Children of the Archbishop (23 page)

Before Dr. Trump could reply, however, Bishop Warple had come to his assistance. He advanced to the foot of the bed and laid his hand upon the mahogany end-piece.

“My pet,” he said sweetly. “You have me.”

“Not always, I haven't,” Mrs. Warple contradicted him. “You're always going out somewhere.”

“But only on my duties,” the Bishop tried to reason with her. “I haven't done what you might call enjoy myself for years …” He stopped himself abruptly and started to rephrase the sentence. “I should say …”

But by then Mrs. Warple had turned to Dr. Trump again.

“You're a lucky man,” she told him. “If Felicity serves you, the way I've served her father, you'll have nothing to complain about.”

“Oh, but I know I'm lucky,” Dr. Trump replied.

He reached out gallantly to take Felicity's hand as he said it, but Felicity was not there. She was busy arranging Mrs. Warple's pillows.

“Besides,” he went on. “I want to serve
her
.”

Mrs. Warple, however, had closed her eyes and seemed no longer to be listening.

“Some men seem to think women were created simply for waiting on them,” she observed to no one in particular.

Bishop Warple smiled and shook his head.

“Ah, Samuel, I'm afraid the invalid knows us all too well. We men are all poor sinners, even the best of us.”

“Quite so. Quite so,” Dr. Trump politely agreed with him.

He was shifting restlessly from foot to foot as he stood there. The one thing that he wanted was to escape. Already in this temperature he could feel himself perspiring. There were little trickles running down his back. And he began to fear that he might be the one who would melt, dissolve, trickle greasily away.

“And nobody thinks of the hours I spend alone here,” Mrs. Warple went on. She had opened her eyes by now and had fixed them on the ceiling. “Hours and hours while nobody comes near me.”

Dr. Trump drew in a deep breath. A happy thought had come to him. Here before him lay his opportunity to ingratiate himself, to demonstrate his thoughtfulness.

“Why not have a wireless?” he asked. “The talks, you know. And the music. And, of course, the sermons.”

There was a shocked hush at the suggestion.

Mrs. Warple did not even trouble to reply. The Bishop looked down at his gaiters. And it was Felicity who spoke for all of them.

“Not with Mother's bad head,” she said reprovingly.

“Alas, no,” the Bishop added sadly. “We tried it. It was no use. It's up in my study now.”

“Oh don't bother about me,” Mrs. Warple said suddenly as though she had been screwing up her courage to speak at all. “I don't count any longer. I'm just a poor old invalid. I'm better out of the way so that happy people can forget all about me.”

An expression crossed Bishop Warple's face as though he had heard all this before. He pulled out his watch rather conspicuously and began fiddling with it.

“Good gracious,” he said, as soon as he could be sure that everyone would hear him. “My ordinands. I must be going. I am already overdue. I am late, in fact. Very late. Very.”

The thought of being left behind there after Bishop Warple had gone came over Dr. Trump in a panic. He realised that he too must do something, and do it quickly.

“And I gave my word that I would not overtire you,” he said. “Next time perhaps you will allow me to stay longer. Much longer. There is so much to tell each other …”

The Bishop had already begun to make his way towards the door, and Dr. Trump started to follow. But Mrs. Warple was too quick for him. She snatched hold of his hand again. Again the soft, damp octopus embrace.

“I don't know why Felicity should want to leave here,” she began. “She's got everything she wants here. Nobody ever tells her anything. She rules this house …”

“Ah,” said Bishop Warple in a tone of great relief, “I hear the nurse coming.”

In the corridor outside Dr. Trump nearly bumped into the woman. She was carrying Mrs. Warple's supper tray. The corridor was narrow and the tray was a wide one. As he flattened himself against the wall, Dr. Trump found himself inspecting the contents like a restaurant supervisor. There was a small casserole of soup; a silver dish from under the cover of which escaped an appetising odour of onions; and the two halves of a meringue glued together by a layer of whipped cream.

But it was at none of these that Dr. Trump was looking. His eyes were fixed on a bottle of milk stout that stood black and irreverent-looking, beside the china toast-rack.

