by Rachel Hore
‘It’s Harold Chisholm on the phone,’ she said. ‘He won’t tell me what it’s about, but apparently it can’t wait.’
‘Dash it, it’ll have to. Tell him I’ll ring him later,’ he snapped, and she rolled her eyes and disappeared again.
‘Chisholm always says it can’t wait,’ he explained. ‘Writers don’t have enough to do, you see. They sit in their garrets fretting when they’re supposed to be writing. They forget that their publishers have other authors, other things to do. Like selling their damn books. Sorry.’ He smiled cheerfully at her again. ‘Now, how can I help?’
He seemed to have forgotten their conversation at the party the previous evening, and for a brief moment Isabel’s confidence ebbed. Half the night, it seemed, she had lain awake thinking about all she’d seen interesting b. It had and heard. She’d gone over and over what she would say to him, this man who couldn’t afford to employ her, who said there was no job, but who had still been persuaded to receive her today. She had, she felt, this chance and no other. And now he appeared so sympathetic. Suddenly it all tumbled out.
‘I want to do something useful, important, and I think this might be what I’m looking for,’ she said, not daring to look at him. ‘I’m aware of the power of words. Sometimes I write, oh, bits of stories and poems. I know I’m not very good yet, but here, yes, here, I could help others with their books. Does it matter that I’m very young? I need to be given a chance.’
She saw his expression then and stopped. Somehow these words, which had sounded so clear and reasonable in her head in the cold darkness of her aunt’s spare bedroom, sounded silly and plaintive in the hallowed light of a publishing office. McKinnon was watching her intently, a slightly amused look on his face.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
‘I can type – quite fast actually. They taught us at school in case we needed to earn our living, that’s what they said. I want a job. I need one. There must be something I can do. And I like all this. Here, I mean.’
‘Oh, there’s plenty to do here, all right.’ She waited, worrying that she was losing him. ‘And I’m sure you’d do. It’s just I can’t afford to pay anyone.’
Just then Audrey interrupted again. ‘Your half past eleven’s here, Mr McKinnon. And I forgot to say, the man from the Mail rang earlier.’
‘Damn. I needed to speak to him. Get him back, will you?’
Audrey withdrew and he snatched up a newspaper from a wire tray and pushed it across the desk to Isabel. ‘What d’you think of this?’ he said, and pointed. It was folded to an advertisement for a female film star’s biography with McKinnon & Holt’s colophon beside it. She stared at it. Everything seemed to be neatly designed and correctly spelled.
‘It’s . . . very nice,’ she said politely wondering if this was the right thing to say.
‘And?’ he said eagerly.
She looked at it again, then her eye strayed to the article next to it. Suddenly she realised what was wrong.
‘Why would they put it on the sports page?’ she asked.
‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘This is the kind of rubbish I have to put up with every day. My advice, Miss Barber? You don’t want to work for a publisher. The hours can be long and business is precarious. Much work can be expended on books that are ultimately, by anyone’s standards, a failure. On the other hand, it can be irksome when books of extreme triviality triumph.’
‘I understand that,’ she said earnestly, ‘but it doesn’t put me off.’
‘It should do.’ He lit a cigarette and contemplated her through a veil of smoke. Finally he sighed and said, ‘I can see it’s no use. Look, as I say, we are particularly busy at the moment. If you don’t mind knuckling down straight away, Miss Foster out there has quite a backlog of correspondence. It’ll only be until Christmas. I can’t promise anything longer. ‘ He pushed back his chair and stood up. The interview was over.
‘Thank you,’ Isabel said, feeling as light as a feather. ‘I am so grateful. I’ll start tomorrow. Today. I can start now.’. Her condition improved s b
‘Tomorrow will do. As for your remuneration. Well . . . three pounds a week.’ It was a sum even Isabel knew was modest. He opened the door for her.
Outside, Audrey was typing briskly. Further down the room Mrs Symmonds, the portly over-made-up woman she’d seen at the party was at her desk making pencil marks on a thick manuscript. On a chair by the door sat the printer’s representative, a lugubrious man with a briefcase and a navy raincoat. Seeing Stephen McKinnon, he rose expectantly to his feet, but no one took any notice.
