Whispering Corner

by Marc Alexander

  After the rain of the previous day the track was muddy underfoot, but the varying shades of green making up the wood were more lush than ever, and when I left the trees and gazed out over the gentle landscape towards Beacon Hill and heard the insect hum of a distant tractor the peace of the scene did something to quell the disquiet caused by the bank’s letter.

  When I reached the public telephone I dialled the number of Charles Nixon’s maisonette in Richmond. After a wait I heard the Welsh lilt of his wife.

  ‘Hello, Olwen,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long time. How’s things?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Northrop …’

  She did not tell me how things were, and I had a mental picture of a pale, severe-looking woman perpetually wearied by the force of her husband’s exuberance.

  ‘Is Charles about?’

  There was a long pause — a pause which, when I thought about it later, was just a little too long.

  ‘Charlie isn’t here at the moment.’

  ‘When will he be in?’

  Another pause. ‘I’ve no idea. He went off location hunting. You know what that means.’

  ‘I’ll ring later.’

  ‘I have to go to Ystrad — my mother’s poorly. So if you don’t get an answer you’ll know Charlie is still away.’

  ‘I’ll keep trying.’

  I was still more uneasy when I hung up. If something had gone wrong with the Pleiades account I dared not contemplate the consequences. The next step was to find out the truth of the matter directly from the bank. Not wishing to carry on such a conversation punctuated by the clash of coins being fed into the pay phone, I rang Marchmont Street to make an appointment. Mr Barnet, the assistant manager, would be able to spare me a few minutes the following afternoon.

  Usually I enjoyed driving through the Dorset countryside before getting on to the M3, but the next morning I could not relax. My thoughts were focused on Pleiades Films. When the company had been formed, I had agreed that Charles, who had the day-to-day problems to contend with, could sign the company cheques. This meant that, not having received any bank statements, I had no knowledge of Pleiades’ financial situation apart from the fact that the really profitable deals with America and Japan that Charles had so confidently predicted had never materialized. However, I did know that some months earlier the film had been sold to one of the new satellite television companies and, thinking about it now, I was sure that the money from the sale should have cleared the original overdraft I had guaranteed.

  The last time I had seen Charles was almost a year ago. I had run into him in a restaurant near Wardour Street, where he was lunching an eager young actor who, he declared, would be ideal for the leading role in a television series based on Shadows for which he claimed he was about to get financial backing. As usual I congratulated him, though I had heard such announcements a dozen times before and each time the deal had mysteriously faded away. Nonetheless, it impressed the young actor immensely and I hid my amusement. Now I wished I had taken more interest in Charles.

  In London I plunged into the tunnel leading to the car park beneath Hyde Park, and then walked to where my agent had her office high in a building of faded elegance.

  ‘I’m glad to be in touch again,’ said Sylvia as she poured a pre-lunch gin and tonic. ‘Without a phone you might as well be in Outer Mongolia. I’m desperate to know how the novel is going.’

  ‘It’s going,’ I said. ‘I’ve been lucky in some ways.’ And I went on to tell her about Mary Lawson’s ‘Narration’.

  ‘You certainly sound more confident,’ Sylvia said. ‘Do bring it on time, for goodness’ sake. Ever since Clipper took over I’ve been having problems. You know how Marian Avent is always behind schedule? The old company understood and scheduled accordingly, but when I had to tell Jocasta Mount-William that Marian would be a month late delivering The City of Glitter she wanted to break the contract. Thank goodness for my little clause about “unavoidable delay”. Still, I can’t swing that one too often.’

  Lunch with Sylvia pushed the anxiety over the bank’s letter temporarily to the back of my mind. She brought me up to date on publishing gossip and the doings, always told with affection, of fellow authors whom she represented.

  It was therefore with a more confident air that I arrived in Marchmont Street and entered the Regent Bank where, after a ten-minute wait, I was ushered into the assistant manager’s office.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Mr Barnet as we shook hands and smiled at each other as though everything was all right in the world.

