‘How big?’ enquired Jarret dryly, and Margot moved her shoulders in a little offhand gesture.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ she prevaricated. ‘Does it matter? Forty—maybe fifty, I’m not sure. What’s really important——’
‘Forty or fifty what?’ Jarret interrupted her. ‘Acres? Margot, you must be out of your tiny mind! I’m no land-owner!’
Margot pouted. ‘That doesn’t mean you couldn’t be, darling. I think you’d make a marvellous squire! And King’s Green hasn’t had one of them for—oh, ten years or so.’
‘Let me get this straight.’ Jarret pushed his thumbs into the low belt of his denims. ‘You’re suggesting I buythis—this King’s Green from some—friend of yours?’
‘A school friend, yes. Alice Chase.’
‘And she’s a widow?’
‘Hardly your taste, darling,’ retorted Margot spitefully. ‘She’s twelve stone if she’s an ounce!’
Jarret ignored her. ‘That’s the proposition you came to put to me,’ he continued. ‘That I buy—King’s Green.’
‘Why not?’ Margot was forced to put her maliciousness aside. ‘It is what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it? A place in the country. Somewhere you can work—in peace.’
‘Mmmm.’ Jarret sounded as though he was extremely doubtful.
‘Well, at least come and see it,’ she urged him. ‘There’s no harm in that, is there? I mean, you’re not committed to anything, are you? And I’m sure you’ll be—enchanted, when you see it.’
‘Enchanted?’ Jarret stifled his rather wry humour. ‘Oh, Margot, you don’t know me very well, do you?’
‘Well enough,’ she murmured huskily. ‘But not as well as I’d like.’
Jarret sighed. ‘Look, I guess you thought you were doing me a favour, coming here and letting me know about this place, but—well, I can’t make a decision just like that. I—need to think about it.’
‘Of course.’ She sounded as if she had never doubted it. ‘But you will make up your mind soon, won’t you, darling? I mean, I told Alice I’d let her know within a couple of days.’
‘A couple of days,’ echoed Jarret irritably. ‘Hell, I can’t make that kind of decision in forty-eight hours!’
Margot hesitated. ‘Come and see it,’ she suggested again. ‘It’s only an hour or two’s drive. We could go tonight, and come back tomorrow.’
‘We?’
‘Of course, darling. I promised Alice I’d introduce her to you. She’s one of your fans, you know. She has all the books you’ve written.’
‘All three of them?’ mocked Jarret cuttingly.
Margot flushed. ‘Will you come?’
‘I can’t,’ he stated flatly. ‘Not today. It’s out of the question.’
‘Tomorrow, then,’ she persisted, only the tightening of her lips indicating her reaction to the inevitable reasons for his refusal. ‘Jarret, you owe it to yourself——’
Jarret cut her off without preamble. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he specified abruptly. ‘It’s Friday. We can drive down before lunch and be back in town in time for dinner.’
‘Are you making me an offer?’ Margot probed, but Jarret’s expression was not encouraging.
‘I have work to do,’ he reminded her, and she made a sulky gesture of acceptance.
‘What time tomorrow?’
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘So early!’ Margot was horrified.
‘If I can make it, surely you can,’ he averred dryly. ‘Is it a date?’
‘How could I refuse such a gallant proposition?’ she retorted, showing a little of the humour which had attracted his attention in the first place. ‘All right, darling, nine o’clock it is. Will you pick me up?’
‘Promptly,’ he affirmed, with a bow of his head, and forced to the conclusion that for the present this was all she could expect of him, she put down her glass and moved towards the door.
‘Until tomorrow,’ she murmured, lingering long enough for him to respond if he chose, but Jarret remained where he was.
‘Tomorrow,’ he agreed shortly, and the door closed rather heavily behind her.
With her departure, Jarret breathed a sigh of relief. Then, raking back his hair with aggressive fingers, he went to take one of the narrow cigars he favoured from the carved box on the bookshelves. He was already regretting the impulse he had had to give in to her, and impatience carved its identity across his dark features. Why the hell had he agreed to such a wasted outing? It was only her way of getting him to spend the day with her. Why on earth hadn’t he told her to go to hell, and shut her out of his life once and for all? He shook his head. A country estate was not for him, and she knew it. A house, maybe. That had possibilities. But forty or fifty acres of arable land …
He slumped down into the chair beside the typewriter and propped his head on his hand. What had he done that morning? Two, maybe three pages! He wasn’t even satisfied with what he had written. It was vacuously amateurish, he thought, with savage criticism, ignoring completely the incisive prose which had made a bestseller of his first novel and subsequent successes of his second and third. Nevertheless, the meaningless words and phrases were not Jarret Manning at his best, and the horrible suspicion that he had nothing more to say stirred in his stomach like a corpse in its tomb.
It was useless to pretend he was working at the moment. He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate, and where once these minor distractions would not have troubled him, lately he was inventing reasons for not sitting down at the typewriter.
Would a change of surroundings help? He suspected it might. Margot had been right when she had said he was too accessible in London, too open to distraction, and maybe for his own good he needed a change. Too many parties, too many drinks, too many late nights … The indictment was endless, and he had no one to blame but himself. He had let the fruits of his success dictate his style of living, and for a writer that was professional suicide. Maybe if he got away from town for a while, he would have time to think. In the clean, unpolluted air of the countryside his brain would reassert itself, and recover from the crippling effects of too little stimulation and too much apathy.
Realising he was not about to write anything of significance today, he determinedly put his self-doubts aside and went to wash and shave. Then, adding a navy corded jacket to his denims, he left the apartment. Downstairs in the underground car park, one of the fruits of his success he did appreciate awaited him, and he lowered his lean body behind the wheel, and started the powerful twelve-cylinder engine. It responded without effort, and he reversed out of the space and then accelerated smoothly up the ramp to the street.
It took him less than half an hour to reach his destination, a narrow terraced house in a row of the same, situated in a less salubrious area across the river. The sun was endeavouringto break through the clouds as he parked his car at the kerb, and levered himself out on to the pavement, and he paused to grin at an elderly matron peering through the lace curtains of the house opposite before walking up the path to the house.
It could do with painting, he reflected, letting himself in with his key and slamming the door behind him. ‘It’s only me, Dad!’ he called by means of a warning, and then strolled down the narrow passage to the back of the house.
The old man was not in the living room or the kitchen, but the open back door indicated his whereabouts. He was in the long