‘Oh, Mr McKinnon,’ Audrey said. ‘I’m sorry, the man from the Mail isn’t at his desk.’
‘Keep trying. Listen, Audrey, you’ll need to clear somewhere for Miss Barber to sit. She’ll be helping you from tomorrow. No buts, please. Goodbye, Miss Barber.’ He shook hands with Isabel, then turned his attention to the man with the briefcase. The office door closed behind the two men.
Audrey squared a ream of paper by banging it on the desk as she looked Isabel over. She was clearly not pleased by what she saw.
‘Looks like I won my bet, Trudy,’ she remarked to Mrs Symmonds. Trudy Symmonds peered over her glasses at Isabel, and her chin sank into her fleshy neck as she gave a deep chuckle.
‘What do you mean?’ Isabel asked, thinking them very rude.
Audrey shrugged. ‘It’s just a private joke. Come on, you’d better give me a hand with this lot.’ There was a battered desk pushed against a wall from which she started moving boxes onto the floor and Isabel hurried to help.
She was puzzled by Audrey’s attitude. She’d thought the young woman would welcome an assistant. Perhaps Audrey believed she would make a hash of it. Well, she wouldn’t. She was determined to prove her worth.
She loved it at once. Not the tasks themselves, which were largely menial and often boring. Audrey kept her supplied with anything she herself didn’t want to do: copy typing, filing, making tea and running errands. It was Audrey who performed what might be deemed the more glamorous side of being Stephen McKinnon’s secretary: greeting visitors, the authors and literary agents, whom she treated with deference. The less glamorous but still interesting selection of sales representatives with their suitcases of samples and their gossip were either flirted with or condescended to, depending on their age and attractiveness.
Isabel quickly learned that there was no Mr Holt. McKinnon & Holt were so called, Trudy explained, because it rolled off the tongue. The business was currently kept afloat by Trudy’s husband, Redmayne Symmonds, a shambling bear of a Yorkshireman, who was rumoured to have done very well out of the war making boots for the military. While he’d cleverly switched production to ladies’ shoes, he had come to relish the prestige of subsidising books. ‘And he likes me to work. He says it keeps me out of mischief,’ Trudy would joke with one of her deep laughs. She, too, was from Yorkshire, but you’d only hear it in moments of emotion. It wasn’t long before Isabel learned from Berec that the Symmonds’s son, their only child, had been killed at Dunkirk.
From the tone of the arguments Isabel could hear on occasion through Stephen McKinnon’s office door – Symmonds had a deep booming voice to match his bulk – their backer expected to achieve the same healthy profit margins with books as he did with footwear, and was being rapidly disabused of that idea. It was towards the end of her second week, when nearly everyone had left for the day and she was giving the spider plants a quick watering, that Isabel witnessed Symmonds’s frustration first-hand. The doorbell rang long and loud, and when she admitted him, a blast of wintry wind seemed to follow as he forged his way down the office with barely a nod to her, and barged into Stephen’s room without announcement.
As she fitted the cover on her typewriter, she saw, through the half-open door, Symmonds write out a cheque and toss it down on Stephen’s desk. Stephen was standing, his back turned, peering out into the dark yard as though the dustbins were of
particular interest that evening. This tableau was conducted with barely a word on either side, but after Symmonds had marched out and Isabel put a timid head round Stephen’s door to say she was off, too, it was to find him sitting at his desk, smoking and staring at the opposite wall, his expression inscrutable. The cheque still lay on the desk, untouched.
‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact way. ‘There’s nothing.’ Then he gave one of his boyish smiles and rose to his feet. ‘Well, Pockmartin’s book will be published,’ he said, snatching up the cheque and slotting it into his wallet. His usual air of worry was quite banished. ‘We can pay the printer. That’s today’s achievement.’
Isabel had already gleaned that landing these memoirs was a real coup. Viscount, now Lord, Pockmartin had been a senior attaché to the British Embassy in Berlin in the 1930s and later a prisoner-of-war. His tales of derring-do after his escape in 1943, and his political insights, had ‘bestseller’ written all over them. If the book worked, it would pay everyone’s salaries for a few months.
