Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘What did you think you were doing to me? Or did you just not think at all?’

  ‘I told him what I felt. That’s all.’

  ‘What a luxury! That’s perfectly all right for you, of course. You can go round the world saying exactly what you feel. That’s the privilege enjoyed by people who have no responsibility for anything.’

  ‘Of course I’m responsible. I have to be responsible for what I say.’

  ‘And what about me? Did you think about me for one single moment, during the Doctor’s visit?’

  Elsie Titmuss had come to dinner that night and had helped Jenny in the kitchen, talking a lot about her distant past, taking little swallows of gin and tonic and revealing old scandals about people in big houses of whom Jenny had never heard. As always they got on well and were ready to receive Leslie with interest and excitement. When he came home he was in a black mood which Jenny did her best to ignore. He waited until Elsie had gone and the dinner cleared away before launching his attack and Jenny, who thought it must have been one of the ‘colleagues’ that had infuriated him, was surprised to find the cannonade directed at her. At first she wasn’t alarmed by his fury; she was busy trying to follow an argument which seemed to involve people she hadn’t met, in a world she hardly understood.

  ‘Did you?’ he repeated, staring at her like some cold lawyer cross-examining a hostile witness. ‘Did you think about me at all?’

  ‘Of course I thought about you, Leslie. I knew exactly how you felt.’

  ‘Oh. How did you know that?’

  ‘Because you told me.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘You told me they’d never build a new town in the valley. Not if you knew anything about it. You told me that the first day we came here.’

  ‘I don’t mean …’ Leslie sighed and looked at his wife with exaggerated patience. ‘I don’t mean how I felt about the new town. I meant how I felt about people knowing how I felt.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked back at him in genuine confusion. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. I’m talking about politics. That’s a dirty word to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘It’s another world to you, beneath your notice. A world where you have to say what you don’t mean in order to get what you want. It’s a world where you may have to tell lies. That wouldn’t have suited your precious Tony Sidonia, would it? He could sit in some old library somewhere and feel cosy and contemptuous of squalid politicians who have to practise a few deceptions to get anything decent done in the world. Well, I have news for you. The time has come to forget Mr Sidonia!’

  There was a silence and then Jenny seemed to crumple at Tony’s name, which had never been thrown at her with such violence before. Now Leslie looked down at her as she sat crouched in a corner of the sofa, her hands hugging her elbows and her knees bent sharply. He seemed surprised at the result of what he had said because he lowered his voice and made an effort to sound reasonable.

  ‘All right …’ And he repeated ‘All right’ as if trying to get the attention of the House of Commons at Question Time, although what he had to say would never be heard in Parliament. ‘I don’t want the town. You don’t want the town. The bloody interfering Doctor doesn’t want the town. You know I don’t want it. But Joe Public mustn’t know that!’

  She looked up at him. He assumed an unspoken question and was encouraged to answer it.

  ‘Why mustn’t they? Because I’m the man of the free market. The patron saint of the builder and the upwardly mobile property investor. That’s why they elected me and why I got my job. If I come out against the new town they’ll say it’s for one reason and one reason only. Because I live here. Because I want new houses everywhere except in my own bloody back garden. You understand that, don’t you?’

  He waited for an answer but she didn’t give it to him. On the other hand she looked at him constantly and didn’t turn her face away. He took that for encouragement and went on being reasonable.

  ‘So let’s spell it out, my darling. I have to keep absolutely quiet. Not take sides in any sort of way, you understand? There’s going to be a full public inquiry, a judicial proceeding with arguments from all sides. Evidence taken. All the trimmings. Plenty of money for the lawyers. And at the end of that, you want to know my own, personal, entirely private prediction? This is not for publication, just between you and me, strictly off the record. I promise you that Fallowfield Country Town will be dead as mutton! So we’ll be able to go on living here in peace. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘But none of that can happen if I’m seen to be personally involved. That’s why I had to wake up old Dickie Dowdswell in Palm Springs and get him to kill the story in the Fortress.’ Confident now that he had won the debate and that the final vote would be in his favour, Leslie went to a table between the two tall windows and poured himself a drink.

  ‘What story?’ Jenny frowned, no longer understanding.

  ‘The story about your joining Dr Fred’s tin-pot resistance movement. The Doctor’s no doubt a specialist in hopeless protests. He learnt the art from his father who was a pacifist vicar.’

  ‘My joining?’ Jenny was puzzled. ‘They were going to put that in the paper?’

  ‘Of course they were. It’s news because you’re my wife.’ And why on earth, Leslie wondered as he drank whisky, did he find himself involved with women who insisted on joining inconvenient organizations? He remembered the trouble he’d had convincing the world that the undoubted fact that his first wife had signed on with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a pure invention. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head,’ he told Jenny. ‘The story’s killed. And now all you have to do is tell the Doctor you never meant to join in the first place.’

  She was looking at him, without understanding. He brought his glass and sat down beside her, and then he remembered to ask her if she wanted a drink. She shook her head.

