IV

‘That’s all over,’ said Mr B.

He spoke only just loud enough to hear, as usual, but the grate in his voice cut me short. He didn’t want to know. We were having dinner at Skindle’s at Maidenhead, at a table by the window overlooking the river. It was no kind of romantic evening though, typical June sulks, with squalls rocking the moored boats and hammering down on to the ruffled black water. What’s more Mr B had ordered my meal without consulting me, nothing special, though my half-bottle of hock was delicious. He had a plain omelette and an apple and drank weak whisky and soda. His chauffeur had driven us down in the Bentley while we sat in the back and talked about the magazine. We were still doing so.

I’d been out twice with Mr B since the opera, to a private dinner given by a rich Greek at Claridge’s and to a weird evening in a huge white villa near Virginia Water where some of us played vingt-et-un for buttons in one room while next door they were playing chemmy with hundred-pound chips. I guessed that us button-players were there so that we could give evidence if there was a police raid that we hadn’t been playing for money, and to delay things a bit so that they had time to hide the equipment in the other room. All three evenings Mr B had been very kind to me, rescuing me from bores, introducing me to people who weren’t bores and telling me juicy gossip about them afterwards; he’d listened to what I’d said, too, and seemed amused. Supper after the opera had been oysters and champagne and I’d been thinking, ‘Oho, now there’ll be his new Bernard Buffet he wants me to see,’ when he’d said he’d got some work to do and asked if I’d mind if the chauffeur took me home.

This evening was not like any of those. It was work all through. The magazine. He’d owned it for seven weeks, giving each department a shake in turn. There was a new advertising manager, three men had been sacked from Circulation and one from Accounts, and we’d got a new contract with our printers which they were rather sulky about. He’d left Editorial till last, apart from getting me my job. Now it was going to be our turn, and he was using me as a kind of spy, to tell him about everything before he made his move.

It was extremely awkward. From his point of view, I owed him my job and I was obviously loving it, so why shouldn’t he get something back? Besides, we all knew, everyone knew, that something had got to be done. I suppose I’d known it even when I only used to read the magazine in the hairdresser’s. There was something dreary about it, something that made you feel mentally constipated. Now that I was on the inside I’d discovered that a lot of the articles and so on were actually pretty clever, pretty tricky to write, but that didn’t stop them being dreary. The opposite if anything. They were like an acrobat doing incredibly difficult stunts which everyone’s seen too often. The circulation was going down and down. Tom said he’d realised the writing was on the wall when his cronies stopped talking about seeing the magazine in the club and started talking about seeing it in the dentist’s. We were all in a way longing for something to happen.

But that didn’t make it any easier being a spy. It wasn’t just because I liked the people I was spying on. I didn’t, not all of them. Bruce Fischer, for instance. Bruce was Art Editor, a big, doughy, blue-chinned man who wore half-transparent nylon shirts which let you see his string vest and hairy chest. A classic edger-up. Only that morning he’d edged me the whole length of the make-up table until I’d used the Gloy brush to write ‘No’ on his nylon shirt. He’d lost his temper. He was the one who drew the cartoons of the blondes in bed with sugar-daddies. It was a sort of tradition. Right back in the Thirties, in the very first issue, there’d been a terribly daring picture like that and Bruce was still doing them. They seemed to be popular. Readers wrote in with new twists. I thought they were unspeakably dreary, but would I have liked them more if I hadn’t thought Bruce was a pretty unpleasant person?

Or Jack Todd? Mr Clarke had appointed him just before the war when the magazine was almost on the rocks, but it was saved by Adolf Hitler. Apparently wars are marvellous for the written word. Ronnie’s theory was that whenever civilisation is heading for the rocks everyone tries to reassert its values by doing the most civilised thing they can think of, like going to Myra Hess concerts in the National Gallery, but especially by settling down for a good read. Even so Jack must have had a pretty exhausting war and now he seemed almost like an editorial zombie some of the time, just going through the motions, laughing that awful laugh, buying dreary articles by writers he’d known when they were brilliantly promising, and so on. But then he’d hit a good patch, come up with a dozen fresh ideas, spot new talent . . . me, for instance. He’d liked Petronella, hadn’t he? And he was dotty about Uncle Tosh. He’d been so keen on their visit to the opera that he’d made me stretch it out to a whole page in the proper part of the magazine with an illustration by Sally Benbow, and that happened most weeks now. I couldn’t help thinking that Jack was a good editor, really, could I?

