An Eligible Man Read online

  Topher had become so besotted with Muriel that he had contemplated throwing up wife, child, and career, and running off with her to the Great Barrier Reef, the ring of which sounded suitably romantic. If Caroline ever suspected that he had been unfaithful, nothing was said. Paradoxically, it was after that affair was over – Muriel had decided that she was not for the law but for Fine Arts and had left London for Florence – that Topher because overwhelmed with guilt and remorse. It was when he made retribution to Caroline in a number of uncharacteristic ways (including sending her a Valentine card) which asserted his undying love about which she had never been in doubt) that she became suspicious. With his hand on his heart he was able to protest his innocence, although it was a long time before he could dismiss from his mind the image of Muriel, who discarded her inhibitions with her petticoats, from his more restrained and legitimate couplings.

  If Caroline had ever been unfaithful, Topher had not been aware of it. There was a period when she had taken to playing squash – from which she returned with an unaccustomed glow which she attributed to the strenuous exercise – when the thought that his wife might have a lover had crossed his mind. Even when she returned one afternoon with the same unmistakable glow, despite the fact that she had left her squash racquet in the umbrella stand in the hall, he did not remark upon it. Her addiction for the sport did not last and nothing was said about its demise.

  Over the years there had been rough waters through which they had had to navigate the thankfully sturdy craft of the alliance forged in reckless youth; sticky patches during which each had threatened to leave the other (despite the fact that the actual mechanics of such a step had appeared so daunting) from which they had managed to extricate themselves more or less unscathed. Caroline was as headstrong as Topher was obstinate. Their polarity extended to patterns of sleep (Topher was the owl and Caroline the lark), travel (Topher had sat on deck reading about the Greek Islands while Caroline explored them) and politics, in which Caroline’s liberal opinions were countered by Topher’s reactionary views.

  There had been a point at which each of them had acknowledged the impossibility of making the other over in his image. The sandpaper of time had softened the sharp edges of the partnership. The disagreements of the latter years had been minor ones. Altercations over whose responsibility it was to renew the television licence, or whether they should take the draconian step of buying new and single beds (Caroline said Topher snored, and Topher accused Caroline of addressing the Cambridge Union in her sleep) had relegated such issues as the powers of the judiciary, and evolutionary theories, on which they held opposing views, to second place. Notwithstanding their differences (which had prevented the relationship from growing stale, had kept them on their toes) their love for each other had prevailed. It had sustained a marriage of which, like foreign travel, one only remembered the good bits. Now it was over. A fact brought home to Topher by the dearth of clean pyjamas.

  It was a phenomenon which he had not encountered for thirty-odd years – not even when Caroline had gone away to give birth to his daughters – and he was not at all sure how to deal with it.

  There was no-one upon whom he could call. Chelsea had gone home to her lover. The Polish help, who had little English and attended two mornings a week, only to clean the floors, was not privy to the secrets of the Osgood washing machine. Topher had previously paid little attention to the contents of his drawers. If he gave the matter any thought at all, it was to imagine that he abandoned his soiled apparel only for it to appear again, clean and folded, by some kind of celestial intervention. Now he associated the miracle very definitely with Caroline. His wife had gone and so had his pyjamas. It was no use standing like an idiot, naked in his dressing room. Something had to be done.

  He opened the dirty-linen basket and surveyed its tightly packed contents with distaste. He would go to bed in his shirt and address the problem, together with the fact that he was down to his last tea-bag, before he went to court in the morning.

  Two

  Topher had never been in a supermarket. Apart from the newsagent’s down the road, and Sweet and Maxwell where he bought his legal books, he rarely went shopping. Since the closing of John Barnes (where you had been able to buy everything from a pin to a Persian carpet), Caroline had sallied forth weekly to Waitrose, from whence she returned with a boot-load of filled cardboard boxes, to the contents of which Topher now wished he had paid more attention. Had it not been for the fact that he wanted to buy some more socks, he would have followed his late wife’s example. He had been forced that morning to put on his white tennis pair, which went ill with his black jacket and striped trousers, and had decided that if he was to keep up his standards he must urgently replenish his hose. He had the suspicion that women did not go about these matters in an entirely practical way. They were conditioned, presumably by the manufacturers of soap powders, to washing socks too frequently when all that was required was more of them. It needed a man on the job.

