It was Sir Raymond's turn to muse, and having done so he was forced to admit that there was truth in this. Bottleton East, down Limehouse way, was one of those primitive communities where the native sons, largely recruited from the costermongering and leaning-up-against-the-walls-of-public-houses industries, have a primitive sense of humour and think things funny which are not funny at all. Picturing Bottleton East's probable reaction on learning of the tragedy which had darkened his life, he winced so strongly that his hat fell off and got another dent in it.
'Well,' he said, having picked it up, 'I do not intend to let the matter rest. I shall most certainly do something about it.'
'But what? That is the problem we come up against, is it not? You might... no, that wouldn't do. Or... no, that wouldn't do, either. I confess I see no daylight. What a pity it is that you're not an author. Then you would be on velvet.'
'I don't understand you. Why?'
'You could have got these views of yours on the younger generation off your chest in a novel. Something on the lines of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies – witty, bitter, satirical and calculated to make the younger generation see itself as in a mirror and wish that Brazil nuts had never been invented. But in your case, of course, that is out of the question. You couldn't write a novel if you tried for a hundred years. Well, goodbye, my dear fellow,' said Lord Ickenham, 'I must be moving along. Lot of heavy Hullo-there-how-are-you-old-boy-ages-since-we-met-ing to be done before yonder sun sets. Sorry I could not have been of more help. If anything occurs to me later, I'll let you know.'
He tripped away, and Sir Raymond was conscious of a mounting sense of indignation. He strongly resented that remark about his not being able to write a novel if he tried for a hundred years. Who the devil was Ickenham to say whether he could write a novel or not?
Anything in the nature of a challenge had always been a spur to Sir Raymond Bastable. He was one of those men who take as a personal affront the suggestion that they are not capable of carrying to a successful conclusion any task to which they may see fit to set their hand. Years ago, when a boy at school, he had once eaten seven vanilla ice creams at a sitting because a syndicate of his playmates had betted him he couldn't. It sent him to the sanatorium for three days with frozen gastric juices, but he did it, and the passage of time had in no way diminished this militant spirit.
All through the rest of the day and far into the night he brooded smoulderingly on Lord Ickenham's tactless words, and rose from his bed next morning with his mind made up.
Write a novel?
Of course he could write a novel, and he would. Every man, they say, has one novel in him, and he had the advantage over most commencing authors of being in a state of seething fury. There is nothing like fury for stimulating the pen. Ask Dante. Ask Juvenal.
But though his theme was ready to hand and his rage continued unabated, there were moments, many of them, in the weeks that followed when only the iron Bastable will kept him from giving in and abandoning the project. As early as the middle of Chapter One he had discovered that there is a lot more to this writing business than the casual observer would suppose. Dante could have told him, and so could Juvenal, that it does not come easy. Blood, they would have said, is demanded of the man who sets pen to paper, also sweat and tears.
However, as their fellow poet Swinburne would have reminded them, even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea: and came a day when Sir Raymond was able to point at a mass of typescript on his desk, the top sheet of which was inscribed:
COCKTAIL TIME
by
RICHARD BLUNT
and to point at it with pride. His whole soul had gone into Cocktail Time – a biting title with its sardonic implication that that was all the younger generation lived for – and he knew it was good. It was an infernal shame, he felt, that circumstances compelled him to hide his identity under a pseudonym.
As, of course, they did. No question about that. It is all very well for your Dantes and your Juvenals to turn out the stuff under their own names, but a man who is hoping for the Conservative nomination at Bottleton East has to be cautious. Literary composition is not entirely barred to those whose ambition it is to carve for themselves a political career, but it has to be the right sort of literary composition – a scholarly Life of Talleyrand, for instance, or a thoughtful study of conditions in the poppet-valve industry You cannot expect to get far on the road to Downing Street if you come up with something like Forever Amber.
