Consequences (16 page)

That evening, she wrote out the letter. The following morning, she found the address of the lady in question, and posted it.

The heavens fell the next week. A tight-lipped Miss Clarence handed her a note from the Chairman, summoning her to an interview with himself and representatives of the Trustees.

She had wondered if Mr. Portland would be there. He was not. It was the ladies in navy suits and another man with whom she had occasionally exchanged pleasantries. The atmosphere was pained and somber. The chairman wanted to know if she understood that it was not her place, as an assistant librarian, to volunteer advice on the running of the lecture series. Molly replied that she did, really—she had simply been struck by some thoughts, and had wanted to share them. One of the ladies said regretfully that she understood that Molly had been quite critical recently of various aspects of the library’s administrative policies. Molly was unable to deny this, and indeed found that she had no wish to do so. The other lady wondered if Molly felt that this job was quite right for her. The other man observed that the library had certain practices, you know, and did not entirely welcome an element of discord. The exchange between the two sides of the table drifted into a kind of stalemate, until after a few minutes more Molly found that somehow she had given in her notice, and would not be working at the library with effect from Friday week.

She said to Lucas “Well, that’s it. Unemployed.”

“Was it the turquoise skirt, and those earrings? I always felt you didn’t dress the part.”

“No, it was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
” Molly explained.

Lucas sighed. “Well, I suppose you can argue that you fell on your sword for freedom of speech. An interesting entry for the
curriculum vitae.
So where next?
Tribune? The New Statesman?
”

“It’ll be back to the Sits Vac pages. I’ll find something.”

It is her last day at the library. There have been furtive farewells from those members in the know. Miss Clarence and Jennifer have remained coolly neutral.

James Portland comes in. He is in need of a particular book, which Molly helps him to locate. She writes out the issue slip, and he says, “Thank you, Molly. See you next time.”

“Actually,” says Molly. “I shan’t be here, I’m afraid.”

“Oh?”

She explains, leaving out a good deal, principally the Lady Chatterley matter. She no longer feels entirely compatible at the library, she says, and they feel the same way about her.

James Portland considers this, impassive. At least, no—not entirely impassive, because there is the impression of a man who is doing some quick thinking. Then he fishes in his wallet for a card, which he hands to her. “Would you like to come and see me at this address on Monday morning? Shall we say ten o’clock?”

“I’m not sure what I’m here for,” says Molly.

“I hope that you are about to apply for a job.”

She stares at him, startled.

“I am in need of…an amanuensis.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I need a personal assistant. Someone who will deal with all the day-to-day stuff for which I don’t have time. Make phone calls, travel arrangements, book theaters and suchlike. I have a secretary in my office who deals with all business related matters but I prefer to keep private and professional life separate—and my activities spread far beyond publishing. I am a collector and a patron, in a modest way. I have an extensive library here that is in desperate need of arranging and cataloguing—a task for which you are now eminently well equipped. Can you type?”

“Not very well.”

“Then you will need to do a crash course, for which I shall pay. Shorthand we won’t bother with because I don’t like dictating. I’ll make the job three days a week to start with, in order to fit in the typing course. Hitherto, I have been getting in someone from an agency, which is unsatisfactory. I would prefer a permanent arrangement. The salary would be what you were getting at the library plus twenty percent—promotion, you note. So what about it?”

The room in which they sat was full of books and pictures: glass-fronted bookcases, paintings each with discreet lighting, so that they glowed against the walls. Over the marble fireplace there hung a large abstract oil painting that seemed in some vague way familiar. There were thick oriental rugs on the floor, a great bowl of roses on the table; the tall window looked out onto a leafy square. It was very quiet. Somewhere else in the house a phone rang, and then stopped. James Portland waited, looking directly at her, smiling.

“I’ll apply,” said Molly.

