September 1941
Another Monday morning, and as Ruby dragged herself up the steps to the PW offices she was assailed with the depressing knowledge that five and a half days of misery were waiting for her.
It had been a little more than two months since Mary’s death, and Kaz showed no signs of emerging from the fog of grief that clung to him like so much poison gas. She had tried to help, asking tentatively if he wanted to talk with her, then inviting him to come to dinner with her and Vanessa, or even go to the Old Bell for lunch, but nothing could tempt him from his desk and the solace of work.
And there was no end of news to keep them busy. Crete had been lost to Axis forces at the end of May, the German invasion of the USSR had begun a month later, and by the end of the summer the Soviets seemed perilously close to defeat. And when that happened, Kaz never tired of telling anyone within earshot, Hitler would once again turn his attention to Western Europe and the long-delayed invasion of Britain. It was only a matter of time.
Ruby was convinced that Kaz was drinking at the office, unremarkable behavior among most newsmen she knew but entirely out of character for her editor and friend. She’d smelled something sharp on his breath the week before, and later that afternoon he had tripped over his words more than once during their editorial meeting. It didn’t help that he wasn’t eating properly, his clothes all but hanging off his broad shoulders, and from the look of his hair and stubbled face he was long overdue for a good bath.
She tried calling Bennett at home, again and again, but he was never there, and Vanessa didn’t have a telephone number for him at work. The only person who knew how to reach him was Kaz, and if Bennett had been in contact with his old friend, Kaz wasn’t saying.
What made it all the harder was that she, too, missed Mary desperately. There were moments, over those bleak days of late summer, when Ruby would have given anything for a dose of her friend’s canny advice, or a glimpse of her rueful smile. Even Mary in one of her foul moods would have been enough to leaven Ruby’s spirits.
The instant she walked through the door, she knew something was wrong. Evelyn was crying—levelheaded, sane, endlessly sensible Evelyn, who never seemed to get upset, and had soldiered through the days and weeks after Mary’s death with nothing more than reddened eyes.
“What is wrong?” Ruby asked, her heart seizing with fear. “Has someone . . . ?”
“No, no. It’s only . . . Captain Bennett and Mr. Bennett are here. Kaz isn’t coming back.”
“What?” Ruby gasped. “Ever?”
“Sorry, no—just for a while. They’ll explain it all, they said. You might as well go on in.”
Ruby rushed down the hall, desperate to learn what had become of Kaz, but the door to his office was shut. Behind it, she could just make out Nigel’s voice, rising and falling, and then Bennett’s, more than an octave lower, measured and calm. Everyone else was in the main office, and by their expressions they shared her apprehension. If Kaz was leaving, what would become of them? What would become of Picture Weekly?
Evelyn came down the hall, and one by one they joined her at the big table. There were so few of them, really, for Kaz hadn’t tried to replace Mary, instead relying on freelancers and agency photographs. Without Kaz, how would they put out the magazine? He was its beating heart—without him, what was left?
The door to his office opened, and footsteps sounded in the hall. First through the door was Nigel, who looked oddly pleased with himself. He was followed by an elderly man who had to be Mr. Bennett, their publisher. It didn’t seem right, in that moment, to think of him as Uncle Harry. Ruby had pictured him as a rather doddery old fellow, but this man was tall and slim, with piercingly blue eyes under shaggy eyebrows. He had once been a judge, she recalled, and seeing him now, she was certain he had been a formidable presence in the courtroom.
Last of all was Bennett himself. His eyes met hers briefly, but there was time for nothing more, and she could discern nothing from his studiously neutral expression.
“Good morning,” Mr. Bennett began. “As you all know, our dear Kaz has not been himself since Miss Buchanan’s death. I confess I was unaware of how poorly he was feeling until I visited him over the weekend. I was so concerned that I rang up Captain Bennett, who is not only my nephew but also Kaz’s oldest and closest friend. He immediately traveled to London, and together we were able to persuade your editor to take a short leave of absence.” Mr. Bennett paused, allowing the weight of his words to settle over them all. “Kaz is coming to stay with me in Edenbridge until he is well enough to resume work.”
