His whole aura was of a man who had power, and money, and had been turned out to the point of perfection by his valet. He was, in short, a hot-house flower of a man, and as he raised a cigarette to his lips the signet ring on his smallest finger caught the light coming through the tall windows so that it seemed to Trilby that even the elements approved of his perfection.
Throwing the cigarette into the fire he walked forward, lithe, practised at greeting, completely in command of his manners, the manners not in control of him.
‘Miss Smythson, how nice that you could come to luncheon so soon.’
Trilby shook his hand and smiled up at him from under her hat. His self-possession was so obvious that she almost felt cowed. Almost, but not quite, for Trilby, having hated her days at school and having made few real friends, had as a consequence spent most of her free time with grown-ups, and she knew from them all that in Society shyness was the first sin, and to allow it to show meant that you were only thinking of yourself.
One must be seen to try, Trilby duck, even if one falls on one’s backside one must try, it’s just a fact I’m afraid.
Molly had often said that. Now, remembering this exhortation, Trilby smiled up as confidently as she could at Lewis James.
‘It was very nice of you to ask me, Mr James.’
He indicated that she should sit down and, remembering the butler’s advice, as she did so Trilby casually flicked Aphrodite’s coat over the back of a Louis Quinze chair and seated herself against it, remembering to keep her feet together and ankles uncrossed as Mrs Johnson Johnson had most particularly advised as she had finally left Aphrodite’s house.
‘What would you like to drink?’
‘I would like a lemonade, please.’
The butler brought in a lemonade on a small silver tray, and as he poured it from a small cut-glass jug into a matching glass it seemed to Trilby, in the silence that surrounded this small ceremony, that the lemonade was being handed to her as if it was a medicine, and she might even be expected to hold her nose as she drank it.
‘I would like to buy your cartoon strip, Miss Smythson.’
It was good that Mr James was prepared to go straight to the point, and when he did, and she heard telephones ringing seemingly all over the house, Trilby thought that a man as busy and powerful as Lewis James must after all have to always get to the point straight away, because there would really be no time for anything else. A thousand demands on his time must mean that something like buying The Popposites would be so far down his list that it would hardly register at all.
‘Yes, I would like to buy your strip cartoon for the paper. We need something young in flavour for the back page. Tell me, where do your characters, where do The Popposites, come from?’
Trilby looked up at him and smiled, expecting this. ‘Oh, from where I live, of course, in Chelsea. You see, where I live everyone is always borrowing from someone else, so I nicknamed the people opposite the Popposites, just as a joke, because they were always popping in and out of each other’s houses. And the people our side of the street, well, I called them the Have-You-Anys, and it all grew from there, really. You know.’
‘Charming, charming. They’re all so real I feel as if I have always known them, and they are so wonderfully – eccentric. Does Miss Golly Gosh really exist? Does she?’
‘Of course.’
He looked across at Trilby, himself now seated on an uncomfortably elegant chair, and he laughed. ‘Really? She really exists? What will she say, when she sees the cartoon in the paper, do you think?’
‘Oh, they have all seen it, and they love it. They know they’re all in it.’
‘What about Lady Droopy? And Mrs Smokey Smokey?’
‘Oh, yes, that’s our neighbour Mrs Johnson Johnson. She made me alter her Turkish cigarettes to a cigar. She wanted me to make her character even more bohemian-looking. And Lady Droopy’s Aphrodite. She, er, well, she’s opposite too – at number fifteen, actually.’
‘What a remarkable set of acquaintances you must have, not to mind you amusing yourself at their expense. You must have a very jolly life in . . .’
‘Chelsea. Oh, I do.’ Trilby leaned forward, suddenly thinking how far away Glebe Street with all its informal delights seemed now that she was seated in this palace of a house with its aura of quiet, and almost overpowering sense of luxury. ‘Yes, they are all remarkable. We have such fun really, and that’s why I drew them all, and, you know, did it, did The Popposites, because I wanted to get them all down on paper before I grew too old, or they did. You know how it is.’
