to your latest question is one, one bottle.’
‘Which you had most of.’
‘If I did it was to save leaving half of it for the waiters to swill at their leisure. I don’t think your precious Mr Thompson is used to wine. He’d obviously have felt more at home with a nice tankard of wallop.’ Jimmie paused and eyed his wife. ‘And if you ask me whether I drank any brandy I might get rather cross,’ he said, giving the last word an old-fashioned pronunciation. ‘To put your mind at rest I refrained, out of kindness not to my host not to myself. I’d had quite enough to eat and drink and I didn’t want to run the risk of stirring my insides up. And I must say, darling, I find it a teeny bit boring of you to tell me I’m not to ask that fellow to take me where I want to go for luncheon and then when I manage to get a tolerable meal after all to haul me over the coals for eating and drinking what I fancied.’
‘Well done,’ said Joanna, looking for another chocolate but for the moment not settling on one. ‘Your capacity for –’
‘Oh, what?’
‘I was going to say, your capacity for putting other people in the wrong seems if anything to increase from day to day.’
Immediately the telephone began to ring downstairs on the ground floor, there being from Jimmie’s repeated prohibition only the one instrument in the house. On hearing it now he laid his hand energetically across his forehead like a figure in high drama expressing the ultimate dissatisfaction with fate. ‘Oh, that damned contrivance, don’t tell me it has no mind of its own, it knows just when to ring to cause the maximum … Well, I’m glad to hear that some faculty in me is increasing against the general trend. Answer that thing, would you, darling, there’s a sweetheart, it’s certain to be for you.’
But when Joanna came back again from downstairs soon afterwards she said, it’s for you.’
‘Oh God. I hope you –’
‘The second Mrs Fane. She’s hanging on.’
‘That bloody woman. I thought I’d made it perfectly clear …’
Saying no more, Jimmie dashed from the room like somebody half his age. Joanna followed him as far as the door, then moved quietly to the stairhead. After a moment she heard a clink and a clash as Jimmie noisily rang off, and was sitting reading a fashion magazine and eating a chocolate on his return to the room.
‘How sure are you there’s a book in it?’ asked Brian Harris a couple of mornings later.
Gordon Scott-Thompson answered without hesitation. ‘Sure enough to sign a contract specifying a delivery date.’
‘What delivery date have you in mind?’
‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that yet. I’d need to think about it.’
‘So think about it, my old Gordon. Anyway, you seem a good bit surer now than you were this time last week.’
‘This time last week I hadn’t talked to him much and I hadn’t realized what a lot of stuff there was in the archives here for a start. You’re going on as if you’re a good bit keener on your side of the fence.’
‘Yeah, we are, I think it’s fair to say.’
Brian Harris used the plural pronoun out of no delusion of grandeur or of anything else but in general reference to the publishing firm in whose offices the two were sitting. His own office in these offices, partitioned off from them with man-high sheets of lavatory glass, had no special publishing look about them, except perhaps for the presence of rather more books than even a literate stockbroker, say, was likely to have installed where he worked. But then Brian Harris was not, in dress, hairstyle and accent, at all the kind of youngish fellow most people might have supposed to be a director of a publishing house, and a rather old-fashioned house at that, one that occasionally published works of literature.
‘So you’ll be commissioning a book on Jimmie Fane’s life and works by me,’ said Gordon now.
‘Quite likely, yeah.’
‘Under a contract.’
‘I clock you,’ said Brian, thoroughly scratching an armpit.
‘With an advance.’
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised, though of course that’s off the record.’
‘What about an advance on that advance?’
‘You mean, you mean I go and give you some money, just like that?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not, you want to know. Why is what I want to know, among other things.’
‘I had to pay for this rather stiff lunch for the two of us.’
‘You were telling me. I thought you were supposed to have an expense account on that paper.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Well then.’
Gordon thought it would take too long to explain that his boss on the paper was opposed to the Fane project and might not look favourably on a submission for the refunding of expenses incurred in its furtherance. So he said, ‘Louise has been spending money like water recently, my money.’
‘What, without you there? Would a couple of hundred quid be any help?’
‘Yes, it would. So you’re paying me an advance on my advance after all.’
‘I’ll send it on to you. It’ll be out of my own pocket actually, and before you say thanks a lot but no thanks it’ll actually be the firm’s money which I’m borrowing from them so when you pay me back I’ll use what you give me to pay the firm back, and before you ask me just out of curiosity how I can be so sure you’ll pay me back on the nail I’ll say you’re enough of a cunt to pay your own grandmother back if you had to cut your foot off to do it. I hope you understand I say that without the slimmest possible sliver of reluctant admiration or any crap like that. You don’t deserve an expense account, you don’t. On a paper that size?’
After giving a couple of upward nods in lieu of imprecations, the publisher recrossed his blue-clad legs on the hard chair he had pulled up to rest them on, and joined his hands behind his head. Uncharacteristically, he hesitated before speaking again. Gordon clearly had nothing to say for the moment.
‘I told you we were thinking of reissuing some of the Fane works to coincide with your own effort.’
‘Still only the novels?’
‘At the moment. They seemed the obvious ones.’
‘M’m. All of them at once, some then some later, or what? You hadn’t decided when you and I talked before.’
‘We still haven’t. Most likely it’ll be two at the time and then if they catch on the others the following season. Nothing fixed yet, though.’
‘I’ll be saying quite a bit about the novels. I’m going to feel, well, hampered, restricted, if some of them are still out of print.’
‘I shouldn’t let that worry you. After all, you’ll be saying more than quite a bit about other items in the Fane story, I hope.’
‘Such as?’
During these exchanges Brian had produced a small oblong tin with a green-and-goldish design on its lid. It proved to contain cigarette makings and their owner was soon demonstrating his skill with them. In this second pause Gordon fancied he could detect traces of actual embarrassment. He wondered a little what was to come.
Now Brian put between his lips a sort of cigarette of about the girth of a stout toothpick, and lit it. A faint narcotic odour became perceptible. ‘Your book’s going