Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘You ought to try marriage,’ Leslie advised him. ‘Give up politics. You’ve clearly got absolutely no talent for it.’ Fred didn’t answer. He was looking round at the newly decorated walls, the fresh plaster and restored chandelier of the Rapstone drawing-room. There was every sign that Titmuss in his new-found happiness was planning on a long stay and he thought that, even without the ill-timed S.O.V. demonstration, the threat of Fallowfield was receding.

  ‘The trouble with you and your father before you –’ Fred was now looking across the room at Jenny, the house’s newest and most beautiful acquisition. He heard, as though from a great distance, yet another attack by Leslie on the late Rector of Rapstone, whose memory still seemed to haunt him. ‘You think your consciences are so much more important than other people’s. You think you’ve only got to parade your precious consciences in some sort of bedraggled procession, take them out for a walk as though they were relics of the One True Cross, and all sorts of miracles will occur. Isn’t that what your old dad thought? He imagined the Bomb would go away if he went out marching with a few mums pushing prams and a handful of weirdos playing guitars.’

  Is that what this beautiful woman had done it for? Fred asked himself in bewilderment. Had she dressed herself up in lace and decorated her hair with orange blossom to listen to this sort of thing from Titmuss over and over again for the rest of her life?

  ‘Wankers of the world unite, you’ve got nothing to lose but your self-advertising liberal causes!’ Leslie laughed and Fred became increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of such an obviously cheerful Titmuss. Then he felt the politician’s hand on his arm and Leslie’s voice sank to a conspiratorial murmur. ‘If you really want to fight the Fallowfield development there’re a lot of better ways of going about it. Oh, there’s the folk from satellite TV. I’d better go and give them a welcome.’

  There were several groups in anoraks piling their plates at the buffet, representatives of the news programmes who had covered the Titmuss wedding. As Leslie went to talk to them, Fred, whose view of his host’s conduct was never generous, thought he was probably going to lean on the broadcasters to exclude the S.O.V. demonstration. On the contrary, and to the delight of the Curdle family, whose shouts of self-recognition echoed from their mobile homes that night, the demonstration was prominently featured. Dot Curdle, waving her poster and flinging her confetti, was bounced into space and back into millions of homes, and the protests seemed electronically multiplied to sound like a substantial popular uprising.

  The Secretary of State for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning gave a brief interview to camera before he left with his bride for Rome. The following is an extract.

  INTERVIEWER: Minister. Does your acquisition of this lovely home, Rampton Manor House –

  TITMUSS: Rapstone. Get it right, young man.

  INTERVIEWER: Rapstone. I’m sorry. Does it mean, sir, that plans for a new town here are unlikely to go ahead?

  TITMUSS: It means nothing of the sort! If the inquiry decides that Fallowfield Country Town can be built, it will be a great experience for my wife and myself to live as part of such an exciting new development.

  INTERVIEWER: And the value of your property will no doubt increase?

  TITMUSS: We hope the value of everybody’s property will increase. We’re not in the business of seeing decent, hard-working householders lose money as they did in the days of the last Labour government.

  INTERVIEWER: So it all depends on the public inquiry?

  TITMUSS: Of course. That’s the way we do things in a democracy.

  INTERVIEWER: And if it happens you’d happily live next door to a new town?

  TITMUSS: Of course we would. Just like any other young couple, starting out in life. Is that it? I’ve got a plane to catch …

  INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Minister. And many congratulations on your marriage.

  TITMUSS: Oh, yes. Marriage is a wonderful thing. You should try it some time.

  Although the interviewer may have had a somewhat ambiguous appearance he was, in fact, the happy father of two and the Secretary of State’s last remark was uncalled for. Most of his audience found it appealing, however, and a sure sign that their much appreciated Leslie Titmuss had lost none of his zip.

