He breakfasted in the morning with Daisy Wapshott, a comfortable bosomy lady in a crêpe-de-chine dress and a pink angora cardigan, who waited on him, despite his protestations, with a huge plate of ham and eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages and baked beans. He ate triangular toasts, and marmalade from a cut-glass dish with a swinging lid and a scallop shell spoon. He drank strong tea from a silver pot under a teacosy embroidered to resemble a nesting hen. He abominated tea. He was a black-coffee drinker. He congratulated Mrs Wapshott on her tea. From the windows of his own elegant house he could have seen a formal garden, and beyond it the sages and junipers of the mesa, and the mountain heads rising out of the desert into a clear sky. Here he saw a strip of lawn, along which ran plastic fencing separating it from identical strips on each side.
"I spent a very comfortable night," he told Mrs Wapshott. "I am extremely grateful to you."
"I'm glad you found my Rodney's letters of interest, Professor. He inherited them from his Mum. Who'd come down in the world, if he was to be believed. I never met his family. I married him in the War. Met him fire-fighting. I was a lady's maid in them days, Professor, and he was a gentleman, anyone could see. But he never had no inclination for any kind of work, really. We kept the shop-general haberdashery-to tell the truth, I did all the work, and he just smiled at the customers, half shame-faced. I never knew exactly where he got them letters. His Mum gave them to him-she said he might be the literary one and they were letters from a famous poet. He did show them to the Vicar, who said he didn't think they was of much interest. I did say as I'd never part with them, Professor. They aren't much, really, just letters to a kid about trees."
"In Harmony City," said Mortimer Cropper, "in the Stant Collection in the University there, I have the largest and finest collection of Randolph Henry Ash's correspondence anywhere in the world. It is my aim to know as far as possible everything he did-everyone who mattered to him-every little preoccupation he had. These small letters of yours, Mrs Wapshott, are not much, maybe, on their own. But in the global perspective they add lustre, they add detail, they bring the whole man just that little bit more back to life. I hope you will entrust them to the Stant Collection, Mrs Wapshott. Then they will be preserved forever in the finest conditions and purified air, controlled temperature and limited access, only to accredited scholars in the field."
"My husband wanted them to go to Katy. Our daughter. In case she was the literary one. That's her bedroom you're sleeping in, Professor. She's been left home now ever such a long time-she's got a son and daughter of her own-but I keep her room just so, for her to come back to, if things get on top of her. She appreciates that. She was a teacher before the children. She did teach English. She often expressed an interest in Grummer's tree letters. That's what we always called them. Grummer's tree letters. I couldn't possibly think of letting you have them without so much as asking her. They're hers, in a sort of way-in trust, if you see what I mean."
"Of course you should consult her. You should say we would naturally give you an advantageous price for these documents. When you speak to her you should mention that. We have very ample funds, Mrs Wapshott."
"Very ample funds," she repeated after him, vaguely. He was aware that she thought it would be ill-bred to ask him what sort of price he might offer, and that suited him very well, that gave him room to manoeuvre, as he calculated that the richest dreams of her modest avarice would be unlikely to reach the sort of sum he would willingly pay on the open market. He was rarely wrong in these cases. He could most frequently foretell to a dollar what some country curate or school librarian might suppose he could demand, both before and after professional advice.
"I shall have to think about it," she said, troubled, but implicated. "I shall have to see what's best."
"There's no hurry," he assured her, finishing his toast, wiping his fingers on his damask napkin. "Only one thing-if anyone else should approach you about these documents, it would be kind if you remembered I showed an interest first. We all have our little academic courtesies, but some of us are quite prepared to go behind each other's backs. I should like your assurance that you will do nothing with these short letters without consulting me first. If you feel able to give it. I can also assure you that you will find it to your advantage to consult me."
"I wouldn't think of it. Not getting in touch, that is. If anyone were to. Which I'm sure they won't, no one ever has, in all these years up to now, up till your arrival, Professor."
Neighbours put their heads out of the windows when he drew away from the front of the little house. His car was a long black Mercedes, of the kind more normally seen driving dignitaries in countries behind the Iron Curtain, a swift funereal car. He knew that in England it was overstated, unlike his tweed jacket. He did not care. It was beautiful and powerful, and he had a flamboyant side to his nature.
As he floated down the motorway he thought of his next ports of call. There was a sale at Sotheby's, with an autograph album with a quatrain by Ash, and his signature. He must also spend a few days in the British Museum. His face contracted with distaste at the thought of James Blackadder. He must also-a matter that he also regarded with more distaste than pleasure-take Beatrice out to lunch. If there was one matter in the world he regretted more than any other, it was Beatrice's lien, her semi-exclusive propriety in Ellen Ash's Journal. Had he himself and his team of research assistants had proper access to that work, much of it would be in print by now, annotated, indexed, ready to be cross-referred and to illuminate his own findings. But Beatrice, with what he saw as a truly English costiveness and dilettantism, continued to sit and shuffle and wonder about meanings and facts, getting nowhere at all, and apparently quite comfortable, like the obstructive sheep m Alice Through theLooking-Glass. He had a whole notebook full of queries to check, when he could, when she gave him access. Every time he came across the Atlantic he had such a notebook. It was his firmly held belief-not one he ever questioned intellectually or experienced as other than a sensuous lack, a knowledge of something missing from his essential comfort-that Ellen Ash's papers should be in the Stant Collection.
Now and then Mortimer Cropper toyed with the idea of writing an autobiography. He had also considered writing a family history. History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself, and Mortimer Cropper, fluently documenting every last item of the days of Randolph Henry Ash, his goings-out and his comings-in, his dinner engagements, his walking-tours, his excessive sympathy with servants, his impatience with lionising, had naturally perhaps felt his own identity at times, at the very best times, as insubstantial, leached into this matter-of-writing, stuff-of-record. He was an important man. He wielded power: power of appointment, power of disappointment, power of the cheque book, power of Thoth and the Mercurial access to the Arcana of the Stant Collection. He tended his body, the outward man, with a fastidiousness that he would have bestowed on the inner man too, if he had known who he was, if he did not feel the whole thing to be thickly veiled. He only thought of this intermittently when, as now, he was encased in smooth black solitude and on the move.