Part 15 (2/2)

”You shouldn't have-” she began, breaking the increasingly frosty silence.

”Don't start!” he interrupted.

”I'm not starting anything, I'm simply observing that had you not come up with the idea of going to Barbara's flat then we wouldn't have landed in that extremely and I mean extremely awkward situation. That's all I'm saying.”

Rupert pursed his lips. He would never never refer to that flat as Barbara's, just as no Argentinian not even the most enthusiastic, polo-playing Anglophile would refer to the Falkland Islands as the Falkland Islands. No, it was ”my father's flat” or ”Pa's flat”. But now was not the time to go into all of that.

”Well, we got out of it, didn't we?” he protested.

”Yes, but it could so easily have gone the other way. And it nearly did, Rupert you can't deny that. What if the yeti had woken up?”

Rupert sighed. ”Don't be absurd, Gloria. There's no such thing as the yeti. It's all complete nonsense, encouraged, I might say, by la Ragg, who should know better but clearly doesn't. She's swallowed the whole story cooked up by that crackpot Greatorex. If ever there was a questionable piece of work, it's him.”

Gloria agreed with this a.s.sessment of Errol Greatorex, the yeti's biographer, but she was not yet quite prepared to let Rupert get away with last night's debacle. ”Do you really think he believed you?” she asked.

”Who?”

”Greatorex. When you came up with that perfectly farcical story about having forgotten that we were meant to stay with your mother rather than with Barbara. What a ridiculous excuse. Does anybody go to stay with somebody and suddenly remember they're in the wrong place?”

Rupert shrugged. ”I considered it was rather quick thinking on my part,” he said. ”And a fat lot of good you were. I had to do all the talking.”

”Well, I don't think he believed you. I saw his eyebrows go up. When a person's eyebrows go up, it's a sure sign that he's smelled a rat. And what's he going to say to Barbara when she comes back? What if the real Teddy, or whatever his name was, turns up at the flat? What then?” She paused. The mention of rats raised another issue that she needed to discuss with Rupert: Ratty Mason. Last night, just before the disastrous visit to Barbara's flat, Gloria had finally caught sight of Ratty Mason, dining alone in the restaurant in which they had eaten a rather unsatisfactory meal to celebrate her birthday. Ratty Mason had stared at them and when she had asked Rupert who the strange man was, he had revealed the name. But he had refused to tell her anything more.

”Well, let's forget all about Errol Greatorex,” she said. ”And his yeti. What I want to know is this: who exactly is Ratty Mason? At least I've seen him now, but what else do I know about him? Virtually nothing. That he was at Uppingham with you, and that's it.” She fixed Rupert with a steely gaze. ”Rupert, what's all this with Ratty Mason? Why the secrecy?”

Rupert looked uncomfortable. He flushed. ”I've told you. I've told you more than once. Ratty Mason was a chap at school. I didn't know him all that well. In fact, hardly anybody knew him all that well, as it turned out ...”

Gloria pounced. ”What do you mean as it turned out? What turned out?”

Rupert looked fl.u.s.tered. ”It's just an expression. It doesn't mean anything.”

”Oh, yes it does. If you say 'as it turned out' you are suggesting, I should have thought, that something happened. Well, what happened? What happened with Ratty Mason?”

Rupert rose from the table. ”I'm not going to sit here and be interrogated,” he said. ”Let's get this clear once and for all. I barely know Ratty Mason. I hardly knew him then. There's nothing more to be said about him.” He glared at Gloria. ”And now I'm going to the office. I've got work to do.”

He reached down and took a final sip of his coffee, banging the cup down and spilling the dregs on the tablecloth.

”Look what you've done,” said Gloria. But Rupert was not listening. He went into their bedroom, took his jacket from the wardrobe, and straightened his tie, ready to leave. Then he returned to the kitchen.

”I'm sorry,” he blurted out. ”I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that ... All this stress. Publishers are cutting advances across the board. Our authors are being terribly bolshy. La Ragg has swanned off to Scotland with her toyboy and ... and it's all a bit much for me. Sorry, my darling. So sorry.”

Gloria came to his side. ”Poor darling! I'm the one who should say sorry. I understand how things are. We should get away.”

”Where to?”

”Oh, anywhere. Amsterdam. Paris. What about somewhere in the UK? Aldeburgh. How about Aldeburgh? It's such a lovely place, and they've got a divine bookshop. Remember we met the booksellers, that nice couple the Jameses? We could potter about in there, and go to some funny little pub for lunch. And we could go and see the monument to Ben Britten, that amazing scallop sh.e.l.l, and watch the fishermen launch their boats from the stony beach. Just like Peter Grimes. It would be so therapeutic.”

