An Eligible Man Read online

  An Eligible Man

  FOR TONY

  I’ve travelled the world twice over,

  Met the famous: saints and sinners,

  Poets and artists, kings and queens,

  Old stars and hopeful beginners,

  I’ve been where no-one’s been before,

  Learned secrets from writers and cooks

  All with one library ticket

  To the wonderful world of books.

  © JANICE JAMES

  Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to herself, “because of his great wig.”

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Acknowledgement

  Lines from “Memory”, by Trevor Nunn, incorporate lines from Eliot poems and are reprinted from Cats: the book of the musical with words by T S Eliot, with the permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgement

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also on Ebook by Arcadia Books

  Copyright

  “WOO-WAANG, woo-wing, nong chow baah! Woo-waang, woo-wing, nong chow baah! Woo-waang, woo-wing, nong chow baah! Woo-waang, woo-wing, nong chow baah! Woo-waang, woo-wing, nong chow baah.”

  On Christmas Day, His Honour Judge Christopher (Topher) Osgood sat wedged between two other members of his group in the sub-zero temperature of Beijing airport, where he had been for the past six hours. Huddled in his padded anorak, his Friendship Store hat (made of what he strongly suspected was cat) ear-flaps down, on his head, he warmed his hands round a cracked mug of green tea and listened to the unfathomable announcement that came with monotonous regularity over the public address system.

  Topher closed his eyes. He had been up since five-thirty. The bus had broken down on the way to the airport, forcing them all to stand – like a crowd of extras in a scene from Doctor Zhivago – in the soft white flakes of snow that drifted down from a black sky. Delilah, eleven years old, the youngest member of the party, who had attached herself to Topher for the duration of the tour, dug an elbow into his ribs.

  “‘Why does the bicycle sleep all the time?’”

  Rousing himself, Topher looked out of the window at the iced up Ilyushin immobilised on the bleak landscape of the runway.

  “Why does the bicycle sleep all the time, Delilah?”

  “Because it’s ‘two tyred’!”

  “I would never have thought of that.”

  Bored with the enforced activity of the long wait, Delilah fiddled with the strands of hair which straggled from under her fluffy white beret. She had bought it in a market in Shanghai, since when it had not left her head.

  “‘What time do you go to the dentist?’”

  “Leave the judge alone, Delilah,” her mother’s potent Brisbane accent reproved the child. “He wants to sleep.”

  Topher closed his eyes again.

  He did not want to sleep.

  He wanted to think how it was that he had come to be spending Christmas Day, chilled to the marrow (despite the thermal vest Lucille had insisted that he wear), holed up in the airport of the capital of the People’s Republic of China with a strange group of Australian school teachers.

  He wanted to discover whether the past year had been a chimera, in which he had been a butterfly thinking he was a man, or if, on the other hand, it had been nothing but a bad dream.

  One

  When Topher Osgood opened his drawer and saw a rectangular empty space next to the dwindling pile of socks where his clean pyjamas should have been, he knew with sickening certainty that his wife had died.

  That he was a supreme example of male chauvinist piggery – according to his surviving family, his daughters, Chelsea and Penge – he accepted. In his day a chauvinist had been one prone to an exaggerated and bellicose fondness for one’s country, and chauvinism was not even remotely concerned with one’s expectations of finding freshly laundered and folded linen in one’s closet. The addendum of the farm animal, renowned for its unaesthetic lifestyle, its wallowing in the mire, was downright offensive. But then were so many of the epithets to which one was currently exposed. Only last week in his court a defendant had removed his denim jacket and appeared before Topher in a tee-shirt which had exhorted him (he took the instruction personally) to “Fuck Off”. He had refused to hear the case.

  It was not only the expectation of clean pyjamas but the assumption of specific night attire which dated him. When Chelsea and Penge had lived at home, unlike their mother who had a selection of attractive floor-length gowns soft to the night-time touch, they had appeared newly risen from their beds in, it seemed to Topher, a random selection of whatever garments happened to be nearest to hand when they crashed out. There was no such thing as a peignoir, and certainly not a slipper, a disaffection they shared with their cavalcade of partners. Real men did not wear pyjamas.

  The patch of emptiness in the drawer next to the socks reflected exactly the hollow area experienced by Topher in the region of his viscera. Since Caroline had died there had been a numbness within, a barren sensation which he would have been hard put to describe. Unpleasant as it had been, it was as nothing compared with the new awareness which now struck at what he could only imagine, in a confusion of metaphors, was his cerebral solar plexus.

  There had always, since his marriage, been supplies of clean pyjamas, as there had been of clean shirts and bath towels. Buttons, where appropriate, had been firmly attached. He had been amazed to discover recently how fragile was their tenure. It was not that Topher was unworldly. Nor other worldly. He had, despite what Chelsea and Penge had to say, moved with the times. Domestic help was not what it had been and he had often given Caroline a hand. When she was tired as she had been sometimes of late, her deposits of youthful energy dwindling, he had done whatever was required of him. But when the cancer had come, like a thief in the night, to spirit her away, he had been totally unprepared.

