Titmuss Regained

by John Mortimer

  ‘I’ve got to keep my word, haven’t I? Otherwise I’d be just a shifty politician. Not someone you could mention in the same breath as the wonderfully honest Mr Anthony Sidonia.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Jenny said, after a long silence.

  ‘No. You probably don’t.’

  She didn’t answer him, but collected the plates and took them out to the kitchen. Mrs Bigwell was coming the next morning but she washed up slowly and with enormous care, taking as long to do it as she could and trying not to think about what Leslie had said to her. When the glasses were polished and the saucepans scoured and put away, she went into the sitting-room where she found her husband watching himself being interviewed about the result of a by-election. The man smiling and making jokes on the screen and the other Leslie, slumped in an armchair, pale and angry, appeared as different people. She collected a book and went upstairs to bed. If she couldn’t avoid an argument she could, at least, put it off for as long as possible.

  She was sitting in front of the dressing-table brushing her hair when she heard his footsteps on the stairs. As soon as he had opened the door he said, ‘He’s got to be got rid of.’

  She didn’t ask him who or what he was talking about, but she sat still with the brush in her hand, wearing a nightdress and with her face clean of make-up.

  ‘You’ve got to get rid of him,’ he repeated.

  ‘If you mean Tony’ – she tried to smile – ‘I think he’s gone already.’

  ‘He’s not gone yet. He’s been here. All the time since we’ve been married. I knew that in Rome. In that restaurant of his you took me to. Sitting between us. So you could compare me with him!’

  ‘Why are you saying all this now? Please don’t.’ She looked at him, pleading. She was ready, even though he had gone so far, to forget what he had said.

  It was her calmness that infuriated him. The way she sat there quietly, with her dark hair shining, dressed in white as though for some sort of sacrifice, forced him to attack her. He had so much information, such a huge weight of evidence which he had carried around for so long that he had to be relieved of it. He had to prove at long last that he was, in every sort of way, a better man than Sidonia, whose shadow had kept him in the cold.

  ‘You’re wrong about him. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  He had meant to wait. When a time came, as he knew it would, when she would say, ‘Tony wouldn’t have done that’, he could have presented his unanswerable case and banished this superior, smiling ghost for ever. But Jenny never did speak the words he was waiting for, although he imagined that she always thought them.

  So it had gone on, during the long period of investigation. Each night he had come home and been friendly, funny in his way, had praised her, appreciated her, even made love to her, and said nothing. But that evening was different. He had been beaten, cheated and forced into a position where he would have to keep his word. Sidonia, he knew she was thinking, wouldn’t have found that difficult at all.

  ‘Please,’ she begged him again. ‘I’m tired.’

  He wanted to say, I’m tired also. Tired of your late husband. What he did say was, ‘This won’t take very long.’ And then, as though he were dealing with a matter of politics, he said, ‘I’ll just run over the main points. His mother, for instance.’

  Now she knew it was a nightmare. What on earth had Myra to do with Leslie Titmuss? She said, ‘She was a dancer.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. She worked in the wardrobe. Even then she was always pretending to be someone important. All her stories about dancing, the parties she went to, probably her lovers, they all came from another girl. A dancer who died. Do you think your Tony didn’t know?’

  ‘You mean Myra made things up?’ Her smile was more infuriating to him than any look of shock would have been.

  ‘Most things. Including the husband killed in the war. So far as I can discover she never married anyone.’

  ‘So far’ – she was looking at him, amazed – ‘as you can discover? What’ve you been doing?’

  ‘Finding things out,’ he told her. ‘I made it my business. Don’t you think I had a right to?’

  ‘Things about Myra. What on earth does it matter?’

  ‘Not much. Except that I had to tell you. Sidonia comes from a family of liars.’

  He had to tell her. Jenny wondered why he should have to tell her anything.

  ‘When it comes to his lies, of course, it’s difficult to know where to start.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear.’ She wanted to cover her ears now, shut out his cold, deliberate voice.

  ‘I expect you don’t. You’ve got to listen, though. Now. It’s only fair.’

  ‘Fair?’

  ‘Fair to me. You’ve never been that, have you? You’re not going!’

  She stood and tried to get out of the bedroom. He positioned himself between her and the door.

  ‘How should I start? The affairs with students. He told you he didn’t have them, didn’t he? That was his way of making you feel special, specially wanted, until you’d passed the exams and got your reward. All lies. Blane told me. At least twice the college nearly got rid of him. Because of the girls who passed through his bed on the way to their exams.’

  ‘Even if that were true’ – she didn’t believe him – ‘what does it matter now?’

  ‘Doesn’t it matter? About him and Susan Bramble?’

  Relief flooded over her. He was going to tell her nothing she didn’t know already. ‘Of course I know,’ she said. ‘Sue was Tony’s girlfriend for years.’

  ‘For years.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘Years after you were married.’

  ‘I know that’s not true.’

  ‘When he went to London to lecture, to go to dinners of the Historical Association and was supposed to be staying in his club. Such a gentlemanly, old-fashioned excuse, wasn’t it? And when Sidonia went to do his film in Rome, the one your friend Bramble worked on. He didn’t want you to drive down through France with the unit, did he?’

