‘You’ve got a short memory,’ he said, when they were in the bedroom together. The calm way he spoke was calculated to drive her to distraction.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The time when working for Ben Bugloss paid for what you wanted.’
‘What I wanted?’
‘Got you out of trouble. My little brother’s trouble. You were desperate!’
‘You think I’m not desperate now?’
‘Agnes!’ By now he was smiling at her. ‘You’re so self-indulgent!’
‘Me?’
‘Enjoying the luxury of feeling desperate in the Beverly Hills Hotel.’
It was a false, even a monstrous accusation; she had only wanted to save Henry from himself or at least from Mr Bugloss and his absurd pilgrimage
She had no answer but to attack him, hitting him, scratching his neck, her fists pummelling him uselessly. He held her and they stumbled among the pink table-lamps, between the sofa and the bamboo tables, in front of pictures of fishing boats at sunset, until they fell, almost by accident, across the kingsized bed, and so their daughter Francesca was eventually conceived.
While his elder brother was away on the Coast, Fred was working towards the end of the long process of turning himself into a doctor, which seemed at times hopeless, exciting, unbearably tedious, rewarding, futile and all he had ever wanted to do. He lived in the lecture halls and dissecting rooms of his London hospital, slept, mostly alone, in a room he found in Battersea, and went back to Rapstone whenever he could to get his clothes mended, his stomach filled and to be exasperated by his mother and father. Although he felt it was perfectly normal that he should find it dull to visit Simeon and Dorothy, he expected them to be more enthusiastic about having him to stay. When he was in the country he went riding with Agnes’s father, or joined the Doctor on his rounds to discover how different the theories he had learnt at St Thomas’s were from the practice of medicine in the sick rooms of Hartscombe and the Rapstone Valley.
‘It seems Agnes has deserted both of us,’ Dr Salter said.
Fred often sat in the Doctor’s living-room, a place which looked shabby by day but comfortable at night when the fire was lit, the stains on the wallpaper hidden, and the light fell softly on paintings of shot game and long-dead horses. They drank brandy and listened to gramophone records, Elgar and Brahms, and the scratchy voices of music-hall performers, Will Hay, Robb Wilton and Max Miller, at whom the Doctor would laugh until his eyes filled with tears and he had to dab at them with a huge silk handkerchief.
‘Have you any idea why she should desert us?’ Fred, to whom any talk of Agnes was like tearing at an open wound, didn’t answer. ‘You prefer not to say?’ Dr Salter looked at him with his diagnostic expression. ‘I’m not sure I approve of that. Our secrets have an awful sort of immortality, they return to haunt us. They went off to America did you say?’
‘That’s what Henry said.’
‘Of course you’ll miss her now, just as I missed my Annie. She didn’t fall in love with my brother, not that I ever had a brother. She was unfaithful to me with a flying bomb. I thought I’d never get over it, but in time, you know, there can be compensations.’
‘Compensations?’
‘The silence all over the house, stretching your legs across an empty bed, an end to all the responsibility of being loved.’
‘Is that a responsibility?’
‘Oh yes, the greatest responsibility of all. It was really too much for you, wasn’t it?’
One summer holiday Fred was with Dr Salter in a widow’s house in Sunday Street, a small row of Victorian cottages that ran behind the Brewery and down to the river. Mrs Amulet was dying with quiet determination, and they had been discussing how much she should be told of her condition. Then Dr Salter had gone upstairs alone and Fred stood in the sunlit patch of garden. Among the hollyhocks and geraniums he saw, against the wall of the house, a small tombstone, of the sort that is erected for a child. Fred read the inscription on it:
IN MEMORY OF TEDDY
A TINY MARMOSET
BELOVED OF COLIN AND KATE AMULET
DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 23RD OF MARCH 1948
WE SHALL MEET BUT WE SHALL MISS YOU
‘An evilly disposed ape,’ Dr Salter said when he came out of the house. ‘Not house-trained, of course, and with an appalling liver condition. Spent more time and trouble trying to keep Teddy alive than Kate Amulet would want me to waste on her.’
