Titmuss Regained
Page 1
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Titmuss Regained
‘One of Britain’s best-loved writers … [A] special blend of wit, humanity and nostalgic English melancholy’ Charles Spencer, The Times
‘A writer with a Dickensian gift for character and rich, robust humour’ Daily Mail
‘There are an enormous number of people whose lives he made happier and better by his writing’ Melvyn Bragg, Guardian
‘A great storyteller’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Only Shakespeare or Dickens could have done him justice in print; only they could have unsentimentally invoked his strain of English kindness and ebullient good nature’ Sebastian Faulks
‘One of Britain’s greatest life-enhancers … a superb example to us all’ Daily Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923, John Mortimer was a barrister, dramatist and novelist. After working in the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, he wrote a number of novels before simultaneously following two highly successful careers as a criminal barrister and as a playright. His most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, has been filmed and is frequently revived. In the 1970s he invented Horace Rumpole, a character who, ‘like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal’ (P. D. James). In the 1980s he returned to novel-writing with Paradise Postponed. He also wrote four volumes of memoir, including the bestselling Clinging to the Wreckage. John Mortimer was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts. For many years he lived in a house in the Chilterns which had been built by his father, also a barrister. Sir John died in 2009, aged eighty-five.
JOHN MORTIMER
Titmuss Regained
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First published by Viking 1990
Published in Penguin Classics 2010
Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1990
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195985-6
Contents
Today
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Tomorrow
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
The Next Day
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
And Ever Afterwards
Chapter Twenty-Nine
For John and Myfanwy Piper
Today
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
‘Inversnaid’
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Chapter One
About a mile to the north of the village of Rapstone there was an area of mixed woodland and uncultivated chalk downs. The woods included some beech, birch, field maple and yew. The grassland, owing to the centuries of peace it had enjoyed from the depredations of farmers and builders, was rich in plant and insect life. The violet hellebore and the bird’s-nest orchid did well there and gentians and wild thyme proliferated. The Duke of Burgundy’s fritillary and the Chalkhill blue butterflies were to be seen, as were the trapdoor spider, fallow and muntjac deer, badgers, foxes, adders and slow-worms. At the foot of the hill there was a stream said to be haunted by two kingfishers, although their nesting-place had never been found.
One afternoon in April a Volvo stopped on the road by the stream. An observer standing on the crest of the grassland might have seen, indeed did see, a young couple, hand in hand, climb the hill towards him. They were a good-looking pair. The man had heavy, regular features, fair hair which covered the tops of his ears and a moustache. At serious moments his face could assume a look of sullen brutality, but now he seemed cheerful enough. The girl with him was sturdily attractive, with white, slightly protruding teeth. Such clouds as there were hung high in the sky. The early sunshine gave promise of a hot summer, never to be fulfilled.
Halfway up the hill the observer saw the couple stop and stand still, facing each other. They had chosen a patch of clear scrub where the turf was soft and springy, much undermined by rabbits. They did not kiss or touch each other, but the girl laughed, causing a colony of fat pigeons to tumble out of the trees in alarm. Then they prepared to make love.
They did this in a businesslike way, with an efficiency born of experience. They moved deliberately but seemed to be under pressure of time, like soldiers at a military tattoo racing against the clock to assemble a gun. Buttons and belt buckles were undone and shoes kicked off and they then fell to the ground in one movement, as though they were under fire. Only then did they embrace, but as soon as their mouths joined they were interrupted.
‘Can’t you lot read? There’s notices where you came in. This place is reserved for nature!’ The man standing over them was short, square and bristling with anger. Hair covered the lower half of his face so profusely that his eyes seemed in a perpetual panic at the danger of being overgrown. With his green sweater and leather patches, his beret, knapsack and stick, he had the appearance of a soldier beating the countryside for terrorists. His name was Hector Bolitho Jones. ‘I,’ he told them, ‘am keeper and warden of the Rapstone Nature Area.’
‘Tell him,’ the girl muttered, avoiding the eyes of the infuriated warden as she stood up, straightening her skirt. ‘Tell him who you are.’ But her companion remained motionless, staring up, unamused.
‘You know what we get on this natural downland which has never known pollution by any form of artificial manure or pesticide of any nature whatsoever? You know what you may be laying on there? Do you have any idea what you may be crushing?’
‘We’re going,’
the girl said. ‘We wouldn’t want to stay here, anyway.’ And once again she advised her lover, ‘Tell him who you are.’
‘Just on a stone curlew’s nest. I don’t suppose you realized that, did you? In your ignorance. The stone curlew habitually makes its nest on the ground. On the natural chalk. You could have got that from our fact-sheet at the area entrance. If you lot can read.’
