An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  Downstairs, Penge, in a loose white dress and sandals, a bunch of wilted marguerites in her hand, was eyeing the cups on the kitchen table.

  “April was just here,” Topher said. “She posted her keys in the letter box.”

  Penge looked at him strangely and held out the flowers.

  “She came to collect the spares. Are they for me? How kind.”

  He filled a vase with water. The flowers were all lengths. Penge seemed not to notice. She followed him into this study where he set the marguerites on the corner of his desk.

  “What’s that noise?”

  Thinking immediately of Lucille, Topher listened. He could hear nothing.

  “A sort of buzzing.”

  Topher followed her gaze to the table near his armchair.

  “I must have left the stereo on.”

  Penge beat him to it. She put her head on one side to read the label on the record.

  “Cats?”

  Her face was incredulous. She waited for her father to speak. He couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “Cats?”

  “Don’t keep saying Cats.”

  “Is something the matter with you?”

  “I could be getting a cold.”

  Topher took his handkerchief out of his dressing gown pocket and blew his nose. He tried to make his voice sound hoarse.

  “If you don’t mind I think I’ll go back to bed for a bit. Marcus is coming to see me later.”

  “I’ll bring some honey-and-lemon,” Penge said, “like Mummy used to.”

  Topher looked round in desperation trying to extricate himself from the hole he had dug. He had a sudden inspiration.

  “There aren’t any lemons.”

  Smiling triumphantly Penge went into the hall. Topher followed her. From her saddle-bag she produced a lemon.

  “I stopped at Camden Lock.”

  Refusing to allow Penge to bring the honey-and-lemon upstairs, Topher had no choice but to drink it in the kitchen. When she wasn’t looking he poured a slug from the bottle on the fridge into the glass.

  By the time he had got rid of her it was eleven-thirty. In the bedroom Lucille, fully dressed, was looking out of the window.

  “Pretty girl,” she said. “I don’t know that she should be riding that bicycle. When’s she expecting?”

  “Expecting what?”

  “Her baby.”

  “Who?”

  “Your daughter.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When is she expecting her baby?” Lucille said, enunciating clearly.

  “Penge?”

  “Do you mean to say you didn’t know?” Lucille let the curtain fall. “Hasn’t she told you? Hadn’t you noticed?”

  “Are you sure?” Topher said. “She often wears those loose things.”

  “I may have left school when I was sixteen, but I do know a pregnant woman when I see one. I’m sorry if I gave you a turn.”

  They drove to the Mount Royal in silence. Stunned by Lucille’s revelation, Topher was unable to get the image of Penge out of his head. The more he thought about it the more he realised that Penge had indeed been acting strangely lately. He had attributed the long silences, the moodiness, the excessive touchiness – Penge had always been quick to take offence – to Caroline’s death. But pregnant! Penge. That would make him a grandfather…

  “Those signals were red, love,” Lucille’s voice broke into his reverie. It was hardly surprising that he was distracted. What would Penge do with a baby? He presumed that it had been fathered by the minor poet, whom as far as he knew Penge had no intention of marrying. Plato had asserted that there should be no such thing as marriage. That children should be brought up by the State. Much as he admired Plato, Topher was of the firm opinion that the result of such misguided equality would be the death of civilisation which had, from time immemorial, been built upon a sound family. He had never imagined that a daughter of his would become an unmarried mother, a present day statistic. Caroline would not have liked it in the least little bit. She would, however, have known what to do. Marriage equipped one to cope with the anxieties of life, which sprung, uninvited, from the least likely corners.

  An illegitimate grandchild was going to prove mildly embarrassing in the Judges’ Dining Room. He wondered what Jo Henderson would say. He realised that he was being old-fashioned. Judge Cabot’s son had been on a drugs charge while he was still at Eton. Stacy-Pratt’s only daughter had done time for persistent shoplifting. A photograph of Jeremy Rowbotham’s youngest (found soliciting in a public convenience) had been on the front page of every newspaper. Their Honours had survived. None of it had seemed anything to get steamed up about. Unless of course, he presumed, you happen to be Cabot, or Stacy-Pratt, or Rowbotham. He wondered why Penge hadn’t said anything, and if Chelsea knew…

  “Come up and I’ll give you the cake.”

