The Dog Who Came in from the Cold (6 page)

Her discovery two days later that she had written to the wrong
author could hardly have been comfortable. The manuscript that had been offered for was by a quite different author—one who was widely published already and would barely have noticed yet another publisher’s advance.

“La Ragg,” Rupert had said to his wife that evening, “made an absolutely colossal blunder. Colossal. She told somebody that his novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t. She got the wrong author. Stupid cow.”

Gloria Porter smiled. “How dim can you get?”

“Not much dimmer,” said Rupert. “And you know what? The story gets better.”

“Difficult to imagine,” said his wife. “Tell all.” She liked to hear stories of Barbara Ragg’s ineptitude; she, too, had come round to resenting Barbara’s enjoyment of the flat that surely had been meant for her Rupert, and ergo for her. She had tried to get Rupert to stop going on about the issue, but eventually decided that it would be simpler to join in his campaign. So now she found a curious satisfaction in his diatribes against Barbara and indeed came up with her own contributions to the feud. Well, it was all very well having the larger drawing room, she pointed out, but how could one possibly benefit from it when one’s life was such a mess in other respects? Barbara’s affair with the odious Oedipus Snark, for instance. It was as if the Recording Angel was
punishing
her for occupying a flat that was not, by rights, hers.

Rupert was enjoying himself. “I went into her office to get something or other, and there was la Ragg sitting at her desk, white as a sheet. Drained. So I said, ‘What ails thee, dear Ragg?’ or something to that effect, and she looked up and said, ‘I fear that I’ve made a small mistake.’ ”

“Small mistake!” expostulated Gloria. “La Ragg certainly be-lieves in understatement.”

“Indeed,” went on Rupert. “She told me about sending the letter to the wrong author. So I said, ‘How could you do that, Barbara?’
And my question, I assure you, was an apposite one. I just didn’t see how one could possibly write to one author in the belief that he’s another.”

Gloria shook her head in disbelief. This was such fun. “Absolutely,” she said. “And her answer?”

“Answer came there none,” said Rupert. “At least to begin with. For some time she said nothing at all, and then she opened her bovine mouth and said something about the two authors having very similar names. ‘In what respect?’ enquire I. ‘Oh, they’re both Welsh,’ la Ragg responds. I ask you! Both Welsh! So Neil Kinnock is Welsh and …” He waved his hand about airily, trying to think of another name. “And that other chap’s Welsh, but would we confuse the two of them, just because they come from …”

“Wales,” said Gloria. “There are loads of Welsh people. Loads of them. I don’t see how one can confuse people on the grounds of their nationality. I just don’t.”

Rupert rolled his eyes upwards. “Well, she did. But wait—here’s the denouement. She then told me that this poor chap—the one who thought that his book had been sold—had gone out and spent the advance.”

Gloria was very pleased to hear this; the story was getting better and better, just as Rupert had promised. She enjoyed her husband’s stories of office affairs—stories in which he came out rather well, as was to be expected, but Barbara Ragg and various other members of staff were shown to have fairly major failings, again, as one might expect. “No!” she exclaimed.

Rupert nodded with satisfaction. “Apparently he went out and bought a new car. Cleaned out his bank account in the expectation that he would soon be getting the money for the book.”

“Poor man,” said Gloria. “But I suppose he’ll be able to take it back.”

Rupert beamed. “Not so fast. Apparently he spent the entire day driving up and down Wales and clocked up an awful mileage. You
can’t take a new car back if you’ve put several hundred miles on it. It’s not a new car any more. The value drops very quickly and dramatically the moment you drive out of the showroom, and even more so when you put a few miles on the thingometer.”

“Odometer,” said Gloria.

Rupert raised a finger. There was even more to come. “La Ragg then says to me, and I quote verbatim—
ipse dixit
—she says, ‘I do hope that the agency will refund him the difference between what he paid and what the garage gives him when he takes the car back. In fact, I hope you don’t mind—I’ve written him a letter to that effect.’ ”

Gloria’s eyes glinted. “Outrageous!” she said.