He looked at her and for a second she thought he looked surprised at her sudden intensity, but then he shook his head and instead of looking surprised, he laughed. ‘No, I am afraid I don’t. But, never mind. We must go in to luncheon or else we shall be in trouble with my cook, the soufflé, you know. It is always a soufflé at lunch nowadays, I am afraid. I can never think of anything else more pleasant to start with.’
Trilby smiled, mentally thanking God for her continual plaguing of everyone in Glebe Street, as a result of which she had not only eaten a soufflé before, but had even helped Berry to make one, and only last week.
‘I love soufflés, particularly cheese soufflés.’
‘This I am very much afraid is fish. I hope you like fish?’
Trilby liked anything outside her own home.
‘Remember the Charlie Chaplin scene, when he eats the shoe as if it was fish? Takes the nails out of the shoe, one by one, as if they are fish bones? That is very, very funny, don’t you think?’
Again thanks to her neighbours Trilby knew a great many old films and books. She also knew how to laugh obligingly, and in a way that made people think that she was exactly the same age as them. She therefore both laughed and nodded appreciatively as one of the maids attending them at luncheon pulled out her chair and she sat down on it.
‘Yes. That is so funny. I love Charlie Chaplin.’
‘But not more than Buster Keaton?’
‘No, not more, but as much.’ She felt quite firm on this point, and for a second she saw the expression in Mr James’s eyes turn from amusement to surprise at her decided tone.
He unpicked his stiff, white linen napkin, and as he did so he said, ‘You know your own mind, don’t you, Miss Smythson?’
Trilby smiled across at him from under her cardinal-style hat. ‘I know what I think is funny, if that is what you mean, but that is hardly a guide, is it? I mean when it comes to making people laugh how do we know?’
‘Only by trying.’
‘How do you know what to put into your newspapers?’
‘I don’t. I have editors who, as you say, put things in my newspapers, and then I read them and I find that I feel just as ordinary or extraordinary as the next man. In other words I go by my instinct. Isn’t that the only way?’
‘I thought newspapers had policies, like governments.’
‘Quite right, Miss Smythson, they do, but they try not to let it show too much. They try to let the readers guess at what their, as you put it, policies could be.’
‘It must be so exciting.’
Without her realising it Trilby’s tone had taken on a dreamy quality, not actually because she was really very interested in newspapers and their policies, but because the fish soufflé was so delicious.
‘Like everything, Miss Smythson, it is only as exciting as you make it. There are times when I wish I had inherited anything but newspapers. A cattle ranch, or a chain of hotels, something less, if you like, opinionated.’
Trilby put her fish knife and fork together and nodded. ‘Inheriting things is difficult, apparently. Because it’s not you that’s done it, and you can’t really value it the same as if you work for it, can you?’
For a second Trilby thought she had offended him as he stared across the table at her and a dull red flush appeared across his forehead.
‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, Miss Smythson,’ he murmured finally, a
nd laughed. ‘You are quite right, and do you know no-one has ever dared to say that to me before?’ He smiled. ‘You’re a very truthful person, aren’t you, Miss Smythson?’
After that luncheon seemed to fly past, and when the delicious pudding had been presented and duly relished by Trilby, it seemed hardly minutes after she had put down her spoon that they were both leaving the house, he to step into his Rolls-Royce, waving and kissing his fingertips to her, and she, in her turn, to wave not at him but at a taxi cab from which ten minutes later she quickly decanted herself outside Aphrodite’s door in a flurry of excitement, running up the steps so quickly that not even her stepmother could have caught sight of her.
‘How was it?’
Molly seemed to spring out from behind Aphrodite’s front door, giving Trilby the impression that she and Aphrodite had been waiting for her ever since she went out. Trilby smiled up at her from under Aphrodite’s hat.
