To the orderly, again: “I would hazard that Mister Raby was merely asleep when you unlocked his door. In full view of the other patients you pretended to discover him dead and called for the supervising physician. Then while alone with the ‘body’ you took his life without waking him.”
“Oh, my poor brother!” Mrs Raby said with a sudden and explosive show of grief.
The Director said, “But what possible advantage could one of my staff gain from the death of a patient?”
“None,” said Sebastian. “Unless someone paid him to do it.”
Willis was about to speak. Sebastian didn’t miss the subtle nudge from the man’s wife that made him stop.
“Raby was a man who received few visitors. I dare say the hospital’s signing-in book will show exactly how often his sister and her husband came to see him. Yet on his death, they were here within the half-hour. I’m sure there’s an explanation, of course. Perhaps they live locally. Or had some business in the area. Any explanation other than that they knew the likely time of their relative’s death, and stood ready to swoop.”
“This is an appalling slander, sir,” Mrs Willis said. “And my brother not yet cold. We have nothing to gain by being here.”
“No?” Sebastian said. “Then this must be a surprise to you.”
He let the book fall open in his hand, and from between its pages took a sheet of folded paper.
“A share certificate,” he said. “There appear to be two or three hidden in every one of Raby’s books. By this means he kept some portion of his fortune out of Chancery control. A fortune that you would have inherited in time, if only you’d had the patience to wait.”
“A fortune bled dry and squandered by then,” Willis said.
And his wife said, “Say nothing.”
The Director said, “Perhaps we’ll await the police.”
“Indeed,” Sebastian said. “You can denounce my speculations to them, and have faith that they’ll grasp your obvious innocence in the matter. In the meantime I’d remind you that this is a secure establishment. An early departure might be difficult.”
“To my office?” suggested the Director.
“I should think so,” said Sebastian. “I don’t fancy the smell in mine.”
Bentinck’s Agent
John Lawton
I was a dodger. I do not mean by this that I have ever played baseball for Brooklyn or LA. I mean I was a draft dodger.
I was also a jumper. “Jump” adds class to what was, in fact, no more than a crawl. I had all but crawled on my belly into Canada in the autumn of 1972. Autumn? I mean fall – of course I mean fall – I have played too long the Englishman.
The matter was simplicity itself. Nixon had been elected in ’68 on a promise of getting us out of Vietnam. What he did was introduce a lottery: every male of age was given a number between 1 and 365, one for every day of the year. The lower your number, the greater your chances of being drafted, and mine were as high as my number was low – 32. Only a college deferment had kept me out and that lapsed as soon as I graduated. Hence Canada, hence England, hence London. Jack Turner, BA (Tufts), twenty-two years old and flat broke. I’d got by for a year in Toronto and blown everything I’d saved on the ticket to London.
As I said, I was lucky. I gambled on the inefficiency of any bureaucracy and applied for a Harbright scholarship. The people running the Harbright Foundation back in Washington had neither the brief nor the inclination to cross-reference their applicants’ list with the FBI’s wanted list. I got one. A year’s funding – fees plus an immodest living allowance. All I had to do was find a college that would accept me and the cockamamie proposal I had knocked out for the Harbrights: “The Use of Imagery in the Poetry of Hart Crane.” Vague as fog and not entirely original. To my amazement, Lincoln College, Oxford University, accepted me.
I had a year to write whatever it was – I honestly didn’t give a damn about getting another degree – and learn to play the Englishman.
I soon toned down my accent, and if asked I said I was Canadian – this more often than not brought “Ah, draft dodger, eh?” So I stopped saying it and just let everyone assume what they liked. Anonymity was hard-won. I was aiming to be a mid-Atlantic nonentity. Never quite made it.
By 1974 I was back in London – straight after the Three-Day Week, smack between the two elections – possessor of one degree (a second looming) and a work permit. London was my oyster. Alas in the post-Heath, post-diluvian England of 1974 the oyster was rotting on the shore. It was a sour time.
