Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘What on earth did you talk about?’

  ‘Well, nothing very much. We didn’t stay that long.’

  In fact they had talked about his dead wife.

  ‘Charlotte used to like this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘Fish and chips, eggs and sausage; all with plenty of sauce. She’d’ve eaten sauce sandwiches if I’d let her. She thought that was “terribly working class”. She was very keen on anything working class, was Charlotte. Coming from where I did, I couldn’t see the attraction.’

  ‘Where did she come from?’

  ‘Oh, the decaying gentry. She was the girl from the local manor house. The sort that’s desperately in love with their ponies until they discover some lad who works round the stable and likes sauce sandwiches.’

  ‘So that was you?’

  ‘Not me. I suppose I was the next best thing. By the way, you can take that flower off if it’s worrying you.’

  Jenny unpinned the orchid and put it down between the sauce and the mustard where it stayed after they had left, forgotten. ‘You’re not married to her now?’ Asking about himself, she knew, only involved her further; but she was curious and wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, no.’ He looked solemn. ‘Charlotte passed away.’

  In his family, she thought, everyone ‘passed away’, the most terrible illness was ‘feeling poorly’ and death itself was ‘a merciful release’. She watched as he dipped a long, golden chip into the yoke of his egg and thought how near we all are to childhood.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I thought you’d understand. That’s why I told you.’

  ‘Because I’d go for people who like lots of tomato ketchup? I have to say, Tony couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘No. Because he’s dead too.’

  She stared at the wall, at a garish señorita with a carnation between her teeth, dancing some sort of clumsy fandango against an electric blue sea. They were the words, it seemed, that her new acquaintance always wanted to make her say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re alike, aren’t we? Both married to people who’re dead.’

  Was death what they had in common? Not much, surely. The world was full of widows and widowers with absolutely no links between them. ‘Does that make us alike?’ she asked, giving him another opportunity to approach her.

  ‘We’re both alone.’

  ‘Well, not quite alone. Friends count for a good deal. Don’t you think?’ What she said sounded to her as trite as ‘he passed away’, or ‘it was a merciful release’.

  ‘Friends?’ he asked. ‘I suppose I’ve never really tried them. That’s why I asked you to dinner. Hope you enjoyed it?’

  ‘I enjoyed the second dinner very much.’

  He paid the bill then, without any argument, and she was driven home.

  ‘What about in the car?’ Sue asked. ‘Did he leap on you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jenny told her truthfully. ‘Not even a kiss on the cheek.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that, at least.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny said. ‘Thank God for that.’

  There was then a long silence from Leslie Titmuss. Jenny spent her days in the art gallery, having been lucky, she told herself, to find a job among beautiful things, although many of the works on the stark white walls of the room in Bruton Street were not, she had to admit, particularly beautiful. She sat behind a desk smiling at the visitors, cataloguing paintings at prices which would have bought her the longed-for house in the country, something which, as the empty days and late nights of her London life dragged on, she wanted more than ever. In the evenings she went to dinner parties and was put next to men thought to be likely partners for her, men unhappily married, divorced, or, and here her hosts always assured her that such was not the case, gay. She was usually relieved when this turned out to be the fact, and then she could talk easily, laugh at their jokes and suffer no fear of attack. The heterosexuals were more difficult. They either hinted at past successful seductions and assumed, without any encouragement, that because they had been placed next to Jenny they would spend the night with her, or they poured out their souls to her, described the way their children were being brought up to hate them, or the greed of their ex-wives and the inferiority of their ex-wives’ present husbands. In neither case did they ask her anything about herself, and never mentioned the fact that her husband was dead.

  ‘Tracked you down!’ She was yawning one morning in the gallery over the proof of a new catalogue, and looked up to see Leslie, his dark suit and pale face striking an unusual note of realism among the art works. ‘I rang your flat and there was a girl there. She didn’t want to tell me where you worked.’