  ‘Tell him he must have misunderstood. You talk quietly, so he probably didn’t hear what you were saying. He wanted you to join, so he seems to have assumed you agreed when all you were doing was being politely interested.’ He drank. ‘You’ll know how to get out of it, I’m sure.’

  ‘You mean,’ she had found a voice now and spoke quite loudly, ‘you want me to lie about it?’

  ‘We all have to from time to time. I bet even Tony wasn’t busy being George Washington every day, was he? It wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover that he found a use for a good thumping lie occasionally.’

  Then she said that she was going to bed and left him.

  Leslie finished his drink slowly, determined not to hurry after her. He felt he had nothing to reproach himself with. His argument, he thought, had been moderate, sensibly put and unanswerable. He had, he hoped, done something to shake Jenny out of an unreasonable obsession with her departed husband. He climbed the staircase slowly and when he reached the bedroom he saw a small shape under the covers. Her face was turned to the wall and her dark hair spread over the pillow. He smiled at her and made a final concession.

  ‘I’ll do the dirty work for you, if you like. I’ll explain to Dr Fred that it was all a misunderstanding. Would that make you feel better?’

  But, it seemed, it wouldn’t. That night Jenny moved away from him in bed, a rejection he had never suffered before. He lay in the darkness and his feeling of having been unfairly treated hardened into a deep hatred, not of Jenny or even of Fred Simcox, but of the late Tony Sidonia.

  The next morning the storm between them seemed to have passed. Leslie got up when Jenny was still asleep and went to bath and dress. When he came back to the bedroom to say goodbye, he was as friendly as before their quarrel and seemed to bear her no ill will. The last thing he said was, ‘I’ll look after everything. No need for you to worry.’ When he had gone she reviewed their quarrel with the fair
ness which, she sometimes worried, might have been her way of avoiding trouble. Perhaps, after all, his embarrassment was understandable. If she’d known there was a danger of it getting into the papers would she have joined S.O.V.? As she wandered into her natural home, the kitchen, in her dressing-gown, put the kettle on the Aga and listened to the comforting sound of Mrs Bigwell’s Hoover, she was about to give Leslie Titmuss the benefit of the doubt. Then she remembered what he had said about Tony, the unexpected attack on a dead man which had unbalanced her like a blow. Was that forgivable? And could it be forgotten? As she had been used to doing for so many years she consulted her friend Sue Bramble.

  ‘Well, I’ve never been absolutely crazy about your Mr Titmuss, as you well know, although he was perfectly civil to me that weekend. Much to my surprise, I must say. But what’s he done that’s so terrible? He just didn’t want you to join this Save the Badger Club, or whatever it is.’

  ‘He wanted me to tell a lie.’

  ‘Well, he might have wanted you to do much nastier things. Like climb into a rubber suit and squirt soda-water at him. Men have such unfortunate wants sometimes.’

  ‘He did want me to lie,’ Jenny repeated.

  ‘And then he told you you needn’t. And he’d do it for you.’

  ‘That’s right. Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s so rare to get a chap to do anything for you nowadays. My bloody trainer wouldn’t even change the wheel on my car, let alone put himself to the trouble of getting a divorce. If you’ve found a man who’ll do things for you, I say be grateful. Even if he does have a row of pens in the breast pocket of his business suiting.’

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Not do things for you?’

  ‘No. Have a row of pens.’

  ‘Oh, well. He looks the sort who would.’

  ‘It’s the way he attacked Tony.’

  ‘What did he say again?’

  ‘He more or less called Tony a liar.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t know Tony, did he?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then he’s talking nonsense. He’s just jealous.’

  ‘Of Tony?’ Jenny couldn’t believe it. ‘I mean, Tony’s not here to be jealous of.’

  ‘I bet your Mr Titmuss wants to think he’s got you all to himself. No memories. Nothing. He probably longs for you to have been a virgin when he married you.’

  ‘Do you think so, honestly?’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. Absolutely nothing you can do about that.’

  So Jenny was surprised by her friend’s lenient attitude towards Leslie Titmuss and she felt she had been unnecessarily upset. This suited her very well because she wanted, above all things, to avoid another quarrel.

  *

  Fred Simcox sat in his consulting room faced, once again, with the immense bulk of Dot Curdle. When he asked her why she had come to see him, she muttered a word which sounded to him like ‘perdition’, so that he was inclined to say that she needed the services of Kev the Rev. rather than his. ‘Perdition?’ he asked, and she nodded her head in a meaningful manner and withdrew a bundle of papers from a Tesco’s bag. ‘It’s a perdition which I wants everyone to sign, but you should sign it particular as a doctor who knows about things.’ Then she read out a preamble which she had composed and Evie had typed out in rough.

