A Splash of Red

by Antonia Fraser

  Gathering Tiger into her arms, Jemima said hastily: 'No time for the present to talk about me. But I've much enjoyed hearing about you.’ Tiger wriggled in her arms and his fierce green eyes gazed at her with indignation. 'Look, I must be off. I have an appointment.' Let her sort out her correct attitude to Adam Adamson and his fellow Friends of the House in peace, rather than under his enquiring squirrel's gaze. She did not, for one thing, like the sound of that future project, whatever it might be, planned by the demonstrators. It might be her duty to Chloe to find out a little more about it.

  'Yes, why don't you think it over by yourself?' said Adam with a smile as though she had spoken. 'And then, my dear goddess, I am convinced that you will join us in our cause, bringing all the powers of your fellow gods and goddesses to our aid.' Was he mocking her and was that a glancing reference to the might of Megalith Television?

  'But do tell me before you go, exactly what brought you, you with your archaic smile, to Adelaide Square from Mount Olympus? Or wherever it is you generally inhabit. I sense a mystery here.'

  'I had better tell you plainly that I am not a squatter - revivifier,' Jemima said quickly as she left the flat. 'I've been lent the penthouse by a friend as a matter of fact. A straightforward tenant. They do exist.'

  She did not wait to see Adam Adamson's reaction to this bold announcement. Back in the penthouse she deposited Tiger, fed him and checked that the balcony window was open for his egresses during her absence. How delightful and bleached and open the penthouse seemed! Like a glorious sandy seaside after the murky cavern of the third floor. Not all the works of the Lionnel Estate were bad.

  She would have preferred to have eaten a quick meal there; but she had finished all the salad the night before. Jemima decided on a local cafe instead, somewhere where she could enjoy a glass of wine and read a book. Fallen Child might be dipped into again, as a tribute to her hostess. She selected a copy from the neat little row of Chloe's novels, stored modestly and inconspicuously at ground level. As usual, she admired the author's photograph which occupied the entire back of the jacket. Chloe really was amazingly photogenic: Valentine was right to take advantage of the fact. All the same, why on earth had a lace parasol seemed an appropriate accessory for this particular picture? No wonder the reviewers sometimes sneered.

  Jemima carefully locked the flat behind her with the second Chubb key.

  But as she returned down the stairs to re-enter the outside world, she found Adam Adamson waiting for her on the landing of the third floor. He was not smiling quite so broadly, a mere curve of his lips saluted her. He was in fact blocking her way.

  'Just one more thing, green-eyed Pallas Athena, oh wisest one. What is the name of the obliging friend who lent you the flat?'

  There seemed no point in keeping it from him. For all she knew, there were letters addressed to Chloe in the hall below.

  'She's called Chloe Fontaine. The writer. You may have heard of her.' She was carrying Fallen Child. 'Look, you might recognize her, even if you don't know the name. She sometimes appears on television.' Chloe's large sloe-like eyes gazed at them, provocative, enigmatic, beneath the white frame of the absurdly pretty parasol.

  Adam Adamson gazed down at the photograph. He looked utterly disconcerted. He still smiled but as she analysed it later it was a smile of genuine surprise, even disbelief. In some way she had astonished him.

  All he said was: 'Chloe: a nymph's name. But for a writer, one of the muses might have been more appropriate, Calliope, perhaps, the muse of tragedy. Still, she's certainly very beautiful.' And on that enigmatic and faintly disquieting note, Adam Adamson went back into the flat and closed its heavy mahogany door.

  6

  B for Beware

  The Reading Room of the British Library, lying inside the British Museum, was very hot. Not unlike the summer streets of Bloomsbury through which she had passed, the Reading Room exuded an atmosphere of dust; it was also airless being without air-conditioning or open windows, the sun beating on the great glass dome which surmounted it. As a result, an aroma of faint dampness met Jemima as she presented her pass at the entrance. For a moment she was tempted to abandon this humid temple to literature in favour of the cooler halls of the Museum itself, presided over by huge wide-mouthed slant-eyed Egyptian monarchs and eagle-headed Assyrian deities. Other vast feline figures were guarding temples which had long ago disappeared. Here tourists worshipped with wondering eyes.

