The Cherry Blossom Corpse (4 page)

Here, up on the fifth floor, and in the ante-room to one of its big conference chambers, one could see the assembled delegates for the first time.

“Gosh!” said Cristobel in wonder. “All those wonderful writers together in one place.”

Gosh was about the word for it. A-sea on waves of pastel shades, topped by wavelets of blue rinse, green rinse and purple rinse, I had to restrain my impulse to turn full circle and march straight out through the door. Meetings of old friends and enemies were producing more “Darlings!” in more intonation patterns than a phonetician could conceive or interpret; reunions were being undergone, new alliances formed, animosities refuelled, and everyone was enthusing about something or other. The hats were of a vegetable splendour that one saw at Tory party conferences fifteen or twenty years ago, now rare in the age of the grocer's daughter. It was impossible not to feel that the male delegates cut a very poor figure of it, sartorially and in every other way, except for a tall and splendid figure in tribal robes who came from Nigeria. The rest of us felt like sparrows in a cage of galahs, and our instincts told us to lie low, or cringe.

In the thick of the “Darlings!” and the enthusi-moosy was Amanda. Superb in a full orange coat, with yellow silk scarf and a yellow hat with a great feather that tickled
her ear provocatively, she stood in the centre of the room, clutching her welcoming fruit juice, and turning this way and that to greet, wave, condescend to and wave eyelashes at this or that attender at the congress. No one, for one moment, was to be in any doubt that she was the centrepiece of this conference. Amanda, quite consciously I'm sure, was forging her party, gathering supporters.

“You'd think, wouldn't you, that Amanda was President of WARN, to watch the way she goes on?”

Mary Sweeny, alert and cynical in the bright morning light, had appeared at my elbow.

“And isn't she?”

“No. The President is Carolyn Fortune. What we really need to improve our image is a common-sensical, down-to-earth president—”

“Someone like you?”

“Right, but not on your life. What we've actually got is a sort of paperback reprint of Amanda. See—she's over there—” she pointed to an American lady in powder blue, with pink-rinsed hair—“and she's having to queen it to a rather small group. Amanda's playing her version of the Queen, so poor Carolyn's having to content herself with being Margaret Thatcher. I wouldn't mind betting her nose is out of joint.”

“What does she write?”

“Bodice-rippers, mostly,”

“What on earth—?” I began, but then I thought I knew.

“Right. Historicals with a spicing of sex and sadism. They're doing very well on the American market these days. I'm thinking of going in for them myself.”

“Undeterred,” I said, “by the heavy burden of research that would be involved.”

“Quite. If Amanda Fairchild can send her heroine
by train to Brighton in Regency England, clutching a photograph of her beloved to boot, I think the rest of us should be allowed to get away with historical murder too. Carolyn Fortune had Mary Queen of Scots and Bothwell spend their honeymoon at Balmoral.”

Cristobel had drifted away, finding, I think, our cynicism distasteful. She was now by the bookstall, which was well-stocked with a selection of the works of various prominent attenders at the Congress, as well as a fat and heavy directory called
Twentieth-Century Romantic Novelists,
and Arthur Biggs's
Happy Tears.
I was just about to stroll over and resume my protective role when I saw one of the few young men in the gathering start up a conversation with her, and Cristobel look up, eager and grateful. I held back, benevolently.

It was at this point that one of the most dreadful things in a ghastly morning happened to me. Mary Sweeny had been seized on by another practitioner of her craft, and they were deep in Gothic mysteries, so I was standing there, tall and alone, a bulky lighthouse in a pastel sea, when suddenly a green-rinsed American harridan waltzed up to me, peered at my identification tag, and said:

“Perry Trethowan! I'm real pleased to make your acquaintance. I just
adored
your last!”

“I—I—” I began, apoplectic with horror, but she had sailed benevolently on to further prey, and I was left nursing the stigma. After this low-point my instinct was to withdraw from the possibility of further humiliating errors. Seeing Cristobel still eagerly conversing with the bony but pleasant-looking young man, I withdrew to an unpeopled corner of the room, and watched.

