Publish and Be Murdered (6 page)

He put down the knife, winced, extended his arm to its full length and opened and shut his fist a couple of times.

Amiss stood in front of his desk. ‘You’re George Naggiar, aren’t you? I’m Robert Amiss. Just starting today as manager.’

Naggiar pushed back his chair and stood up gingerly. As he straightened himself he emitted an ‘ouch’, inhaled sharply through his teeth and grimaced with pain. ‘Sorry. Knee’s bad today.’

Amiss put out his hand, but Naggiar shook his head. ‘Afraid I can’t shake hands. Bit of a problem with my right arm. But do sit down.’

Amiss looked at the solitary chair, whose seat was covered with envelopes. Naggiar waved at it carelessly. ‘Just put the stuff on the floor.’

Amiss obeyed, sat down and contemplated his host, who with another grimace resumed his seat.

‘I was sorry to miss you on Friday when Mr Lambie Crump took me around to perform the introductions,’ said Amiss.

‘Yes, that was too bad. I was at the hospital.’

‘Your knee or your arm?’ asked Amiss sympathetically.

Naggiar looked amused. ‘Oh, no. Neither of those on Friday. That was my ulcer. It was playing up a bit and I had to talk to the consultant about whether we should go for laser treatment. But he reckons I should play it carefully, not exert myself too much, avoid anything stressful and it’ll settle itself down again.’

‘Sounds sensible.’

‘So what will you be doing?’ asked Naggiar, valiantly trying to keep the boredom out of his voice.

‘Taking some of the burden off Mr Lambie Crump and I hope off some of the rest of you. But initially I’ll just be listening: I don’t want to be precipitate, so I thought that for the moment I’d spend a week or so getting some kind of grip on how the place runs.’

‘Runs? It doesn’t really run. It just jogs along.’

‘I’d appreciate knowing how, though.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well, for instance, I’d be grateful if you could take me through the methods by which you persuade people to become subscribers, to renew their subscriptions, how you deal with complaints procedures and all that sort of thing.’

Naggiar looked at him in some bewilderment. ‘We don’t solicit subscribers. This is a journal with a sense of its own dignity. We simply make it possible for people to subscribe if they wish. As you will see in
The Wrangler
, there is a form they can fill in and send to me; then they will be sent the journal. But we don’t go in for… marketing ourselves.’

Amiss tried not to look incredulous. ‘Fine, fine. I understand. But for a start if you could just show me how those who do apply are dealt with, it would help.’

Naggiar looked at his watch. ‘Can’t be today, I’m afraid. Got to go to my chiropractor.’

‘For your knee?’

He laughed scornfully. ‘Nothing he can do for my knee – not for either knee, if it comes to that. They’re like the dark side of the moon, my knees, my consultant says. All pitted and scarred. When they get really bad the only thing for them is bed rest. No, it’s for my back that I have to go to the chiropractor.’ He moved his shoulders about a bit and winced. ‘Otherwise I’d be a cripple.’

‘So you’ll be out for a couple of hours?’

Naggiar looked surprised. ‘No, no. I go at lunchtime and can’t get back. He’s an hour and a half away, my chiropractor.’

‘Isn’t that very inconvenient for you?’

Naggiar shrugged. ‘What can you do? When you find someone who understands you who then moves, you’ve no choice but to follow. But tomorrow will be all right.’

‘Shall I drop in about’ – Amiss hazarded a guess – ‘nine-thirty?’

Naggiar laughed derisively. ‘How can I get in at nine-thirty? I can’t travel in rush hour. Standing’s terrible for my knees. Ten-thirty’s more realistic’

‘Fine,’ said Amiss. ‘Thank you very much, I’ll be here.’

Scudmore was a different proposition altogether. ‘Delighted to see you, my boy,’ he said as he bounded around the desk emitting bonhomie from every pore. ‘Delighted to see some young blood come into this place for once. Could do with a bit of company.’ He jabbed Amiss in the ribs. ‘Take a drink, do you?’

‘Oh yes. Frequently.’

‘Man after my own heart, eh what?’ Scudmore looked at his watch. ‘Fancy a noggin this lunchtime?’

‘Thanks very much. Could we perhaps combine it with work? I’m rather anxious to find out about the advertising department.’

