A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (2 page)

‘T
AXI, NO LESS
,’ she said, impressed and disapproving, as she stepped into it. ‘You
are
extravagant. I thought you must have brought the car when you said you’d pick me up.’

They kissed. He searched her face for signs of illness and recovery but the suntan masked it. Otherwise she looked the same, dark and thin. It did not show yet. She was wearing a pretty grey dress at the latest fashionable length—he thought it was new but could not be sure—and her hair was scraped back and tied with a red ribbon. She wore no make-up, except for stuff round her eyes. She was absurdly young and it hurt him to see her.

‘Well,’ she said under his scrutiny, ‘how do I look?’

He had to make an effort. ‘Fine. Perfectly fine. I think you were shamming.’

She laughed triumphantly. ‘There you are. In the morning the Dying Swan, by lunch time the Hungry Horse. Where are we going, by the way?’

He smiled. ‘You’ll see. How was Partridge? Worth getting up for?’

She glowed. ‘Oh yes, he always is. But Judson wasn’t. He came afterwards. I nearly went to sleep. People had to keep nudging me. That’s the other awful thing: apart from being sick in the mornings, I keep falling asleep all over the place. D’you know, I actually fell asleep in the bus queue this morning. Yes, really. Or very nearly. You know the sort of sleep you have in church, when you let your head sink lower
and lower and your eyes close and maybe you sleep for ten seconds or so, I don’t know, and then your head jerks up with a terrible jolt and you wonder if anyone’s noticed. Well, I did that, sort of, only in a bus queue. I just started drooping and drooping until I finally keeled over on the man in front and then of course I woke up and he was holding me and people were crowding round saying are you all right and other people were pretending not to notice. And I said yes of course I was all right, just pregnant and liable to go to sleep anywhere, and they all said oh well, and hum, and that’s different then, and they all got back in their places and we pretended it hadn’t happened, only the bus was ages coming and I had to make a real effort to make sure it didn’t happen again.’ She giggled. ‘That would have been
really
embarrassing.’

He said soberly, ‘You shouldn’t have been in a bus queue.’

‘Oh now
really.’
She was unconcerned, even teasing. ‘I can’t take taxis everywhere, like some people.’

‘You could. I’d be happy to pay.’

‘I know.’

‘But you wouldn’t use the money for taxis if I gave it to you. Would you?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh—’ She shrugged, cornered. ‘I just couldn’t. It would seem so extravagant when we need so many other things more.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well—’ She paused, suddenly alert. ‘Now this isn’t one of your—I mean, you promise you aren’t pumping me so you can rush off and do something silly.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. I know you.’

‘Come on, Prue. Out of purely academic interest. What is it you need more than taxis right now?’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing important. Nothing we can’t do without. But Gavin needs a new suit, you know, and some shoes, and if I had taxi money I’d rather buy things for him, or half a pound of steak instead of half a pound of cheese—’

He said sharply, ‘You mean you’re not getting enough to eat?’ and she laughed.

‘Oh, of course we are, it’s all protein. I just mean fun things like Horlicks.’

‘Horlicks?’ he repeated stupidly.

‘Yes. It’s very expensive, didn’t you know?’ She was proud of her knowledge: a month ago, he reflected, she would not have known the price of such things any more than he did. ‘Oh, and flowers and theatre tickets and all sorts of silly little extravagances. Because that’s what taxis are, after all. Anyway, it’s not going to arise because we’re going to manage as we are, that’s all agreed, and we
are
managing, too. Heaven knows we should do after all you did to help us over the flat.’

‘Wedding present,’ he said automatically. They had had conversations on this theme many times. ‘That’s allowed, after all.’

‘When I think what that lease must have cost you,’ she said, serious, ‘I go cold with horror, I really do. I mean, I’ve looked around and I know, well, it just can’t have been less than a thousand pounds.’

Her eyes searched his face for confirmation and he saw genuine horror and guilt. He did not understand it. How did it happen that a girl, not rich but not poor, all her life accustomed to the best that ordinary professional middle-class standards (if you cared to be technical about it) could provide, how did it happen that this girl had never learnt to spend money with abandon or to take any of these things for granted? He made his face a blank and sat firmly, ‘Now, Prue, presents are presents. You do like the flat, don’t you?’

