“Are you all right, Your Honour?” Mrs Sweetlove set his apple juice on the desk. “You look tired.”
“Perfectly all right,” Topher barked. Seeing his usher flinch, he added more gently: “I’ve a bit of a headache.”
It was of course a lie. From Mrs Sweetlove’s remark he gathered that the effects of his afternoon with Lucille at the Mount Royal were reflected in his face.
Lucille had hung the “Do Not Disturb” notice outside the door. As she did so, something within Topher had snapped. It was as if all the nights, all the days, all the loneliness which he had experienced in the past months, had become focused into a single sensation of anguish. He had pulled Lucille towards him. There had been a pause during which Lucille had removed her false eyelashes and put them on the dressing table. What happened next he was not absolutely sure. When it was all over, not only the king-sized bed but the room itself looked like a bomb had hit it. He was lying with his feet on the pillow, gazing shamefacedly at Lucille. Her mouth was bruised, her lipstick had patterned her cheek, and she had been crying black mascara tears. Topher braced himself for her just reproach.
“I was wondering should we cut in to Tina’s fruit cake,” Lucille said. “I’m starving!”
Over the fruit cake, which they had eaten in crumbling chunks from the tin, Topher had apologised for his unbridled behaviour.
“Will you forgive me?” He stroked Lucille’s freckled arm.
“Whatever for?” Lucille, sitting up beside him, picked out a glacé cherry and popped it into Topher’s mouth.
Topher was silent. He knew that absolution would have to come from himself.
After the fruit cake he had fallen into an exhausted sleep. When he woke up, Lucille was sitting on the bed, watching him.
“Feeling better, love?”
Topher felt as if he had been reborn. He had showered and dressed, and taken Lucille down to the coffee shop for breakfast. At the table Lucille had put her hand, with its long red nails, over his.
“Don’t feel badly,” she said. “There’s nothing like a good…”
“Lucille!” Once more in control of himself, Topher looked round to see if anyone was listening, but the coffee shop was empty.
“You are a card.” Lucille winked at him. “But ever so nice.”
Driving away from the Mount Royal, Topher thought that “nice” was not an epithet which he would, in the circumstances, have applied to himself. He had behaved abominably. It was just as well that Lucille was to catch the early morning train back to Bingley.
He was waiting at the lights, at the junction of Gloucester Place and Marylebone Road, when he remembered his impending grandfatherhood. Anxious to give the lie to what he hoped would turn out to be idle speculation, he made not for Hackney, where Penge herself could admit or deny the allegation that she was pregnant, but for Wapping.
Chelsea was watching a re-run of Citizen Kane. She expressed her surprise that her father was visiting her twice in one week.
“There’s half a pizza in the oven,” she said. “It might be a bit dried up.”
“I’ve just had breakfast.” Topher saw Chelsea’s mouth drop open. “I mean dinner.”
She looked at him suspiciously.
“It’s about Penge,” Topher changed the subject.
“What about her?”
“Don’t you know?”
Chelsea’s face was blank. The two girls had always stood by each other.
“Is she all right?”
“As far as I know.”
“You know what I mean, Chelsea.”
“Do I?”
Orson Welles, alias Charles Foster Kane, alias Randolph Hearst, was running amok in the boudoir of his estranged wife.
“Can’t you turn that thing off?”
Obediently Chelsea pressed the button on the remote control. The picture faded. “Something bugging you?”
“Penge is pregnant. That’s what’s bugging me.”
“Did she tell you?”
“It’s perfectly obvious,” Topher lied.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to stop playing games with me.”
“Don’t you think you should be discussing this with Penge?”
“You’re the oldest…”
“Father, this is not a communal pregnancy.”
“So it is true?”
“She was afraid to tell you.”
“How long did she think she could keep it a secret?”
“You know Penge.”
As a child Penge had been prone to walk round the house with her eyes closed in the firm conviction that no-one could see her.
“When is she …? How long has she…?”
“Seven months,” Chelsea helped him out.
“You mean…”
“Mummy was too ill.”
A life had ended and a new one was coming into being. Topher acknowledged the poetic inevitability of the situation.
“Your sister is only a child herself.”
“She’s twenty-five.”
“You know what I mean.”
Penge had always been babied. Both by himself and Caroline, and by Chelsea.