Entirely to my surprise, I found I hated English hippies. Parental recrimination, personal incompetence, political shallowness, pseudo-religious gullibility . . . all wrapped up in a tie-dyed T-shirt and played out to the sound of pompous stadium rock. Please. Gimme a break.
I was living with my girlfriend, Jess, same age, same rising sense of dissatisfaction, same sense that we were doing what we always boasted we’d never do: fuck up as our parents had fucked up.
That autumn she turned out every cupboard in the flat – the English had yet to invent the closet – and I found myself staring at a heap of tie-dye shirts, flared jeans and crushed velvet jackets.
“What a load of tat!”
I reached down to rescue my bong. She kicked it away from me.
“Tat, Jack. A load of fucking tat.”
I saw an ideology shrivel in that heap.
If this was what we had been, what were we now?
* * *
I did what my father would have told me to do, had he the faintest idea where to find me: I got a job. I got a job without him bellowing the instruction in my ear. Jess and I burnt all the tie-dye tat in the backyard. She wanted to throw on her Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd albums as well, but I pleaded the stink it would make and put them out by the trash. They were gone the next morning. And so began the new game. No more playing at hippies. From now on we’d play at being grown-ups.
“Are we straights now?” Jess asked me.
“Nah. We could never be straights.”
“Then what are we?”
“We’re . . . in disguise. We’re . . . subversives.”
“Oh Jack, you’re so full of shit.”
Time and again Jess came back to me about that assertion.
We went into advertising . . . Y’know, selling shit and saying it’s toothpaste . . . Boogle, Biggle & Boggarty. Whatever.
I did not stay the course. After less than a year Boogle or Biggle or it may have been Boggarty (whatever) suggested in that understated English way that perhaps I might be better suited to some other profession. It might have had something to do with my slogan for a campaign to relaunch Ranger bicycles: “Go to work on a bike.”
Fine.
I cleared my desk.
I went into publishing. Atterbury & Sykes. At the interview Atterbury (or maybe it was Sykes) told me the firm prided itself on publishing a book on – he did not say “life” or “biography” – “Jimmy or Marilyn” every year.
“Who?” was my reply.
“James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,” was his.
My heart, scarcely buoyant in the first place, sank beneath the banality of my new trade.
After less than a year, Atterbury (or maybe it was Sykes) suggested in that understated English way that perhaps I might be better suited to some other profession. Clearly I had not taken Jimmy and Marilyn into my sunken heart.
So I moved to Hopkins Dean, where I lasted longer, long enough to get the message. London publishing was a game of musical chairs. Scarcely worth unpacking the metaphorical briefcase.
Jess stayed in advertising. She did not stay with me. Every so often I’d get a call, “This is your straight speaking.”
She hated it. Opted for a policy of Take the Money and Sneer.
“They’re idiots. Utter fucking idiots. They call themselves ‘creatives’. They’re about as creative as my left buttock.”
All the same, she kept up the disguise. And the sub
version dwindled to gossip and drunken cynicism as we propped up bars all over London and she rubbished everyone she ever met in the cling-wrapped, plasti-coated world of the ad man.
Our habitual first clink of the glasses was “Fukkemall.”
Either they’d get her in the end or the bottle would.
By the mid-eighties I was with Hamilton Hardy, a small house with a big reputation. I didn’t have a big reputation. I’d move from one job to another without any seeming promotion even if the salary went up. I was a concierge . . . the doorman of Lit Fic. I edited on autopilot while the kettle boiled.
I think my boss at that time, Sebastian Hardy, tolerated me. He would not have been heartbroken if I quit on him. All the same he was unlikely to come to me with the understatement about my suitability. Sebastian would never “have to let me go”. He’d fire me or I’d quit.
