They reached a small bookshop with a display of modern first editions in the window. “This is the place,” James said. “Tindley and Chapman. It’s a great place. They’ve got all sorts of stuff.”
They went in. Mr Tindley was at his desk, paging through a book. He looked up and smiled at them. “Poussin?”
“Yes,” said James.
Mr Tindley half-turned and extracted a small pamphlet from the shelf behind him. “It’s in quite good condition,” he said, handing the pamphlet to James.
James looked at the price. “Seventeen pounds?”
Mr Tindley nodded. “It’s quite rare.”
James reached into his pocket and extracted a twenty pound note. Mr Tindley took the note and gave the change. They went out.
Caroline noticed that after he had slipped the pamphlet into a pocket, James put the three pound coins into his wallet. Then he reached into another pocket and took out the bottle of sterilising gel.
“Money’s really dirty,” he said as they began to cross St Martin’s Lane.
She watched as he poured a small quantity of gel onto the palm of his right hand.
“Dirty in what sense?” she asked. “Corrupting? Or because it represents exploitation of others?”
James looked at her in surprise. “Of course not,” he said. “Nothing political. I meant because it’s often covered in germs. It’s handled by so many people, you see.”
Caroline said nothing for a few moments, but once they were safely across the street she turned to James and touched him lightly on the forearm. “Listen, James,” she said. “Aren’t you being just a little bit too fussy about germs? I mean, there are germs all over the place. We’re covered in them.”
James gave a shudder. “Speak for yourself,” he said.
Chapter 9: The Use of the Subjunctive
While Caroline and James made their way to Covent Garden Market, not far away, in their offices in a discreet square in the heart of Soho, the Ragg Porter Literary Agency was about to have its quarterly review meeting. There were three principals in the firm, two of whom, Barbara Ragg and Rupert Porter, had taken over the business from their respective fathers. Gregory Ragg and Fatty Porter had collaborated amicably for over thirty years, and had blithely assumed that their offspring would do the same. The hope that Barbara and Rupert would work together was not misplaced, but that their relationship should mirror that of their fathers proved to be a wish too far; for although they made a success of the agency, Barbara and Rupert would never have described each other as friends.
The main reason for the coolness between them was an historical one rather than any fundamental incompatibility of temperament. And like the old enmity between Ecuador and Peru, or between Chile and Argentina, the ill-feeling between Barbara and Rupert was based on a territorial dispute. In the case of Ecuador and Peru, the argument had been about ownership of part of the Amazonian Basin; in the case of Barbara and Rupert, the casus belli was the ownership of the Notting Hill flat Fatty Porter had sold years ago to Gregory Ragg. According to Rupert, this sale had only gone through because Fatty believed that Gregory wanted the flat for himself; but in the end, after living there for only a year or so, Gregory had retired to the country and passed the flat to his daughter. Had Fatty known that this would happen, Rupert maintained, he would never have sold the flat in the first place, and he – Rupert – would now be comfortably ensconced in it. As it was, Barbara now lived in it and enjoyed the advantages of its substantial drawing room, which was very much larger than that which Rupert and his wife had in their own, markedly inferior flat.
The disagreement between Ecuador and Peru had resulted in a state of armed tension between the two countries. Every so often, in the war season, as it became known, when the weather allowed for good flying, this would flare up into an exchange of actual hostilities, during which the Ecuadorians would shoot down a few Peruvian MIG fighters, and vice versa. Eventually better sense prevailed and the issue was resolved by the World Court – largely in favour of Peru, a decision that did not meet with wide support in Ecuador. (It is still possible to engage the taxi drivers of Quito in discussion of this matter, making the Ecuadorian capital one of the few cities in the world where taxi drivers are prepared to discuss the jurisprudence of the World Court. London taxi drivers, although opinionated in some areas, are not known for the strength of their views on the decisions of the Hague court.)
There had never been open hostilities between Barbara and Rupert, who restricted themselves to the occasional slightly needling remark – just enough to keep the matter alive but not sufficient to lead to actual conflict. There was one such exchange that morning, as Rupert came into the meeting room at the Ragg Porter Agency to find Barbara flicking through an unsolicited manuscript, a look of amusement on her face.
“I see you’re enjoying that,” Rupert observed. “I took a manuscript home last night and left it there, I’m afraid. There’s so much clutter in my study in the flat, you see – not quite enough room. The manuscript disappeared under a pile of papers.”
Barbara picked up the inference immediately. What Rupert was saying here was that her flat – to which he did not think her entitled – was much roomier; had he lived in the flat to which he was morally entitled (hers) he would not mislay manuscripts.
So she looked up and replied: “You really should think about moving some time, Rupert. I hear that this is quite a good time to buy. There are quite a few for sale signs in our street, you know. Not that I would ever think of moving myself.”
