Mr Toppit (3 page)

“I’m—”

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re Rachel’s brother. Luke Hayseed.”

“Hayman. Actually.”

“Yeah. Cigarette?”

I shook my head.

“We all smoke like chimneys in here. Except Rachel. She’s given up. Given everything up.” He chortled. “I’ve been with Rachel before.”

“Oh? Where?”

“I was at Lakewood for a bit. Near Marlow. When she was there. Like youth hostels, these places. You run into the same people if you’re on the circuit. No, I really liked her.” He looked away with a jerk, and started to bite the nail of his little finger with astonishing ferocity.

I began to get up. “I’d better go back,” I said.

He put out his hand and, with surprising strength, grabbed my wrist. He leaned into me and said softly, “I’ve read the books. All of them. I can quote bits, if you like.”

I wanted to go, but something about him almost riveted me there. “What are you in here for?” I asked.

Sheepishly, he held up his hands, palms out, and like a concert pianist about to play, he pushed his arms towards me so that the shirt-cuffs pulled back. On his wrists there was a mass of vertical scars. “I expect they’ll start on Rachel soon,” he said.

“To do what?”

“They’re not going to put up with her being like a loony for long. See, you’re meant to confront yourself, change your behavior patterns. They break you down. If you like wearing white, they make you wear black. If you like to dance, they make you sit still.”

I heard myself ask, “And if you’ve stopped talking?”

“Oh, they have ways of making you talk.” He threw back his head and laughed so loudly that the group at the other end of the room looked round briefly.

Then he stopped. “I know Toby, too.”

I was confused. “Toby?”

“Toby Luttrell. Who played you. In your TV series. We shared a room at that place in St. Albans.”

“It wasn’t my TV series,” I said.

“I fucked him,” he added conversationally.

The appropriate response to this statement eluded me for a moment. As Matthew stared at me expectantly, I managed to conjure up, “Well, bully for you.” I tried to mold my tone into something smooth and light, although I felt anything but. I felt as if I had stepped off a cliff, but had not yet begun to fall, like a character in a cartoon film. “I have to go,” I said.

He looked me right in the eyes. “You see, I know who Mr. Toppit is. That’s something we have in common.” He smiled as if he had just worked out something rather important. “In fact,” he said, “that’s only one of the things we have in common.”

I got up so abruptly that my chair fell over backwards. “Actually,” I said, “I don’t give a flying fuck who Mr. Toppit is.” I headed for the doors.

“Don’t worry about Rachel. I’ll look after her,” Matthew called to me, and then he shouted, “She’s my
friend
!”

I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but they had the grace to remain at my sides.

I found Dr. Honey’s office at the other end of the corridor. I knocked, and a muffled sound came from inside. He was in the middle of his lunch. On his desk everything had been arranged with mathematical precision—a plastic cup of coffee, a KitKat, a bag of crisps, and a sandwich placed exactly in the center of a square of greaseproof paper, all equidistant from each other. He was probably an expert on obsessive-compulsive disorders.

“I want to take Rachel out of here,” I said.

Dr. Honey nodded slowly. He cleared his throat. “Do you think that should be your decision,” he said, “or hers?”

“I don’t think she’s capable of making that kind of decision,” I said.

“So you think you should do it for her? Impose it?”

“Don’t you impose things here? In this place?”

“As a matter of fact, we impose very little. We try to …” he searched for the word “… 
suggest
a structure under which a patient can confront the issues that concern them. Has something upset you?”

“I’m not upset,” I lied. “I’m worried about Rachel.” I didn’t want to talk about Matthew yet, but I knew I had to come up with something quickly. Dr. Honey had the air of a theatergoer waiting for a late curtain to rise.

“I think some of the other patients are …” And then I paused. I didn’t know how to go on and, to my amazement, the word “horrid” limped out of my mouth, like a straggler at the end of a race.

“Horrid,” he repeated thoughtfully. He turned his head away from me briefly and looked out of the window. Then he swung back, fixing me with his eyes. “This is not an hotel or a health farm. Our patients are not here to improve their table manners. Nor, may I remind you, is it a prison. Anyone, including your sister, may leave when they wish. She is as free to go as you are.”

