Julia regarded him for a moment. “You sound like a moralist, Mr Rothermere.”
Quickly he shook his head. “Moralising is like refrigeration. It doesn’t make life any better; just destroys the flavour.”
“My husband,” she said, “might almost be said to be an immoralist. He is for ever talking like a rake, but the only real talent he has is one for making money.”
“You resent that?”
“His talk or his talent?”
“His money-making.”
“Not in the least. One must love somebody to resent his preoccupations. The talk, though, I do find a bore. It’s meant to be provocative, of course.”
The wine list had arrived. While looking through it rapidly for what he wanted, Mr Rothermere held his free hand in a gesture of postponement of all other matters. The hand, Julia noticed, was white and very clean. The fingers were short and thick. On the backs of the fingers grew symmetrical patches of ginger hair. He wore three rings, one jewelled.
“The fifty-nine Macon.” He handed back the list. To Julia he said: “He probably is fearful of impotence. That troubles rich men quite a lot, actually.”
“All David fears is that I’ll...”
She stopped, looking suddenly surprised, as if the absurdity of the situation had only just occurred to her. From her handbag she drew the letter she had received.
“Look here, just what is all this about?” She smoothed out the sheet of paper and peered first at it, then at him, shaking her head. “I must be out of my bloody mind.”
Mr Rothermere mournfully chewed a fragment of roll while he watched delivery of steaks and fried potatoes to three silent, wary men at a nearby table. They eyed the meat on their plates like secret policemen counting in a new batch of suspects.
“Nonsense, my dear,” Mr Rothermere assured her in an abstracted manner. “You are here because you think I can help you... God, just look at all that cholesterol... which of course I can.” He wrenched his regard away from the steaks and smiled at her with fully restored attention.
“Now then, tell me if I am wrong. You are married to a man of substance but no sensibility. He is boring, offensive and—worst of all—mean. You would be glad to let him have the divorce he so ardently desires for certain squalid purposes of his own. However, you would require adequate compensation for the loss of material comfort and social status which the marriage confers—or ought to confer. And you fear that your husband’s meanness, in alliance with his own financial cunning and the expertise of his advisers, might result in your being cheated once you agree to start divorce proceedings. Am I correct?”
“Absolutely.” Julia’s eyes had widened a fraction. “You actually sound like a lawyer.”
Mr Rothermere’s little pink lips pouted with pleasure. A ringed finger passed in and about his beard. “I hate to think,” he said, “that so expensively acquired a qualification should be obtrusive enough to be instantly detected.” He shrugged self-deprecatingly.
Food arrived.
Julia viewed her salad. Not a doctor, then. A lawyer. Not that he’d actually said...
“You could have him done away with,” remarked Mr Rothermere, in a matter-of-fact tone. “He sounds as though he deserves it.” He speared a morsel of food on his fork. Julia was finding his beard not the least intriguing of the day’s novelties; she watched the piece of sweetbread conveyed through the hirsute hazard with quite remarkable deftness.
Airily, Mr Rothermere waved his fork. “I was joking, of course.”
“Naturally.”
They tried some of the wine. Julia liked it very much, and said so. He topped up her glass immediately.
They ate. After a while Julia asked: “This set-up of yours—is it something to do with Reader’s Digest?”
“Good heavens, whatever makes you ask that?” His surprise was so complete that several seconds went by before he saw, and acknowledged with a grin, that the question had been sardonic.
“American Express?” she persisted. “Encyclopedia Britannica?” She tapped the letter with her knife. “It’s this privilege lark—the old you-have-been-selected approach. Oh dear.”
“You think it is fraudulent?” He broke off a piece of roll and began to butter it. “I’m very glad you do. A client of intelligence is always much easier to work with.” He raised his eyes. “Intelligence, and a modicum of ruthlessness.”
“Oh, I can be ruthless, all right.”
“Good. Now I shall tell you something surprising. The claims you so rightly view with scepticism happen to be true. You have been recommended—and selected. No come-on, Mrs Harton. It is all, as I believe the expression runs nowadays, happening for you.”
Julia watched the rosy cheeks broaden, the eyes crease into shining slits and the mouth tighten and tremble with amusement as Mr Rothermere suddenly gave himself up to a transport of good humour: a condition which he emphasised by seizing the bottle and filling their glasses with a flourish that even Dr Heineman could scarce have improved upon.
“I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why me? And who has been doing the recommending?”
A sudden cloud of regret dimmed his smile. “My dear Mrs Harton, confidentiality is the essence of our organisation. You must see that.”
“It wasn’t Daddy, was it?” she persisted. “He’s a Mason.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What, that he’s a Mason?”
“That I cannot satisfy your perfectly natural curiosity.”
“It must be Daddy. He gets fits of indulgence. And he’s always looked on David as a sort of Steerforth who ought to be expelled.” She giggled. “By Christ, he’s right, too.”
The waiter closed in. He partitioned them with menus. Julia said she wanted only black coffee. Mr Rothermere did some reading.
“Kindly tell me,” he said at last, “what is meant by ‘couched in double Devon farmhouse cream, with mist of Kümmel and Toasted Kent hazels, dredged with rough-crushed Barbados crystals’.”
“Sir?” The waiter leaned and peered at the description indicated by Mr Rothermere’s finger. “Oh, the strawberries, sir. Yes, they’re very nice.”
Mr Rothermere said that coffee would suffice. Oh, and perhaps another bottle of wine.
“And now we shall never know,” he said to Julia. For the first time since their meeting, she gave him a full and friendly smile.
“No,” she said. “So let us talk instead of my loathsome husband and how to make his life a misery. Not that we shall be able to. He is one of those asbestos bastards who are so convinced of their own marvellousness that you can be gouging their eyes out and they’ll think it’s because you want to go to bed with them.”