“Because it was too raw, wasn’t that it?”
“I don’t think so. It was just incoherent and dull.”
“Aw, now, lookit, Mrs. Cornish, m’dad was a very intelligent man. You’re not going to tell me anything he wrote was dull.”
“That’s exactly what I am telling you.”
“I heard there was some stuff in it about people high up—government people, some of them—in their youths, that they wouldn’t want the public to know about.”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
“That’s what you say. I don’t want to be nasty, but maybe this is a cover-up. I heard a lot of publishers wanted it.”
“Several publishers saw it, and decided they didn’t want it.”
“Too hot for them to handle, eh?”
“No. They simply didn’t see any way of making a book of it.”
“You got letters saying that?”
“Mr. Crottel, you are becoming very pressing. Now listen: the typescript of the book by the man you tell me, without showing me any evidence, was your father was left outright to Professor Hollier and me. And I have the letter that says so. We were to deal with it as we saw fit, and that is what we have done. That’s all there is to it.”
“I’d like to see that book.”
“Impossible.”
“Well then, I guess I’ll have to take steps.”
“What steps?”
“Legal. I’ve been mixed up with the law, you know, and I know my rights. I’m an heir. Your right may not be as strong as you think.”
“Take it to law, then, if you feel you must. But if you hope to get anything out of that book, I can tell you you’re in for a disappointment. I don’t think we have anything more to say.”
“Okay. Be like that if you want. But you’ll be hearing from my legal man, Mrs. Cornish.”
It looked as if Maria had won. Arthur always said that if someone threatened legal action the thing to do was to tell them to see what it would get them. Such talk, he said, was probably bluff.
But Maria was unhappy. When Simon Darcourt came to see her that evening she greeted him in a familiar phrase:
“Parlabane is back.”
It was an echo of what a lot of people had said, with varying degrees of dismay, two years earlier, when John Parlabane, garbed in the robes of a monk, had returned to the university. Many people remembered him and many more were aware of his legend, as a brilliant student of philosophy who had, years ago, left the university under a cloud—the usual cloud, that old, familiar cloud—and had banged about the world making trouble of several ingenious kinds. He turned up at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly “Spook”) as a runaway and renegade from the Society of the Sacred Mission, in England, and the Society showed no sign of wanting to get him back. Maria, Darcourt, and Hollier, and many others, hoped that his suicide about a year later—and the suicide note in which he confessed with glee to the murder of Professor Urquhart McVarish (monster of vanity and sexual weirdo)—had closed the chapter of Parlabane. Maria could not help reopening it with this theatrical flourish.
Darcourt was satisfactorily astonished and dismayed. When Maria explained, he looked a good deal better.
“The solution is simple,” he said. “Give him the typescript of the book. You don’t want it. Let him see what he can do with it.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t got it.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Threw it away.”
Now Darcourt was really horrified.
“You what?” he roared.
“I thought it was done with. I put it down the garbage chute.”
“Maria! And you call yourself a scholar! Haven’t you learned rule number one of scholarship: never, under any circumstances, throw anything away?”
“What was the use of it?”
“You know the use of it now! You’ve delivered yourself, bound and gagged, into this man’s hands. How can you prove the book was worthless?”
“If he goes to court, you mean? We can call some of those publishers who turned it down. They’ll say what it was.”
“Oh, yes; I can hear it now. ‘Tell me, Mr. Ballantyne, when did you read the book?’ ‘Mmm? Oh, I don’t read books myself. I turned it over to one of my editors.’ ‘Yes, and did your editor present you with a written report?’ ‘That wasn’t necessary. She took a look and said it was hopeless. Just what I suspected. I took a quick peep into it myself, of course.’ ‘Very well, Mr. Ballantyne, you may stand down. You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there is no evidence that the book was given serious professional attention. Are masterpieces of what is called le roman philosophe to be assessed in this casual way?’—That’s the kind of thing, Maria, that you’ll hear until every one of your publisher witnesses has trotted in and out of the witness-box. Crottel’s lawyer can assert anything he likes about this book—a philosophical masterwork, a sulphurous exposure of sexual corruption in high places—anything at all. He will say that you and Clem Hollier were professionally jealous of Parlabane, and depreciated his talent for the trivial reason that he was a self-confessed murderer. The lawyer will positively sing to the harp about Genet, the criminal genius, and tie him up in pink string with Parlabane. Maria, you have put your foot in it right up to the hip.”
“You’re not being very helpful, Simon. What do we do next?—Can’t we get rid of Crottel? Fire him, perhaps?”
“Maria, you numbskull! Haven’t you understood that under our splendidly comprehensive Charter of Rights it is practically impossible to fire anybody—particularly not if they are making your life a misery? Crottel’s lawyers would crucify you.—Look, child, you need the best legal advice, and at once.”
“Well, where do we get it?”
“Please don’t talk about ‘we’ as if I were somehow involved in this mess.”
“Aren’t you my friend?”
“Being your friend is a very taxing experience.”
“I see. A fair-weather friend.”
“Stop being feminine. Of course I’m with you. But you must let me have my grievance. Do you think I haven’t enough trouble with this bloody opera scheme of Arthur’s? It’s enough to drive me mad! Do you know what?”
“No. What?”
“We’ve gone ahead much too fast. We’ve undertaken to back Schnak—I haven’t met Schnak but I hear ominous things about her—in putting this sketch for an opera together, and naturally I wanted to see what these Hoffmann papers consist of. It should have been done earlier, but Arthur has rushed ahead. So I had a look. And do you know what?”
“I wish you’d stop asking me if I know what. Its illiterate and unworthy of you, Simon. Oh, don’t sulk, sweetie.—Well, what?”
“Only this. There’s no libretto. Only a few words to suggest what ought to go with the music. That’s what.”
“So?”
“So a libretto has to be found, or else provided. A libretto in the early-nineteenth-century manner. And where is that to come from?”
It seemed to Maria that the time had come to get out the whisky. She and Darcourt rolled and wallowed in their problems till after midnight, and although Maria had only one drink, Simon had several, and she had to push him into a taxi. Fortunately it was after midnight, and the night porter had gone off duty.
4
Simon Darcourt had a bad night, and in the morning he had a hangover. He endured something more than the layman’s self-reproach. He was drinking too much, no doubt about it. He refused to think of it in the modern sociological term as “a drinking problem”; he told himself that he was becoming a boozer, and of all boozers the clerical boozer was the most contemptible.
Excuses? Yes, plenty of them. Wouldn’t the Cornish Foundation drive a saint to the bottle? What a pack of irresponsible blockheads! And headed by Arthur Cornish, who was thought in the financial world to be such a paragon of good judgement. But, provocation or no provocation, he must not become a boozer.