And Tom? And Ronnie? Whom I did like, who treated me as a real person, junior member of the boys’ gang? Who’d taken my side when Bruce had lost his temper—not that Ronnie didn’t make the odd bit of accidental-seeming contact now and again . . .

I was worried about both of them, for opposite reasons. Ronnie ran the review pages and wrote the parliamentary sketch. He knew a fantastic amount about what was going on. He could always tell you which ministers Mr Churchill was prepared to listen to and which made him pretend to go gaga the moment they opened their mouths and things like that, but somehow when he wrote it down it came out drab. Tom was the other way round. He was brilliant at noticing the surface of life, what people were wearing and eating and so on, and he had a lovely easy way of writing, but he wasn’t remotely interested in what was going on beneath the surface or why things happened. If he wanted to know whether the Viet Minh were on our side or theirs, for instance, he would have to ask Ronnie. I was specially worried about Tom because somehow I sensed that Mr B wouldn’t be interested in what he did.

I liked Tom most of all. I had decided, tentatively, that he was ‘queer’. Powdering one’s nose before a dance of course one gossiped about the men who’d been in the dinner party and who were therefore going to provide most of one’s partners for the rest of the evening. All of them would have been to one of the big public schools, and as most of the girls had brothers, quite a bit of information got around. On the whole one welcomed the queers. They tended to like dancing and do it well. They noticed what one wore. They talked more amusingly. They weren’t possessive. Above all they didn’t behave as though they were going out to bat for the Men’s First XI in the great game of sex, all arrogance and nerves, in varying proportions but just as tiresome whatever the mixture. I’d known one of these queers since childhood as he lived only three miles from Cheadle and got asked about a lot, despite having been sacked from Harrow, because he was a good tennis-player. But even he, one vaguely assumed, was going to grow out of it.

Tom (if I was right about him) was not. This made him seem different from anyone else I’d known. And then there was the danger, the daring, involved in that way of life. Only a fortnight before the supper at Maidenhead a well-known playwright had been sent to prison after being found in the arms of a guardsman under some bushes by the Serpentine. Jack Todd had become almost hysterical with excitement at the news, chain-laughing, thrilled by the man’s downfall, derisive of the hypocrisy of public life, but obviously inquisitive as a small boy and shocked as a great-aunt. Did he know about Tom? Was he in some way getting at him? Tom hadn’t seemed to notice but Ronnie had become very jumpy and tried to shut Jack up. Later he’d told me, ‘Jack’s got it in for old Tom. He needs him. Tom’s the flywheel, keeping the machine running when the engine’s off. But Jack will do all he knows to stop Tom becoming editor when his own time’s up. In fact he’ll hang on to that chair till he keels over.’

Now, how much of this could I tell Mr B? Of course I longed to tell him everything, to show how bright I was, how at home in my new adult world. Only I guessed he wouldn’t be all that impressed, so I stuck to what actually went into the paper. We were talking about ‘By the Way’. This was a series of unconnected paragraphs at the start of each week’s paper, beginning with a phrase like ‘We notice that . . .’ and going on to be ironic or witty or lightly sentimental about whatever Tom claimed to have noticed. He wrote most of them. They looked as easy as pie. You didn’t realise till you’d tried that they were incredibly difficult to get right. I was explaining this when Mr B interrupted.

‘That’s all over,’ he said.

I looked up.

‘No time for that sort of thing. Not any more,’ he said.

‘He does them incredibly quickly.’

