An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Does April know?” Topher thought it strange that she hadn’t mentioned anything about a child.

  Sally shook her head.

  “There are not many people whom I tell.”

  She stood up and replaced the photograph of Penge on the table from which she had taken it.

  “There’s not really much point.”

  Topher watched her compose her face. As if she was putting the memory of Tom away where it belonged.

  “You must be lonely.”

  “It’s better for a writer to be alone. The thoughts come. I enjoy solitude, the way some people enjoy being in a crowd. Being by myself gives me an enormous sense of being alive. I loved Oliver, but my internal certainty – I think all artists have it – made him uncomfortable. He wanted me to need his approbation, his agreement, his consolation. Like most men he needed constant attention. He had to know what I was doing, where I was going – and how long I would be – had I seen the corkscrew, and wasn’t dinner ready. Sometimes he made me feel like a dilatory housekeeper. I’m not exactly a feminist. I’m not even very sure what it means. But I do think that marriage is not very fair on women. We are still expected to accommodate men. If I ever had a lasting relationship with anyone again, it would have to be on very special terms.

  Topher said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.

  “Let’s sit in your study,” Sally said abruptly, as if she had talked enough about herself.

  Looking round the bay-windowed room at the front of the house, she said: “This is how I pictured you. When April introduced us, at the dinner party. You looked as if you were sorry you’d come. As if you wanted nothing so much as to go home. Home, I imagined, was like this.” She waved an arm at the bookshelves, the leather armchair with its footstool, the record player, the complete set of Law Reports, the stacked journals, the desk which had belonged to Topher’s father.

  “This is you, Christopher. The rest of the house is Caroline.”

  She took a copy of An End to Dying from her handbag.

  “I almost forgot.”

  Topher opened to book to see what she had written in it.

  “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend/All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.”

  “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Topher leaned forward and kissed Sally on her cheek, smelling her fragrance.

  Putting An End to Dying on a shelf he said: “What shall I read next?”

  “It’s extremely embarrassing to have to recommend one’s work. Almost as bad as admitting to writing it. Sometimes I wish I were a harpist, or a vet. Having owned up to being a writer, people want to know your name. When you tell them, there’s a tangible silence. Then they ask should they know you? Or insist that you tell them what you have written. You have to go through the humiliating process of reciting the titles. Said aloud they sound so inane that you can’t think how you ever came to choose them.”

  She looked round the room. “You don’t look like a novel reader, Christopher.”

  “I’m not. I’d like to know more about you.”

  “And you think that you will find out by reading my books?”

  “Won’t I?”

  Sally Maddox thought for a moment. “Possibly. Perhaps you will be disappointed. If I have to recommend one it would be my first, before the disillusionment, the cynicism set in. Read Unto the Rainbow.”

  “‘To smooth the ice, or add another hue/Unto the rainbow…’”

  “What I like about you Christopher is that I don’t have to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s. The book’s out of print.”

  “I’ll get it from the library.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I’ll lend it to you. I must be off. I’ve taken up enough of your day. I’m going to say hallo to April.”

  “I hope you got what you wanted.”

  Sally patted her handbag in which was her notebook. “It was most useful.”

  “I’ll walk down the road with you.”

  At the Gordons’ gate, Sally said: “I can’t offer to take you to Cats, or to a poncy French restaurant, but there’s the Quarterly Dinner at the PEN club next month. Will you be my guest?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “If you don’t hear from me for a bit it’s because I’m in the grip of a muse.”

  Topher felt a sense of disappointment.

  “I tend to shut myself away when I’m starting a new book.”

  Topher, used now to the kissing game, was about to plant a chaste peck on Sally’s cheek by way of farewell, when she flung her arms round his neck and fastened her mouth on his as if she were a honey-sucking bee. The experience was not unpleasant. He hoped that April was not looking out of the window.

  Back in the house he cleared away the tea things. He was spending the evening with Chelsea and David. There was no need to think about dinner.