“It would have been different if it were you.”
Chelsea looked away. Topher realised that he had been tactless.
“I’m sorry.” He seemed to have spent his day apologising to women. “I should not have said that.”
“I shall never have children.”
Distressed by the despair in her voice, he tried to steer the conversation back to Penge.
“Has she seen a doctor? Is she looking after herself?”
Chelsea, busy with her own thoughts, had clammed up.
“Look, don’t you think all that would come better from Penge?”
By the time Topher had left Wapping it was too late to go to Hackney. A flapping poster on a deserted pavement news pitch caught his eye. NEW AIDS VICTIM. HOLLYWOOD MOURNS STAR. He thought back to Arthur, and their conversation in the kitchen.
“When you’re pulling a bird,” Arthur’s son had said, “you got other things on your mind”. Thinking about Lucille, and his afternoon at the Mount Royal, Topher almost drove the car onto the pavement. HER MAJESTY’S JUDGE LATEST AIDS VICTIM…
When he got home he had had a hot bath. Then headed for the whisky bottle. Then, although it was after midnight, he had phoned Sally.
“Did I wake you?”
“What is it, Christopher?” It was obvious she had been asleep.
He could hardly confess to Sally his fear that, as a result of his licentious behaviour with Lucille, he might have precipitated his own early death.
“It’s Penge. She’s going to have a baby.”
“Congratulations! That’s wonderful.”
He failed to see what was so wonderful about it.
There was silence on the line. Sally was waiting for him to speak.
“I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“It’s not every day you find out you’re going to be a grandfather.”
“Don’t!” Topher groaned.
He had a sudden urge to see Sally. The subject of literature, she had said, is the relation of human beings to each other. It occurred to Topher that it was largely the subject of life too.
“When can I see you?”
“Any time.”
“Tomorrow,” Topher said. “After I’ve spoken to Penge.”
Despite the afternoons exertions, he had been unable to sleep. He had prowled restlessly round the bedroom picking up and putting down Caroline’s silver birds. The swallow and the nuthatch were cold and unresponsive. He replaced them on the table and made for his study.
There was a record already on the turntable. The arm swung smoothly into position.
“Midnight, not a sound from the pavement…”
He did not want to think about Lucille.
“Has the moon lost her memory…”
In his embrace all her bitterness, all her brashness, had disappeared. He had spoken to another Lucille and that other Lucille had answered him.
“All alone in the moonlight…”
“To share, to give, to make other people happy was part of a woman’s nature …”
“I was beautiful then…”
…he couldn’t remember who it was who had said it.
“I remember the time I knew what happiness was…”
“Human beings have no right to be happy, nor should they be.” That was Thoreau.
“…Let the memory live again.”
He had turned off the stereo and slept like a log. Overslept. Now his head seemed disagreeably heavy.
“I’ve got a couple of Anadin in my handbag,” Mrs Sweetlove interrupted Topher’s thoughts. “Mr Sweetlove used to swear by them.”
Topher declined the panacea. With the same gesture he dismissed the usher from his robing room. Mrs Sweetlove did not go away. Topher looked questioningly at her. She was wearing her red fly-away glasses.
“I just wanted to say, Your Honour…”
Topher waited.
The scent of a not very expensive perfume assailed Topher’s nostrils. It emanated from Mrs Sweetlove.
“If there’s anything I can do…”
Topher wondered if Penge’s pregnancy was written on his face.
Mrs Sweetlove swallowed.
“It can get very lonely…”
Topher sat up horrified as he recognised what he suspected was a proposition.
“I appreciate your kindness,” he said, fixing Mrs Sweetlove with a judicial smile and deliberately misunderstanding her, “but I find that the general tendency of headaches is to cure themselves.”
The morning’s case was a paternity suit. A pregnant schoolteacher (ironical) was trying to prove that the man with whom she had had a steady relationship for the past two years was the father of her expected child. The man, a used-car salesman, admitted that although he had indeed had a relationship with the schoolteacher, he was not her boyfriend and he had, in fact, given the plaintiff money in return for her favours. Prosecuting counsel challenged the used-care salesman’s assertion that their affiliation was purely a sexual one, with reference to joint outings to the cinema and the seaside. He was trying to demonstrate, with the help of diary entries, that they had in fact lived together, as a couple, when Topher – who was experiencing some difficulty in keeping his eyes open – had felt himself nodding off. He managed to rescue himself, just in time, from the brink of unconsciousness and, like Dickens’ Mr Justice Stareleight, “immediately looked unusually profound to impress the jury with the belief that he always thought most deeply with his eyes shut”.
