“Thank you, Vicky. That’s honest, at least—even if I don’t agree.”
“Barry, darling, it isn’t a question of agreeing. It’s just the way I am. Put it another way, if you like. It’s often said that if the bedroom’s wrong in a married couple’s house, all the other rooms are wrong too.” (I saw him flinch and hastened quickly on—I did not want him to think for a moment that the blow was coming from that quarter.) “Well, to me, Barry, if the jokes—the manner of speech—the language, whatever you like to call it—between a married couple are wrong, don’t fit—well then, nothing else would really go right either.”
“But the converse isn’t necessarily true?” said Barry.
I wondered if this was a shot in the dark. I have barely mentioned Raymond to him. If he were curious, I would not blame him.
“Oh no, no,” I said definitely, “the converse isn’t true. If I thought that, Barry, I would be a superficial person and no mistake.”
“And that you certainly are not,” said Barry gravely.
It was when he said that, that I felt for the first time a real pang of regret that I could not possibly feel differently about his proposal. I do respect a man who can make me be serious. I do respect a man who can take a knock and pay it back with a compliment.
However, all that was six months before our conversation on this particular evening. We had, as Barry wanted, gone on seeing each other, although not quite so frequently as formerly. We always had plenty to talk about. When it’s a case of serious discussion, of something concrete, Barry is an excellent person to talk to. I used to tell him about the office, and he used to tell me about his school. We discussed the war too, of course, but in this book I am taking such conversations for granted. They are not worth recording, so swiftly out-dated were all our feeble comments by the grim march of events.
On this occasion I told Barry all about some trouble we were having at the office with one of our authors. Unless you are an avid reader of women’s magazines you would not know her name, but even if you had happened to notice it somewhere, you would be surprised to hear what a large and steady income she makes for herself from her writing. The woman’s magazine short story market may be a footling one, from the point of view of literature, but it’s an extremely lucrative one for the skilful craftsman. Ten per cent of this author’s earnings (the agency’s share) was well worth bothering about.
The agency’s share only, of course, if we had ‘placed’ the stories for her and that was just our trouble now. For years we had placed all her stuff and, in all honesty, we had done much better for her than she could have done for herself. (It isn’t a matter of lunching with editors and pulling strings, as many people seem to think. It’s a matter of persistence and special knowledge.) Doubtless had this woman—let us call her pen-name Dorothy Harper—worked entirely on her own she would have succeeded in selling a story or two, but she would never have built up such useful connections for herself as we had done. She would never have sold her stuff in the U.S.A. or got so many contracts for series of articles or probably even heard of ‘second serial rights,’ which sounds abstruse and mathematical but really only means selling a story twice over. As a matter of fact, she would probably never have persevered as we made her persevere. Psychologically, an agent is important as a good shoulderer of disappointments. An agent is hardened to refusals and doesn’t find it necessary to tell the author about every one.
Well, for many years—since before I went to work in the agency, which was immediately after I came down from Oxford—Miss Dorothy Harper had been a loyal and amenable client of ours. Not only had we placed her stories but we had advised her as to the sort of stories she might write that we could most easily place. We had worked splendidly as a team.
All this I rapidly recapitulated for Barry, and, with quick interested nods, he took it all in. He knew already, from me, a good deal about the workings of a literary agency.
“So what’s the trouble now?” he asked sympathetically.
“Well, it all started some time back. She wrote a story quite out of her usual line—a sort of highbrow, trailing off into dots, reader-no-wiser-at-the-end style of story—and sent it to us saying she had an idea that this was the sort of thing she was really meant to write. We weren’t enchanted, of course. There’s not much money in that sort of thing.”
“Was it—well, you know about writing and all that and I don’t—but was it ‘better’ than her usual stories?” asked Barry.’
“Better? God knows. It was a different class of thing altogether. Not so awful in some ways, I suppose, I’ll grant you that.”
“Well. Go on.”