  He was sweeping up the crumbs from the chocolate-chip cookies when he heard singing in the kitchen. It was a moment before he realised that the sounds were emanating from his own lips: “‘When I was a lad I served a term/As office boy to an Attorney’s firm./I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,/And I polished up the handle of the big front door…’”

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had broken spontaneously into song. Certainly not since Caroline had died. In his early days at the Bar he had performed Gilbert and Sullivan, much of which he knew by heart, on stage in the Middle Temple concert. His noisy renditions drove Caroline mad. She used to hold her hands over her ears in mock horror. Running the broom methodically over the linoleum, he wondered whether she could see him now. He moved the chairs and collected the crumbs which had fallen beneath the table, just in case she could. Returning the broom to the cleaning cupboard he took out the dustpan and brush.

  “‘I polished up that handle so carefullee,/That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!’”

  Going up in the cage of the creaking goods lift to the Wapping warehouse which had once been a grain store, Topher’s carefree mood vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. He remembered Jo Henderson’s words, concerning his daughter’s relationship with David Cornish, and wondered whether during the course of the evening there would be an opportunity to talk seriously to Chelsea about the unsuitability of her lover.

  While she was occupied with the dinner, Topher stood with David by the window overlooking the dirty river.

  “Good health, Sir,” David raised his glass. “How are the criminals? Still giving crime a bad name?”

  “It’s no good asking him about criminals.” Chelsea’s voice wafted from the kitchen. “I don’t suppose he’s ever actually met any.”

  “You don’t need to be a chef to judge an omelette, darling,” David said.

  “Thank God someone’s on my side. I did spend twenty years at the Bar, but I have never been able to convince Chelsea that the lives led not only by judges, but by other successful professionals, do not preclude them from the knowledge of what the ordinary man, whoever he might be, is thinking, nor how he is likely to react. We spend a great part of our day listening to the ordinary man. We have every opportunity of testing our opinions about a case against those of the jury, and of making up our own minds about the character of a witness. We’d have to be extremely stupid not to absorb – from what is constantly being acted out before us – a sense of the ordinary man’s attitudes in the situations with which the law has to deal. In Chelsea’s book all criminals are misunderstood members of the lower classes, just as all judges are disagreeable bullies with their minds rooted firmly in the nineteenth century.”

  “Present company, of course, excepted.” Chelsea came in with the wooden salad bowl.

  “Her notions are not only based upon stereotypes but are as ill-conceived as they are unjust.”

  David put an arm round Chelsea.

  “I didn’t mean to put the cat among the pigeons.”

  “It’s all right, David,” Topher said. “Intemperate abuse of judges is punisha
ble as contempt of court. There’s no doubt that, in the old days, there were some extremely unpleasant judges. Many of them were politicians. The English distrust politicians, just as they are suspicious of academics and make jokes about civil servants. Since the last war the judiciary has changed considerably. It is now composed, by and large, of unremarkable men with unsensational private lives. Critics – such as the one you have your arm around – are living largely on legend.”

  “I think this critic had better get back into the kitchen if we’re to have any dinner,” Chelsea said.

  “Don’t tell me you’re actually cooking?” Topher sat down on the white canvas sofa.

  “Heating up the spare-ribs. David brought a takeaway.”

  When she had gone Topher said, “Chelsea’s a different person when she has you around.”

  “I do realise how hard it is on her,” David said, coming to sit next to him. “As you know my wife is a manic depressive. If I’m not there she doesn’t take her drugs. It’s impossible for me to leave her. I’ve tried not to mess up Chelsea’s life. We’ve both tried. You see –” he looked at Topher – “the trouble is…it’s quite simple, really. Chelsea and I love each other.”

  “It’s good of you to discuss it with me.”

  David looked towards the kitchen. “I couldn’t manage without Chelsea.”

  “What have you two got your heads together about?” Chelsea weaved her way round the Edwardian birdcage with a pile of plates. “Whatever it is, you’ll have to break it up. I need a butler.”