Rupert reassured her. “Oh, I nipped that in the bud all right,” he said. “I told her that I
did
mind and that if she chose to rectify this mistake it was to be from her drawings on the firm and
not
from anywhere else. Those who make mistakes should pay for them, I said. And not with other people’s money.”

“That taught her, no doubt,” said Gloria.

“She sulked,” said Rupert. “She’s a terrible sulker, is la Ragg. Went all moody. You know how women get from time to time.”

Gloria looked at him sternly. “
Some
women,” she corrected him. “Not all.”

“Of course,” said Rupert. “Of course,
mon chou
. That’s what I meant.”

C
AROLINE PUT DOWN THE RECEIVER
. She had finished the telephone call she had been making to James, and had ended by blowing a kiss down the line. When, she asked herself, did I last do something like that? As a teenager, perhaps, when she had enjoyed
those long conversations with her first boyfriend, Will Brown, and had found it so hard to hang up, although they really had so little to say to one another beyond half-whispered declarations of undying love. And then Will Brown had gone to university in Cardiff and broken his promise to phone her every day. So much for men, she thought; they promise things and then don’t deliver. It was ever thus.

James was different. He always did what he said he was going to do, even if it made him just a tiny bit predictable. No matter. They had arranged to meet later that evening, when James would come round to the flat. They would cook a simple meal and watch a film together, making it the sort of evening that both she and James preferred. James had offered to cook if Caroline would go and buy Arborio rice—he had a special risotto recipe that he wanted to try—as well as a carton of crème fraiche and a punnet of raspberries. He would bring Parmesan cheese and asparagus for the risotto, and a bottle of wine that some friends had given him for looking after their cat while they went to Norwich for the weekend.

Caroline decided to go out to the shops immediately. None of her flatmates was in, and so she double-locked the door behind her and made her way out into the street. A short walk later, as she turned the corner onto Ebury Street, she found herself faced with a woman who had dropped her shopping bag and was bending down to recover a scattering of Brussels sprouts from the pavement. The woman looked up at her apologetically.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m sure that you didn’t expect to find your way blocked by Brussels sprouts, of all things.”

Caroline laughed, and bent down to help her retrieve the last of the vegetables. The woman looked vaguely familiar; obviously Caroline had seen her in the area before, but had not met her. There were plenty of people like that; they were the neighbours—in a loose sense—but one had no idea who they were.

“London pavements are perhaps not as clean as they ought be,”
the woman remarked. “But boiling will get rid of most things, I’d have thought.”

“Of course it will,” said Caroline. She sounded very authoritative, she realised, although she had no reason to profess expertise in the matter. “My boyfriend wouldn’t approve, though.”

She had not called James her boyfriend before, but it came quite naturally. And it was true: James would be appalled by the idea of eating Brussels sprouts that had been on the pavement. She could just hear him: “They should be put down, Caroline, not eaten!”

The woman straightened up. She seemed interested in Caroline’s remark. “Oh really? He’d disapprove? Why’s that?”

Caroline felt disloyal talking about James in this way but she could hardly leave the matter up in the air now. “He worries a bit about germs,” she said. “In fact, he worries a lot about them.”

The woman tucked the last of the Brussels sprouts back into her shopping bag. “I’ve seen you before, I think,” she said. “We haven’t met, of course, but we’ve seen one another, haven’t we?”

“I live back there,” Caroline said, nodding in the direction of Corduroy Mansions.

The woman extended a hand. “I’m Berthea Snark. I think I’m just behind you. You know the little mews?”

“Of course. I sometimes walk past those houses and think how nice they are. I’ve often wondered what they’re like inside.”

Berthea Snark smiled. “They’re very comfortable.
Gemütlich
, even.” She paused. “But why don’t you come in for a cup of tea? I was going to put the kettle on when I got back. You could satisfy your curiosity—mine is a typical mews house.”

Caroline hesitated. One did not accept invitations from complete strangers, and yet surely that rule did not apply to invitations from middle-aged women whose bags contained nothing more sinister than Brussels sprouts. No, this was not a “Have some Madeira, my dear” invitation; this was one neighbour inviting another in for a
cup of tea after she had helped her pick up dropped Brussels sprouts. What could be more innocent than that?