“Well, this is where we made a mistake: she happened to drop into the office one day shortly after and, all bubbling over with enthusiasm, she asked Mrs. Hitchcock—she’s the head and owns the place, as you know—what she thought of it, and Mrs. Hitchcock more or less showed her. Our Dorothy went off in something of a huff. Extraordinarily touchy creatures, authors. What are you grinning at?”
“I feel a bit sorry for Dorothy. I mean, probably to her the story meant quite a bit—a fresh development and so on.”
“Quite. That’s just what Mrs. Hitchcock was afraid of. God help us when one of our competent hacks starts ‘developing,’ after all the trouble we’ve taken to standardize her. Now don’t start grinning again, Barry. I’m talking money and business, not literature.”
“I can see that, Vicky.”
“Yes. Well, hold on to that then, and don’t get an attack of chivalry about Dorothy, because it’s quite misplaced. Incidentally she’s a woman of forty-five and quite hard-boiled in most ways.”
“All right. Go on. What happened next?”
“Dorothy said if we didn’t like the story, please give it back to her. No, no, we said, we’ll try it for you. No, no, said she (all grand), I didn’t want you to handle my work if you don’t appreciate it. Great fun to say, of course, but absolute rot. Because for years we’d been talking honest commercial sense to each other.”
“This was a different sort of honesty, in a way,” suggested Barry.
“Yes, quite. Only this conversation took place in an office, not in a debating society. Well, she took the story away and she did actually sell it to some new, slightly highbrow paper. I suppose you’ll say ‘Good for her!’?”
“Yes,” said Barry, laughing.
“Well, yes and no, really. The paper went smash after very few issues, and I very much doubt if she ever got her money. Then, shortly afterwards, we had a sudden patch of luck with one or two of her stories that we already had on our hands, and, anyway, our Dorothy graciously gave us to understand that she had forgiven and forgotten all, and turned out two splendid new stories about mother-love and the straying wife who sees the error of her ways. A bit on the hot side, but not too hot for the shilling magazines—the best market of all. I will say this for our Dorothy, she is a worker.”
“I know you’re not really so cynical about your wretched authors as you pretend to be,” said Barry.
“I’m not at all cynical about the money side, Barry darling. Do you know what our Dorothy’s doing now?”
“No. What? Has she left you?”
“No. It’s more annoying than that in a way. If she left us outright and went elsewhere we’d be sorry, of course, but that would be that. No, she’s playing a really rather dirty game. She’s selling her best stuff herself and letting us handle the less hopeful chances, and that really is not fair.”
“Best? Do you mean her more highbrow stories?”
“Oh Lord, no,” I said scornfully. “She’s welcome to handle those herself. She’ll never really break into that market, and, anyway, there’s comparatively little money in it. No, Barry, this is not a story about idealism justified. Our Dorothy may have spasms of the creative urge, but she’s also got a sound head for business—we’ve taught her that, don’t you see? That’s what’s so aggravating. I can’t pretend she needs us quite as much as she used t
o, but she does still find us useful. She doesn’t want to break with us altogether, so she just sends us her less good stuff.”
“Has she told you so outright?”
“No, the mean skunk. We’re just beginning to guess it—but I bet we’re right. We saw one of her stories published that we hadn’t handled—a real good Dorothy Harper one that was almost certain to sell. I expect there are others—stories aren’t published immediately they’re sold, you know. And then Mrs. Hitchcock met an editor of one of the women’s papers who let drop something that pointed to our Dorothy having submitted a thing to the magazine directly, I won’t go into all that mixture of gossip and etiquette, but what she’s doing is pretty clear.”
“Have you any remedy?”
“No legal remedy whatsoever, Barry. We’ve no contract with her. There just aren’t any contracts in our business.”
“Well, you can’t do anything then, Vicky?”