Mr B gave me his toad look, pulled the mustard pot towards himself, took the spoon and began to smear parallel yellow lines on the table-cloth. I watched, shocked. There was something sacred about clean white linen, about the columns of folded table-cloths in Mrs Hamm’s cupboards at Cheadle, some of them stitched with my great-grandmother’s initials, as part of her trousseau, and therefore new in 1876, but still perfectly good thanks to the systematic rotation of the columns. Probably they’d all had mustard spilt on them over the years, but Mr B’s deliberate smearing was different. Each time he drew a line he reduced the space between it and the one before.

‘Our relationship with time is changing,’ he said. ‘We think of time as a constant, but it’s not. It is an accelerating process. In the Middle Ages . . .’

He drew a line on the table, a foot back from where he’d started.

‘. . . it might be a century between one serious change in society and the next. It made sense to plant oak trees.’

He began to move the spoon slowly across the rows, an inch above the cloth.

‘By the industrial revolution the gap was a generation, by the First World War a decade. Soon we will stop thinking in years and think in months. It affects us all. When our cities were built we invested in a hundred-year future, with sewers and roads and bridges and warehouses that would last. What businessman today will invest in a ten-year future?’

‘I’ve got a friend—the man you rescued me from at that dance, as a matter of fact—who says he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he’s forty.’

‘Perfectly possible, provided he remembers there is no future and therefore no past. The only time is now.’

‘What’s it got to do with what Tom Duggan writes?’

‘He is writing for here,’ said Mr B, pointing to a space two mustard-lines back.

‘A lot of people probably still think they are living there.’

‘Do you watch the television?’

‘We haven’t got one. There’s a set at one of my friends’. They can’t tear their eyes from it.’

‘Exactly. Your people who you think are living in the past are bored with the past, without knowing it. They will move on, all of a sudden, leaving Duggan stranded.’

‘In that case, why did you buy the paper?’

He swung round and beckoned to a waiter, then pointed to the mess on the cloth. The waiter took a clean napkin from the empty table next door and spread it over the mess, blotting it out. But I could still feel it was there, shocking, between the snowy layers.

‘Why did I buy Night and Day?’ said Mr B when he’d gone. ‘Have you surfed ever?’

‘Brrr, no thanks. I’ve watched people doing it at Brancaster but it takes a north-easter to get the waves up. I don’t see the fun in waiting around in a wind that’s come from Finland so that you can lie on your turn in the water and let a wave push you ashore.’

‘In Barbados we have learnt to do it on our hind legs. It is a healthy activity. You should come to Barbados and try.’

‘Oh, I’d love to.’

I don’t think I spoke with any special gush. I liked England, and because of the war and problems afterwards I hadn’t been abroad much. Two seasons skiing, and bicycles in Normandy, that was all. A squall threshed along the river. The idea of sun and blue waves and warm beaches made my skin crawl with imagined pleasure. I saw Mr B looking at me with his pop eyes half hidden by lowered lids.

‘Will you come and live with me?’ he said.

Of course my heart gave a bump and I felt my eyes widen. I suppose I blushed, because I do. But in a funny way I wasn’t surprised, though I certainly hadn’t been expecting him to say anything like that. As I’ve said, I’d half expected it my first evening out with him, but then I’d come to the conclusion that he liked my company occasionally because I was young and amusing and had a bit of snob appeal, but he’d want somebody much more sophisticated for a lover. And if you’d asked me, when he wasn’t there, how I’d react to such a proposal, I’d probably have said that my chief problem would be trying to hide my disgust at the idea. But he was there.

‘Be your mistress, you mean?’ I said.

‘If you choose to put it that way.’

‘How long for?’

Now he did the smile.

‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Nina left me after two years to marry a farmer in Mull. I kicked another girl out after six weeks and she tried to sell her story to the press.’

‘Tried?’

‘Stick to the point.’

‘You know I’m a minor?’

‘Until the tenth of August. I have considered that, but I would like your answer in principle.’