Caroline accepted, and began to retrace her steps with Berthea Snark.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” Berthea said as they walked along. “Does he worry about germs all the time?”

Caroline laughed. “Of course not. In fact, I think I may have given you the wrong impression. He uses hand steriliser, you see, and is worried about handling coins, but I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed.”

Berthea raised an eyebrow. “Some degree of concern about germs is quite natural,” she said. “But, if you’ll forgive my saying so, your young man seems to be rather too concerned.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “You see, perhaps I should explain. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m professionally interested in these matters.”

Caroline attempted to make light of the situation. “I assure you, James is quite normal.” Is he? she asked herself. Is he really?

They were now at the entrance to the mews, and Berthea Snark was pointing to a red-painted door halfway along the row of houses. “My place,” she said. “Let’s talk further once we’re inside. You can tell me all about your James.” Then she added, “And his fears.”

Caroline frowned. Perhaps she should not have accepted this invitation after all. Hansel and Gretel, she thought.

“A
CUP OF TEA
?” asked Berthea Snark. “Or would you prefer coffee?”

Caroline chose tea, explaining that she could not drink coffee in the afternoon or early evening. “It’s the wrong taste,” she said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Berthea. “Coffee is possible between seven-thirty in the morning and eleven-twenty. And then again after eight-thirty at night.”

Caroline laughed. “That’s very precise,” she said.

“I’m not entirely serious,” said Berthea. “And I’m quite happy to bend the rules I set for myself. But we do need some rules in our lives, you know. As a psychotherapist, I can assure you that we need rituals and rules to anchor ourselves.” She paused. They were standing in the entrance hall to her mews house and she now directed Caroline along the small corridor, which led to a room at the back. “You know, we did ourselves a great deal of damage in the sixties and seventies. Which was before you were born, of course, but will be affecting your world every bit as much as anybody else’s.”

Caroline looked about her. They were in a comfortable sitting room, neatly furnished in a surprisingly contemporary style, with one wall entirely taken up by shelves. A row of CDs, stacked two deep, occupied one of the shelves, the rest being filled with books.

“What did we do?” she asked.

Berthea gestured to a chair. “Please sit down. What did we do? Well, I suppose I should have said something was
done to us
. We, in the sense of the mass of the people, the men and the women in the street, so to speak, didn’t do it. It was done by people who considered themselves opinion-formers. Social change tends to come from the moulders and manipulators of opinion, does it not? So people who may be dismissed as theorists are actually immensely important. Mrs. Thatcher made the great mistake of thinking that the academic talking heads did not count. They did.”

Caroline raised an eyebrow. Was this woman
mad
? Was she one of those people who had some grand theory that they would thrust upon anybody they met, even somebody who had helped them retrieve their Brussels sprouts from the pavement? She waited for Berthea to continue.

“There was a body of opinion in this country that set out to
remodel the fabric of our society,” Berthea continued. “They weakened the common sense of the people; they intimidated them. They decried that which people—ordinary people—actually believed in. They spoke in the language of liberation, but what did they liberate people to? To a new servitude—a servitude of shallowness and impermanence, of loneliness and alienation.

“They destroyed the familiar—they preached against it, ridiculed it. And in doing this they weakened the notion of order in people’s lives. People used to have a sense of what their lives meant because they belonged to things, and observed certain rules. You belonged to a union, or a church for that matter, which gave you a sense of who you were. It made you proud of your craft or your trade, or of being Catholic or Church of England or whatever. It gave structure. You also knew where you came from—you had a body of which you were a member. You shared a culture.”

Berthea continued to talk as she moved into the little kitchen off the sitting room. Caroline watched her as she filled the kettle and plugged it in. This woman
was
mad. She would drink her tea, then look pointedly at her watch and make her excuses.

“Half my professional time,” said Berthea over her shoulder, “is spent trying to help people who simply don’t have any purpose in their lives. They come to me because they are unhappy—they think that therapy will help. But what are they trying to heal? The wound in their psyche or the wound in society? They’re actually perfectly all right in themselves—it’s society that has done the damage because it’s the one that’s sick.”