An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  Tears welled in the eyes of both father and daughter. Penge’s overflowed on to Topher’s shoulder.

  “Bloody hell,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Are you working?” Topher asked, back on safe ground.

  “Not actually at the moment but there’s a very good chance.” She blew her nose into an inadequate pink tissue. “I met this guy who’s putting on this Lorca. They’re auditioning next week.”

  Topher could not understand how it was that she was able to continue fooling herself. It was not the moment to tell her.

  The train, as if it would be thankful to reach its destination, trundled wearily through the outskirts of the station. Darren, now incarcerated securely in his snow-suit, stared at Topher. Wondering whether Tina had come to meet him, Topher stared back. Although they were twins, Christine having preceded Christopher into the world by fifteen minutes (a fact which in their early years Tina had never allowed him to forget), Topher and his sister were unalike. As a child, knowing no fear, he had made the more timid Tina’s life a misery. He had pushed her into the deep end of the swimming pool where she had almost drowned – leaving her with a lifelong fear of the water – put spiders in her bed at home, and jelly-fish down her back on holidays where he was the self-crowned king of the sandcastles. Notwithstanding his youthful ill-treatment of his sister, he was extremely fond of her, as she was of him. He had been disappointed both by her decision to marry at the age of eighteen, and her subsequent removal to “foreign parts”, just when he had been looking forward to renewing her acquaintance after his years away at school. The separation had become more than geographical as they met less and less frequently. They had been briefly reunited by the deaths of their parents, but the drift apart had been exacerbated by the passing of time.

  Next to Topher, the man in the anorak was folding his newspaper into an impossibly small rectangle. He stowed it into his pocket, leaning against Topher as he did so and crowding him even further into his corner. The guard, in his red-trimmed uniform, swayed through the carriage, glancing proprietorially from left to right. Topher stood up to get his coat. The train lurched. Darren’s mother smiled at him.

  He looked along the platform, with which they were now level, but he could not pick out Tina, whom he had last seen at Caroline’s cremation. He realised that he was looking for a slim redhead, and adjusted his mental sights.

  At the barrier a plump, outdoor-looking woman with short grey hair waited anxiously. Her eyes were the same hypnotic blue as Topher’s. Tina’s embrace expressed the empathy the two had always felt.

  In the car they caught up with the news. From the back seat a black labrador licked Topher’s ear.

  “It’s Miles’ sixtieth birthday on Saturday,” Tina said. “We’re having a party. Is that all right?”

  Topher sought to reassure her.

  “Of course it is.”

  “How have you been?”

  Before Topher could answer, Tina put her hand on his arm. In view of her erratic driving he would rather she had kept it on the steering wheel.

  “It was a stupid question.”

  Miles and Tina lived in a prosperous suburb. The West Yorkshire lawns, embraced by carriage drives, were green and manicured. In front of the house, the dog, anxious to get out, leaped across Topher.

  “Laddie!” Tina said, as he went to lift his leg against the chestnut tree.

  “Bloody dogs!” Topher was not enamoured of the species.

  Tina switched off the engine and ruffled Topher’s hair as she had done when it was as red as her own had once been.

  “You haven’t changed.”

  Neither of them had. One didn’t. You could not mess about with genes.

  The evidence of tender loving care in Tina’s house brought home to Topher the recent signs of neglect in his own home. Tina had made the curtains in the bedroom to which she showed him. She had covered the cushions on the window seat against which Evelyn’s dolls still leaned.

  Topher opened the suitcase Penge had packed and gave Tina the Belgian chocolates he had brought, remembering her weakness.

  “You shouldn’t encourage me.” Tina hugged him, then stood back with her hands on his shoulders. “Stay as long as you like. Feel free. Miles will be in soon. I’m going to see to dinner. Why don’t you have a rest?”

  Topher did not want, suddenly, to be left alone in this room which did not belong to him.

  “I’d rather come and talk to you.”

  “Fine. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  She saw Topher’s face fall.

  “There’s some scotch in the sitting room. You know the way. Help yourself when you’re ready.”