I thought about it. No, I didn’t, but I felt I had to pretend to. I could have said no—he hadn’t made it seem difficult. I looked at the sodden willows and two swans on the dark water for about ten seconds.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘In principle.’

‘You don’t want a day or two to think it over?’

I shook my head. Now I was shocked, astonished, frightened. It was him knowing my birthday. It meant he’d been thinking about it in his cold way. The name of the town we were in crossed my mind and that made me go scarlet. He was watching me and raised an eyebrow.

‘I wouldn’t have guessed you liked puns,’ I said.

‘I don’t . . . oh, I see. If it will set your mind at rest I hadn’t intended to make the suggestion this evening. But you looked so delicious at that moment . . .’

‘It was thinking about Barbados.’

‘We won’t be going there for some months, I’m afraid.’

‘I don’t mind. What shall I call you?’

‘My first name is Amos.’

‘Does anyone call you that?’

‘Only my mother.’

‘Is she still . . .’

I could have bitten my tongue off. I don’t think a muscle or line in his face changed but I could feel he was hurt and furious. I reached across the table and took his hand. It was as small as mine, but dry and hard.

‘I haven’t had any practice,’ I said. ‘I’m bound to be clumsy at first.’

He squeezed my hand, turned it over, looked at it and let it go.

‘I’m an ugly little man,’ he said. ‘Try not to remind me. But I am not yet fifty.’

‘You are the most exciting person I’ve ever met.’

He patted my hand and pushed it away.

‘I want to talk about ways and means,’ he said. ‘I implied just now that I was able to keep my affairs out of the newspapers, but there are, of course, limits. We may have reached them. The combination of British prurience and British snobbery may prove too strong.’

‘I wouldn’t care.’

‘You would, when it happened. Furthermore there is your mother and Cheadle Trust.’

‘She can’t do anything except persuade the Trustees to cut off my allowance, and that’s a pittance. It’s all entailed and I inherit when I’m twenty-five.’

‘So I gather. But I hear your mother is a formidable woman, and in any case there is no point in creating problems where they can be avoided. I myself am not anxious for publicity. I am not a particularly rich man, though like your friend I intend to be. I operate by persuading richer men that they can trust me to use their money to their profit, and if they were to see my name all over the gossip-columns their confidence might be less. So what I propose is this: you will have to move out of Charles Street . . .’

‘I couldn’t possibly afford anywhere you could bear.’

‘Let me finish. I will of course pay the rent, but you will need to explain where the money is coming from. Todd tells me that these little pieces you’ve been doing are very popular with readers . . .’

‘All I know is people have started sending in grisly imitations.’

‘All successes have their drawbacks. But they appear to have caught on. I see no reason why you shouldn’t produce a little book on those lines. If you judge it right you might do very well. There is a certain type of essentially non-literary small volume which people give each other by the tens of thousands for Christmas. A sensible publisher, recognising the possibilities, might well offer you a fair-sized advance to complete the work in time for him to get it out for the Christmas market. In any case the general public is absurdly ignorant about publishing finances. I don’t think any of your family or friends would question the possibility that your advance enabled you to set yourself up in a small flat in the block where I happen to live. The need to have total peace so that you can write the book in a hurry would be your reason for leaving Charles Street.’

‘Is this real?’

‘You seem markedly more stimulated by the idea than by my previous proposal.’

I laughed and reached for his hand again. He shook his head. We had started to live our secret life, even if the other people in the room were only waiters, or stockbrokers out with their wives or floozies. Hard to tell which was which. There wasn’t going to be much doubt in my case. It was extraordinary, now, how much I needed to touch him, to show him I meant yes with something that wasn’t just words. To show myself, too, I suppose.

‘It’s the way I’ve grown up,’ I said. ‘Family. You don’t let on about feelings that really matter. Except with Jane, of course. She’s different.’

‘Your sister?’

‘I’ve got two others, but she’s my twin. We have unspeakable rows, but we mind about each other dreadfully too. Is it all right if I tell her?’