There was an Italian couple—Maria and Carlo—who lived in the basement and served as cook and butler. There was Maureen, the daily cleaner. There was George, the chauffeur, who sat outside in the sleek black car until James Portland was ready to go. And now there was Molly, in her small office on the top floor, with her desk, her telephone, and her filing cabinets. Here, she received daily instructions from her employer—call the following people, arrange this, order that—and a sheaf of handwritten letters to be typed up. She was a buffer zone, she came to understand, between James Portland and the world; she kept at bay those to whom he did not wish to speak, she filtered through the more privileged. She negotiated with travel agents, restaurants, box offices. She fended off the importunate. She came to know who was who, and where they stood in the hierarchy of those seeking access. She sent flowers to hostesses, and bought birthday presents for nephews and nieces. She acquired a telephone manner, a voice that she hardly recognized: “I’m calling from Mr. Portland’s office…” Once, she looked up in the midst of such a conversation and saw him watching her from the door. She was a month into the job. When she had put the phone down she said, “Am I doing it right?”

He inclined his head. “As to the manner born. You have assumed a new persona. But mind you keep the old one intact.”

She was now looking into a world of which she had known nothing. It was a world in which very large bills were paid at once and without a tremor (she knew this because one of her tasks was to present checks to James Portland for signature), in which there were cocktail parties and private views and charity dinners, in which men smelled of cigars and women each had an individual perfumed aura. These were the people who often arrived at the house in the early evening, as she was leaving, and were shown into the drawing room by Carlo, from whence would come gusts of talk and laughter. Often she knew the names of these people; she had fielded their phone calls, relayed messages to them, thanked them for the delightful party with a bunch of red roses.

James Portland was married, she learned. But Mrs. Portland—

Eleanor—lived elsewhere. An amicable separation, this appeared to be, and indeed from time to time an elegant figure would appear on one of the cocktail evenings, and stand for a moment before the big mirror in the hall, tucking strands of dark hair into a chignon, adjusting a slim black dress. “Is wife,” Maria would hiss to Molly. “Is wife not living here. Marriage is not like good marriage.”

When her desk was temporarily clear, Molly would attend to the library, which was housed partly in the first-floor drawing room and partly in a big room above, which doubled as James’s study. He was James now, at his request, rather than Mr. Portland; at first she had found this form of address inhibiting, but it was beginning to slip off the tongue quite easily. The books were indeed disordered, and she was enjoying the process of rearrangement and the compilation of a card index. There was also the interest of the titles themselves—a varied collection reflecting James’s own taste for art and architecture, for travel, for history, and with a considerable assemblage of fiction, plenty of poetry, and an entire case of collectors’ editions. It was while she was going through these that she found the Heron Press
Lamb’s Tales
with her father’s engravings. Delighted, she took it down to her office for closer inspection, and there James saw it lying on the desk when he came in with some letters.

He picked it up. “Ah. Yes—I remember this. Nice production.”

“The illustrator was my father.”

James opened the book and was silent for a while, turning the pages. “Matt Faraday. Of course.” He looked at her. “Wasn’t he killed in the war?”

“Yes.”

“What a wicked loss. He was outstanding. And for you…do you remember him at all?”

“Pictures in the head,” she said.

He nodded. “Good.” He put the book down. “I’d be happy to give this to you.”

“It’s very kind,” she said. “But Lucas has a copy or two left, I know. Lucas is…” She explained Lucas. And her mother. And Simon.

He listened attentively. “Now I understand the spirit of independence. You have had to be self-sufficient. See to things for yourself.”

Embarrassed, Molly shuffled papers.

“The radicalism is another matter. But I can see why you and the Lit. and Phil. were not an easy fit. They’re a bunch of old stick-in-themuds, for the most part. I try without success to promote change. I must say, though, the Lady Chatterley proposal wouldn’t have occurred to me.” He chuckled.

Molly felt a rich blush creep from neck to hairline. “You knew about that?”

“Of course. I was hugely entertained. The outrage…Miss Clarence has never recovered, by all accounts. The Chairman blames the current educational climate—the universities have a lot to answer for.”

“They produce people like me?”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” said Molly. “I don’t care for pop music and I haven’t got a black leather jacket.”

“Ah, but you speak your mind. And the Chairman finds your mind perplexing—indeed, downright disturbing.”

“Oh dear.”

“I shouldn’t worry. He’s a nice old chap but set fast in whenever it was that he was young—if he ever was.”