  The Reading Room on the other hand was full of up-to-date activity. No one wandered. People strode. Unlike the tourists, the readers, carrying briefcases and rolled copies of the Guardian, gave an unmistakeable air of knowing where they were going. Because the Reading Room constituted its own busy little world in the midst of the great sprawling castle of the Museum, with its staircases and salons and guards, it always seemed to Jemima peculiarly appropriate that it should be built in the shape and design of a spinning-wheel in a fairy story. So one might fancifully imagine its toilers bent over intricate webs.

  There were however a great many toilers already present this Saturday afternoon in August, and that particular idle fancy quickly gave way to irritation as Jemima embarked on the notoriously long-drawn-out process of finding an empty seat. Doggedly, she inspected the rows of seats, which radiated out from the central enclosure, forming the spokes of the wheel. After a while she gazed at those fortunate enough to possess them with the hostility of one searching for an empty taxi. The trouble was that the British Library system of sending for a book from the stacks necessitated the possession of a seat before you could fill in a request slip.

  In the past, Jemima had enjoyed one concentrated and instructive spell working in the Reading Room. During a temporary lull in her television career, she had supported herself for three months researching in the Reading Room on behalf of an enterprising publisher who wished to launch a series composed of abridged versions of Victorian classics - out of the public mind, and also out of copyright. The series had never appeared and the publisher had disappeared. Jemima had gone back to television. But during the long days, Jemima had surreptitiously begun to study, on her own account, a topic more congenial to her own taste. This was the genesis of the book on the Edwardian lady philanthropists.

  She still remembered the curious stifling anonymous freedom of working in the Reading Room every day, as though going to some office where one was at the same time totally unknown and yet expected. She had also, during that original sojourn, learnt the Reading Room rules about looking up books, which had their own logic, not readily assimilable on the first visit, but like riding a bicycle, once learnt never forgotten.

  Jemima turned left and began to pace round the semicircle of seats radiating out from the central desk. They were arranged alphabetically, and she found herself beginning at L. The despised little central row of seats between each spoke were marked double L, double M, and so forth. The first three or four sections were too full to be inviting.

  From an old girlhood habit, she began to tick off the letters of the alphabet in her own personal superstitious terms - L for Love, M for Marvellous, N for Naughty but Nice, O for Optimism, P for Peace, R for Romance ... But as she searched for an empty seat, aware of a few people looking up at her with an air of vague disapproval as she passed on her high heels (or perhaps it was recognition or perhaps in the Reading Room the latter quickly turned into the former) she found imperceptibly that her litany was turning into something more macabre. V is for Violence, said the voice inside her head, and double V is for Victim of Violence. But V in Jemima's alphabet had always been for Variety, one of her favourite words, so much more diverting to the curious mind than the certainty of Victor)', the bull-headed sound of Valour.

  And then as she crossed over the entrance to the corridor which led to the North Library and began the alphabet again - this time at the beginning - she found herself reciting A is for Accident, B is for Beware ... C is for Chloe ... she found her mind automatically continuing. But at B for Beware
and before C for Chloe was reached, Jemima suddenly found that B9 - the first end seat and thus her favourite for its slight extra feeling of space - was empty. Someone must have recently vacated it, for such a desirable position to be available so late in the day, by British Museum standards.

  August after all was notorious for an influx of overseas scholars. Valentine Brighton had warned her as much when she announced her intention of using the summer season to work on those ladies inevitably christened by him, with his characteristic penchant for trivialization by nickname, 'Goodies of the Golden Age'.

  'I assure you that you will find a mob of sweating scholars from Minnesota: they run package tours to the Reading Room in August.'

  'You've never been seen in the British Library in August,' retorted Jemima. 'You simply sit at Helmet in the world-famous Elizabethan garden, having patrician nightmares about the proletarian professors.'