  They were outside the Mount Royal. Topher had quite forgotten Lucille.

  He hoped he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew, as he escorted her, in her black lace, her diamond securely on her finger, through the lobby.

  Her room was on the fifth floor. It looked out onto the well.

  “Sit down a minute,” Lucille said. “The cake’s here.” She indicated a tin on the dressing table next to a half-empty vodka bottle. “But there’s a note somewhere from Tina.”

  There were clothes on the armchair. Topher sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands.

  “Drink this,” Lucille had poured some vodka into a tooth-glass.

  Topher did not protest. Lucille was turning out her suitcase for Tina’s note. Finding it, she put it on top of the cake tin.

  “You all right, love?”

  It was the third time that morning that the question had been put to him.

  Lucille kicked off her shoes.

  “My friends will be here in a minute. I don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  She put a hand over her shoulder to undo her dress and turned her back to Topher for help.

  There was a swimming sensation in his head. Remembering that with all the morning’s goings on he had had no breakfast, he reached for the zipper. Lucille’s skin was remarkably young. It seemed to burn his fingers. She stepped out of the dress and moved to the wardrobe.

  “Don’t go…”

  “I’m not going very far. I’m only going to get my trousers.”

  She came back to the bed and cradled his head against her belly, against her flesh coloured body stocking.

  “Don’t go to Windsor,” Topher said.

  “What’ll I tell them?”

  Topher didn’t answer.

  The telephone rang. Lucille answered it.

  A garbled voice came through the receiver. Topher couldn’t make out what was said.

  “Will you give them a message, love?” Lucille looked at Topher.

  “Tell them… Tell them I can’t make it. Say I’m not feeling very well. And that I’m really sorry. And that I’ll be in touch.”

  Seventeen

  “Are you all right, Your Honour?” Mrs Sweetlove set his apple juice on the desk. “You look tired.”

  “Perfectly all right,” Topher barked. Seeing his usher flinch, he added more gently: “I’ve a bit of a headache.”

  It was of course a lie. From Mrs Sweetlove’s remark he gathered that the effects of his afternoon with Lucille at the Mount Royal were reflected in his face.

  Lucille had hung the “Do Not Disturb” notice outside the door. As she did so, something within Topher had snapped. It was as if all the nights, all the days, all the loneliness which he had experienced in the past months, had become focused into a single sensation of anguish. He had pulled Lucille towards him. There had been a pause during which Lucille had removed her false eyelashes and put them on the dressing table. What happened next he was not absolutely sure. When it was all over, not only the king-sized bed but the room itself looked like a bomb had hit it. He was lying with his feet on the pi
llow, gazing shamefacedly at Lucille. Her mouth was bruised, her lipstick had patterned her cheek, and she had been crying black mascara tears. Topher braced himself for her just reproach.

  “I was wondering should we cut in to Tina’s fruit cake,” Lucille said. “I’m starving!”

  Over the fruit cake, which they had eaten in crumbling chunks from the tin, Topher had apologised for his unbridled behaviour.

  “Will you forgive me?” He stroked Lucille’s freckled arm.

  “Whatever for?” Lucille, sitting up beside him, picked out a glacé cherry and popped it into Topher’s mouth.

  Topher was silent. He knew that absolution would have to come from himself.

  After the fruit cake he had fallen into an exhausted sleep. When he woke up, Lucille was sitting on the bed, watching him.

  “Feeling better, love?”

  Topher felt as if he had been reborn. He had showered and dressed, and taken Lucille down to the coffee shop for breakfast. At the table Lucille had put her hand, with its long red nails, over his.