  Leslie had been happy in Rome. He couldn’t help noticing and enjoying the looks of envy and increased respect caused by having Jenny at his side. She spoke a little Italian and he encouraged this performance with pride, although so far as he was concerned an inability to speak any foreign language was an essential feature of the no-nonsense politics he embodied. Foreign languages, in Leslie’s book, were for wets and international socialists, although from Jenny’s lips the words sounded entrancing and musical to his ears. He assumed she would be interested in clothes and she agreed, after some argument, to let him buy her a dress and a pair of shoes, but a tiny part of the expensive wardrobe he offered her. Clothes shops, she said, bored her and she took him on short visits to picture galleries, insisting that no one could really take in more than a few paintings on any one visit. He was grateful for this wisdom and failed to wonder who had taught it to her. He found the religious subjects, the pale saints bristling with arrows and the agonized crucifixions, embarrassing. He was more interested in the portraits of Popes and Emperors, persons of authority at whom he looked with fascination and some understanding.

  During these days he felt that he had his new wife’s full attention. When they were together she looked at him in a way he found flattering and he was engrossed in watching her, so that her smallest movement, the doubtful way she frowned at herself in a mirror, her habit of running a long finger around the rim of a wine glass as she talked, delighted him. He assumed she had picked up her knowledge of the language and the pictures on other visits, but he didn’t worry about that until their last evening when she said she knew somewhere for dinner. It was when they had come out of the narrow streets of the drug-dealers into the square with its fountain and its gold mosaic church, that he felt, for the first time, the presence of an intruder. As they crossed the square of Santa Maria in Trastevere he knew that she was concerned, not with him, but with whoever her last companion there had been. When she lit a candle in the church he knew that it was not in tribute to her future but to her past. And when they sat together outside the restaurant her sudden, unexpected tears seemed an act of infidelity to him. They were married and alone, she was wearing the dress and the shoes he had bought her, they were going back to the house she had wanted, in the countryside she found beautiful. He had been consistently kind and considerate and had taken the greatest care of her at all times. If she were weeping it wasn’t because of him; her tears, like her candle, were a tribute to another man.

  Leslie Titmuss’s jealousy of Tony Sidonia began that evening.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the place on the Rapstone Nature Area, once known, although the fact is forgotten except by Hector Bolitho Jones and a very few former villagers now lodged in the Hartscombe Old People’s Home, as Hanging Wood, there were, when Hector was a boy, at least fifty badgers. Their numbers had considerably diminished over the years. Some had died, like operatic heroines, of tuberculosis. Some had been frightened by poachers’ lights and killed by poachers’ lurchers, long-legged, sharp-toothed dogs who could run faster than they. A few had even, so it was suspected, been flushed out by terriers and kidnapped by the likes of sixteen-year-old Billy Curdle, who organized furtive and illicit dog and badger fights in a remote corner of the rabbit hacienda to make money. In these prize fights the badgers, heavily built and with tight-locking jaws, were sometimes able to defeat and kill the smaller dogs. At the top of Hanging Wood, where the old and close beech trees abruptly gave way to a corn field, there was a sett which was no less than four hundred years old. Now it contained one family of four. The sow had the scar of a deep and inadequately healed dog-bite in her stomach, but she had given birth to two cubs, born blind and now, at two months, just about able to find the
ir way into the open air. At nightfall this family left the sett and the complicated system of tunnels which surrounded it and ventured out to feast on roots, fruit, eggs, insects, young birds and small mammals.

  When out foraging, the badgers, short-sighted but with a keen sense of smell, recognized their family by the musk which they sprayed from their bodies. They had sprayed some of this pungent odour on Hector Jones’s boots, so he was always a welcome and recognized member of the group. As his relations with Daphne deteriorated he would spend more of his nights with the badgers.

  One moonlit night towards the end of that summer Hector had gone out after a supper with Daphne noted for its prolonged silences and deliberate, resentful chewing. He had climbed to the top of the wood, carrying no light which might alarm nocturnal creatures. The moonlit hills were not silent. Dogs barked distantly, owls shrieked and whirled down on mice stirring among the fallen leaves. There was a sound of running in the ground cover of brambles, which Hector took to be a deer on the rampage. So he climbed steadily to the top of the wood and was there rewarded by the sight of the old sow badger tirelessly collecting bedding of dried grass, twigs and leaves to make her family comfortable.