“Mrs. Hitchcock wants me to have a talk with her; that’s what’s on my mind, and the reason why I’ve been pouring out all this rigmarole to you. I wanted Mrs. Hitchcock to talk to her herself, but she wants me to do it. She says she thinks I’ll be more tactful than her.”
“That’s a tribute to you, Vicky.”
“Not really,” I said grimly. “Really, Mrs. Hitchcock’s a bit annoyed with me because I hinted it was her fault all the trouble started over that ridiculous highbrow story. Of course, Mrs. Hitchcock shouldn’t have offended Dorothy over it. I more or less told her so, and her retort was to the effect that if I was such a wonderfully tactful person I had better be the one to talk to Dorothy. There’s a certain coolness between me and Mrs. Hitchcock now, I can tell you. That’s why I’ve got this talk with our Dorothy more on my mind than ordinarily I would have. I can’t help worrying about it.”
“Poor old Vicky,” said Barry, patting my hand, “it does seem a shame . . .”
He was being sweet, of course. But it wasn’t the reaction I wanted.
“What’s a shame?” I said suspiciously.
“That you should have to . . . oh, I don’t know . . . cope with all this and be worried about things like this when—”
I got up hastily. We had, by this time, finished dinner.
“No, no, Barry,” I said quickly. “It isn’t a shame, and it’s not that at all. I like it, I tell you.”
“Like it? You said a moment ago you were worrying about it,” said Barry, reproachful as a man checked in mid-sympathy naturally is.
“Yes. I mean I like being worried,” I retorted absurdly. “At least, I mean I’m all for a nice change of worry, and if I had to stay at home all day with nothing to worry about except Antonia and Blakey—I expect I should put in some good strong worrying about them, being disengaged otherwise, so to speak—well, I should go absolutely crazy.”
“Well, if you don’t want sympathy, what do you want, Vicky?” (Barry can say that sort of thing without sounding peevish—I do admire him for it.) “You can hardly want my advice. I know nothing of literary agencies, except what you’ve told me.”
“Oh, I think the plain truth is, Barry, I don’t want anything, except just to tell you, which is a certain relief in itself. Although why the hell I should use you in this way I really don’t know. I wouldn’t stand it, if I were you.”
“Oh, please Vicky! I like it. I value your confidence immensely. You know that.”
“You’re far too nice to me, Barry,” I said penitently, “I ask you to dinner, I bore you with a long rigmarole about the office, I snub you when you sympathise, and then finally you pay me a compliment. What a man! Incidentally, all this story is in confidence in the strictest professional sense. I had no business to tell you a word of it really.”
“Of course I shall treat it as absolutely confidential, Vicky. In the unlikely event of anybody mentioning the name ‘Dorothy Harper’ to me, I shan’t bat an eyelid.”
“Nobody ever will mention Dorothy Harper to you,” I said cheerfully, “because, as far as I know, no such author exists. The facts are exactly as I told you, but I did alter the name.”
“I expect that was a wise precaution,” said Barry politely. But he did, I am afraid, look a little hurt nevertheless.
Chapter 3
*
There is, as I remarked to Barry, a great deal to be said for a change of worry. During the weeks that followed, sirens and bombs formed an excellent counter-irritant to private difficulties. London, during the time of those autumn air-raids has been too often described for me to go over that ground again. It affected me, as it affected many people, with a most terrible sense of wrathful impotence. Also, for the first time, I knew what it was to feel really vindictive against the Germans, and was quite shocked at the intensity of my hatred.
On the whole, I was lucky enough to be angry nearly all the time, and that meant that I escaped being consciously frightened.
Not, of course, that, living in Harminster as I did, I went through anything really bad. It was mostly just a matter of setting my teeth and determining that I would carry on with my ordinary life whatever the difficulties. Mrs. Hitchcock felt the same, and we never closed the office, although for a week or two there was practically no business to be done. I got quite used to glancing quickly towards the building in which the agency is when I turned the corner of the road, just to see whether it was still there or not, after the previous night’s raid. The moment I saw it was, I heaved a sigh of relief and dismissed the matter from my mind. Ordinary life is a tough plant, as I observed once before, and minor affairs and interests did continue to matter even though the skies were raining death and the British Empire was fighting with its back to the wall.