‘Is it necessary?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

Once more my hand reached towards his but I managed to stop it. Instead I smoothed with my fingers at the napkin. The mustard was gluing it to the table-cloth now, and the yellow lines were soaking faintly through. I looked straight at him.

‘Did you ever meet a girl called Veronica Bracken?’ I said.

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It sounds as if it mattered to you.’

‘It might have. Please forget I asked.’

‘If you wish.’

He turned to order coffee. I felt shivery and ill, not because of what I’d agreed to but because of the sudden notion that he might have been the man in Veronica’s story. My instinct was to go back, for safety, back to the first half of the evening.

‘You haven’t told me why you bought Night and Day,’ I said. ‘You were saying something about surfing and that got us on to Barbados and then this . . . other thing came up.’

He was lighting a cigar. (The time before, when we’d dined alone, after the opera, he’d asked my permission.) He answered between sucks and inspections of the glowing tip.

‘It’s the hollow before the wave that matters,’ he said. ‘If you let that go past you’ve missed the wave. Then you’ve got to work like blazes to get your board moving as the wave itself comes. And then you can get up and find your balance and ride the wave. In the sea, of course, you can look over your shoulder and see the wave coming and decide whether it’s worth waiting for a better one. But in the metaphor I’m using, where time itself is the wave, all that is hidden and you have only the feel of the hollow to go by. I met a fellow who wanted to sell some shares privately because he thought they were going down and down. I made some inquiries and decided this might be only the hollow before a wave. Now I have to get the board moving. The pun is not intentional.’

‘And if there isn’t a wave after all?’

‘I shall be in serious trouble. As your friend who also wishes to be a rich man could no doubt tell you, it is necessary to take risks. Mostly I risk other people’s money, and their trust in me not to lose it, but in order to underwrite that trust, and also to maximise my own share of the eventual profits, I have to risk the capital I have been able to accumulate by riding previous waves.’

‘What was the first one? I mean how do you start? I wish some of the Milletts had known. I feel like a sort of mermaid born to sit on a gloomy old rock while your waves come chuntering past. It’s worse than that because it’s rather a soft rock, and the waves are slowly wearing it away. Sometimes I think I’ll be the last mermaid who’ll ever sit there.’

I was rather pleased by the way I’d picked up his image and made something of it, but he seemed not to notice.

‘It’s not so much of a risk to begin,’ he said. ‘You’ve little to lose, but you need to see your chance and take it. In my case I was able to help some influential people just after the war and they . . .

‘You were on the Control Commission, weren’t you?’

He looked at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It comes of belonging to a big family. You get used to interrupting each other. I’ll try and behave.’

He nodded, still watching me.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I think we had better have a definite understanding that we avoid the subject both of my work and yours. Otherwise, where they overlap, you will find yourself in an invidious position. We will begin from this moment.’

‘All right.’

‘I’ve told you the only thing that concerns you. I seem to be riding the wave successfully at the moment, but I may suddenly lose my balance and go under.’

‘It won’t matter. I’ll pull you on to my rock.’

Rather charmingly he let me hold his hand all the way back to London while we talked about the Petronella book, but he didn’t want to kiss me before he dropped me at Charles Street. Because of the chauffeur, I assumed, though I imagined he must have been used to that sort of thing.[1]

[1] I am relieved to find that this is almost as far as I chose to go in writing about my sex life. The omission would seem perverse if I had been writing the same story in these days, but in those it would have been extraordinary if I had gone into detail. I do not propose to do so now, but feel an impulse to deal briefly with the question of whether I loved B. The answer is certainly yes. Suppose we were to meet now (I as I am, he as he was) I would probably dislike and distrust him, with good reason. For all his magnetism I would not think him a pleasant or worthwhile person. He was not. But in spite of that, in spite of all changes, I cannot deny that I still, however irrationally, feel for him what can only be called love. Did he love me, though? He never said so. Perhaps that is what this book has turned out, after all these years, to be about.