Rupert, of course, understood perfectly what this meant, which was: You should forget the past and stop moaning about things that happened a long time ago. You should find a larger flat because I’m never going to move out of the flat that you think is yours, so just forget it and shut up. So there.
Rupert pursed his lips. The subject would not be discussed further now, and possibly not again that entire week, but it would not be dropped. Oh no. When one was as certain of the rectitude of one’s cause as he was it would take more than a cheap salvo about moving and for sale signs to take the subject off the agenda altogether. But for now there was business to be done.
He sat down. The directors usually spent half an hour or so talking about agency affairs before the firm’s three other agents, who were not on the board, joined the meeting. This gave them an opportunity to catch up on who was doing what, and also to exchange odd bits of publishing gossip that might be useful in negotiations on their clients’ behalf.
“Your man, Great … What’s his name again?” said Rupert.
“Greatorex. Errol Greatorex.”
“Yes, him. Where are we? Has he delivered the final manuscript yet?”
Barbara tossed aside the manuscript she had been reading. It would never do. “Unpublishable,” she said, and added quickly, “This one, not Greatorex’s. This is by a man who set out to sail from Southampton to Istanbul in a small yacht barely the size of a bathtub.”
Rupert smiled. “And?”
“It all went terribly well, as far as I can make out. There were no storms, no incidents with larger vessels, and the Turks were terribly good to him when he arrived. It makes for dull literature when the Turks are kind to one. We can’t have books like that.”
“But what about Greatorex?”
Barbara sighed. “He’s in London at the moment,” she said. “He says that he’s still putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. He promised me that it would be ready soon, but I’m having great difficulty in getting it out of him.”
Rupert sighed. There had been a lot of talk – hype even – about the launch of Errol Greatorex’s Autobiography of a Yeti, a story dictated to the author by a yeti who worked as a schoolteacher in a remote Himalayan village. But they had been waiting for some time now, and he was beginning to wonder whether the author would ever deliver.
“Are you sure that he’s genuine?” Rupert asked. ‘The whole thing seems a little bit …. How should I put it? Dubio
us.”
“Oh, I think he’s the real thing,” Barbara assured him. “I had lunch with him the other day, when he came back from Tibet. He gave me a lovely Tibetan knitted hat. He picked it up in Lhasa.”
“Generous of him,” said Rupert. “It’s nice when you meet an author who isn’t selfish – rare though it unfortunately be.”
Barbara was impressed. “I love your subjunctives,” she said.
And she was sincere in her praise. She did love a man who used the subjunctive mood, as Hugh had done that very morning when he kissed her goodbye at the door of the flat. “Were I to search for twenty years,” he had said, “I would never find somebody as lovely as you.”
It made her feel warm just to think of it. A beautiful subjunctive, as warm, as loving as a caress.
Chapter 10: How Dim Can You Get?
It was not only Barbara Ragg’s remark about the subjunctive that made Rupert wonder about her; there were other things he had noticed, little things, perhaps, but which taken together indicated that something was afoot. She was engaged, of course, and he asked himself whether the mere fact of engagement could make a person dreamy and distracted. He tried to remember what he had felt like when he had become engaged himself, but found it difficult even to recall when that was, and in what circumstances, let alone how he had felt at the time.
Of course Rupert knew that Barbara’s private life was none of his business, and he would never have dreamed of prying, but if her state of mind was affecting her work, then that was a different matter altogether. And there had been signs of it. A few days previously, Barbara had written to an author and told him that not only had his manuscript been accepted for publication by a well-known publisher but that a sizeable advance had been negotiated. This must have been good news for the author in question, who had not been published before and whose work, although worthy, was on the very margins of what was commercially viable.
Her discovery two days later that she had written to the wrong author could hardly have been comfortable. The manuscript that had been offered for was by a quite different author – one who was widely published already and would barely have noticed yet another publisher’s advance.
“La Ragg,” Rupert had said to his wife that evening, “made an absolutely colossal blunder. Colossal. She told somebody that his novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t. She got the wrong author. Stupid cow.”
Gloria Porter smiled. “How dim can you get?”
“Not much dimmer,” said Rupert. “And you know what? The story gets better.”
“Difficult to imagine,” said his wife. “Tell all.” She liked to hear stories of Barbara Ragg’s ineptitude; she, too, had come round to resenting Barbara’s enjoyment of the flat that surely had been meant for her Rupert, and ergo for her. She had tried to get Rupert to stop going on about the issue, but eventually decided that it would be simpler to join in his campaign. So now she found a curious satisfaction in his diatribes against Barbara and indeed came up with her own contributions to the feud. Well, it was all very well having the larger drawing room, she pointed out, but how could one possibly benefit from it when one’s life was such a mess in other respects? Barbara’s affair with the odious Oedipus Snark, for instance. It was as if the Recording Angel was punishing her for her occupying a flat that was not, by rights, hers.
