Paradise Postponed

by John Mortimer

  ‘I understand.’

  From along the bedroom corridor they heard the strains of another Pinky Pinkerton special, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Grace, determined that her husband should not be the only one to spend a comfortable day in bed, was listening to her gramophone, propped up on her pillows and sorting through the contents of a mother-of-pearl box which she usually kept on her dressing-table. She reminded herself of old bits of jewellery buried in it and in its depths she found a brooch in the shape of a Maltese Cross, set with garnets which flashed in the glow of her bedside light. It was nothing very grand or expensive, of course, nothing like his mother’s pieces which Nicholas had given her and which were always kept in the bank, but she was glad to see it because it reminded her of something that happened during the war. Under the jumble of rings and necklaces, ear-rings and bracelets, was a letter on pale blue notepaper together with a few other scraps of correspondence that she kept for the same reason.

  ‘You never liked Grace, did you?’ Nicholas asked Simeon over the distant sound of music.

  ‘You want me to tell you the truth?’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re here for? A truth-telling occasion.’

  ‘No. I never liked her.’ Simeon smiled. ‘In fact, I think I disapprove of everything about her!’

  ‘Spoilt, overprivileged, selfish and intolerant?’ Nicholas suggested.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you’d say. But there’s always something I shall remember about Grace. She was so beautiful and I was rather dull, but she married me, you know. Do you do much of this nowadays?’

  ‘Much of what?’

  ‘Hearing confessions.’

  ‘Hardly any at all.’

  ‘People don’t believe in it, eh? I’m not sure I do. Good heavens! What’s the point of remembering things that never happened so long ago?’

  From Rapstone, Simeon drove to Picton House. He was admitted by Janet Nowt, and found the curtains drawn in the hall and the standard lamps at the foot of the stairs illuminating a theatrical scene. The Rector was delighted to see a small figure, wearing a beret of Janet’s with a pheasant’s tail feather stuck in it, a black, curly moustache painted on his face, clad mainly in a tartan car rug, climbing the stairs with a bread knife at the ready, undoubtedly intent on murder. Half-way up, the nine-year-old Nicholas George Titmuss struck the old dinner gong, a relic of the Stroves, and recited the only lines he could remember:

  … the bell invites me.

  Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

  That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

  So, with a bloodcurdling laugh, Nick vanished into the shadows, and Simeon, standing at the back of an audience consisting of Charlie, Elsie Titmuss and Janet Nowt, clapped loudly.

  ‘We did it when I was at school,’ he said. ‘I had the other part. And my boys did it with me, one Christmas at the Rectory.’

  ‘They were taken to see it at Stratford, and they’ve been doing scenes,’ Charlie explained. ‘Such a good school! I can’t imagine why Leslie wants to move him.’

  Elsie shivered. ‘I don’t think it’s right to teach children things like that.’ At which moment Nicky ran delightedly back down the stairs. ‘I’ve done it now. I’ve stabbed the old King! Ring the bell and pretend it was the servants.’

  ‘Oh that’s not fair!’ Elsie protested but Nicholas, his face, hands and the bread knife liberally smeared with crimson water colour, hit the gong again.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Charlie to the mother-in-law. ‘It’s the sort of thing Thanes do.’ But the show was suddenly over; Nicky bowed to prolonged applause, then Elsie took him away to clean him up and Janet Nowt went off to get tea. ‘I’ve been summoned by your father,’ Simeon told Charlie when they were alone. ‘He wanted to make a confession.’

  ‘He’s not seriously ill?’

  ‘Fred hasn’t said so.’

  ‘Poor Father.’ Charlie smiled. ‘He finds it hard to do anything seriously.’

  ‘Yes. Well, what I wanted to say to you, is’ – Simeon was positive – ‘he has absolutely nothing to tell you.’

  ‘To tell me?’

  ‘Has he tried to say anything to you?’