  'My God, how wrong can you be? And I thought you were supposed to be an acute social observer, Jemima Shore, Investigator. I shall think twice about entrusting my Golden Goodies, to you, let alone old Aunt Emma Helmet's deeply philanthropic diaries about stamping out sex among the Sussex poor. ["But the book was my idea, Valentine," thought Jemima.] My dear girl, throughout the whole of August, I just can't wait to leave my world-famous Elizabethan garden for the ordered tranquillity of my Bloomsbury office. Those same sweaty professors from Minnesota also hie themselves inexorably to Helmet. Weekends, when the office isn't functioning, are pure hell. It's not so much them asking questions about the history of Helmet - Mummy always insists on answering them by the light of invention anyway - as telling me things about the place. And there I am, at one and the same time a cringing victim and the unworthy possessor. At Helmet in the summer they have me at their mercy; I much prefer the anonymity of Bloomsbury.'

  It struck Jemima, glancing from her new vantage point of B9, that for the purposes of disappearing in London, the Reading Room would be ideal; for everyone, that is, except the very few physically famous. It was not ideal for Jemima Shore, for example.

  As she looked up the press marks of the books she needed in the lumbering leather catalogue, a girl with long brown hair and a sharp nose spoke softly at her elbow.

  'Miss Shore, I simply loved The Unvisited. It's all true, so true; the artificiality of our geriatric culture ...'

  'Thank you so much,' said Jemima hastily, beginning to move away.

  'Just one question. It's rather personal I'm afraid; in fact I did think of writing to you—'

  Firmly, Jemima filled in SHORE J. on the white book slip, gave the reference number, hoping devoutly she had got it right, and beat a quick retreat, murmuring: 'Yes, why don't you?'

  The girl stared after her. Her gaze was both annoyed and vulnerable. Jemima posted her slips, six of them, in the little brown tray at the central desk and settled down in the harbour of B9 to await her books. One to two hours was said to be the average delivery time: perhaps on a Saturday she would be luckier. B for Beware - yes, indeed, beware of strangers accosting you in the British Library.

  But then it seemed that no place was absolutely ideal for Jemima Shore's planned disappearance. The tomb-like weekend quiet of the concrete Bloomsbury block had been disrupted already by one visitor and one squatter - no, revivifier, but the interruption was the same; what was more the revivifier showed no signs of leaving, and the visitor might be lurking anywhere in the district. There had been that cacophony of telephone calls both from the pathetic Stovers and a so-far-unidentified male of presumed Irish extraction.

  Only Chloe Fontaine possessed the magic art of disappearance, eluding a persistent ex-lover, worried elderly parents, and her great friend Jemima Shore with equally maddening grace.

  Jemima had a book of her own with which to while away the waiting time - Fallen Child, which she had begun to reread with pleasure while in the Pizza Perfecta - but the heat and stickiness made her more inclined to put her head in her hands and rest. As for B for Beware, V for Violence and the rest of it, she put that down at Kevin John Athlone's door. The British Library was, if anywhere, a safe refuge from physical violence; no possibility of assault here (except verbally by importunate strangers).

  As a resting-place it was also unparalleled, if you could stand the airless atmosphere. The man - or was it a woman - next to her had already given up the struggle for consciousness. The fair head was bowed onto the desk and the pile of delivered books ignored. Jemima recalled other people sleeping on their hands in the Reading Room in the past, on a hot afternoon, but they had been older; retired professors perhaps, turned out by their wives to graze peacefully in these quiet pastures. But there was something different about the attitude of this slumbering flaxen poll. The figure was utterly slumped, giving the impression of total abandon, even despair. It was almost as if its owner were dead rather than asleep, had found his or her last resting-place in the Reading Room, not merely a convenient situation for a quick kip.

  'Hamilton? Your books.' A handsome Asian with a cultivated voice deposited five books carefully on the desk beside her, and was whisking out the white slips poked into them. He was wearing a dazzling green T-shirt with the single word BOMB on it. The books were about chemistry.

