Harry Andrews was found not guilty of attempting to steal a lady’s handbag from the public house in Covent Garden. The verdict was unanimous. Topher could only surmise that the jury had been swayed by the allegations of police brutality made by the defendant. By and large, officers of the law were honest. When they were convinced, however, that a defendant was guilty (no matter how trivial the offence), they were quite capable of bending the rules.
Judging by the police officer’s expression as Harry Andrews left the dock, Topher felt sure that it would be only a matter of time (and a little leg-work on Sergeant Bullock’s part) before the two of them met again.
He had been sitting at Southwark for a month when he was woken one morning by the doorbell from a deep sleep in which he had been dreaming of Sally Maddox. Sally, draped in marble, had usurped Pauline Borghese from her couch in the Villa Borghese and was holding out her stone arms to him.
Opening the front door to an unfamiliar postman, Topher wondered if the dream had been significant and whether there would be word from the still silent Sally.
“Recorded delivery. Parking fine.”
“Not me,” Topher said smugly.
“Osgood?”
Taking the stub of pencil, Topher signed where requested. He guessed that a mistake had been made. Chelsea was always taking chances in her Renault 5.
The name of the street where the alleged offence had taken place meant nothing to him. The registration number of the offending car was his own. He cast his mind back to the expedition to Marks & Spencer from which he had returned minus his socks. He had always prided himself on the efficiency with which he dealt with his correspondence. He couldn’t think how the ticket, issued by the traffic warden, whom he now recalled quite clearly, had been overlooked. He wondered what he had done with it. It was certainly not in the car.
Padding across the parquet in his bare feet, he looked for his winter overcoat in the closet at the back of the hall. Caroline’s wellingtons, her parka, and her ancient leather gardening jacket had been missed by Chelsea and Penge. There had been times lately when Topher did not think of Caroline. When the intimacies of their life together seemed to belong to an earlier civilisation. At moments such as the present one, he was assailed by a trenchant recollection of things past. The leather jacket, an unusual extravagance for Caroline, took him back – an archaeologist with a forgotten shard – to Paris, and the wedding anniversary (he could no longer remember which one) for which it had been bought. It had been pelting when they left London and they had worn their raincoats. It wasn’t until they were flying over the English channel that Caroline discovered she had left her new jacket on the bed. The incident had coloured the weekend. Caroline would not be mollified. The celebration had been only a qualified success. Topher had done his best to understand her disappointment, to reassure her that she looked fetching in her macintosh. She refused to be placated and they had, he remembered, almost come to blows in the Jeu de Paume.
Perhaps there had been a kernel of truth in the words of Lucille from Bingley. Marriage, even to Caroline, had not always been a moonlit trip down the Grand Canal in a gondola. Searching through the pockets of his winter overcoat, he thought that even at its very worst, when the waters had been turbulent, and the moon decidedly skulking behind a cloud, matrimony was, without question, preferable to the arcane existence he was now leading. Extracting from his pocket nothing but a half-eaten packet of Polo mints, a soiled handkerchief, and a fistful of silver which he kept for the evening newspaper, he put the oversight of the parking ticket down to his equilibrium having been so savagely shaken by Caroline’s death.
The day at Southwark was uneventful. The novelty of HMS Belfast beneath his window was beginning to wear off. Squeers, with his obsequiousness, was getting on his nerves.
In order to defer the onset of the prolonged evening at home, he had taken, after court, to going to his club. No sooner had he arrived, however, than he was assailed by a profound disinclination to enter into conversation with anyone who might address him.
He had adopted several ploys to fill the arid hours at the nether end of the day. Sometimes he thought that they would never pass. He had tried the commercial theatre. It not only frequently disappointed, but entailed the tedium of finding somewhere to park, a descent into the bowels of the Soho earth, and the necessity of bobbing up and down from one’s seat every few minutes to allow latecomers to pass. The National Theatre was more rewarding, but when the mailing list arrived he found himself unable to commit to far-off dates and times and preferred parts of the auditorium, and let the whole exercise go by default. The programmes were stacked up on top of the fridge beneath the whisky bottle.
He had tried the films, both alone and with Penge, but the cinema seemed to address a culture with which he did not associate himself. Music, as therapy, had come out tops. He preferred to listen in the comfort of his own home.
A reading of the poetry of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, on Radio Three, heard by chance when he was timing his boil-in-the-bag kipper, had recently given him a new interest. With Latin as his first love he had no knowledge of, and thought he had no interest in, the Russian language. Listening to The Covetous Knight, read in the original, followed immediately by the English version, made him realise what he might be missing. Through his battles with Horace, he had always been aware of the pitfalls of translation, He decided, nonetheless, to dispose of an hour each evening, with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar, getting to grips with Pushkin. When he succeeded in reading the lyrical Pyeryedo mnoy yavilas ty, “Before me didst appear thou”, he almost danced for joy. As the evenings progressed he became convinced that no British horse ever galloped as poetically as did Peter the Great’s – kak budto groma grokhotanye – and that no lovelorn English maiden’s heartache could match her Russian counterpart’s tryepyetanye.