“The diary, Your Honour!” Mrs Sweetlove hissed, handing the exhibit up to Topher.
Taking it from her, Topher dismissed from his head The Pickwick Papers, the afternoon with Lucille, and Penge and her pregnancy. He applied himself to the cross-examination of the used-car salesman, and to the case before him.
In the purlieus of North London, on his way to see Penge, Topher remarked the number of upmarket shops which had unexpectedly mushroomed in what had once been a spurned and moribund area. Penge’s street had, so far, escaped the gentrification. The garden of the Victorian house where she had lived for the past twelve months was overgrown and the path was strewn with rubbish. A young man with a black moustache, wearing a plaid shirt and sporting a single earring, answered the door to Topher.
He was taken aback when the fellow said: “You must be Judge Osgood.”
Penge’s bicycle in the hall reassured Topher that he would find his daughter at home.
In the front room the minor poet sat at the table writing. With his pale face, his prematurely receding hair, and his damp hand (which he extended in greeting) he did not look, Topher thought, capable of fathering a child. Having enquired after each other’s health and commented on the weather, both Chad and Topher looked out of the window, which was so grimy that you could scarcely see across the street. The young man in the plaid shirt, whose name was Robert, went upstairs to fetch Penge. She had been washing her hair and came down wrapped in a grey bathrobe which Topher had discarded many years previously and which had once been pale blue. He averted his eyes from the girdle which was tied around Penge’s middle but did not define her waist. Mystified, she greeted Topher and the four of them stood staring at each other awkwardly, as if about to embark on some bizarre quadrille.
Penge broke the silence. “Is everything all right?”
“I wondered if I might have a word with you.” Topher said.
“You’d better come up.”
Contemplating the bedroom – shared presumably with the minor poet – Topher hoped that the house-proud Caroline, from her metaphysical existence, was spared the sight of it. Penge cleared the chair of its tangle of unsavoury looking garments so that Topher could sit down. Blotting her wet hair with a thin towel, she perched on the unmade bed.
“What’s the matter?”
Topher wondered what they used for fresh air.
“I thought perhaps you could tell me that.”
They eyed each other. Topher looking into his mirror image. The resemblance was uncanny.
“Chelsea has been shooting her mouth off…”
“Not at all.”
“Well…?”
Topher was silent for a long time watching Penge dab and squeeze the darkening fronds until they began to turn golden.
“I’m not much good at this.”
Caroline had always dealt with the more delicate situations. Penge put the wet towel on her lap and sat facing him, her hands unconsciously cradling her belly.
“You know.”
Topher nodded.
“Well, that’s a relief. I did try once or twice but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”
“Couldn’t you have done something about it while there was still time?”
“Chad and I have been trying for ages…”
“Are you thinking of…?”
“Having a baby has nothing to do with marriage. We are very happy as we are.”
“You’d be better off with Robert.”
Penge started to laugh. “You can’t be serious!”
Topher recalled the coloured handkerchief spilling from the back pocket of the young man’s jeans, the moustache, the earring. He had opened his mouth to talk about responsibility and commitment, about finances and plans for the future, when he happened to glance at Penge. Her face beneath the long curling strands had the gentle gaze of a Madonna, the unmistakable and indescribable halo of motherhood. He went to sit beside his daughter on the bed. He took her in his arms and felt the damp hair against his face.
“I wanted to tell you,” Penge sniffed into his shoulder. “I thought that you’d be angry.”
That was putting it mildly.
“I wish Mummy was here.”
Recounting the episode later to Sally Maddox, Topher said that it was the minor poet, to whom Topher had addressed himself over a mug of rose-hip tea, who seemed to have the situation in hand. He had enrolled with the Law Society and was going to qualify as a solicitor.
“What made Penge pluck up courage to tell you about the baby?” Sally asked.
“Oh, she didn’t tell me,” Topher said, without thinking. “That was Lucille.”