What had seemed on our first entrance to be a sea, was gradually sorting itself out into a series of ponds. Delegates, in other words, were beginning to cluster together in groups, often groups around someone. There
was Amanda's group, of course, but this was beginning to disperse, and Amanda was looking round distractedly, apparently having other fish to fry. From some of the other groups was to be heard the sound of sycophantic laughter, or murmurs of enthusiastic assent. One of them was clustered around Arthur Biggs, and I wondered—

“Peregrine!” came the unwelcome voice of Amanda Fairchild. When had I given her permission to use my Christian name? How had she found out the full form of it? She was floating round vaguely in my vicinity, peering shortsightedly in search of someone. “You really
mustn't
stand there all stand-offish and Scotland Yard, you lovely man,” she continued. “With so
few
men around, and even fewer
real
men or
attractive
men, you really ought to make more effort . . .
Spread
yourself around!”

She fluttered two large eyelashes in my direction.

“It's all a bit overwhelming,” I muttered.

“Of course. It must be. So literary and all that. Darling, you haven't seen my Australian publisher anywhere around, have you?”

“I'm not sure that I know what an Australian publisher looks like. Do they carry koala bears with ‘Write me' on them? I haven't heard an Australian accent yet, anyway.”

“Oh dear, I
must
find the child. We
must
talk, and I've got an interview with the local paper in ten minutes.”

She wafted away in graceful distraction, and I resumed my contemplation of the scene. The groups still intrigued me, and I began to work out in my mind the people who were being deferred to. Notables of some kind they had to be. Before long I had my solitude interrupted and my guesses confirmed by the American lady who last night had been talking to Arthur Biggs in the bar.

“Hi!” she said. “You're the Scotland Yard man—right?
I wish I wrote crime, then I could have an excuse for grilling you. I'm Maryloo Parker, by the way. I can see you're standing there trying to make order of this chaos.”

“That's right,” I said. “I've already got my suspicions.”

She was smart verging on the alluring, in browns and greens, thirtyish, with an amorous eye. I classed her with the nobody's-fool group, and thought we might easily get along.

“See that group around Arthur Biggs? Well, he's the author of
Happy Tears,
A History of the Romantic Love Story.”

“I know.”

“Well, he's preparing a new edition, and they're sucking up to him, hoping for a mention. The Americans are wasting their time, because he only deals with the English ones, and that's not going to change in the new edition. I know because I did my stuff on him last night. But he also has a review page in
Cosmopolitan Woman,
so they probably think it's worth while.”

“I see. I rather thought the groups might be centred on reviewers—is that right?”

“Most of them. There's Margaret French of
Woman in the Home.
Betty Morgan of
New York Lady
and that's Everard Manning of
Boudoir
—he's a buddy-pal of Arthur Biggs, on a you-scratch-my-back basis. The other groups are mostly around publishers. Those two—” she pointed to a jolly lady and a serious one, with an enthusiastic mob of people milling around them—“they're from Bills and Coo. Hard-headed ladies, hard-headed firm, so they're wasting their time, mostly. That guy there is Marriott Dulac from Lockett Press, of Boston—our equivalent of Bills and Coo, an efficient mass-market operation. He's interested in bed—and they'd better provide it if they're young enough to be interesting and want to get on his list.”

“This is all fascinating,” I said. “Who's your publisher?”

“Lockett Press,” she said, and she raised an eyebrow meaningfully. But before she could pursue this further she was grabbed by a friend, and I went walkabout around the room.

Amanda Fairchild had met up with her interviewer. Copies of
Bergens Tidende,
the local daily, had been scattered on a table, no doubt by the reporter, and it had a banner across the front page announcing the Congress, with pictures of the various romantic notabilities who were attending. A glance at the front page of the paper suggested it was of a dullness quite monumental, the sort of thing the Ayatollah Khomeini's followers might be permitted to read during Ramadan. But perhaps if you understood it, it was real snazzy. The emissary from the paper was closeted with Amanda in two armchairs in a bleak little niche. She looked like one of those hard-faced women who have done well out of the feminist movement. It could hardly be easy, however, to engage Amanda on an ideological plane, and I didn't fancy her chances of pushing la Fairchild into a corner.