And so time passed delightfully. Isabel liked the atmosphere in the office, where half a dozen employees, all coming and going at different hours, on mysterious schedules of their own, managed to cut out the noise of each other’s conversations and telephones ringing in order to pursue their roles. Despite Berec’s disdainful comments about Trudy, Isabel liked her. Trudy combined a no-nonsense approach to the practical business of preparing manuscripts for publication with a motherly tact when persuading writers to accept necessary alterations to their darling prose.
At the desk opposite sat Philip Houghton, an older man with the face of a mediaeval Christ, lugubrious, pale and bearded. He was responsible for the design of the books, both insides and jackets, and received a steady pilgrimage of undernourished visitors bearing portfolios of illustrations, which were commented on, retained or turned away. Any invoices were sent across the hall to a room the size of a broom cupboard, where Mr Greenford, the company accountant, sat two days a week. From the frantic phone calls from suppliers that Isabel sometimes intercepted, it seemed that he was rarely able to get these paid on time.
Next to Mr Greenford’s room was the trade counter, where sales representatives and booksellers’ assistants picked up parcels of stock. Downstairs in the basement was a room so cold that the paraffin heater which burned all day made little difference, and between here and the trade counter, wrapped in coat and scarf, operated Mr Jones the packer, sometimes hindered rather than assisted by his son Jimmy, a lolloping fifteen-year-old with no manners. And this was the whole team – oh, apart from Dora, Stephen’s sparky bachelor cousin, who would swan in once or twice a week to chatter to Audrey about weekend parties, but was supposed to be working with Philip on an experimental new venture: picture books for children.
It was all a world away from claustrophobic family life on the housing estate, so such so that sometimes she wondered if bright little Miss Isabel Barber, publisher’s clerk (temporary), was the same person as the mutinous puss who three weeks ago had snarled at her father and flounced out of the house. Now, she lived life in a fever of ecstasy, from moment to moment, hour to hour. The only trouble was that every day brought her nearer Christmas and after Christmas, despite Lord Pockmartin, Stephen McKinnon might have no money to keep her any longer.
Most of the time she didn’t dwell on it. Life outside work was interesting too. She loved living at Penelope’s. Her aunt, initially so anxious at the prospect of her niece staying, had said no more about her going, and her sojourn in the house passed with delightful freedom. Penelope Tyler’s life seemed to follow no particular schedule, but it was rare that she rose from her bed before Isabel left for work, and the girl found herself creeping downstairs in the early morning darkness to be greeted by the slap of Gelert’s tail on the kitchen lino and his soulful gaze as she made a cup of tea and cut herself a slice of bread for breakfast. She had been amused to hear that the dog had been named for the hound in the Welsh legend who had saved a baby from a wolf. This modern Gelert was too soppy even to bark at the milkman. On the evenings when Isabel came straight home from work, the cleaner, Mrs Pettigrew, would have been and gone and the store cupboard would be miraculously stocked with food. Aunt Penelope was usually out, so with Gelert as her sole companion Isabel would eat a makeshift supper at the kitchen table, absorbed in some book or other. She was currently reading her way through McKinnon & Holt’s back catalogue, borrowing office copies from Trudy on pain of severe punishment for non-return. Through talk in the office or by reading the reviews files she learned of new books from rival publishing houses. She often spent her lunch hours ‘devouring’ books in the nearest library, her penchant being for fiction and her secret vice romance. She’d read all Maisie Briggs’s novels, her eyes widening like saucers at the schmaltzy love scenes. In The Stranger Bride and Fairytale Wedding, she’d immersed herself in the yearnings of young women like herself, who’d had to make their own way in life but who found sanctuary in the arms of a strong, true man. She knew reality didn’t offer happy endings – after all, her parents quarrelled all the time, and then there was Penelope, who seemed perfectly happy living by herself.