  ‘Your Mr Titmuss,’ Sue said, ‘is so horribly persistent. He just wouldn’t get off the phone until I spilled the beans. Can you ever forgive me?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jenny said later. ‘I forgive you.’

  ‘What’ve we got here?’ Leslie Titmuss asked, looking about him. ‘Portraits of bath-towels?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the New Abstraction.’

  ‘Dull, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she had to admit. ‘Very dull.’

  ‘Well. I’ve come to take you away from it all.’ He spoke as though he were a rich Victorian squire offering to save a girl from long hours in the sweatshop. ‘What would you say to a breath of country air?’

  ‘It would be wonderful. But I can’t possibly.’

  ‘Who says you can’t?’

  As though summoned by the Secretary of State’s peremptory questions, the proprietor entered the gallery. He looked, as always, nervously exhausted, his grey hair ruffled, his bow-tie askew and a scratch on his cheek, which was, perhaps, a war wound from the battles of his love life, which involved the constant unhappiness of at least five people. He lived in fear of women, in fear of his landlord and in the faint but constant hope that he would discover, in some villa owned by an insane old lady who had once been the artist’s mistress, an unknown Modigliani which she would give him for love and make his fortune.

  ‘Mark. This is Mr Titmuss. Mark Vanberry.’

  ‘Not the Mr Titmuss?’ Mark’s perpetual guilt was such that his heart missed a beat whenever he saw a policeman. The sight of a Cabinet Minister caused him instant terror, which he did his best to suppress.

  ‘A Mr Titmuss, anyway,’ Leslie told him.

  A member of the government, Mark began to calculate, who might have some say in the funding of the arts and in the buying of pictures for countless offices. He said, ‘I’m so glad you dropped in. This is a very patriotic show. We’re entirely given over to the British Abstract stuff. We got an absolutely super notice in the Guardian. Does it interest you at all, Mr Titmuss?’ Mark looked proudly at the monotonous canvases.

  ‘Not in the least. We were just saying how dull they all were.’

  ‘Dull?’ Mark was pained.

  ‘Nothing abstract about life, is there? I suppose my job might be a deal easier if people were no more complicated than bath-towels. I want to take your assistant away from you.’

  ‘You want to take Jenny?’ Mark sounded deprived.

  ‘Only for a day in the country. Don’t you think she could do with a breath of fresh air?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Anxious to appease this overbearing and undoubtedly influential man, Mark said, with an air of great concern, ‘You do look a little peaky, Jenny.’

  ‘She doesn’t look peaky at all. She looks glorious. All the same, she’d appreciate a day in the country.’

  ‘Perhaps we can spare her.’

  ‘Of course you can spare her. You’re not going to get much trade with these things, are you?’

  ‘I really do have work to do.’ Jenny resented having plans made for her as though she wasn’t there.

  ‘I suppose they might make room for one of the small tea-towels in the Oslo Embassy,’ Leslie speculated. ‘Very abstract sort of people, the Scandinavians.’

  ‘Oh, do please go, Jenny. We can manage here easily, just for t
oday. And it would do you good,’ Mark pleaded and she fell, once more, a victim to her reckless longing to help the underdog.

  When they were in the car she asked what country they were going to.

  ‘My country,’ Leslie Titmuss said.

  Chapter Eight

  It hadn’t been a good summer, but as they turned off the motorway and took the road to Hartscombe the rain stopped, heavy gun-metal clouds were dragged away and a shaft of sunlight lit the church tower and the swollen river. When they reached the Rapstone Valley the whole sky lightened and, switching down her window, Jenny smelt the wet countryside. She saw a stream at the foot of a chalky hillside which led up to a beech wood, and asked Leslie to stop the car. They got out and walked down a path where the bracken and the white lace on the cow parsley were steaming like drying laundry.

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ Jenny was looking up the hill. The wind from behind her blew a dark veil of hair across her face.

  ‘It’s where I was a kid,’ Leslie Titmuss told her. ‘I didn’t think it was beautiful then.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘I suppose so. Anyway, it’s been designated under the Nature Areas Act.’