  When two cups of anonymous liquid from a beverage dispenser had been brought in by a junior, he looked at me with an alert expression.

  ‘It’s about the Pleiades account,’ I began.

  ‘To be sure. We’ve been sending out letters to the managing director about it for some time now, but neither you nor Mr Nixon has seen fit to reply.’

  ‘You should have written to me direct. I’ve only just learned about it — that’s the reason I came straight up from Dorset. There must be some mistake.’

  ‘Legally we are only obliged to write to the managing director. If you choose to remain out of touch with the workings of a company of which you are a director — and a joint and several guarantor — that is your business. The bank has behaved perfectly properly.’

  ‘Mr Nixon never passed anything on to me. We haven’t been in touch for some time. After the film was made the company virtually ceased to trade, and anyway I’ve been too busy with my books to be involved with it.’

  ‘But I’m afraid you are involved,’ said Barnet gently, holding up the agreement I had signed.

  ‘That was merely for an overdraft of ten thousand pounds to get The Dancing Stones completed. If that overdraft wasn’t cleared, as it should have been, by the film’s earnings, then Nixon owes you five thousand and I owe you the same amount — not nearly fifty thousand pounds!’

  Barnet permitted himself a little chuckle at my naivety.

  ‘It was an open-ended agreement,’ he said. ‘There was no specified limit. On the assurance of Mr Nixon that Pleiades was about to sign up with a television company to produce one of your books we allowed the facility to be increased, but although he gave us continual assurances that the deal was about to go through nothing happened. It seems to me that Mr Nixon lives in a fantasy world. The overdraft, on the other hand, is a reality and it has to be cleared.’

  ‘If you thought Nixon lived in a fantasy world why the hell did you allow him to go on using the account?’ I knew my voice was rising but I was too angry to control it. ‘You should have bloody well warned me it was creeping up.’

  ‘I repeat, the company was kept informed, but our letters were ignored. There is no legal requirement to inform someone in your position separately. You could have arranged to have company statements sent to you at regular intervals, but you chose not to do so.’

  ‘It isn’t that I didn’t choose — I just never thought of it,’ I said more quietly. ‘At the time the most important thing was to get the film completed. The signing of the guarantee seemed such a routine matter.’

  ‘It isn’t a routine matter now, I’m afraid. We have had instructions from Head Office …’ He let the words ‘Head Office’ hang in the air with the same reverence as a parish priest announcing that he had just had a call from the Vatican. ‘Unless the overdraft is cleared, legal action will be taken. I suggest that to save yourself trouble you make funds available in the next couple of days and clear the whole matter up.’

  ‘And what about Nixon?’ I demanded. ‘Why aren’t you asking him? He was the man with the chequebook.’

  ‘If we have to go to law, and I most sincerely hope it won’t come to that, our legal department would go for a summary judgement against him as well. But realistically he is not worth chasing. I understand he only rents his maisonette, whereas as well as a flat in London you own a substantial property in Dorset. Under law we can proceed against the guarantor who is most likely to settle. You can, of
course, take legal action later to recover what you can from your coguarantor.’ He glanced none too surreptitiously at his watch.

  I felt I was in the middle of a nightmare. All I could think of asking was where the money had gone.

  ‘That is something you might learn from the company accountants — if the accounts are up to date.’

  As Barnet showed me to the door he said, ‘I’ll get the latest figures sent to you. As you know, interest increases every day.’ Then an amusing thought struck him. ‘One thing, Mr Northrop. You might be able to make use of such a situation in one of your novels.’

  *

  ‘You ought to be locked up for your own protection,’ exploded Paul Lincoln, my accountant, to whose Kingsway office I had hurried after my visit to the Regent Bank. ‘You mean to say that you signed this joint and several without checking with me first?’

  ‘You must have been away at the time. It seemed such a minor thing. We needed money to get the show prints finished and it was so easy — a good lunch with the manager, sign a form and away we went.’