  When she had gone, Topher questioned the wisdom of his decision to come to Bingley. He disliked staying with people. Apart from the strange beds and unfamiliar bathrooms, it imposed restrictions and inhibitions. He looked round at the cushion covers and the dolls and wished he was at home in his study where each evening he sought solace amongst his books. Shakespeare with his facility to illuminate the darkest secrets of the human soul; Cicero who believed (but did not manage to convince Topher) that nature, having so wisely distributed to all other periods of life their peculiar and proper enjoyments, had not neglected to endow the last act of the human drama with similar advantages; Horace with his Alcaic metres. Sometimes he feared he was in danger of becoming a recluse.

  Tina’s sitting room looked out onto the garden. It was redolent with Tina’s colours, yellow and blue, reflected in the furnishings. A half-completed tapestry lay on the sofa. Tina’s reading glasses were on the coffee table on top of the novel she was reading: An End to Dying. Recognising the quotation from Montaigne, “Death is but an end to dying”, Topher picked up the book, turning it over. Sally Maddox’s face, the untidy hair falling over it in wisps, stared at him from the jacket. He put the book under his arm and found the whisky bottle.

  Tina was preparing dinner. The dog followed her with adoration as she crossed and recrossed the kitchen. Topher noticed with surprise that his sister’s movements were no longer that of a young woman. He remembered that dining with Tina, who had little idea of time or timing, was inclined to be traumatic. There was none of Caroline’s efficiency or April’s panache. “Calamity Jane” had been their private name, his and Caroline’s, for Tina for whom invariably the toast burned, the meringues wept and the soufflés failed to rise. Topher could have coped with all that, were it not for the fact that at the moment he thought he would die – either of frustration or starvation – if the meal were not served, Tina would rush out into the garden and pick the spinach. Topher had only the vaguest idea of vegetable patches but hopefully, he thought, it was too early for spinach.

  Tina was opening all the drawers in the kitchen units one after the other and peering into them as if she were taking the inventory.

  “Scissors…”

  “Can I help?”

  “…I doubt it.”

  The scissors were on the table, partly buried by a tea-cloth. Topher handed them to her. Followed by Laddie, she snipped herbs from a pot on the window-sill.

  Topher showed her the book.

  “Is this any good?”

  “I’ve only just started it.”

  He flipped through the pages.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Sally Maddox? I read everything I can lay my hands on. There’s always a waiting list at the library. There are so few people these days one cares to read.”

  “May I borrow it?”

  Tina looked at him doubtfully over the tomatoes she was extracting from a paper bag.

  “I think Miles put some reading matter in your room.”

  “I’ve met Sally Maddox.”

  She was not only pursuing him but had followed him to Yorkshire.

  “She must be a lovely person.”

  Topher would not have used exactly those words to describe what he knew of the author of An End to Dying.

  Tina tore the basil leav
es into tiny pieces. “I hate buying them. Help yourself.”

  Topher assumed that since Tina grew her own, the first remark related to the tomatoes and the second to the book. He picked up the whisky bottle.

  “Hang on,” Tina said, “I’ll find you a glass.”

  Topher opened a cupboard.

  “I’m supposed to be looking after you.”

  “Tina, I’m not ill.”

  His sister put a heavy tumbler on the table.

  “It’s a garage one. We use them in the kitchen.”

  Tina, notwithstanding her abortive comings and goings, long moments when, engaged in her narrative, she forgot what she was doing, brought Topher up to date with her children and grandchildren. By the time Miles came home (Laddie jumping excitedly to attention several minutes before he put his key into the door) the meal had, miraculously, been assembled.

  Although Topher had little in common with Miles he was extremely fond of him. As his brother-in-law came into the kitchen (followed by Laddie who welcomed his master with a series of little jumps and hand-lickings), his first words were for his wife.

  “Hallo, sweetheart.”

  The warmth of their embrace, after so many years, made Topher feel both superfluous and sad.

  Miles wore a heather-green suit made, Topher guessed, from cloth woven in his own mills. When he’d released Tina he turned to Topher. The pressure of the welcoming arm he put round his brother-in-law’s shoulders indicated the depth of the feelings he was unable to put into words.

