An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  “I’m not a country person,” Topher said.

  “I didn’t think that I was. There’s something very compelling about Badger’s. I wouldn’t like to give it up.”

  “Why should you?”

  “It’s an enormous headache. Too much for one. It needs a man about the place.”

  “Anyone in mind?” Topher thought of Giles or Sebastian.

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  Jo took his arm and led him back over the dried ruts of the path which bordered the field, towards the house.

  “There’s one thing I think you should know about me.”

  She stopped. Facing Topher, she fixed him with her green eyes. In the Berkshire air they looked clearer, even more translucent, than they had in London.

  “I always get what I want.”

  Nineteen

  The remainder of the weekend had passed pleasantly enough. No, that was not true, Topher thought, recalling it. With the exception of the polo game – of which the rules seemed incomprehensible and the action always to take place on the far side of the field – he had positively enjoyed it.

  Dinner on Saturday night, presided over by Jo in a close-fitting black dress with spaghetti straps, which slipped perpetually from her shoulders, had been pleasingly relaxed. Tilda and Scott (with bags beneath their eyes) regaled the table with stories of thinly veiled royal idiosyncracies. Giles (feeding Fiona tit-bits from his plate and nibbling her ear) went over a blow-by-blow account of the afternoon’s polo with Sebastian (who had sprained his elbow and had to eat with a fork in his left hand). And Flora (now into Panatellas) told tales of her beloved Kenya, where she had owned a coffee farm until she was chased out by the Mau Mau. After dinner, at which they had all drunk too much, they had played charades. Topher had led his team, comprised of Jo, Flora and the injured Sebastian, to victory. In the small hours, after the nightcaps, he had been escorted to his bedroom by Jo.

  She had switched on the lamps for him, and with her hands on his shoulders kissed him goodnight, brushing his cheek with hers.

  “Have you everything you want?”

  The scent of her warm skin and her now familiar perfume adding to his general intoxication, Topher hesitated for only a second. “Yes, thank you.”

  Jo had kissed him again. This time in earnest. He was just beginning to enjoy it when she pulled away from him abruptly, replacing the strap of her dress on her shoulder.

  “My room’s through here.” She opened a door on the far side of the room. “Sleep well.”

  Topher had not been able to sleep at all. He was not sure whether it was because of the unaccustomed silence, broken only by the hoot of an owl and the recognisable cries of Fiona (which sounded as if she were spurring on an indolent horse), or the image of Jo Henderson in the adjoining room. During the night he thought that he heard footsteps along the corridor, the creak of a door, the sound of Jo’s low laugh. He had been trying to sort out the conflicting messages which were assaulting his mind, when he had become aware of the barking of dogs and the light filtering through the curtains, and realised that he must have dropped off.

  His appetite at breakfast suggested that he had in fact slept quite well.

  Jo, Sebastian, Giles and Fiona were out riding. Tilda and Scott had not yet appeared. Topher was left with the effluent from Flora’s ever smoking chimney to season his grilled kidneys.

  “You didn’t know Henry of course.” Flora eyed him from across the table.

  Topher shook his head.

  “Delightful man. Everybody loved Henry. Jo was devastated when he died.”

  Topher raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve known Jo a long time. You mustn’t be taken in by her act.” Her cigarette hanging from her lips, Flora reached for the silver coffee pot.

  “You know something, Osgood. You remind me of Henry.”

  Topher had spent the morning walking. And thinking. Both about Jo Henderson and her night visitor – who could only have been Sebastian – and perhaps that the country was not such a bad place after all. Back at Badger’s Cottage they had been joined by neighbouring farmers for cocktails which went on until two o’clock in the afternoon. At lunch, at Jo’s request, Topher had carved the beef. As he wielded the knife, he half expected to hear Caroline’s voice from the table. “Penge likes the crispy bits,” and “No fat for Chelsea.” When lunch was over they had all slept (Giles with his arm round Fiona, her breast in his cupped hand) amidst the sea of Sunday newspapers, until it was time to go home.