  He had been reading the letter from his sister, Tina, which reinforced her invitation issued at Caroline’s funeral, to come and stay with her and Miles in Bradford (Bingley to be more precise), when the thought crossed his mind that while Waitrose most certainly sold tea-bags it did not, to the best of his knowledge, carry socks. Folding Tina’s letter, and mentally filing away her hospitable offer, he hit upon a visit to Marks & Spencer, which was on his way to Knightsbridge Crown Court, as the solution to his problem. All his needs could be satisfied in a minimum of time and under one roof. He sluiced his coffee cup and saucer beneath the tap, and dusted the toast crumbs from the table on to the floor. He felt rather pleased with himself.

  He had to feel something. Pleased with himself. Or worried about something. Or immersed in the case in hand – today it was Arsenal and Everton supporters who had had a vicious go at each other on an underground station – to stop himself falling into the abyss of thinking about Caroline. He did think about Caroline. He allowed himself ten minutes a day after he had got into bed. He would lie against the pillows, adhering still to the left side, as if it were not quite right to infiltrate into territory which was not his own, stare at the cheval glass on the far side of the bedroom and recall her.

  The difficulty he had been encountering was that, no matter how hard he tried, he was unable to picture Caroline other than in her last weeks. He had spoken to himself severely. Commanded himself to dwell upon Caroline on holiday, stalking the brent goose or the black-headed gull; Caroline as mother, manhandling the twin pram – Chelsea and Penge had been born within eleven mortifying months of each other – up the steep hill to the Heath; Caroline as author, burning the midnight oil over her Birds of Passage now translated into fifteen languages including Urdu; Caroline in the kitchen, straightening up flushed from the cooker with some succulent meat or familiar pudding between her oven-gloved hands; Caroline as lover, tender and intuitive; Caroline as friend, turning her attention from the winter flight of turnstone or widgeon, to her husband, as he unloaded some legal quandary on to her broad shoulders.

  Try as he would however, channel-hopping like mad through the stations of his mind, he was unable to tune into anything but Caroline’s last illness. The recurring picture he received was of the day before she died. The last time she had spoken to him. Chelsea had gone down to the kitchen to make tea. Two previous cups, cold and white-scummed, stood untouched on the night table. Topher had thought Caroline was sleeping and had watched her gaunt face with a fragmented heart.

  “Topher?”

  It was no more than a whisper, a rush of air from the pillow. He wasn’t quite sure whether his name had in fact been uttered at all.

  “Topher?”

  He crossed to the bed and sat on it, next to the thin stick that was Caroline’s arm. Again the rush of air. And on it something about it being Saturday. Words he could not quite catch. He inclined his head towards hers, stroking her hair.

  “It’s only Thursday, my love.”

 
“Sad…” Caroline said, making an effort.

  “Sad?”

  “Don’t be,” she sighed.

  But it was she who was sad. A tear escaped from the corner of one closed eye and trickled lazily, tracing a crooked path down her face.

  “White walls,” she whispered suddenly. And then more quietly still as Chelsea came into the room with the tea, “White walls.”

  Topher looked at the stripe of the once biscuit-coloured wallpaper. Caroline had never liked white walls.

  Chelsea put the tea down. “I think she said ‘iced water’.” She held a glass to her mother’s lips but Caroline turned her head away.

  “It sounded like white walls to me.”

  But they never discovered whether it was “white walls” or “iced water” because Caroline did not speak again. Only opened her eyes, in which there seemed to be no message, no final communication, to look at Topher for the last time before she slipped into the coma from which she did not awake.

