Bitter Herbs

by Natasha Cooper

  The room did not have its usual soothing effect. She walked round it four times, wishing that she had never invited Tom to dinner that night and for a moment that she had never even met him. There seemed to be no way of dealing with him that would not escalate their shared dissatisfaction. After all she could hardly ask him about his troubles for a third time.

  She flushed the lavatory and went back to the basin to repair her makeup and wash her hands again, and at last returned to the drawing room to ask Tom whether he would like to eat whatever Mrs Rusham had left for them in the Aga. He stood up at once.

  ‘Thanks. As I was saying, it’s an upsetting case – one of those messy murders of a young woman. Clearly a lot of hate and anger behind it. It’s making me irritable.’

  ‘I had noticed,’ said Willow nearly as coldly as he had spoken earlier. It seemed a pretty poor apology to her. ‘It’s also corrupting your judgement of other things.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He followed her into the dining room and sat at the perfectly set table. When he looked up at her he managed to smile slightly. ‘Tell me stories, Will. Please.’

  ‘So that you don’t have to think about the dead woman – or about things I’ve said to you?’

  ‘The murder.’

  As he produced those abrupt syllables, Tom held out a hand and smiled. Willow tried to ignore the other, unpleasant, emotions she had seen in his face and to remember her affection for him. Part of her mind told her that Tom had just given her the perfect excuse to lose her temper with him and smash the remains of their pleasure in each other. Unfortunately she still liked him far too much to do that.

  Playing for time, she fetched the boeuf bourginon and baked potatoes from the kitchen and then spun stories out of her uneventful solitary days at the mill as urgently as though she were Scheherazade talking for her life. So long as she talked she would not have to think about his feelings or her own.

  Later he took the dishes out to the kitchen for Mrs Rusham to wash up in the morning and made a pot of coffee, and later still they went to bed. Willow continued to do everything she could to prevent herself thinking and was mostly successful.

  The next morning she woke to discover that Tom had already left. She lay surrounded by all the luxury her books had brought her, asking herself why she had ever allowed someone else’s state of mind and criticism to matter so much to her. One of the most exasperating aspects of Tom’s moods was that it appeared that there was nothing whatever she could do to change them.

  Willow turned over on to her side, telling herself that since she could not change his state of mind, the only thing to do was to ignore it and concentrate hard on something else. The obvious thing was the memoir of Gloria Grainger. Finding out what had made her tick might become enormously interesting. Distracted and therefore feeling better, Willow got out of bed and went to run herself a bath.

  Having put a match to the remains of the previous day’s fire, she turned on the taps and took from the mahogany cupboard a clean, yellow towelling dressing gown, which she draped over the hot pipes. Lying back in the hot, scented water, eating a tangerine, she started to think of questions she would need to ask the dead woman’s friends and family. The questions would have to be carefully framed to establish what kind of woman she had been and why she had written the novels Ann Slinter disliked so much.

  When the water had cooled uncomfortably, Willow took the plug out of the bath and sat in front of the fire, wrapped in her warm towel, until the scent of frying bacon called her to breakfast. She went to dress and start the day properly.

  Mrs Rusham had grilled mushrooms to go with the bacon. Willow ate them as she read the letters piled beside her plate. She was half glad to be back in the warmth and luxury of Belgravia and yet something in her yearned for the breakfasts of strong tea and hunks of bread she had made herself at the mill and eaten huddled over the fragrant wood fire. The beds at the mill were hard, but she had slept better there than ever she did in London.

  There was nothing particularly interesting in her post except for a derisive review of her latest book in a quarterly magazine published mainly for writers, publishers and booksellers. The critic had taken exception to Willow’s characters, their assumptions, their habits, tastes and dialogue. Only at the end of the review did she add any comment on the novel itself, which she had found:

  sentimental and full of the worst kind of fantasy. One wonders at the motives of an author who can base an entire novel around the notion that extravagant spending and arousing admiration are in themselves desirable points of aspiration. Only the satisfaction taken by the astonishingly selfish heroine in her revenge on the woman who had once ruined her is more unpleasant. It is regrettable that this kind of trivia is so remunerative for its authors.

