An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  It wasn’t until after lunch on Saturday that he realised he had lost Sally Maddox’s address. He remembered making a note of it after the dinner party, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where it was. He dialled April’s number, then remembered that she and Marcus had gone up to Oxford to visit John. The telephone book revealed an S Maddox in SW19, a Stuart Maddox in E5, Maddox Salon de Lingerie in W1, but no Maddox, Sally, in Kentish Town. He had been looking forward to his visit. He had stopped at Books Etc. in Fleet Street, on his way to the Law Courts, to buy a copy of An End to Dying with the intention of asking Sally Maddox to sign it. Waiting for his change, and for the novel to be wrapped, his attention was caught by John Gould’s The Bird Man. He picked up the book and turned over the laminated pages, but was unable to focus on the plumed partridge, the white-fronted falcon, the toco toucan with its great orange beak, because his eyes were filled with tears.

  Surrounded by the ordered chaos in his study (into which Madge was forbidden to venture with her Hoover), Topher tried to recall what he had done with Sally Maddox’s address. He had always been a hoarder but had been delivered from his own excesses by the fact that Caroline liked to throw everything away. The sea of papers with which he was now surrounded was not entirely his fault. He could scarcely be blamed for the deluge of junk mail beneath which he was in danger of sinking. With every post, unsolicited printed matter – from within the folds of which fell further printed matter – came through the letterbox. Each day he was persuaded of the futility of his existence without a Welsh miner’s lamp, simulated pearls, an embossed press for stationery, or a polyester djellabah. He was exhorted to send away for mini-computers of the most daunting complexity, sides of oak-smoked salmon and flea collars for the dog. The credit card companies were only partially responsible for this effluent. Personal Lucky Numbers, attached to catalogues of household goods or thermal underwear, advised Topher that he might already have won thousands of pounds. Names of previous winners – Piddlesden and Wigglesworth – living in places one had never heard of, did little to reassure.

  As if all this were not enough, there was the recent addition of gratuitous property magazines offering houses with indoor swimming pools and “his” and “hers” jacuzzis, and a confetti of visiting cards promising 24-Hour Messenger Services, Radio-Controlled Taxicabs, and rogue plumbers. Somewhere beneath this accumulation lay Sally Maddox’s address.

  Topher began, half-heartedly, to throw some of the detritus into the waste-paper basket. He then decided that it might be more useful to sit down and think the matter out. It had been the day after April’s dinner party when his assailant had phoned him. He had been sitting in his own court. Mrs Sweetlove. Possession orders. Mr Biswas and Mr Archibald. Two girls with coloured hair. A breach of contract, after which he had gone straight home to an empty house. A deserted hall in which he had remarked the lack of flowers. The welcome sound of the telephone bell. He had been expecting Chelsea or Penge… He got up from his chair and crossing to the bookcase picked up a back number of Counsel. “Advertising and the Bar: The Debate Begins”. “Bar’s Withdrawal of Credit Scheme – How and why it will work …” He closed the journal and on the back cover, in an almost illegible hand, as if he were not really interested in recording it, was Sally Maddox’s address.

  Ten

  Topher stood beside the dustbins on a doorstep in Jeffrey’s Street clutching An End to Dying and a bottle of tawny sherry, which reminded him of Sally Maddox herself. Stooping to read the labels on the entryphone, most of which seemed to have faded into illegibility, he had his hand in his pocket for his half-glasses when Sally Maddox threw open the peeling door.

  “I thought you’d got lost.”

  “I mislaid the address.”

  Topher stepped into the hall and into Sally Maddox’s outstretched arms. She drew him to her generous bosom against which he stood awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do. Deciding upon inertia as being in the best interests of self-preservation, he waited for her to release him, then followed her down the stairs to what he half-imagined, on the strength of their first meeting, would be some den of vice.

  He was not unused to bed-sits. Chelsea and Penge had lived in a few in their time. Somehow it was an arrangement he had not associated with grown-up people. Far from the bordello he had expected, Sally Maddox’s room seemed mostly to be furnished with books. There was a plain wooden table on which was her typewriter, a double bed (covered by a spread of crisp white lace which reminded Topher of his grandmother), a sofa and an armchair. The simplicity of it all made Topher wonder suddenly what he needed such a large house for, when it seemed that life’s needs could be adequately catered for in the space of a few hundred square feet. Any uncertainty he might have had about accepting the invitation to Kentish Town was soon dispelled. He was spared even from volunteering the sherry.

  “Is that for me?”

  Topher handed over the bottle. There was no dissimulating with Sally. Once again, this time with Topher’s acquiescence, she flung her arms round his neck.

  He put An End to Dying on the table next to the coffee tin filled with pens.

  “I don’t read many novels…”

  “‘Things that never happened to people you don’t know’.”

  “I brought it for you to sign. I thought it extremely moving.”

  “Thank you.” She accepted the compliment with grace.

  “Was it well received?”