My indifference to my own fate was shattered one day in 1985 by a telephone call from Syd Meadows – to give the old man his full whack, the Hon. Sydney Price-Meadows, senior partner in one of London’s oldest literary agencies, Hawes Greene. Syd had been there so long he’d even known Ebenezer Hawes, a man born in the 1860s and often dubbed the last Victorian in London publishing, if not in London itself. I liked Syd. I’d done business with Syd, bought half a dozen books off him and watched contentedly as he racked up boozy lunches on my expense account that would one day surely plunge Hamilton Hardy into well-deserved bankruptcy. I liked Syd. I’d not the remotest idea why he liked me.
“You saw my ad in the Bookseller?”
Actually I’d seen it and ignored it in the Guardian.
“The one for a new book agent.”
“Yes. I’ve been interviewing.”
“Aha?”
“A shower, an absolute shower. I’ve just listened to a dozen wet-behind-the-lug’oles graduates in Eng Lit rehash their education for my benefit.”
Syd had never been to university – Sandhurst and the Guards – and degrees never impressed.
“Not one I’d dare leave alone with Tom Maschler for two minutes.”
“Bad as that, eh?”
“Fucking awful. They could all spot the next Byron, but they wouldn’t know the next Ian McEwan if he fell on them. The hard men of Bedford Square would skin ’em alive.”
“Syd. Why are you telling me this?”
“Simple. Job’s yours if you want it. I’ll pay you whatever you’re on now plus three grand.”
I said nothing. He filled my silence.
“Don’t take too long to think about it. Your days at HH are numbered and you know it. You’ve no future with Sebastian Hardy. And if you stay I predict he will bore you to death in less than two years.”
He rang off without another word.
I typed a brief note to Sebastian: I have to quit. Can we just forego the thirty days’ notice?
And then I cleared my desk. I would love to have typed Fuck you or something equally “subversive”, equally childish, but – dammit – I was going to be an agent. I might to have sell the old bastard a book one day.
I dropped in at Hawes Greene’s office in Henrietta Street the next day, thinking I’d tell Syd I had accepted and agree a starting date.
Syd wasn’t there. Instead I got his secretary, Vera Buckett – Dagenham Vera, the prototype of Essex Girl. I’d never met Vera, talked to her frequently on the phone but never face to face.
“Well, dearie, you look just like you sound.”
So did she – more than a little blousy, a tad to the fat, a fag glued to her lower lip and a hint that she might have been a looker fifteen or twenty years ago.
“He ain’t ’ere, but you was expected.”
“I was. I mean, I am?”
“Fourth door on yer right. That’s your office.”
“When do I start?”
“You have started. The Hon. Syd’s in Libya. You’ll handle his clients till he gets back and until you’ve got a few of your own.”
“Libya?”
“Tobruk, dearie. Another of his bleedin’ army reunions. If he goes to one he goes to a dozen. There are times I think he was in every bleedin’ battle from Waterloo to Arnhem.”
All morning figures, faces would appear at my door.
“Oh, has the photocopier been moved?”
Men in suits, mostly. Nobody asked who I was.
Vera phoned.
“Mr Mailer, for Syd. You’d better take it.”
Oh shit. Norman Mailer. Oh shit.
“Er . . . er . . . Mr Mailer, what an . . . er . . .”
“Dennis Mailer here, son. Daily Express. I was looking for a quote from Syd . . . your rivals at Curtis Brown are rumoured to have got a seven-figure sum for Francis Freeman’s new one. I mean, funny money or what?”
“Er . . . I er . . . no comment.”
I put the phone down. It rang again at once.
“Butterfingers,” Vera said.
“What?”
“You dropped the ball. The point was to deal with him, give him something pithy, not hang up on him. Unless, of course, you declare this an FO day.”
“Foreign Office day?”
“Fuck Off day. A day when Syd says I can tell the press to fuck off.”
“In those words?”
She hung up on me, the sigh all but audible over the dialling tone.
Two minutes later she dropped a couple of dozen manila files on my desk and said, “Read and learn.”
I passed an hour in silence. Reading and learning. She rang through again.
“Mr Vidal for Syd. Just deal with it, will you?”
Fred Vidal of the News of the World or Bert Vidal from the Observer?
“Hello?”