  Then, from a clump of bushes far down the wood, Hector saw a little light. It was a distant pin-point but its presence, and the addition it gave to a feeling of danger provided by the sharp calls of birds of prey and the sudden flutter of death, sent the sow scuttling into the safety of her sett, her carefully gathered bedding forgotten. Hector looked after her with regret and then up to stare at what was happening in the clearing halfway down the hill.

  Three men had emerged from the shadows, running, crouching, bent almost double, carrying objects that had the undoubted appearance of guns. They were dressed in flak jackets and berets, their parti-coloured trousers tucked into huge boots and their faces daubed with camouflage paint. ‘Christ!’ said Hector Bolitho Jones, seeing that they were undoubtedly soldiers.

  Soldiers, but whose? He tried to remember what little he’d read in the papers, or seen on the television when Daphne insisted on having it on. The Russians, surely, had become friendly. But could the Russians be trusted? He strained his ears to listen for commands in a foreign language as the men vanished into the shadows beside a great holly bush. If not Russian, were they Chinese or Arabs – the spearhead perhaps of an Islamic invasion, a terrifying crusade in reverse, set off to burn the church and rape the women? Hector’s mind raced. His father had told him about the war, about the nights they had watched in Hanging Wood for Germans landing by parachute; how some of the Home Guard had laid hands on a man from the Electricity Board with a small toothbrush moustache and thought, for a single intoxicating moment, that they had ‘got Hitler’. Well, the foreigners were obviously back, looking leaner, healthier, more determined and better armed. Alone in the wood he thought how he might raise the alarm and if he would be heard above the owls’ shrieks and the distant barking, and the rattle of wind in the treetops. In his pocket he kept a whistle which he used to command the dogs who corralled sheep in the Nature Area. He raised it to his lips and blew a deafening blast.

  Then he heard a charge and a thunder of boots. He turned and saw another platoon in uniform rushing towards him. They ran, grinning with triumph and excitement. He raised his whistle again, but as he did so the leader of the second platoon aimed his gun at Hector’s face. Their eyes met and, in spite of the camouflage paint, Hector Jones had no difficulty in recognizing the fair moustache and heavily lidded eyes of Ken Cracken, the Minister at H.E.A.P. Whether Ken had been recognized seemed not to trouble him. He had seen an old enemy unexpectedly delivered into his hands. He pressed the spray-gun he held and the warden of the Rapstone Nature Area was struck dumb by the great spurt of yellow paint filling his mouth and dripping down his clothes towards the boots on which the badger sow had so sympathetically sprayed her musk.

  ‘All in all, I think, one of our better exercises. Would you say that, Jumbo? As O.C. of the Yellows, old fellow. And, by the way, bad luck.’

  Christopher Kempenflatt, still in his flak jacket but with his camouflage paint washed off, stuck his legs out towards the log fire in his country house, a listed mill which was in no danger at all of redevelopment. He held up his glass and the devoted Mrs Armitage refilled it. In the room a number of other men, still in bits and pieces of army uniform, were gathered. They included Ken Cracken and ‘Jumbo’ Plumstead, who looked as game as an old colonel. Joyce Timberlake was also of the party; there was still a spot of camouflage paint on her face, for she had been a fully combative W.R.A.C. girl for the Reds.

  ‘I was commanding from our base,’ Jumbo admitted, ‘but from what came over my radio it sounded like a damn close-run thing.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter about being close run,’ Kempenflatt told him. ‘When it comes to war, you either win or lose. There’s no half measures.’

  ‘Much the same in politics,’ Ken Cracken said. ‘By the way, I think our battlefield got a bit extended. Weren’t we meant to keep to your chum’s woods, Christopher?’