Bishop Warple caught Dr. Trump's eye for the second time.

“For medicinal purposes,” he said. “She needs the nourishment you know.”

Mr. Prevarius was back in Charing Cross Road again. He went there quite a lot nowadays, and every time he got out of Leicester Square Underground Station it did something to him. He felt better, younger, springier. And, above all, more creative. His mind enlarged suddenly. Tunes, with the accompanying words already attached to them, came into his head from nowhere. He saw glimpses of a musical comedy that he was going to write one day. He hummed brief snatches of a new cantata. He planned an opera.

Altogether it was as though the air that blew up Shaftesbury Avenue was oxygen, pure oxygen. Everything that he saw delighted him. The bird prints and the maps of old London. The bookshop that was preoccupied with world revolution. The one almost next door that was dedicated to reconciled and acquiescent-looking nudes. The stark simplicity of the Welsh Chapel. The monographs on the ballet. And the gentleman's outfitters. Particularly, the gentleman's outfitters. Fairly intoxicated by now with the sheer exhilaration of the place, Mr. Prevarius plunged inside and bought himself a saffron necktie with magenta spots. Then carried away by the charm of the little emporium, he purchased a pair of braces with horses' heads on them and a yellow bandana handkerchief with a design of horseshoes, to go with the tie and the braces.

Within limits, he could afford to be self-indulgent nowadays. Because, compared with himself on the first timid visit that he had paid to Mr. Jerome, he was now in a different class of men altogether. He was a success. A hit. A somebody. Not that all his numbers had rung a bell, of course. “Handbag Hankie,” in particular, had failed to strike even the faintest chord in the public consciousness. It might just as well never have been written. But the other little piece, “Four O'clock Doll”—the title had come to him last Christmas during choir practice for “The Messiah”—had got there all right: only this morning he had heard a milk-boy whistling it in Putney High Street. And another composition
of his, in an entirely different vein this time—a number entitled “Desolation”—looked as though it was going to repeat the success of “Four O'clock Doll.” No matter how much the Rev. Sidney Prevarius might be kicked around inside the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital, here in the Charing Cross Road, Mr. Berkeley Cavendish was on the up and up.

It was significant that Mr. Spike Jerome, his publisher, no longer kept him waiting when he called. And, on the whole, Mr. Prevarius rather regretted it. Because he was getting on rather nicely with the daffodil-haired young lady in the front office—the one who was so conscious of her fingernails. He had already discovered so far that her name was Desirée, that her mother was a widow—her father, it appeared, had been something in the Indian Army—and that she had been destined for a career as a doctor. Then papa had died, once of cholera and once of a native spear thrust—there appeared to be two versions—and Desirée had been forced to take up shorthand-typing to keep the home together. The only other information about her that Mr. Prevarius had been able to acquire was that she was thirty-two round the bust—the point arose naturally out of a conversation about jumpers—that her hair was really that colour, and that she liked open-toed shoes and sun-bathing.

But it was no use allowing his thoughts to wander in that direction because Mr. Jerome, his cigar gripped firmly between his teeth, was ready and waiting for him. With no more therefore than a hasty “ta-ta” coming almost on top of the welcoming “cooee,” Mr. Prevarius left Desirée and went inside.

Mr. Jerome's smile was already in full display. And the flashes of gold bridgework made Mr. Prevarius feel as though he had stepped clean out of Charing Cross Road into one of the bazaars of old Damascus. There was a strangely hypnotic effect about such a smile, and Mr. Prevarius found himself smiling back at it.

“Got some good news for you, Mr. Cavendish,” Mr. Jerome said with a quick roll of the cigar from left to right.

“You mean about ‘Handbag Hankie'?” Mr. Prevarius asked eagerly.

But it was the wrong question. At the mere mention of that unplayed, unsung, unloved number, the shutters came down on old Damascus, and the cigar was smartly transferred from right to left again.

“‘Handbag Hankie,'” Mr. Jerome said contemptuously. “Forget it. Give it a rest. Bury it. It isn't worth crying over. This is something important. It's ‘Lullaby Lady' I'm talking about.”