And he was forced to admit as he skimmed through its pages, that there was no gainsaying the fact that in both tone and substance Cocktail Time had much in common with Miss Winsor's masterpiece. Sex had crept into it in rather large quantities, for while exposing the modern young man he had not spared the modern young woman. His experiences in the divorce court – notably when appearing for the petitioner in the cases of Bingley versus Bingley, Botts and Frobisher and of Fosdick versus Fosdick, Wills, Milburn, O'Brien, ffrench-ffrench, Hazelgrove-Hazelgrove and others – had given him a low opinion of the modern young woman, and he saw no reason why she, too, should not have her share of the thunderbolts.
Yes, he mused, Cocktail Time was unquestionably outspoken in one or two spots, particularly Chapter 13. A Raymond Bastable, revealed as the man behind Chapter 13 and in a somewhat lesser degree Chapters 10, 16, 20, 22 and 24, could never hope to receive the nomination for the impending election at Bottleton East. A prudish Conservative Committee would reject him with a shudder and seek for their candidate elsewhere.
CHAPTER 3
Into the early vicissitudes of Sir Raymond's brainchild it is not necessary to go in any great detail, for it had much the same experiences as any other first novel. He sent it from an accommodation address to Pope and Potter, and it came back. He sent it to Simms and Shorter, and it came back; to Melville and Monks, and it came back; to Popgood and Grooly, Bissett and Bassett, Ye Panache Presse and half a dozen other firms, and it came back again. It might have been a boomerang or one of those cats which, transferred from Surbiton to Glasgow, show up in Surbiton three months later, a little dusty and footsore but full of the East-West-home's-best spirit. Why it should eventually have found journey's end in the offices of Alfred Tomkins Ltd one cannot say, but it did, and they published it in the spring, with a jacket featuring a young man with a monocle in his right eye doing the rock 'n roll with a young woman in her step-ins.
After that, as is customary on these occasions, nothing much happened. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. The book had a rather limited press. The Peebles Courier called it not unpromising, the Basingstoke Journal thought it not uninteresting, and the Times Literary Supplement told its readers that it was published by Alfred Tomkins Ltd and contained 243 pp, but apart from that it received no critical attention. The younger generation at whom it was aimed, if they had known of its existence, would have said in their uncouth way that it had laid an egg.
But Fame was merely crouching for the spring, simply waiting in the wings, as it were, for the cue which would bring it bounding on stage to drape the chaplet about the brow of its favoured son. At two minutes past five one Tuesday afternoon the venerable Bishop of Stortford, entering the room where his daughter Kathleen sat, found her engrossed in what he presumed to be a work of devotion but which proved on closer inspection to be a novel entitled Cocktail Time. Peeping over her shoulder, he was able to read a paragraph or two. She had got, it should be mentioned, to the middle of Chapter 13. At 5.5 sharp he was wrenching the volume from her grasp, at 5.6 tottering from the room, at 5.10 in his study scrutinizing Chapter 13 to see if he had really seen what he had thought he had seen.
He had.
At 12.15 on the following Sunday he was in the pulpit of the church of St Jude the Resilient, Eaton Square, delivering a sermon on the text 'He that touches pitch shall be defiled' (Ecclesi
asticus 13-1) which had the fashionable congregation rolling in the aisles and tearing up the pews. The burden of his address was a denunciation of the novel Cocktail Time in the course of which he described it as obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt, shameless, graceless and depraved, and all over the sacred edifice you could see eager men jotting the name down on their shirt cuffs, scarcely able to wait to add it to their library list.
In these days when practically anything from Guildford undertaker bitten in leg by Pekinese to Ronald Plumtree (11) falling off his bicycle in Walthamstow High Street can make the front page of the popular press as a big feature story with headlines of a size formerly reserved for announcing the opening of a world war, it was not to be expected that such an event would pass unnoticed. The popular press did it proud, and there was joy that morning in the offices of Alfred Tomkins Ltd. Just as all American publishers hope that if they are good and lead upright lives, their books will be banned in Boston, so do all English publishers pray that theirs will be denounced from the pulpit by a bishop. Full statistics are not to hand, but it is estimated by competent judges that a good bishop, denouncing from the pulpit with the right organ note in his voice, can add between ten and fifteen thousand to the sales.
