A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (5 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Do nothing, is all. We’re going. I’ll just have to mind my manners and keep out of your Dad’s way.’

Prue said confidently, ‘It’ll be better when the baby’s here.’

‘Yeah, so long as it looks like you.’

‘No, that won’t matter. Nothing will matter then. They’ll be so thrilled to be grandparents they’ll forget there was ever a time when they didn’t like you. You’ll see. The baby will make everything all right with them.’

‘Poor kid. That’s some job it’s got on.’

T
HE WEEK
crawled by. He did not know whether he was dreading the weekend or longing for it to arrive. He read interminable manuscripts and readers’ reports, either ahead of Rupert or to supplement his judgment. He was perfectly aware that this was the job he resented giving up and he still made an effort to retain at least some part of it for himself. Rupert pretended not to notice the encroachment. Manson thought back to the days when he had been young and each manuscript, before he opened it, looked as if it might be the one. If you could not stay at Cambridge, not produce anything of your own, you might at least discover a rare talent and nurture it: that would be worth doing. And not sourly, with envy, as a writer-manqué, like so many publishers, but generously, with a sense of importance in the role of guardian.

There had been relatively few worth nurturing, however, and the sympathetic sorrow he felt at composing letters of rejection had faded as fast as his eager anticipation on facing a new title. He had been truly amazed. If people played the piano like this, he said, they surely would not look for work in a night-club. If they danced like this, they would surely not even attempt to join the chorus in a provincial show. Nobody brick-laying at such a standard would ever dream of trying to get a job as a brick-layer. What was it about the written word that made it fair game? He began to have fresh respect for the masters, few as they were, and most of them
dead, and though he looked in a sense harder, with more need and appreciation, for new live ones, he looked also with less actual hope of success.

But the job at least was a real job. Of all the aspects of the business in which he had been forced to dabble with an appearance of humility, the boss’s son learning the trade, it was the most congenial and, he felt, the one for which he had the most genuine aptitude. His mind did not run much on advertising: he had never thought to display himself to the best advantage so could not do it for books either, though he could see the merits of a particular scheme when they were pointed out to him. The legal and accounting departments spoke a language of their own of which he learnt only the rudiments. Impossible to infiltrate there. The Art Department attracted him more, but everyone was so expert that he was no use to them except as an interested observer and independent voice. The public relations side was easy, publicity and so forth, because people tended to like him, or, at the very least, not to dislike him: he did not put their backs up, and this quality, he discovered, was highly prized. Among all the agents and authors and reviewers and publicists and columnists and other publishers that he saw, he never made an enemy. He himself did not think in terms of enemies, so this achievement had to be pointed out to him. It was only later, when he was older and had more experience of others’ failure in this direction, that he realised quite what an achievement it was. At first he merely took it for granted. He was young and had pleasant manners. He had not had any enemies at Cambridge; he did not expect to have any here. He passed from this, with discreet encouragement, to satisfaction at evading what others appeared to find it so difficult to evade, and then, finally, to a feeling of futility and anti-climax. A man who made no enemies, he began to think, must be a colourless sort of man, perhaps with few friendships or at least no deep ones, the sort of man about whom nobody
cared much one way or the other. He did not wish to be that sort of man.

He remembered one time, long ago, hearing two typists discussing him, and one saying, ‘What I like about Mr. Manson, he’s such a
gentle
man,’ and the other agreeing. He had looked in the mirror and said to himself ‘Hear that?’ and pulled a face, for it was at a time when Prue was small and he was on the way to becoming an expert at face-pulling to entertain her. He would practise new faces in secret, the way other men might buy toys or make model aircraft. But even then, in his thirties, he had felt that gentleness, though undoubtedly an asset, was not a glamorous quality, would not stir up any man’s life into wild excesses of vice. Not that he wished for such things, as it happened, but it would have been nice to feel that they were immediately accessible, had he so wished: that his very nature and aspect did not preclude them without an element of choice. If he looked in the mirror again he would see the same conventional reflection—a gentle, cultured Englishman, with dark, greying hair and a face that managed to be aesthetically pleasing without being remarkable in any way. A quiet, attractive family man, well-groomed and well-dressed, to whom no one could take exception, but who had given up making faces to amuse his daughter now because he, and she, were both fifteen years older.