‘He was really very nice.’
‘Yes, but – will he buy The Popposites, Trilb?’
‘Yes, he wants to buy the cartoon strip. Actually, I can hardly believe it.’
‘But my dear girl, that is so exciting and wonderful!’
Trilby’s eyes drifted past her. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’
‘What’s he like, my dear? Tell, do.’
‘Like? Oh, he’s terribly tall, and he has such a nice voice.’
Molly stared at her. ‘Oh dear. Not smitten are you, Trilb?’
‘Goodness no. No, but I must say I thought such a rich and powerful man might be dull and have no sense of humour, but he laughed and talked just like we do here, really.’
‘That is good.’
‘But just remember he is buying the cartoon strip, not you. You are not thrown in.’ Mrs Johnson Johnson had suddenly appeared from Aphrodite’s basement, as usual smoking a Turkish cigarette and looking regal.
‘Oh, Melanie, do stop saying that. It’s not as if Trilby has any interest in him. She has more sense.’ Molly patted Trilby on the arm, and they all smiled at her.
As for Trilby, she was suddenly very glad that she was wearing the cardinal-style hat, so comforting to hide behind.
Chapter Two
There was a long and terrible silence, and Trilby knew at once that if she lived to be a hundred, she would never forget it. She felt as if she was confessing to a robbery, or had been found planning to murder one of them.
‘You what?’
It was her father who spoke, not Agnes, for once.
‘I have sold my drawings to a newspaper, to a man who owns them.’
She had always known that it was going to be a difficult moment, that her father and stepmother might not approve of selling something to a newspaper. Thinking of themselves as they did as being extremely respectable, the Smythsons had little or no respect for Fleet Street, so that Trilby had wrestled with the idea of not telling them at all, of publishing the whole series under a different name, but because she was still a minor this was not possible.
Molly had explained all this to her, and they had all, Molly and Berry and Aphrodite and Mrs Johnson Johnson, tried to find a way round it, but the fact was that there was none, she had to tell the truth.
Trilby was only just eighteen. There would be three long years before she was twenty-one and able to do as she wished. Besides, the contract with the newspaper, as Berry had explained, was bound to be long and complicated and cover all kinds of agreements, so it was not practical either. Trilby would need someone to advise her, someone like Geoffrey, or her father.
‘I told you she was up to something!’ Agnes looked across at Trilby’s father with a smug expression on her face. ‘I told you she was up to no good. I just had this feeling these last days,’ she addressed herself to Trilby now, ‘I just had this feeling that you were up to something, going behind our backs about something.’
‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes,’ Trilby lied, but her feet wriggled in her shoes, and she knew that her father could see this, and that he had always said that shifty feet meant a lie was being told, so she stopped them wriggling, only she could see that it was a little too late and he had noticed.
‘How did this come about?’
‘Er. Well. You see, what happened was this.’ Trilby stopped, aware that her voice sounded nervous. ‘I, er, I, er, had the newest set of drawings, and one day I was in Molly’s kitchen talking to her and Berry.’
‘You go round to their house far too often. I told you she goes round to their house too often, Michael.’
Michael Smythson nodded but remained silent for a moment, staring across at Trilby. He often stared at her as if he was not quite sure how she had come about, as if he had not really expected her to grow up, change from child to teenager, and since she had it was necessary for him to examine her very closely.
‘Yes, you do, Agnes is right. You go round to their house too often,’ he agreed. ‘But please, go on. Tell us how this all came about?’
‘As I said, I was in the kitchen with Molly and Berry, and they were laughing at the latest set, you know? I mean I always show them all what I am drawing, because, well, because I wouldn’t want them to be upset or anything.’
‘A bit too late to think of that if you have sold them. Much too late, I should have thought.’
‘Go on.’
‘And, well, Molly came out with . . . well, she came up with this idea, rather, that I should, that she should send them to this friend of theirs, a Mr Micklethwaite or someone.’
