Muriel Spark - The Ballad of Peckham Rye

‘No, sir, you’re welcome. We get people from the papers sometimes as well as students. Did you read of the finds?’

Towards evening a parcel was delivered at Miss Frierne’s addressed to Dougal. It contained his notebooks.

‘I hope to remain with you,’ Dougal said to Miss Frierne, ‘for at least two months. For I see no call upon me to remove from Peckham as yet.’

‘If I’m still alive…‘ Miss Frierne said. ‘I saw that man again this morning. I could swear it was my brother.’

‘You didn’t speak to him?’

‘No. Something stopped me.’ She began to cry. ‘Who put the pot of indoor creeping ivy in my room?’ Dougal said. ‘Was it my little dog-toothed blonde process-controller?’

‘Yes, it was a scraggy little blonde. Looks as if she could do with a good feed. They all do.’

Mr Druce whispered, ‘I couldn’t manage it the other night. Things were difficult.’

‘I sat at the Dragon in Dulwich from nine till closing time,’ Dougal said, ‘and you didn’t come.’

‘I couldn’t get away. Mrs Druce was on the watch. If you’d come to that place in Soho-’

Dougal consulted his pocket diary. He shut it and put it away. ‘Next month it would have to be. This month my duties press.’ He rose and walked up and down Mr Druce’s office as with something on his mind.

‘I called for you last Saturday,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I thought you would care for a spin.’

‘So I understand,’ Dougal said absently. ‘I believe I was researching on Miss Coverdale that afternoon.’ Dougal smiled at Mr Druce. ‘Interrogating her, you know.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Her devotion to you is quite remarkable,’ Dougal said. ‘She spoke of you continually.’

‘As a matter of interest, what did she say? Look, Dougal, you can’t trust everyone -‘

Dougal looked at his watch. ‘Goodness,’ he said, ‘the time. What I came to see you about – the question of my increase in salary.’

‘It’s going through,’ Mr Druce said. ‘I put it to the Board that, since Weedin’s breakdown, a great deal of extra work falls on your shoulders.’

Dougal massaged both his shoulders, first his high one, then his low one.

‘Dougal,’ said Mr Druce.

‘Vincent,’ said Dougal, and departed.

JOYCE WILLIS said, ‘Quite frankly, the first time Richard invited you to dinner I knew we’d found the answer. Richard didn’t see it at first, quite frankly, but I think he’s beginning to see it now.’

She crossed the room, moving her long hips, and looked out of the bow window into the August evening. ‘Richard should be in any moment,’ she said. She touched her throat with her fine fingers. She put to rights a cushion in the window-seat.

Still standing, she lifted her glass, and sipped, and put it down on a low table. She crossed the room and sat on a chair upholstered in deep pink brocade.

‘I feel I can really talk to you now,’ she said. ‘I feel we’ve known each other for years.

She said, ‘The Drovers were getting the upper hand. Richard was, well, quite frankly, being pushed into the position of subordinate partner.

‘The nephew, Mark Bewlay – that’s her nephew, of course – came to the firm two – was it two? – no, it was three years ago, imagine it, in October. And he was supposed to go through the factory from A to Z. Well, quite frankly he was sitting on the Board within six months. Then the son John came straight down from Oxford last year, and same thing again. The Board’s reeking with Drovers.

‘One of Richard’s great mistakes – I’m speaking to you quite frankly,’ she said, ‘was insisting on our living in Peckham. Well, the house is all right – but I mean, the environment. There are simply no people in the place. Our friends always get lost finding the way here; they drive round for hours. And there are blacks at the other end of the Avenue, you know. I mean, it’s so silly.

‘Richard’s a Scot, of course,’ she said, ‘and in a way that’s why I think you understand his position. He’s so scrupulously industrious and pathologically honest. And it’s rather sweet in a way. Yes, I must say that. He simply doesn’t see that the Drovers living in Sussex in a Georgian rectory gives them a big advantage. A big advantage. It’s psychological.’

She said. ‘Yes, Richard insists on living near the job, as he says. And quite frankly, I have to put up with a good deal of condescension from Queenie Drover, although she’s sweet in a way. She knows of course that Richard’s a bit old-fashioned and prides himself on being a real merchant, they both know, the Drovers. They know it only too well.’

She filled both glasses with sherry, turning the good bones of her wrists and holding the glasses at the ends of her long fingers with their lacquered nails and the bright emerald. She looked at herself, before she sat down, in the gilt-framed glass and turned back a wisp of her short dark-gold hair. Her face was oval; she posed it to one side; she said, ‘Of course it has been a disappointment that we had no children. If there had been a son to support Richard on the Board… Sometimes I feel, quite frankly, the firm should be called Drover, Drover, Drover Willis, not just Drover Willis.

‘Richard was touched a few weeks ago,’ she said, ‘he told me so, when he met you one Saturday afternoon while he was waiting for me outside the shop, and he saw you working away on your Saturday afternoon, spending your Saturday afternoon with a Peckham girl, trying to get to know the types. Richard thinks you are brilliant, you know. A fine brain and a sound moral sense, he told me, quite frankly, and he thinks you’re absolutely wasted in the personnel research job. The thing about you – and I saw it long before Richard and I’m not just saying it because you’re here – you’re so young and energetic, and yet so steady. I suppose it’s being a Scot.

‘Not many young fellows of your age,’ she said, ‘- I’m not flattering you – and of your qualifications and ability would be prepared to settle down as you have done in a place like Peckham where the scope for any kind of gaiety is so limited, there’s nothing to do and there are no young people for you to meet. I’m speaking quite frankly, as I would to my own son if I had one.

‘I feel towards you,’ she said, ‘as to a son. I hope – I would always hope – to count you as one of the family although, as you know, there are only Richard and me. I was so interested in your conversation the other night about so many things I didn’t quite frankly know existed in this area. The Camberwell Art Gallery I knew of course; but the excavations of the tunnel – I had only read of its progress in the South London Observer - I didn’t dream there was anything so serious and learned behind it.’

She turned and plumped out the cushion behind her. She looked at her pointed toes. ‘You must sometimes come to town with us. We go to the theatre at least once a week,’ she said.

She said, “The idea that you should come on the Board with Richard in the autumn is an excellent one. It will almost be like having a Willis in the firm. Your way of speaking is so like Richard’s – I mean, not just the accent, but well, quite frankly, I mean, you don’t say much, but when you say something it’s the right thing. Richard needs you and I think I’m right in saying it’s an ideal prospect for a young man of your temperament, and it means serious responsibility and an established position within a matter of five or six years. You have this way of approaching life seriously, not just here today and gone tomorrow, and it appeals to Richard. Richard is a judge of character. One day the firm might be Drover, Willis & Dougal. Just a moment -‘