  White walls. After so many years together, it was all he had to cling to.

  There was nowhere to leave the car in the vicinity of Marks & Spencer. Topher had to be in court by nine forty-five at the latest and had no time to crawl round the block in search of a meter. Casting a furtive eye up and down the mews, he parked on a yellow line. Socks first. That shouldn’t take long. In search of them he made his way through Pure New Wool Suits Made in Italy in the midst of which, even at this early hour, foreign visitors were deciding upon the length of a sleeve or the cut of a cloth.

  “Excuse me, Miss.” Topher stopped a girl whose cream overall bore the Marks & Spencer logo, patterned in blue and red. She turned towards him and looked past his right ear.

  “Alison!” she shrieked.

  Topher looked round.

  “Alison!” This time louder. “Alison. AlisON. ALISON.” An earsplitting crescendo. “Can I borrer yer tape measure?”

  Over the shoulder of the coloratura he noticed the sock section. He was making his way towards it when he realised that he had no idea what size he wore. Socks, like lavatory paper and light bulbs, had been one of the minutiae he had left to Caroline. He hadn’t realised that there had been so many of them. He decided to go for colour rather than composition, and vainly searched the fixtures. A girl (Alison?) was flicking the shelves with a feather duster.

  “Do you have any socks in black?” Topher asked reasonably.

  “Not if they ain’t there.”

  “Will you be getting any?”

  The feather duster continued its dance.

  “You can try next week and we’ll know if they’re coming in or they ain’t.”

  No wonder the teachers were striking for more pay, Topher thought, if this was the material they had to deal with. He picked up a three-pair pack of grey socks as being the least discordant beneath his court attire. Unwilling further to distract the young lady, who clearly did not like to be diverted from her dusting, he infiltrated deeper into the store – wondering as he did so what manner of man wore boxer shorts bedizened with Mickey Mouses – searching for someone who would take his money. Two assistants, arms akimbo, seemingly concerned with neither tape measures nor feather dusters, stood in the aisle.

  “Where do I pay?” Topher held his socks aloft.

  “…it wasn’t triplets she was ’avin’…it was twins.”

  Lucky girl, Topher thought. Just then he spied the cash point, which was manned by what appeared to be a perky twelve-year-old wearing a dot of a diamond engagement ring.

  He stood directly in front of her in an attempt to capture her dreamy eye.

  “Queue this side, please!” The stentorian tones came surprisingly from one so slight.

  Topher looked round for the other customers. There was no-one to be seen. Not wishing to upset someone patently doing her job – albeit with an excess of zeal so early in the morning – he obligingly walked the length of the counter and faced smartly about.

  “Woz it cash or woz it charge?”

  Topher’s money and his socks were summarily wrested from his grasp. He watched, mesmerised, as an instrument was slid along the bar-code, and a toccata and fugue played on the buttons of the till. The nymphet delved beneath the counter, from which she produced a slippery green carrier-bag into which she inserted the socks, tore off the ejected receipt on which there seemed to be sufficient data for a degree in higher calculus, counted out change and thrust it into Topher’s hand.

  “There you go!”

  Topher wondered where exactly. Clutching his purchase and feeling sympathy for the fiancé, whose future clearly would be no bed of roses, he asked the little madam, in the split second before she returned to space, if she would be so kind as to direct him to provisions.

  The food department was brightly lit, like some fluorescent Hades. Prime cuts of meat, continental pâtisserie, exotic fruits and unfamiliar vegetables, filled the cornucopiæ of the shelves. Picking up a basket Topher joined the tide of shoppers moving trance-like among the displays. He tried to dismiss the thought from his head that every year millions of children died of hunger-related causes, and that one-fifth of the world’s population was undernourished. That the situation was due to politics rather than economics he was well aware. He doubted whether the pâtés or the persimmons, the monkfish or the moules, which he by-passed in search of tea-bags, would do much to relieve it.

