Honourable Schoolboy (14 page)

Throughout that whole sunny week Jerry Westerby’s leave-taking had a bustling, festive air which never once let up. If London was holding its summer late, then so, one might have thought, was Jerry. Stepmothers; vaccinations, travel touts, literary agents and Fleet Street editors; Jerry, though he loathed London like the pest, took them all in his cheery pounding stride. He even had a London persona to go with the buckskin boots: his suit, not Savile Row exactly, but a suit undeniably. His prison gear, as the orphan called it, was a washable, blue-faded affair, the creation of a twenty-four-hour tailor named ‘Pontschak Happy House of Bangkok’, who guaranteed it unwrinkable in radiant silk letters on the tag. In the mild midday breezes it billowed as weightlessly as a frock on Brighton pier. His silk shirt from the same source had a yellowed, locker-room look recalling Wimbledon or Henley. His tan, though Tuscan, was as English as the famous cricketing tie which flew from him like a patriotic flag. Only his expression, to the very discerning, had that certain watchfulness, which also Mama Stefano the postmistress had noticed, and which the instinct describes as ‘professional’, and leaves at that. Sometimes, if he anticipated waiting, he carted the book-sack with him, which gave him a bumpkin air: Dick Whittington had come to town.

He was based, if anywhere, in Thurloe Square where he lodged with his stepmother, the third Lady Westerby, in a tiny frilly flat crammed with huge antiques salvaged from abandoned houses. She was a painted, hen-like woman, snappish as old beauties sometimes are, and would often curse him for real or imagined crimes, such as smoking her last cigarette, or bringing in mud from his caged rambles in the park. Jerry took it all in good part. Sometimes, returning as late as three or four in the morning but still not sleepy, he would hammer on her door to wake her, though most often she was awake already; and when she had put on her make-up, he set her on his bed in her frou-frou dressing gown with a king-sized crême de menthe frappée in her little claw, while Jerry himself sprawled over the whole floor-space, among a magic mountain of junk, getting on with what he called his packing. The mountain was made of everything that was useless: old press cuttings, heaps of yellowed newspapers, legal deeds tied in green ribbon, and even a pair of custom-made riding boots, tree’d, but green with mildew. In theory Jerry was deciding what he would need of all this for his journey, but he seldom got much further than a keepsake of some kind, which set the two of them on a chain of memories. One night for example he unearthed an album of his earliest stories.

‘Hey Pet, here’s a good one! Westerby really rips the mask off this one! Make your heart beat faster does it, sport? Get the old blood stirring?’

‘You should have gone into your uncle’s business,’ she retorted, turning the pages with great satisfaction. The uncle in question was a gravel king, whom Pet used freely to emphasise old Sambo’s improvidence.

Another time they found a copy of the old man’s will from years back - ‘I, Samuel, also known as Sambo, Westerby’ - jammed in with a bunch of bills and solicitors’ correspondence addressed to Jerry in his function as executor, all stained with whisky, or quinine, and beginning ‘We regret’.

‘Bit of a turn-up, that one,’ Jerry muttered uncomfortably, when it was too late to re-bury the envelope to the mountain. ‘Reckon we could bung it down the old what-not, don’t you, sport?’

Her boot-button eyes glowed furiously.

‘Aloud,’ she ordered, in a booming, theatrical voice, and in no time they were wandering together through the insoluble complexities of trusts that endowed grandchildren, educated nephews and nieces, the income to this wife for her lifetime, the capital to so-and-so on death or marriage; codicils to reward favours, others to punish slights.

‘Hey, know who that was? Dread cousin Alfred, the one who went to jug! Jesus, why’d he want to leave him money? Blow it in one night!’

And codicils to take care of the racehorses, who might otherwise come under the axe: ‘My horse Rosalie in Maison Laffitte, together with two thousand pounds a year for stabling… my horse Intruder presently under training in Dublin, to my son Gerald for their respective lifetimes, on the understanding he will support them to their natural deaths…’

Old Sambo, like Jerry, dearly loved a horse.

Also for Jerry: stock. Only for Jerry: the company’s stock in millions. A mantle, power, responsibility; a whole grand world to inherit and romp around in… a world offered, promised even, then withheld: ‘My son to manage all the newspapers of the group according to the style and codes of practice established in my lifetime.’ Even a bastard was owned to: a sum of twenty thousands, free of duty payable to Miss Mary Something of the Green, Chobham, the mother of my acknowledged son Adam. The only trouble was: the cupboard was bare. The figures on the account sheet wasted steadily away from the day the great man’s empire tottered into liquidation. Then changed to red and grew again into long blood-sucking insects swelling by a nought a year.