I struggled on lamely, now forced to play my remaining cards. “Matthew … I don’t know his last name …”

“Sumner,” he said.

I could feel my palms sweating. “He said some really strange things.”

“Strange?”

I tried to lighten the atmosphere. “I don’t suppose you use that as a technical term much here.”

“Not often. No.”

“He seems to be obsessed with these books, my father’s books.” It sounded impossibly feeble. “You know, they’re quite—”

He cut in: “Yes, I know all about them. Obsessed? My goodness, the books are famous. It can’t be a surprise that your
father’s extraordinary creation of Mr. Toppit might strike a chord in someone whose issues stem from an ambivalent attitude to authority figures. You know, Mr. Toppit has an almost iconic significance: his need to be obeyed, his withholding of approval. Naturally Matthew is interested. I doubt if it’s obsession. Personally, I’m a great admirer of the books. They’re as dark as Grimm but not so one-note. We use them sometimes in our group sessions. They’re a surprising link: everyone has such a clear memory of when they first read them.”

“You mean like where you were when Kennedy was shot?”

He smiled wearily. “We aren’t strangers here to the children of well-known figures: film stars, politicians, the corporate world. The burden of an achieving parent can seem formidable,” he said.

I shook my head. “He wasn’t an achieving parent. He just wrote some books.”

“Rachel, if I may say so, seems more comfortable with that than you do.” He arranged a patient look on his face. “Your sister—and please do not take this the wrong way—is not a well person, is not a
functional
person, to use our jargon. She identifies very strongly with the books—perhaps too strongly—but they represent a kind of golden age to her. That’s an area we touched on in many of our sessions the last time she was here. She told me then that she is writing the official biography of your father. Has that progressed? It’s important that she has a project, something that will build her confidence.”

“No, she’s not writing his biography,” I explained patiently. “She went to see the publishers and told them she wanted to do it. They’ve made a fortune from the books so they could hardly say no. If she’s written half a page I’d be surprised.”

“I sense you have a sort of ambivalence about her work. Do
you feel that it might be more appropriate for you to write his biography?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

I couldn’t help laughing as if it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. Which it was. “It isn’t ‘her work.’ It isn’t anything.”

He seemed hurt. “I can’t help feeling you’re competing with Rachel in some way,” he said. “Surely you can both share in the riches—I don’t mean material riches—of your father’s books. His extraordinary heritage, if you will.”

“It’s not about sharing. That’s the problem.” I stopped because I saw something now more clearly than I ever had before. “You’ve read the books,” I said. He nodded. “There’s one omission from my father’s heritage. The books are about me. I am Luke Hayseed. The thing is, there’s no Rachel Hayseed in them. Not a walk-on part, not a guest appearance. How would that make you feel? Don’t you see? She just isn’t … there. Somewhere in that area I think you might locate her issues. That’s why she’s not a functional person, to use your jargon.”

When I went back to Rachel’s room, she was asleep, her head tilted up against the headrest of her chair. I leaned down and kissed her forehead.

As I said, her problems were quite different from mine.

On a spring day in 1981, Arthur Hayman, now in his sixties and lately the author of an obscure set of children’s books, but when younger general factotum to the British film industry in the shape of sometime editor, sometime scriptwriter, and one-time director of the 1948 film entitled
Love’s Capture
, not well reviewed at the time and not remembered precisely as a milestone in the oeuvre of the lead actress, Phyllis Calvert—so tenuously remembered, in fact, that the title, having once been misprinted in a
Festschrift
to its star as
Love’s Captive
, now tended to be referred to, when it was referred to at all, as
“Love’s Captive
(a.k.a.
Love’s Capture
)
”
—was walking through the gardens in the center of Soho Square. It was two minutes before one o’clock on the Monday after the first hot weekend of the year and some of the men lounging on the grass eating their sandwiches had already taken off their shirts. The girls, in short-sleeved dresses or scoop-necked tops, were rubbing suntan lotion on their shoulders and arms, still red from sunbathing over the weekend.

