Stanley and the Women (13 page)

Mr One
tended to speak of his fellow-countrymen as worthy but limited, needing a
Western nudge of some sort to fall in with his proposals, of which the latest
known to me was the buying of space in the paper to tell its readers, or a
couple of dozen of them, about his country’s achievements. Actually that
particular proposal had come from me in the first place, but I found I could
face having the credit hogged.

‘You
and I,’ he tinkled on, ‘will be making some arrangements beforehand. We mustn’t
trouble the Minister with details. Please come to lunch here. I think you like our
food.’

‘Oh,
delicious.’ I liked their ginseng stuff too, though delicious was probably not
the word for it. ‘I’ll look forward to that. Well, I mustn’t keep you, Mr
Attaché.’ Then a thought struck me. ‘By the way, I gather you have an assistant
these days.’

It had
not been a good thought. ‘Assistant?’ said Mr One in a voice like a blast off
the Eiger. ‘What assistant?’

‘I don’t
know, the switchboard seemed to think —’

‘Oh no.
No no. I’m not having an assistant, Mr Joke.’

‘Sorry,
I just —’

‘He’s
being an observer, you understand. We’re calling him an observer, you see.
Please telephone my secretary shortly to arrange lunch. And please give my
regards to your charming wife.’

No
light on the replacement question, then, but the stuff about the advertising space
was good news as far as it went. Lunch with Mr One, assuming he managed not to
vaporize first, would be no huge treat, still, worth it for the experience and
for telling Susan afterwards. She had got a mention just now because she had
given a small party for the Penangan Cultural Attaché, and he had invited us to
a do at his High Commission, and among those present had been Mr One, in on
whom I had homed as soon as I had heard what he was, and then Penangans were
the sort of people who took a lot of trouble over things like wives.

I
glanced up and saw a short bearded man watching me from the doorway, or what
might have been the doorway if the walls of my office had come up high enough
to contain a door instead of only reaching about as far as the top of this
fellow’s head. That was as far as the walls of nearly everyone’s office had
come up since the inside of the whole building was remodelled at some stage in
the Seventies. Perhaps he had not been actually watching me, only looking at
me, but I felt a bit watched that day.

When I
reckoned I had noticed him he said, ‘Got a minute?’

‘Sure,’
I said, standing up behind my desk. You always had a minimum of that much for
the Editor, whoever he might be. This one’s name was Harry Coote and he had not
been in the job long, anyway not as long as I had been in mine, which was what
counted, and what made me feel a little uneasy too from time to time. Harry
struck me as one of those men who very much preferred their own ideas to other
people’s on all sorts of issues, including ones like who should and especially
who should not be advertising manager of the paper they edited. Of course
nobody took a blind bit of notice of what editors thought about that unless the
paper was putting on readers, but then rather to my surprise the paper was
putting on readers, and doing it at a time when its rivals were giving all
their readers cars to try and coax them to go on being their readers a bit
longer. And I liked my job — I thought I was good at it slightly more than I
liked it, but still.

On my
way out I dropped the Thurifer note in front of Morgan. I followed Harry along
to his office, which had walls that went all the way to the ceiling, also
enough hardware to launch a smallish satellite, also a long tank for tropical
fish with no fish in it, no other creatures either, no greenery, no water even,
just sand, stones and empty shells, and a light still going that probably no
one knew how to put out. In its active days the tank had tipped you off that a
great man worked here, along the lines of a flint-glass sherry decanter or an
antelope-hoof snuffbox further back.

‘How
are things?’ asked Harry. That just meant he was not yet ready to come to the
point, if any.

‘Fine,’
I said, pretending to hesitate before turning down one of the dusty, gnarled
cheroots he showed me. ‘You remember that business about the Penangan report we
talked about.’ I ran through part of my phone conversation. When the subject
had been mentioned before Harry had shown guarded approval. To print four or
any number of pages of guff about a distant and irrelevant hell-hole would do
nothing, or nothing good, for circulation but it would raise the tone, lift the
paper a millimetre up market. More than once I had noticed him saying he
thought it was time to improve the paper’s image, give it a touch of quality,
etc. Perhaps he really hated to have it putting on readers. Anyway, it might be
interesting to see his reaction to the nearer approach of the Penangan report.

It was
interesting, but not encouraging. ‘Yes, well, that’s what you get,’ he said
firmly and vaguely. He wanted to register doubt or disapproval without knowing
how. ‘Of course, it’s nothing to do with
me.’
There he was telling the
strict truth, only it lacked conviction.

‘Well,
we’ll see how it goes.’ Not easy to quarrel with that either.

‘You’re,
er, you’re going to meet this Minister of Trade bloke, are you?’

‘I
thought I would, yeah. When he comes over.’

‘If he
does.’

‘That’s
right, if he does.’

Harry’s
mouth buckled behind the beard with the exertion of dragging air through his
cheroot. You could tell they were a cruel smoke just from the look of them. For
some reason I thought of what he had been known to do, perhaps invariably did
do, when he had you up to dinner at his bachelor joint in Tufnell Park — give
you an admittedly not too bad Chinese takeaway meal and make you eat it with
chopsticks, real ones though, mind you, bought or stolen on some all-expenses
trip to Peking. I had never been asked along myself, but had had the facts on
the first-hand authority of the Features Editor, who had heard from somebody
else, somebody not even in Fleet Street, that at one of these blow-outs Harry
had given them tea to wash it down with, pointing out that actually with any
national food you were supposed to drink the national drink, the wine of the
country, which in this case any fool could see was not wine. There had been
times when 1 found the tea story a bit hard to believe, but at the sight of
Harry now, looking quite upset at the way his cheroot would not draw to suit
him, I could manage it all right.