‘We’re moving, anyway.’ The girl, glancing down, found another button and did it up.
‘That’d be a bit late if you’ve laid on a stone curlew’s nest. If you’ve smashed the eggs or frightened away the mother. You might have had a death on your hands then, mightn’t you? As if you lot cared!’
The man didn’t move but spoke for the first time. ‘Why don’t you shut up and mind your own bloody business.’
‘It’s not my business!’ Hector Bolitho Jones raised his voice as though talking to the deaf or to a foreigner. ‘It’s S.C.R.A.P.’s business. S.C.R.A.P. owns this ground, the Society for Conservation, Rural and Arboreal Protection. S.C.R.A.P.!’ he shouted, so that his voice echoed across the woods and set the pigeons off again. ‘I suppose that means nothing to you?’
‘Of course it does.’ The man got slowly to his feet, on which he towered over the small, infuriated Jones. ‘It means I’m your boss. I just happen to be at H.E.A.P., the Department of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning. It may come as news to you out here in the sticks, but we have just taken over the S.C.R.A.P. Nature Areas with a view to privatization!’
‘After all the government money you’ve had poured into you!’ The girl, who seemed to understand such matters, looked at Hector Bolitho Jones accusingly.
‘So you’d better keep a civil tongue in your head. If you value your job, that is.’ Her friend was even more threatening.
Hector Bolitho Jones drew a breath. His chest swelled and his beard bristled. He was about to start on a lengthy speech about stone curlews being the business of all of us, together with rain forests, the black rhino, badgers, otters, the greenhouse effect, lead in petrol, seal slaughter, mink coats, fox-hunting, hedge destruction and non-organic farming. He looked at his audience and decided, like a Victorian missionary facing a hostile couple in war-paint with rings through their noses, that a sermon would be a waste of breath. ‘I don’t care who you are,’ he said. ‘I give you five minutes to get off this Nature Area.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘You’ll find yourselves mentioned in S.C.R.A.P.’s annual report.’
‘Oh, Christ.’ The man smiled coldly. ‘You’re scaring us to death.’ He was strong, with muscles that stretched his neat grey suit, clothes which looked too formal for courting in the countryside. For a moment he seemed about to strike the warden but, surprisingly, he took his girlfriend’s arm and they walked away down the hill towards the road where their car was waiting. Hector Bolitho Jones watched them leave with undiminished hostility and only when the lovers had driven away was he satisfied that he was once again in command of a small kingdom where nature might pursue its uninterrupted course.
‘What’re you going to do?’ In the car the girl, whose name was Joyce Timberlake, twisted the driving-mirror and leant sideways to repair her lipstick. ‘You going to get him the sack?’
‘Probably not worth it.’ Her companion drove with one hand, the other was lying coldly on her thigh. ‘But it’s not something I’m going to forget either. You can be sure of that.’
Hector Bolitho Jones, true to his word, did mention the sacrilegious behaviour of the lovers in the Nature Area in a report to his masters at S.C.R.A.P. Months later, watching television, he saw an interview with Ken Cracken, M.P., on the subject of planning permission for a theme park in the Lake District. He at once recognized the fair moustache, the wary and hostile expression of the youngish man who had become, with a rapidity which alarmed many older politicians, Minister at the Department of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning, a position only junior to that of the Secretary of State himself, the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss.
Chapter Two
‘What a swine God was!’
While the forces of nature were in collision on the chalk downland, and Ken Cracken and his girlfriend, who was also his personal assistant and political adviser, were being expelled from the paradise of the Rapstone Nature Area, a woman of eighty, her legs and arms shrunk as though from enforced starvation, lay waiting, with growing impatience, for death. Grace Fanner was unaccustomed to being kept waiting for anything. Her bedroom in Rapstone Manor was dark and gloomy, its windows curtained by the spreading yew tree in front of the house; patches of damp stained the wallpaper which was decorated with lighter squares from which pictures had been removed and auctioned off as Lady Fanner’s overdraft climbed to dizzier heights. She lay now, an unpaid-for and half-drunk bottle of champagne beside her, her diminutive body scarcely swelling the coverlet on the bed in which her husband Nicholas, over a decade before, had met death with the polite but puzzled smile with which he had greeted all his visitors.
‘I’ve been reading the Bible.’
The Rector of Rapstone, Kevin Bulstrode, known to many of his parishioners as Kev the Rev., looked at her as though this activity were a sign of mental weakness, like astrology or studying the measurements of the Great Pyramid.
‘Not the Old Testament?’ he asked nervously.