‘Ah well, Pet,’ said Jerry, in the unearthly silence of early dawn, as he tossed the envelope’ back on the magic mountain. ‘Shot of him now, aren’t you, sport?’ Rolling on to his side, he grabbed the pile of faded newspapers last editions of his father’s brainchildren - and, as only old pressmen can, fumbled his way through all of them at once. Can’t go chasing the dolly birds where he is, can he, Pet?’ - a huge rustle of paper - ‘Wouldn’t put it past him, mind. Wouldn’t be for want of trying, I daresay.’ And in a quieter voice, as he turned back to glance at the little doll on the edge of his bed, her feet barely reaching the carpet: ‘You were always his tai-tai, sport, his number one. Always up stuck for you. Told me. Most beautiful girl in the world, Pet is. Told me. Very words. Bellowed it at me across Fleet Street once. Best wife I ever had. ‘

‘Damn devil,’ said his stepmother in a soft, sudden rush of pure North Country dialect, as the creases collected like a surgeon’s pins round the red seam of her lips. ‘Rotten devil, I hate every inch of him.’ And for a while they stayed that way, neither of them speaking, Jerry lying pottering with his junk and yanking at his forelock, she sitting, joined in some kind of love for Jerry’s father.

‘You should have sold ballast for your Uncle Paul,’ she sighed, with the insight of a much deceived woman.

On their last night Jerry took her out to dinner, and afterwards, back in Thurloe Square, she served him coffee in what was left of her Sèvres service. The gesture led to disaster. Wedging his broad forefinger unthinkingly into the handle of his cup, Jerry broke it off with a faint putt which mercifully escaped her notice. By dexterous palming, he contrived to conceal the damage from her until he was able to gain the kitchen and make a swap. God’s wrath is inescapable, alas. When Jerry’s plane staged in Tashkent - he had wangled himself a concession on the trans-Siberian route - he found to his surprise that the Russian authorities had opened a bar at one end of the waiting room: in Jerry’s view amazing evidence of the country’s liberalisation. Groping in his jacket pocket for hard currency to pay for a large vodka, he came instead on the pretty little porcelain question-mark with its snapped-off edges. He forswore the vodka.

In business matters he was equally amenable, equally compliant. His literary agent was an old cricketing acquaintance, a snob of uncertain origins called Mencken, known as Ming, one of those natural fools for whom English society and the publishing world in particular are ever ready to make a comfortable space. Mencken was bluff and gusty and sported a grizzled beard, perhaps in order to suggest he wrote the books he hawked. They lunched in Jerry’s club, a grand, grubby place which owed its survival to amalgamation with humbler clubs, and repeated appeals through the post. Huddled in the half-empty dining room, under the marble eyes of empire builders, they lamented Lancashire’s lack of fast bowlers. Jerry wished Kent would ‘hit the damn ball, Ming, not peck at it’. Middlesex, they agreed, had some good young ones coming on: but ‘Lord help us, look at the way they pick ‘em,’ said Ming, shaking his head and cutting his food all at once.

‘Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’t, too much popery. Malraux if you like philosophy, which I don’t. Maugham you can have, and before that it’s back to Conrad. Cheers. Mind my saying something?’ Jerry filled Ming’s glass. ‘Go easy on the Hemingway stuff. All that grace under pressure, love with your balls shot off. They don’t like it, my view. It’s been said.’

Jerry saw Ming to his cab.

‘Mind my saying something?’ Mencken repeated. ‘Longer sentences. Moment you journalist chappies turn your hand to novels, you write too short. Short paragraphs, short sentences, short chapters. You see the stuff in column inches, ’stead of across the page. Hemingway was just the same. Always trying to write novels on the back of a matchbox. Spread yourself, my view.’

‘Cheerio, Ming. Thanks.’

‘Cheerio, Westerby. Remember me to your old father, mind. Must be getting on now, I suppose. Still it comes to us all.’

Even with Stubbs, Jerry near enough preserved the same sunny temper; though Stubbs, as Connie Sachs would have said, was a known toad.

Pressmen, like other travelling people, make the same mess everywhere and Stubbs, as the group’s managing editor, was no exception. His desk was littered with tea-stained proofs and ink-stained cups and the remains of a ham sandwich that had died of old age. Stubbs himself sat scowling at Jerry from the middle of it all as if Jerry had come to take it away from him.

‘Stubbsie. Pride of the profession,’ Jerry murmured, shoving open the door, and leaned against the wall with his hands behind him, as if to keep them in check.