Around half past ten or eleven of an evening, her aunt would arrive home, wrapped in her fur coat, her eyes gleaming as brightly as the pearls at her ears, her skin flushed from the warmth of the taxi, and she’d talk animatedly of the party she’d been to or the play she’d seen. Twice, she’d brought someone back with her, a man she introduced to Isabel merely as Reginald. Reginald was fiftyish, tall and silent with a blandly handsome face and exquisitely tailored clothes. He had politely shaken Isabel’s hand with a crushing grip on first meeting, but she sensed no flicker of warmth in its strength so she’d made her excuses and escaped upstairs to bed. That night she lay awake for some time, unable to throw off a sense of unease about the situation. Her room was right above the parlour so she could hear murmurings and movement downstairs. She must finally have fallen into a deep sleep because she wasn’t aware of him leaving, but when she passed through the hall the next morning his hat and coat were gone.
It wasn’t every evening, of course, that Isabel spent at home. She became quite friendly with Alex Berec, whom she quickly learned to call plain ‘Berec’ like everyone else did. He had a habit of turning up dark hair bi‘ at the offices unannounced, at least once or twice a week, and was treated as family. Occasionally he’d beg Mr Greenford for ‘a little advance payment’ and disappear again with a pound or two in his pocket. Sometimes, he just came for the company.
‘I was passing,’ he’d say, appearing in the doorway, his smile irrepressible. He’d doff his hat and nod charmingly at everyone, though Trudy, who hated being interrupted, would deliver him a stern look in return. ‘I promise I won’t stop, I can see you’re all verrry busy. However, I brought a little something for the workers.’ And he might produce a box of honey cakes and once, extraordinarily, a bag of oranges – and then, of course, Audrey or Isabel would have to make him a cup of tea and he’d chat away to whoever would listen.
Stephen might walk through and ask his opinion on a book jacket or the latest Katharine Hepburn film – Berec was a great fan of Hepburn – but if there was a rush on he’d down his tea quickly and depart. Isabel was quickly becoming his clear favourite, and she’d hurry to let him out, even though the street door was kept on the latch during the day. Occasionally he’d ask her to accompany him to a poetry reading or, once, to supper at the home of some refugee friends.
‘Myra cannot accompany me – a migraine, the poor lady – but you will like Gregor and Karin, I think.’
The flat she was taken to in a gloomy street off Bloomsbury Square was poor beyond her experience, being a single large room, where the bed was screened off from the living area by two Army-issue blankets on a rail. Karin, a shy middle-aged woman, too thin for her shapeless dress, disappeared and returned soon after bearing a steaming t
ureen containing an aromatic stew, mostly made of vegetables, which they ate with hunks of greyish bread. The conversation was conducted half in English and half in Czech, which was all Karin could speak. Berec had extracted from his pocket a bottle of sweet-tasting liqueur. This made Isabel’s throat burn, but imparted such a deep sense of relaxation she feared she’d fall into a swoon.
She and Karin didn’t say much, though Gregor translated any English for Karin, who nodded and smiled, though she never looked happy. Maybe she never would, it occurred to Isabel, who experienced a sense of floating above the table round which they all sat, surprised to be seeing herself here in this place with these people, when such a short time ago her knowledge of the world outside the family home and school had been through books. Of course she knew all about refugees from the newsreels and her father’s newspaper, but she’d never actually had a meal with any before, or listened to such passionate conversations about politics or seen such despair in a woman’s eyes. Berec had explained to her that in Czechoslovakia, before the war, Gregor had trained as a doctor, but here his qualifications were not recognised and he’d only been able to get manual work. He was well known as a Communist, too, but at home he’d fallen out with his own party and there was no returning for him.
Now Berec was patting her shoulder and saying, ‘My poor Isabel, please forgive me. Gregor and I, we would talk all night. It’s time to go, yes?’ They said their goodbyes and walked arm in arm through the freezing night to the nearest bus stop, where Berec saw her onto the right bus, instructed the conductor to look after her, and kissed his fingertips in farewell.
Dear Berec, she thought, smiling at him as the bus bore her away, what a warm and generous friend. She felt perfectly safe with him. Safe and free to be herself. She thought that, despite his perpetual lack of money, Myra must be a very lucky woman. Sometimes she wondered about him, what exactly had brought him to England early in the war. She’d read his poetry collection, the one dedicated to Penelope, a translation from the Czech, and had been moved by the ones about exile, but some of them were dark, very dark, about violence and death, and she’d skipped over these, not wanting to know. He never spoke to her of these things. Like her, he tried to put the past behind him.