‘Particularly the Old Testament. What a swine God was, most of the time.’ Lady Fanner said this with a tight smile of admiration. ‘Smiting people in a way I’ve hardly ever done. Right, left and centre.’
‘I don’t think we see God as so much of a smiter nowadays,’ Kev the Rev. explained. ‘We see Him more as the depth of our being.’
‘Certainly the depth of my being,’ Lady Fanner agreed. ‘Smiting away like that. Bully for Him!’
‘The God that’s within us all’ – Bulstrode was still patient – ‘is above all things a God of love.’
‘God is within you?’
‘I’d certainly like to think so.’
‘It seems’ – Lady Fanner looked at the clergyman with ill-disguised contempt – ‘a most peculiar place to put Him. The tide’s gone down.’ She put out a matchstick arm and her hand trembled as it felt for the glass on her bedside table. ‘Pour!’
‘Are you sure that’s absolutely wise?’
‘Pour!’ she repeated in a voice which rose towards an enraged squawk. Her eyes widened with anger and the Reverend Kevin obeyed her immediately, although he could have sat still and left her impotent and thirsty. Being unused to pouring champagne he sent the liquid bubbling up over the top of the glass. Life, Lady Fanner thought, had deteriorated in Rapstone. The previous Rector, the Reverend Simeon Simcox, although a life-long Socialist, could at least pour a glass of champagne without letting it overflow and ruin the furniture.
‘I read the Book of Job.’ She lifted the great weight of a half-filled glass to her lips and pecked at it in the manner of a blue tit at a bird-bath. ‘God certainly gave that poor bugger a hard time. Boils!’
‘I think you’ll find that He has grown a little more civilized down the centuries. As, perhaps, we all have.’ Kevin Bulstrode did his best to sound reassuring. ‘I don’t think the Old Testament God should be taken as a model of behaviour.’
‘Oh, I do. I quite definitely do. I’d love to see my son-in-law afflicted with boils. That is if the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss hasn’t got plenty of them already. As a young man, I hate to remember, he appeared to suffer from terminal acne. What my poor Charlotte saw in him, I really can’t imagine. But then Charlie was such a beggar in the looks department, she couldn’t be much of a chooser, could she?’
‘I always heard your daughter Charlotte was a bit of a saint, Lady Fanner. Didn’t she die in a C.N.D. demonstration at Worsfield Heath?’ Kevin sounded like an old-time army padre, remembering those who fell on the Somme and at El Alamein. His head was bowed and his hands locked between his knees.
‘She was run over there. In
some foolish demonstration.’ Once again Grace Fanner pecked at the liquid in her glass and then waved it wildly in the air, trying to restore it to the bedside table, an operation which her visitor just saved from disaster. ‘At least she caused the terrible Titmuss extreme embarrassment. He was something rather pompous in the government at the time. Having a wife who went to bomb protests was worse than tucking up with a tart in Mount Street.’
‘Did he do that?’ His nose was twitching and Grace Fanner thought how eager the little cleric was for gossip. No doubt that was why he came to visit her; though her gossip was mainly about a vanished society and persons long dead.
‘Did he do what?’ She was tired and testy.
‘ “Tuck up” … with whoever you said?’
‘Oh, no. So far as I can tell he didn’t tuck up with anyone. Leslie Titmuss wouldn’t have the gumption. On his way up from being the spottiest and commonest little boy in the village to Minister of Something Incredibly Boring he thought it might help his career to marry my daughter. Well, Charlie put him right about that. We’ve got to give her the credit. Bloody near scuppered his miserable career, my Charlie did.’
She smiled proudly and then fell silent for so long that the Reverend Kevin thought she had gone to sleep or died. Her eyes were closed but her brain was whirling. She was thinking, not of Leslie Titmuss, her son-in-law, or of Charlotte, her dead daughter, but of their son, Nicholas, who once used to visit her, riding over on his bike and listening, while she fed him cocktail biscuits and let him take sips of her champagne, to her long, involved stories about the South of France and the old days at the Café de Paris. She would ask Nick, ‘Do you know who I mean by Nancy Cunard?’, at which the schoolboy would smile tolerantly and nibble at a Twiglet. Sometimes, in the long winter afternoons, she would show him her photograph albums or the old Molyneux dresses she kept hanging like tattered banners in her wardrobe. All that had ended when the toad Titmuss, dressed for Westminster, with his hair slicked down like a counter-jumper, had burst in and accused her of being drunk and of corrupting his boy with stories of useless people whom she had probably never known anyway. Titmuss’s driver had packed Nick’s bike into the boot of the government Rover and the boy, silent and tolerant of all adult outbursts, had been driven away, never to visit his grandmother again at Rapstone Manor.