Having done so he felt committed to something, small as it might have been, and about time too.
The day came when Gordon was to take Jimmie Fane out to lunch. The morning of it he filled in at the offices of the Sunday newspaper he worked for. These had once been majestically sited in the area of Fleet Street, but rising costs had compelled a series of moves into humbler quarters, ending for the moment in a dockland semi-wilderness. The building was reachable, or nearly, by a water-bus service that was slow and uncomfortable but at least different from that of the ordinary land bus with its route through miles of houses in silent-screen disrepair apparently occupied by remnants of a dwarfish aboriginal race. Both alternatives had the quality of always seeming a little worse to experience than to remember. This time it was the water-bus that Gordon swore he would never use again. The weather was wet and he had to plod across a kind of mudflat between disembarking and reaching shelter.
‘Nice of you to condescend to drop in on us,’ said the books editor. Originally he had not much wanted to be books editor, but the then editorial editor, the Editor in fact, had not wanted him to be anything else. ‘We appreciate immeasurably being spared some of your attention.’ This man was now nearing sixty and called Desmond O’Leary, though he gave no other sign whatever of having to do with Ireland or any of its inhabitants, past and present. ‘Everybody here understands that you have weightier calls on your time.’ Whatever his origins, O’Leary looked like a kind of bird or lizard above the neck, having no hair at all to be seen on his head, though he was very ready with the assurance that he was like an ape everywhere else. ‘All that we lesser mortals would beg from you in the foreseeable future is a thousand words on this latest piece of New England farmhouse guff, a round-up of female black American guff with some latitude as to space and, let’s see, no, yes, whither the docudrama as seen on TV and film and what, if anything, is literary truth.’ O’Leary laid bare and lit a smallish cigar of rectangular cross-section.’ Actually all I need from you more or less straight away is your next column piece and a word with Harry about our coverage of the Codex Prize. It looks like Latin America’s turn this time round, much to my personal mortification. How did your lunch with JRP Fane go?’
‘It’s today.’
‘Look, Gordon, when it comes to picking up the bill, mind you don’t –’
‘It’s come to that already and I’m picking it up. He virtually made it a condition of coming out at all.’
‘Oh did he? Clearly his hand has lost none of its cunning. Aristocratic sort of old sod, isn’t he? I saw him at some party once and there was nobody there half grand enough for him.’
‘He was quite willing to talk to me.’
‘Ask yourself why. But what’s the attraction as far as you’re concerned? Not your cup of tea as a bloke or as a writer, I’d have thought. And he’s what, he’s passé, over and done with, gone for good, thing of the past, beyond revival even by you.’ O’Leary stared over his half-glasses at Gordon, ‘I happen to think you’d do the job about as well as anybody if it could be done, but it can’t, as you’ll see. Not worth the sweat.’
Gordon shrank from saying that O’Leary himself was something of a relic, specifically in the view he took of Fane’s irrevocable departure as a literary figure. What he did say, no less truthfully, was, ‘He may not be my kind of writer and he’s obviously not my kind of man. That’s an important part of what you called his attraction for me as a subject. I want to see how far I can –’
‘Oh God, it’s the challenge, is it, the fascination of what’s difficult and all that. Some old tit, even older and tittier than JRP Fane, anyway you remember he said when you’ve done something you can do, do something you can’t. Wrong again. Do something you can do and then do something else you can do and never mind if it’s the same thing. No virtue in trying what you find uncongenial because you find it uncongenial. You know that very well, or you would if you weren’t still stuck in that bloody Scottish Presbyterianism you flatter yourself you’ve left far behind you. My own upbringing was – but it’s a little early in the day to be bringing up bygones, I suppose. I shouldn’t really have started on any of this. Sorry.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Gordon, though he could see little enough to forgive, O’Leary having mostly stuck to his habitual friendly-jeering manner. Well, perhaps what he had said had fetched up a little nearer the bone than usual, ‘In fact it’s a nice change to be treated as an adult. Anyway, with your permission I mean to have a fair crack at showing how decent writing can overcome almost any prejudice in the reader, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.’
Perhaps it did; whether it did or not, O’Leary seemed to pay it small heed. He said, ‘I just hate to see a reasonably competent and successful journalist like yourself thinking it’s about time he did something less perishable and throwing his talents away on a serious book. I wouldn’t mind so much if you were going for something of your own, even a novel, but a critical biography, your phrase be it noted, of a prehistoric old sod like Fane, oh dear oh dear. Right, I’ve said too much already, not that any of it’ll shake your determination to misuse your abilities. You know, Gordon, in this life it’s important to recognize one’s limitations. Mine extend as far as this desk and no further, not my first choice as you may have heard, which goes to show one can sometimes do with a bit of guidance in setting one’s course. Now I mustn’t be late for the Chairman’s conference. He’s become a degree or two less tolerable since he got that bloody knighthood, unless it’s my imagination. Well, show me a pot of ointment and I’ll show you a fly. Give me a call tea-time about the days of the week you’ll be coming in to the office. Don’t forget to talk to Harry before you go. And first thing in the morning will do for your column but no later.’
It had been arranged that, when the time came, Gordon as host-designate should call to collect guest at the Fane residence and he turned up there punctually, indeed with a couple of minutes to spare. A girl of about thirty answered his ring apparently clad in an excerpt from the Bayeux Tapestry. ‘Yes?’ she said loudly before he could speak. Her manner was unwelcoming.
‘I’ve called to pick up Mr Fane.’
‘What?’
‘I’m taking him out to lunch.’
‘Name?’
‘Yes, meaning yes, I have a name, and if you ask me nicely I might tell you what it is.’ That was something like what Gordon was tempted to say. But all he did say was his name in full.
‘I’m terribly sorry but I’ve never heard of you.’
‘I exist nevertheless,’ Gordon actually did say this time. ‘Will you kindly tell Mr Fane that I’m here as arranged with him on Monday this week?’
‘Mr Fane is not here.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps I could wait for him. May I come in for a minute?’
‘Anything wrong, darling?’ asked a new voice, new in this conversation but in other respects age-old. Gordon had spied its owner, or that person’s head, sticking out of a nearby doorway inside the house a moment before. Now he was to be seen in full, striding up the hallway, a well-set-up man in a dark-grey suit and glasses. As he approached he repeated his question.
‘I don’t really know, darling,’ answered the girl.
‘M’m,’ said the man. He came to a halt in front of Gordon, at whom he still gazed while he said, ‘Could this be the chap, do you think?’
‘Well, he certainly looks and sounds like it.’
‘M’m.’
Now the man took his glasses off his nose and put