To his amazement her eyes went misty. ‘You know I do. I adore it. It’s the most lovely flat in the whole of London.’

‘Well then, that’s fine. Just enjoy it. That’s what presents are for. Tell you what, I’ll make a bargain with you. I won’t mention taxis again if you don’t mention the lease. How’s that?’

‘It’s a deal.’ She held out her hand and he shook it. A cold hand, even on a warm day, but a firm handshake. There was a lot of decision in her, he thought. Not always for the good, but
there
.

‘Anyway,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘lots of pregnant women walk about and take buses. It doesn’t do them any harm.’

And what if it did? he thought. They could all choke on their varicose veins or miscarry on the pavement and I would only think what a pity, and maybe donate a little money to some appropriate charity, or increase my subscription to Oxfam, but they would not wring my heart, because they are not you.

‘That’s not the point,’ he said lightly.

‘What is then?’

He smiled at her as they reached their destination. ‘The point is, you’re my daughter.’

* * *

Prue said, getting out of the taxi, ‘I should have known we were coming here. Oh, you
are
lovely to bring me. I know you think it’s vulgar but I can’t help loving it.’

Manson glanced over his shoulder at the doorman. ‘I think he heard you.’

‘Oh dear. Will he mind?’

‘He’ll be pleased.’

They went down into the bar and were given the full treatment. Manson had been there often enough on business. Prue had tomato juice while she studied the menu: this was a new development. There had been a time, he reflected,
when she could drink him under the table, when she was about seventeen, before she went away to college, and he remembered thinking smugly that no man would ever be able to take advantage of her through drink.

‘I don’t know what I want,’ she said rapturously. ‘I could eat it all.’

‘If you really could,’ he said, ‘I would let you and I’m sure they wouldn’t charge. It would be such excellent publicity.’

She smiled up at him and he saw a great vista of meals stretching back into the past. Prue with a bib being fed in her high chair (he had never been squeamish about doing things for her, though less helpful later with the twins), Prue with braces on her teeth being taken out to tea from school, Prue an adolescent with the largest appetite he had ever seen. ‘What are you going to have?’ she asked.

‘Avocado, steak and salad. A man of simple tastes.’ He sipped the Scotch he had not meant to order: the drink before lunch that he had thought to cut out.

‘Mm, avocado.’ She actually licked her lips. “There’s always that, of course. But how do I decide between that and prawn cocktail?’

‘If you choose the prawn cocktail I might just let you share my avocado. Or you could have avocado with prawns.’

‘Oh, that’s a lovely solution. But there’s still the smoked salmon, isn’t there?’

‘Now there I can’t help you.’

The waiter smiled tolerantly and moved away. Prue crammed her mouth full of nuts and olives. ‘Oh, it’s so difficult. Maybe I don’t need to eat. Maybe I should just pin a menu on the wall at home and read it three times a day.’

At home. She meant the flat. He said with an edge to his voice, scarcely perceptible but there, ‘If you could decide on your main course I could order the wine.’

Her head jerked up from the menu. ‘You’re cross. I’m wasting your time.’

‘Not at all. But it would be something for them to be getting on with, that’s all. I’ve got all the time in the world till three.’ Had he ruined everything?

‘I’ll have smoked salmon, and the lamb to follow with peas and celery, no spuds.’ She closed the menu. ‘There. Will that do?’

‘That’s fine, if that’s what you really want.’ He gave the order to the waiter who had magically appeared at that precise moment. ‘And the wine list.’

Her eyes were troubled. ‘I’ve done something, haven’t I? Or said something.’

‘No.’

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘You haven’t, Prue.’

‘Yes, I have. You’re cross. You were all right before so it must be me. I ought to know but I don’t so you must tell me. That’s only fair.’

How direct she was. Much too direct and logical. Coming right out with it. Like that other time. (‘Daddy, I’ve got something to tell you. I’m going to have a baby.’) ‘Gevrey Chambertin,’ he said to the waiter. Prue did not care for rosé. Always an extremist, my daughter, he thought.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m ashamed to admit it, but it hurts me when you mention the flat as home. There now. My secret is out, and I know it’s quite indefensible, that’s why I didn’t tell you. Because you are quite in the right, the flat is your home and I am being absurd and sentimental and I know it.’