“What will happen to PW?” Peter asked, giving voice to their concerns. “To us?”
It was Nigel’s turn to speak. “Mr. Bennett has asked me to assume the editorship until Kaz returns. It is his hope that nothing will change, and I have promised him that we shall go on as we did before.”
“I’m afraid we must ask most of you to shoulder some extra work,” Mr. Bennett added. “Kaz has been trying to take on some extra staff for some time now, but the Ministry of Labor has been singularly unhelpful in that regard.”
He turned to look at Ruby, his bright blue eyes capturing and holding her gaze effortlessly. “We hope, Miss Sutton, that you will agree to take on the role of acting assistant editor. Kaz was most insistent.”
If the proverbial pin had dropped in that instant, she certainly would have been able to hear it. “Me? He wants me to do it?”
“He does.”
The notion of her having been selected for the role, rather than Peter or Nell, was so startling and unexpected that she simply stared at the men sitting across the table, her brain struggling to attach words to the sentiments running through her head. Bennett nodded, his calm confidence lending her strength, and Mr. Bennett—Uncle Harry—appeared to approve as well.
But Peter’s face was pale and drawn, and when she tried to meet his gaze, to offer up an apologetic smile, he frowned and looked away. The sneer that animated Nigel’s blandly handsome features was similarly discouraging, and in that moment she was reminded of her conversation with Mary on the train back from Brighton, just days after she’d arrived in England. How men like Nigel and Peter wouldn’t hesitate to fight dirty if she got in their way. How she had to watch out for Nigel most of all.
And then an even more worrisome thought occurred to her. Perhaps Kaz hadn’t insisted. Perhaps it was all Bennett’s doing—a way for him to be kind to her.
And if it were? What else could she do but accept?
“Thank you,” she said, focusing on Uncle Harry alone. “I’m honored. I promise to do my very best.”
“And that is all we can ask of you, my dear,” he said. “I for one am perfectly confident you are up to the task.”
Nigel cleared his throat and made a show of rustling the papers before him. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Bennett, we still have this week’s issue to put to bed. Let’s all of us focus on that for now, and leave the glad-handing for another day. I’ll be in my office if any of you wish to speak with me.”
Bennett spoke up now, addressing Ruby directly for the first time. “We’ve agreed you can use Kaz’s office while he’s away. Would you like to come along with me now?”
She nodded, gathering up her bag and notebook, and followed him out of the main room and down the hall to Kaz’s office, which looked as if a brief but intense hurricane had set down only minutes before. It might be more trouble than it was worth to clear a space for her to work.
Bennett closed the door behind them and turned to face her. “Say it. I could see the wheels turning in your head out there.”
“Did you see Peter’s face? He couldn’t believe it. For that matter, neither can I.”
“You will do a better job, Ruby. That’s all there is to it—that’s why you were asked. Even Nigel, when we pressed him on it, had to admit that your skills as an editor far surpass Peter’s.”
“So this isn’t you looking out for a friend?”
“Absolutely not,” he assured her. “This magazine is too important to Kaz to entrust the work of running it to someone who doesn’t know what he—or she—is doing. The better question isn’t whether you deserve the job, since we both know you do, but whether you actually want to do it.”
“I do want it.” And she did, she truly did. It would be a challenge, though, not least because of the man for whom she’d be working, and she felt ill just thinking about the circumstances that had brought it to her door . . .
“So?” Bennett prompted. “What is there to worry about?”
“Nigel, to start with. You saw the look on his face.”
“That was the look of a man who had just been told he couldn’t have his toady of an underling as his assistant editor. He’ll get over it,” Bennett promised, “and if he doesn’t, he’ll have me to deal with—and Kaz, too, when he’s recovered.” The expression on his face was sufficiently grim for her to almost feel sorry for Nigel.
His next words nearly eroded her meager store of confidence. “I have to warn you, though, that one of Nigel’s conditions for taking on the role was that Harry and I remain at arm’s length. That we not interfere in the editorial content of the magazine.”