Mr Prestwick, the senior partner, read the Express, the Mail and the Mirror in the train coming from his Esher home, and within five minutes of his arrival at the office was on the telephone to Ebenezer Flapton and Sons, printers of Worcester and London, urging Ebenezer and the boys to drop everything and start rushing out a large new edition. Cocktail Time, which Alfred Tomkins Ltd had been looking on all this while as just another of the stones the builder had refused, was plainly about to become the head stone of the corner.
But there was no corresponding joy in the heart of Sir Raymond Bastable as he paced the lawn of Hammer Lodge. Ever since he had read his morning paper at the breakfast table, his eyes had been glassy, his mind in a ferment.
To anyone who paces the lawn of Hammer Lodge, that desirable residence replete with every modern comfort, a wide choice of scenic beauties is available. He can look to the left and find his eye roving over green pasture land and picturesque woods, or he can look to the right and get an excellent view of the park of Hammer Hall with its lake and noble trees and beyond it the house itself, a lovely legacy from Elizabethan days. He can also, if it is a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, look in front of him and see a jobbing gardener leaning on a spade in a sort of trance in the kitchen garden. There is, in short, no stint.
But Sir Raymond saw none of these attractive sights or, if he did, saw them as through a glass darkly. His whole attention was riveted on the morrow and what it was going to bring forth. In writing Cocktail Time, he had had a malevolent hope that he would be starting something, but he had never expected to start anything of these dimensions, and the thought that chilled him to the very spinal marrow was this. Would that pseudonym of his be an adequate safeguard?
If there is one thing the popular press of today is, it is nosey. It tracks down, it ferrets out. Richard Blunt becomes front page news, and it is not long before it is asking itself who is this Richard Blunt? It wants photographs of him smoking a pipe or being kind to the dog and interviews with him telling the world what his favourite breakfast cereal is and what he thinks of the modern girl. It institutes enquiries and discovers that nobody has ever seen the gifted Blunt and that his only address is a sweets-and-tobacco shop in a side street near Waterloo station, and before you know where you are headlines have begun to appear. As it might be:
LITERARY MYSTERY
or
PHANTOM AUTHOR
or possibly
DICK, WHERE ART THOU?
and from that to exposure is but a step. At this very moment, Sir Raymond felt, a dozen reporters must be sniffing on his trail, and the contemplation of the appalling mess in which he had landed himself made him writhe like an Ouled Nail stomach-dancer.
He was still busily writhing when the voice of Peasemarch, his butler, spoke softly at his side. Albert Peasemarch always spoke softly when addressing Sir Raymond Bastable. He knew what was good for him. It is no pleasure to a butler to be thundered at and asked if he imagines himself to be a barrow boy calling attention to his blood oranges.
'I beg your pardon, Sir Raymond.'
The author of Cocktail Time came slowly out of the uneasy dream in which he had been sustaining the role of the stag at bay.
'Eh?'
'It is Madam, sir. I think you should come.'
'Come? What do you mean? Come where?'
'To Madam's room, sir. I am afraid she is not well. I was passing her door a moment ago, and I heard her sobbing. As if her heart would break,' said Peasemarch, who liked to get these things right.
A wave of exasperation and self-pity flooded Sir Raymond's tortured soul. Phoebe, he was thinking, would start sobbing at a time like this, when he needed to devote every little grey cell in his brain to the problem of how to elude those infernal reporters. For an instant he was inclined to counter with a firm refusal to go within a mile of Madam's room. He had just been deriving a faint consolation from the thought that, she having breakfasted in bed and he being about to take train and spend the day in London, he would not have to meet her till late tonight, by which time, he hoped, his agitation would be less noticeable. Phoebe, seeing him now, would infallibly ask what was the matter, and when he assured her that nothing was the matter would say 'But what is the matter, dear?' and carry on from there.
Then kindlier feelings prevailed, or possibly it was just the curiosity and urge to probe first causes which we all experience when told that someone is crying as if her heart would break. He accompanied Peasemarch back to the house and found his sister sitting up in bed, dabbing at her eyes with a liquid something that looked as if it might have been at one time a pocket handkerchief.
