‘In a history of Night and Day? Really, Ronnie!’
‘This is an imperfect world, in which books need to be sold by often spurious means. My publishers expect me to devote a disproportionate amount of space to Brierley. My excuse is that though he controlled the paper for barely a year, that year was a turning-point. His reorganisation of the managerial side, which had been more than moderately chaotic, was described to me as masterly. And he brought Naylor in, of course.’
‘Well, Ronnie, for old times’ sake . . . let me put it like this: I’m prepared to talk to you, in this room, for this hour, as though I may have been what you call close to Mr B, but I must make it clear that if the slightest hint about this appears in the book I shall sue. No, let me go on. You may think you could do it in such a way that I wouldn’t have a case, but I promise you I’d sue all the same. The kind of publisher who would do a history of Night and Day is much too stuffy and timid to risk it, I promise you. I’ve won three libel cases in the last fifteen years, all settled out of court. They’d be scared stiff of me.’
Ronnie grunted, peered about the table, reached for the champagne bottle and unclipped his gadget. I put my hand over my glass.
‘I shall have to think about that,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile let’s talk about something else.’
I took my hand away and let him pour me another glass. We both did our best but the mood would not come back. There was one brief moment when I’d been explaining how I organised my life these days.
‘You take a lot on, Mabs,’ he said.
‘It has taken me. I try not to whinge, that’s all.’
He shook his head.
‘When you were on the paper you didn’t exactly leave stones unturned or avenues unexplored. You came as Dorothy’s assistant, but not a week had gone by before you had Tom’s glue-pot in your hands.’
‘Only as a defence against Bruce Fischer.’
‘Momentarily. But you had your finger in every pie, and you were writing a book. I say nothing of your extra-curricular activities.’
‘It was the best year in my life. I knew at the time I had to make the most of it. I breathed happiness all the time. Didn’t you notice anything different? I don’t mean because of me. Just in the air.’
‘Morale in any organisation has its own mysterious ups and downs. My impression is that we were near the bottom of a trough when you arrived, which we then began to climb out of. But you know, Mabs, everybody has his own personal Golden Age. One of the weaknesses of the English is that for too many of them it is located in their early childhood. Mine ended when I was sent to prep school.’
‘Is that why you became a Communist?’
‘In part, no doubt.’
‘What happened to Bruce, by the way.’
‘Naylor gave him the boot after a couple of years. Row over who controlled the art side. Drove his car into a bridge a few years later. Deliberately, it was thought.’
I tut-tutted vaguely. Bruce Fischer. Blood all over the nylon shirting. The mood died.
I had said goodbye to Ronnie and was on my way to my appointment with the man from Burroughs—less than five minutes late after all—when it struck me that I should at least have asked him who had told him about my affair with B. He had seemed quite sure of his ground. Not Jane? No, of course not. Who else had known? . . . But she couldn’t still be alive, surely.
I told Simon about the divorce at supper. I chose to do it because Terry was there and I felt a need for human contact. As far as I am concerned, although Simon is my son he might as well be an elf-child. I mean that I have no idea at all what it can be like to be him, though he has my eyes as well as the Millets nose (much more unfortunate, for some reason, on a man than a woman). He is not simply a stranger; I see plenty of strangers, doing the occasional stint of conducting a tour round the house; I make a point of studying faces, trying to imagine inner lives, and usually succeed in constructing a coherent personality, not necessarily the true one but credible to me. I cannot do the trick with Simon. He lived inside me for nine months and his birth was an immense satisfaction. A happy baby, smiling and active. A busy, inquisitive, pleasing child, enough trouble at times not to seem unnatural. And then, about seven, the first awareness on my part of this alien-ness, an only faintly worrying sense of oddness in him, a little patch, spreading in the next five years, inexorable as a disease, until the whole personality was absorbed. I suppose he was about fourteen when I gave up attempting to persuade myself that I loved him.
Now he opened his eyes wide and produced his charming but meaningless smile.
‘Poor Mums, that’s tough on you.’
‘High time, if you want my opinion,’ said Terry.
‘For Mark or for me?’
‘For the both of you. How long before you start feeling old? Ten, fifteen years, if you’re lucky. Why waste it? Sir Mark can marry this Julia who seems to think he’s the best thing since the Beatles, and that’s something you’ve never been able to do for him. Now you can stop feeling guilty about it.’
‘Is that all I get out of it?’
‘You want me to find you a man, Marge?’
‘Providing he’s a roofing specialist.’
‘An arsonist would be more to the point,’ said Simon.
Terry shook his head, as usual treating the banter as if it were in earnest.
‘Not after all the work she’s put in,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, what kind of a man would take you on?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Come off it. You know what I mean. For looks you can still knock spots off most women, and you’ve got brains and guts with it, only you expect such a hell of a lot of anyone. My theory, if you want to know, is that you were spoilt for men by somebody way back. I don’t think it was ever Sir Mark, though.’
He studied me, candid and serious. He wasn’t being inquisitive, let alone prurient, but typically just wanting to check his ideas out. I have got used to Terry and now thoroughly approve of him. If only he were a woman he could have married Simon and I could have worked on the assumption that he would take over running Cheadle when the time came. The fact that Simon is at best only faintly interested in the house would not have mattered. Not that Terry is in love with Cheadle, any more than I was thirty years ago, but he (she) would have recognised the need.
Mark, of course, cannot stand him. He says that living with Terry is like living with a mental nudist—company acceptable in a nudist camp but not where everyone else walks around with their minds fully clothed. Though he speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent he is English, one of a large family whose parents run a bakery in Doncaster. He is eight years older than Simon, his curly dark hair thinning fast, and though he and Simon jog ritually round the park every morning his weight is getting out of hand. They act the parts of footmen when the house is open, but I shall soon have to promote Terry to butler, rather than go to the expense of new livery. They spend their spare time perfecting programmes for computer games, always ending up with something far too sophisticated for commercial exploitation. Another reason why I approve of Terry is that Simon seems not to be an alien to him, nor he to me, so I still have indirect contact.
‘If it were true I wouldn’t tell you,’ I said. ‘Let’s change the subject. You might like to know that the financial outlook is suddenly a good deal rosier than it’s been for ages. I can actually see a future.’
I explained about the tax repayments, speaking to Terry because Simon always shuts off when anything serious to do with Cheadle comes up. It took me by surprise when I discovered that this time he had actually been listening.