After a
short silence he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you, Stanley.’

I could
think of one or two rude answers to that but no polite ones, so I just looked
expectant.

‘You
really, you really
enjoy
doing what you do, do you?’

‘Yes,’
I said, sounding terrifically certain and relaxed at the same time.

‘And
you think you ought to be doing it, do you?’

‘Without
any question whatever. How do you mean?’

‘Well,
you know, I was just wondering whether you felt you had the proper scope for
your talents in the present job.’

‘What?
What talents?’

He gave
a slight laugh. ‘Get stuffed, Stanley,’ he said, or rather must have meant to
say, but what he in fact said was something far nearer ‘Gat steffed, Stunley.’
That was because he came from up North, so much so that if he ever got tired of
editing he could have walked into a job as a chat-show host on any of the TV
channels. ‘I know more about you than you give me credit for,’ he was going on.
‘I’m not such a fool as I look, you know.’ It seemed a good idea to let that
one go too. ‘For instance, er … Oh yes. Tell me, do you ever see anything
of old Nowell these days?’

I had
always thought that one of the most appealing things about Harry was his
complete openness, if you could use the word to cover being incapable of
successful deceit. So I knew straight away and for sure that he had heard not a
word about my recent contacts with Nowell — whom many years previously and for
a very short time he was supposed to have been in the same digs as — and was
just being pushy and nosy in his usual way. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Practically nothing.
Why?’

‘Oh… I always thought it was a pity you two couldn’t manage to make a go of it.’

Always?
Until he joined the paper, Harry would not have known of my existence much. ‘Well,
there we are.’ I looked at my watch.

‘I see Whatsisname,
Bert, in the Ladbroke Arms occasionally.’

‘Oh,
yeah.’

‘I
suppose you haven’t got much time for him.’

‘Not a
lot, no. Well …’

‘Oh, he’s
not so bad when you get to know him.’

I
glared suddenly at the fish-tank as though I had noticed something starting to
come to life there. Another short pause followed, long enough all the same for
it to dawn on even our Harry that the time had not yet come to fill me in on
all those good points of Bert’s that I had been missing up to now. A knock
sounded at the door and the Political Editor put his bald head round it. Harry
told him to come on in, sounding quite relieved. ‘Well, if you don’t mind,
Stan,’ he said, smiling, ‘I seem to have this conference.’

‘No, I
don’t mind, Harry. I really don’t mind a bit.’

‘Right,
see you. Oh, and, er,’ he turned his smile off, ‘I hope everything’s going fine
at home.’

He
conveyed to me that I was not to not manage to make a go of my second marriage
if I knew what was good for me, using so much wattage that something of the
sort got across to the Political Editor, a man I knew only from his photograph
in the paper, who looked at him and then at me and had started to look back at
him about the time I left them together. Outside I just missed butting under
the chin, luckily on the whole, a seven-foot female in a knee-length cardigan
also bound for the conference. Harry was quite capable, I thought to myself, of
believing that what he had been up to back there was showing sympathetic
interest in me, kindly concern about someone who was not his responsibility in
any strict way but about whom he nevertheless felt a certain this, that and the
other. At least he would have said he had been doing that if challenged, gone
on saying it to the death too if necessary. But what had he really been up to?

No
answer. I had no clear idea why, but I went straight on to do a bit of
wondering, for the tenth time, about Harry’s sex life. He appeared to have none
at all — his name had never been remotely linked with any man’s, woman’s or
child’s, though he was seen around with plenty of people. He never went near
the subject in conversation — so for instance when his long-ago alleged
chumminess with Nowell arose, as it did from time to time, I was at least
spared any hint that they might have had it away together, which comparatively
few men in that situation would or could have kept themselves from suggesting.
He gave nothing away in his clothes or mannerisms or speech. And so on. The
consensus was that the bed he kept his distance from had a little boy in it. Of
course, it still could have been a big boy, even though Harry must have been
getting into his middle fifties by now. After all, you never knew, did you? Not
with them.

I
forgot about Harry straight away when I got back to my office. No secretary.
Morgan made a nothing-to-do-with-me face and at the same time I saw there was a
woman standing by my desk. Her back was half turned and for a moment I thought
it was Nowell. Then I realized I had been misled just by the hair, which had
the right rough texture and shortish cut, though it was rather too dark, and by
the vaguely foundry-style rig-out in slate-coloured denim, and it was true that
Nowell had been fresh in my mind. I soon saw that this woman was hardly like
her at all really, younger, longer in the leg, thinner, with a thin face and a
nervous or restless manner. For the second time in a few days I guessed
something was wrong without being able to say what.

‘Mr
Duke?’ She had a deep, harsh voice with one or other regional accent.

‘Yes.
What do you want?’

‘There’s
no need to be unfriendly, surely.’

‘So you
say.’ I felt somehow I had had enough laughs for one morning. ‘Now, please tell
me who you are and what you want.’

Morgan
had been following this, and called, ‘She said she had an appointment, Stan.
There was nothing in your book, but I couldn’t, er …’ He left it there. He
was a very capable deputy advertising manager.

‘Okay,’
I said, and nodded to the woman to go on.

She
ducked her head and said with souped-up humility, ‘My name is Trish Collings,
and I’m a friend of your son’s, and I was —’

‘What’s
up? Is he all right?’

She
stared at me. ‘Well … that’s rather what I’ve come to ask you, Mr Duke. I
thought you might have some news of him.’

‘Oh,’ I
said. Morgan’s phone rang and he answered it. ‘Now,’ I went on, ‘how did you
make your way here, to this room?’

‘Does
that matter?’

‘Certainly.
You’re not supposed to be allowed up without personal permission. Standard procedure.’