‘In office hours.’
‘Her office hours.’
He strutted over and put his arm round her. It seemed as long as an orang-utan’s. His right hand, hairy-backed, clamped on to her breast. Bruce Fischer was a model of finesse by comparison. Jane went Millett scarlet and tried to hoick herself free but he gripped her wrist and winked at me.
Jack Todd wrote his own articles longhand and kept a large bottle of Quink on his desk for the purpose. Probably because I remembered my success with Bruce and the Gloy pot I snatched it up and undid the top. Mr Naylor saw and let go of Jane to grab at it. I snatched it away but he caught my other wrist. Jane swung at him round-arm from behind, hitting him high up on the side of the head. I don’t know whether without that I would have thrown the ink or merely threatened him with it, but his sideways stagger—Jane had muscles like a blacksmith from her sculpting—pulled me half off balance, so that my arm holding the ink-bottle threshed instinctively forwards. The ink shot out in a fountaining arc, starting on the curtains, spraying across the wall and a bookcase and finishing on Mr Naylor’s trousers. He looked down, then at the mess on the wall. He straightened his specs, rubbed his head where Jane had hit him and laughed—an open, cheerful sound.
‘If we’d rehearsed that we’d never have brought it off,’ he said. ‘Is that stuff washable?’
I looked at the label.
‘Yes.’
‘God, what a mess.’
He laughed again.
‘It was your fault,’ I said. ‘Being editor doesn’t give you droit de seigneur.’
Instantly he lapsed back into his stage face and voice.
‘I will try and remember that, Margaret.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to clear up.’
I found Jane in the corridor, said, ‘Hang on a tick,’ and poked my head round the secretaries’ door.
‘I’ve spilt Mr Todd’s ink, Nellie.’
‘You haven’t! Over his desk?’
It must have been a regular occurrence, though I didn’t remember it happening. Nellie whipped a drawer open, snatched out a folder of blotch and rushed past me. Just inside jack Todd’s room, though, she stopped dead. Over her shoulder I could see Mr Naylor. Not unnaturally he had taken his trousers off. Nellie, a large, pale girl of about thirty whose salient characteristics were efficiency and devotion to Jack Todd, hesitated a second, flung the blotch at Mr Naylor and rushed back out.
I don’t imagine she meant to use the blotch as a missile. She was only trying to get it into the room and herself out again as quickly as possible. He wasn’t a specially indecent sight as his shirt-tails covered his pale, hairy legs almost to the knees. The blotch had struck him in the chest and strewn itself at his feet. Ink was pouring in rivulets down the spines of the books beside him. He was laughing again, and I was too.
‘How long do you keep this up?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about. Where I come from we tar and feather strangers. I think I’m going to like it here.’
I yelled to Jane to come and help, and while she blotted the worst bits I telephoned the commissionaire, Sergeant Sawyer, and told him there was a mess to clear up urgently. Then I asked Mr Naylor for his measurements and took Jane with me along to a men’s outfitters in Ludgate Circus where we bought him a cheap pair of grey flannels. On the way we talked quite placidly about what we were going to do. The silly little bout of action seemed to have cleared my mind. I understood something about Jane which I’d never really seen before. She’d often sworn she wasn’t jealous of my luck in being born first and I hadn’t believed her, but it was true. Provided that in the end I did what Mummy wanted Jane didn’t mind how much special treatment I got, or how much fun I had. She didn’t mind my having an affair with B, because it wasn’t going to last for ever. I would come back in the end. But what I’d said about swapping places, stupid though it was, had truly frightened her, because it showed that given the chance I might somehow slip away for ever. Her reward, what had made the whole arrangement tolerable for her, had always been that in the end she was the one who would be free. In their different ways Mummy’s wicked scheme and my own dotty idea, though neither of them could possibly work, had been images—nightmares—hinting that her freedom might not be there, ever, after all.
We didn’t talk about this, directly. I told her we were going away for a week to Barbados and I’d give her a key of my flat in case she wanted to go and live there for a bit, and I tried to make her see that the best way to think of Mummy was as a sort of blood-curdling old witch who loses all her power as soon as you realise that none of her spells actually work. There was nothing, however she raged or wheedled, she could actually do. I didn’t tell Jane what B had said about Mummy being in a position to make a nuisance of herself just then—that was none of her business.
[1] And I, at least, still do. Not about the literally virgin bride, of course, but at a deep and primitive level something that has the same ritual meaning, something to do with innocence, and also with being chosen—not by my mother (or now by me) but absolutely. Chosen, like that. I accept that this is probably only a way of rationalising what I have now become, but that makes no difference to the nature of the feeling.
VII
‘You’d better come and meet my mother,’ said B.
It was one of his typical tricks, to spring something on you and watch you jump. I was used to it, but he caught me this time. We had been in Barbados five days and met a number of B’s acquaintances—a much more ramshackle and dubious collection than his friends in England, and not at all the sort of polo-playing Barbadian Mrs Clarke wrote about in her winter excursions to the islands, either. There’d been a numbingly boring American businessman who could only talk about expanding the island’s tourist facilities, an almost wordless lawyer, a voluble half-Indian building contractor, and so on. I hadn’t had any sense that B had enjoyed these meetings—in fact he disliked and despised the people as far as I could make out, but he was strangely patient with them and refused to tell me afterwards the sort of gossip about them which he would have amused me with after similar encounters in England. None of them had even hinted that his mother was on the island.
‘Take off that nail varnish and find something quiet to wear,’ he said.
‘Do you really want me to come? I’ll be perfectly happy . . .’
‘Yes. It’ll be a help.’
‘All right.’
She lived in a new block of flats overlooking the harbour at Bridgetown. The place was obviously expensive—bowls of flowers in the entrance lobby, thick carpet, the chill of air-conditioning, smooth-running lift. But when B opened the door of a top-floor flat with his own key I realised that I was crossing a frontier—between times, or civilisations, or something vaguer. The hallway reeked of spiced cooking. Its walls were white-painted, like those outside, but the furniture consisted of a monstrous black armoire, heavily carved, and beside it a cane chair with one of its legs mended with a splint. In the distance a strange big voice was ranting through shouts and bursts of music. We passed an open door where a small black man, grey and wrinkled, was stirring an old iron cooking-pot on a modern electric cooker. B raised a hand in greeting to him, and the man’s face, wreathed in the spicy steam, split into the traditional water-melon smile. I smiled back, of course, but the scene through the door heightened the sense of having moved into a country much more foreign than the Barbados outside. The worn old face, the smile, the stoop over the pot, the pot itself—older possibly than the man—belonged to an illustration to some book in the Cheadle nursery, one of Daddy’s perhaps, or going back even a generation beyond, a G.A. Henty about adventures in the American Civil War. Or pirate-hunting, a century before, among these very islands. Some images don’t change. The man in the kitchen was the old slave who happened to hold the clue to where the treasure lay.