‘All right.’
He was in his dressing-gown reading a company report. A large cup of very pale coffee steamed beside his armchair—he was waiting for it to get completely tepid and then he would drink it. On the low table beside him were several neat piles of letters and other papers. The ripped envelopes lay on the floor. He picked up one of the letters and glanced through it. Mummy’s handwriting was large and jagged. You could recognise it from yards away.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘It really isn’t fair on you.’
He did his toad smile.
‘Believe it or not she’s trying to blackmail me.’
‘But it hasn’t got anything to do with you. It’s entirely my look-out.’
‘For money.’
‘Oh. How much am I worth to her?’
‘No exact figures. She appears to think that as I have taken something out of the Cheadle estate I ought to put something back, in the shape of a new roof to the Banqueting Hall.’
‘She’s disgusting.’
‘There is a hint of other elements in the transaction.’
‘I’ve a good mind to go straight down to Cheadle and beat her up.’
She appears to be still in Charles Street.’
‘Terrific. I can . . .’
‘No.’
‘You aren’t going to take her seriously!’
‘I am not going to take her proposal seriously. But she might be in a position to make a nuisance of herself at this particular moment.’
‘Oh.’
People keep saying it’s a small world, when really it’s a lot of small worlds, with less overlap than you’d think. Moving in with B I had changed from one small world to another, though to outsiders they might have seemed almost identical. The fathers of many of my friends might sit on the boards of companies on which B’s allies and enemies also sat, but they were not the same sort of people. My friends’ fathers, whether they said so or not, were waiting for England to return to the kind of place it had been before the war. Mr Churchill belonged to that period and Mr Eden, and now that they were in power my friends’ fathers were impatient for it to happen. The war itself and the struggles afterwards had been only an interruption. But for men like B the Thirties were dead history—deader even than they were for me because of my connection with those times through Cheadle and the people there, such as old Wheatstone. For these men the war and the period since had been the start of things. That was when they had begun, one way and another, to spot their opportunities and make the most of them. They were impatient too, but to go on, not back. They weren’t impressed by Churchill and Eden. Their hope lay in the younger politicians who were going to clear away all the left-over restrictions of wartime—B had a particular bee in his bonnet about currency control—and let those who could get rich.
Of course there were occasional overlaps. These could be embarrassing, and hilarious. There’d been one dinner-and-night-club evening at which Sir Drummond Trenchard-Yates turned up with a marvellously bosomy and brassy blonde, the sort Bruce Fischer kept drawing. Aunt Minnie Trenchard-Yates was really no relation of ours but that’s what we’d always called her because she was Mummy’s closest friend, a tiny, smiling, sweetly tough woman I’d known since I could remember. Sir Drummond had got rather grand, Director of the Bank of England and so on, and he huffed and puffed a bit when he saw me, rather as though bringing his blonde had been like coming to the party wearing a black tie when he should have been in tails. He kept explaining that the blonde was his secretary, and that she was wonderful at putting his spelling right. Later that evening, having apparently decided that I was the other kept woman in the party—the remaining three seemed to be more or less wives—she poured out her heart to me. It was too sad. She seemed really fond of Sir Drummond and was longing for Aunt Minnie to divorce him so that she could marry him and become what she called ‘a real person’. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that Aunt Minnie would never let it get that far.
That sort of thing didn’t happen often, and though the men mightn’t be as awkwardly placed as Sir Drummond, they still behaved as if they all belonged to a sort of huge, vague club, whose basic rule was that the members didn’t tell their wives about each other. But clubs have snags, as well as advantages. Suppose Mummy were to talk to Aunt Minnie about me, and then Aunt Minnie snapped her fingers at Sir Drummond—well, I couldn’t imagine Sir Drummond sitting on one of his boards and putting forward a coherent financial argument against some enterprise of B’s, but I could imagine him going a bit red and pulling his moustache and saying, ‘Don’t care for the feller myself. Heard something the other day . . .’ And that might be enough. It was what Sir Drummond was for, after all, being a sound chap and hearing things.
I’m only using Sir Drummond as an instance. There were a dozen people Mummy could get in touch with, any of whom might have been able to put a spanner in B’s works. The point is that B couldn’t afford it. Though I gathered things had been going rather well these last months he was still always desperately short of money. He had a huge overdraft. He lived like a rich man, spent like a rich man, but if he’d been forced to sell up at certain moments he’d probably have been bankrupt. It was other people’s money, and it all depended on other people’s confidence.
He was reading the letter again.
‘I never really believed you, you know,’ he said. ‘I put her down as a stupid woman.’
‘Oh, she is, in some ways. But she’s brilliant at people. If you’ve got a weak spot she’ll find it. What are you going to do?’
He caressed a little bronze sculpture he’d brought back from his last trip to Germany—more like an egg than a head, though it had a nose and eyebrow-ridges.
‘Nothing for the moment,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Just one thing. I’m terribly sorry. It’s family still. Jane. I found a rather desperate-sounding note from her when I got downstairs. I think Mummy may be giving her hell. I wondered if you’d mind if she came and lived in my flat for a bit.’
He tested his coffee with his finger and licked it clean, glanced for a moment at Mummy’s letter and then stared at me, slowly, all over. I was baffled. He might have been irritated or furious, even, but it wasn’t like that. It was more as though he was seeing me for the first time and making up his mind whether to buy me.
‘It is gratifying to feel that there is one person in the world who trusts me,’ he said.
I didn’t understand at once, though Jane and I were used by now to the idea that some men get excited about twins. Casanova wasn’t the only one. I felt myself do one of my pillar-box blushes, but I made the words come.
‘If you really wanted to,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what she’d say.’
I had to wait while he took a long swig at his disgusting coffee. He did it on purpose, for pleasure, getting his own back in a small way for what Mummy had done to him. It struck me that he might even want to show her what he thought of her attempt to blackmail him by taking Jane away from her too.
‘I think it’s time we had a treat,’ he said at last. ‘Thank God Barbados is still in the sterling area.’
Mondays were always a bit desultory. The true week began on Tuesday, when the outside contributors came in for the editorial conference and Jack Todd made up his mind about the main features of next week’s issue. Haggard from the weekend at Hastings I read would-be-funny manuscripts—always an extra large batch in the Monday post—and passed on about one in ten to Tom. Ronnie found, in the Daily Worker of all places, a review of Uncle Tosh, treating it as a text for a satiric blast at the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. I guessed Ronnie had used his connections to get it mentioned at all, but I was still pleased, though it wasn’t a review that was going to sell many copies. The others were more interested in a gossip-column paragraph in the News Chronicle about Jack Todd leaving and Brian Naylor taking over. It hadn’t been officially announced yet.