He was struggling with Autumn when the telephone distracted him.
Hearing the unfamiliar voice of a woman, his first thought was that Sally Maddox had returned from Ireland.
“Sally?”
“This is Jo…”
He was about to tell the caller that she had the wrong number.
“Jo Henderson. We met at Southwark.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry. I was expecting… How did you…?”
“Squeers gave me your number. I went off with your pen.”
A Gold Cross. Initialled. A present from Caroline. He had thought it lost.
“I found it in my handbag. What would you like me to do?”
While Topher was considering the matter she said: “Look…”
She meant listen, Topher thought.
“…why don’t you come over here for a drink?”
There was no reason at all why not. Topher did not need to consult his diary. A day a week ahead was fixed. Six o’clock at Lowndes Square.
“By the way,” Jo Henderson said, “how long did you give your fellow for nicking handbags?”
Topher remembered his assurance that Harry Andrews would be condemned “without a shadow of a doubt”.
“The jury found him ‘not guilty’.”
Hearing a laugh from the other end of the phone, he realised that there had not been too much laughter lately in his life.
He had settled down again with Pushkin when the telephone rang for the second time.
“Hallo?”
“Hallo.”
A woman’s voice. He was not going to make a fool of himself again.
“Christopher?”
There was only one person who called him Christopher.
“This is Sally. Sally Maddox. I did ring from Ireland but your cleaning lady told me you were in Yorkshire. Then I got bogged down with work. Are you alone?”
“Apart from Pushkin.”
Topher disillusioned her. Sally Maddox asked him how he had been keeping. She sounded as if she cared. The author of An End to Dying seemed less threatening than the Sally Maddox who had groped him at the Gordons’. He found himself accepting, even with some enthusiasm, her renewed invitation for tea in Kentish Town. His diary began to look less boring. When Sally’s call was followed by that of Tina, on the line from Bingley, he was able to reassure his sister, in all honesty, that he was very well thank you and that he had plenty to occupy him.
It wasn’t until after lunch on Saturday that he realised he had lost Sally Maddox’s address. He remembered making a note of it after the dinner party, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where it was. He dialled April’s number, then remembered that she and Marcus had gone up to Oxford to visit John. The telephone book revealed an S Maddox in SW19, a Stuart Maddox in E5, Maddox Salon de Lingerie in W1, but no Maddox, Sally, in Kentish Town. He had been looking forward to his visit. He had stopped at Books Etc. in Fleet Street, on his way to the Law Courts, to buy a copy of An End to Dying with the intention of asking Sally Maddox to sign it. Waiting for his change, and for the novel to be wrapped, his attention was caught by John Gould’s The Bird Man. He picked up the book and turned over the laminated pages, but was unable to focus on the plumed partridge, the white-fronted falcon, the toco toucan with its great orange beak, because his eyes were filled with tears.
Surrounded by the ordered chaos in his study (into which Madge was forbidden to venture with her Hoover), Topher tried to recall what he had done with Sally Maddox’s address. He had always been a hoarder but had been delivered from his own excesses by the fact that Caroline liked to throw everything away. The sea of papers with which he was now surrounded was not entirely his fault. He could scarcely be blamed for the deluge of junk mail beneath which he was in danger of sinking. With every post, unsolicited printed matter – from within the folds of which fell further printed matter – came through the letterbox. Each day he was persuaded of the futility of his existence without a Welsh miner’s lamp, simulated pearls, an embossed press for stationery, or a polyester djellabah. He was exhorted to send away for mini-computers of the most daunting complexity, sides of oak-smoked salmon and flea collars for the dog. The credit card companies were only partially responsible for this effluent. Personal Lucky Numbers, attached to catalogues of household goods or thermal underwear, advised Topher that he might already have won thousands of pounds. Names of previous winners – Piddlesden and Wigglesworth – living in places one had never heard of, did little to reassure.
As if all this were not enough, there was the recent addition of gratuitous property magazines offering houses with indoor swimming pools and “his” and “hers” jacuzzis, and a confetti of visiting cards promising 24-Hour Messenger Services, Radio-Controlled Taxicabs, and rogue plumbers. Somewhere beneath this accumulation lay Sally Maddox’s address.
Topher began, half-heartedly, to throw some of the detritus into the waste-paper basket. He then decided that it might be more useful to sit down and think the matter out. It had been the day after April’s dinner party when his assailant had phoned him. He had been sitting in his own court. Mrs Sweetlove. Possession orders. Mr Biswas and Mr Archibald. Two girls with coloured hair. A breach of contract, after which he had gone straight home to an empty house. A deserted hall in which he had remarked the lack of flowers. The welcome sound of the telephone bell. He had been expecting Chelsea or Penge… He got up from his chair and crossing to the bookcase picked up a back number of Counsel. “Advertising and the Bar: The Debate Begins”. “Bar’s Withdrawal of Credit Scheme – How and why it will work …” He closed the journal and on the back cover, in an almost illegible hand, as if he were not really interested in recording it, was Sally Maddox’s address.