“Oh,” she said, wishing she had something more worthwhile to offer than a single, feeble syllable.
“Since his leaving would mean our having to close up shop, we felt we had to agree. I’m not happy about it, but I didn’t see any alternative. He’ll take the magazine to the right—that’s all but a certainty.”
“I know. He’s always complaining in meetings that Kaz is too liberal in his approach to stories.”
“Yes. I’m not thrilled at the prospect of PW becoming a mouthpiece of Nigel’s brand of last-stand, old-guard conservatism, but it won’t be for long. At least I hope not for long.”
“Will Kaz . . . will he be all right?”
“I hope so. I have to believe he will. Harry will take care of him, and Kaz has always loved the house in Edenbridge. He simply needs some time to heal. He will be back. I’m sure of it.”
“Good. That should . . . well, that’ll make it easier. At least I hope it will.”
“If you’re convinced Nigel is about to publish something truly objectionable, something that would ruin what Kaz has created here, you must let me know straightaway. Here’s my telephone number at work if you need me.” Bennett pressed a card into her hand.
“I will.”
“If I’m not there, leave a message with one of the secretaries, and I’ll ring you back as soon as I’m able.”
“Thank you. For taking care of Kaz, and for—”
“You’re very welcome. Now, unfortunately, I need to go—I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. And you do have a magazine to edit.”
He kissed her cheek, so gently she scarcely felt it, and was out of the office and down the hall before she had so much as blinked.
The business card in her hand brought her back to the present. She looked down, curious as to what it would say.
Capt. C. S. Bennett
Inter-Services Research Bureau
Welbeck 1966
Nothing very enlightening, then, but she hadn’t expected to discover his secrets engraved on a rectangle of cardstock. Tucking it away in her handbag, she went back to her desk in the main office, sat herself down, and got back to work.
NIGEL’S ASCENSION TO the editorship went pretty much as she had guessed, and rather worse, she suspected, than Uncle Harry and Bennett would have liked. Stories in the works that Nigel deemed too “soft” were canned, including one on female pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary that Ruby had been working on for several weeks. He brought in a monthly column on military affairs, written by a press relations officer from the War Office, and he revived the letters page, ignoring her protests that they could make far better use of the editorial space.
Worst of all, he declined to pursue any of Ruby’s story ideas. Week after week, he rejected her proposals, limiting her writing to the women’s page he had instituted at the back of the magazine. As for her editorial contributions? Any substantive edits she made to his or Peter’s pieces, or those of the increasingly conservative contributors who filled their pages, were soundly rejected.
“Now that we’re down to sixteen interior pages,” he was fond of saying at their editorial meetings, “we simply don’t have room for any of that lightweight stuff that Kaz loved.”
“Where does the ‘women’s page’ fall in your estimation?” Ruby had asked the first time they discussed the subject. “I’d have thought you considered it far too insubstantial for our newly serious magazine.”
“We’re holding on to it for the advertising, no more. I’d like nothing more than to can it—but then how would you and Nell fill your days?”
He was especially nasty to Nell, who vowed again and again that she was about to resign. “The only thing holding me back is the fear of where I’ll end up. If I quit, the Ministry of Labor is sure to send me somewhere even worse. Sewing parachutes, most likely, or ladling explosives into shell casings.”
They tried to laugh together, for Nigel’s antics could be amusing at times, particularly when he was shouting down the phone at some poor soul. “I’ve started marking off each day on my wall calendar at home,” Nell admitted toward the end of October. “We’ve already survived six weeks of this. If Kaz does come back at the beginning of December, that means we’re almost halfway there.”
“And if it’s still just as bad once he does return?” Ruby asked.
“Then I’m off to work in a munitions factory. But I’m sure he’ll be back before long, and when he does he’ll set everything to rights. Chin up, Ruby.”
“Chin up, Nell.”
Ruby did her level best to get on with Nigel. She kept her edits light. She tried her damnedest not to impose her point of view on the pieces that landed on her desk, some of them so shrill and unbalanced that they read more like satire than serious editorial content.
