatha.’

  ‘Agnes.’ Fred also stood up, but without much hope. ‘Her name’s Agnes.’

  ‘I’m sure you know best.’

  They went out of the back entrance to where Arthur Nubble’s dented, second-hand Jaguar was parked on the pavement. Fred got into the car which smelt strongly of coffee and Arthur drove very fast, coming to rest in front of a tall house in a square. The top-floor windows were open and modern jazz drifted down to them.

  ‘This is where my brother lives.’

  ‘Well, anyway we’ll get a drink.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ Fred warned him as they got out of the car. ‘Anyway, nothing but Algerian cow’s piss.’

  Fred was wrong about that. When they got up to the party a large, suntanned man wearing a silk scarf and a hugely checked tweed jacket poured him a glass of champagne. There were a lot of girls in the shadows, sitting on the sofa, whispering in corners, even dancing together to the calculated murmurs of Dave Brubeck. Some of them called out ‘Arturo!’ and Arthur hobbled off to join them. Fred thought that he saw some new bits and pieces, some black-shaded lamps and a new silky rug on the floor. Henry, who had clearly been buying furniture, was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Are you a friend of the genius?’ the man who had been pouring Fred’s champagne asked him.

  ‘Which genius is that?’ Fred was puzzled.

  ‘Mr Henry Simcox.’

  ‘Oh, that genius. I’m his brother.’

  ‘Henry never told me he had a brother.’

  ‘No? So far as Henry’s concerned it’s a closely guarded secret.’ Fred suddenly felt a large arm round his shoulder. The man had come unacceptably close to him. ‘Honoured to meet you, my dear. I’m Benny Bugloss. And I’m overjoyed to be translating your brother’s great work into a major motion picture. We shall try, Mr Simcox, my dear, and we shall overcome.’

  ‘The Greasy Pole?’ Fred asked, extricating himself from Mr Bugloss’s embrace.

  ‘Isn’t that a great title? And I’ll tell you something, we’re keeping it exactly as it is!’

  ‘You’re Mephistopheles?’ Fred looked at Mr Bugloss.

  ‘No. Bugloss. Benjamin K. Bugloss. Has someone else got an interest in the film rights?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I have told your brother. I want to be absolutely true to his conception.’ Mr Bugloss was deeply serious. ‘You see, in the end this guy decides to give up the Ladyship and go back to his job in the Brewery. He’s true to his class, you understand. Some would say he’s a schmuck, but I say, “No. He’s a hero.” ’

  ‘What about Gregory Peck?’ Fred remembered what Henry had told him.

  ‘No.’ Mr Bugloss was thinking deeply. ‘Somehow I don’t see Peck in this. I more likely see someone along the lines of Albert Finney, someone British. Shall I tell you something? Britain is bankable right now, Britain could be good news at the box office.’

  ‘So you took Henry up on to a high mountain?’

  ‘Our first meeting didn’t go too well. But he called me and I met with him again. In the Dorchester, my suite, we worked something out. A modus.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A modus vivendi.’

  ‘You showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.’

  ‘I told him I’d fly him to the Coast.’

  ‘ “And said unto him, all this power will I give thee.” ’

  ‘Hey, what’re you talking about?’

  ‘How much did you pay him?’ Fred, on his third glass of champagne, made so bold as to ask.

  ‘Thirty thousand dollars, plus a piece of the action. It may not be all the kingdoms of the world, my dear, but it certainly ain’t peanuts.’

  A young woman emerged from the shadows and Mr Bugloss introduced her. ‘This is a friend of mine. Mrs Wickstead. This is Mr Simcox.’

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Absolutely loved your book,’ Mrs Wickstead told him.

  ‘That wasn’t me. It was my brother.’ Fred allowed his glass to be refilled and looked towards the bedroom door which had suddenly opened. The lights were on inside and the party was beginning to spill into it. When Henry came out of the door he had a bottle of champagne in one hand and his other arm round Agnes’s waist. They both looked at Fred, he thought, with a smile of faint amusement.

  ‘Hullo, young Fred.’ Henry seemed not at all surprised to see him. ‘Welcome to our farewell party. I’m off to the Coast. Of course, Agnes is coming with me.’

  *

  When he thought about it, and he thought about it always, it seemed to Fred like some sickening accident, the prolonged moment when a car slithers out of control and you wait, helplessly, for the inevitable crash, the tearing of metal, injury or death. He remembered Agnes smiling patiently as, humiliated, he held her arm, tried to drag her away from the party and back to Hartscombe. She didn’t move, or try to shake him off, but waited, still smiling, until he released her and then she walked away into the kitchen where three or four girls were getting food ready for the party. He remembered Henry, also smiling, speaking as though his younger brother had left him with a heavy responsibility which he had, selflessly, agreed to discharge.

