The Silent Tide (12 page)

At this point they were interrupted by the waiter, who cleared away their plates. After they had declined dessert and ordered coffee, Joel moved the conversation swiftly on.

‘Where did you work before Parchment, Emily?’

‘Artemis,’ she told him. ‘I’d been desperate to get into publishing, but it was so competitive. I got a temp job first of all, in their Rights department, and then someone needed an assistant in Editorial and amazingly I got it. One of those strokes of luck.’

‘So you worked your way up there?’

‘Yes – again I was lucky. An editor didn’t come back after having a baby and I was given a few of her authors to look after. It went on from there, really.’

‘It must have been more than luck,’ he teased. ‘Not a spark or two of talent?’

She smiled . ‘Maybe . Lots of very hard work, certainly. I used to be there all hours.’

‘Good for you. It’s obviously paid off. And how did you get this job?’

‘Gillian was looking for another acquiring editor. I’d had a couple of successes at Artemis . When she called me it seemed a good move. But now I have to prove myself.’

‘I’ll do my very best for you with this book.’ He gave one of his warm smiles and she felt a rush of happiness.

When they’d finished their coffees he said he must hurry; he had another appointment.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay and deal with the bill.’

‘Thank you for everything,’ he said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘I’ll call you very soon.’

‘And I’ll send you those photocopies,’ she replied. ‘Take care.’

But as she watched him disappear down the stairs, she felt her unease return. It was the evasive way he’d answered her questions about Isabel. Was she wrong to believe he was holding something back?

Isabel

‘No gentlemen friends and the door’s locked at midnight.’ Mrs Fortinbras, pale, plump and powdered, swollen feet in mid-heeled shoes, had two young daughters of her own upstairs and wasn’t the sort to stand any nonsense. Widowhood might mean letting out rooms to strangers, but she still had her standards.

‘Of course,’ Isabel murmured. Her gaze roved the small ground-floor room, her new home. She noted the cloths stuffed against draughts in the bomb-bowed window, and the ugly utility furniture. It was clear why the rent was so modest. She sniffed a faint smell of gas in the air, presumably from the ugly fire bolted into the old grate. Still, the room was clean and got the afternoon light, and there was a carpet of reasonable quality.

In the end, it had been Audrey who had found it. Audrey, who knew Vivienne, who lived in this shambling house in Highgate, near the cemetery, where a room had become vacant. The previous occupant had been taken seriously ill and removed to hospital, never to return. The thought of this cast a pall over the enterprise for Isabel, but she tried not to dwell on it.

When Vivienne had brought her to see the room a few evenings previously, Mrs Fortinbras had requested two weeks’ rent in cash. This Isabel had just handed over and it had taken up all her funds. That very morning she’d plucked up courage and asked Stephen for a small advance on her wages. He’d said nothing, but had taken out his wallet on the spot, and pressed several notes into her hand. He’d also said that he’d have a word with Mr Greenford the accountant on Monday to see if he ‘could do better for her’. Both of them felt intensely embarrassed at the need to discuss money, but she thanked him profusely.

‘Not at all, don’t mention it. I must say, Berec’s a sound chap to have recommended you,’ he said, picking up her latest report from the desk and studying it. It was about a novel by a young Englishman who’d been brought up in Kenya. She’d admired the lush descriptions of the African landscape, but found the writer’s tone disturbing.

‘Yes, this is the crux,’ he said, reading from her final paragraph. ‘“One might call it an old-fashioned approach. The author does not seem truly to understand the people about whom he is writing, nor does he strive to do so. The views bred into him intervene all the time. He has no curiosity.” That’s exactly it. You’ve hit upon the problem very succinctly. Let’s turn it away.’

As he put down the report, his eyes had alighted on another manuscript on the desk and he brightened. ‘This one, however, isn’t bad. Have you time to take a look or shall I ask an outside reader?’

‘I’ll do it,’ she said firmly, taking it before he could change his mind. She sensed his eyes on her as she left the room.