I may say at once that the office survived the blitz with only one quite minor ‘blasting.’ As for Harminster, it was lucky enough to escape with only a comparatively few stray bombs, mid none of those near my cottage. I can quite imagine that, had Antonia ever been exposed to real danger, I should have been in a pitiable state of terror.
By November it was apparent that, bad as the night-raids still sometimes were, the intensity of the enemy’s attack had reached and passed its zenith. I felt that I could turn round, breathe again, and take stock of my position.
Rene’s arrival had coincided with the beginning of the bad London raids. In the circumstances I did not notice the consequent domestic upheaval and reorganization quite as much as I might otherwise have done. Most people’s houses were crammed full of evacuées, paying or otherwise. Everything everywhere was at sixes and sevens.
Rene was evidently determined to be as little trouble as possible. She had, I think, hopes of ‘helping Blakey,’ but Blakey ruthlessly treated her as ‘Mr. Philip’s widow,’ and Mr. Philip’s widow in a certain condition, at that. I’m afraid poor Rene’s only occupation at this time was her condition. She treated it as a full-time job, but I can’t really blame her, as-what else was there for her to do?
Sometimes I used to think that I really must bestir myself and prod her into making some sort of life for herself somehow—ask a few people in to meet her, introduce her to the head woman at the W.V.S. office, and so on—but I always ended by deciding that I could not really do much until after the baby was born. Rene was unnecessarily conscious of her appearance. She was even coy of shopping and travelling in buses. So, rather thankfully, I shelved that responsibility and, for the time being, just mentally placed her on a sofa with her feet up.
Some time I meant to do what Mother wanted and have a little talk with her about my divorce, but I hadn’t even got round to that yet.
It was a letter from Mother that had made me feel I ought to tell Rene a little bit more about myself. It had arrived after Rene had been with me about a week. The first part was chitchat, the second Mother had evidently steeled herself to write:
‘. . . I do hope you and Rene are settling down all right together. Now, Vicky, don’t be cross with me if I tell you that Rene is a little bit frightened of you. She told me so, although of
course she never meant me to tell you. I’m only doing so because I think if you realize that you may be a little alarming sometimes to people who don’t know you well, you and she will get on better. Heavens knows I don’t want a daughter of your age to be as childish (in some ways) as Rene is, but I am afraid Rene has got a little bit the impression that you’re too sophisticated altogether for her ever to be a real companion to you. I think your divorce worries her a lot. You know people . . .’
(Here something was vigorously scratched out, and I had some difficulty in deciphering it. I grinned when I saw at last that it was ‘of that class.’)
‘. . . people like Rene don’t take that sort of thing easily in their stride.’
(Here there was an omission mark, and Mother had scribbled in: ‘I don’t myself’ between the lines.)
‘So think me an interfering old busybody if you like, but do just have a little talk with Rene some time and just tell her, quite simply, the bare facts. She tried to pump me, but I knew you wouldn’t like what I’d say, so I shut her up. I’m sure what’s worrying her is the fact that you were divorcing. Raymond during the time Antonia was on the way. I didn’t tell her so, but evidently she’s worked the dates out for herself—because that’s what she began to ask me about.’
More chit-chat followed. It was a rather sweet motherish sort of letter—so characteristic that I couldn’t possibly really be annoyed.
Well. I didn’t, as a matter of fact, want Rene to be a ‘real companion’ to me, but I did see that in the circumstances, she had the right to know at least some things about me.
The facts of the case were actually very simple. At the time I instituted divorce proceedings against Raymond I did not know I was going to have a child. Later, when I did know, I went obstinate. Nothing would have induced me to withdraw the case and attempt a reconciliation.
Company in the Evening Page 5