  Kempenflatt had got cooperation for his latest war game from the farmers who had sold him options to build Fallowfield on their land.

  ‘We moved our operations to another wood. We’d organized a really great pincer movement but some old fart with a whistle tried to hold up our advance,’ Ken Cracken told him.

  ‘Oh, really? What did you do with him?’ Christopher Kempenflatt was only moderately interested.

  ‘Let him have it with my paint-gun. Full in the kisser! As a matter of fact, it’s something I’ve been waiting to do for a long time.’

  When he got home Hector Bolitho Jones cleaned the paint off his face and out of his hair and put his clothes aside for Daphne to take to the dry cleaners. He told her that he had been attacked by lager louts with a paint-gun, but he didn’t think they’d dare to do it again. However, he wrote another report to his superiors at S.C.R.A.P. to say that the hooligan who had been about to make love on a possible site of stone curlews’ nests had returned to Rapstone Nature Area with a party in military attire. He had been sprayed with paint by a man he was now in a position to identify positively as Kenneth Cracken, M.P., Minister of State at H.E.A.P.

  A few days later Hector visited the attic of the converted cottage in which he still kept, neatly packed away, certain of old Jones the gamekeeper’s possessions. There was a tea-chest which contained his father’s boots, carefully cleaned and wrapped in newspaper, his much worn and leather-patched jacket and an assortment of caps, his clasp knife, his silver watch and some homemade snares. There was also the gamekeeper’s shot-gun, oiled and packed away in its case, and a khaki shoulder-bag still full of cartridges. Hector had never used this weapon. Now he often took it out of its case, raised it to his shoulder and aimed it, unloaded, at an imaginary target. He had no intention of using the gun against any of the wild creatures under his care, but ever afterwards, on his night-time patrols, he went armed.

  The war in Rapstone woods had one other result. Leslie Titmuss was invited to lunch at the Sheridan Club by Lord Skirmett, President of the Society for Conservation, Rural and Arboreal Protection (S.C.R.A.P). It was not an invitation he welcomed. Skirmett was exactly the sort of silver-haired, well-meaning and tweedy old Tory who was inclined to give trouble in the House of Lords on such subjects as the closing of rural schools. Leslie distrusted clubs like the Sheridan where the food was adjusted to the tastes of those who had been brought up in nurseries. However, as soon as his apologetic Lordship had explained the reason for the invitation, Leslie was glad he’d come.

  ‘Of course the fellows at S.C.R.A.P. don’t want to embarrass the Ministry in any way. But we can’t have members of the government running around spraying our wardens with paint! I mean, one can understand a bit of high spirits …’

  ‘High spirits?’ Leslie shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid I take a far more serious view of Cracken’s conduct.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I must say
…’

  ‘And I mean –’ Leslie held up his hand to stop Lord Skirmett, who shuddered to a halt in mid sentence like an elderly motor car conking out on the road. ‘I mean –’ his voice sank to a low and menacing tone – ‘to take this on board at once. I’m grateful to you for coming to me on this one, Lord Skirmett. I suppose I can rely on your organization to see that the whole matter remains absolutely confidential. I know you won’t wish to embarrass the government, at the moment when we’re considering leaving some of our best reserves in your control.’

  ‘No privatization?’ Lord Skirmett asked hopefully.

  ‘Wait for the statement. That’s the trouble with the House of Lords. You all panic so easily. I think I can say that the proper preservation of nature is something which comes very high on our list of priorities. And I’m sure you’ll understand how green our thinking is.’

  ‘Green thinking?’ Skirmett looked vaguely up to the ceiling as though trying to imagine what thinking of such a colour might look like. ‘I’m so glad we’ve had this chance to exchange views, Secretary of State. It’s been extremely helpful.’

  ‘Oh, I agree.’ But Leslie Titmuss did nothing with the knowledge he had gained for some time. He had no doubt that it would, in his future dealings with Ken Cracken, prove very useful indeed.

  The Next Day

  As I was going up the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today.

  I wish, I wish he’d stay away.