Paradise Postponed

...so that we read from page to page happily spinning our private speculations about the will and about the past lives of Simeon Simcox and his contemporaries, intrigued by an incongruous word here, an opaquely revelatory touch there...

...and he crowns this first stage in his career by winning the affection of Charlotte (Charlie) Fanner, dumpy, bitter, hysterical daughter of the vapid Lady Grace, who is that most pitiable and lamentable of all female creatures, an aging beauty...

...He studies hard...

...He was the first symptom of the national disease that spread alarmingly and became Leslie Titmuss...

...His method in this novel is to advance and develop by a succession of interconnecting vignettes, the conclusion of one suggesting the subject of the next, even though the succeeding episode may take place in the past, ten or even forty years before the death of the vicar in 1982, its conclusion neatly explicating action in the present—that is, since the death of the vicar, A playwright, Mr...

...he learns accounting himself, working nights at courses in higher finance...

...Lady Grace remarks to Fred, "I was devoted to your father, even though he sometimes looked at me as though he disapproved of my not being black .. ." Lady Grace, who is vain, and capricious, and everything that is shallow, is nevertheless given some of the best lines, especially where concerning her "appalling" son-in-law, "Well, absolutely anything we can do to scupper the toad, Titmuss...

...Leslie becomes the son-in-law of Rapstone Manor, and at the time the novel opens, his star has not only soared politically, he has permitted (there was luck involved here) Magnus Strove to come to ruin, so that he has ended up usurping not only the Strove safe seat in Parliament, but Picton House, their county seat, as well...

...Fred, her younger son, a bachelor country doctor who since schooldays has never got along with the dominating Henry, is if anything even more deeply offended, and his immediate object in life becomes to frustrate Henry's litigation by discovering some sane explanation for his father's strange last testament...

...She much prefers to be cut out of the will than to have her husband's reputation damaged...

...but by this time Fred had conceived a significant affection for her father, whose integrity of unbelief is absolute, and in following Dr...

...Leslie begins his climb out of lower middle-class obscurity by making up to the Rector of Rapstone, cutting the nettles in the vicar's garden for him when his own sons decline the prickly job...

...The Restoration put things to rights...

...it just could be...

...Now that is a heap of complimentary adjectives, obliging me to come up with hard coin...

...Thatcher's reactionary government, which should Reid Buckley is a novelist and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking...

...Brother Henry, meanwhile, had been negotiating the film rights of his first novel with the awful Benny Bugloss, a not tremendously original caricature of the big-talking, loud-mouthed, sleazy film producer...

...His prize is Agnes, who eventually becomes his wife...

...it is on all counts gratuitous...

...He plays this theme against the secret guilt that ultimately is called upon to explain the actions of Simeon, a man who served Karl Marx better than his God, and like Cardinal Woolsey in another connection, lived to regret it...

...He has an eye for the striking visual image...

...Says the contumacious Henry to his second wife Lonnie after the father's burial, "I'd need a miracle to divide one bottle of strictly non-South African, anti-apartheid sherry among all those thirsty mourners...

...and both families, the Fanners and the Stroves, declined by inevitable degrees as the generations succeeded one another, their circumstances shrinking, though one Magnus Strove revived his family's fortunes at the turn of the century by (the ironies are all intentional) buying up slum properties, permitting his son Doughty to lead the comfortable life of a propertied squire...

...T he milieu Mr...

...A skirtchaser in his youth, Doughty becomes by early old age—when we meet him—an almost moot Tory MP of the brainless type, with a burning but secret ambition to be elevated to the House of Lords...

...The saddest thing about Henry is that though he is the person who most astutely articulates the weaknesses of his father, he does so with an absence of compassion, and never leaps to an understanding of related faults in himself...

...It is fitting that the chairman of the county Conservative party should be Sir Nicholas Fanner of Rapstone, tall, dull, and amiable, and that Doughty Strove, descended of Puritans, labors under the delusion that his ambition is being furthered by the scion of ancestral foes...

...Mortimer has chosen for his novel is stock English and a never failing lode for the comic novelist's eyes...

...Mortimer's dialogue is always pithy, in character, and helps define-either the speaker or someone alluded to by the speaker...

...She enthusiastically conspires with Leslie in faking a pregnancy, boldly maneuvering to make it impossible for Lady Grace to whisk her away to the Continent for a discreet abortion...

...Such is John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed, set in rural England between 1948 and 1982 (and now being portrayed in an eleven-part series on PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre"), a story that charms from its opening sentence (" 'I had a disagreeable dream,' the old man said") right through to the romantic epilogue that follows a stylish, ironical, mischievous, and touching denouement after the grand Victorian manner...

...fulfillment of, his own father's activist political dedication, which—contrastingly—sublimated a failure of belief...

...Mortimer's familiar theme is the failed twilight of the Fabian-humanist dream, etiolated England post-Empire and post-Christian...

...This son Henry, a successful novelist, seeks diligently to prove, calling to witness behavior that viewed in hindsight is odd indeed, such as the time when the vicar opened the door to visitors dressed as a woman (he was enacting Lady MacBeth for his boys, but who was to know that), or another time when he entered Rapstone Manor, on his knees, trumpeting, one arm extended in front in imitation of an elephant's trunk, the other held behind to resemble an elephant's tail...

...In his pompous way, Henry announces to Agnes and Fred that he has broken off these negotiations, and thus saved his soul, of which Fred is permitted to wonder privately the whereabouts...

...Agnes eventually became pregnant...

...There are clear hints, also, that she is alarmed by what investigation into Simeon's past might disclose...

...It wouldn't bother him in the least...

...Salter, a crusty agnostic and Simeon Simcox's natural foil...

...Mortimer puppeteers the puzzles of his dense plot with a lawyer's nicety...