  ‘You abandoned her, Fred.’ Henry was holding a short sausage on a stick and taking small, eager bites as he spoke. ‘You let her down, you didn’t give her what she needed most.’

  ‘You know what that is?’ The room had become misty and Fred had an appalling suspicion th
at he might burst into tears.

  ‘Of course. Money was required and I provided it. As a matter of fact I made a considerable sacrifice. Just because of you, Fred, I’m writing a film for Benjamin K. Bugloss. If you hadn’t let Agnes down so badly my soul might have remained a virgin. I say. You’re not going to blub, are you? I haven’t seen you blub since we were at Knuckleberries.’

  Fred didn’t blub. Instead he drank everything he could lay his hands on until Arthur Nubble told him he looked ghastly and should be taken away. As they left, they passed Mr Bugloss in the doorway.

  ‘Did I have a problem persuading your brother to write this screenplay? Well, artists are not easy people or they wouldn’t be artists, would they?’

  ‘I fixed it for you,’ Fred assured him.

  ‘You son of a bitch! How did you manage that?’

  ‘Well, you see, my brother’s hang-up was his soul. I can reliably inform you that he hasn’t got a soul any more. There’s absolutely nothing to stop him working for the movies.’

  They left with several girls from the party and, organized by Nubble, went to a dark, reverberating club somewhere high over Leicester Square. In the gents, Nubble found that he had a packet of purple hearts about him and offered them to Fred.

  ‘No thanks, really.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Simcox? You never want to take what anyone has to give. It was the same at school. You never really wanted the bit of pâté de foie I got hold of. People don’t like it, you know, if you don’t take what’s offered.’

  So Fred chewed purple hearts for the sake of not offending Nubble and returned to stumble round the dance area guided by a girl called Denise whom he had last seen cutting up sandwiches at Henry’s flat. She appeared to him as a mildly attractive blur and he heard himself talking to her as though his was the voice of a distant stranger.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ the voice said.

  ‘You’re pissed.’

  ‘You mean I think you’re beautiful therefore I must be pissed? That’s an a priori argument. But I’m pissed therefore I think you’re beautiful. A posteriori.’

  ‘Try not to be vulgar.’

  ‘ “God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the world.” Does that mean God’s there so the world’s all right, or does it mean the world’s so sodding marvellous that there has to be a God?’ The stranger who was talking seemed to Fred to be a pretentious and patronizing idiot.

  ‘You’re tense. That’s what your trouble is.’ The girl’s face was almost entirely out of focus. ‘You’ve got inner tension.’

  Later he thought he was in bed with Agnes who was wearing nothing but one of his shirts, a silent, almost inert Agnes who said nothing and kept changing her shape. When he woke in the morning feeling terribly ill he looked for the deer skulls on the walls of Tom Nowt’s hut and found that he was in a put-u-up bed in Arthur Nubble’s Pimlico maisonette, and that his shirt was on the otherwise naked Denise, who was sitting up beside him repairing her make-up.

  ‘Just remind me,’ she said. ‘Did we knock it off last night?’

  In the kitchen, to which Fred had staggered for a glass of water, Arthur Nubble was wearing the sort of camelhair dressing-gown and flannel pyjamas that were uniform in the dormitory at Knuckleberries. He was grilling some lambs’ kidneys he had been lucky enough to put his hands on for breakfast.

  ‘I say, Simcox. You know that girl you were looking for at the party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember now,’ Nubble told him. ‘She was a bit stuck for a name and address. Well, I was able to fix her up with someone, of course, but she couldn’t come up with the hundred pounds.’

  When he got home, Fred went for a walk in the woods to Tom Nowt’s hut. He heard his voice, hoarse, strained and despairing, calling ‘Agnes!’ through the trees. Overcome with exhaustion, alcohol, purple hearts and the indulgence of grief, he sank to his knees in the fallen leaves, and there he was when Dr Salter, hacking his old grey, found him. The Doctor took Fred to his house and treated all his complaints with the medicine he trusted most, the passage of time.

  But when he found him, kneeling in the wood, he said, ‘For God’s sake, young Fred. Don’t tell me you’ve taken to prayer!’

  Part Three

  Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

  Sören Kierkegaard

  12

  Chez Titmuss

  On a Saturday morning, not long after Fred’s visit to London, George Titmuss was washing and cleaning the Ford Prefect in front of ‘The Spruces’, according to his established practice. He hosed, shampooed, washed off and polished the car’s maroon exterior, Windowlened the glass and hoovered the inside. Then he opened the glove compartment in order to give it a good dust and made an unwelcome discovery. A lipstick, a headscarf and a small crumpled handkerchief, still faintly redolent of perfume borrowed from Grace, were there found lurking. George removed these objects and took them into the house, where his son was finishing his breakfast, three rashers and two eggs on a fried slice prepared by his mother, and reading the Financial Times.