  “I assume you mean by the critics? I don’t take too much notice. I’m a reviewer myself. I know how easy it is to demolish, in a sentence, a novel it has taken someone two years to write. It’s your readers you have to worry about. They are more discerning, bless them. I shan’t be a minute. Make yourself at home.”

  Sally disappeared behind a curtain from where Topher, who had been anticipating the call of sirens, could hear the rattle of teacups. He wandered over to the books. The titles, in no particular order, proclaimed the catholic tastes of their owner.

  “Milk or lemon?” The voice floated from behind the curtain.

  Topher presumed that Sally Maddox was referring to the tea and asked for milk.

  When she reappeared, with a loaded tray, he moved to take it from her. She put it on the low table in front of the sofa.

  “I’m used to doing things for myself. I was married. A good man but it didn’t work out. We still see each other. There are scones, with or without currants, and crumpets. Home-made jam from Killarney. How does one get to be a judge?”

  “By accident really.” Topher sat down and accepted a plate. “One starts out, as a young man, desperately wanting to be an advocate. When one reaches one’s peak, one finds oneself faced with two alternatives. The first is to become progressively disillusioned as the up and coming young barristers pass one by. The other is the soft option of twenty years on the Bench – leading the life of Riley – while one waits for one’s index-linked pension based on half-pay. I had no ideas when I started out of becoming a judge. It’s really not much of a choice.”

  Sally put sugar into her tea and offered the bowl to Topher.

  He shook his head.

  “My first appearance on the Bench came quite by chance. A member of my chambers, who had been made a Recorder, asked me if I’d mind sitting as his assistant. His previous chap had been rushed into hospital with some surgical emergency. I went on from there. There were no special qualifications to become a judge in those days. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that middle-aged men, starting a new job, might need some sort of training. You learned, like brick-laying or paper-hanging, by watching others do it.”

  “And you send people to prison?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does it do any good?”

  “Putting people inside protects the people outside. Sometimes it’s necessary to deprive an offender of his liberty for quite a long stretch in the interests of public safety.”

  “‘One learns patience in a prison’.”

  “The House
of the Dead?”

  “I thought lawyers only read law books. Do you lie awake at night, thinking that you might have given the wrong sentence?”

  Topher helped himself to a crumpet oozing with what, he was certain, was not polyunsaturated margarine.

  “The time to worry is before you make a decision, not after it. Sentencing is a serious matter. Imprisonment is a waste of the human spirit. Every day of it must be justified.”

  Sally Maddox passed him the jam.

  “What about capital punishment?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you believe in it?”

  There was no spoon. Topher put his knife into the jam.

  “Let’s say I believe all life to be sacred.”

  “You’re religious then?”

  “I just happen to think that there is some good in every human being.”

  “Even murderers?”

  “Most murderers are insane. They wouldn’t qualify for capital punishment anyway.”

  “Doesn’t the threat of being topped act as a deterrent?”

  “It can’t intimidate a man who does not know he is going to commit murder. The statistics indicate that there is no connection whatsoever between the death penalty and the incidence of crime. It seems more reasonable to me that those who have shown themselves unfit to be in contact with the rest of society should be removed from it for the remainder of their lives.”

  “Until they sink into mindless senility?”

  “If necessary.”

  “But you wouldn’t reinstate the death penalty?”

  Sally was nothing if not persistent. Topher put his empty cup into her outstretched hand.

  “Step back into the dark ages? Certainly not.”

  He heard her breathe a sigh of relief, and felt as if he had passed an examination.

  “Writers have to know everything. We use every crumb. I shall probably put you into a book.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “I might even ask if I can come to your court.”

  “With the greatest of pleasure.”

  “You can get your own back now. Ask me anything you like.”

  “There is something I’d like to know.”

  Watching her tuck into her umpteenth scone – sure that it wasn’t wise, she really was extremely plump – Topher thought how harmless Sally Maddox appeared, dressed today not in brown but some sort of loose dress covered with scarlet poppies. The material looked as if it could quite easily have been made into curtains. Fortified by the crumpets, he decided to solve the mystery of her attack upon him at the Gordons’ table.

  Topher put his empty cup and saucer down on his plate and replaced the plate on the tray. “What I’ve been meaning to ask you…”

  Whether it was because he was unsure how to phrase the question, or whether he feared Sally’s reply, he was not quite certain. At the last moment his courage failed him. “What I wanted to ask you is…how do you write a book?”

  “‘Begin at the beginning; carry on till you come to the end; then stop’.”

  “Alice in Wonderland used to upset Chelsea, for some reason. Particularly the White Rabbit. Do you write every day, or do you wait for inspiration?”

  “I wait for inspiration. But I make sure that it arrives at nine o’clock every morning! Seriously though, Christopher, it’s a job like any other. I have to keep myself, remember?”

  “Since you’ve given me carte blanche,” Topher said, “tell me where you get your ideas.”

  “You only have to live for one day with your eyes and ears open and you have more ideas than you know what to do with. ‘The jog of fancy’s elbow’, Henry James called it. When your subject matter is the relationship of one human being to another, until we’re all blown into kingdom come, there can be no shortage of material.”

  “Do you plan the whole book out before you start?”