  ‘No. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? So, well, if he summons you to tell you something, it’ll really be nothing very much. Nothing for you to be concerned about in any case.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that.’ Charlie was laughing, then she went back to the question that concerned her most. ‘Why does Leslie want to send Nicky away from me? Would you send a child of yours away?’

  ‘It’s something we’ve all done,’ Simeon admitted.

  ‘Doesn’t he understand?’ He saw Charlie’s fists clench, her back stiffen and he remembered how she used to be just before she started to scream. ‘For God’s sake! Who else is there for me to talk to?’ Simeon wondered if he’d have to resort, as he had before, to a reading of Biggles of the Royal Flying Corps. Then the door opened to admit Nicky, still in his costume, Elsie Titmuss and Janet with a tray. ‘We’ve washed the blood off our hands,’ Elsie told them. ‘But we’ve decided to keep our nice moustache.’

  When Charlie said that Nicky was the only person she had to talk to, she was scarcely exaggerating. Her longing to have someone helpless to look after, which had disposed her towards Leslie when he was thrown into the river, and had been distributed among a random selection of hard cases and students she thought badly done by, had concentrated itself powerfully on her child. She forgave Nicky everything, including not being homeless or underprivileged or living below the poverty line or in constant trouble with the police. Deprived of these disadvantages, she thought her son had compensating problems. He had a father who had managed to become extremely rich and too busy to see much of him. Nicky was an only child, as she had been, and therefore must be lonely. In fact he grew up to be a pale, contained but self-reliant small boy, who wore glasses, read a lot of books and never minded being left alone. He found little to say to his father and thought of his mother as someone who needed a great deal of looking after.

  When her son was growing, Charlie decided he should be brought up in the country. Leslie agreed. It was no bad thing that his family should live in the constituency although he spent most of the week in London. He thought it politic for Nicky to start his education at the village school, although he was later sent to a small fee-paying day school in Hartscombe. So Charlie gave up her social studies, her case work and her clientele of lame dogs.

  She spent no more time in afternoon drinking clubs in Soho, students’ bedrooms or the backs of vans. She enjoyed her days in the country and looked forward to Nicky coming home at tea-time far more keenly than she did to her husband’s return at weekends. A shadow hung, however, over the peaceful landscape of Nicky’s childhood. As doom-laden as the pronouncements of the witches in Macbeth came Leslie’s constant references to the day when their son would have to go away to Knuckleberries.

  When Charlie tried to argue about Nicky’s education, Leslie merely smiled tolerantly and changed the subject. The date was fixed, it seemed to Charlie, like that of an execution. Pleas for clemency were met only with a polite smile and a quick glance at the calendar. It’s fair to say that Nicky, reading on his stomach in the long grass all the summer, seemed unaware of the condemned cell in which he was waiting.

  ‘Leslie never went away to school. You kept him at home. Did you want to get rid of him?’ Charlie did her best to get her mother-in-law to sign the petition for a reprieve.

  ‘Get rid of him?’ Elsie smiled at the absurdity of the idea. ‘Of course not. He was always his mother’s boy. I never thought George really understood his ways. Besides which Leslie was always one for my cooking.’

  ‘Then will you tell him not to send Nicky away?’

  ‘He wants him to have all the advantages.’

  ‘The advantages of being buggered and beaten and brought up by a lot of bloody snobs?’
Charlie sometimes reverted, at moments of emotion, to the language of the London School of Economics.

  ‘There now.’ Elsie was making rock cakes for tea. ‘I’m sure Leslie only wants the best for Nicky.’