  ‘Then it must be beautiful.’ She pulled the hair away from her face and laughed at him.

  ‘They always said there were kingfishers by that stream.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The rook call grew nearer and sounded distinctly human. ‘I never did have the time for bird-watching.’

  ‘There’s a man up there.’ Jenny was worried. ‘He seems to be shouting at us.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake. Who does he think he is?’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Jones! Looks after this place. Obviously they don’t give him enough work to do.’ And Leslie added, lacking his Junior Minister’s taste for anonymity, ‘Doesn’t he know who he’s talking to?’

  ‘No.’ Jenny put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t let’s have an argument. Not here.’

  ‘We can’t let him shout at us.’

  ‘Please. Let’s go.’

  ‘All right. Anyway, I wanted to show you something.’

  They drove on up the valley, between a fold in the hills and then high over fields and little woods. They turned down an avenue of decrepit lime trees, planted, it was always said, to celebrate a young Fanner’s return from the Peninsular War, and through an open gateway into a long drive across a park, in which the deer were lit dramatically as the clouds blew away from above them. They came to the empty Manor with its jumble of architectural styles, its pillared portico and its stone green with age, as though it had at some point in its history emerged from under the sea.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Well, a house.’

  ‘I think I can see that.’ She laughed at him.

  ‘I just thought you might like to look it over.’

  He’s like an estate agent, she thought, as he took a key from his pocket and opened the heavy front door, trying to sell me something. ‘Well,’ she humoured him, ‘I suppose it might suit me. How many bedrooms, did you say?’

  ‘I think about ten. A lot for the servants, of course. When they had servants. Most of the rooms haven’t been used for years.’

  ‘Ten?’ She was still laughing. ‘It might just do me. There’s a gun-room, I hope. And billiards. And a place for the butler to clean the silver.’

  ‘Oh, yes. There’s all that.’ Standing in the black-and-white marble- paved entrance hall, looking up the wide staircase that twisted away into the shadows, towards a domed ceiling on which falling angels had been badly painted, she felt an extraordinary peace come over her. It was all a huge, a ridiculous, joke; but for some absurd reason she would have liked to live there, quietly perhaps, in one of the rooms, causing no harm to anyone.

  ‘This is the sitting-room, madam.’ He pushed open some high double doors, playing the part in which he seemed to know she had cast him. ‘Madam might be quite cosy in here.’

  She went through, on the echoing boards, into what seemed to be a sort of stateroom containing nothing but a table and some old garden furniture. Through the tall windows she saw the deer again, moving in and out of the shadows.

  ‘Will you be taking it?’ he asked.

  ‘On my wages from the gallery and the nothing much Mr Sidonia left me? Well now, why ever not?’

  ‘Didn’t your husband leave you anything very much?’ Leslie Titmuss was concerning himself with an old wind-up gramophone he had discovered on the table and blowing the dust off a record.

  ‘Tony didn’t have anything to leave, except the house in Oxford. I bought my flat with that. Money bored him.’

  ‘What a luxury, to be bored by money!’ Quite unexpectedly a deep voice and a tinkling piano came to them through a fusillade of scratches.

  You’re the top!

  You can trump the A–ce.

  You’re the top!

  You’re the Lady Gr–ace …

  ‘What on earth’s that?’

  ‘My ex-mother-in-law’s favourite song. She liked it because it was about her.’

  ‘It’s her house!’ How could she have been so stupid, so intoxicated by a rare day out in the country, not to have understood at once what he was up to?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your wife lived here.’

  ‘Not for very long. Or very happily.’

  ‘You used to come here with her?’

  ‘As little as I could manage. I told you, the old lady hated me.’ He switched off the gramophone, causing Pinky Pinkerton, Lady Fanner’s beloved singer, to skid into silence.

  ‘What about her father? Did he hate you too?’