The aristocratic, Virginian voice, slightly drawly, affected and affecting. Oh shit, da man.
“I was hoping Syd was free this evening, but I gather not. Why don’t you come over to the old boarding house at six-thirty? New blood is always interesting, for the first half hour at least.”
“The old boarding house?”
“The Connaught.”
The Connaught. Posh posh posh.
“Any . . . er particular dress code?”
“No. But Princess Margaret is a stickler for titles, so HRH her until she’s drunk and then you can call her your honeybum and she won’t care. And if you bring Vera Buckett you’d better bring your own gin, too. I’m rich . . . but not rich enough to refloat the Titanic.”
He didn’t say goodbye. I got Vera in an instant. Giggling down the line.
“Dress code. Hahahah. You twat.”
I got a few minutes with the Great Man. It went the way most conversations with fellow Americans went . . . ending with the inevitable . . . “Draft dodger?”
For once I could take it as a compliment.
I chatted with the boyfriend, Howard – a short, Bronxy guy who reminded me of nothing quite so much as a gumshoe – and I watched Vera Buckett and Princess Margaret get shit-faced without addressing a word to one another. And very soon I began to see that they were almost identical, displaying the same disdain for all around, divided only by an accent. Although to be fair, I’m pretty sure Princess Margaret didn’t buy her frocks in the M&S on Oxford Street.
Then a familiar face appeared. Tony Marks of the Daily Beast. A pleasant enough hack of limited talent. I’d bought a couple of books by him for Sebastian and as far as I could remember he’d been at work for years on a life of Maurice Oldfield (the M in MI6) that I was pretty certain he’d never finish.
“Jack boy. I hear you jumped ship.”
“Jumped ship?”
“Y’know. Gamekeeper turned poacher.”
“Ah. Yes. I’m an agent now.”
“’Scuse me if I talk shop for a bit, but there is something I’d like to ask you.”
Oh no. I did not want Tony Marks to become my first client. I didn’t ever want Tony Marks to become a client.
“Tony, I thought you were with Curtis Brown.”
“I am, Jack b
oy. Not about to ask for meself. Chap I’ve met writing a book needs an agent.”
“So why not introduce him to your man at Curtis Brown?”
“Are you kidding? Introduce a friend to your agent and you’ll end up losing both. No, this could be right up your alley. Chap named Roger Bentinck. Ring any bells?”
“Should it?”
“MI6. Dodgy business behind the Iron Curtain. Bulldog Drummond. James Bond. That sort of thing. He wants to write a memoir.”
“Will they let him?”
“Precisely why he needs an agent. I’ll get him to give you a bell at old Syd’s.”
He ducked out so fast I didn’t have time to say no. But I was an agent without any clients. Why would I say no?
The following day the telephone rang a couple of dozen times. Routine stuff and most of the people who wanted to talk to the Hon. Syd weren’t prepared to talk to me. He was the sorcerer. I was just Mickey Mouse.
Around five, Vera put Roger Bentinck through. I had no real idea whether I had wanted him to call or not, and expectation simply didn’t enter into it.
“Bentinck here.”
“Mr Bentinck, I—”
“Newmarket, tamorrer.”
“What?”
“Meet me in the Owners and Trainers Bar at Newmarket in time to study form for the 2.30. I’ll leave your name with the johnny on the door. Just ask for me.”
I did not get another word in.
Two minutes later Vera Buckett appeared in my doorway, fag adroop.
“Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Go on, ask me.”
“Vera, for Christ’s sake!”
“Ask me what the Hon. Syd would do.”
“What would Syd do?”
“What, Syd? Turn down a day at the races? Not bloody likely.”
A Day at the Races. Wasn’t that a Marx Brothers movie?
I’d never been to a racetrack in my life. I wasn’t about to risk another burst of derision from Vera on the matter of dress code, so I went dressed in workaday sports jacket and grey pants, assuming that an ordinary summer Thursday would not be a top-hat gig and I would not be meeting royalty twice in one week.
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