  Death had of course been discussed. In practical terms it had been anticipated. Equal shares of their worldly goods to Chelsea and Penge, notwithstanding their unsuitable liaisons. The only exceptions were the Chippendale mirror, to which Chelsea had a particular attachment (Topher shuddered to think where it would fit in the Wapping warehouse) and the Sheraton cabinet which Penge had had her eye on ever since they had brought it back from the King’s Road.

  When the subject came up, both he and Caroline had each declared their certainty that they would go first. In their heart of hearts neither of them, convinced of his own mortality, believed it. In the manner of most people who at some time or another imagined their loved ones dead, Topher had on occasion pictured himself a widower. Or thought he had. He had seen Topher Osgood, an object of both sympathy and pity, mourning his spouse, putting a brave face on things, but otherwise carrying on with his life precisely as he had done before his bereavement. There had even been times, when Caroline had been particularly annoying, that he had momen
tarily relished the prospect of his release from her incursions into his mental privacy or some of her more maddening habits, such as that of tidying up after him so that his clues were removed and he could not remember what it was that he was supposed to have been doing.

  Once, he remembered, before he had been appointed to the Bench, Caroline had accidentally thrown out his next day’s brief. He had had to run along the street in his dressing-gown after the dustcart. Fortunately it had been in the days before a mechanical grinder masticated everything that was hurled into its revolving maw.

  He thought he had been prepared, but the obscenity of death, when it visited so unexpectedly, so swiftly, caught him totally unawares. There had been nothing the matter with Caroline, who normally waged an ongoing battle with the scales, except that she was off her food. The minute amounts she did manage to eat disagreed with her. The doctor, whom on Topher’s insistence she consulted, had at first prescribed antacid tablets, then an X-ray, by which time Caroline was scarcely eating anything at all. The surgeon, to whom in due course she was referred, diagnosed a blockage. Waiting for her to come back from the operating theatre, Topher had passed the time wondering where he would take his wife to convalesce. The South of France, although indisputably south and therefore warm, had never been, either in his opinion or Caroline’s, France. Jamaica was too far, and Madeira too dull. Ecuador and the nearby Galapagos Islands, which was of special interest to Caroline and on their list of places to visit, was appealing, but she would be tempted to chase after frigate birds or blue-footed boobies. The Costa del Sol was the Costa del Sol. Greece perhaps. Turkey possibly. He was bogged down in Bodrum when the surgeon came into the ante-room where Topher was waiting.

  “Your wife is still in ITU.”

  It was no more than Topher had expected.

  “We opened her up.”

  The man seemed to be preoccupied with a fly, left over from the summer, buzzing against the window pane.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.”

  Topher smiled, sensing some joke. The man was having him on.

  “The tumour has obstructed the pylorus and metastasised to the liver.”

  “How long…?” Topher began.

  The surgeon shrugged. “A couple of months at the outside.”

  “How long will she be in intensive care?” Topher said irritably, as to some barrister who had wilfully misunderstood him.

  “Only until her blood pressure settles. Probably by the time you’ve had a cup of coffee, she’ll be back on the ward.”

  “She’s all right though?” Topher said.

  “She’s over the operation.”

  Caroline had always been strong. She had never been in hospital other than to give birth to the children.

  The surgeon looked at his watch. Topher accepted that his time was up. He had his own methods of indicating that an interview was at an end. He would put both hands on his desk and lean forward. “Well,” he would say. “Well.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  Topher understood. The surgeon was a busy man. He was a busy man himself.

  “I shall go and have a cup of coffee. As you suggest.”

  When Penge, in her fake leopard coat, had flung her arms round her father’s neck and sobbed and sobbed – she had always had exhibitionistic tendencies – Topher had comforted her, as he had when as a child she had fallen from her tricycle or come face to face with some imagined bogeyman in the night. Chelsea, as was her wont, had been more restrained. Caroline herself, after her discharge from hospital, had been unpredictable. She vacillated between falsifying the scales in the opposite direction from usual, to convince Topher that she was gaining weight (or at least maintaining it), and being realistic beyond endurance. He was to be sure to sell the house, she said in one of the latter phases, it was far too large for two, let alone for one. A small flat would suit him very nicely. And he was to dissuade Penge should she dream of throwing in her lot permanently with that highly unsuitable young man she was living with. And she was sorry to leave her affairs in such a mess, she had been meaning for years to go through her papers. And he was not to hesitate to re-marry. There was no question of disloyalty. He simply would not be able to cope on his own. He never had been able to. She even proposed possible successors, suggesting females with whom even in extremis Topher could not imagine having a relationship.