Rupert looked wistful. ”I love that scallop sh.e.l.l,” he said. ”It's so much better than a statue. You can sit on it, and you can watch the sea from it, and listen. There are so few statues one can sit on.”

”I agree,” said Gloria. ”And yet it's recognisable. We know what it is. It's part of our world. Unlike anything that wins the Turner Prize. Not that all Turner Prize artists are useless. I know somebody who actually knows what she's talking about, and she says that some of them have been real artists.”

Rupert thought about this. ”Actually, the Turner Prize stuff is part of our world,” he said. ”That's the problem. Those installations are merely the ba.n.a.l replication of the ordinary, and nothing more.” He looked at his watch. ”We're so lucky, my darling.”

She looked at him enquiringly. Why were they lucky? Because they had one another? Because they could go off to Aldeburgh together, when lots of people had n.o.body to go to Aldeburgh with?

Rupert explained, ”We're lucky because we both think the same way about the Turner Prize. Imagine being married to somebody who actually thought all that pretentiousness had any actual merit. Imagine that!”

Gloria shook her head. ”Impossible,” she said.

Rupert looked at her fondly. ”Do you think we're reactionary?”

Gloria shook her head. ”Not at all. Not us. n.o.body really likes the jejune things those people create, Rupert. n.o.body. But it's the Emperor's new clothes. Remember the story? n.o.body will dare to say: Look, can these artists actually sculpt, or paint, or make anything of beauty? Or terrible, naive question can they actually draw?”

”They can't,” he said. ”Or many of them can't. That's what David Hockney was complaining about when he talked about the art colleges ...”

”He can draw,” said Gloria.

”He certainly can.” He looked at his watch. ”I really must get to the office, darling. Tempus fugit.”

”Tempus is so utterly predictable, darling. All he ever does is to fugere.”

Rupert shook a finger. ”Darling, you mustn't say 'to fugere'. That's like saying 'to to fly'. Fugere is the infinitive form, my little darling. Too many 'to's. No additional 'to' required.”

She planted a kiss on his brow. ”Oh, darling, you're so clever.”

”Not as clever as you, my darling! A bientot!”

Chapter 49: In the Waiting Room.

The offices of the Ragg Porter Literary Agency occupied one third of a comfortable-looking building overlooking a leafy square in Soho. It was convenient for both the agency's members of staff and for their clients, as it was a stone's throw or, as Rupert's father, Fatty Porter, used so wittily to put it, a ma.n.u.script's throw from Piccadilly Circus. He used the expression to describe to new authors how to find the offices, and they usually laughed, little realising that Fatty did, in fact, throw ma.n.u.scripts out of the window if he considered them dull or they otherwise annoyed him. Behaviour was different in those days, and a literary agent who threw ma.n.u.scripts out of the window was considered merely eccentric, or colourful, rather than an over-educated litter-lout. The sense of ent.i.tlement, now so deeply embedded in consumerism, that would have regarded such behaviour as insensitive and arrogant was then quite unheard of. In those days people took what they got from a literary agent, just as they did from doctors, teachers, policemen and virtually all other figures of authority. That this was grossly unfair and intimidating is surely beyond debate, especially in an age when the tables have been so completely reversed as to require doctors, teachers, policemen and other figures of authority to take what they get from members of the public, and to take it in a spirit of meekness and complete self-abas.e.m.e.nt.

The office occupied the top storey of the building, the two floors below being having been let for as long as anyone could remember to a film-editing company and a dealer in Greco-Roman antiquities. The dealer in antiquities, Ernest Bartlett, was himself of great antiquity, and there was occasionally some debate as to whether he could technically still be alive. However lights still went on and off in his office, and sometimes on the stairs one might hear drifting from behind his door s.n.a.t.c.hes of sound from the ancient device that Gregory Ragg had christened ”Bartlett's steam radio”. This radio was permanently tuned to a radio station of the sort everybody thought had stopped broadcasting. It played light cla.s.sical music and big bands, but played them in a quiet, rather distant way, as if from a far corner of the ether. The effect was haunting.

Ernest Bartlett was always invited to the Ragg Porter Christmas party, and would normally attend. He would arrive wearing a very old silver-grey double-breasted suit and a Garrick Club tie, and bearing an armful of carefully wrapped gifts. In conversation with the staff, he would refer to Rupert as ”Fatty Porter's much-admired son”, and to Barbara as ”Gregory Ragg's distinguished daughter”. He drank bitter lemon at these parties and rarely ate more than one or two small biscuits, which he described as ”egregiously Baccha.n.a.lian behaviour on my part”.

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