By the end of October she’d resigned herself to her role as a glorified copy editor, trusted to pick out typographical errors but not much more. Nigel had flat-out refused to let her accompany him to the compositors or the printers, and when she had objected, pointing out that he had always gone along with Kaz, Nigel had informed her that women weren’t welcome, and that was that. For all she knew, it may have been true, but it stung just the same.
The covers that Nigel chose were even more objectionable than the stories they ran. Kaz had insisted their cover image be attached to a story, and the photographs they used—always photographs and never illustrations—had been, under Kaz’s leadership, selected for visual impact but never for shock value.
Their first issue with Nigel fully at the helm marked a sharp departure from their usual fare. The cover was a close-up of two dancers from the notorious Windmill Theatre, the women wearing exaggerated stage makeup; and the picture was cropped so as to show only their heads and upper torsos, with a generous amount of cleavage underpinning the bottom third of the cover. It gave the impression that both women were entirely nude—as they might indeed have been, since the Windmill was known for its risqué tableaux. The article that ran inside, by contrast, was scathingly critical of the theater and others like it, and proclaimed them an affront to “true British values.”
Ruby had felt sick to her stomach when the first proofs had arrived. Rather than challenge Nigel in front of everyone else, she had followed him into his office and, tossing the proofs on his desk, had gathered together every scrap of her courage and faced him down.
“This is the most hypocritical pile of crap I have ever seen, and you know it. How could you? Kaz will be mortified.”
“Watch your language, Ruby.”
“Oh, come on! This cover image is one of the most salacious photographs I’ve ever seen! Yet I wouldn’t mind it so much if you’d chosen to couple it with a decent article. Something that actually gets to the bottom of why the Windmill is popular. Or what it’s like to be a dancer there. Or any number of other subjects. But it’s a diatribe—it reads like Oswald Mosley wrote the first draft.”
He didn’t even bother to look her in the eye, and instead was concentrating on extracting a speck of dirt from under his thumbnail. “Go ahead and resign, then.”
“Not if it leaves this magazine in your hands. Kaz will be back soon, and everything will go back to how it used to be. You should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage—”
His face reddened, but still he didn’t look up. “What’s shameful about it? I’ve been given a chance to show what I’m made of, and I plan to make the most of it.”
“You’ll be lucky if Kaz doesn’t show you the door when he sees what you’ve done to PW.”
“I doubt it. He’ll see how well it’s been managed and be grateful. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some work to do. Shut the door behind you when you leave.”
It didn’t help that she was right in her prediction that Nigel would run the magazine into the ground: advertising revenues plummeted, together with newsstand sales, and before long they were solidly in the red issue after issue. Nigel refused to discuss it with her, insisting that the war was pushing down profits everywhere, but Ruby was unconvinced.
She knew Kaz was recovering well, for Uncle Harry’s letters to Vanessa arrived like clockwork every Monday morning and he invariably promised that their editor would be back to work by the end of December, if not earlier. But what if there was no magazine left by the time he returned?
Nearly at breaking point, she shut herself into Kaz’s office one morning in late October and, fishing out the card Bennett had given her, dialed through to his work.
“Good morning, Inter-Services Research Bureau, how may I direct your call?”
“May I speak with Captain C. S. Bennett?” she asked.
“I’m afraid he isn’t in the office today. May I take a message?”
“Could you tell him . . .”
“Yes, miss?”
What could she tell him? Nigel had insisted on control of the magazine, and Bennett had given it to him. They’d published some awful stuff since then, but nothing so terrible that it would put Kaz in his grave. Surely, she reasoned, both Uncle Harry and Bennett had seen some of PW’s recent issues. If they truly hated what Nigel was doing, they would have acted by now.
“Sorry. I’ll call back another time.”
She would give it another month. If things got any worse, she would write to Uncle Harry and let him know. Kaz would be back before long, and the damage Nigel wrought could be undone. Surely all would be well in the end.