  Thanking Jo for the weekend, and realising that this was the second occasion on which he had enjoyed her hospitality, Topher promised to contact her in town so that he could reciprocate.

  “Only if you want to.”

  He looked into the green eyes.

  “I do.”

  On the motorway, his problems, relegated to the far reaches of his mind during the weekend at Badger’s Cottage, came flooding back. Lucille, and what to do about her. It wasn’t just that he had to make reparation. He wanted to see her. She made him laugh. He hadn’t done too much laughing of late. He would call Lucille and tell her that he was free next weekend. To be on the safe side – he prayed it would not be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted – he would take suitable precautions to protect himself.

  The next problem was Penge. It was all very well that the minor poet had elected to eschew poetry for the law, but it would be years before he qualified. Topher reckoned that he would now have not only to subsidise his daughter but also his grandchild. In response to Topher’s enquiry as to where she would be having the baby, Penge had told him that she would be staying where she was. The birth would be attended by the District Midwife, by Robert, who had had experience of such matters, and Chad (who looked to Topher as if he would pass out at the mere mention of childbirth) who had not. Caroline, Topher was sure, would not only have disapproved of the arrangement but would not have countenanced it. Chelsea had promised to have a word with her sister.

  Chelsea had her own worries. The anguish in her voice as she said “I shall never have children,” had grieved Topher. She adored children (as a child she had played mothers and fathers setting up home with her dolls) but she had firm views about parenting. There would, he was sure, be no unmarried motherhood for Chelsea. He wished there was some magic with which he could cast the mote of David Cornish from her eye.

  When he got home there was a postcard from Sally on the mat. She reminded him (he had not forgotten) that he was to be her guest on Wednesday at PEN. The picture, a Rembrandt etching, was of the Garden of Eden. Watched by the serpent, a naked Adam – looking uncomfortably like himself – reached for the apple held by a middle-aged Eve with hair round her shoulders, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Sally. Although the couple were both overweight, and decidedly past their prime, the statement was categoric. Romance, desire, love, passion, were not the exclusive province of the young.

  With the postcard on the kitchen table, Topher had opened a tin of sardines. After his supper he had taken the etching with him into his study. He kept it on the arm of his chair while he wrote a reserved judgement. On Monday morning, his response to Mrs Sweetlove’s customary query as to whether he had had a good weekend, brought home to him just how much he had appreciated Badger’s Cottage. What if he and Caroline had been wrong? It apparently did one good to get out of London, to experience a change of environment. It had certainly made him feel more amenable. He had already treated the empty house to the first act of Patience, and was not aware of the least flicker of resentment at Mrs Sweetlove’s enquiry.

  “I had a splendid weekend, Mrs Sweetlove,” he said, cracking his knuckles before he remembered how much it annoyed her. He added: “I trust you did, too,” before he realised his mistake.

  “Yes, thank you, Your Honour.” Mrs Sweetlove slotted the video recording of the events of the past two days into the play-back mechanism of her mind.

  “My sister came over from Purl
ey on Saturday with her husband and children. It’s not that they’re badly behaved, they’re lovely children really…”

  Topher picked up The Times. He tried to concentrate, against the monologue which floated over the newspaper.

  Mrs Sweetlove had got as far as Sunday. “I always do a bit of gardening on Sunday. Dennis was really the gardener. Salvias. He loved salvias, Dennis did…” when Topher decided that she had stretched his tolerance (induced by the weekend in the country) to the limit. He dispatched her, still nattering about slug pellets and John Innes compost, with a trumped up message to the Crown Prosecution Service.

  The PEN club met in a house in Dilke Street. Beneath a frieze of members of the London Sketch Club (whose premises it was), depicted in silhouette, the long tables were set for dinner. Bringing a bottle of Fleurie, his contribution to the evening, Topher had picked Sally up from her flat.

