When B came in I gave him his drink and asked whether he’d bid for anything. He went and stared out of the window, emptied his glass and poured himself another without saying a word. By then I knew that something was wrong, but I wasn’t prepared for it when he swung round and asked in his harshest voice why I hadn’t been at the office. I explained about the Petronella piece and was trying to say I thought we’d agreed not to talk about my job, but he went off on another tack, saying that it was pointless for me to write about pictures because I was too stupid to understand anything about them. The only pictures in the flat were a couple of sea-scapes, fishing-boats in rough seas, which I actually liked because they reminded me of a painting in one of the West Wing rooms at Cheadle where I used to hide under the bed to read. I made the mistake of saying so. B said they were rubbish and he was going to get rid of them next day. Then, deliberately I thought, he set about reducing me to tears. I thought he’d decided to ‘boot me out’ but after all that he insisted on going to the play, which turned out dire. He never referred to the incident again. It might almost have been some kind of brainstorm, except that he did get rid of the sea-scapes and next time he came back from Germany replaced them with a horrid little picture of the head of Christ, grey with death, and Mary’s head huddled against it, clumsy and grey with grief. Naturally I didn’t risk saying anything about it, or any of the other pictures and knick-knacks he began to import.
I took it as a warning. I knew it meant something, and I told myself it was his way of making sure I didn’t take my luck for granted. I didn’t, and I suppose that made me enjoy the happiness all the more, so it may have been worth it. (Apart from that it meant that B stopped trying to educate me and when we went to Private Views let me wander about eavesdropping on the perfectly extraordinary things people say to each other in art galleries.) That was the worst time. Usually I could cope with him by treating that part of our affair as a sort of game. If he didn’t like something—a dress for instance—he’d be brusque or even rude about it, and that meant I’d lost a point. If he was pleased he didn’t tell me, but I learnt to know, and scored myself one.
Though I’d signed the publisher’s contract and written and rewritten every comma and read the proofs and so on, somehow I never really believed Uncle Tosh was a real book until the publication party. We held it at the Night and Day offices in Shoe Lane. It was what Petronella would have called a hoot, because everyone seemed to think it was a perfect opportunity to work off hospitality debts, and the list grew longer and longer. We cleared the big middle room but it soon became obvious that that wasn’t going to be enough so I had the cheek to ask Mrs Clarke if we could use hers too, and she said yes. I’d been half hoping that B would subsidise the drinks—the publisher’s budget would have run to about half a glass each—but I couldn’t ask and he didn’t offer. In fact I didn’t even know whether he was coming—during our usual morning telephone confab he’d just said he was meeting someone and might perhaps bring him along. In the end Jack Todd authorised Accounts to help, and I topped up with some of my advance, but we were still short, so Ronnie mixed the drinks.
The drink, I mean. It was take-it-or-leave-it. Apparently left-wing politics make men expert in how to get stoned on a shoe-string. It was mostly Algerian white wine, with Moroccan brandy to give it a kick and a couple of other things to hide the taste and cochineal to turn it bright pink. We told the guests that it had been created specially for the occasion and was called Petronella. Jack Todd had used the party to invite a lot of his lame dogs—quite well-known names, some of them, in an is-he-still-alive sort of way—which gave the occasion what Tom called a certain cobwebby literary cachet. It made me giggle to see those mottled noses sniffing warily into their glasses, though I heard one of the old boys mutter that at least it was a bit stronger than what publishers usually produced.
Then the publicity man at the publishers had said it would be a good idea if I got some real debs along—the Susans, he nicknamed them. I chose ones who looked the part and could talk Petronella. One of the things that had happened during the summer was that she’d really caught on. For instance Selina had come back from a weekend in darkest Worcestershire and told me that two girls had physically fought over Night and Day when it arrived because they wanted to see whether Petronella had come up with anything new for them to work into their repertoire. Some of the Susans could talk Petronella for twenty minutes non-stop, which I certainly couldn’t; she came to me sentence by slow sentence on my typewriter in my little empty-feeling fiat at the top of Dolphin Square in the early morning. By now there was an accepted Petronella voice, a breathless but metallic quack, just right. A few young men tried to talk Uncle Tosh, but I never heard a good one.
And then there were the professionals, reviewers and gossip-columnists and even a few ordinary reporters who’d been sent along by their editors to do a story about this titled idiot who’d written a book. The jacket said ‘Uncle Tosh by Petronella’ but I’d sneaked in an Acknowledgement in which she thanked darling Margaret Millett for helping her with the speling. This was the first time we’d publicly admitted that I was the author of Petronella, though there’d never been any real mystery about it after the first few weeks. By the end of the Season I was getting invitations from women I’d never heard of saying it would be absolutely divine if Petronella would come and be foul about their party. I remember moaning to Mrs Clarke about how difficult it was to keep her innocent, and Mrs Clarke smiling in her seen-it-all way. But the press hand-outs for Uncle Tosh didn’t just use my name; they made a song and dance about the title, and the Cheadle inheritance and all that. I didn’t mind, because it was terrific publicity, though Mummy was going to loathe it when she saw the papers next morning. Anyway, these extraordinary men turned up at the party expecting me to be like Petronella. I suppose people who rely on facts really rather distrust the idea of anybody making things up out of their imagination. They feel threatened. So I threatened them a bit more by explaining that Petronella was best understood from a post-existentialist standpoint, and telling them about the underlying parallels with Camus. (I could keep that up because B had told me to read Camus.) Then I introduced them to one of the Susans, so they got their story after all.
I was talking to a Manchester Guardian journalist who had rather called my bluff by knowing about Camus and wanting to explore the parallels when Tom came up and said, ‘Mabs?’ You get used to the question mark when you have a twin sister. That was the first I knew that the family had arrived.