I refused to meet her look. She still had her arm half round me, resting on my shoulder. Straight in front of me was Mrs Clarke, talking to a tall thin stooping man I didn’t recognise. Ronnie came up to them with a fresh-mixed jug of Petronella.
‘I do think I’d better talk to him, don’t you?’ said Mummy.
I put my hand up and lifted hers off my shoulder. She didn’t resist, but let it fall.
‘He isn’t here yet, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if he’s coming.’
‘But when he does?’
‘If he does.’
‘Don’t forget, Mabs.’
No punishment. None at all.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Come and meet this new cousin I’ve found.’
I introduced her to Ronnie and Mrs Clarke, and the three of them hived off leaving me with the tall stooping man. He turned out to be the head of the firm which was nominally publishing Uncle Tosh, though we’d done all the real editing and so on in the office. I’d only met a couple of his underlings—Uncle Tosh must have seemed very small beer to a man used to publishing two-volume biographies of Rilke. He was an edger-up, but in a different dimension from Bruce Fischer. He used his height to crane over you and then came smiling down, like a rook eyeing turf for leather-jackets. Luckily my frock had a high collar. He told me that now the subscriptions were in he’d decided on a reprint. When something good happens in publishing, it is always the doing of whoever tells you about it; something bad is always the fault of the system, incurable. I tried to look starry-eyed with gratification. Mercifully one of the mangy lions came maundering up, with suggestions for an autobiography. Any other time I would have hung around to see how the publisher fought him off, but I edged away.
Jane wasn’t even polite to the man she’d been pretending to talk to. She swung round and grabbed my wrist.
‘What was that fratch for?’ she said. ‘I was having fun.’
‘Sorry. You couldn’t have known. I tried not to.’
‘They didn’t know anything. I could have got away with . . .’
‘Careful, darling. It’s coming back.’
‘Oh, all right. You might have warned me when I rang up about the frock.’
‘Didn’t think of it. There’s such a lot of my own life . . .’
‘Who’s Mummy talking to?’
The man with the jug is Ronnie Smith. He’s a sort of fourth cousin. A Communist. Works here. I like him.’
‘Mummy doesn’t. She’s in a filthy mood about something, Mabs.’
‘She’s found out about me and B.’
‘She hasn’t! How?’
‘No idea.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing. I suppose she might try and have me declared insane, or something, or break the Trust in your favour, but I don’t think she’d get away with it.’
‘Anyway it’s you she wants, Mabs. You’ve always been the one. Is he here?’
‘Haven’t seen him. He may not come. He wasn’t sure. She says she wants to talk to him.’
‘What on earth about? Oh, if it were anyone else, Mabs, wouldn’t it be bliss to eavesdrop?’
‘She’ll tell him to give me back and he’ll say no. I don’t think she’s met anyone like him before. Listen, darling, suppose she reacts by making life hell for you . . .’
‘Why should she?’
‘She’ll have to take it out on someone. Anyway, you could come and live at my flat if you wanted. I’d have to ask B, of course.’
‘I don’t think . . .’
Close by my shoulder I was aware of one of those minor jostlings you get when somebody tries to head for another part of a crowded room. It was my publisher, escaping the autobiographical lion. Jane and I had been standing at an angle so that we could mutter into each other’s ears, isolated by clamour. This stirring forced us to turn and I found myself face to face with Mrs Clarke, apparently waiting to come through between us. I’d last seen her in quite the other direction, talking to Mummy and Ronnie. She had a photograph in her hand.
‘Oh, Lady Margaret,’ she said. ‘Do you think your dear mother would be kind enough to sign a picture for my collection? I’ve been looking through the file for a good one.’
She spoke perfectly naturally, as if she hadn’t overheard a thing. She’d had a lot of practice, of course, but I didn’t think she could have. Mummy was sure to say something unspeakable to her about the photograph. I tried to head her off.
‘She’s in rather a dicey mood just now,’ I said. ‘Have you met my sister Jane?’
‘I knew it must be,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘You’re an art student, I believe, Lady Jane. Such a worthwhile accomplishment in a woman, being able to paint and draw beautiful things.’
Jane’s ‘art’ at that stage consisted of welding iron bars and plates to each other until she’d got something like a section of gaunt skeleton with bits of machinery muddled in, and then dipping the result into acid baths to make it go into interesting pits and nodules. She could be very intense about it, and sniffy about pictures and sculptures ordinary people liked, but I’d told her I approved of Mrs Clarke so she was a saint and swallowed her aesthetic pride and talked about our great-grandmother’s watercolours of Italy which hung—hundreds of them—around Cheadle in back passages and bedrooms and were supposed to be rather good for an amateur. In spite of what I’d said to Jane I was really very shaken and worried and longing for B to come. I eased myself away and went off to look for him.
The other room was just as crowded and even noisier. We had hooked the swing doors open, but it was as though they were still exerting their influence, separating the civilised from the rowdy. Most of the Susans were here, quacking away, and the men seemed to look younger too. I weasled my way round, but it wasn’t easy. For a start B was too short for me to see him over people’s heads, and then I was constantly being stopped and asked to settle arguments. It was amazing how that word-list had got everyone going. We’d put a stack of the book out on the landing, just to prove that it was real, but they’d all been snitched. People were holding them open and consulting them so that it looked like a roomful of foreigners trying to carry on conversations with the help of phrase-books. Then people tended to assume that the Susans knew all the answers, as if they’d been born with silver dictionaries in their mouths, when in fact some of them came from decidedly ponsy backgrounds—though girls have a fantastic knack for picking up tones of voice and getting them right. The extraordinary thing was that though I was really aching to find B, and though I also thought my word-list was just a bit of nonsense I’d shoved in to make up space, as soon as anyone asked me about a particular word I couldn’t help talking as though it really mattered. I got into a long argument with Priscilla Stirling, who certainly wasn’t one of the ponsy ones, about ‘mirror’. Perhaps because the Petronella drink was stronger than people realised no one seemed at all bashful about discussing the subject, though they did so with a kind of inquisitive glee, like schoolgirls talking about sex. It must have taken me twenty minutes to find out that B wasn’t there after all.
I met Tom out on the landing. He raised one eyebrow at me, making his face look suddenly very Irish. Ronnie used to say that Tom was really a wild Celt who spent his time trying to pass himself off as an English gentleman-scholar. When he reverted like this it was a sign that he was moderately drunk, though a stranger mightn’t have known.