  ‘No joint and several is a minor thing,’ said Paul, his glasses flashing as a shaft of westering sunlight illuminated his office with its mini-jungle of plants and club furniture. ‘How much do they want from you?’

  Feeling like a schoolboy in the head’s office, I handed over the crumpled letter from the bank.

  ‘Jonathan, how could you let it go as high as this?’

  I went through the same routine as I had with Barnet, Paul’s silence making me feel more and more stupid.

  ‘We’ll worry where the money has gone later,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the bank to send me a copy of the agreement you signed, but I’m sure they’ll be certain of their ground. Can you pay if off?’

  ‘You know I can’t. I put everything I had into buying Whispering Corner and renovating it. I’ve only got a few hundred quid in my current account. So what do I do?’

  ‘How much is the Bloomsbury flat worth?’

  ‘That’s out. It’s always been in Pamela’s name.’

  ‘So that only leaves Whispering Corner. It’s likely that it’ll have to go.’

  ‘But it’s my home,’ I protested.

  ‘When the bank gets judgement they can force you to sell it,’ said Paul with gloomy relish. ‘As far as the court is concerned it would be regarded as a second home, a luxury. Of course we’ll get a good solicitor and delay as much as possible. When the time comes he might be able to get you a Tomlin.’

  ‘A Tomlin?’

  ‘When the bank gets judgement against you they’ll have the right to seize your property at any time without further application to the court, but they might allow you a Tomlin, which means you pay off a set sum monthly. Of course, if you can’t pay on the dot they move in. You might be lucky and get away with paying around fifteen hundred a month.’

  ‘You know that would be impossible,’ I said. ‘I only get my royalties every six months.’

  ‘How about that book you’re working on? The payment for delivery would be something to throw into the pot as a goodwill gesture, and then we might be able to do a deal, assign future royalties and so on.’

  ‘So everything depends on getting Whispering Corner finished,’ I said.

  Paul nodded. ‘You look like you could use a drink, old man.’

  8

  It was a serene evening as I drove back to Dorset. The sunset was particularly good; a wall of castellated clouds which, as the sun departed in a golden nimbus, took on the most delicate shades of pink to contrast with a backdrop of mauve sky.

  But the celestial artistry was lost on me. As I sped into the darkling world no Weather Report boomed from the car’s speakers, there was no sense of pleasurable expectation at returning home — I had a pain in my stomach and I was so angry that at times my knuckles were bloodless as I gripped the steering wheel.

  ‘Fool!’ I kept reviling myself. ‘To get into this bloody situation because you were careless about signing a piece of paper.’

  I knew Paul Lincoln had not been bluffing when he talked about having to sell Whispering Corner unless I got the novel finished and made enough on translation and paperback rights to fend the bank off for a while. But that was rather like throwing a baby out of a sleigh to halt a pursuing wolf pack; it would soon be in full cry again. Even if I were granted the Tomlin thing, there would be several miserable years ahead when everything I earned went straight into the Pleiades account. It was not just the debt; Paul told me that the accumulating interest must be roaring up the chimney at the rate of several hundred pounds a month.

  At a stroke I had lost the fruit of the lean years when I was attempting to get established as a novelist, of the books that only just covered their advances before vanishing without trace, of the nights driving a minicab when my credit ran out, of the feelings of guilt when Pamela saw those red unpaid bills on my desk.

  Even when success came with Shadows and Mirrors much of the money it earned went to pay off old debts. The rest redecorated our flat, bought me a new car and established a decent bank account until Whispering Corner came along. If I sold the house and cleared the Pleiades debt there would be some money left over, but a dream would be gone.