  “For spare-ribs?” Topher said.

  “I can’t help it if I was brought up properly.”

  Fifteen

  “Olga, you morning-star,/God-child of Aphrodite,/Miracle of beauty,/How accustomed you are/To sting with a caress…”

  Topher, his mind only partly on the poem, wondered in what weak moment he had agreed to go with Lucille to Cats. Cats! She had called to say that she was spending the day in Hendon with one of her girl-friends who would give her a lift to Hampstead at around six. She was looking forward to seeing Topher again. Politely, Topher had returned the compliment. But he was not looking forward to seeing Lucille. He would much rather have spent the evening battling with Pushkin and listening to the Beethoven Late Quartets. Ringing Jo Henderson to say that he was unable to come down to the cottage, he had been unable to bring himself to confess the true reason.

  “I’m afraid I’m tied up on Saturday night,” he had said, lamely. Jo had not pressed him further. She had reissued the invitation to Badger’s for the following weekend when there should be some “amusing people”. Topher was relieved to discover that he was not to be the only house-guest.

  He tried to concentrate on his translation, but was listening for the sound of the front-door bell. In Lucille’s honour he had put a decanter of sherry and two glasses on a silver tray. At the back of the larder he had found a packet of peanuts (the “sell by” date long past) and had tipped them into one of Caroline’s engraved glass finger-bowls.

  Lucille was late. An impeccable timekeeper himself, he did not take kindly to unpunctuality in others. Drumming his fingers on the side of his armchair he tried to work out the Russian for “priapic folly”.

  When Lucille finally arrived she was all apologies.

  “Sorry I kept you waiting, love.” She embraced a decidedly edgy Topher. “There must be something on at Wembley. We were sat sitting more than thirty minutes at Hendon Central. You’ve never seen such jams! What a smashing house. I’m dying to spend a penny.”

  She was wearing a dress which might have looked right at a rave-up in Bingley, but was, even to Topher’s untutored eyes, a bit over the top for Cats. The grotesque diamond, spanning two knuckles, was set off by the black lace. Topher showed Lucille the way to the downstairs cloakroom. On her return to the sitting room she looked at the sherry decanter and the time-expired peanuts. Her face fell. Topher fetched the whisky bottle from the top of the fridge.

  The drive to Drury Lane was not auspicious. The entire population of North West London appeared to be heading for the West End. The traffic was snarled up at Swiss Cottage and again at Euston Road.

  “It’s all my fault,” Lucille wailed. “It’s not one of my days!”

  “Optat supremo collocare Sisyphus in monte saxum.”

  “Come again?”

  “‘Someone up there doesn’t love me’.” Topher hooted angrily and uncharacteristically at a driver who was attempting to cut him up.

  “You’re ever so clever, aren’t you?” Lucille said. “I like a man with brains.”

  It took fifteen minutes to find a parking space. Another ten – because of Lucille’s stiletto heels – to reach the theatre.

  “You must be cursing me,” Lucille said, taking three tiny steps to Topher’s one. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s a bad time-keeper.”

  “We should just make it,” Topher said gallantly, with more conviction than he felt.

  Outside the theatre the queue for returned tickets regarded them hopefully. In the foyer, usherettes in Cats tee-shirts directed them to the escalators, urging them raucously to “Pass along quickly please” as the performance was about to commence.

  Topher bought a programme and a souvenir brochure for Lucille. The auditorium resembled a giant rubbish dump. Dustbins, an abandoned car, tyres, bicycles, and discarded Christmas decorations littered the stage and were suspended from the dress circle. Apologising for the disturbance, Lucille and Topher squeezed past a line of knees. An American tourist in a plaid sportscoat removed his raincoat from Topher’s seat.

  “Hi!”

  “Hi,” Topher said without enthusiasm as the house lights were extinguished and a trumpet blast from an unseen band threatened to shatter his ear drums.