  ‘Sir Nicholas? He was a country gent. He wore an old tweed suit and gave his tenants blankets and pounds of tea at Christmas.’

  ‘He sounds rather nice.’

  ‘He was the sort that went out with the dinosaurs.’

  ‘The sort of country gent?’

  ‘The sort of Conservative. We’ve got rid of them all now. Swept them into the dustbin of history. Thank God.’

  Jenny was surprised at herself. He had brought her here and involved her in his past life without warning and without her permission. She should have been angry. What did she have to do with his dead wife, his dead mother-in-law who hated him, the dead old man who went out well-meaningly with presents for the village? She should insist on leaving and after, well, perhaps after, lunch in Hartscombe (why was she always so inconveniently hungry?), she should make him drive her home and avoid seeing him again. Was he trying to stage a repeat of his past life with her, Jenny Sidonia, of all unlikely people? She ought to have been angry but the situation was so curious that she thought of hanging on to see what happened next.

  ‘We’re going to have a picnic in the kitchen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Unfortunately she supposed she would.

  The driver brought in a cardboard box with sandwiches in plastic wrappers and tins of beer, the sort of lunch Leslie would have sent out for while he stayed working at his desk. They sat in the kitchen by a rusty cooker the size of a steam engine, installed to feed dinner parties which hadn’t taken place for years, and families who had long stopped visiting. They sat under iron hooks from which hams had once been suspended, and well-populated fly-papers, beside tarnished saucepans and shelves which supported no more than a few pieces of broken china, beside the electric kettle and the two-ringed cooker which had been enough to provide Lady Fanner’s light meals. Jenny ate gratefully, having decided to stop worrying for the moment – the sort of decision she came to easily.

  ‘What I want to know is’ – she chose something harmless to ask – ‘are you going to get some embassy to buy one of Mark’s dreadful pictures?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looked at her seriously. ‘Did you think I’d deceive him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  ‘Well, madam.’ He
changed the subject. ‘Would you like the house?’

  There was a long silence and then she said, ‘Yes, I would. Very much. It’s madness, of course.’

  ‘Why is it madness?’

  ‘How could I possibly buy it, or live here? It’s quite impractical.’

  ‘Nothing you want’s impractical. It’s people who don’t know what the hell they want that are the impractical ones.’ So that, she thought, was the Titmuss philosophy of life and no doubt simple enough.

  ‘All right,’ she laughed at him, ‘I’ll buy it.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s already sold.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Me.’

  She unwrapped another sandwich, wondering where on earth they had got to now.

  ‘I happen to be a good friend of my ex-mother-in-law’s solicitor. He told me the whole damn thing had been pawned to the bank, oh, for years before she died. So I got the bank to sell it to me. Quite quietly, of course. They tried to get some fancy price on the ground that there might be a new development round here, a bloody great new town.’

  ‘You mean they’d build over this valley?’ Jenny was dismayed. ‘That’d be sacrilege.’

  ‘It won’t happen,’ Leslie assured her. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it.”

  ‘So you’re going to live here?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘What on?’

  He stood up, brushing crumbs off his dark suit. ‘Would you like to see upstairs?’ he asked her.

  They inspected servants’ bedrooms, with crumbling ceilings and peeling wallpaper. They saw guest bedrooms and the room where Charlotte Titmuss, when a young girl, had pinned up the rosettes she won at gymkhanas and her many photographs of horses. They went into her mother’s bedroom, where the furniture had not yet been sold and the big bed was stripped to the mattress, and smelt the sour smell of old age and spilt wine and the sweet smell of death. It was there that, suddenly and with great authority, Leslie Titmuss kissed Jenny Sidonia for the first time. She was not, she supposed, surprised that it happened, but she was astonished by the result. Like a skier who had been standing nervously and then, without taking a breath, pushes off down the steepest part of the mountain, she felt elated, irresponsible and in extraordinary danger. Whatever the Titmuss kiss was like it was far from the comforting warmth and reassurance provided by Mr Sidonia.