An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  It was such moments, Topher thought, rather than any material success or acquisition, that rendered the quiet desperation of most people’s lives, tolerable. Because of the possibility of infection he had as yet seen neither his youngest daughter nor his new grandson.

  Lucille, who had arrived with the largest teddy bear Topher had ever seen, had opened one of Jo Henderson’s bottles of champagne “to wet the baby’s head”. They were drinking the toast when Sally had played her distinctive melody on the doorbell. Lucille had let her in.

  The encounter had been civilised. Lucille, as if she were holding a salon, had poured champagne for Sally who accepted it with only a soupçon of approbation for the older woman. Each of them had endeavoured to prove herself at home. Lucille had straightened his pillows with a proprietorial “Lift your head up for me, love,” and Sally, who had brought When We Were Very Young (a first edition) for the new baby, had demonstrated her familiarity with the house by fetching Cross and Jones on Criminal Law at Topher’s request, without having to ask him where it was located.

  Watching the two women circling each other, like boxers in the ring (Sally having the slight advantage of having known of her rival’s existence), the sudden thought struck Topher that he loved them both.

  Twenty-three

  Topher, fully recovered from the mumps, was delighted to go back to work. In addition to Chelsea, who wandered round the house like a zombie and got in his way, he now had Penge and the baby to contend with.

  Chelsea had been down the road unburdening herself to Marcus. Topher, glad to have the house to himself, was in his study listening to the sixth Brandenburg and trying to work out the Russian for: “For three days Natasha/The merchant’s daughter/Was missing”, when Penge had appeared on the doorstep with what Topher thought was a bundle of washing, but which had turned out to be his grandson.

  At the sight of her tear-stained face beneath the porch light, he had groaned inwardly.

  “We’ve been evicted!” she said in her Lady Bracknell voice. She handed her bundle to Topher and, to his dismay, picked up her suitcase from the step.

  It was a story such as Topher heard every day. Penge’s landlord had been granted a possession order. The tenants of the Hackney commune had been given notice to quit. Robert had found alternative accommodation. Chad was staying with his grandmother in Wales whilst working for his Law Society exams. The other occupants of the house had gone their various ways. Penge had come home.

  Temporarily, she assured Topher. Until she and Chad got their act together. Meanwhile mother and baby were well and truly ensconced. Topher, who had on his own admission been lonely at times, was ambivalent about the new arrangements. There was no doubt that the house was large enough, but he did not care for the perpetual clutter (about which he had forgotten) left by his daughters in the kitchen, the havoc wreaked in his now ordered housekeeping, the baby garments he pulled out of the airing cupboard whilst searching for his underpants.

  He could have overlooked the chaos were the household not in perpetual auditory and sensual motion. To begin with there was the crying. The sound had at first delighted him, as had the initial glimpse of his grandson. As he returned the inquisitive gaze, explored the minuscule limbs, an immense sadness had enveloped him as he realised that he could not share with Caroline his earliest impressions of this imprint they would leave upon the sands of time. Charles Sheridan Beerbohm (poor little mite) Osgood-Jones.

  The novelty of having the little chap in residence had now worn off. His stertorous yells disturbed Topher in the night and awoke him in the morning. The small noises, breathing and scuffling, from the Moses basket in his study (where Penge was prone to dump her son in the evenings), distracted him.

  It was not only the baby. When Topher wanted to use the telephone it was to find that it had been appropriated – on what seemed a permanent basis – either by Chelsea or by Penge (whom he could not disabuse from the impression that Plynlimon was a local call). When the line was available there was little privacy.

  When Topher was well enough to go out again in the evenings, both Penge and Chelsea, the parental role reversed, enquired where he was going. They waited up for his return and demanded to know where he had been. Apart from the domestic disorder, he had to contend with Lucille on Sally Maddox and Sally Maddox on Lucille.