  ‘Hell!’ said Willow aloud, looking at the reviewer’s by-line. ‘Posy Hacket. Never heard of her.’

  Coming right on top of the previous day’s vicissitudes, the journalist’s contempt seemed too much to bear. Depressed, Willow contemplated her future as a gradually less and less popular commercial novelist, becoming despised by the very journalists who had once sought interviews she had refused to grant in the days when the real identity of ‘Cressida Woodruffe’had been a secret shared by very few people.

  ‘I bloody well won’t,’ she said loudly as she thought of ways to throw the contempt back in the faces of her detractors.

  The memory of the Home Secretary’s stated admiration of her brains and her refusal to take any nonsense – and even the prospect of going back to work in the civil service – cheered Willow up a little, which seemed ironic. But at least it made her laugh.

  ‘Did you call?’ asked Mrs Rusham from the door leading to the kitchen. Willow shook her head.

  ‘I was just talking to myself, Mrs Rusham, a foolish habit.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The housekeeper’s severe mouth relaxed just enough to show that she was making what passed with her for a joke. Before Willow could retaliate, the telephone rang. Mrs Rusham answered it, pressed the silence button and then turned to say:

  ‘It’s Evangeline Greville. Shall I tell her you’re here?’

  ‘Yes, please. Thank you.’ Willow took the receiver. ‘Eve? It’s Saturday. Surely you’re not working a six-day week now.’

  ‘Good morning to you too, Willow. How are you?’ Eve sounded sharply sarcastic.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, wondering why everyone had suddenly started to attack her. ‘I hope you are.’

  ‘That’s better. Actually, I’m getting extremely bored with this weather and the fact that most people I want to talk to are taking extended holidays. I agreed with Ann late yesterday afternoon that she’ll pay you a non-returnable thousand pounds to produce a synopsis of a memoir of Gloria Grainger. If they don’t like it or don’t think it’ll suit their purposes, you keep the money and forget about writing the fall text.’

  ‘You’re a brilliant agent. I’m not sure I’d have had the bottle to ask for that.’

  ‘You know it is nice sometimes to have authors who don’t have overblown ideas about their own importance.’

  Willow was amused to think that the first compliment she had received from Eve for weeks should have been for her meekness. Perhaps Tom would soon be congratulating her on her domestic skills. That would be just as incongruous. Her self-mockery dissolved a little of her resentment at his behaviour and she managed to concentrate on what Eve was saying to her.

  ‘I thought you’d better know straight away. A thousand pounds is not much considering that some journalists get that per thousand words, but the work need take you only a day or two. I have asked Ann to send you a complete set of Gloria’s paperbacks and you’ll have to browse through them when they arrive on Monday. But after that you can get going on plans for your own book.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ said Willow. ‘You’re right, I’d better start. I need something to get my teeth into. You obviously know a bit about Grainger; can I begin with you? Is that fair at a weekend?’<
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  ‘Fine by me. We’ll have to do it by telephone though. I can’t leave the house and it’s too wet to let you come here. I’ve had a flood and there’s supposed to be a plumber. You know what they’re like. He was due half an hour ago.’

  Willow thought of her Clapham flat and quailed at the prospect of persuading the voluble but dilatory builders to do the work she wanted in a sensible sequence, within their estimates and within a reasonable time. Their idiom and habits provided excellent copy, but she would rather have been able to do without them.

  ‘Poor you,’ she said with some sympathy. ‘But you’re lucky all the same. All my blokes in Clapham are on holiday until Monday. What I need to know really is why you ever agreed to represent Gloria, how long it lasted and why you stopped.’

  There was the sound of a lighter clicking and a deep inhalation before Eve answered.