As Arthur walked through the gate at the southern end of the gardens and crossed the road to the top of Greek Street, a church bell struck one. The reverberation of the chime hung in the still air and he looked up, wondering which church it had come from. When he was younger he had spent most of his time in and around Soho. He still banked there—indeed, had just walked past his bank where, in the days before he had had money, the manager would proffer a cup of tea and give
him and the other young men who looked as if they might have promising careers in the film industry one last chance before bouncing their cheques while they waited for the accounts department at Rank or Ealing or Gainsborough to pay the money that would clear, or at least reduce, their overdrafts.

Now he rarely ran into anyone he knew in Soho. Once, in the fifties, he might run into any number of people, normally either leaving the Sphinx Club, heading for lunch somewhere else, or heading for the Sphinx to drink their way through lunch. He would sometimes be sucked into their wake and cram himself with them into the rickety lift, with the peculiar smell and judder, to the top floor where Jimmy the barman would greet them—the greetings somewhat more vociferous for the others than for Arthur—and they would settle down for some serious talk as lunchtime folded into teatime and the sandwiches sat untouched on the tables.

Although Arthur was included because he was—nominally at least—one of them, he knew that his major contribution was to offer news of Wally Carter, one of his oldest friends, who was now a successful director in Hollywood. Occasionally he made it up if he had not heard from him. Actually, he almost never heard from Wally, these days. It was Wally through whom he had met his wife Martha, then Martha Jordan, who had been detached from her long-gestating PhD on the Crusades to do research on a film Wally was planning about Richard the Lionheart. Terry Tringham, who had worked with Arthur and Wally in the old days, was always particularly keen to know what was happening: “How’s Wally? How’s old Wally? Raking it in?
Talented
boy.”

The trouble was, once Arthur had passed on any snippets of information about Wally, he felt he was there under false
pretences. He was, anyway, slightly nervous in either of the two camps that tended to congregate there. He did not feel he had the credentials to be part of the more successful—and significantly smaller—crowd who, if they hadn’t moved on entirely to smarter clubs than the Sphinx, might drop in for a couple of rounds. They had the air of people just passing through for form’s sake, glancing at their watches, which had become slimmer as their stature in the film business had grown, and downing the last half of their gin in one gulp as they murmured, “Got a bit of a lunch,” and headed for the thinner air of Mayfair, knowing they would have walked off their drinks and be clear-headed enough by the time they reached Les A or the White Elephant to be at their best when they met the visiting dignitaries from Hollywood, who had flown over the Pole through the night but were up and running for business by lunchtime.

Nor was he witty or hard-drinking enough to fit in with the gang headed by Terry Tringham, who might pick up the odd editing job on a documentary but had generally given up all pretense of work. Sometimes as the day wore on, waiting for the moment when the conversation had one of its cyclical upswings, Arthur would get up as if to go to the lavatory and, with a glance over his shoulder, go round the corner towards the lift and simply vanish.

As chance would have it, his publishers had a ramshackle office just round the corner from what had once been the club, which was why, many years later, now that he was no longer in the film business, Arthur still came to Soho.

Just after one fifteen, he turned into Meard Street. Standing outside the door of the Carter Press, he pressed the bell and lowered his face to the entryphone in preparation to speak, but the buzzer went immediately, without anyone asking who he
was, and the door clicked open. The receptionist, Stephanie, was eating a sandwich and reading the paper. She looked astonished to see him, as if someone arriving in the office was the very last thing she might have expected on a working day.

He stood awkwardly for a moment, then said, “Would Graham be in?”

She waited before speaking, as if she was deciding whether to answer yes or no. Instead, she hedged her bets: “Is he expecting you?”

“Well, no—not exactly. I was just passing.”

She nodded slowly, as if giving herself time to think, “And you are Mr.…?”

“I’m Arthur Hayman, Stephanie,” he said gently. “I’m …” He moved to the wall and placed his finger on the cover of
Darkwood
, which was framed on the wall below the other four books in the series.