Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘Why?’ Leslie looked hard at her and spoke with sudden bitterness. ‘Was he a perfect person?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She laughed at him, but was not unfriendly. ‘No one is. But somehow he seemed to know what was right. And if you had Tony on your side you knew you couldn’t be so bad after all. Now, why don’t you forget about him?’

  ‘Because he’s dead.’ He frowned when he said that and looked, Sue thought, tormented. She began to get the vaguest idea, a mere glimmer of his troubles. ‘And you’re afraid he isn’t?’ she suggested. ‘Not in Jenny’s mind, anyway.’

  ‘I do want to understand her. Completely. That’s the way I feel I can do most for her. Of course I only want Jenny to be happy with me.’ Leslie spoke with the sudden unexpected sincerity which had won him, many years ago, his party’s nomination for the Hartscombe seat and had convinced the House of Commons at a few dangerous moments since then. It wasn’t wasted on Sue Bramble. ‘I just feel I could make her happier if I really knew about her life. I mean, I haven’t kept any secrets from her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s kept any secrets from you, either. She probably just didn’t want to trouble you with a lot of old photographs.’

  ‘So she burnt them?’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘She left them in the flat.’

  ‘You’ve still got them?’

  Sue was silent for a little and then she told him, ‘Yes.’

  ‘If I could only see him. See them together.’

  ‘You think you’d know what you’re up against?’

  ‘I do want to feel close to Jenny. As close as you are.’ He gave Sue Bramble the sincere look again.

  ‘Because you’re really not up against anything,’ she tried to reassure him. ‘Quite honestly you’re not. Tony Sidonia’s lost and gone for ever.’

  But, in the end, she was persuaded to let him come back to the flat with her and there, in a bottom drawer where sheets and blankets had been put away, were two photograph albums and Jenny’s old wedding ring. It was the ring she had taken off on the first night she spent with Leslie, wrapped in cotton wool and put into an envelope. Sue handed the books to Leslie, telling herself that it was somehow touching that he should want to know as much as possible about Jenny and also feeling some pride at having information to impart.

  He stood impassively, turning the pages without any particular expression of interest. At first she tried to give him a bright running commentary. ‘That was Tony’s cottage. Oh, there’s Willoughby Blane in his famous shorts. Their house in Oxford. Jenny’s birthday party. That was the Christmas when we did charades. Tony as Marlene Dietrich. That was them in Rome. Tony standing in front of St Peter’s and Jenny kissing his ring. Shocking, really. Tony with a crowd of students. Of course they all adored him.’ The picture showed him in a big basket-chair in a garden with girls and young men sitting on the grass, listening to him talking. ‘Tony’s old mum. Myra Sidonia.’ And then, as he said nothing, she stopped guiding him round the photographs and went out to make the tea he had asked for.

  When she came back with it, he said, ‘I put them back. I think I remember them well enough.’

  ‘I hope it’s made you feel better.’

  ‘You’ve been an enormous help.’ He stirred the tea into which he’d asked her to put two spoonfuls of sugar.

  ‘It was another world. But like I told you, it’s gone for ever. I’m not even sure she still thinks about it.’

  ‘Just one thing.’ He looked at her solemnly. ‘It would be better if you didn’t tell Jenny you’d shown me these things. Could you promise me that?’

  ‘I suppose so …’ She felt involved in a conspiracy, a sensation she didn’t particularly like.

  The day after his lunch with Sue Bramble, Leslie Titmuss directed his ministerial Rover towards a turning off Fetter Lane, a jammed little thoroughfare handy for the Law Courts, barristers’ chambers and similar resorts for persons in trouble. He got out in front of a narrow and gloomy building, went up in a lift which sighed with the hoarse complaints of worn-out machinery and entered the offices of the Neverest Detective Agency: ‘All Inquiries Undertaken. Complete Confidentiality Guaranteed’. He was ushered without delay into the office of the head of the agency, a man called Arthur Nubble, of whom he had some previous knowledge.