...Sim-eon's will is not only dumbfounding...

...Salter on his country rounds discovered in himself a deep commitment to medicine...

...Titmuss is an impossible person, the nakedly ambitious brat of a longtime bookkeeper for Simcox Ales, the family's business, who has schemed his way to riches and political eminence...

...Isn't that right, Jennifer...

...He plots to have Doughty Strove give up his seat in expectation of greater things, thus leaving it open for himself...

...Politically theywere Puritans, who under the parliamentarian banner once invaded Rap-stone Village, seizing the Manor and indulging in much righteous sack, pillage, and rape...

...All right, she says, bitter in her disappointment: but in that case she will need £100 for an abortion...

...My father wasn't much of a man for miracles...

...When still a young man, Fred fell in love with Agnes, beautiful daughter of old Dr...

...I don't suppose he'd've managed it...

...He is endearingly eccentric, also...

...No one, least of all sons Henry and Fred, seemingly widow Dorothy, comprehends this extraordinary behavior...

...much is alleged, implied, suggested, or inferred by everyone without anyone coming right out and saying so) that he seeks unwittingly to displace his natural father...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987...

...The novel revolves on integrity...

...but also, because of his personal defeat, preparing himself to understand, and to pity with no diminution of love or respect, the father who broke faith as well...

...but shortly after his death that charming eccentricity is given a shocking turn when the family solicitor reveals that Simeon has disinherited wife and two grown sons, leaving his estate entire to one Leslie Titmuss, well-named by, his mother-in-law, Lady Grace Fanner, as "toad Titmuss...

...He is determined to make something of himself, to escape the prison of his station, which, even today, in England is not far removed from the permanence of condition implied in Jane Austen's novels...

...By dint of tireless service Tit-muss has, if not ingratiated himself with the executive committee of the local Conservative party (nobody can like Leslie Titmuss), indebted the committee to him...

...Fred tells Agnes he cannot afford to marry her...

...Of Lady Grace, "There [she] sat, with a face dead-white and powdered, a head apparently held up by a choker of pearls and a mouth like a small wound...

...Simcox's divided heart...

...Fred failed to live up to the challenge that Agnes flung at him...

...Dorothy Simcox is affronted by son Henry's suit...

...he keeps the books for, and in time becomes a junior partner of, the commercial real estate development firm founded by the odious Magnus Strove (son of Doughty) and another young toff...

...But when Henry learns of Agnes's fix, he goes back to Bugloss, selling out in order to raise the £100...

...rom this sibling rivalry we discover much about the Rev...

...Simcox gone dotty...

...Rapstone Village is the aristocratic seat of the county, and historically royalist, but the county includes also the village of Skurfield, once part of Picton Principal, whose seat, Picton House, is the property of the Stroves, a gloomy tribe of gentry formerly given to hanging their tenants from an old yew tree...

...n top of this—incredibly, inexplicably—Simeon Simcox bequeaths to Leslie Titmuss his stock in the prosperous Simcox Brewery, income from which has enabled Simeon to live comfortably while indulging in his egalitarian socialist politics...

...moreover, as a minister in Mrs...

...At once the question pops into the public mind: at eighty years of age, had the eccentric Rev...

...he did not dare, and lost, and carried on with an empty aching heart, becoming almost an ascetic in his calling...

...Charlie cannot stand her silly dame, who, she knows, is ashamed of her plain daughter...

...Son of Elsie, once a toothsome parlor maid at Picton House, and still a good-looking woman, the anagramous Leslie may be PARADISE POSTPONED John Mortimer/Viking Penguin/$17.95 Reid Buckley THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 43 a sprout from Doughty's wild oats...

...Mortimer has an acuteear for dialogue...

...A barrister by profession, the many-faceted...

...He was, undoubtedly, a direct descendant of one of those dedicated Skurfield Puritans who attacked Rapstone Manor with crowbars and reaping hooks during the Civil War...

...Leslie is some piece of work...

...He tried to interfere with other people...

...To the indignation of Henry, Fred deserted a march protesting the latest abominations by the South African government to meet with Agnes for an evening of dancing that ended with the double profanation of their making love in the churchyard...

...As for Henry, he in fact compromised his integrity by going Hollywood, abandoning his inherited leftwing beliefs, becoming with time (and the prosperity attending his literary success) a Tory stuffed shirt...

...He has a talent, besides, for summing up a person with telling brevity, as when introducing George Titmuss, awful Leslie's (putative) father: "He spoke in a deliberate and extremely boring voice, which caused his utterances to be dreaded at the meetings of the Parish Council...

...Resolution in the lives of these three people (Agnes, Fred, and Henry) is synchronized with the unwrapping of the mystery of Simeon Simcox's will...

...First-rate compost, spaded into the rich soil of his novel with considerable skill...

...and in reference to a poacher whom she detested, "He got above himself...

...Fred cannot raise the money...

...Both brothers are profoundly wounded by these events, each in his way adumbrating the compromises that their father never reconciled...

...This (preposterous) notion (it begs conceiving that even the House of Lords has fallen so low as to admit a Doughty Strove into its company) is cleverly planted by Leslie Titmuss, the arriviste...

...ten the arguments against the latter...

...This was probably in reaction to, yet also in...

...More committed to preaching the Gospel of the New Jerusalem on earth than the ghostly creed of his calling, he is a popular and admired figure...

...have gagged in his benefactor's throat...

...Of Agnes, Fred's mistress become Henry's first wife, "Shortsightedness added to her habitual expression of ironic contempt, so that she looked as though she were watching a theatrical performance which she had decided not to enjoy...

...The old man in question is Simeon Simcox, Anglican rector of Rapstone parish, widely known as the "Red Rector of Rapstone" for his socialist views...