  Above his head a thousand cats’ eyes twinkled through the gloom. An old boot, hurled from the wings, landed with a thump in the centre of the stage. The four rows of seats, at the back of which Topher and Lucille were sitting, began slowly to revolve.

  “It’s the moving platform,” Lucille hissed. “I was very lucky to get them.”

  Topher, who was prone to motion sickness and never went on boats if it could be avoided, wondered for how long they were going to rotate. He became disorientated in the darkness and began to feel queasy.

  “Smashing, isn’t it?” Lucille said. “We end up right round the other side. My friend told me.”

  When they finally stopped, Topher had the sensation that the seats were still moving. He shut his eyes. When he opened them again the stage had filled with cats. Male and female bodies, taut leotards leaving no detail of nipple or crotch to the imagination, moved in erotic, feline rhythm to the hypnotic thrum of the orchestra. Wigged and whiskered, ginger and marmalade, multicoloured and tabby, Thomas Stearns Eliot’s Jellicle Cats enacted their anarchic rituals and belted out lyrics of which Topher could make neither head nor tail, because long before they reached him they were swallowed up by the music. Feeling decidedly alienated, and distinctly uncomfortable, he wondered what on earth had possessed him to come.

  A sideways glance at his companion confirmed that his misgivings were not shared. Lucille – in company with the rest of the audience – was drinking in every movement, seemed to be able to distinguish every word. Topher considered Chelsea’s contention that the habits you were trained in, the people with whom you mixed, led you to have certain ideas of such a nature that, when you had to deal with other ideas you were unable to be as impartial as you might wish. Perhaps Chelsea was right. If he was unable to share the evident pleasure of those who surrounded him, to raise the least fervour for what they were so patently lapping up, how could he be expected to give a sound and accurate judgement to the man in the street?

  A number on the naming of cats preceded the information that, together with the Pollicle Dogs, the Jellicle Cats were preparing themselves for the Jellicle Ball. Topher had never heard such arrant nonsense.

  A glance at his programme, illuminated by
the overspill of lights from the stage, told him that there were ten more acts to sit through before the interval. In them he would have the opportunity to meet The Rum Tum Tugger, Bustapha Jones, Old Deuteronomy, Mungojerrie, and Grizabella the Glamour Cat. Resigning himself to the fact that, in the interests of courtesy, all escape routes were barred, he sat back to let the sights and sounds of the production wash over him.

  Bustapha Jones, a muscular black giant whose private parts seemed in imminent danger of rupturing his skin-tight hose, rolled his eyes, rotated his pelvis, and finally leaped from the stage to sit on the laps of several delighted ladies in the auditorium.

  Old Deuteronomy, a senior (cat) citizen, solemnly decreed that – come the dawn – one lucky cat from those assembled at his feet would be selected for the Journey to the “Heaviside Layer”.

  The lights were again doused. An oversized moon appeared in the sky. Grizabella, a mangy, spindle shanked, has-been of a glamour cat, tottered into the spotlight in her high-heeled shoes. Softly, throatily, she crooned into the silence.

  “Midnight, not a sound from the pavement…”

  Topher sat up.

  “Has the moon lost her memory?… She is smiling alone…”

  Something in her voice touched a chord within him. Grizabella’s melancholy face was time-ravaged beneath the tousled hair.

  “I remember…the time I knew what happiness was…”

  Topher remembered too. It seemed a long time ago now.

  “…Let the memory live again. /Every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning…someone mutters…and a streetlamp gutters… and soon it will be morning.”

  Grizabella’s song, reinforced by its injection of hope, grew stronger. It swelled to fill the auditorium. Made its way, uninvited, into Topher’s head.

  “…If you touch me…You’ll understand what happiness is…look, a new day has begun…!”

  Topher refused to believe that there was a lump in his throat, tears in his eyes. Who was it who had said “in the hands of a genius even a musical comedy can become a masterpiece”?