  ‘She approached me soon after I’d set up on my own and, not knowing all the gruesome details of her reputation, I was rather flattered.’ Eve stopped, as though she were having to work hard to remember herself being as naive and easily manipulated as that. Then she laughed. ‘It lasted for an unspeakable eighteen months before I told her that I was simply not big enough to handle an author as important as she.’

  ‘Goodness, Eve, how tactful!’

  ‘I know. I’m far more brutal these days, as you know. It saves time – and trouble – in the end.’

  ‘I see. What exactly was it that she did to cause you to sack her?’ Willow hoped that her irrational sympathy for the dead writer was not making her sound aggressive.

  The agent considered for a moment.

  ‘It’s impossible to list everything but you could sum it up by saying that she behaved as though I had no other authors, that my time was entirely at her disposal, that I was a suitable receptacle for her ill-humour,’ said Eve briskly. ‘I won’t go on or I’ll lose my temper, which would be a fearful waste of energy.’

  ‘That’s clear enough,’ said Willow, pulling forward the notebook that was always kept beside the telephone. ‘When we were at Ann’s office, you talked about some people who might have whacked her over the head and killed her, and …’

  ‘That was a figure of speech,’ said Eve with enough sharpness to surprise Willow and set her imagination working madly.

  ‘You also told me that there would be lots of other people relieved to hear of her death. Whom had you in mind?’ Willow hoped that the polite formality of her question would serve as a rebuke to Eve for taking so seriously what she must have known Willow had intended only as a mild joke.

  ‘Ann herself, I suppose, whoever is agenting Gloria these days, whoever was in her power in any way at all … and Posy Hacket.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t much sympathy for her,’ said Willow tartly as she wrote down the short list.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Haven’t you read the review she’s just given me in The Readers’ Quarterly?’

  ‘No. I haven’t got to the current issue yet. It’s never top of my list of priorities and I’ve still got a daunting heap of manuscripts. What did Posy say?’

  ‘She accused me of pandering to the lowest tastes of the mob for pecuniary gain.’ A little of Willow’s sense of humour returned in time to make her add: ‘Justifiably no doubt.’

  ‘How brave of her!’ Eve’s voice contained a note of real admiration, which prompted Willow to remind the agent whose corner she was supposed to be fighting.

  ‘I am, Willow, believe me. But Posy wrote a highly critical piece about Gloria, which led the old bat to sue her. The case wasn’t due to come to trial for ages, but if Posy has had the guts to go on writing offensive pieces about popular novelists you have to admire her.’

  ‘Perhaps I do, but I’d rather not have been her target. Thanks, Eve,’ said Willow, feeling her sympathy for the dead woman increasing still further. ‘You’ve been helpful. Oh, yes, one more thing: do you know anything about Gloria’s family?’

  ‘Not a lot. I expect you’d get far more up-to-date information on that from her current agent – or her editor.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll ring Ann. Thanks. By the way?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are many authors as personally hated by their publishers and agents as she clearly was?’

  There was a gasping laugh from the other end of the telephone and then Eve said carefully:

  ‘At various stages in their careers many authors become a little trying. If that coincides with an editor or agent having a difficult time with other aspects of work – or life – it can lead beyond ordinary anger to actual hot hate. But I’d have said that Gloria was the only one I’ve met who could make even the most reasonable people feel truly murderous.’

  ‘I see.’ The iciness of Willow’s voice was not apparent to her.

  ‘Profitability always dilutes dislike and Gloria was no longer profitable enough,’ Eve went on as though an explanation might melt the ice. ‘The real bestsellers can behave pretty much as they choose, although quite often it is the most professional and successful who behave best.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow again, hoping that she could still be considered part of the last category. ‘Well, I’d better ring Ann and see what I can find out from her. Good luck with the plumber.’

  ‘I’ll need it. Look, you may not get Ann today, although I know she sometimes goes into the office on Saturdays.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch, Eve. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Good bye.’