  “There are those I do. I know where my characters are going but not how they are going to get there. I start them off then allow them to take over. I have a rough idea of the shape…a bit like an architect having to carry the entire plan of the finished building in his head. Writing never gets any easier. You start out determined to write Hamlet, Beethoven’s 5th, The Brothers Karamazov…and end up with Little Noddy.”

  “In An End to Dying,” Topher said, “I particularly liked the way you coped with the…physical relationships.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth he wondered what had possessed him.

  “Sex is a special interest of mine,” Sally Maddox said.

  Topher avoided her eyes.

  “I’m glad you noticed.”

  “En passant.” Topher tried to extricate himself from the hole he had dug.

  “Reading about sex is like being forced to look at holiday snaps. It’s extremely boring to watch other people doing something you’d rather be doing yourself.”

  Topher let the comment pass.

  Sally warmed to her theme. “Any decent writer can say all he wants to say without resorting to ‘gross details of lascivious images’. What passion there is in Emma Bovary hurtling round Paris in a closed fiacre with Leon, in Rhett Butler sweeping Scarlet O’Hara into his arms and up the stairs at Tara, in the exchanges between Zhivago and Lara. Tell me about your wife.”

  Topher was thrown by the abrupt change of subject. The unexpected imperative. It was still not easy to discuss Caroline. Not without disgracing himself. He knew that he should. That is was therapeutic. Marcus had told him as much. Diffidently, stumbling over his words at first, he made a blundering attempt. He told Sally about Caroline’s love affair with the natural world, about her infatuation with birds. How, when he came home from court in the afternoon, no matter what the weather, they would walk on the Heath, Caroline searching for chaffinches or starlings. He told her about the contributions Caroline had made to ornithological classification, about the papers she had written, and the book she was – had been – writing.

  He must have talked for a long time. When he stopped, the basement was in semi-darkness. Sally got up from the armchair to put on the lamps. From a cupboard she brought a bottle of wine and two glasses and set them beside the tea tray. Topher looked at his watch. He had never known time pass so quickly. He was about to say he really must be going. Sally put a glass of wine in his hand and sat down beside him on the sofa.

  “Now,” she said, and her voice was firm, insistent. “Tell me about your wife.”

  Topher sipped his wine. Sally waited. He knew that she didn’t want to hear how Caroline had tracked down the green woodpecker or the female shrike.

  “I watch people’s faces in repose,” Sally said. “I know who is putting on a brave front.”

  Topher knew that it was not possible to describe the rapport which had existed between himself and Caroline. That he could not put into words the love, which neither philos nor agape could adequately describe, which had bound them together.

  He had emptied his glass and it had been refilled before he said: “I never really told Caroline how much I loved her.”

  “Didn’t she know?”

  “Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t. I never said it. Not even when she was dying. In my family the words were not used. I did say them. But it was too late…”

  On the day that he had disposed of Caroline’s ashes, Topher had felt that he was as near as he had ever come to manslaughter. He had been putting it off and putting it off. At first he had blamed his procrastination on the weather. It had been raining. Then it had been snowing. For some reason, as if it were a picnic he was planning, he was waiting for a fine day. He had kept the wooden casket in Caroline’s bureau in the bedroom, in the little cupboard next to the secret drawers. Aware that his action was morbid, he discussed it with neither his daughters nor with Marcus, knowing what they would say. He never touched the box. Only looked at it. When he found himself sitting in court thinking about the moment when he would go home to it – as if Caroline herself were waiting in the
house to welcome him – he knew that the time had come to dispose of its contents.

  He left it until the weekend. On Saturday morning Marcus had rung him to ask whether he would like a game of chess. Topher had prevaricated. Not long afterwards Chelsea had called to enquire what he was up to.

  “I’m going for a walk on the Heath.”

  “Alone?”

  Topher thought about it. He was unable to bring himself to tell her that he would have the company of her mother on the way up Fitzjohn’s Avenue, but that he would be alone – and lonely – on his return.

  “Not exactly.” It was the best answer he could think of.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “Good Lord, no.”

  “I mean, are you all right?”

  He had reassured Chelsea with more composure than he felt, and dressed carefully. For Caroline. In her favourite suit. He put on the tie she had brought him from the States where she had gone to watch seabirds. When he had looked for something in which to carry her remains, and found himself wondering whether Caroline would prefer the dark green of a Harrods bag, or the paler shade used by Fortnum and Mason (where she bought the Bath Olivers), he realised that the entire manoeuvre had assumed an air of farce. No one, as far as he knew, saw him leave the house. As he crossed Arkwright Road a passing police-man led him, as if he had indeed committed some felony, to quicken his step. He stopped at the Whitestone Pond. In his mind he heard one of the girls call “Mummy, Mummy,” as her frail craft capsized in the water. He turned to look at Caroline, who was not by his side but in the bag – Fortnum and Mason – he clutched beneath his arm. He thought that he could not go through with it. Pulling himself together, he left the frozen pond and walked quickly to the spot where he and Caroline had taken their daily walks.