She was staring at him, both hands clasped over her mouth. She looked shocked. He thought, This gets worse and worse. Now I’ve disgusted her as well. Finally she moved her hands and said, ‘Oh God, I said it. It slipped out. I’ve been so careful—I knew you’d feel like that, you and Mummy. I’ve really made an effort not to use the word at all. Oh, I
am
sorry.’

His eyes stung. ‘Prue,’ he said, ‘you’re an idiot.’

‘Am I?’

‘And I love you.’ How seldom this was said after childhood: what curtain of restraint descended?

‘I love you too.’

They clinked glasses.

‘Strong stuff, this tomato juice,’ said Prue.

R
UPERT LOUNGED
back in Manson’s chair, tipping it so that it rested on two legs instead of four and made deeper dents in the carpet. He was wearing a check jacket in two shades of mustard, pale and dark, and a shirt in the pale shade with pants in the dark shade. He wore suede mustard shoes and no tie and was smoking a cigar, giving it occasional quite unnecessary taps on the ashtray in front of him, and in between these dropping ash in generous amounts on Manson’s carpet. It made Manson laugh just to look at him: not at him but simply out of sheer exhilaration that characters like Rupert existed outside fiction, that he could be there and all of a piece, perfectly assembled with a sense of design and symmetry rarely found beyond the bounds of art. It was refreshing, if you spent much of your time dealing in fiction, to find that your editor was a man who might well have stepped out of it: it reaffirmed your faith in the validity of what you were doing. I choose my staff well, he thought.

‘So,’ Rupert said, ‘you’re even later back from lunch than I am. That takes some doing.”

‘I had a very special date,’ said Manson, just for the hell of it, and watched Rupert’s eyebrows lift. Even these seemed mustard-coloured today: could it be that he dyed them to match each ensemble? Surely that would be too much, even for Rupert. ‘Prue,’ he added, to let Rupert down.

Rupert smiled, as if to show that he had not for a moment thought otherwise. I am well-known, Manson reflected, for
not being That Kind of Man. And Rupert—what kind is he? All kinds to all men. And women, come to that. ‘Ah yes,’ Rupert said. ‘Dear Prue. How is she? Gently burgeoning?’

Despite his affection for Rupert, Manson felt himself bristle. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Give the girl a chance.’

Rupert took the rebuke with good humour. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’s early days yet. I hope she still regards me as a secular godfather.’

‘I don’t know,’ Manson said. ‘I expect so. We didn’t talk about you.’ He had not meant to be so late, to find Rupert waiting for him, but instead of sending Prue back in the taxi he had gone with her, just for the ride, and then had to travel back again to the office, adding about half an hour to his journey. ‘So how did your lunch go?’ he asked, feeling they had been personal long enough. Lunch with Prue had made him forget the appointment with Rupert at three-thirty. Monica should have reminded me, he thought irritably; she’s getting too starry-eyed if it makes her forget things like that. Then at once he blamed himself for being so quick to blame her.

‘Oh,’ said Rupert, leaning back even further so that the chair actually touched the wall, ‘it verged on the disastrous, I think one could say.’

‘Oh really,’ Manson said conversationally, sitting down in the visitor’s chair and lighting a cigarette. ‘Care to tell me why?’ So that was how those marks on the wall were made, those curious scratches. It must have been Rupert all along. I’m sure I don’t lean back like that, he thought; I’m sure I’d notice if I did. He was not unduly worried by Rupert’s description of the lunch, knowing Rupert’s penchant for melodrama.

‘Well, she’d actually read the contract,’ Rupert said. ‘I mean right down to the small print. I assumed she’d acquired an agent but she said no, she’d merely taken what she described
as “a crash course”, I suppose that was just a macabre joke—what do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Manson said. ‘Was there anything wrong with the small print? I didn’t actually see the contract before you sent it to her but I assumed it was standard. Wasn’t it?’

He had never come so close to seeing Rupert shame-faced. ‘Well—’ Rupert said slowly, dragging the word out, ‘just a shade on the mean side.’

‘One hundred and fifty pounds and ten per cent to two thousand, five hundred?’ Manson asked.

Rupert jiggled his fingers so that more ash fell on the floor. ‘One hundred pounds and ten per cent to three thousand, five hundred,’ he said, almost inaudibly.