  When I thought about Charles Nixon I literally felt the bile rise in my throat. But it was myself I blamed. Dozens of incidents should have rung warning bells, but had been dismissed as funny or eccentric. I had a sudden vision of one of the last times I had been with him, lunching some American who, he assured me, was going to sell Shadows and Mirrors to one of the big networks for us. His long, normally pale features were flushed and the lenses of his granny glasses flashed as he held the floor while the American paused at regular intervals to look up from his steak au poivre to say, ‘Is that right?’ Charles, a great flirt with waiters, suddenly complained of the heat, and when one of the handsome Italian boys opened a window for him he pressed a five pound note into his hand.

  Why did that cameo return now? Something to do with extravagance, I supposed. It had been an omen which I failed to recognize, even though I knew in my heart that we were all playing make-believe: the big producer, the Hollywood salesman and — God forgive me — the distinguished author.

  In my anger at myself, Nixon, Pleiades Films and the Regent Bank I had pressed the accelerator pedal down until the speedo needle was wavering at the 100 mph mark. The last thing I wanted was to be overhauled by a police cruiser, so I slowed to a sober sixty. The dusk was turning to darkness as I turned south from Salisbury and realized with a fresh sense of resentment against a hostile world that I would be too late to visit Ashley. I needed a drink when I finally parked the Peugeot in the drive and approached the dark house. The gables looked like sinister black triangles against the starshine, yet it seemed unusually welcoming when I got inside. Here was home — but for how long?

  In the living room I only switched on a heavily shaded table lamp, preferring to sit in the shadows with the brandy and a bottle of Perrier on the marble coffee table beside me.

  The first drink helped.

  It steadied me enough to put a Dian Derbyshire LP on the turntable. Teleman’s music, played with her amazingly sensitive touch, began to calm me enough to try and think more constructively. Somehow I had to find a way to keep Whispering Corner — I had accepted the fact that I would have to pay the bank — and I tried to think of alternatives. For a moment I believed that the answer might lie in raising a second mortgage, but the sum owed by Pleiades was too large. The prospect of a mortgage company’s financing someone like myself, self-employed with no regular income and owing such a massive debt to a bank, was remote.

  Several brandies later I came to the conclusion that my only chance lay in writing myself out of trouble. I had to write as I had never written before in the hope that Whispering Corner would live up to Shadows and Mirrors and get paperback and overseas sales in time to enable me to offer a sum large enough to prevent a forced sale. It would be a race between my finishing the
novel and the bank’s getting judgement against me.

  I was reminded of Sir Walter Scott. He toiled at his novels to clear debts incurred by a business partner for which he was no more responsible for than I was now, and in doing so brought about his own death through overwork. The thought of Sir Walter slaving through the lonely nights while he suffered increasingly ill health made me raise my glass in his memory, and I found when I came to fill it that the bottle was empty. I swayed slightly when I got up to get another bottle from the kitchen and my fingers were clumsy with the stylus when I put on another LP.

  The truth was that I was drunk. But there are times when one needs to get drunk, and after such a day I felt that this was one of them. I lay back on the sofa balancing a glass of Courvoisier and Perrier while notes of piano music filled the room like showers of sparkling raindrops shaken from fantastical flowers …

  It was the sound of a baby crying which woke me. There was a wet patch on my chest where my drink had spilled when my fingers relaxed on the glass, and beneath that my heart was thumping unpleasantly — always the penalty with brandy.

  The sobbing continued as I tried to sit up. When I swung my legs over the edge of the sofa the room rocked gently like a moored boat caught by the wash of a passing vessel. I was already in the grip of a hangover, and I sat with my head in my hands until the room steadied. But at least I was awake now and could tackle the problem of the crying. I got to my feet and walked very carefully to the door, where the sound was louder. Apart from the crying the house seemed very still. I switched on the light in the kitchen expecting to see something — a bundle of cloth, I supposed.

  Nothing.

  I went into the old scullery, pulling open the doors of the big cupboards, but all was in order. The sound was more urgent now, nearer screaming than crying, and I began to panic. It was as though something terrible was happening, something that I could stop if only I could find out where it was going on. It was the stuff of nightmares, but I knew by my pounding heart and the sweat beading my face that I was uncomfortably awake.