Rupert was enjoying himself. “I went into her office to get something or other, and there was La Ragg sitting at her desk, white as a sheet. Drained. So I said, ‘What ails thee, dear Ragg?’ or something to that effect, and she looked up and said, ‘I fear that I’ve made a small mistake.’”
“Small mistake!” expostulated Gloria. “La Ragg certainly believes in understatement.”
“Indeed,” went on Rupert. “She told me about sending the letter to the wrong author. So I said, ‘How could you do that, Barbara?’ And my question, I assure you, was an apposite one. I just didn’t see how one could possibly write to one author in the belief that he’s another.”
Gloria shook her head in disbelief. This was such fun. “Absolutely,” she said. “And her answer?”
“Answer came there none,” said Rupert. “At least to begin with. For some time she said nothing at all, and then she opened her bovine mouth and said something about the two authors having very similar names. ‘In what respect?’ enquire I. ‘Oh, they’re both Welsh,’ La Ragg responds. I ask you! Both Welsh! So Neil Kinnock is Welsh and …” He waved his hand about airily, trying to think of another name. “And that other chap’s Welsh, but would we confuse the two of them, just because they come from—”
“Wales,” said Gloria. “There are loads of Welsh people. Loads of them. I don’t see how one can confuse people on the grounds of their nationality. I just don’t.”
Rupert rolled his eyes upwards. “Well, she did. But wait – here’s the denouement. She then told me that this poor chap – the one who thought that his book had been sold – had gone out and spent the advance.”
Gloria was very pleased to hear this; the story was getting better and better, just as Rupert had promised. She enjoyed her husband’s stories of office affairs – stories in which he came out rather well, as was to be expected, but Barbara Ragg and various other members of staff were shown to have fairly major failings – again, as one might expect. “No!” she exclaimed.
Rupert nodded with satisfaction. “Apparently he went out and bought a new car. Cleaned out his bank account in the expectation that he would soon be getting the money for the book.”
“Poor man,” said Gloria. “But I suppose he’ll be able to take it back.”
Rupert beamed. “Not so fast. Apparently he had spent the entire day driving up and down Wales and clocked up an awful mileage. You can’t take a new car back if you’ve put several hundred miles on it. It’s not a new car any more. The value drops very quickly and dramatically the moment you drive out of the showroom, and even more so when you put a few miles on the thingometer.”
“Odometer,” said Gloria.
Rupert raised a finger. There was even more to come. “La Ragg then says to me, and I quote verbatim – ipse dixit – she says, ‘I do hope that the agency will refund him the difference between what he paid and what the garage gives him when he takes the car back. In fact, I hope you don’t mind – I’ve written him a letter to that effect.’”
Gloria’s eyes glinted. “Outrageous!” she said.
Rupert reassured her. “Oh, I nipped that in the bud all right,” he said. “I told her that I did mind and that if she chose to rectify this mistake it was to be from her drawings on the firm and not from anywhere else. Those who make mistakes should pay for them, I said. And not with other people’s money.”
“That taught her, no doubt,” said Gloria.
“She sulked,” said Rupert. “She’s a terrible sulker, is La Ragg. Went all moody. You know how women get from time to time.”
Gloria looked at him sternly. “Some women,” she corrected him. “Not all.”
“Of course,” said Rupert. “Of course, mon chou. That’s what I meant.”
Chapter 11: Caroline Meets Berthea
Caroline put down the receiver. She had finished the telephone call she had been making to James, and had ended by blowing a kiss down the line. When, she asked herself, did I last do something like that? As a teenager, perhaps, when she had enjoyed those long conversations with her first boyfriend, Will Brown, and had found it so hard to hang up, although they really had so little to say to one another beyond half-whispered declarations of undying love. And then Will Brown had gone to university in Cardiff and broken his promise to phone her every day. So much for men, she thought; they promise things and then don’t deliver. It was ever thus.
James was different. He always did what he said he was going to do, even if it made him just a tiny bit predictable. No matter. They had arranged to meet later that evening, when James would come round to the flat. They would cook a simple meal and watch a film together, making
it the sort of evening that both she and James preferred. James had offered to cook if Caroline would go and buy Arborio rice – he had a special risotto recipe that he wanted to try – as well as a carton of crème fraiche and a punnet of raspberries. He would bring Parmesan cheese and asparagus for the risotto, and a bottle of wine that some friends had given him for looking after their cat while they went to Norwich for the weekend.
Caroline decided to go out to the shops immediately. None of her flatmates was in, and so she double-locked the door behind her and made her way out into the street. A short walk later, as she turned the corner onto Ebury Street, she found herself faced with a woman who had dropped her shopping bag and was bending down to recover a scattering of Brussels sprouts from the pavement. The woman looked up at her apologetically.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m sure that you didn’t expect to find your way blocked by Brussels sprouts, of all things.”