You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (28 page)

Mr Freemont was the only Archive employee who actually spoke, as he pedantically explained his criteria for choosing their latest acquisitions and mooted the possibility of having a more stringent vetting procedure for allowing access to the Archive. He’d had a real bee in his bonnet ever since he caught Our Lady of the Blessed Hankie popping a mint humbug into her mouth while she was in the Reading Room.

‘… even though I’d like to draw your attention to the sign at Reception, which clearly states that all food and drink is strictly forbidden.’

Neve was starting to feel less anxious now and more like she might actually die from sheer boredom. She stifled a yawn and caught the eye of Mary Vickers from the Arts Council, who smiled at her.

‘Well, that’s certainly given us all something to think about, George,’ Jacob Morrison suddenly said, cutting Mr Freemont off mid-rant. ‘Shall we move on to Any Other Business now?’

‘I hadn’t finished,’ Mr Freemont reminded them. ‘I also wanted to talk about the umbrella-stand in—’

‘Please, George, I would like to get out of here some time before midnight,’ Mary Vickers said, with a rueful little smile, as if she was riveted by the conversation but had another very important engagement.

Mr Freemont settled back on his chair with an aggrieved huff and Neve gripped the edge of the table because Any Other Business could mean anything. Maybe Rose had also discovered that she sometimes faxed her mum in Spain when no one else was around; that was probably grounds for instant dismissal.

‘So, Any Other Business?’ Harriet Fitzwilliam-White looked around the table without much enthusiasm.

‘Yes. Rose and I would like to discuss something,’ Chloe said, actually daring to stand up. ‘We have a proposal to take the Archive into the twenty-first century and bring in new revenue too.’

‘I thought we’d talked about this, Chloe,’ Mr Freemont snapped, spraying breadcrumbs across the table because he was in the middle of stuffing down the last prawn-cocktail sandwich. ‘And I made my thoughts perfectly clear.’

‘Yes, you did,’ Chloe said evenly, looking directly at Jacob Morrison as she spoke, and Neve noticed that Chloe was wearing a much darker lipstick than she normally did and a smart grey dress and nipped-in jacket that was an upgrade on her usual jeans and jumper. ‘But maybe I wasn’t being perfectly clear, as you didn’t seem to grasp the concept of bringing in our own revenue streams so we’re not reliant on donations.’

‘That’s certainly something I’d like to hear,’ Jacob Morrison said, lounging back on his chair. ‘Who doesn’t love a new revenue stream?’

‘It won’t take long,’ Rose said crisply. ‘I made a PowerPoint presentation.’

There was a faint murmur rising up. Neve still wasn’t completely on board, as she had a horrible feeling that one way of bringing in a new revenue stream was by getting rid of her and using her annual salary of fourteen thousand, three hundred and forty-seven pounds (before tax) to secure some hot literary collection. She also hadn’t known that the Archive possessed a computer that was capable of producing a PowerPoint presentation without crashing.

Everyone else seemed a lot more excited as Chloe started to talk and Rose pressed buttons on an ancient laptop. Their plan was to start digitising the Archive and introducing subscription charges, as well as joining up with other literary archives and academic libraries to create a database of dead people’s writings. Apparently there were all sorts of organisations queuing up to fund such an innovative project.

It actually sounded do-able, though Neve could see a lot of scanning in her near future, if she got to keep her job. Maybe they’d want to hire some computer whiz kid, she thought, as she looked down the table and saw Mr Freemont’s head sinking lower and lower in defeat, which made the three greasy strands of hair that he combed over his ghostly white bald pate even more prominent.

She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, and not for the first time either. Yes, he smelled awful and he was cantankerous, curmudgeonly and also rather misogynistic because he always tried to turn down any new acquisitions from women writers, but Neve knew what it was like not to fit in. She doubted that Mr Freemont had ever fitted in anywhere in his life, so it was no wonder that he’d turned his back on personal hygiene and good social skills.

Chloe and Rose had finished their presentation and shared a small, smug smile as absolutely everyone, except Neve and Mr Freemont, fired questions at them, which was absolutely unheard-of in an AGM. Usually you only spoke when you were spoken to and spent the rest of the time avoiding eye-contact.