  The discussions embarrassed him. He tried to change the subject. To the vexed and hypothetical topic of the convalescence; the roses which were still budding in the exceptionally mild December; possible delicacies in the way of nourishment he should suggest to Chelsea, who had moved back temporarily into her old room in order to look after her mother. Once only, unable to continue with the façade she had herself erected, Caroline had wept. Her despair discomforted Topher even more than did her bravado. She did not want to die. Before she got her free bus pass. Before she had grandchildren. Before she had written the definitive book on British birds for which she had been collecting material for the past ten years. Why me? She asked with uncharacteristic naïveté, as if she had somehow behaved badly and had been singled out for punishment. It was not a simple question to answer. Topher did not believe in the prosperity of the righteous and the ultimate frustration of the wicked; that either the floods and earthquakes of the Old Testament or the present day scourge of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was the result of Divine retribution, the judgement of God upon human sin. Fortunately his wife’s soul searching did not last long, and the familiar stoical Caroline, with whom he was more at ease, reasserted herself.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Shakespeare died when he was fifty-two. Mozart was only thirty-five. And look at Siegfried Sassoon!”

  On one dreadful afternoon, Topher shuddered when he thought of it, Caroline had suddenly screamed as loud as she was able: “I do not want to die! I do not want to die!” She repeated the words over and over until she became quite hysterical. Unable to calm her, Topher had left the house and gone for a walk, her anguished voice in his ears.

  Sometimes Caroline turned her face to the wall and would not speak at all. It was hard to keep up with her changes of mood. It was a confusing time. Chelsea kept him sane. She was an existentialist. After the first tears she ran the house – when she came back from producing her programmes at the BBC – and looked after her mother with philosophical efficiency.

  Topher did not care for the “when I’m gone” conversations. They made him uneasy. Adjustment to the situation needed time. Looking at Caroline, as her flesh dissolved and her bones assumed excessive prominence in her haunted face, there seemed to be precious little of it left. Much of it was spent playing what seemed to Topher was a ghoulish game of make-believe having to do with Caroline’s diet. She could not stomach meat. The sight of fish made her ill. Vegetables would not go down and bread stuck in her throat. Chelsea did her best with mushes of ground rice and semolina, proprietary weight-gain mixes, and puréed soups, most of which ended up down the sink. The three of them put their heads together on a daily basis to discuss what might be managed. The fact that Caroline’s digestive system had more or less packed up was not mentioned. As her cheeks hollowed, her abdomen swelled. Caroline put the latter down to wind. Topher averted his eyes from the shiny drum which had once been the tolerably flat planes of his wife’s stomach. Even in her mid-fifties she had been a good-looking woman. Statuesque. It was what had first attracted him to her in the Union at Cambridge, when she had stood up to oppose his motion, culled from Trevelyan, that “Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.” That Caroline’s physique had been instrumental in advancing his career Topher had no doubt.

  “I am Caroline Osgood,” she would introduce herself, drawing herself up to her full five feet eleven inches, “wife of Topher Osgood the well-known criminologist.”

  In the early days of their marriage, soon after Topher had been called to the Bar, where as the most juni
or pupil in his chambers he had twiddled his thumbs waiting for the odd crumb of a brief to come his way, Caroline’s description of him had of course been a downright lie. She did not confine her declaration to social or professional gatherings. She broadcast his name and qualifications abroad in such unlikely places as the local fishmonger’s and Harvey Nichols’ hosiery department. Whether it was his wife’s persistence or his own aptitude, Topher was never quite sure, but in what seemed no time at all he progressed from thumb twiddling to being one of the most feared and sought after prosecutors at the criminal Bar.

  While advancing his career with disconcerting tenacity at every opportunity, Caroline did not altogether approve of it. She was invariably on the side of the defendant (whom she often mistakenly considered to be the underdog) and would have been happier had Topher confined himself to defending those she considered to be the hapless victim of circumstance. They had an ongoing argument in which Topher cited a conglomerate of murderers, rapists, arsonists and others whom Caroline, with her unique disregard of logic in all its forms, equated with the various species of threatened wildlife on which she was an expert. When, through Topher’s instigation, some enemy of society was removed from the contemporary scene for periods coinciding with Her Majesty’s pleasure, Caroline’s lips would tighten with disapproval. Later, when it was her husband who did the sending down, the lip-tightening became more manifest.

  They had been together for a long time. Interminable by present day standards, when any minor aberration, any unlooked-for disharmony, any pinprick of marital discord, sent the protagonists rushing headlong for the divorce courts. It had not been roses all the way. God forbid. Topher had always been attractive to women. Caroline had said it was the irresistible combination of impeccable manners and bedroom eyes. There had been the matter of Muriel Mills, a nubile law student, whom he had coached to supplement his income after Chelsea was born and Caroline had been engaged in the nursery. The tuition had necessitated a certain proximity. When Topher had accidentally touched Muriel’s summer arm, a charge of electricity had passed between them and they had ended up in bed.