  “Well,” he said, “how’s His Nibs?”

  Sitting between the two of them, eating Tina’s steak and kidney pie – while she rose from the table to fetch the salt and the wooden salad-servers and the rolls which she had put into the oven and forgotten about (and which were only slightly charred) and the extra gravy – Topher felt even more isolated than he had at Marcus’ and April’s.

  “I hear they’re thinking of making Your Worship’s work a bit harder,” Miles (who had been upstairs to put his slippers on) said, over the cognac in the sitting room. Tina, who had refused offers of help, was attending to the dishwasher in the kitchen.

  “I wouldn’t say no,” Miles went on, “to knocking off at four. With eight weeks off in the summer and an index-linked pension at the end of it.”

  “There was a time when judges never sat more than three hours a day. They employed the rest of their time in reflection.”

  “Reflection?” Miles raised his eyebrows.

  “Eating and drinking. In mitigation I must say that the work we do is highly concentrated. It’s very exacting. It’s questionable whether a judge could actually absorb more if he did sit a longer day.”

  “I daresay it must be a bit of a strain being a living oracle,” Miles said, not unkindly. “But what about the delays? What about the age it takes to get a case heard? If I ran my business along those lines I’d be bankrupt in no time.”

  “I’m not saying that there isn’t room for improvement.”

  Topher explained some of the proposals which had recently been made to enhance the functioning of civil justice.

  Over coffee (Tina going back to the kitchen for the sugar, then the spoons) they discussed what Miles said was the British Establishment’s unshakable belief in its own infallibility, and the perennial problem of unemployment in West Yorkshire. Tina picked up her tapestry. Miles sucked at his pipe and read the newspapers. He quoted little snippets aloud for Tina’s benefit. When it was time, as if it was a ritual, he turned on the television news. Topher was glad when he could decently excuse himself from the domestic scene, without appearing rude, and retire to Evelyn’s room.

  He had just removed his shoes and his tie when Tina tapped at the door.

  “You forgot this.” She put An End to Dying into her brother’s hand.

  Seven

  Topher lay in Evelyn’s bed. The first night in Bingley, fearful that he would suffocate, he had slept only fitfully beneath the duvet, which threatened to obstruct his breathing but left his feet exposed to the elements. The feather-filled monstrosity had led him, in one of his few unconscious moments, to relive Caroline’s cremation, in a re-enactment in which he was both onlooker and corpse.

  The day of the funeral had been sunny, but cold enough to make Topher glad, in a way, that his wife was being cremated and that he did not have to leave her beneath the sod. Her wishes had been specific. She had made Topher promise. That her mortal remains would be consigned to the flames. Her ashes scattered amongst the birds she so loved. Preferring regular cemeteries and gravestones, where you knew what was what (who was where, Chelsea said), Topher had, with reluctance, agreed to do as Caroline had asked. His wife’s was the first cremation he had witnessed.

  The chapel had been filled with flowers, as it had been with mourners. Although the immediate family was not large, Caroline had had many friends. Topher had chosen the music. He smiled wryly as he remembered that Caroline had been tone deaf. Verdi’s Requiem for her departing and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy for what he hoped, but did not believe, was the world to come. There had been a moving address by Caroline’s brother. The stillness of the congregation while Mathew Eskdale’s carefully chosen words were being delivered testified to the fact that his sister had played a significant part in the lives of those who had come to pay their last respects. It had been like an earthly version of the Last Judgement. True worth was tested and revealed for all to see. As he listened to the proceedings, Topher had tried to take his mind off the coffin (adorned with the single rose he had placed upon it) in which he had had his final sight of Caroline. Her ravaged face had been serene in death and he had been unable to convince himself that she lay other than in an untroubled sleep. He did not want her to be burned, incinerated like so much rubbish disposed of by Arthur in the garden. He did not think he would be able to tolerate her annihilation. He had put his arms round the rigid Chelsea and the tearful Penge, who stood on either side of him in the front row of the chapel, for support. The moment when, with a small grinding sound, the doors flanking the bier were opened and the coffin began its mechanical slide, had recurred often and vividly in his dreams.