  She had embraced him warmly. “I missed you. I hope you aren’t going to make a habit of going away for weekends.”

  It was said lightly, but Topher thought that he detected a note of jealousy in her voice. His suspicion was confirmed when Sally, ostensibly tidying away the pages of the novel on which she had been working, said: “I went to the hairdresser’s on Saturday. There was a picture in the Tatler. ‘Lady Henderson at the Save The Children Ball …’ Saint Laurent from head to foot.”

  Turning to Topher she looked down at the sprigged dress she was wearing.

  “What hope have Iin my Laura Ashley?”

  In the car, Topher, omitting certain details, recaptured the weekend for Sally. Perhaps to compensate her for the Laura Ashley, he said: “It must be immensely satisfying to write a book.”

  “‘…we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity’.”

  “What would you say makes a good writer?”

  “A built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

  Startled, Topher stopped at the zebra crossing on Lower Sloane Street. The home-going crowds laid hands on the bonnet of his car. One never knew with Sally.

  He had never been amongst a group of writers before. Squeezed into the tiny bar of the PEN club, he wondered was there a collective noun for them. A paragraph? A synopsis? Sally introduced him to an emaciated biographer who had recently published a seminal work on Goethe. He wore a spotted muffler beneath the open neck of his shirt, and bemoaned the lack of charity amongst reviewers. An unlikely looking author of best-selling children’s books greeted Sally warmly, and brought Topher a gin and tonic. He wasn’t sure what he had expected writers to look like. Pens for fingers? Full stops for eyes? Taking in the company, unassuming in both demeanour and dress, it was hard to credit their gifts for transmuting the everyday into works – if not always of greatness – at least of art.

  At dinner he was seated next to Sally. On the other side of him was a nondescript young woman who looked as if a fat royalty cheque would not come amiss. Topher put on his half-glasses to read her place-card. Ann Barker. It meant nothing. Opposite, a red-faced man with a white beard had already made considerable inroads into his bottle. A younger man, in a suede jacket, glanced nervously towards the door. An ancient member, who looked to Topher like one of Caroline’s more exotic birds, twitched her head, winked her beady eyes, and picked up the bread roll on her plate with red-tipped claws. Quivering with indignation, she leaned across the table to tell Sally that after forty years she had changed houses. She refused to be published by a conglomerate.

  At the top table, the speaker, a writer of thrillers, was already seated. Since there seemed to be no Grace, or other formality, Topher picked up his knife and fork and attacked the square of pâté on the plate in front of him.

  Ann Barker looked at his place-card: “Guest of Sally Maddox”.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Christopher Osgood.”

  “What do you write?”

  Topher was taken by surprise.

  “I couldn’t write to save my life. I envy those who do. I’m a judge. You, of course, are a writer?” He noticed that she had bitten fingernails.

  Ann Barker nodded.

  “Do you write under your own name?”

  He realised that he had fallen into the trap.

  Ann Barker was shaking her head.

  “‘Tania Roxbury’.”

  Topher swallowed. He could not believe that his dinner partner was the author of the explicit titles, with their titillating jackets, to be found on every bookstall.

  “You’re shocked?”

  “Surprised. I imagined ‘Tania Roxbury’ differently.”

  “I suppose you won’t talk to me now. You think I write pornography.”

  Topher picked up the bottle he had brought.

  “Pornography, surely, is in the mind of the beholder. I’m not certain exactly what it is. Would you care for a little red wine?”

  Ann Barker held out her glass.

  “Most men,” Topher went on, “if they were honest with themselves, would be perfectly happy to look at page three of the Sun, although they mightn’t buy the newspaper for that or any other purpose. Pictures or descriptions of attractive, naked women are appealing. To suggest that they are not – or should not be – is hypocritical.”

  The young man in the suede jacket, who had been listening to the conversation, leaned forward.

  “Ah,” he said, “but where would you draw the line?”