‘I think I’ve found you a secretary,’ Monica said. He did not hear her. There seemed to be a faint buzzing in the room; he went on reading the same paragraph over and over again. She cleared her throat sharply and he looked up.

‘I think I’ve found you a secretary.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you when you’re so busy but I think I’ve really found one who might do. If you like the sound of her I thought we could interview her next week. She’s in publishing already, she has three years’ experience with Farrer, but she wants a change and promotion. She’s only twenty-three, that’s the snag, but at least she won’t be set in her ways, and
she’d probably stay till she gets married at least.’ The unspoken ‘like me’ hung coyly in the air. ‘Here’s her letter.’

‘Well, I’ve no objection to poaching from Farrer,’ said Manson. ‘They’re probably paying her the minimum anyway.’ He read the letter. Nothing much emerged in the way of personality: a list of facts, concisely presented, a carefully worded paragraph on her reasons for moving as if to stress proper ambition without a shadow of disloyalty. She might as well have written ‘I am not a fly-by-night but I do want to get on’. Perhaps if anything the letter sounded just a shade smug to him. He could imagine her being very pleased with herself when she had completed it; it read as though it was the outcome of several drafts and had wound up as the perfect paradigm of a business letter, fit for use in schools. Not a word, not a comma out of place. He looked at the signature, in its neat, sharp handwriting. Well done, Sarah Francis, he thought. ‘She seems very efficient,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Monica beamed as if personally responsible. ‘That’s what I thought. And that’s unusual in such a young girl.’

He felt suddenly that this applicant was going to be his secretary, had been divinely chosen by Monica, and there was nothing he could do about it; the whole matter had been taken out of his hands and the interview she was proposing was a mere formality or, at most, a chance for
Monica
to make sure
she
approved.

‘Shorthand one hundred and twenty, typing one hundred,’ he read out. ‘Is that really necessary? I’m sure I don’t dictate as fast as that, and there aren’t
that
many letters per day.’

‘She’s no faster than I am,’ said Monica, a trifle sharply.

‘No, I’m sure she isn’t. But I’m equally sure I’ve never used your—er—speeds to the full either. Have I?’

‘Well, not very often. But it doesn’t do any harm to have them, all the same. It leaves a good safety margin.’

It sounded to him as though they were discussing dangerous machinery rather than secretarial work: he had a
vision of cogs and wheels and hair tied back in a net. ‘Monica,’ he said, ‘I wish you weren’t going.’ He meant that too many things in his life were changing at once. He nearly added ‘I’m used to you,’ but realised in time that this might sound unflattering so changed it into the time-honoured words ‘I shall miss you.’

Monica to his horror burst into tears.

‘Oh, Monica,’ he said aghast, ‘what’s the matter? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

Monica stood in the middle of the room, her hands over her face and sobbed. He felt impelled to greater efforts of consolation.

‘Now come on, my dear, sit down.’ He got up from his chair and began fussing round her. ‘You’re overwrought. It’s pre-wedding nerves, that’s all it is. Better have a drink.’ He managed to get her seated, still weeping, and rooted in the cupboard of drinks kept for visitors. There being no brandy, he poured her a large glass of sherry instead. ‘Now then, you drink this and you’ll soon feel better.’

Monica took a large gulp. He heard her teeth trembling on the glass. She swallowed and sniffed. Inevitably her first words were, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Now there’s nothing to be sorry for.’

A fresh wail of grief. Choking sounds interspersed with words. ‘Didn’t mean—not fair—burden—sorry—always been so kind—’

He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Monica,’ he said, ‘calm down. Take your time. Is it more than pre-wedding nerves? Do you want to tell me about it?’

Monica nodded vigorously. She produced a packet of tissues from her handbag and blew her nose and wiped her eyes on three of them in quick succession. He waited, wishing he had poured himself a drink, but it was too late now: it would break the moment if he got up.