‘Does she know?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You told her?’
‘No. No, I didn’t tell her.’ They walked towards the gate. ‘I shall have to tell you though.’
‘Tell me. What?’
‘It’s difficult to know when to give out the bad news about death or marriage. It’s often best to let the patient draw his own conclusions.’
‘Marriage?’ In the small, sunlit garden, among the hollyhocks, Fred felt as cold and helpless as the old woman upstairs.
‘A lady Baptist minister married them, in a place called San Bernardino. The cable was full of unnecessary detail. Must have cost a fortune.’
‘Did she want you to tell me?’ Fred asked.
‘She didn’t say.’
The next day Simeon and Dorothy had a similar cable from Henry. His mother put a hand on Fred’s arm and said, ‘Poor boy. Poor old Fred.’ She was smiling as she said it, but it seemed to him that her eyes were full with tears, something he didn’t remember ever having seen before.
15
Living in the Past
That year the papers were full of extraordinary news; more and more scandals were unearthed, and the serious face of the nation cracked into an incredulous smile of secondhand delight, before prim looks returned and there was much talk of the need to preserve standards in public life. The Secretary of State for War was found to be sharing a mistress with a Soviet naval attaché but this was only the aperitif before a banquet of revelations which culminated in the search for a mysterious masked figure, some person of great political distinction who, naked but for his mask, was said to act as butler and enjoy other humiliations at the dinner parties of the rich and influential figures of the time. The masked man serving the potatoes was never identified but the golden age of Conservative Government, the period when the Prime Minister had told the British people that they had never had it so good and they had believed him, seemed about to disintegrate into a widespread chorus of unseemly giggles.
Charlie Titmuss read all this news with delight each morning before she went off to pursue her social welfare course at Worsfield Polytechnic. But her husband was unsmiling and refrained from comment, as though he felt it was too early, even at their breakfast table, for him to commit himself on a great national issue, and one which, he felt, might have a considerable influence on the future of Leslie Titmuss.
In the evenings he would get home from work as soon as possible and listen to the news in the cottage Nicholas had given them, plainly furnished with Charlie’s childhood books and photographs of ponies, and with few signs of Leslie’s occupancy. He studied advanced accountancy while his wife drank beer in the Worsfield pubs with a group from the Poly and gossiped about problem families and their favourite delinquents.
‘We can all understand your wife taking up welfare,’ Elsie said when she brought a basket of her son’s clean shirts round one evening. ‘Even if she’s never going to take up ironing. She’s got to have something to look after. Ever since it turned out to be a false alarm about the baby.’
‘It’s not a bad thing for a politician’s wife to be in the welfare service. It does no harm at all.’
‘I never heard of Mrs Strove being interested in anyone’s welfare when she was alive. I never heard of that at all.’ Elsie had brought some homemade rock cakes for Leslie’s tea and she was putting them out on a plate.
‘You must have known old Doughty Strove pretty well?’ Leslie asked his mother casually.
‘Since I was ei
ghteen and in service.’ Leslie looked pained at the word ‘service’, but cheered up when his mother added, ‘Quite a lad was Doughty, in his younger years.’
‘What’s that mean?’ Leslie took a rock cake and buttered it. ‘One for the girls?’
‘Well, he’d come down to the kitchen for a slice of pie, something to take out shooting, and he’d try and put an arm round you, all that sort of nonsense. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? Not looking at him now.’ Elsie had made tea for Leslie, something she understood him not doing for himself before his wife came home, and now she poured him a cup.
‘Was there anyone in particular?’
‘Well, they did say Bridget Bigwell. It was all just talk.’
‘Go on!’ Leslie smiled, sugaring his tea.
‘Bridget worked at Picton House, you know. Then she left to go to the Fanners and married Percy and had Glenys, well all on top of each other! I don’t suppose there was anything in it.’
‘Glenys Bigwell! She does typing for the Rector.’