  It was not the first time that Mr Nubble had been concerned in the affairs of the Cabinet Minister. He had been a small, fat boy at a boarding-school with Fred Simcox and his brother, and a faded school photograph now hung above his desk beside his certificate of affiliation to the Private Inquiry Agents Association. Since his school days Arthur Nubble had gone into various service industries fashionable from time to time: coffee bars, boutiques, gossip columns and, finally, detection. With a recent increase in divorce and industrial espionage he had prospered, although it suited his romantic view of his trade to keep his premises as squalid and down-at-heel as they would have been in fiction. He had been engaged by Leslie Titmuss on a previous occasion in proceedings concerning the Reverend Simeon Simcox’s will and, although he had done his best to serve both sides in that case, Leslie had not learned the full extent of Nubble’s duplicity and was prepared to engage him again in a matter which was unlikely ever to surface in a court of law.

  ‘Leslie’ – Arthur Nubble liked to call all his clients, especially criminals and Cabinet Ministers, by their Christian names – ‘I was delighted when I heard you’d called. Thank you for having faith in us.’ His soft brown eyes pleaded for a compliment as urgently as a spaniel begs for a tin of dog food.

  ‘I was brought up to trust nobody,’ Leslie told him. ‘Especially a professional peeper into other people’s bedroom windows. All the same, this is something pretty simple. You can’t really mess it up.’

  ‘It’s good of you to say so.’ Arthur Nubble smiled with delight, as though he had got the praise he was asking for. He also mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, as he always seemed to be suffering from over-heating, however chilly the weather.

  ‘It’s this man.’ Leslie felt in an inside pocket and brought out a photograph. ‘I want you to find out everything you can about him.’

  ‘Is it a divorce matter?’ Nubble picked up the photograph and saw a tall man in a garden talking to some admiring young people who sat before him on the grass.

  ‘No. It’s a private matter. There’s no question of divorce. The chap’s name is Anthony Sidonia. He’s the one in the chair, holding forth.’

  ‘And where do I find him, Leslie?’

  ‘In some North Oxford cemetery, I imagine. He’s dead.’

  ‘Then what do you want me to find out about him?’ Nubble always tried not to seem surprised by any instruction. On this occasion he didn’t succeed.

  ‘Everything you can. Especially …’ Leslie was silent for a long time, as though he found the next words hard to say. ‘Especially if he always told the truth.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It’s no sort of comment, favourable or otherwise, on the general integrity of planning inspectors, to say that Gregory Boland was a peculiarly honest man. His honesty wasn’t anything he could help. It had been with him all his life, like a birthmark or a stammer. Some of those who knew him found it faintly ridiculous, some inconvenient. His wife felt sure this unfortunate defect was what had caused Greg’s failure as an architect in private practice. That, she told him, and his resolute refusal to join the Freemasons. Building developers, it was well known, always gave jobs to the architects they met whilst swearing strange oaths in the banqueting rooms of provincial hotels. Greg had smiled and announced in his soft Scottish accent that if he couldn’t get the contract for the new bacon factory without putting on an apron and pressing the point of a pair of compasses to his naked bosom he’d rather stay at home and build kitchen cupboards. His home was well furnished with fitted cupboards, but Sir Joseph Buddle, F.R.I.B.A., whose membership of the ancient order of Masons in no way
improved his brutal style of architecture, got the bacon factory with the geriatric ward of a local hospital thrown in.

  Gregory Boland was also rare among architects as he lived in a house he had built himself. Jo Buddle, who had dumped the pile of vast building-bricks on the centre of Worsfield, who wrote regularly in the Architectural Review saying that we must forget the past and stamp the culture of the 1990s on our towns and villages, lived in a Georgian rectory with a walled garden, a place he furnished with Chippendale and English watercolours. Gregory, who also built in the modern manner, was prevented by the handicap of honesty from living in a house any more or less beautiful than those he was able to design for his customers. Accordingly he and his family inhabited a smallish concrete block in an area to the south-east of London where planning permission was not too hard to come by. This home which looked, in a poor light, like a small bunker built to withstand the onslaught of World War Three, was a source of derision and complaint from the neighbours and of regret to Mrs Boland and the children, who pined for a thatched cottage beside an old mill stream. Living with cheerful determination in this unsympathetic residence, Gregory Boland found his practice fading away and so, looking for a regular source of income, became an inspector with the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning.