‘It’s Harry,’ Monica eventually said.

He prompted her. ‘You had a row.’

She nodded.

‘A serious one?’

‘I don’t know.’

He waited.

‘It’s just that—well, I get so tense with all the waiting. I keep thinking, suppose something goes wrong and he doesn’t get the decree absolute and we can’t get married.’

Manson said in his most soothing voice, ‘Now, why should anything go wrong?’

‘I don’t know.’

Manson wished he didn’t feel so sure that something would indeed go wrong, only not until later, when it would be too late.

‘You haven’t moved in together or done anything that might complicate the divorce?’

She shook her head. He wondered if he had shocked her. One way and another, he thought, I don’t understand the younger generation. My own daughter, at nineteen, carries on little better than a whore, and my secretary at thirty-plus behaves like the Virgin Mary. I need a holiday.

‘Well then, there’s nothing to worry about, is there? It’s all going to go quite smoothly and you’ll get married just as planned and move into your nice new house. You’ll see.’

Monica raised a ravaged face from the tissues. ‘But suppose Harry changes his mind?’

‘After all this time? Now you’re being silly. Why should he change his mind?’

‘I’m being so moody. It’s enough to put him off. I wouldn’t blame him—’ A new howl of misery as full realisation sank in, of the horror that Harry’s change of mind would entail.

‘Well, I would. I’m sure he understands how you feel. Waiting is always the worst part of anything, particularly at the very end. It’s bound to get you down. I expect he’s feeling
tense himself and that’s why you quarrelled.’ He went on and on in this vein—it was like talking to a frightened horse; any moment he might give her a reassuring pat—and watched her grow calmer. Finally she said as if to reward him for his efforts, ‘I really am trying to find you the best possible secretary.’

‘I know you are. And I appreciate it.’

‘Well, that’s what you deserve. Oh—’

God, she was starting again.

‘I’ve been so happy working for you.’

‘I don’t know what I would have done without you, Monica.’ Somehow the conversation served to remind him that he had not yet bought her present. She would have to have a personal present from him, as well as the one from the office. What on earth could he give her? He had not the remotest idea. But Cassie would know. Or perhaps he would ask Rupert, though Rupert’s suggestions might be obscene.

Monica sniffed and said, ‘It’s been a wonderful nine years.’

‘Has it really been as long as that?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him with bright, shiny eyes. The end of her nose was pink. Monica, he thought, I am very, very fond of you, and you are without doubt the plainest girl I have ever seen.

* * *

He walked in the park at lunch-time. It was sunny and he did not want to eat, beyond beer and a sandwich in a pub. As usual it was full of people and because he had been reading for most of the morning he saw them as characters, each waiting to be chosen by an author. Where did they all go? He remembered being a child, shopping with his mother the week before Christmas, holding tight to her hand, his bright woollen mitten in her sober leather glove, and looking round at the lights and the shops and the people scurrying round
Oxford Street and Knightsbridge like rabbits. He liked rabbits: he had just acquired one for his birthday and was hoping to be given another for Christmas, then they could have babies. He saw himself selling them at school, becoming a rabbit tycoon and amassing vast wealth in shillings and sixpences, and he knew at the same time that he would never want to part with any of them, although people told him that rabbits produced babies very fast and in great numbers. He had watched the rabbit closely since it was given to him and he thought that the people in the street moved in very much the same way, with small, urgent steps and sudden changes of direction.

‘Where do all the people go at night?’ he asked his mother, and she said, ‘They go home, of course,’ in her Don’t bother me now voice. Her face had the same expression, when he looked up at it: all busy and pre-occupied and somehow shut in upon itself, as if it could actually grow smaller. He thought of it as her folded-up face.

But it wasn’t a satisfactory answer; though he knew he wouldn’t do better while she was in her shopping mood. Shopping ought to be fun; he wished she would make it fun. But he no longer expected her to. He knew now that she always got very grim before Christmas and said that she had too much to do. He never actually found out what.