Scudmore emitted a jolly laugh. ‘Department? I’m the department.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I think I can truly say that every ad we get in this place is as a result of my work and my work alone. I can tell you nobody’s ever lunched for
The Wrangler
the way I have.’ His laugh boomed out again. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t I show you how it’s done? We’ll go off to one of my regular haunts and see if we can see any of the boys.’

‘What are all these?’ asked Rachel, pointing to the pile of books beside Amiss’s armchair. She removed herself from his embrace and took off her coat.

‘Newspaper histories culled from the London Library.’

‘You
are
taking this seriously, aren’t you? So how were your first days? Sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘Interesting and complicated. Tell you over dinner. Meanwhile, how did you and the minister get on in Brussels?’

‘Apart from the fact that he misread his brief at a crucial moment and almost gave the Commission a concession that would have added another ten million quid a year to our contribution, it went fine. He’s quite good company really when he gets off his high horse. And he is serious about what he believes in.’

‘You’ve found an idealistic politician? Come now, Rach, are you losing your marbles?’

‘They’re not all the same,’ she said stiffly, then looked at her watch. ‘God. It’s eight o’clock already. Is there anything to eat?’

‘Yes,’ said Amiss smugly. ‘One advantage of this job is that pretty well everyone buggers off early so I can do shopping. Come on into the kitchen, have a gin and tonic and I’ll put on the steak.’

‘It’s incredible,’ Rachel said later, as he poured out the last of the wine. ‘Lord whatshisname must be mad to have allowed it to go on like that. How could he?’

‘He’s no more reason than anyone else to realize how time has moved on. Now I am rather more in touch with the modern world than Lord Papworth, and I grasped these guys were throwbacks, but it wasn’t actually until I settled down and read and skimmed a few newspaper histories that I realized to what extent
The Wrangler
was out of its time.’

‘But I thought you’d already read its history.’

‘
The Wrangler
history was written by the sort of person who believes anyone to do with administration is below stairs and beneath contempt; it concentrated wholly on editorial. You wouldn’t have known that the paper couldn’t have come out without the assistance of printers, distributors, advertisers or anyone else. As Lambie Crump observed to me more than once: “The management people are a race apart.” And that editorial cast of mind explains why they’ve been left quietly to rot for decades, and to preserve – as if in aspic – most of the methods of the nineteen thirties.’

He leaned back in his chair. ‘Take Scudmore, for instance. He learned his craft at the feet of one of the greatest advertising canvassers of the nineteen thirties, who picked up advertisements in the manner of the time by spending hours in City pubs buying drinks for those who bought space in which to publish their company results.

‘He later graduated to chatting up advertising agencies as they blossomed, and taking the odd mate to dinner. But these days there’s much more to this job than bonhomie. You have to be able to answer the questions that all these thrusting young advertising executives ask about the age profile and class breakdown of the readership. That requires scientific questionnaires and all sorts of balls-aching marketing techniques which – needless to say – have never been tried out on
Wrangler
subscribers. So Scudmore gets ads only for old times’ sake, or because some enterprising person actually beats on the door begging to be allowed to insert an ad – for port or cashmere scarves or handmade shoes – that might be expected to appeal to fogeys.

‘It was really sad on Monday with poor old Scudmore. He took me to a wine bar and explained proudly it was the haunt of the Perkins Telford and AJD Advertising Agency. But only one person spoke to him. The place was entirely full of people sitting around drinking designer water and stabbing at the odd leaf of arugula.

‘Such people look at Scudmore and they see a boozy old remnant of the bad old days when people tottered back to work slightly pissed, making decisions that were based on friendship and sentiment rather than greed. These guys don’t drink any more: cocaine is in, alcohol is out and with it people like Scudmore. My job – if you’ll forgive me sounding like one of those prats – is to ensure that
The Wrangler
doesn’t go the same way.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if it deserves to survive,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t that you need the job and we need the income, I’d probably hope you fail.’

Amiss felt suddenly depressed.

7

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It was five o’clock on Thursday evening,
The Wrangler
had gone to press and Amiss was bored. He decided to investigate Henry Potbury, who welcomed him with a big smile.