  ‘You’ve taken to wearing lippie-stick, have you, boy?’ George asked with an unwonted but not good-humoured smile. Before his son could answer, George Titmuss had gone into the kitchen, found a carrier-bag for the three exhibits, and was setting out for Rapstone Manor.

  Nicholas received him in the conservatory, and there, among the begonias, George Titmuss laid out the damning relics saying, in the manner of a police sergeant giving painful evidence at a particularly repulsive murder trial, ‘Traces of your daughter, Sir, have been found in my vehicle. The handkerchief displays her name-tape.’ He produced Exhibit A: ‘C. Fanner. No doubt she’ll have had it marked for going away to boarding-school. My son, Leslie, never went away to boarding-school,’ he added, as though to clinch the prosecution case.

  ‘Of course, there’s a great deal to be said for keeping the family together.’ Nicholas was conciliatory.

  ‘There’s a great deal to be said for only doing what you can afford.’

  ‘And of course, we have a magnificent state education. We must take the credit for that, you remember Rab Butler’s splendid Act? It’s done a great deal for the youngsters.’ Nicholas avoided looking at the traces of Charlie on the table, taking refuge in wider political issues.

  ‘We don’t complain.’ George was clearly speaking for the youngsters also.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. And your young man, if I may say, is making something of himself. He chipped in at a meeting the other day. I’m not saying we’ll see him on the Executive Committee for a year or two yet. But he’s making his mark.’

  Leslie had, Nicholas remembered, been particularly passionate at one recent gathering, when local issues had been discussed. He wanted the Hartscombe Party to get behind a plan to pull down Garthwaite’s, the old grocer’s shop, and allow some appalling chain restaurant to be built in its place. The Conservative majority on the Town Council, young Titmuss had told them all, must move with the times, although Nicholas didn’t see the need for it himself. Now he wondered uneasily if George Titmuss had also come in pursuance of the scheme to pull down the old family grocer’s shop, founded by a long-dead butler of a long-dead Nicholas Fanner. A silence fell on the two fathers in the conservatory, and Nicholas looked round at the stunted plants, too brightly coloured for their own good, which moved him to pity.

  ‘You don’t care for begonias, Titmuss?’

  ‘Our only child will do perfectly nicely in his niche at the Brewery, just as I did before him.’ George failed to answer the question. ‘We don’t want our Leslie disturbed by any undesirable friendships. I am referring, Sir Nicholas’ – George shaped slowly up to the object of his call – ‘to your daughter, Charlotte.’

  ‘You call her undesirable? Well, I suppose that’s reasonable.’

  ‘Imagine if it went too far,’ George went on gloomily. ‘If it led to marriage, for instance.’

>   ‘Marriage? Is that what you have in mind?’ Nicholas smiled with a tolerance which appeared to irritate Leslie’s father.

  ‘I do not have it in mind, Sir Nicholas. I certainly do not. Mrs Titmuss and I have something of a reputation around Skurfield. We are well known for keeping ourselves to ourselves.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard that, of course.’

  ‘Do you think we want to be invited here all the time for dinner parties, cocktails and the like? Do you think my Elsie wants to sit down to dinner with Mr Doughty Strove?’

  ‘Well, poor old Doughty does rather bore for England, of course. But she could probably talk to whoever’s on her other side,’ Nicholas suggested helpfully.

  ‘It’s got to be put a stop to,’ George said firmly, no doubt feeling that the discussion was about to drift into backwaters of irrelevance. ‘Our Leslie and Miss Charlotte, they’ve got to be told it won’t do. They mustn’t see each other again, that’s for the best.’

  ‘It may be for the best,’ Nicholas admitted, ‘but we live in the world of practical politics. What can we do, even if it’s not for the best?’

  ‘It’s simple, isn’t it? Your daughter’s not twenty-one, you’ve just got to put your foot down!’ George looked at Nicholas who was shifting uncomfortably, as though prepared to put his foot anywhere but down. ‘Or, if you can’t manage that, no doubt her Ladyship can.’

  Charlie had no idea whether or not she loved Leslie, but she thought about him incessantly and these thoughts puzzled her. Sometimes he looked so unnaturally pale and fragile that she felt sorry for him and afraid he wouldn’t last the winter, then his almost grotesquely grown-up behaviour and serious ambition made him even more vulnerable and pathetic. At other meetings he seemed indestructible and the possessor of unnatural energy. He made Charlie, who often felt like a decent night’s rest almost as soon as she had got up in the morning, tired to look at him. He was neat and precise where she was slapdash and untidy. When they were together, she would be laughing at one moment, sullen and silent the next. He was always practical and business-like, particularly when he was kissing her. Then she knew that, when his arms were round her neck, he was looking at the time through the forest of her hair. His mother was always waiting up for him.