  “Known her long?” Lucille said in the Mount Royal coffee shop. Topher’s libido seeming to have been affected by the illness, they had spent the evening in the cinema. The film had been a transatlantic gangster epic about the notorious Al Capone, whose appalling lack of table manners had led him to fracture the skull of a dinner guest with a baseball bat. The sepia-toned streets of Chicago (peopled by extras and traversed by vehicles exhumed from motor museums) had been intended to evoke the days of Prohibition. They succeeded only in making it more difficult, as did the clumsy plot and distorted sound-track, to suspend, even for a moment, disbelief. While brains were blown out and blood spouted from machine-gunned viscera – to spread over Persian carpets across which dying victims dragged themselves towards final acts of redemption – Lucille fed herself popcorn from the carton on her lap. Topher, narrowing his eyes to see its face in the semi-darkness, looked frequently at his watch. When the film was over and they made their way over the rubbish-strewn floor towards the exit, he reflected sadly that the cinema seemed not only to be aimed at society’s lowest common denominator but also at the very young.

  When Lucille, with both hands round her coffee cup, had enquired how long he had known Sally Maddox, Topher was still lamenting the decline of the silver screen.

  “Sally is a good friend.”

  “See much of her?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  He realised afterwards that what Lucille had been seeking was not an assessment of how many times a week he saw Sally Maddox, but reassurance. Women did not always say what they meant. It was the expression on Lucille’s face, as she uncharacteristically refused a second chocolate éclair, which alerted him to the fact that he had been tactless. He tried to redeem himself by dismissing Sally merely as an acquaintance. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew that he was not telling the truth. Over the past months Sally had become part of his life. He needed Sally as much as he needed Lucille.

  He had been expecting to see Lucille again on the following Saturday. It wasn’t until she called to say that she couldn’t manage it that he realised how much he looked forward to her visits.

  Tina had telephoned soon afterwards.

  “What have you done to Lucille? All the stuffing seems to have been knocked out of her.”

  “Nothing.” Topher lied.

  “I thought perhaps you’d had a row or something. Lucille’s ever so miserable. Of course it’s not my business…”

  “No it’s not,” Topher sighed.

  Feeling guilty, he had called Lucille.

  “It’s stupid to get upset over Sally Maddox…”

  He could hear her sniffing.

  “You know I love you.”

  As soon as he’d said it Topher was appalled. He didn’t even know if it was true. He wondered if his brain – although it was not his brain Dr Harrington had been worried about – had been affected by the mumps.

  Lucille had been slightly mollified by his declaration.

  “I can’t help it if I’m jealous.”

  “Of course you can’t. But there’s no need to be.”

  “Sure?”

  Topher was saved from replying by Penge bursting into his study, demanding to know whether he had seen the baby’s rattle.

  “See you next week?” he said to Lucille, shaking his head at Penge.

  “Do you really want me?”

  “You know I do.” He only slightly evaded the issue. Penge was turning over the papers on his desk in search of the rattle. He did not return Lucille’s telephone kiss.

  The appeasement of Sally had proved much more difficult.

  “She’s very nice,” Sally
said, over her sesame prawns.

  Unable to face Sally’s spaghetti, Topher had taken her to Mr Kai of Mayfair (to which he had been introduced by Jo).

  “It would be easier if she wasn’t.”

  “Who is?” Topher asked, knowing very well.

  “Your Lucille.”

  “She’s not m y Lucille.”

  “This is me you’re talking to. Sally Maddox. Remember?”

  He could not delude Sally.

  “I like her,” Sally said.

  Topher spread plum sauce on the paper-thin pancake, topped it with slivers of cucumber and spring onion, and searched with his chopsticks for the succulent bits amongst the pieces of shredded duck.

  “So do I.”

  They ate in silence for a while.

  “How’s Penge managing?” Sally changed the subject.

  “Very well indeed.” Topher was relieved to be shot of the spectre of Lucille which had come between them. “Caroline would have been proud of her.”

