by Stan Barstow
‘Well...’ Raymond Waterford put down the receiver and smiled at her across his desk. He was the firm’s editorial director, the person with whom she had corresponded, a bulky man in his middle forties with untidy thinning wavy hair and a square fleshy face. He wore a navy-blue pinstriped suit and, in flamboyant contrast, a huge yellow bow tie with blue spots. He fiddled with a new briar pipe but didn’t fill it. He wasn’t a pipe-smoker, he’d already told her, but he was trying any method he could think of to break himself of the habit of an enormous daily consumption of cigarettes.
‘We like your novel very much, Miss Hatton. All my colleagues agree with me about its exceptional quality.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It isn’t always the case. Are you working on something else?’
‘I haven’t had the time since I finished that one.’
‘You mean we’re the first people to see it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What made you choose us?’
‘You publish one or two writers I admire. If you’re good enough for them you should be all right for me.’
Waterford laughed. ‘Quite. And I think you’ll find we’re as good as anyone else in London at selling fiction. You are going to write another novel, though, I take it?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m mulling over an idea now.’
‘Good. A publisher likes to look to the future, you know. Most first novels don’t make any money; it’s with the second or third that the dividends start to come in. In this case, though, providing the reviewers can see what’s in front of their noses, and the public respond in the right way, we might have a small success. But don’t let me build you up too much. This business is full of people who’ve come unstuck with their predictions.’
Ruth hesitated. It seemed silly here in this room. But she asked just the same.
‘You don’t think it might be a bit too much in parts?’
‘What? How d’you mean?’
‘A bit outspoken.’
‘Too graphic, d’you mean? Goodness me, no. Nobody here has suggested anything of the kind.’ He smiled. ‘Do you still live with your family?’ Ruth nodded. ‘I sometimes think,’ he said ‘that the only tenable situation for a writer would be an omniscient anonymity, knowing everything but not taking any part in it.’
‘You mean something like a Catholic priest?’
He gave a guffaw. ‘Yes, something like that.’
‘Except that readers seem inclined to see it the other way round,’ Ruth said. ‘That it’s the writer who’s making the confession.’
‘Yes...’ His attention had wandered. He moved papers on his desk as though looking for something, then glanced at his watch. ‘We ought to be going to lunch.’
He asked if she wanted to freshen up and, calling in the girl who had brought her upstairs, had Ruth shown to a small lavatory on the next landing. Then, a few minutes later, she and Waterford were walking across the square, he swinging a tightly rolled umbrella with which he pointed the way at each intersection. In the restaurant, a low-ceilinged room with oak-panelled walls, red velvet upholstery and quiet, attentive waiters who addressed Waterford by name, Ruth, her tongue loosened by a mixture of excitement and wine, became talkative, telling Waterford at his prompting, about her family, her career at college, her work now, and which writers she admired. At one point she recognised the face of an actor whom she’d seen in films at a nearby table and Waterford amused her by recounting a slightly scandalous anecdote about the man. Then Ruth switched to questioning him. When was her book likely to be published? How long before she would see the proofs...?
‘You haven’t got an agent, have you?’ Waterford asked.
‘No. Should I have?’
‘Yes. You won’t be able to handle the subsidiary rights yourself. A paperback sale is our province, but then there are all the other pickings: foreign rights, both in the United States and on the Continent; possible serialisation before publication; film rights, and so on.’
‘Can you recommend anybody?’
‘I should think so. It’s a question of who’ll be best for you. How long are you going to be in town?’
‘Till tomorrow. I’m staying with a friend tonight.’
‘In any case, he’d want to read the book before deciding whether or not to take you on. Have you got a spare typescript?’
‘Just one carbon.’
‘If you could send that on to me as soon as you get back. You won’t need it, will you?’
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘No. You forget this one now and get on with the next. In any case, if I have it you’ve a perfect excuse for preventing people from reading it before the proofs are ready.’ He smiled.
‘All right.’
‘I fancy it’s something that writers have to get used to,’ he said, returning to the subject they’d begun to discuss in his office. ‘I mean the question of saying in print what you possibly wouldn’t discuss in so-called polite society. It’s not easy to be honest. So far as I can gather the solution is to find an environment in which you can feel free and at ease, yet not cut off altogether from the sources of your inspiration – if we may use such a word. Your material, if you like. That’s why so many young writers come to London after their first success. And why too many of them find that in doing so they’ve lost their basic nourishment. The other side of the coin is the danger in becoming too big a fish in too small a pond.’
‘The pond may be small,’ Ruth said. ‘But I think it’s very deep.’
‘Well, then. We shall have to wait and see what you haul out of it with your next book. In the meantime, you won’t really mind becoming quite well known and having your picture in the papers, will you?’