  A woman, inconsiderately trailing a trolley at right angles to her body, obstructed his path to the food cabinets. If he didn’t get out of the place soon he was going to be late for court. The case could not of course be heard in his absence but tardiness was against his principles. When the access was clear, he loaded his basket and hurried across to the tills, before each of which several people waited. He wondered if he should find a sympathetic face and explain his predicament in the hope that he might be given priority. Deciding against it, he attached himself to the shortest line, realising too late that it was the one with the most loaded trolleys. He took it as a personal affront. As if, taking advantage of his ignorance in supermarket mores, he had been duped. He stood impatiently as the customer heading his particular queue requested Car Service. This entailed sufficient provisions for a siege being transferred, in slow motion, by a curly-haired youth, into various bags and boxes. The woman’s place was taken by a pensioner, clumsily manoeuvring a shopping bag on wheels in addition to her wire basket, who watched the flashing figures on the cash register as her goods were rung up with the eyes of a well-trained hawk. Waiting until the grand total was arrived at, she delved into her shopping basket, removed her handbag, located her purse, and with some difficulty extracted twenty pounds. The cashier scrutinised the note, then waved it in the air above her head.

  “Check twenty, Yvonne,” she demanded of her colleague on an adjacent till.

  “What did you think of the trains last night?” was the unexpected response.

  “Not much.” The money was consigned to a drawer. “When I got there, there was a load of Sidcups.”

  A shipment of wine and several dozen assorted items of cocktail savouries – someone must be having a party – was unloaded next. Two more to go. Topher thought that he shouldn’t be more than a few minutes late. He wondered whether he ought perhaps to ditch the contents of his basket among the Buttered Mintoes and the Swiss Mountain Bars and forget the whole thing. He watched, appalled, as a cheque was written out with agonising slowness, a bank card produced from a pack which seemed to comprise every credit card known to man, and two documents scrutinised by both the cashier and an Inspector Clouseau of a supervisor, clearly trained to spot the counterfeitor. The transaction having proved highly successful, only a blonde goddess, wearing a fur coat over a track suit and tapping her foot with an impatience that matched his own, stood between Topher and the cashier. She put the “Next Customer Please” sign in place on the conveyor belt to separate Topher’s goods from her own.

  All went well, and his release seemed to be in sight, until it came to w
hat he thought was a papaya. Unless it was a mango. The checkout girl did not seem too sure. She turned the misshapen object over and over in her hands, as if she were working out the sum of the sides of the square on its hypotenuse, and studied the price list in front of her. Holding the fruit aloft, preparatory, Topher thought, to hurling it into some imaginary goal, she let out a cry.

  “D’yer mind findin’ out ’ow much this is for us, Mandy?”

  “Perhaps I could just…” Topher indicated the cash he had ready (no dilatory fumblings for His Honour Judge Osgood) before he realised he had spoken out of turn. There would not be, could not be, any dispensations. A transaction in progress could not be interrupted, not without throwing the microchips, if not the entire store, disastrously out of kelter.

  Mandy, he thought, whilst dribbling down the left wing with the papaya (or was it a mango?), must have gone for her coffee break, or at the very least a jog around the department.

  “Ninety-five,” she announced on her eventual return, to the relief of all concerned. Action, which had been temporarily consigned to limbo, was resumed.

  When it came to his turn, Topher was the very model of efficiency. He assisted the passage of his Cream of Tomato from conveyor belt to counter, receiving a glare for his pains. He tendered the exact money and smartly packed his provisions. Picking up his carrier he resisted the temptation to look to those behind him for applause. There was nothing to it. If it were left to him he would re-organise the whole department, change the system. All it needed was a little common sense and some time-and-motion studies. He might write a letter to The Times about it, with the suggestion that a single queue, as it did in the more enlightened banks and post offices, should feed the first available cashier. Resolving on future occasions, the prospect of which he did not relish, to avoid positioning himself behind the elderly, the overloaded, or those with exotic fruit, he made his way to the escalator.