  ‘I flew out to Rome. I was with him.’ She hated herself for arguing, for admitting that Tony needed defending.

  ‘You joined them. After he’d slept with your friend in all the hotels during a scenic trip through Europe. And then he lied to you about it. Come to that, they both lied to you.’

  ‘You don’t know!’ Now she was trying to defend Tony. ‘Anyway, how do you know?’

  ‘I had a man’ – for the first time he seemed defensive – ‘a man to find out.’

  ‘A man to find out things about Tony?’ She found it impossible to believe.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean a detective?’

  ‘Yes.’ And then he said, as though this made it better, ‘I couldn’t rely on him. He’s a bit of a fool, quite honestly. In the end you always have to do these things for yourself.’

  ‘You did it for yourself!’ She felt herself choking with anger, a feeling entirely new to her. ‘You mean, you went round asking questions? Trying to find out that Tony slept with people and where he did it?’

  She was attacking him now, but her blows were like those of a child. They didn’t move him from his position or hurt him in the least. He smiled at her complacently, knowing, as he always did, that he was in the right. Sooner or later she would have to agree with him.

  ‘I didn’t just try to find out when Tony slept with people. I succeeded.’

  ‘What for? Whatever for?’ She was looking at him, not only angry but amazed, as though he were a creature from outer space.

  ‘So you’d be free of him.’

  It was a shock, of course, he understood. She’d come to terms with it. Sooner or later.

  ‘Free?’

  ‘All right,’ he admitted. ‘So we’d both be free. I did it for both of us.’

  ‘You did it for me? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ Now he sounded like a doctor, promising her that if she took the medicine she’d get b
etter quite soon. ‘You will when you think about it. I’ll leave you in peace, if you like. We can talk in the morning.’

  ‘In peace? How can I be in peace now?’

  ‘I’ll sleep next door. I think you’ll find the worst is over.’

  He left her then, like a man conscious of a job well done.

  Something was over, but what was it? Certainly not the worst, probably the best. Had Tony died at last, killed effectively by Leslie Titmuss? Was her marriage to Leslie over, to be only another memory, ending in a disaster more final than death? Had she a friend she could trust? Jenny stood alone in the middle of the bedroom floor, turned and saw herself in the dressing-table mirror, a pale figure who seemed as far from her as the smiling image on the television screen had been remote from her husband.

  She would have liked, above all, to get into bed, to pull the pillow round her ears and try to forget everything Leslie had told her. That would have been to follow her instinct, not to meet trouble halfway but to take refuge from it, in silence, in a refusal to argue, in sleep. But she had to get away from Leslie. She couldn’t lie down in his bed, in his house where he might come to her in the night, get in beside her and, failing to understand the enormity of what he had done, attempt to make love to her. She had to go. This need was stronger than her usual passion for avoiding trouble, so she began to dress quickly, to pull on jeans and a sweater, to find her bag, her keys and her money, and then she went down the big staircase, seeing no light under the spare bedroom door. She moved quietly, as though she were leaving a child who, after a great deal of trouble, seems at last to have fallen asleep. She crossed the marble-paved hall and then, still trying her best to make no sound, unbolted and slid open the heavy front door. When she stepped out into the darkness it was as though she were breathing clean and unpolluted air at last.

  She took off the handbrake of her car and let it roll down a gravel slope silently before she started the engine. Then she switched on the headlights and saw the trees, the hedges just starting to turn green, the walls of thorn and twigs, all speed past her, lit for a second. At the head of the valley she looked out towards dark fields and woods and remembered that they were now to be obliterated in a tidal wave which her husband had not been able to control. But that, she told herself, was the least of the troubles of that night. The road was empty so she drove fast towards the lights on the motorway and the signs for London.

  When she got to the flat she was surprised that it was not yet one in the morning. Leslie’s revelations which seemed to have gone on for ever must have been over by eleven and she had broken all records on her journey to London. Now she longed to avoid meeting Sue and had no idea how she could put the questions that had to be asked. Her heart sank when she saw the lights on in what had been their sitting-room, and when she rang the bell Sue came down to open the door almost at once. She looked suddenly older and much less pretty than Jenny had pictured her when she thought of the scene to come. Sue was wearing glasses, as she only did when she was reading or watching television on her own, and a dressing-gown which looked as if it were ready for the cleaners.

  ‘Jenny! What is it? You look terrible!’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Worse luck. Come in. It’s wonderful to see you.’

  And when she was inside and Sue had closed the door Jenny, who could believe she looked terrible, said, ‘Not so wonderful, I’m afraid. Not now.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Happened? Everything seems to have happened.’

  ‘My poor Jenny. I can imagine. Has Mr Titmuss turned out awful? You’ll stay here, won’t you? What else can I do to help?’

  ‘I suppose’ – and now Jenny realized that she was asking for the last thing she really wanted – ‘you can tell me the truth.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kev the Rev. thought an all-night vigil outside the Rapstone Nature Area would be the best way of dealing with the matter. He saw a great crowd of protesters holding up candles and singing together.

