Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Gloria pounced. “What do you mean as it turned out ? What turned out?”

Rupert looked flustered. “It’s just an expression. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Oh, yes it does. If you say ‘as it turned out’ you are suggesting, I should have thought, that something happened. Well, what happened? What happened with Ratty Mason?”

Rupert rose from the table. “I’m not going to sit here and be interrogated,” he said. “Let’s get this clear once and for all. I barely know Ratty Mason. I hardly knew him then. There’s nothing more to be said about him.” He glared at Gloria. “And now I’m going to the office. I’ve got work to do.”

He reached down and took a final sip of his coffee, banging the cup down and spilling the dregs on the tablecloth.

“Look what you’ve done,” said Gloria. But Rupert was not listening. He went into their bedroom, took his jacket from the wardrobe, and straightened his tie, ready to leave. Then he returned to the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that … All this stress. Publishers are cutting advances across the board. Our authors are being terribly bolshy. La Ragg has swanned off to Scotland with her toyboy and … and it’s all a bit much for me. Sorry, my darling. So sorry.”

Gloria came to his side. “Poor darling! I’m the one who should say sorry. I understand how things are. We should get away.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, anywhere. Amsterdam. Paris. What about somewhere in the UK? Aldeburgh. How about Aldeburgh? It’s such a lovely place, and they’ve got a divine bookshop. Remember we met the booksellers, that nice couple the Jameses? We could potter about in there, and go to some funny little pub for lunch. And we could go and see the monument to Ben Britten, that amazing scallop shell, and watch the fishermen launch their boats from the stony beach. Just like Peter Grimes. It would be so therapeutic.”

Rupert looked wistful. “I love that scallop shell,” he said. “It’s so much better than a statue. You can sit on it, and you can watch the sea from it, and listen. There are so few statues one can sit on.”

“I agree,” said Gloria. “And yet it’s recognisable. We know what it is. It’s part of our world. Unlike anything that wins the Turner Prize. Not that all Turner Prize artists are useless. I know somebody who actually knows what she’s talking about, and she says that some of them have been real artists.”

Rupert thought about this. “Actually, the Turner Prize stuff is part of our world,” he said. “That’s the problem. Those installations are merely the banal replication of the ordinary, and nothing more.” He looked at his watch. “We’re so lucky, my darling.”

She looked at him enquiringly. Why were they lucky? Because they had one another? Because they could go off to Aldeburgh together, when lots of people had nobody to go to Aldeburgh with?

Rupert explained, “We’re lucky because we both think the same way about the Turner Prize. Imagine being married to somebody who actually thought all that pretentiousness had any actual merit. Imagine that!”

Gloria shook her head. “Impossible,” she said.

Rupert looked at her fondly. “Do you think we’re reactionary?”

Gloria shook her head. “Not at all. Not us. Nobody really likes the jejune things those people create, Rupert. Nobody. But it’s the Emperor’s new clothes. Remember the story? Nobody will dare to say: Look, can these artists actually sculpt, or paint, or make anything of beauty? Or – terrible, naive question – can they actually draw?”

“They can’t,” he said. “Or many of them can’t. That’s what David Hockney was complaining about when he talked about the art colleges ...”

“He can draw,” said Gloria.

“He certainly can.” He looked at his watch. “I really must get to the office, darling. Tempus fugit .”

“ Tempus is so utterly predictable, darling. All he ever does is to fugere .”

Rupert shook a finger. “Darling, you mustn’t say ‘to fugere ’. That’s like saying ‘to to fly’. Fugere is the infinitive form, my little darling. Too many ‘to’s. No additional ‘to’ required.”

She planted a kiss on his brow. “Oh, darling, you’re so clever.”

“Not as clever as you, my darling! A bientôt !”

The offices of the Ragg Porter Literary Agency occupied one third of a comfortable-looking building overlooking a leafy square in Soho. It was convenient for both the agency’s members of staff and for their clients, as it was a stone’s throw or, as Rupert’s father, Fatty Porter, used so wittily to put it, a manuscript’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. He used the expression to describe to new authors how to find the offices, and they usually laughed, little realising that Fatty did, in fact, throw manuscripts out of the window if he considered them dull or they otherwise annoyed him. Behaviour was different in those days, and a literary agent who threw manuscripts out of the window was considered merely eccentric, or colourful, rather than an over-educated litter-lout. The sense of entitlement, now so deeply embedded in consumerism, that would have regarded such behaviour as insensitive and arrogant was then quite unheard of. In those days people took what they got from a literary agent, just as they did from doctors, teachers, policemen and virtually all other figures of authority. That this was grossly unfair – and intimidating – is surely beyond debate, especially in an age when the tables have been so completely reversed as to require doctors, teachers, policemen and other figures of authority to take what they get from members of the public, and to take it in a spirit of meekness and complete self-abasement.

The office occupied the top storey of the building, the two floors below being having been let for as long as anyone could remember to a film-editing company and a dealer in Greco-Roman antiquities. The dealer in antiquities, Ernest Bartlett, was himself of great antiquity, and there was occasionally some debate as to whether he could technically still be alive. However lights still went on and off in his office, and sometimes on the stairs one might hear drifting from behind his door snatches of sound from the ancient device that Gregory Ragg had christened “Bartlett’s steam radio”. This radio was permanently tuned to a radio station of the sort everybody thought had stopped broadcasting. It played light classical music and big bands, but played them in a quiet, rather distant way, as if from a far corner of the ether. The effect was haunting.

Ernest Bartlett was always invited to the Ragg Porter Christmas party, and would normally attend. He would arrive wearing a very old silver-grey double-breasted suit and a Garrick Club tie, and bearing an armful of carefully wrapped gifts. In conversation with the staff, he would refer to Rupert as “Fatty Porter’s much-admired son”, and to Barbara as “Gregory Ragg’s distinguished daughter”. He drank bitter lemon at these parties and rarely ate more than one or two small biscuits, which he described as “egregiously Bacchanalian behaviour on my part”.

As Rupert made up his way up the stairs that morning, he caught the faint sound of Ernest Bartlett’s steam radio. Vera Lynn, he thought, and smiled. It was a good omen for a day that had not, he admitted to himself, had a brilliant beginning, what with that uncomfortable froideur from Gloria, now happily laid to rest with the paying of mutually satisfactory compliments.

He pressed the buzzer on the office door. He had a key somewhere, but he could see Andrea, the agency’s receptionist, through the glass. She looked up at him, waved and triggered the mechanism to open the door.