  It was still two years before the date of his son’s banishment, when Leslie Titmuss found himself fighting his third election. It was the end of the sad seventies, a decade whose contributions to history, the Watergate scandal, President Carter, hot pants and the skate-board, vanished from the memory more quickly than a Chinese dinner. The country, it seemed, was prepared to atone for the greatly exaggerated sins of its past. The dreams which Simeon had were dying at last, and a new age was coming to birth. Young people in black leather, loaded with chains, with white faces and pink, green and purple hedgehog hairdo’s hung round the market square in Hartscombe, some wearing swastikas and iron crosses, nostalgic for an old horror. Leslie stood on an empty beer crate at the Brewery entrance and addressed his former workmates through a loudhailer. Stuck on his campaign van were posters, showing Mrs Thatcher looking prepared to face a grim future for a lot of other people with considerable fortitude. ‘You’re worried about your jobs?’ Leslie’s magnified voice bounced round the vats, the barrels and piles of hops to be disregarded by a group of drivers enjoying their mid-morning pints; although someone in the accounts department stuck his head out of a window to listen. ‘Of course you’re worried with a Labour Government giving you one and a quarter million unemployed! Thank your lucky stars Simcox Ales hasn’t been nationalized. It hasn’t been taken over by the Socialist bureaucracy. This is just the sort of small business we want to see prosper. Your jobs are going to be safe after the election.’

  And after the election Leslie found himself a job as a Minister. His rise, as always, was rapid, and, in an early reshuffle, he entered the Cabinet.

  Hartscombe is in the more fortunate half of England and was not as desolated by the abandonment of old industries, or the complete hopelessness of unemployment, as the remote and foreign North. All that happened in the riverside towns was a little ‘slimming down’, a bit of ‘rationalization’ and ‘cutting down on overmanning’. There were also a large number of bankruptcies. Fred went away on a holiday and came back to find a change had come over Marmaduke’s garage. The pumps were now self-service, and the only attendant was a lumpy girl sitting in a burglar-proof booth who handed out, through a tiny grille and with the change, green plastic men. Collecting about five hundred ‘greenies’ could mean the infliction of garden tools, Pyrex dishes or a cuddly toy. Marmaduke’s had given up repairs, and had also given up Terry Fawcett, who sat in his tower block, thinking of his dwindling two thousand pounds redundancy money, and wondering why it was proving so unexpectedly difficult to find another job.

  ‘Glenys is back typing for your father,’ he told Fred when he visited. ‘I do the shopping and fetch the kid from school. I’d make a lovely wife.’

  ‘I tell him he ought to go into window-cleaning. Look at all Tina’s got round her, it’s through Gary’s window-cleaning. That’s what she’s always telling us.’ Glenys had just got home from work.

  ‘Gary doesn’t want me in his business. Well, who needs to live with a lot of tropical fish, anyway?’

  ‘Do you ever get the feeling the whole world’s going backwards? It’s as if we got tired of chugging on slowly and put the whole engine into reverse. Back to the dole queues and poverty being thought of as a shameful little secret, something respectable people don’t get involved in. Nicholas wouldn’t have approved however much he called himself a Conservative.’ Simeon and Fred were on one of their walks together, threading their way down a long, overgrown bridle-path, walking in single file so that the Rector’s random thoughts were shouted back over his shoulder. ‘Poor old Nicholas! At the end he seemed to let go of life. Not that he ever had hold of it very firmly.’

  ‘Not like you!’ Fred smiled at his father, who was striding along as though on a Fabian Society walking tour of the Lake District. ‘You’re remarkably tenacious.’

  ‘Your predecessor, Dr Salter, used to tease me about that. He said Christians ought to give death a warmer welcome. Well, Salter was an unbeliever but he went first.’

  ‘So he did.’

  ‘And he was always so strong.’ Simeon was hitting at brambles with his walking-stick, clearing the path for both of them, with as much relish as if he were using a machete in a jungle. ‘Of course, I’ve always known you were the tough one of our family.’

  ‘Am I?’ Fred was surprised.

  ‘Henry’s not as strong as you. But he can look after himself, don’t you think?’

  ‘Does he have to? Now he’s got Lonnie to look after him.’

  ‘Lorna! Your mother doesn’t hit it off with Lorna at all.’ They were slithering down the steep end of the path. The wood stretched out around them, coloured by pools of bluebells. ‘There is something rather unsettling about her, though. About Lorna, I don’t mean about your mother.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Lorna would appear to be deeply religious,’ Simeon said as though it were much to be regretted.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Fred laughed.