  “Don’t feel badly,” she said. “There’s nothing like a good…”

  “Lucille!” Once more in control of himself, Topher looked round to see if anyone was listening, but the coffee shop was empty.

  “You are a card.” Lucille winked at him. “But ever so nice.”

  Driving away from the Mount Royal, Topher thought that “nice” was not an epithet which he would, in the circumstances, have applied to himself. He had behaved abominably. It was just as well that Lucille was to catch the early morning train back to Bingley.

  He was waiting at the lights, at the junction of Gloucester Place and Marylebone Road, when he remembered his impending grandfatherhood. Anxious to give the lie to what he hoped would turn out to be idle speculation, he made not for Hackney, where Penge herself could admit or deny the allegation that she was pregnant, but for Wapping.

  Chelsea was watching a re-run of Citizen Kane. She expressed her surprise that her father was visiting her twice in one week.

  “There’s half a pizza in the oven,” she said. “It might be a bit dried up.”

  “I’ve just had breakfast.” Topher saw Chelsea’s mouth drop open. “I mean dinner.”

  She looked at him suspiciously.

  “It’s about Penge,” Topher changed the subject.

  “What about her?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Chelsea’s face was blank. The two girls had always stood by each other.

  “Is she all right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “You know what I mean, Chelsea.”

  “Do I?”

  Orson Welles, alias Charles Foster Kane, alias Randolph Hearst, was running amok in the boudoir of his estranged wife.

  “Can’t you turn that thing off?”

  Obediently Chelsea pressed the button on the remote control. The picture faded. “Something bugging you?”

  “Penge is pregnant. That’s what’s bugging me.”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “It’s perfectly obvious,” Topher lied.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to stop playing games with me.”

  “Don’t you think you should be discussing this with Penge?”

  “You’re the oldest…”

  “Father, this is not a communal pregnancy.”

  “So it is true?”

  “She was afraid to tell you.”

  “How long did she think she could keep it a secret?”

  “You know Penge.”

  As a child Penge had been prone to walk round the house with her eyes closed in the firm conviction that no-one could see her.

  “When is she …? How long has she…?”

  “Seven months,” Chelsea helped him out.

  “You mean…”

  “Mummy was too ill.”

  A life had ended and a new one was coming into being. Topher acknowledged the poetic inevitability of the situation.

  “Your sister is only a child herself.”

  “She’s twenty-five.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Penge had always been babied. Both by himself and Caroline, and by Chelsea.

  “It would have been different if it were you.”

  Chelsea looked away. Topher realised that he had been tactless.

  “I’m sorry.” He seemed to have spent his day apologising to women. “I should not have said that.”

  “I shall never have children.”

  Distressed by the despair in her voice, he tried to steer the conversation back to Penge.

  “Has she seen a doctor? Is she looking after herself?”

  Chelsea, busy with her own thoughts, had clammed up.

  “Look, don’t you think all that would come better from Penge?”

  By the time Topher had left Wapping it was too late to go to Hackney. A flapping poster on a deserted pavement news pitch caught his eye. NEW AIDS VICTIM. HOLLYWOOD MOURNS STAR. He thought back to Arthur, and their conversation in the kitchen.

  “When you’re pulling a bird,” Arthur’s son had said, “you got other things on your mind”. Thinking about Lucille, and his afternoon at the Mount Royal, Topher almost drove the car onto the pavement. HER MAJESTY’S JUDGE LATEST AIDS VICTIM…

  When he got home he had had a hot bath. Then headed for the whisky bottle. Then, although it was after midnight, he had phoned Sally.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “What is it, Christopher?” It was obvious she had been asleep.

  He could hardly confess to Sally his fear that, as a result of his licentious behaviour with Lucille, he might have precipitated his own early death.

  “It’s Penge. She’s going to have a baby.”

  “Congratulations! That’s wonderful.”

  He failed to see what was so wonderful about it.