  Once he had got over the shock of seeing his daughter bare her veined and swollen breast publicly to stop his grandson’s mouth, Topher had been astounded at the way Penge managed to cope with motherhood. True she never seemed to get dressed, and fed her child wherever she happened to be when he was crying. She was besotted with young Charlie, however, and ministered as if to the manner born to his not insubstantial needs. It looked as if the advent of her nephew might be the saving too of Chelsea. Sharing the baby’s care with a perspicacious Penge had been the catalyst in rescuing her from her depression. There was talk of her returning to the BBC but as yet none of her going back to Wapping. Topher was looking forward to leaving the Community Care Refuge and Home for Unmarried Mothers (into which his house seemed suddenly to have been transformed) and getting back to the comparative tranquillity of the Bench.

  “Do you go back to the County Court?” Sally, as usual, was tuned in to his thoughts.

  Topher nodded. He had already been in to glance at the papers of his first case.

  “Compensation. An old lady knocked down by a lorry.”

  “I know all about that…”

  Topher remembered about the son who had been killed.

  “Our action was in the Crown Court. I thought it was a crime. I’ve never been sure exactly what a crime is.”

  Topher finished the last of his pancake. “In attempting to define a crime one runs into serious difficulties. When Parliament enacts that a particular act shall become a crime, or that an act which is now criminal shall cease to be so, the act does not change in nature in any respect other than that of legal classification…” He looked at Sally. “You’re not listening.”

  “I was thinking about Lucille.”

  She took Topher’s hand.

  “You don’t need Lucille.”

  “Sally…” Topher said. “Dear Sally.”

  On his way to court Topher replenished his larder (which during his illness had become the dumping ground for alien cans and packages) with his familiar requirements. Next to the supermarket a colourful display of posters in the window of the Travel Agent’s caught his eye. “Fishing in the Lijang River”. “Carnival in Shanghai”, “Temple of Heaven: Beijing”. Unaware what impelled him, he went inside. The brochures were stacked at the back of the window between the ski literature and the “Short Breaks”. A slow boat to China. A little time on his own, away from Chelsea and Penge, and young Charlie, and Lucille, and Sally (who had made it clear she was expecting him to spend Christmas with her), and Mrs Sweetlove (who had telephoned him every single day of his illness), might be exactly what he needed to sort out the turmoil in his head. Dr Harrington had suggested a holiday.

  The brace of young ladies in charge of the office were plugged into their telephones. They seemed not only uninterested in selling him a vacation, but indifferent to his presence. He helped himself to a brochure which he tucked beneath his arm. On the way to the car he wondered whether an inclusive tour of the People’s Republic of China via Cathay Pacific, although not exactly a slow boat, might not be just what the doctor ordered.

  In his robing room a jam-jar of pom-pom dahlias had been put on his desk next to the apple juice. Mrs Sweetlove, fidgeting with her gown and perfuming the room with essence-of-something not very much to Topher’s liking, was like a cat on a hot tin roof.

  “We are pleased to have you back, Your Honour.”

  Topher noticed that in his absence her hair had become a curious shade of plum. He grunted what he hoped was graciously.

  “Mumps can be very nasty,” Mrs Sweetlove said. “I remember when my sister had them. My younger sister that is, not the one that lives in Purley…”

  “I need to look at the County Court Rules, Mrs Sweetlove.” Topher indicated the bookcase. “I wonder if you would be so very kind as to hand me the Green Book.”

  It was a relief to be back in court. To conduct his own orchestra after being at the mercy of his body, which had seen fit to play such infantile tricks on him, and of his frenetic household. Reinvigorated by his enforced rest he found himself smiling benignly upon the most lumpen of witnesses, extending unaccustomed tolerance towards barristers seemingly in the grip of verbal diarrhoea, and listening with great patience to the most inarticulate of police officers. With his mind partly on Jo (who was taking him to a dinner party at the nether end of the day) he made a determined effort not to look at the clock even when it got towards lunchtime. He did not want to be accused, like Tolstoy’s Court President, of being anxious to get through the sitting as early as possible, in order “to call before six o’clock on the red-haired woman with whom he had begun a romance”.