  ‘We’d never get hold of enough candles.’ Daphne Jones was practical. ‘They’ve even given up selling them in Worsfield supermarkets.’

  ‘They’ve got those curly, coloured things people buy for dinner parties in the Hartscombe Hostess shop,’ Mrs Vee remembered. ‘But they’d be terribly expensive.’

  ‘Not much good getting a crowd assembled together at night,’ the herbalist said. ‘That’s not going to cause much inconvenience to traffic.’

  ‘We could get a good few people together,’ Mrs Vee thought. ‘Our phone’s never stopped ringing. But night time wouldn’t be much use to television. What are your views, Chairman?’ It was an emergency meeting of S.O.V. committee members, a solemn occasion after they had read the news in their copies of the Fortress.

  What Fred thought was that he was back in his youth again, in the time of protest marches and all-night vigils. As the Reverend Kevin Bulstrode spoke he seemed to hear a more shrill, less elegant version of his father’s voice. How many times had Simeon Simcox coughed the night away in draughty churches, or led singers down country lanes to put an end to apartheid or the Bomb – and these things were still obstinately there when the guitars had been put away and the churches emptied. All the same, Fred would have liked to tell them that Fallowfield Country Town would vanish into the mists of legend if only they could exorcize it with candles and protest songs. He said, ‘It’s up to Leslie Titmuss. He could still stop Fallowfield.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Mrs Vee agreed. ‘That’s why we need to demonstrate. To show Titmuss we mean business.’

  ‘Of course, he has said he’ll stick by the inquiry’s decision.’ Mrs Wilcox was pessimistic.

  ‘Then it’s up to us,’ Mrs Vee said cheerfully, ‘to persuade him to change his mind.’

  Fred remembered his father, in a rare moment of insight, saying that protests and marches might not do much for a cause but they certainly made the people who took part in them feel better. He also wished that Jenny had managed to preserve her loyalty to the group and they could have talked, stood together under the trees, held candles, sung songs or done whatever else came into their minds. These thoughts he immediately recognized as fantasies and did his best to dismiss them.

  It hadn’t taken Jenny long to learn all she needed, and far more than she wanted, to know from her friend, Sue Bramble. Sue might have been capable of years of silent deception but she couldn’t lie when asked a direct question by her friend.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s true. Would it be pointless to say I’m sorry?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny told her. ‘Quite pointless.’

  ‘You were always special to Tony. Absolutely special,’ Sue said after a long and hopeless silence. ‘I’m sure it didn’t make any difference to his feeling for you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jenny felt she was in a dream from which there was still, perhaps, some hope of waking up. ‘I don’t know what difference it made. But I do know’ – here she was certain – ‘something’s changed. Changed for ever.’

  ‘It’s useless to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I’m truly sorry you had to find out.’

  Jenny thought that if it hadn’t happened, it wouldn’t have been there for her to find out. But that wasn’t the point either.

  ‘What’re you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know at all.’

  ‘But you can’t go back to Leslie?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘Not to a man who sets on detectives.’

  The detectives were the worst part about it. It was the thought of detectives, shadowy men in macs, Jenny imagined, lying in wait for her, thumbing through her past and Tony’s, which had turned a quarrel into a nightmare.

  ‘You’ll stay here tonight, anyway?’

  ‘No.’ Jenny looked at her friend. ‘No, I don’t think I can.’

  ‘Because you can’t forgive me?’

&
nbsp; ‘I don’t feel I can do anything yet.’

  ‘Then I’ll move out somewhere. You can stay here on your own.’

  ‘No. I’ll go now, honestly. I need to think.’

  ‘Can’t you think here?’

  Jenny looked round the flat and thought of all it had meant in their long friendship.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can.’

  When Jenny left Sue Bramble, she couldn’t make up her mind about anything, even where to go next. She thought of going to a hotel, and then decided against turning up without luggage at almost two in the morning. During her time with Leslie she had lost touch with London and there was no friendly front doorbell she felt she could ring. She stayed in the car because it was warm, because its familiar shell protected her and because driving was, after all, some sort of occupation. She travelled at random, taking turnings without thinking, until she found herself by the river. She drove along it and saw Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which made her think of Leslie and then she accelerated, wanting to put him out of her mind.

  Then she was in the City, finding herself among tall banks and office buildings, places where her previous life had never taken her. The streets were silent and deserted, as in a town that has been evacuated in time of war, but the area was so strange to her that she was lost immediately and took turnings which brought her back, after a long detour, to the river again, so she was driving in aimless circles. At last she turned northwards, through streets which were still alive with drunks and minicabs waiting outside all-night discos and couples quarrelling, and, somewhere in Kilburn, two gangs of teenagers chasing each other across a wide road. She saw bottles thrown and heard glass breaking. Later it was quiet again, among rows of sleeping houses with cars parked in front of small, trim gardens, decorated with plaster lions and sundials. She turned by a sign to a motorway, not caring particularly where it led her.

  Jenny drove in the slow lane and container lorries surged up behind her, flashed their lights angrily and lurched past. After a while she pulled into a service area, parked and sat for a long time before she felt she dared get out of the car.