  “Why should the line be drawn at all? I am not convinced that one’s attitude could be changed for the worse by what one read or saw in a book or film. Every adult must draw the line for himself, every parent for his child. I don’t deny for one moment that some of the material which is brought to my court disgusts me, but what disgusts does not necessarily harm.”

  “Not even the young and weak-minded?”

  “In a free society we have to concentrate on the proper education of children – by the parents, not the state – and take that risk.”

  “When Mrs Whitehouse catches up with me,” Ann Barker said, “I hope my case comes before you. There can’t be many judges who share your views.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” Topher said. “The attitudes and notions that a permissive society propagates have been responsible for a very great deal of harm. But there’s no legislation, that I could think of, which could put an end to it.”

  Sally, who was standing up, was pulling at his sleeve.

  “We have to help ourselves to the next course.”

  “Forgive me.” Topher put down his napkin. “I was getting carried away.”

  “It was my fault, Sally,” Ann said. “It all started because Judge Osgood thought I should either be exposing my heaving bosom – which would be hard in my case – in true stereotypical fashion, or writing Hampstead novels in which the misunderstood wife commits joyless adultery in the afternoons.”

  “I didn’t think it was adultery in the afternoons,” Sally said, making everyone around them laugh.

  Topher stood back to allow the ladies to precede him to the buffet tables. Ann Barker took Sally by the arm and whispered, sufficiently loudly for Topher to hear: “I like your boyfriend.”

  Twenty

  There was Coronation Chicken or vegetable lasagne, doled out in careful portions by two lady members of PEN. In the queue, Sally introduced Topher to a science fiction writer and an Armenian poet with whom Topher discussed Pushkin over the peas and carrots. The brought-in bottles of wine were beginning to have their effect. When Topher, carrying his plate, sat down at the table again it was difficult, on account of the low ceiling, either to hear or be heard.

  The man in the suede jacket – a literary agent – leaned over to ask Topher if he had come across his friend, a barrister, who would have been at the dinner but for the fact that he was nursing a cold. Topher enquired his name but all he could make out was Michael, the surname, on each of three occasions, getting swallowed up by the acoustics.

  Ann Barker discussed the fickleness of
editors with Sally, behind Topher’s back, and inclining forward so that they could converse better, Topher became involved in a shouting match with the red-faced man with the white beard, who had finished his own wine and was looking hopefully up and down the table to see if anyone had any to spare. As far as Topher could make out he wrote books on what sounded like “gravel” but was, Topher presumed, travel.

  The Coronation Chicken was followed by a choice of lemon mousse or trifle. Holding out his small bowl Topher asked if he might have a little of each, only to be reprimanded for his temerity.

  Before the coffee was served, the company was asked euphemistically if it would like to “make itself comfortable”, prior to the serious business of the evening. The room, already clamorous with voices, was now further polluted by smoke. Turning his chair a little so that he had a better view of the top table, Topher settled back to be diverted.

  With a few carefully chosen words, dry with humour and fulsome with praise, a retired publisher with silver hair introduced the crime writer. Watching the speaker get to his feet and adjust the microphone, Topher thought how pleasant it was to relax while someone else sang for his supper. Being one of Her Majesty’s judges had its flip side. Every week brought its requests. To be the guest of honour at a dinner. To address societies, bodies of magistrates, social workers, or others concerned with the law and its administration. Those invitations, which in a weak moment he accepted, were for dates frequently as far as a year ahead. He deluded himself that they would never come round. When they did, he would sit in his study in the small hours, wondering what would amuse a gathering of City Liverymen, or hold a banqueting suite of visiting American lawyers spellbound. He was a seasoned after-dinner speaker and well able to deliver a peroration of anything up to an hour’s duration fluently and without notes. Like the most accomplished of actors, however, his unruffled exterior on such occasions disguised a certain inner apprehension. Although he rarely sat down other than to prolonged and enthusiastic applause, he was often unable to do justice to the usually excellent dinner which preceded such a disclosure.