‘David Micklethwaite, yes, I know him. We have met him at their house.’
‘So she did.’ Trilby swallowed hard, knowing that there were rough waters ahead. ‘She sent them to Mr Micklethwaite, and he showed them to his boss, Lewis James, who owns all these newspapers.’
‘We know who Lewis James is, thank you very much!’ Agnes lit a cigarette and went to the sitting room window where she stared out at the houses opposite as if they were offending her.
‘And?’
‘And. And, well, he bought them.’
Trilby had to miss out the luncheon bit. They had all agreed that she must, Aphrodite, Molly and Berry, all of them had agreed that it was the only way. One whiff of deception, they had all agreed this too, and Michael and Agnes would put a stop to the whole deal, and she would never be allowed to sell The Popposites to anyone.
‘Just like that.’
‘Yes, he apparently finds them very funny.’
‘Does he.’
‘Yes.’
‘So. Where from here, Trilby?’
‘I don’t know, that is why I came and asked you.’
Her feet had stopped wiggling and for a minute or so it seemed to Trilby that the waters ahead might be going to be a little calmer than she had anticipated.
‘Anyway, that at any rate is good, that you came and asked us,’ her father said, and approval suddenly registered in his gentle smile as Agnes turned back from the window.
‘I fail to see what is good about it, Michael. I do really fail to see that. All I can see ahead is trouble.’
Michael Smythson turned and contemplated his wife with a bland look in his eyes as if he had only just realised that she was in the room.
‘How is that, Agnes?’
‘All the people in the street, they will all sue her. You will see, and we will be left with all the pieces. I mean Trilby has spent weeks and months showing these wretched drawings of hers to everyone and anyone, which is one thing, but as soon as they see themselves depicted in a newspaper, you wait. They will change their tune all right. You’ll see.’
There was a small silence which crept into a long silence during which Agnes finished smoking her cigarette and stubbed it out in a silver ashtray, while at the same time allowing a look of triumph to creep into her dark eyes.
‘Oh, I think we can cope with that, Agnes,’ Michael said. ‘We can ask them all to sign away any . . . you know, make them agree to not suing, as you put it. And that being so, it would be
very difficult for any of our friends to sue Trilby, I should have thought.’
‘So foolish of you to show them your drawings, though, you must admit, Trilby; it was really very foolish.’ The triumph in Agnes’s eyes was now reflected in her voice.
‘Oh no.’ Trilby’s own tone had changed. She so hated Agnes in her sadistic mood. When she was younger she had dreamed of killing her, but now that she was older she just settled for hating her. ‘Oh no, I should always have shown them what I was doing. It simply would not have been fair not to have shown them as I went along. And, after all, when you think of it, without them having seen the drawings, Mr James would not have been interested in them, would he?’
‘She’s quite right, Agnes.’ Michael closed the door on that particular line of conversation with a look. ‘Well, now, young lady,’ he went on, his face devoid of emotion as it always was, even when he was feeling emotional. ‘We had better hire you a lawyer, or someone who knows about negotiating with a newspaper over rights and so on. You don’t want to go signing away something that you should own, do you?’
Trilby shook her head, silent. She could hardly believe her father’s tacit acceptance of her new situation. It did not seem possible that, starting off as he had in a kind of silent fury, he had finally ended up on her side.
For a second she found herself wondering why, and then a possible answer came to her. Agnes must have gone too far. She did sometimes. Sometimes her cruelty and mockery, her sadism and domineering ways came to Michael’s notice, at which point he would side with Trilby. But for how long?
Agnes never let a matter she wanted to win rest for any length of time. She always returned to it. If not today, tomorrow. Trilby knew that ultimately her freedom rested on one thing and one thing alone, and that was on everyone in the street keeping their mouths shut about the luncheon. If Michael found out about the luncheon, Trilby would, as Aphrodite would put it, ‘have well and truly had it’.
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