  As such he presided over inquiries where his height and his flaming red hair made him an imposing figure. Having been brought up by a father who had been a postman, lay preacher and an elder of his church, and having fought his way up without losing his faith in a punitive God, Gregory Boland was quick to smell a whiff of corruption in any planning application or council proceeding. His clear blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles were always on the look-out for builders who gave councillors peculiar and talismanic handshakes before the proceedings began. Such was the upright judge who was to hear the application for permission to build Fallowfield Country Town. In due course his recommendations would be laid on the desk of Leslie Titmuss, who had, in the particular case of Fallowfield and the Rapstone Valley, agreed to accept them, however inconvenient they might be to his own life and happiness.

  ‘The Inspector’s Greg Boland.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Scottish Wee Free. Straight as a die. Slightest touch of pressure being put on him and he’ll be off like a shot in the opposite direction. I’ve made the fullest inquiries.’

  Ken Cracken and Christopher Kempenflatt were in a corner of Bettina’s, an upper-crust disco tucked away in a Mayfair mews. The music overlaid their voices, as the shadows in the corner where they sat drinking a late-night bottle of champagne almost concealed their presence. Their companions for the evening, Joyce Timberlake and the gold-burnished Mrs Armitage, had gone off to exchange confidences in the Ladies, leaving the two men to discuss business.

  ‘He doesn’t sound quite the right chap for us.’ Kempenflatt was doubtful.

  ‘He’s absolutely the right chap for us. Anyway, if he hadn’t been straight Leslie Titmuss wouldn’t have let them appoint him.’

  ‘I thought you said that Titmuss was leaving the whole Fallowfield business to you.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’ And Ken Cracken laid his finger along the side of his nose in a gesture used by generations of the Cracken family to mean ‘pull the other one, it’s got bells on’. ‘Leslie’s got to make sure this business is done strictly on the level. If anyone thought he was swinging it in favour of his country house he’d be finished.’

  ‘I thought that was rather what you wanted.’

  ‘There are more ways than one of skinning a dead cat.’ Ken Cracken again used a phrase which had been a great favourite with his grandfather when the old man was in the fur trade. ‘But you’re right. I wouldn’t mind Leslie retiring gracefully to the back benches, after years of valuable service to the country and the Party. All that sort of rubbish. Perhaps the time has come for the old boy to take things easy.’

  ‘And let you pinch his job?’ Christopher Kempenflatt had never, since the day when he pushed the great servant of his country into the river, favoured the subtle approach.

  ‘Of course, although that’ll be entirely up to the Prime Minister. And you need to built Fallowfield. With a bit of luck we may both get what we want.’

  ‘How’re we going to manage that?’

  ‘Politics, Christopher. Some of us were born with a bit of a talent for it. We might as well finish the bottle, before the girls get back.’

  Dancing with minimal movement in the company of the wildly gyrating editor of the Home Maker pages, Tim Warboys noticed the Minister at H.E.A.P. drinking in a corner with the Chairman of Kempenflatts building consortium. Any story about Leslie’s Ministry, he felt instinctively, might result in his own immediate transfer to the obituary column, so he averted his eyes. In another corner he saw the much-pilloried Labour M.P. who had tried to get into White’s, doing his best to present a swinging image to his research assistant. The absurd hypocrisy of such a fellow behaving like a conservative started an avalanche of column inches in Warboys’ mind. His dancing became minimally more animated as he shaped his first sentence: ‘A Bettina’s Bolshevik takes the floor, but not in the House of Commons. Who is the unknown blonde with whom Labour leftie Dudley Dumpton seems anxious to form a liberal alliance?’ Exhausting though it undoubtedly was, and however absurd he felt swaying slightly and clicking his fingers in time to the music, Tim Warboys thought there was nowhere like Bettina’s for getting an insight into politics.