Stubbs bit something hard and nasty on the tip of his tongue before returning to the file he was studying at the top of the muck on his desk. Stubbs made all the weary jokes about editors come true. He was a resentful man with heavy grey jowls and heavy eyelids that looked as though they had been rubbed with soot. He would stay with the Daily until the ulcers got him, and then they would send him to the Sunday. Another year, he would be farmed out to the women’s magazines to take orders from children till he had served his time. Meanwhile he was devious, and listened to incoming phone calls from correspondents without telling them he was on the line.

‘Saigon,’ Stubbs growled, and with a chewed ballpoint marked something in a margin. His London accent was complicated by a half-hearted twang left over from the days when Canadian was the Fleet Street sound. ‘Christmas three years back. Ring a bell?’

‘What bell’s that, old boy?’ Jerry asked, still pressed against the wall.

‘A festive bell,’ said Stubbs, with a hangman’s smile. ‘Fellowship and good cheer in the bureau, when the group was fool enough to maintain one out there. A Christmas party. You gave it.’ He read from a file. ‘ To Christmas luncheon, Hotel Continental, Saigon. Then you list the guests, just the way we ask you to. Stringers, photographers, drivers, secretaries, messenger boys, hell do I know? Cool seventy pounds changed hands in the interest of public relations and festive cheer. Recall that?’ He went straight on. ‘Among the guests you have Smoothie Stallwood entered. He was there, was he? Stallwood? His usual act? Oiling up the ugliest girls, saying the right things?’

Waiting, Stubbs nibbled again at whatever it was he had on the tip of his tongue. But Jerry propped up the wall, ready to wait all day.

‘We’re a left-wing group,’ said Stubbs, launching on a favourite dictum. ‘That means we disapprove of fox-hunting and rely for our survival on the generosity of one illiterate millionaire. Records say Stallwood ate his Christmas lunch in Phnom Penh, lashing out hospitality on dignitaries of the Cambodian government, God help him. I’ve spoken to Stallwood, and he seems to think that’s where he was. Phnom Penh.’

Jerry slouched over to the window and settled his rump against an old black radiator. Outside, not six feet from him, a grimy clock hung over the busy pavement, a present to Fleet Street from the founder. It was mid-morning but the hands were stuck at five to six. In a doorway across the street, two men stood reading a newspaper. They wore hats, and the newspaper obscured their faces, and Jerry reflected how lovely life would be if watchers only looked like that in reality.

‘Everybody screws this comic, Stubbsie,’ he said thoughtfully after another longish silence. ‘You included. You’re talking about three bloody years ago. Stuff it, sport. That’s my advice. Pop it up the old back passage. Best place for that one.’

‘It’s not a comic, it’s a rag. Comic’s a colour supplement.’

‘Comic to me, sport. Always was, always will be.’

‘Welcome,’ Stubbs intoned with a sigh. ‘Welcome to the Chairman’s choice.’ He took up a printed, form of contract. ‘Name: Westerby, Clive Gerald,’ he declaimed, pretending to read from it. ‘Profession: aristocrat. Welcome to the son of old Sambo.’ He tossed the contract on the desk. ‘You take the both. The Sunday and the Daily. Seven day coverage, wars to tit-shows. No tenure or pension, expenses at the meanest possible level. Laundry in the field only and that doesn’t mean the whole week’s wash. You get a cable card but don’t use it. Just air-freight your story and telex the number of the waybill and we’ll put it on the spike for you when it arrives. Further payment by results. The BBC is also graciously pleased to take voice interviews from you at the usual derisory rates. Chairman says it’s good, for prestige, whatever the hell that means. For syndication -’

‘Allelujah,’ said Jerry in a long outward breath.

Ambling to the desk, he took up the chewed ballpoint, still wet from Stubbs’s lick, and without a glance at its owner, or the wording of the contract, scrawled his signature in a slow zigzag along the bottom of the last page, grinning lavishly. At the same moment, as if summoned to interrupt this hallowed event, a girl in jeans unceremoniously kicked open the door and dumped a fresh sheaf of galleys on the desk. The phones rang - perhaps they had been ringing for some while - the girl departed, balancing absurdly on her enormous platform heels; an unfamiliar head poked round the door and yelled ‘old man’s prayer meeting, Stubbsie’; an underling appeared, and moments later Jerry was being marched down the chicken run: administration, foreign desk, editorial, pay, diary, sports, travel, the ghastly women’s magazines. His guide was a twenty-year-old bearded graduate and Jerry called him ‘Cedric’ all the way through the ritual. On the pavement he paused, rocking slightly, heel to toe and back, as if he were drunk, or punchdrunk.