She took the keys Mrs Fortinbras held out to her now, and waited till the woman had gone away upstairs. Then she set about unpacking her meagre possessions, lining up her shoes under the rickety bed, hanging her skirts and dresses on the crooked rail set in the alcove, arranging the books on the shelves by the fire. She missed her home with Penelope already, especially Gelert’s companionship. Her aunt had been faintly surprised when Isabel announced that she’d found her own place. Isabel was touched when Penelope had tried to make her stay, but she also sensed the woman’s relief when she shook her head. ‘It’s too good an opportunity to miss,’ Isabel lied. She turned down suggestions of Reginald’s help and transported all her things in a taxi. After all, there wasn’t much.

She pushed her empty cases behind the shoes and sank down on the bed, which let out a creak so violent she leaped up and tried again more gingerly. She wondered what to do with herself. Vivienne, who was Jewish, had been spending the day with her family. For the first time in London, Isabel felt truly alone. But not miserable. Before her, the curtains stood open and a golden January twilight began to steal over the room. A blackbird was singing on its perch in an ilex bush and she listened for a moment. How peaceful it all was. Tomorrow being a Sunday, she’d explore. There was Highgate Cemetery to see, which she’d passed on the taxi ride, and a row of interesting-looking shops round the corner.

She was setting her alarm clock on the bedside table, when there came a gentle knock and the door opened. ‘Hello, are you decent?’ A smiling freckled face with a frizzy halo of fair hair peered round, and a lanky figure slipped into the room.

‘Vivienne,’ Isabel said joyfully. ‘I didn’t know you were back. How is your family?’

‘Just about endurable today,’ Vivienne said, coming to sit next to her on the bed, which squealed in complaint. ‘Looks like you’ve settled in all right, then. Gosh, it’s chilly in here. Have you fed the meter? Let me do it.’ She slotted in Isabel’s last few coins and found matches on the mantelpiece. She crouched by the fire like a spindly insect, then yelped in surprise as the gas caught light. They both knelt down beside the fire, waiting for it to heat up. Soon the room began to feel like home.

‘Super. I’ll go and make a pot of tea.’

She and Vivienne had taken to each other immediately. The other girl must have been a couple of years her senior, and she, too, had been forced to move away from home to establish her independence. Vivienne was at Duke’s College and had recently joined a research team in a laboratory, working towards a further degree whilst earning a little money for setting up equipment. It must be a pittance if she had to live here. Her parents had originally supported her desire to study, but not to pursue a career as a scientist. She and Isabel came from quite different backgrounds. Her parents sounded wealthy, though they tried to control Vivienne by denying her money. The link to Isabel’s world was slight. ‘I don’t know Audrey very well, actually’ she’d told Isabel when they first met. ‘My brother works with Anthony, her fiancé. Audrey’s awfully stylish, isn’t she?’ That was something else the girls had in common: nervousness of Audrey.

Moving to Highgate that winter was only one way in which Isabel began to establish herself and grow in confidence. Lord Pockmartin’s book had sold so well over Christmas, along with the film star’s biography, that Mr Greenford the accountant agreed with Stephen McKinnon that a small raise for Isabel was indeed possible. The weeks went past and there was no more talk of her having to leave.

Isabel and Audrey had their work cut to a pattern now. There were still hours of typing for Isabel to do, and filing, and showing visitors in and answering phones and making endless cups of tea, but she became quicker at the office tasks and was now reading regularly for Stephen, as did Trudy, and a freelance reader named Percival Morris, who was shy as a moth in person, but devastatingly acerbic in his written reports.

Given that Trudy was back to full strength, Isabel felt she had to be tactful about impinging on her#R0 McKinnon responsibilities, but Trudy was generous and seemed genuinely not to mind. After all, the firm’s decisionmaking lay with Stephen, all aspects of negotiating for new books, indeed any money matter. Trudy’s job was to work with the authors and to turn the scruffiest of scripts into rigorously edited and properly proofread books. There was plenty of work for all, and towards the end of January when there was a rush, she asked Isabel to look at some proofs for her and showed her how to mark them up. ‘They’re a final set, so you’re just checking to see that all the corrections have been made properly,’ she said. ‘It’s the Ambrose Fairbrother, and he really has been very naughty with all his last-minute rewriting.’