  The day – an injunction, followed by a committal, followed by a trial – went quickly.

  He spent an agreeable half-hour playing with his grandson before changing into his dinner jacket and presenting himself at Lowndes Square.

  Topher had not seen Jo since his illness. He thought at first that he had forgotten how attractive she was. Then he realised that she had made an extra special effort with her always immaculate appearance, and that something was afoot. Her neck and shoulders emerged, lotus-like, from a shimmering orange sheath with a matching bow on the hip. One leg, in its shadowed stocking, was visible to the thigh when she moved. The table was set for an intimate dinner for two and the candles matched her dress.

  “Aren’t we going out?”

  “It’s so long since I’ve seen you.”

  “I thought you couldn’t cook?”

  Weighed down by his recent miseries, he realised how much he had missed the sound of Jo’s laughter.

  “Who said anything about cooking?”

  The meal had been sent in. Caviar with the champagne, consommé with the claret, roast partridge on foie gras with the white burgundy, and peaches with the port. Having subsisted for so long on Lucille’s caramel custard, Sally Maddox’s spaghetti, Tina’s Lancashire hot-pot, Chelsea and Penge’s haphazard offerings, and the rapidly diminishing contents of his own larder, Topher savoured every morsel. He demonstrated his gratitude by making the coffee. Setting the cups down next to the double brandies Jo had dispensed while he was in the kitchen, he sat down (which was about all he was now capable of) on the sofa next to his hostess who was slightly out of focus.

  “I must congratulate you.” Looking at the abandoned dinner table, Topher raised his glass. Jo reciprocated with her brandy balloon.

  “Better than going out?”

  “Infinitely.”

  “In which way?”

  “In every way.”

  “Name one.”

  “Superb food…”

  “How about the wines?”

  “Incomparable.”

  “Service?”

  “Impeccable.”

  “Ambience?”

  “Intime.”

  “Company?”

  “Adorable.”

  “Pleased you came?”

  “Yes.”

  “Glad we stayed in?”

 
; “Yes.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes…”

  Topher put down his brandy and looked at the orange blur.

  “What’s that you said?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I need notice of that question.”

  He didn’t remember much of the rest of the evening. Only that he had left his car on the Res. Park. in Lowndes Square and had gone home in a cab. He was grateful to find all the lights out in the house. Taking his shoes off in the hall in order not to wake young Charlie, he crept noiselessly up the stairs.

  On his bed, scribbled across the dragon on the front of the unopened China brochure, was a note from Penge. “Lucille wants you to ring her, no matter how late”, and “Sally Maddox phoned”.

  Twenty-four

  “Passenger’ for Guangzhou please board plane. Passenger’ for Guangzhou please board plane. Passenger’ for Guangzhou please board plane. Passenger’ for Guangzhou…”

  The child, Delilah, was pulling at his sleeve.

  Opening his eyes, Topher saw a column of Chinese travellers, hung about with parcels, moving resolutely towards the boarding gate. He tried to orientate himself.

  Delilah’s mother was assembling her formidable array of hand baggage. She held out the bottomless bag of Australian sweetmeats which had sustained her daughter throughout the tour.

  “Give the judge a lolly, Delilah. Your mouth gets very dry when you’ve been sleeping.”

  “Passenger’ for Guangzhou please board plane. Passenger’ for Guangzhou please board plane…”

  Through the window Topher could see that the fog had lifted and that the Ilyushin had been turned round. It was now guarded by six emissaries of the People’s Liberation Army, in oversized green overcoats, with bayonets fixed. He was amazed to find how long he had slept. His cracked mug, half-full of tea, was on the spit-spattered floor by the lumps of lead that were his feet. Delilah must have taken it from him.

  Stamping to restore his circulation, Topher helped himself to a sweet. He remembered the riddle which Delilah had asked him before he dropped off.