“But darling, if we believe in women, as a sex, then surely we want them to be as
feminine
as they possibly can, don't we?”

“But surely in insisting on women's traditional roles as wives and sweethearts, you merely enforce those roles. This sort of escapist fantasy—”

“Escapist? But it's what women
want
!”

“Why is it in your books that women's happiness is always dependent on men? Women today feel—”

“Darling, why is it that feminists always say ‘women feel' when what they really mean is ‘feminists feel'? It's very dishonest, because it's not at all the same thing. Darling, I respect your opinions, truly I do, but I do
feel that I have
rather
more right than you to say what the average woman feels, considering my readership.”

“Many women feel,”
came back the interviewer, through gritted teeth, “that women should be encouraged to find their happiness in a loving community with other women, rather than in dependence on one man.”

“Well, darling, all I can say is that if you believe
that's
likely, you're displaying a tendency to escapist fantasy well beyond anything you could attribute to my readers!”

Feeling, obviously, enormously pleased with herself at this put-down, Amanda looked up, and seeing me lurking near she flashed me a conspiratorial and intimate smile. I moved hastily away. Over by the bookstall Cristobel was now on her own, but looking quietly pleased with herself,

“Found a friend, I saw,” I said.

“I don't know about that,” said Cristobel. “But we did have an
awfully
interesting conversation.”

“You're not going to tell me he writes romantic novels? He looked quite sensible.”

“Well, he does. He's an ex-monk, and he took it up when he lost his faith and had to leave the monastery.”

“Good God—that's a pretty funny change of allegiance. I can't imagine he has much to bring to the hearts and flowers market.”

“I think he could bring an
awful
lot of interesting perspectives,” said Cristobel, setting her chin at an obstinate angle that I knew very well from childhood. “I do wish you didn't always have to be so cynical about everything, Perry.”

So I held my peace until a gong sounded and we all trooped into the conference room, and took our places on hard, square red chairs. We gazed up at the members of the committee, sitting in line on the platform, of whom I knew Mary Sweeny and Arthur Biggs, and could identify
the President, Carolyn Fortune. It was her big moment at last, and she washed forward to the microphone in her pastel blue outfit, and did her third-carbon version of the Amanda Fairchild manner.

“Friends—darlings—all of you lovely people out there—I just want to start this very exciting conference by saying a very big hello, and welcoming you to this lovely, lovely city of Bergen, Norway, the home of—” a quick look at her notes—“Grieg, Ibsen, and all those marvellous Viking kings and warriors and people. I just know we're going to have a fabulous time, the kind of experience that will enrich our work, and that we shall remember for the rest of our lives.” (That last bit turned out to be true for many of the delegates, anyway.) “Now, darlings, before I tell you about all the lovely things we've got lined up for you this week, I want us to be serious for just one moment. Since our last conference in Edinburgh, England—” (ouch!)—“we have lost by death two very dear members of our association. They were Mary Jane Knapp, who wrote many of those wonderful hospital romances published in the name of Evelyn Deane, and Suzanne Manners, who wrote several of the ‘Lucinda-Jayne, Confederate Spy' historical romances.”

“Ghost writers in the sky,” I muttered to Cristobel.

“I want you to be silent for a moment, to remember their very great contribution to our art.”

We were silent for Mary Jane and Suzanne, except Maryloo Parker, sitting behind me, who seemed to be snuffling delightedly at my joke.

“Now to happier things, darlings. As you'll see from your programme, we have this afternoon a very exciting lecture by Miss—er—ah—Jack—I think it's Jack-hellen, of the English Department, here in Bergen, Norway on—”

There came from the back of the hall the sound of a
door opening, and then the sound of slow, heavy footsteps and an unmistakable New York voice, not hushed one whit to suit her late arrival.