Mr. Prevarius had recovered his poise by now. He was not going to give Mr. Spike Jerome any further opportunity for rebuking him. Besides, “Lullaby Lady” was frankly an experiment, a little piece that he had tossed off with no vulgar thought of profit. He cared nothing for it.

“‘Lullaby Lady,'” he said “Oh that. I was thinking of withdrawing it.”

“Oh you was, was you?” Mr. Jerome remarked, taken off
his
guard this time. “Well, you won't when you hear. I've placed it. It's in panto.”

“But there is no pantomime in May,” Mr. Prevarius objected.

“There will be when December comes,” Mr. Jerome told him. “
Puss in Boots
. End of the first act. Principal boy number. Words on the screen. Audience singing the chorus. All the children joining in. Everything lovely.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Prevarius. “Let us see if we can agree about the royalty scale …”

But in this he had gone too far. Mr. Jerome fixed his teeth more firmly in his cigar and leant forward across the little desk.

“We haven't touched on the financial side,” he said severely. “It's only placed, subject. The lyric needs tidying up—something topical, you know. And they don't like the chorus. They've got their own man on that—subject to your approval, of course. And they want it re-orchestrated. Sid's looking after that. And Olly's rearranging it.”

“Sid and Olly?” Mr. Prevarius inquired vaguely.

“They're under contract,” Mr. Jerome explained. “You can't cut them out so it's no use trying.”

“I was only wondering …” Mr. Prevarius began.

“Then don't,” Mr. Jerome told him. “If you break with them, you're through. As it is, they'll expect something.”

“How much?” asked Mr. Prevarius.

“Twenty-five each and fifty to you.”

Mr. Prevarius paused. It was at moments such as this when he wished that he was a better business man, a stronger character altogether; someone with teeth.

“They're on to easy money, very easy money,” he said slowly. “Who represents them?”

Mr. Jerome shifted the cigar into position again somewhere underneath his left ear.

“I do,” he said.

But, even with fifty per cent of his new earnings about to go to Sid and to Olly, Mr. Prevarius felt that strange excitement—a kind of electric stimulation running right through nerves and sinews—that is known by all artists on the verge of achievement. And Mr. Jerome had shown himself the large-hearted gentleman that he really was. With scarcely any cajoling from Mr. Prevarius, who kept mentioning that he was thinking of moving over to Chappell's or Francis, Day and Hunter, Mr. Jerome had agreed to advance him twenty-five pounds against future royalties. And this put an entirely new complexion on the whole affair. Mr. Prevarius found himself cordially liking Sid and Olly.

But in the midst of his exhilaration, a wave of something colder, of sheer mortal loneliness, swept over him. It was dreadful that one so gifted and successful, so conspicuously in funds, should be left without a friend in London. Eight million people—and not one among them who cared whether he went under the first bus.

His self-sorrow was still mounting as he passed through the outer office, but a glimpse of the daffodil-coloured curls over the top of a filing-cabinet made him pause. He walked over to the little frosted window, marked “Enquiries,” and tapped playfully on the glass.

“Cooee,” he said again.

After what seemed to him an unnecessarily long pause, the window shot up and the young lady looked out.

“You again,” she asked. She was using a chamois leather buffer this time.

“I again,” Mr. Prevarius told her.

“Well?”

“I've just been given two theatre tickets for to-night,” Mr. Prevarius began.

But the Colonel's daughter stopped him.

“Not in there you haven't,” she told him. “He never gives anyone anything.”

Mr. Prevarius smiled.

“Well, what would you like to see?” he asked.

The young lady was at work on the little finger by now.

“That's more like it,” she said.

“Well?” Mr. Prevarius asked.

“Well what?”

“Well, what is it to be?”

“Please yourself entirely,” she said. “It's no affair of mine.” She had now picked up a nail file, and was at work like a real craftsman. “I never go out with accommodation addresses, thank you.”

“Accommodation addresses?” Mr. Prevarius paused. “Oh, but I only use the box number for business purposes,” he told her.

The young lady removed a fragment of loose nail with her teeth.

“I didn't imagine you lived in it,” she said.