Jacob Morrison had whipped out his BlackBerry and was pencilling in a meeting with Chloe, Rose and Harriet Fitzwilliam-White to discuss the matter further. Chloe was beaming, Rose was serene in her victory and Mr Freemont kept opening his mouth, only to close it again, as he realised that digitising the Archive was going to happen whether he liked it or not. Neve saw Philip give her a surreptitious thumbs-up, and light finally dawned: Mr Freemont was the one being thrown under the bus, not her.

Neve fidgeted in her chair, keen for the meeting to end now so she could beetle to the safety of the back office in the basement and avoid Mr Freemont, preferably for the rest of the year, because he was going to be in a
filthy
mood after this.

‘There was one other thing we wanted to discuss,’ Rose announced, once the hubbub had died down. ‘It’s about Neve.’

Everyone turned to look at her, including old Mr Granville, who hadn’t been able to sleep in all the excitement.

Neve felt a blush scorching her cheeks, which was odd when the rest of her had suddenly gone icy cold. ‘Look, if it’s about that letter,’ she stumbled, ‘the thing is … there was a queue at the Post Office and—’

‘It’s about Neve,’ Rose repeated, glaring Neve into silence, ‘and a woman called Lucy Keener who died a couple of years ago. She never had anything published …’

‘Actually she did have two poems in
Time and Tide,
’ Neve interrupted, then lapsed into silence when Alice, one of the part-timers sitting next to her, gave her thigh a warning pinch.

‘Which is probably why Mr Freemont didn’t feel that there was a place for her literary estate in the Archive,’ Rose continued smoothly, as if Neve hadn’t spoken. ‘While this is perfectly understandable, we think that decision should be reviewed.’

‘It’s something we all feel very strongly about, thanks to Neve, who has tirelessly championed Lucy Keener,’ Philip said, as soon as Rose had got to the end of her sentence, and Neve wondered if they’d actually rehearsed this, because, as Chloe started talking about how much everyone had loved reading
Dancing on the Edge of the World
, it was coming across as very polished.

She sat there in frozen silence as, one by one, the other members of staff chimed in with the Lucy love. She didn’t know whether to be mad at them for going behind her back or getting up so she could hug each and every one of them. She’d never have had the guts to plead Lucy’s case before the Trustees.

‘And Neve has even started writing a biography of Lucy Keener,’ Philip finished proudly. ‘Haven’t you, Neevy?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it a biography,’ she mumbled, head bent so she could stare at Mr Freemont’s trail of breadcrumbs. ‘It started off as a timeline of Lucy’s life as I tried to collate her correspondence with her diaries and it kind of, well … it just sort of happened.’ She frowned and came to a grinding and agonising halt.

There was silence, then someone coughed and Neve looked up to see Mary Vickers giving her an encouraging smile and she even had Jacob Morrison’s full attention, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

‘So, Neve, can you tell us a little bit about the mysterious and unpublished Lucy Keener?’ he asked.

She stammered out the first few chronological facts about Lucy, then paused. This wasn’t hard, they weren’t asking her to find the square root of something, and she owed it to herself and God, she owed it to Lucy Keener most of all, not to screw this up. And after Neve thought that, the rest was easy.

Neve didn’t know how long she talked, though at one point, the part-timers left and Rose got up to turn on the lights, but eventually when she could hear that her voice was growing hoarse, she tried to wrap it up.

‘… and she was ashamed of Charles for betraying his country and working for the KGB, but she also felt partly responsible because she’d introduced him to Socialism. When he left his wife and family and defected to Russia, she went with him … it was the only way that they could ever be together. But she was horrified by what she saw over there and she came back to England two years later to find herself completely ostracised, not just for defecting but because she’d run away with a married man, a member of the Establishment who’d turned traitor, and it destroyed her. She didn’t write anything for thirty years, then she started again. Her last poems and short stories, they’re just … well, they’re kind of heart-breaking.’

There was another silence when Neve stopped and swallowed hard because she hadn’t thought she’d get so emotional and choked up talking about Lucy. She smiled weakly and waited for someone to say something.