  On his first night at Tina’s it was his own remains which had, in his slumbering fantasy, been substituted for Caroline’s. As he fought to avoid his descent into the inferno, he had woken relieved to discover that it was the quilt from which he had struggled to escape rather than a wooden box. He was glad that he had come to Bingley. To get away not only from the torment of his home and the attentions of Sally Maddox, but from his preoccupations. The week had gone by quickly. One of its more positive aspects had been the opportunity to renew his acquaintance with his sister. Outnumbered at home by Caroline and his militant daughters, it had been comforting to discover that the tentacles of feminism had not yet reached this particular backwater of Yorkshire. His sister was the archetypal woman. Kirche, Kinder Küche. Except that Tina didn’t go to church. On her shoulders she took the burden of house, dog, husband, children and grandchildren – roughly in that order – and looked at Topher with uncomprehending eyes when he suggested that, just occasionally, any or all of them might be left to fend for themselves.

  Evelyn and Jane seemed similarly deaf to the seminal reverberations of the women’s movement. He had accompanied Tina on visits to their houses which were replicas of her own. Both the young women were dressed neatly, like their mother, in recognisable sweaters and skirts, rather than in the bundles of rags affected at similar ages by Chelsea, and even now by Penge. The welcome his two nieces gave their uncle was warm. Topher shuddered to think what might confront Tina were she to present herself unexpectedly at the Wapping warehouse or the Hackney commune. Evelyn, married to a dentist, had twin babies in the Osgood tradition. She served her visitors coffee, not in mugs but in china cups and saucers, set on a tray, with a teaspoon for each person. Afterwards she took Topher proudly out to the garden to show him her greenhouse. Jane – whose husband, John, was working his way up the l
adder in his father-in-law’s business – had one five-year-old daughter whom Tom had fetched from nursery school. Both Evelyn and Jane had enquired warmly after their London cousins, but tactfully avoided any reference to their late Aunt Caroline. There was an old-fashioned simplicity to life in Bingley, where Tina still paid weekly visits to the local hairdresser and the shopkeepers called Topher “love”. The highlight of the visit had been Miles’ birthday party at which Topher had met Lucille.

  He had come downstairs on the Saturday morning to find preparations in hand for what Miles – who had sensibly escaped after breakfast to the golf course – referred to as a “slap-up do”.

  Feeling superfluous, and anxious to get out of the way of Paula (of Paula’s Pantry according to the van in the drive) who had taken over the kitchen, Topher took Laddie, with whom he had come to some kind of mutual agreement, if not understanding, for a long walk. As Laddie bounded after the skylarks and meadow pippits, startling them into flight, it was inevitable that Caroline, never far from Topher’s thoughts, addressed him from the grave. Not that she had one of course. A fact about which he was none too happy. He would have preferred some specific spot, some stone engraved with her curriculum vitae which he could see and touch from time to time, rather than the open spaces of Hampstead Heath where, in a macabre ceremony he preferred not to recall, he had scattered her ashes in accordance with her wishes. Alone on the Yorkshire moors, wearing Miles’ waxed jacket against the howling wind, he heard his wife’s voice as clearly, as conversationally, as if she strode beside him. She told him that, just because birds were able to fly, he was not for a moment to imagine that they were free to go where they pleased. They were creatures of habit, and restricted to a particular area by the need for food and shelter. Caroline’s ecological studies and her easy familiarity with the countryside had contributed to her skill as bird watcher. In the area they were in now, Topher thought (as Laddie in his element covered twice the ground he did himself), the birds would be those endemic to grass moorland; merlin and golden plover, wheatear and dunlin, red grouse and partridge. Unless perhaps they belonged to heath or bracken. He was not quite sure. Busy with his own thoughts he had never paid all that much attention to the diatribes which accompanied their walks, as Caroline, by his side, rattled on. Well, she wouldn’t rattle on any more.