At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  She had been running it, so far, for forty years. Blatt wondered if he might offer her a cigar.

  ‘You’re the first person to whom I’ve told this, dear, but I’ve decided that I’ve done enough for Shakespeare. In the future he must do without my help.’

  ‘Who’s going to break that to him, lady?’

  Freddie smiled indulgently.

  ‘I’ve done everything I can for him, dear. He doesn’t need me any more. There’s going to be a complete transformation at the Temple School. As from next term I shall offer no training at all in Shakespeare or Peter Pan or the classic drama, no ballet, nothing for the movies because in the end they always want amateurs for the children’s parts, my whole fluence, my whole resources, are going into the one thing – training for TV commercials.’

  So the brick wall against which he had battered had come down without his even knowing it, but, as it seemed, in the wrong direction, felling him to his knees, so that he gasped from the dust and rubble: ‘You’ve run out of money. All the rest is gas. You’re short of assets. That’s why you’re doing this. What does Unwin say?’

  ‘Whatever could it have to do with Unwin? I haven’t consulted him. If you want to know where he is, he’s taking out Hilary Blewett, no doubt at the smallest possible expense he can contrive, to try and find out what it is I’m going to talk to you about. She won’t know. But she’ll enjoy herself – she has a great capacity for that. He never seems to realise that he’s of no importance at all, except to tell me how much I’m in debt. The changes in Freddie’s aren’t a matter of money. I’ve done without money for far too long to start caring about it now.’

  Blatt knew this was true. But, a cheated man, he realised also, with a bitter sense of loss, that the scorn of worldly things which had fascinated him against his will, and for so long, was itself an illusion. Freddie cared neither for art nor tradition nor for the theatre nor even for her children. She loved only power, indeed she loved Freddie’s.

  ‘Lilian used to pray a good deal,’ he heard her saying. ‘But she told me she didn’t mind whether God saw through her prayers or not, as long as she got good houses at the Vic. It’s my duty, you know, to take my school where the power is.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about TV,’ Blatt shouted.

  ‘I do know something.’

  ‘That’s not possible. Always you’ve had to ask me what it was all about, and you’ve never listened. You never see it. You’ve never even watched it.’

  ‘I watched it in the hospital,’ Freddie replied. ‘It was turned on in the ward at midday and it went on without a break until close-down.’

  ‘And that was enough?’

  ‘It was quite enough, dear.’

  ‘It got you,’ he pressed her.

  ‘I saw how it got other people, even if they were 89, 93, or 97. Let us say my eyes were opened.’

  ‘After forty years.’

  ‘Opened to the future, dear. There mustn’t be a future without Freddie’s.’

  She had waved away reason and experience and honest offers of help and refused even to read through her own accounts, now after a couple of days’ viewing in the company of the mindless and toothless, plus some slogan she’d picked up, she was turning her back on all she once stood for. She hadn’t come to her senses. They were further away than ever. Something was slipping out of control. ‘What about the parents?’ he asked. ‘Have you thought of them?’

  ‘They trust me. I shan’t persuade them. I shall just tell them what I’m going to do. As to my staff, well, Hannah Graves will go, I suppose, quite a nice girl, a pity to lose her, and Carroll of course will stay. Where would he ever get another post?’

  ‘And the kids? Aren’t some of them supposed to be the hope of England? What about the little one that got pissed?’

  Freddie hesitated, if only for a moment. ‘You mean Jonathan Kemp. He always seems quite self-sufficient.’

  ‘I did the wrong thing that day.’

  ‘Did you? But you know I don’t know why you’re becoming so red in the face, dear, or why you’re taking all this so hard. Have you forgotten why you took me out to dinner in the first place? Surely it was to flatter me into coming into some sort of business arrangement. I haven’t decided yet whether to let you lend me any money or not. But, as you pointed out a few minutes ago, what I’m doing is exactly what you’ve been asking me to do for what seems rather a long time.’

  ‘I’m not pretending anything, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Pretence would be wasteful. I know your point of view, I can hardly help it. I know exactly what you want.’

  ‘But you don’t know,’ he cried in desperation. ‘For eight days now I’ve been trying to say to you what I’m saying now. You thought, didn’t you, that I wasn’t educated up to Shakespeare, I was thick, I was the funny man who made you all feel good by being so thick. Well, listen to me and don’t give me any more until I tell you how it is with me now. In a sense telling you this was going to be my happy hour, Miss Wentworth, I thought that anyway. A week ago I went down to the theatre to see King John, no seats they made out but a friend of mine fixed it, it’s one of his sidelines, and at first I thought, this is slow, it’s the slowest thing that was ever inflicted on me, but when the scene came in the prison camp, where Stewart’s boy has to stand up to the torturers, I sat there with tears running down my face so that I had to turn to the right and the left of me and ask them to excuse me for the tears. Before this, I told them, I cried only at the movies. I looked forward to this evening with you, Miss Wentworth, because I thought it would be a memorable moment when I told you that I wanted to invest in Shakespeare. So do me the favour to tell me what you think it feels like, now that you’ve trodden Shakespeare under and scraped him up and thrown him back in my face. You’ll say to me, well, that was one scene from one act of only one of his plays, and there are others. But what more could everything that he ever wrote do for me?’