  ‘Of course, Henry goes to church whenever they come down for the weekend. He’s become such an old English country gent, it makes me feel quite young sometimes. You don’t go to church, do you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame you. But I look across at Lorna during prayers. Most people – Well, there aren’t many of them now – adopt the usual sort of Church of England crouch: bottoms on the edge of the pew, head stuck forward, you know the sort of procedure? Not Lorna! She’s down on her knees, hands together, eyes tightly shut, lips moving. Sometimes I want to leave the altar and go over to her and say, “For heaven’s sake, my dear girl, give it a rest! Don’t try so hard.” I don’t think God likes to be pestered, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So you admit the existence of a God who doesn’t like to be pestered?’ Simeon asked quickly.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No.’ There was a gate at the end of the path. The Rector climbed it and sat for a moment, perched on the top bar. ‘But you’re all right, Fred. You’ll always be all right. Are you happy?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Of course not, foolish question.’ Simeon dropped from the gate. Fred followed him and they came out on the edge of a cornfield. They walked for a little and Fred saw a track going back into the wood behind them. He suddenly realized where they were, in that part of the Mandragola Valley in which, one long past night, he had seen Tom Nowt shoot a deer.

  ‘You know we all think, I certainly thought,’ Simeon told him, ‘that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to go.’

  ‘Not for a long while yet.’ They were walking side by side along the muddy edge of the field and Fred took his father’s arm.

  ‘Why? Do you think I’m about to make some great new discovery?’

  As the date crept slowly towards Nicky’s first term at his big school (Leslie’s description) or his imprisonment, his execution, his being sent off to the front (as Charlie called it), the process seemed to his mother to have a sickening inevitability. Leslie was quite set on it. Elsie was not going to help. Grace, Charlie knew without asking her, would be worse than useless. Faced with what she regarded as a huge disaster, Charlie could only exercise the right that Henry had once claimed in the face of the Vietnam War. She did not, it’s true, organize a march with banners or attract the attention of the mounted police; she demonstrated in the sitting-room at Picton House after dinner and shouted at her husband.

  ‘You hated them once, didn’t you? You really hated them when they threw you in the river! That was when I thought I could love you. You were some sort of a person, I thought, a real, liv
e, fighting, kicking, human person.’ She turned away from him and started a journey up the carpet. ‘Now you’ve stopped hating. Now you feel so safe and smug and sure of yourself. What are you now? Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Leslie sat in front of the coffee tray. He was nibbling at an after-dinner mint, always having had a sweet tooth. ‘Only a member of Her Majesty’s Government. Only in the Cabinet.’

  ‘Exactly what I said. Nothing!’ The last word rose in volume to just under a scream. Leslie put the rest of the mint into his mouth, wiped his fingers delicately on his handkerchief and urged his wife not to shout. ‘They’ll hear.’

  ‘Who’ll hear?’ Charlie pounced on his fear. ‘The servants? My God, let them hear, if it interests them in the least.’ She went to the door, wrenched it open and yelled down the kitchen corridor. ‘Listen to this, Janet Nowt. Listen, Cook. The Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss is nothing!’ There was no reply from the brightly lit kitchen where the radio and the washing-up machine were both playing loudly. Charlie banged the door shut. ‘Pity the gardener’s gone home. He might have been interested.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Charlotte. I’ve tried to make you happy.’

  ‘Happy? Does that include separating me from my child?’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous. It happens to everybody.’

  ‘Everybody? Who’s everybody? Magnus Strove and that horrible Christopher Kempenflatt and all those braying imbeciles who threw bread rolls and laughed at your dinner-jacket. Have you forgotten? Have you quite honestly forgotten?’

  ‘It’s a long time ago.’ Leslie finished another mint and this time he licked his fingers quite delicately.

  ‘And now you want Nicky to join them?’

  ‘Your father went away to school.’

  ‘My father! Poor man.’

  ‘His main problem in life was being married to your mother. I must say’ – Leslie couldn’t help smiling – ‘you get more like her every day.’