  There was silence on the line. Sally was waiting for him to speak.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “It’s not every day you find out you’re going to be a grandfather.”

  “Don’t!” Topher groaned.

  He had a sudden urge to see Sally. The subject of literature, she had said, is the relation of human beings to each other. It occurred to Topher that it was largely the subject of life too.

  “When can I see you?”

  “Any time.”

  “Tomorrow,” Topher said. “After I’ve spoken to Penge.”

  Despite the afternoons exertions, he had been unable to sleep. He had prowled restlessly round the bedroom picking up and putting down Caroline’s silver birds. The swallow and the nuthatch were cold and unresponsive. He replaced them on the table and made for his study.

  There was a record already on the turntable. The arm swung smoothly into position.

  “Midnight, not a sound from the pavement…”

  He did not want to think about Lucille.

  “Has the moon lost her memory…”

  In his embrace all her bitterness, all her brashness, had disappeared. He had spoken to another Lucille and that other Lucille had answered him.

  “All alone in the moonlight…”

  “To share, to give, to make other people happy was part of a woman’s nature …”

  “I was beautiful then…”

  …he couldn’t remember who it was who had said it.

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

  “Human beings have no right to be happy, nor should they be.” That was Thoreau.

  “…Let the memory live again.”

  He had turned off the stereo and slept like a log. Overslept. Now his head seemed disagreeably heavy.

  “I’ve got a couple of Anadin in my handbag,” Mrs Sweetlove interrupted Topher’s thoughts. “Mr Sweetlove used to swear by them.”

  Topher declined the panacea. With the same gesture he dismissed the usher from his robing room. Mrs Sweetlove did not go away. Topher looked questioningly at her. She was
wearing her red fly-away glasses.

  “I just wanted to say, Your Honour…”

  Topher waited.

  “I’m a mother, as you know…”

  The scent of a not very expensive perfume assailed Topher’s nostrils. It emanated from Mrs Sweetlove.

  “If there’s anything I can do…”

  Topher wondered if Penge’s pregnancy was written on his face.

  Mrs Sweetlove swallowed.

  “It can get very lonely…”

  Topher sat up horrified as he recognised what he suspected was a proposition.

  “I appreciate your kindness,” he said, fixing Mrs Sweetlove with a judicial smile and deliberately misunderstanding her, “but I find that the general tendency of headaches is to cure themselves.”

  The morning’s case was a paternity suit. A pregnant schoolteacher (ironical) was trying to prove that the man with whom she had had a steady relationship for the past two years was the father of her expected child. The man, a used-car salesman, admitted that although he had indeed had a relationship with the schoolteacher, he was not her boyfriend and he had, in fact, given the plaintiff money in return for her favours. Prosecuting counsel challenged the used-care salesman’s assertion that their affiliation was purely a sexual one, with reference to joint outings to the cinema and the seaside. He was trying to demonstrate, with the help of diary entries, that they had in fact lived together, as a couple, when Topher – who was experiencing some difficulty in keeping his eyes open – had felt himself nodding off. He managed to rescue himself, just in time, from the brink of unconsciousness and, like Dickens’ Mr Justice Stareleight, “immediately looked unusually profound to impress the jury with the belief that he always thought most deeply with his eyes shut”.

  “The diary, Your Honour!” Mrs Sweetlove hissed, handing the exhibit up to Topher.

  Taking it from her, Topher dismissed from his head The Pickwick Papers, the afternoon with Lucille, and Penge and her pregnancy. He applied himself to the cross-examination of the used-car salesman, and to the case before him.

  In the purlieus of North London, on his way to see Penge, Topher remarked the number of upmarket shops which had unexpectedly mushroomed in what had once been a spurned and moribund area. Penge’s street had, so far, escaped the gentrification. The garden of the Victorian house where she had lived for the past twelve months was overgrown and the path was strewn with rubbish. A young man with a black moustache, wearing a plaid shirt and sporting a single earring, answered the door to Topher.