  Now, surely, even if there was to be no other satisfaction, at least he had surprised her. But Freddie was silent only for a few moments, while her lips moved with a suggestion of chewing, as if she was a connoisseur of heartfelt words.

  ‘You say that it was Mattie Stewart’s performance that really moved you?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘You liked him in the part? You thought he did it well?’

  ‘I wanted to make it clear to you that I’m prepared to invest up to the limit, yes and a bit beyond, in a place that can train a child like that. Now you can tell me that I’ve got no sense.’

  ‘I won’t tell you that,’ said Freddie,’ ‘but I’ll tell you that you have no taste. You don’t know bad acting when you see it.’

  By this time Jonathan had been locked out of the Temple School for about an hour, but he had reckoned with this and at first it did not particularly disturb him. He had intended, if he got too cold, to go inside and scout round for a packet of crisps and to find somewhere to sleep in Costumes. There were plenty of drapes and blankets there. That wouldn’t do now. Still, he had other resources. Although it would take a certain amount of nerve, there was nothing to stop him jumping down on the street side and getting out that way. The drop was a good bit longer, though, than the one he was doing at present, down into the middle of the yard.

  His object was to get so used to the Jump that he could do it without thinking, and exactly the same way every time. The crates he had got hold of from the Garden were rotten, as indeed he’d noticed when he took them, but by standing on the outside slats and exerting very little pressure he could manage the top of the wall quite easily. In the morning there would be someone to come and watch, and tell him whether he was right or not. Meanwhile he went on climbing and jumping, again and again and again into the darkness.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  The Golden Child

  The Bookshop

  Offshore

  Human Voices

  Innocence

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sp; The Beginning of Spring

  The Gate of Angels

  The Blue Flower

  The Means of Escape

  NON-FICTION

  Edward Burne-Jones

  The Knox Brothers

  Charlotte Mew and her Friends

  A House of Air: Selected Writings

  So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Blue Flower

  Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

  With an introduction by Candia McWilliam

  The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father’s permission to announce his engagement to his heart’s desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?

  Tracing the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, The Blue Flower is a masterpiece of invention, evoking the past with a reality that we can almost feel.

  ‘A masterpiece. How does she do it?’

  A. S. Byatt

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  Innocence

  With an introduction by Julian Barnes

  The Ridolfis are a Florentine family of long lineage and little money. It is 1955, and the family, like its decrepit villa and farm, has seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality.

  Chiara has set her heart on Salvatore, a young and brilliant doctor who resolved long ago to be emotionally dependent on no one. Faced with this, she calls on her English girlfriend Barney to help her make the impossible match.

  ‘Witty and moving … not just about Italians in love but of living and loving for all humans’

  The Times

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Gate of Angels

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

  With an introduction by Philip Hensher

  It is 1912, and at Cambridge University the modern age is knocking at the gate. Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus – where for centuries no female has been allowed to set foot – lectures in physics. Science, he is certain, will explain everything. Until into Fred’s orderly life comes Daisy. Fred is smitten. Why have I met her? He wonders. How can I tell if she’s quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything. But even scientists make mistakes.

  ‘Exquisite, moving, wonderful’

  Independent on Sunday

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Beginning of Spring

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

  With an introduction by Andrew Miller

  It is March 1913, and the grand old city of Moscow is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. Change is in the air and nowhere more so than at 22 Lipka Street, the home of English printer Frank Reid. Frank’s wife Nellie has taken the train back to England, with no explanation, leaving him with their three young children. Into his life comes Lisa Ivanovna, a country girl, untroubled to the point of seeming simple. But is she? And why has Frank’s accountant, Selwyn, gone to such lengths to bring them together?

  ‘Flawless. Packed with the kind of off-beat humour and perceptive observation that makes you turn back and read it again’

  Sunday Times

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Bookshop

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

  In the small East Anglian town of Hardborough, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done and, as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.

  ‘A gem, a vintage narrative … a classic whose force has not merely lasted but has actually improved in the passage of years’

  New York Times

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Golden Child

  In a prominent London museum, the ‘Golden Child’ exhibit arrives and takes pride of place, to huge excitement and not a little panic among the staff. But while the new exhibit lures thousands of curious spectators, it also becomes the sinister focus in a web of intrigue and murder.

  The Golden Child shows how Fitzgerald’s distinctive wit and humour and her sense of the absurd were present at the very beginning of her career. It shows, as always, how acutely perceptive of human nature she is, how understanding and how forgiving. It is also, perhaps more than any other of her books, a minor comic masterpiece.

  ‘Fitzgerald has the knack of being able to give comedy an undertow of menace. Most museums take themselves too seriously: here is the perfect riposte’

  Sunday Telegraph

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  This Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2013

  Previously published in paperback by Flamingo in 2003, 1997, 1989

  First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1982

  Copyright © Penelope Fitzgerald 1982

  Introduction © Simon Callow 2013

  Preface © Hermione Lee 2013

  Series advisory editor: Hermione Lee

  Penelope Fitzgerald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780006542551

  Ebook Edition © August 2012 ISBN: 9780007439676

  Version: 2013-10-24

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