‘Glenys was a bright girl. Always seemed bright above her station, as you might say.’
‘The Rector said she can’t spell. Perhaps she inherited that from Doughty Strove!’
‘No.’ Elsie sat beside her son, delightedly shocked at the suggestion. ‘It’s talk, most likely. They were all the same, though. The young men in those days. Not enough to do and too much money to do it with.’
‘All the young men?’
‘All the same, all tarnished with the same brush. Of course, I mean the gentry.’
Leslie was munching rock cakes and looking at his mother. ‘What about the Rector?’
‘Mr Simcox was different.’ Elsie smiled distantly. He was always different from all the rest.’
‘In the old days. When they never got about much. Well, before the invention of the bicycle, Skurfield stayed Skurfield, and Rapstone never left its frontiers and their inhabitants simply bred with each other!’ Another authority on the past of the district, Dr Salter was instructing Fred as they rode together up Picton Ridge. ‘Cousins with cousins. Closer than that sometimes. Well, rabbits don’t stop to ask, “Excuse me, but are you my sister by any chance?” and yet they’re perfectly lively little creatures.’
Fred rode a little behind him, mounted on a small stolid hack from the riding-stable, a great deal slower than the big, black, nervous hunter, a new acquisition from the Worsfield Show, on which the Doctor was turning in the saddle, shouting back against the wind. ‘Can’t see all that in-breeding did much harm. They cut down their own trees, managed to turn very decent chair legs in the huts they put up in the beech woods. Look at the dates on the tombstones in your old father’s churchyard, they lived far beyond any reasonable time for living. Of course the bicycle changed all that. Then they got over to the next village and rogered girls they weren’t even related to. In the old days there were Nowts in Skurfield and Bigwells in Rapstone, and that was about the size of it.’
‘I was thinking about Tom Nowt.’
‘Oh, were you?’
‘I just wondered why my father’s always so against him. I remember, when I was a child, the fuss he made when I went to his old hut.’
‘His hut?’ Dr Salter sounded puzzled.
‘His hut in the woods, you must know it?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘But I was there! When I got back from London and Agnes had gone off with Henry to that Coast of theirs. It was where you found me. By Tom’s hut!’
‘A hut in the woods?’
They had come to the top of the ridge. Their walking mounts snorted and rolled their yellow eyes, quivering neurotically.
‘I didn’t notice.’ Dr Salter kicked his hunter and galloped away, a stocky figure sitting stolidly in the saddle. Fred followed as best he could. He was never entirely at his ease with horses.
After another ride, and before another Sunday lunch, the bell rang and Fred opened the Doctor’s front door to discover Agnes standing on the step and smiling. She had come without her key and apologized to him, and he, looking down at her swollen stomach, managed to congratulate her.
‘I’m sorry. I so wanted you to be there,’ Fred heard her say, and was about to hug her gratefully when he realized that she had not said it to him but to her father, who had come more slowly down the stairs behind him.
‘I was there in spirit,’ Dr Salter said.
‘In San Bernardino, with this female minister telling us to take God into the bedroom with us? I don’t think you were there at all.’ Then she kissed her father and they began to walk up the stairs together. ‘Henry’s in London, writing very hard, so I just came down to collect a few things. I will stay for lunch of course, if you ask me. Is it Mrs Beasley’s mince? I thought of that so much in California, we used to get jumbo-sized prawns and jumbo-sized tomatoes. It all tasted of cottonwool and I used to think of Mrs Beasley’s grey mince which tasted of good, honest dishwater.’
All through lunch Agnes was cheerful and unusually talkative. ‘I haven’t talked for so long,’ she told them. ‘You can’t talk to American film producers, they just talk to themselves and expect you to listen.’ She told them about lunch with Mr Bugloss and climbing out of the window of the ‘Señoritas’. ‘The last three years, we seem to have gone to the Coast so often and sucked up to Mr Bugloss. It isn’t writing for Henry, really it isn’t, it’s more like interior decorating. But Henry’s running away from Mr Bugloss too now, he’s writing another novel.’ Fred thought of Henry’s soul, and the way it was always being saved for him. Then Agnes said, ‘It’s going to be extremely good. Don’t say you’re sorry to hear that.’