‘I’ll can start on it straight away,’ Isabel said, glancing at Audrey, who shrugged. ‘Stephen’s out this afternoon.’

Trudy was pleased with Isabel’s careful work and began feeding her other tasks. Before long she was checking rolls of galley proofs and engaging in conversations with writers, typesetters and printers. January turned to February and although she was still anxious that the moment might arrive when Stephen would call her into his office and say sorry, he couldn’t afford to pay her any longer, that moment didn’t come and she started to relax.

She was enjoying her new life. In the evenings, sometimes, she’d go to a party, the launch of a new novelist, perhaps, or accompany Berec to a poetry reading. If she and Vivienne were both at home, they’d cook a simple meal together in the chilly kitchen at the back of the hall, where occasionally one of the house’s other inhabitants might be glimpsed. There was a plain-faced, youngish woman, the secretary for a uniformed church organisation , who once gave them leaflets of Bible verses with her too-bright smile. A fourth tenant was much older, a woman who , Isabel guessed from her manner – rightly, it turned out – was a retired schoolteacher. She wore a perpetual expression of disapproval and kept herself to herself.

On 10 February, Isabel celebrated her twentieth birthday. Despite her general neglect of her nieces and nephews, Penelope had always remembered Isabel’s birthday, and this year she sent her five pounds, an unimaginably high sum. Isabel didn’t like to question the motive. Perhaps her aunt felt guilty that she’d not been more hospitable. She spent it on clothes, using all her precious ration coupons. After all, she had to be smart for work. And even Audrey gave her approving looks when she wore her new suits. Appearance was everything for a girl on the make.

Isabel

Isabel sat at her desk, trying to ignore a throbbing headache. She stared at the page in the typewriter in front of her, but the words kept moving in and out of focus. It was a cold day, even for March, but she felt as if she was on fire. A wave of dizziness finally overcame her and she laid her face on the desk. How lovely and cool it was.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Audrey sighed, ‘don’t droop about here. Go home. There’s no point being a martyr if the rest of us catch it.’

Jimmy Jones, the packer’s son, was loitering in the doorway, picking his nose and waiting for Trudy to give him a parcel to take to the Post Office.

‘What are
you
staring at?’ Audrey snapped. ‘Go and find her a taxi.’

‘Awright, keep your hair on,’ he muttered and slouched off.

‘You needn’t worry,’ she told Isabel, who was trying to finish up. ‘Take the fare out of petty cash – spoil yourself.’

Audrey helped Isabel on with her coat. Whilst the older girl’s back was turned, Isabel slipped a manuscript that Stephen had given her inside her shopping bag. If she had to be ill, she’d want something to read.

For the next three days, however, there was no question of reading anything. She slept, cocooned in the extra blankets that Vivienne had dragooned their landlady into giving her so she didn’t have to spend precious pennies on gas. Nothing passed her parched lips and burning throat but water. Each evening, when she came home, Vivienne went and sat with her, sponged her face and tidied up the bed. On the fourth day she felt a little better, and on the fifth, well enough to feel absolutely wretched. She missed her home, she missed her old bedroom, above all she missed her mother. She blew her nose until it was swollen and stinging and felt sorry for herself. She must be the loneliest, ugliest girl in the world; everyone had forgotten her and no one would ever love her again. It was in this mood that she cast about for distraction and remembered the manuscript in her bag. She staggered out of bed and fetched it.

An hour later, she had forgotten her aching head and runny nose. She was completely caught up in a young man’s voice, as he told her a story of suffering, of love denied. She read until it grew dark and Vivienne knocked on the door to see how she was. She read again when Vivienne left her later. She dreamed about the characters and woke in the night to find pages of the manuscript rustling round her on the bed. The next morning she finished it, actually weeping when the young man and his love, Diana, were finally parted by Diana’s death in an air raid when he was on his way to meet her. But when she’d dried her eyes, she gathered up the pages and felt better, much better. She sat up in bed, a coat around her shoulders, and wrote a long and enthusiastic report. Finally she threw pen and paper aside, tired out. She had to be well enough to go to work the next morning. If she arrived early she could type up the report before tackling the pile of tasks that undoubtedly awaited her return, and eagerly anticipate Stephen’s response.