‘Come in, my dear chap. Sit yourself down and let us have a tincture. Would you be so kind as to fetch the bottle from that cupboard beside you?’

Amiss opened the doors and looked with respect at the array of bottles within. He reckoned there must have been a couple of dozen, including, at first glance, gin, sherry, vodka, port and several kinds of whisky. ‘Which bottle would you like?’

‘Would Scotch suit you?’

‘Admirably,’ said Amiss, as he passed the bottle across the desk. ‘But I’ll have just a small one, Mr Potbury.’

‘Henry, please. And forgive me, but I don’t know your name. Or even, come to think of it, who you are.’

‘Robert Amiss. I’ve been brought in as manager. You might have seen me at the Monday meeting.’

‘Of course, of course. I do apologize. I fear that age, drink and New Labour have taken their toll.’ Potbury bellowed with laughter, half filled two tumblers and handed one to Amiss, who poured water to the top of the glass and sipped the mixture gingerly.

‘Of course, I remember your face from the Monday meeting, but we weren’t introduced properly. So welcome to
The Wrangler
and all that.’ He waved his glass jovially. ‘What exactly are you here to do?’

Amiss spared him the knowledge that he had been too pissed on the previous Friday to remember their first meeting and instead went patiently through his patter.

‘Can I be of any help? I fear I know little of the other side of things here. All I do is churn out words.’

‘You could tell me something of the ethos of the paper,’ said Amiss artlessly. ‘Like our relations with the government, for instance. Are we just implacably opposed because they’re Labour?’

‘No, no, dear boy. We always hated Labour – as, of course, we hated socialists in general – but we hate New Labour even more.’

‘Because?’

‘Because it’s like having Gladstone back.’ Potbury’s great eyebrows moved to meet each other, giving to his face a look of deep dejection. ‘Sanctimonious, high-minded bullshit, inimical to everything that makes life worth living. It’s going to be the most depressing government we’ve had for a hundred and ten years.’

‘Wasn’t the post-war Labour government a bit like that? And come on, Henry, surely Mrs Thatcher was as high-minded and censorious as they come.’

‘It’s different now, my boy. Of course Old Labour could be priggish; I admit that under Maggie there was precious little sense of
joie de vivre;
and when it came to sanctimoniousness the Liberals always used to win hands down. But New Labour combine all the worst of all of them. They sit there in their fastnesses in Hampstead and Islington drizzling their extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar over their radiccio, planning to meet up in Tuscany during the summer and instructing all the rest of us how to behave.’

‘Not too different from Thatcher when it comes to core values, though?’

‘Oh yes, I grant you that. She was big on duty and responsibility and industriousness too. But she had been brought up to these values and believed them. This crew have adopted them as election-winning rhetoric to cover the hollowness of their centre. And what’s more, the old girl was a lot more tolerant than this lot. Always forgave the womanizers, the drunks and didn’t grudge her husband his gin.’ He drained his glass. ‘For heaven’s sake, Maggie didn’t marry a puritan. All these New Labour buggers marry mirror images of themselves. And it’s almost required of them that they mix only with their own kind. We’ve got the narrowest ruling elite we’ve ever had.’

‘But they’re quite an efficient government in many ways, Henry.’

‘Efficient? I don’t care about efficiency. Hitler was efficient. What I want is a government that leaves us alone.’

‘Surely…’ interjected Amiss.

Potbury raised a fat hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that under Maggie the nanny state extended its grip, but I would say to you the difference between her and Tony Blair is that she didn’t want it to. She was trapped by forces like the EU which even she could not control, yet she truly wanted to roll back the frontiers of the state. God help us, if we hadn’t had her, things would have been infinitely worse.’

He gazed at Amiss indignantly. ‘Who are these buggers, anyway? And what have any of them ever done? They’re all career politicians. Except of course the countless lawyers that infest their ranks.’ He paused for effect and then said with deliberation. ‘There is no lower form of life.’

‘Henry, what have you ever done other than be a journalist?’

‘Ah ha, a fair point, my boy, a fair point. I have never been anything other than a hack. However, I will plead in mitigation that I’ve never claimed that my calling is a glorious one and I have never condemned the sins of others – only their lack of intellectual rigour.’