Except that her ears did not stick up and that she went about on two legs instead of four, Phoebe Wisdom was extraordinarily like a white rabbit, a resemblance which was heightened at the moment by the white dressing jacket she was wearing and the fact that much weeping had made her nose and eyes pink. As Sir Raymond closed the door behind him, she uttered a loud gurgling sob which crashed through his disordered nervous system like an expanding bullet, and his manner when he spoke was brusque rather than sympathetic.
'What on earth's the matter?' he demanded.
Another sob shook the stricken woman, and she said something that sounded like 'Cosh him'.
'I beg your pardon?' said Sir Raymond, clenching his hands till the knuckles stood out white under the strain, like the hero of an old-fashioned novel. He was telling himself that he must be calm, calm.
'Cossie!' said his sister, becoming clearer.
'Oh, Cosmo? What about him?'
'He says he's going to shoot himself
Sir Raymond was in favour of this. Cosmo Wisdom, the fruit of the unfortunate marriage Phoebe had made twenty-seven years ago, long before he had become influential and important enough to stop her, was a young man he disliked even more than he disliked most young men in these days when the species had deteriorated so lamentably Algernon Wisdom, Cosmo's father, had at one time sold secondhand cars, at another been vaguely connected with the motion pictures, and had occasionally acted as agent for such commodities as the Magic Pen-Pencil and the Monumento Mouse Trap, but during the greater part of his futile career had been what he euphemistically described as 'between jobs', and Cosmo took after him. He, too, was frequently between jobs. He was one of those young men, with whom almost all families seem to be afflicted, who are in a constant state of having to have something done about them. 'We must do something about poor Cossie,' were words frequently on his mother's lips, and Sir Raymond would say in the unpleasant voice which he used when addressing hostile witnesses that he had no desire to be unduly inquisitive, but would she mind telling him what precisely she meant by the pronoun 'we'.
The most recent attempt on his part to do something ab
out poor Cossie had been to secure him a post in the export and import firm of Boots and Brewer of St Mary Axe, and the letter his sister was reducing to pulp announced, he presumed, that Boots and Brewer had realized that the only way of making a success of importing and exporting was to get rid of him.
'What has he been doing?' he asked.
'What, dear?'
Sir Raymond took a turn about the room. He found it helped a little.
'Why have Boots and Brewer dismissed him? They have, I take it?'
'He doesn't say so. He just says he wants two hundred pounds.'
'He does, does he?'
'And I haven't got two hundred pounds.'
'Very fortunate. You won't be tempted to throw it down the drain.'
'What, dear?'
'Letting Cosmo have it would be tantamount to that. Don't give him a penny.'
'He doesn't want a penny, he wants two hundred pounds.'
'Let him want.'
'But he'll shoot himself.'
'Not a hope,' said Sir Raymond, with a wistful little sigh as the bright picture the words had conjured up faded. 'If he tries, he'll be sure to miss. For heaven's sake stop worrying. All that letter means is that he thinks he may get a tenner out of you.'
'He says two hundred pounds.'
'They always say two hundred pounds. It's common form.'
'What, dear?'
'Phoebe, in the name of everything infernal, must you put your head on one side like a canary and say "What, dear?" every time I speak to you? It's enough to madden a saint. Well, I can't stand here talking. I shall miss my train. Take an aspirin.'
'What, dear?'
'Take an aspirin. Take two aspirins. Take three,' said Sir Raymond vehemently, and whirled off like a tornado to the car which was waiting to convey him to the station.
CHAPTER 4
Of the several appointments he had in London that day the first was lunch with Lord Ickenham at the Demosthenes Club. Arriving there, he found the place its old peaceful self, the smoking-room full of the usual living corpses lying back in armchairs and giving their minds a rest. He eyed them with distaste, resenting this universal calm at a time when he himself was feeling like a character in a Greek tragedy pursued by the Furies. Though he would have said, if you had asked him, that far too much fuss was made about being pursued by Furies. The time to start worrying was when you were pursued by reporters. Curse their notebooks and pencils and damn their soft hats and raincoats. He could see them in his mind's eye, dozens of them, creeping about like leopards and getting nosier every moment.