  'B for Bomb,' she thought automatically. 'Beware the Bomb. Ban the Bomb. Beware the British Library.' Why were her thoughts so insatiably morbid today? She said aloud:

  'No, I'm Shore, J. Shore. These aren't mine.' At that moment the fair head next to her raised itself and a pair of light rather narrow eyes were gazing at her. The long mouth twitched; the lips, like the eyes, were rather narrow but the general effect was not unhandsome in a conventional English fashion.

  'Jemima Shore! I do declare!' The Asian glanced at the slips, picked up the books and went away. He seemed unconcerned by the mistake. In that respect the British Library had not changed. Jemima wondered how long it would be before her own books arrived.

  'B for Brighton,' said Jemima, wondering how she could have mistaken Valentine Brighton's sleek thick fair hair, even recumbent, for anyone else's - let alone a woman's.

  'Naturally it's B for Brighton, my dear. Where else should I sit? You know my obsession for my own initial, expressed in so many fascinating ways, not the least of which is the famous colophon of the Brighthelmet Press. But what good fortune that you too should have chosen to honour this humble row. Welcome to B—'

  'But, Valentine, what on earth are you doing here? It's a Saturday in August. Even the professors in Minnesota can't have driven you this far.'

  Valentine looked at her. For a moment he did not seem to understand the reference. Jemima saw that he was rather pale and there was perspiration on the fine fair skin of his brow.

  'Can't you guess?' he said at length in his usual bantering tone. 'Three guesses. You won't need three hundred.'

  'Hardly. You're the most unlikely sight here I can assure you.'

  'I'm waiting for Chloe.'

  'What? In her amazement, Jemima's voice had risen above the sibylline murmur adopted by Library readers. The woman in the seat next to Valentine looked up crossly and clicked her tongue. 'Where is she, then?' Jemima hissed.

  'I am hardly the person to ask, my dear girl, since I have been waiting here, pinioned to row B, for longer than I care to remember. Hence the state of torpor, not to say stupor in which you discovered me on arrival.'

  'We must talk. Can you come outside for a moment?'

  'That sounds as if you are challenging me to a duel, or are going to knock me down or something. However if the encounter is to be nonviolent, I shall be delighted. What is the time? Can we get a drink or something?'

  'It's after two o'clock. No, I don't need - want - a drink. I've just had lunch. Pizza, salad and one glass of white wine. Perfect scholar's meal and as a matter of fact I had it at the aptly named Pizza Perfecta. But as the mystery of Chloe's whereabouts deepens, I can't lose this opportunity of getting one or two things straight.'

  They both got up.

>   'Aren't you going to leave a note?'

  'Ah. Good thinking.' Valentine wrote with a flourish in red pentel on one of the white book request slips: 'C. Gone for a good chat with Jemima Shore, Investigator. Hope to iron out your problems to both our satisfaction.' He signed it: 'V. The red writing sprawled across the printed slip, a splash of red.

  'V for Violence' floated through Jemima's mind automatically. It was an inappropriate thought. Of all the men she knew, Valentine Brighton was the least redolent of violence; he seemed to lack even the smallest trace of that natural aggression which goes with masculinity, hence his oft-discussed lack of sexuality. Not that Valentine was in any way effeminate. Adam Adamson, with his youth and slightness, was the more girlish looking of the two. Yet it occurred to Jemima that oddly enough, he was also the more attractive. Even the odious Kevin John had a kind of forceful demanding sexuality which she could appreciate, while shuddering away from it. Yes, that was it. It was Valentine's polite lack of demand towards either sex, so far as could be made out, which caused the question mark to be raised. Besides, he really did not look at all well, perhaps the rumours of his heart condition were something more than maternal fussiness.

  Jemima walked with Valentine out of the Reading Room in the direction of those cool Egyptian and Assyrian halls, the memory of which had originally tempted her. As they left the Reading Room, Jemima's handbag was searched in case she should have slipped out a rare book or two. Valentine was ignored, like all the other men without briefcases.