  ‘ “Science has taught us,” ’ Dot thundered, as though announcing the end of civilization, ‘ “that eating of chicken produces salmonella and the gastric. It’s dicing with death to eat beef, lamb and pork meat, or tinned tongue, as these fatty substances gives you heart attacks. For a healthy diet keep to regular meals of pure, local raised, free-range rabbit meat, low in fat or starch which raises the blood pressure. Rabbit will cure heart disease. It can be cooked in a variety of ways ranging from haute cuisine to peasant. We the undersigned being consumers, producers and experts in the field are gravely concerned” – Len Bigwell told us to put that “gravely concerned”. He says as how everyone’s gravely concerned on the news nowadays – “are gravely blah, blah … at the prospect of our locality losing a huge natural source of this vital food by the closure of the Rapstone Valley Rabbit Hacienda.” ’ Here Mrs Curdle paused and looked at Fred triumphantly. ‘So will you put your name on the dotted?’

  Fred was tempted to sign any document, however misleading, which was designed to protect the valley. Then common sense prevailed and he said, ‘Perhaps I could have that and tidy up the scientific side a bit.’

  ‘You do that, Doctor. I’ll trust you to get it right, after all you done for Evie.’

  ‘Marriage guidance worked, did it?’

  ‘Puts me in mind of old Dr Salter as was here before you. If ever us children got ill he’d come round with a big black bottle of medicine and say, “This tastes like liquid cow-pat and if you don’t get better at once you’ll have to drink it all up.” Well, we was well again before he left the house. You got the same idea, didn’t you? ’Course she’d rather have the sex than that nasty old marriage guidance.’ Then the telephone rang and Fred’s panic-stricken receptionist announced a person of great importance who insisted on coming in to see him. Before he could ask for further details his door was pushed open to admit Leslie Titmuss.

  ‘Mr Titmuss.’ Dot Curdle heaved herself to her feet. ‘We’d like your signature to my perdition too, sir. Save the Rabbit Farm. I’ll leave it with you.’

  When she had gone Leslie looked at the document, dropped it on to Fred’s desk and said, ‘Are you going to sign this rubbish?’

  ‘I’ll have to edit the medical bits. But, yes. I want to help her keep her rabbit farm.’

  ‘Poor old Fred!’ Leslie looked at him with pity. ‘Why don’t you give up politics?’

  ‘It is my morning surgery. Could we make a time to talk?’

  ‘You’re even more ridiculous than your old father was when he went on marches all over the place. Neither of you had the faintest hope of achieving anything. Why don’t you just give up?’

  ‘I suppose I could ask you the same question.’

  Leslie looked at Fred with particular coldness and didn’t bother to ask him to explain.

  ‘If you hadn’t taken up politics, if you didn’t go around making speeches about market forces and consumer choice, we might have had a bit of peace in the Rapstone Valley.’

  ‘So you and your well-heeled friends can enjoy the rural life?’ Leslie was, in fact, far better heeled than Fred would ever be but the Simcox family had, since childhood, represented his idea of wealth plagued by guilt and a half-hearted hankering for socialism in order to ease their consciences.

  ‘So long as there’s any countryside left for everyone to enjoy.’

  ‘It’s not going to be saved by you having a few jumble sales and coffee mornings. You know that. It’ll be decided by people who’ve got power, and that hasn’t been your lot for a long time and it may never be again.’

  ‘You mean it’s going to be decided by you?’

  ‘It’ll be judged in due course by a proper, fair, public inquiry.’ Leslie repeated the words which he was going to use again and again to distance himself from the future of his new home.

  ‘In the end you’ll have to decide whether to accept the inquiry’s decision. If there is an inquiry. As of now the District Council seems about to condemn the valley to death without an inquiry.’

  ‘Please, Fred.’ Leslie smiled at him tolerantly, as though he were a child. ‘You may be the world’s greatest expert on prescribing the pills my government has to pay for when you can’t think of how else to treat your patients, but please, don’t try to teach me my job.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone have a right to teach politicians their jobs?’

  ‘Oh, Fred.’ Leslie now managed a look of genuine pity. ‘You used to have a bit of life in you once. You used to chase girls, although as far as I can remember most of them got away. You used to play mournful jazz numbers rather badly on the drums. Now you’re growing old with nothing better to do than cha
tter about democracy.’

  ‘I notice you chatter about it quite a lot.’

  ‘I know what it means.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got a whole line of patients waiting.’

  ‘It means handing over power to whoever’s got a majority in Parliament and then forgetting about it for the next four years. And it doesn’t mean calling on people when they’re out and trapping their wives into joining their funny little pressure groups.’

  ‘Did you say, trapping?’ Fred was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Jenny was reasonably polite, as she always is. And then you ran away and claimed she’d joined your Save Our Back Gardens Group, or whatever you call yourselves. Very pleased with yourself, weren’t you? You even had to ring up and tell the bloody newspapers.’

  ‘I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, no? And you didn’t make my wife a member, without her consent?’

  What was going on? Fred thought that Jenny must have lied in the face of her husband’s anger. Clearly she needed help.

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘Of course she told me that. Why do you think I’m here? I’d be a great deal too busy to waste my time in National Health surgeries if you hadn’t involved Jenny.’

  ‘Then I must have been mistaken.’