‘I didn’t.’ Fred denied it.
‘You did nearly. You’d’ve hated yourself if you had, wouldn’t you?’
Later, in her old bedroom, Fred helped Agnes pack the clothes and books she needed. He was sorry that there were so few of them, and that their little time together would so soon be over. She was silent for a long while, and then she said, ‘Why have you moved in here?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Not yet, but why do you spend so much time with him? Why are you always helping him, why?’
‘I suppose because he’s teaching me.’
‘Teaching you what?’
‘All I want to know.’
‘All?’
‘Almost all.’
‘It’s not because of me? I couldn’t bear that.’
‘It’s not because of you.’
‘I mean that’d be like living in the past, wouldn’t it?’ She crammed the remaining things into her suitcase. ‘Condemning yourself to stay still all the time. You wouldn’t do that, would you?’
She was struggling, unusually agitated, with the suitcase and he closed it for her. As he carried it downstairs he asked her if Henry was pleased, looking again at the distended stomach which she had told him made her feel ridiculously helpless.
‘Would you be pleased? I mean if you were Henry?’
‘If I were Henry I have no idea what I’d feel.’
When she had gone, Fred did his best to forget Agnes and Henry and their expected child. This left him short of an obsession and he began to concern himself irrationally with the question of Tom Nowt. Why had Dr Salter pleaded ignorance when reminded of old Tom’s hut and why, he wondered after so many years, had the place been forbidden to him as a child? He found Simeon, one day, sleeping in his study, or at least stretched out in his chair with his eyes closed in an attitude which he always called ‘thinking up a sermon’. As the door closed, his father woke with a start.
‘What do you still find to tell them in sermons?’ Fred asked. ‘When I was a child I can’t remember you giving me any advice at all. Or only once.’
‘Once?’
‘When you told me not to go to Tom Nowt’s hut.’
‘Nowt’s hut? I really can’t recall.’
‘I’m sure you can. Whatever was wrong with going there?’
‘When do you
expect to qualify?’ Simeon climbed out of his chair and felt in his pocket for a pipe.
‘In about three years with any luck.’
‘I can’t see how it can take all that time to learn Salter’s trade. All he does is tell me not to cling on to life and then gives me a couple of aspirins. Oh, and he tipples my brandy.’
‘But about Tom Nowt’s hut…’
‘Some people, I’m sure you’ll find this out, bring bad luck.’ Fred realized that any answer that might be coming his way would be lost in the mists of a sermon. ‘That’s the point of my sermon. God put such a lot of luck in the universe. Sometimes He seems to have thought He was creating an immense casino. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything essentially evil about Tom Nowt, it’s just that people like that provoke accidents.’
It wasn’t until a weekend visit much later that Fred met the provoker of accidents in the public bar of the Baptist’s Head. It was a crowded Saturday night with the pints of Simcox’s Best slopping as the drinkers pushed their way from the bar and Fred found himself squashed into a corner inappropriately shouting the question that concerned him.
‘The old hut?’ Tom answered, grinning over his beer. ‘Picked up a bit of something new, have you?’
‘No. It’s just that Dr Salter…’
‘Keep out of the man’s way. They reckon he’ll see you off quicker than a shot-gun in the chest.’
‘Ever been to your hut, has he? I mean, has he ever taken anyone there?’
‘No questions, boy, then you won’t get no lies.’
Fred considered the matter and decided on another line of inquiry. ‘What’ve they all got against you, Tom?’
‘Who?’
‘My father, I remember how angry he was when I told him I’d been there. And Dr Salter says he’s never heard of the place…’
‘Don’t forget her bloody Ladyshit.’
‘Grace?’
‘Wanted me in the nick. Well, of course, she had her reasons.’
‘What reasons?’
‘You want to know?’
Paradise Postponed Page 19