‘No,’ Ruth admitted. ‘No, I don’t suppose I shall.’
‘No,’ Waterford said, ‘you’d be quite a rare human being if you did.’
In the middle of the afternoon, slightly muzzy headed from the lunchtime wine, Ruth made her way by Underground to the flat of her friend, in Baron’s Court. Monica Darrell had been in Ruth’s year at college, but soon after qualifying she had given up teaching to go on the stage. After a year with a provincial repertory company she had landed a regular role in a television serial and now she was combining this with a part in a long-running West End play, which had been recast for the second time.
‘I wish you’d write something decent for me,’ Monica said. ‘This play I’m in is a terribly creaky old thing; but the public love it and it looks as though it’ll run forever. Why don’t you write a super television play and tell them you simply must have me for the lead?’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ Ruth said.
‘It’s all a living, though. And God knows I shouldn’t grumble when there are any number like me out of work. Anyway, it’s lovely to see you, Ruth, and absolutely marvellous news about the novel. You are a sly boots, though, not saying anything about it before.’
Ruth gave the excuse she’d given everyone else. Not that she minded one bit Monica’s reading the book. She was the kind of intelligent equal for whom she’d written it, and whom she expected to be her most perceptive audience.
‘When is it coming out, then?’
‘They’re going to try to get it into the autumn list. That means before Christmas at the latest.’
‘And do they seem pleased with it?’
‘Yes, they were very flattering.’
‘Let’s hope you have a big success with it, get lovely notices and make pots of money.’
Ruth turned from the window. They were high up under the roof of the house. ‘That field’s a bit of luck, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘So totally unexpected when you’re in the street.’
‘It’s the grounds of a church,’ Monica told her. ‘You can’t see the building itself
for those trees, but if you look past that wall you can just make out the tops of some gravestones.’
Ruth sat down on the bed-settee. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the funniest feeling about the book. I think it’s going to do very well indeed.’ She was silent for a moment, then she laughed, breaking the intent seriousness of her features. ‘Probably no more than wishful thinking.’
‘Sillier things have happened, as my Aunt Amelia used to say. You just keep your fingers crossed, lovey, and hope for the best.’
Monica brewed a pot of tea and made some toast.
‘Lucky I’m written out of the series for a couple of weeks,’ she said, ‘or I should hardly have had a chance to talk to you. When I’m rehearsing that and doing the play as well it’s all go, go, go from nine-thirty in the morning till ten-thirty at night. I usually wait and eat properly after the show. Then if I’m lucky there’s someone to pay for my supper too.’
‘Is there anybody special?’
‘No, not just now. And that reminds me.’ Monica arrested the motion of the teacup towards her mouth. ‘I saw Maurice Waring the other week.’
‘Oh? Where?’
‘In the Salisbury. I nipped in for a drink with a friend after the show and there he was.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘For a minute. He seemed quite pleased to see me. Glamour of the stage, and all that. I suppose he’ll be mad keen to read your book when he hears about it. Very fond of the off-beat success things, is our Maurice.’
‘Did he say what he was doing now?’
‘Teaching at a grammar school somewhere in the Home Counties. I forget just where he said. Ruth, he’s not queer at all, is he?’
‘Whatever makes you ask that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. Something about the way he was standing there eyeing people when we went in. Maybe my imagination. He was probably just looking out for celebrities.’
‘Anyway,’ Ruth said, ‘I don’t know that he is. Or I should say was.’
‘You should know, I suppose,’ Monica’s gaze lingered on her for a second. Ruth felt it rather than saw, because stupidly she couldn’t bring herself at this moment to look back at Monica. She had nothing to hide. Except, that was, the way her heart had lurched at the mention of his name, and the trembling hollowness just under her ribs now, which it seemed to her must show in an unsteady control of her voice.
‘Is he married, or anything?’
‘How can he be if I got the impression he might be queer? But then, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him and he didn’t say.’
‘Did he... did he ask about me?’ She was impatient with herself for putting the question. She had thought herself in command of her emotions on the subject; that the long labour of the novel had purged her of bitterness, bringing her to the realisation that to keep her wounds open was to destroy the beauty of what she had felt at the time. She had come to terms with it, so she’d thought. But now she was undone again, jealous of Monica who had spoken to him, stood near him, only a few weeks ago, when she herself had not seen him for more than two years.
‘He asked about the old gang in general, then mentioned you. Did I ever see you. So I told him we wrote to each other, and what you were doing.’
‘And that was that?’
‘Yes. What else did you expect?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Ruth...’ Monica said in a moment, gently chiding.
‘I know.’ Ruth poured herself another cup of tea. ‘He’ll get a shock if he does read the novel.’
‘Oh? It’s all in there, is it?’