‘This Lucy Keener, she certainly seems to have had quite an effect on you,’ Harriet Fitzwilliam-White said to Neve. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to Neve. ‘I can remember when Charles Holden defected; the papers hinted that there might be a woman involved, but they never named her.’

‘Well, the family of Laura Holden, Charles’s wife, were very well connected and they tried to keep as many details out of the press as possible,’ Neve explained. ‘It was bad enough that Charles was a traitor, without being an adulterer too.’

‘I should probably read this novel then,’ Jacob Morrison said, although he didn’t sound overly keen at the prospect.

‘You can’t.’ Mr Freemont had been silent all this time, though periodically his tongue would slide out of his mouth so he could moisten his chapped lips. ‘Neve was under strict instructions to send everything pertaining to Lucy Keener back to the solicitor administering her estate.’

‘George, I think it’s fairly obvious that everything pertaining to Lucy Keener
wasn’t
sent anywhere,’ Mary Vickers said gently. She seemed highly amused by it all. ‘It’s very exciting. Maybe Ms Slater has discovered a new literary star.’

‘So, Neve, do you have a copy of this novel?’ Jacob Morrison asked, and for the life of her, Neve didn’t know whether still being in possession of all of Lucy’s papers was a good thing or a sackable thing. She threw Chloe an imploring look.

‘It’s being stored off-site,’ Chloe said, which sounded a lot better than admitting it was in an archive box in Neve’s spare room. ‘You’ll want to see the first few chapters of the biography Neevy’s written too. Absolutely unputdownable.’

‘Why don’t you just bang me out a synopsis instead? No more than two pages,’ Jacob suggested, reaching into the inner pocket of his suit jacket to extract a business card. ‘You can include it with a copy of the manuscript of er,
Dancing on the Edge of the World
, is it?’

Neve stretched across to take the card and said thank you and smiled and nodded, but she knew that Jacob had only asked her to write a synopsis to be polite, in much the same way that he’d probably read the first page of
Dancing on the Edge of the World
and decide that it had no literary merit. He was a super-agent with a couple of Man Booker Prize winners on his client roster and at least three sex-and-shopping novelists who were always on the bestseller lists. He wouldn’t ‘get’ the novel and Neve almost didn’t want to send him the manuscript because she felt fiercely protective of Lucy – which had to be the reason why the universe (or Lucy’s solicitor) had entrusted her literary estate to Neve.

The meeting was finally wrapping up. Neve was painfully aware of Mr Freemont’s squinty eyes resting first on her and then on Chloe as Harriet Fitzwilliam-White thanked them all for attending, as if they’d had any choice in the matter. Then the Trustees were getting up, Jacob Morrison slipping Chloe another one of his cards as he walked past her.

Chloe, Rose, Mr Freemont and Neve sat there listening to the sound of five pairs of feet tramping over the parquet flooring in the foyer. Mr Freemont waited until they heard the door close behind them, then turned to Neve, his weak chin wobbling in fury. ‘Well, I would never have expected that
from you
, Miss Slater,’ he hissed, as Neve cowered back in her chair. She’d known that she’d bear the brunt of Mr Freemont’s anger. He wouldn’t dare start on Rose or Chloe, because they didn’t even pretend to respect his authority. ‘I expressly ordered you to return those papers. What you’ve done … well, it’s theft.’

‘Oh no, it isn’t, George,’ Rose snapped, as Chloe took advantage of the distraction to slip out of the room. ‘It’s not at all like theft. It’s a pity you don’t spend less time writing me memos about my excessive use of Post-it notes and spend more time thinking of ways to generate new business.’

‘We’re not about generating new business; we’re about protecting a literary heritage,’ Mr Freemont snapped back. Once they got on to this particular subject, they’d be going at it for hours, so Neve felt perfectly justified in jumping up and racing for the door with a muttered, ‘Sorry,’ flung over her shoulder.

‘I want a word with you!’ she squeaked furiously at Chloe who was hurrying down the stairs that led to the basement. ‘Stop right there!’