Molly said, “I hope I’m not going to be labeled 1960 for ever.”

“If it comes to that, I am the 1940s—a wartime youth. Do you catch the whiff of austerity and deprivation?”

“Actually, no,” said Molly.

“There you are. Some of us manage to rise above it. No doubt you’ll kick free of the 1960s, in due course.” He put the pile of papers down on her desk. “These by this evening, if you can. And a sycophantic box of chocolates to my sister, please—I forgot to go to dinner with her last night.”

Molly tells Lucas, “Rich people are different. Well-off people. Like another species.”

“So it’s said. Personally, I’ve never known any. Except a few customers, in the glory days of the Press, and then they were just orders and checks, so to speak, not people. Do you find them congenial?”

“They don’t notice me. I’m a telephone voice, or the girl in the office upstairs. An essential furnishing, that’s all.”

“How obtuse. What about your employer? I hope you are not just furniture to him.”

“I think James notices me.”

At James Portland’s big house on the square, people come and go: deliveries from Harrods, from the dry cleaner’s, from the wine merchant, the man who winds the grandfather clock (eighteenth-century long-case), the lady who does the flowers (roses out of season, gladioli for parties), friends, rivals, lovers (perhaps).

“Is pity no senora,” says Maria. “Man should have wife.”

“Bambini might be nice too,” says Molly. “Why doesn’t Mrs. Portland live here?”

Maria snorts. “Is lady who like her own way.” She rolls her eyes. “Have other man, I think.”

“Tut, tut,” says Molly.

She has not identified any lovers in particular, but one has to assume that they are a possibility. This worldly view is new to her; that’s what comes of rubbing shoulders with the metropolitan set, she thinks. I have lost my innocence.

I am in the Victorian governess role, she thinks—largely ignored, invisible, neither servant nor gentry. Watching.

She watches the people on the stairs: the polished men, the women in silk. She catches little gusts of conversation: James is buying a Paul Klee, he is selling his Brancusi, so-and-so has made a killing, someone else got their fingers burned.

“It’s all white for this evening,” says the flower arrangement lady. “Peonies and regale lilies. I do hope Mr. Portland will like it—he has such perfect taste. I love your new haircut, Molly.”

“Some person throw up in downstairs toilet,” says Carlo. “Have too much to drink. Pig.”

There is a raffish fringe to James Portland’s acquaintance. A handful of people who are not polished or silken, but wear leather-patched corduroy jackets and polo neck sweaters. These are the writers published by his firm—those who cash in on an arduous trip to a rain forest, or pull off a novel that gets adulatory reviews in the Sunday papers. Molly perceives that such people occupy an ambivalent position—they are not friends, and they are certainly not colleagues, they are both cultivated by James and kept at arm’s length. They have to be appeased, but not allowed to come too close. There is a middle-aged lady writer who telephones far too often and must be fobbed off by Molly; “I’m not taking her out to lunch again for at least a year,” says James. “Last time I had to hear about her hysterectomy, in vibrant detail.” There is a voluble Irishman who has found his way up to Molly’s office, where he hung around, and eventually suggested that they should meet up for a drink, when she had finished work. James came into the room at this point, and bundled him away. Later, James returned.

“Did that fellow chat you up?”

“Yes,” said Molly. “At least I think that was what he was doing.”

“I’m not having that.” James was patently furious; Molly had never seen him like that before. “Carlo will be told he is not to be let into the house again.”

Molly wonders why this incident has so got up James’s nose. On the face of it, she and the writers occupy the same social level—they are necessary appendages but not associates—so it would have seemed rather appropriate for the Irishman to strike up a friendship.

Once a year or so, Molly would visit her maternal grandparents at the house in Brunswick Gardens. She did not find these occasions comfortable; she felt alienated by the determined refinement of her grandmother’s lifestyle, and by her grandfather’s hearty imperviousness to anything outside his own experience. Sometimes a breezy uncle would be there, with a complacent wife, and some cold-eyed cousins who clearly liked Molly no better than she liked them. Reporting to Lucas, she said, “I think I have dropped out of the upper-middle class. I can’t seem to fit there at all.”