  Ken Cracken was right. Leslie Titmuss had discovered the name and character of the Inspector who would hear the Fallowfield inquiry. Leslie had no rooted objection to honesty, provided it was not used, as in the case of Jenny’s previous husband, to make wounding comparisons with himself. The honesty of Gregory Boland could only underline his own incorruptibility. He had agreed to abide by the result of the inquiry, and the inquiry was to be conducted by an inspector who was above suspicion. How could he conceivably be criticized for that?

  It might be thought that Leslie was taking a risk, but having examined the case with the iciest impartiality he came to the conclusion that he was betting on a certainty. Apart from Christopher Kempenflatt and two or three farmers who hoped to make millions, there seemed to be few people who could see any good reason for building over the Rapstone Valley. The number of new houses could easily be fitted into many villages and on the outskirts of Worsfield. A new town would block the roads, pollute the rivers, lay waste the countryside and provide a permanent blot on a much-loved landscape. Given the fact that Gregory Boland was clearly closed to any dubious approach by the Kempenflatt consortium, Leslie Titmuss didn’t see how he could possibly decide in favour of Fallowfield Country Town.

  He had only one worry. Could the opposition to Fallowfield get its act together? His plan depended on a well-organized outcry by the public, to whose demands, after judgement had been pronounced in its favour, he would bow graciously. He would have every opportunity of showing the human heart beneath the rugged Titmuss exterior. Could Fred Simcox, never to be classed among nature’s politicians, get the outcry going effectively? Leslie thought back to the ease with which he had won the skirmish over Jenny’s membership of S.O.V. and didn’t feel encouraged. At least he could see that the protesters had a decent Q.C. to argue their case. He arranged for his solicitors to send another cheque from an anonymous benefactor to help with the legal expenses of the protest group. ‘Send it to Dr Simcox,’ he told them. ‘It’ll be a rare treat for him to get a glimpse of so much money.’

  Leslie and his wife also discussed Gregory Boland’s character.

  ‘He’ll say exactly what he thinks and the hell with the consequences.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ Jenny, stretched in front of the fire that autumn evening, flicking through a catalogue full of hopelessly optimistic pictures of a herbaceous border, had almost forgotten they had ever quarrelled.

  ‘He won’t try to guess what I want and do it. He’ll come
to a perfectly honest decision.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we want?’

  ‘Just the sort of chap your ex would have approved of.’

  ‘My ex?’ She was genuinely confused. ‘Exes’ to her were living husbands of the sort constantly complained about because of their failure to provide for the children’s school fees or the awful hairdos of their new wives. Death was not, surely, a similar act of infidelity, a ground for divorce, and it was only slowly, and with a distinct feeling of unease, that she realized who he was talking about. ‘I don’t know what you mean, exactly.’

  ‘Only that Sidonia put such a high value on honesty. Never told a lie, all that sort of thing.’

  Jenny stopped turning the pages, apparently engrossed in a portrait of lupins. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Isn’t that what he said?’

  ‘No. He didn’t say it much. It was the way he behaved.’

  ‘Admirable, of course. What did he talk about?’

  Not to answer him seemed likely to prolong an inquisition of which she felt no good would come. ‘He made jokes a lot of the time. About the things he did. The people we met. You can’t expect me to remember everything.’

  ‘No. No, of course not.’ He sounded understanding and fell silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I wish I could’ve met him.’

  ‘Why?’ She could imagine no two men less likely to understand each other than those she had married. Their meeting would, no doubt, have been a disaster, but it was also an impossibility. So why did she feel in such a panic?

  ‘He must have been enormously entertaining.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was, that.’

  ‘Judging by what Sue said about him.’

  ‘You mean, when she was staying here?’

  ‘Yes, of course. She talked about him then. And his wonderful old mother. What was her name … ?’

  ‘Myra.’ Jenny smiled, feeling they’d moved to safer ground. ‘She was tremendous value.’