  Willow stood, her eyes unfocused and her brain running over what little she had heard about Gloria Grainger. Eve had clearly disliked her and Willow respected her agent’s judgement and intuitions. On the other hand she could not forget the sight of Eve and Ann Slinter almost congratulating each other on Grainger’s death. However badly she had behaved in the past that seemed a most unfair reaction to the news that she was actually dead.

  At last Willow went back to her cooling breakfast and tried to clear her brain by rereading Posy Hacket’s review. As she got to the end of it, she suddenly thought of something else she should have asked Eve and went back to the telephone. It was answered at the first ring.

  ‘Me again.’ said Willow, ‘I …’

  ‘Damn.’ Eve sounded even more irritable than she had earlier. ‘I thought you might be the bloody plumber. What?’

  ‘Have you got the Readers’Quarterly issue that had Posy Hacket’s article about Gloria in it?’

  ‘Yes, somewhere. D’you want me to fax the piece to you?’

  ‘Would you? That would really help. Thanks, Eve. I’ll leave you to the plumber. ’ Bye.’

  ‘May I bring you some hot coffee?’ asked Mrs Rusham from the door into the kitchen.

  ‘That would be nice. Thank you,’ said Willow, holding out her half-full cup.

  The housekeeper took it away with all the rest of the dirty crockery, to reappear with a clean cup of well-foamed cappuccino a few minutes later. Willow drank it quickly and retreated to her writing room, where her big word processor stood shrouded in reproach and anti-static plastic covers. She ignored it and waited for her fax machine to come alive. After ten minutes, during which she imagined Eve searching piles of periodicals for the right one, Willow pulled the telephone towards her and pressed the button that automatically dialled her publishers’office.

  To her relief the telephone was answered and by Ann Slinter herself. Sounding preoccupied and annoyed to be interrupted, Ann told Willow very little beyond the fact that Grainger was no longer represented by an agent and that her novels were edited by a woman called Victoria Taffle.

  ‘She’s really a line editor, but we had to promote her to the status of commissioning editor as a sop to Gloria’s vanity,’ said Ann.

  ‘Oh,’ said Willow, wondering whether Ann’s hostility was to Gloria or to the editor. ‘Isn’t that rather a big step up the promotion ladder?’

  ‘In a large house it would be, but not really for us. It’s not unprecedented by an
y means.’ Ann laughed. ‘It’s just been less successful this time.’

  ‘Could I be transferred to Ms Taffle’s extension?’ asked Willow, disapproving of Ann’s too-obvious contempt.

  ‘She won’t be there today. She never comes in at weekends because she lives so far out. What do you want to ask her?’

  ‘What Gloria was like to work with and which of her relations I ought to talk to first.’

  A dry laugh was all that answered her until Ann said:

  ‘I can tell you that she had an ego the size of Mount Kilimanjaro and so was hell to work with. You probably ought to talk to her niece, Marilyn Posselthwate. She, poor creature, worked as Gloria’s housekeeper in Kew. But look, don’t get too bogged down in all this. Your own book is far more important.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Willow truthfully. ‘But I think the memoir could be interesting.’

  ‘Yes, so do I,’ said Ann quickly, ‘and it’ll make Gerald Plimpton very happy, which is an added bonus.’

  ‘Who he?’

  ‘Have you never met him at any of our parties? He was chairman here when I first came.’

  ‘When Gloria was so successful?’

  ‘Precisely. He’s always been upset by my loathing of her books. He’s away just at the moment, but I know he’ll be pleased when he hears what we’re doing. It was a good idea of Eve’s and I think you’re the ideal person to write the memoir. I look forward to reading the synopsis.’

  ‘Before you go, have you got the telephone number in Kew?’

  ‘Somewhere. Hang on while I twizzle my Rolodex. Yes, here it is.’ Ann dictated the number and then said good bye again before putting down her receiver too quickly to allow Willow to ask her anything else.

  Willow grimaced at her telephone and then rang Kew to make an appointment to visit Marilyn Posselthwate early that afternoon.