‘Well, I used it rather than recorded it. I mean, that’s what a writer does. But it’s close enough for him to recognise it. The girl in the book has an abortion.’
‘Wow! You don’t mean...? You couldn’t have...’
‘Not without you and perhaps some of the others knowing, no. But he’d gone away by that time. No, I just extended it all a bit, pushed it to a further extreme. I did think for a time that I was pregnant, you see.’
‘And you never said a word!’
‘No, I kept it to myself. Terrified out of my wits for nearly three weeks.’
‘I don’t think I was ever absolutely certain that you and he...’
‘Had been sleeping together? Weren’t you? It was bloody marvellous, Monica. The most stupendous uplifting experience of my life. Until it turned sour, of course.’
‘I was never quite sure before how badly he’d behaved... So when he reads the novel he’s going to wonder if you…’
‘I expect he will.’
‘Serve the swine right. If he’s got enough conscience for it. Of course, I’ve got to be honest and tell you that I never really did care for him myself…’
In the early evening they set out for the theatre. While Monica was getting ready for the performance, Ruth wandered along Shaftesbury Avenue, looking into the shop windows. The play was, as Monica had said, a rather creaky, contrived piece and not the kind of thing she would have gone to on her own initiative. But Ruth had never seen her friend working on the stage before and was glad of the chance. Afterwards, she met Monica at the stage door.
‘Is there anywhere special you’d like to go?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been to that pub you mentioned. The Salisbury, was it?’
‘Oh, it’s just a place in St Martin’s Lane where you can sometimes find a few actors after the show.’ Monica paused.
‘It’s not his local, you know, Ruth.’
‘No,’ Ruth said. She felt foolish, found out in something unworthy of her. ‘Let’s go and eat, shall we?’
While still in London she could to some extent keep her main concerns at bay; but once on the train, with the thread which connected her to the familiar and the past drawing tighter over every mile, she gave herself to a brooding examination of her state of mind.
The conviction which had come to her yesterday, that the novel would be a success, was as strong as ever; and on its foundation she allowed herself to build the notion of a new life. She saw opening out before her prospects of which she would hitherto hardly have dreamed; saw them with a prophetic clarity, but soberly now, without elation. For she knew that whatever small measures of fame and fortune came to her with this book would have to be justified by the long and continuous labour of the future; saw also that the task before her would provide no magic shield against the disappointments and deprivations of her life; rather would it, in its conscientious execution, expose her to a raw-nerved apprehension of reality such as she had never known before.
And, oh, that all this should have come to her so soon, while the joy was still fresh in her!
If she were not, therefore, to lose everything there was above all else the grave necessity of making something of herself: of learning somehow to hang on until she found, if not happiness, a strength of mind to endure whatever in its probing, analysis and self-questioning this new life could challenge her with, so that through it all she would in her basic purpose keep firm and true both to her talent and the memory of that exultant womanhood she had known when Maurice loved her.
Had she been a praying girl she would have prayed. As it was, she closed her eyes and addressed herself with stern resolve.
A little while later a white-jacketed steward slid open the door of the compartment and announced the first sitting for lunch. Ruth had not thought herself hungry but now she got up and made her way towards the dining-car, swaying from side to side as she balanced herself against the motion of the train.
THE GLAD EYE
For C.M.B.
Work in Progress
Otterburn had come to live in this cathedral city when he left his wife. He rented a room and kitchen, with a shared bath and lavatory on the next landing. He had never lived alone in his li
fe before and from his window he could look down three floors at the river flowing between its stone banks and think that at least he hadn’t far to go if he decided to do away with himself.
The river ran through the city under four bridges. Upstream was the bishop’s palace, which Otterburn had not yet seen. The city was a great tourist attraction and at every season of the year, though more plentiful in summer, damp crocodiles of children and groups of visitors speaking many different languages could be found in the narrow streets and around the cathedral, whose walls of carved stone were just now free of masons’ scaffolding for the first time in years. It sometimes seemed to Otterburn that every corner one turned gave fresh evidence of the city’s beauty. He soon found also, as others who had come to live here before him had discovered, that the damp air gave him recurring trouble with his sinuses.
One day, coming into the house, he found an envelope addressed to him on the mat behind the door. It surprised him, for no one knew he was here. Yet this was an envelope with his name written on it in someone’s hand. He took it upstairs and opened it in his room. There was a single sheet of rather good dove-grey writing-paper, folded once. On it, written in the same hand, was the message: ‘I shall be in the Ferryboat at seven tonight’. Nothing more. No signature. No date. Otterburn could not decide whether it was a woman’s handwriting or a man’s. He looked at the envelope again. There was no stamp or postmark. It had presumably been delivered by its sender. And seven tonight meant just that.
