Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (94 page)

‘Yes,’ she said wonderingly, ‘yes, I can see you have.’

‘So—what do you think?’

‘I think it would be heaven. I’ve never felt so happy.’

‘But—not a word to anyone. Not till you’re sixteen. Otherwise they’ll all start flapping and fussing.’

‘Not a word. Of course.’

‘Izzie—’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I kiss you? I mean really kiss you?’

‘Of course you can. But maybe—’

‘Yes?’

‘We should move into the woods.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh Kit,’ she said, half exasperated, half amused. ‘If this is going to be a secret, we can’t have everyone watching us kissing, can we? And we’re rather visible here.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said, ‘but then I wouldn’t, would I?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, you wouldn’t. Of course.’

She lay awake all night: staring into the darkness, sometimes smiling, sometimes very solemn, awed by her own happiness, by this miraculous realisation of her dreams.

Kit loved her! Really loved her. Loved her so much he wanted to marry her. It was so amazing. It was all so amazing.

And really—what was to stop them? Why should anyone want to stop them? Certainly if they waited until she was eighteen. When he would be – what, twenty-eight. Of course, he was ten years older than her. Funny, what a long time that was, when you were a child, and how short when you were grown up.

Her father had been much older than her mother, she knew that. Oliver certainly looked much older than Celia. Ten years was nothing. Nothing at all. And they could wait. Even if they made them wait until she was twenty-one—which they wouldn’t, loads of girls married at eighteen, even some of the sisters of her friends at school.

Oh it was so, so wonderful. Kit, her hero, her beloved Kit, so handsome—she wondered if he knew how handsome he was—so brave, so clever. In love with her. In love! No one at school was in love yet. Well, not in her class. They mooned over film stars, over Clark Gable and Cary Grant, but not over real people. Although Joanna Humphries had said some boy had kissed her at a New Year’s Eve party. Well she was sure he hadn’t kissed like Kit. It had been amazing, his kissing; she’d felt so much more that she’d expected to. All kind of fizzy inside. And it had been really nice, not slobbery like you thought it might be, watching film stars. And standing there in the woods, in his arms, her arms round him, it had felt so right, so wonderfully right . . .

Goodness, she was lucky. So, so lucky . . .

She was going to be happy now for the rest of her life.

CHAPTER 45

‘It was a heart attack, Lady Celia, I’m afraid.’

‘A what?’

‘A heart attack. Without doubt.’

‘But’—she looked at Oliver, lying still and pale, apparently peaceful—‘but he’s—I mean he isn’t—’

‘Oh, I know. He’s alive. And doing pretty well on the whole. Thanks to you, in no small measure. All that insistence on his exercise regime, keeping him on his diet. For a man of his age, and after what was a very major stroke, he’s doing very well. But there’s no doubt that’s what happened. It was a minor heart attack, and a little calling card from mother nature.’

‘Saying what?’

‘That he needs to slow down. Finally. Stop going into Lyttons every day, take things easy. The two of you could have a very nice time now, you know, enjoy yourselves, have some leisure. It really can’t be necessary for you to carry on working at the pace you do.’

Celia looked at him in horror. Of all the things that appalled her in life, the prospect of a great deal of leisure was the greatest. Work to her was the purpose of life: it gave it its colour, its inspiration. It dispelled depression, fought despair, increased joy, created energy. Leisure was a tedious commodity, welcome, for occasional brief interludes, while she recovered from some particularly arduous task or other, and then to be left behind, abandoned like a dull guest at a party.

All her life she had worked: worked hard and passionately. It had been her happiness; when all else failed her, she had turned to it with a joyous relief, knowing that in it she would find satisfaction, fulfilment, and an absolute release. She would listen as politely as she could to people as they told her—as they often did these days—how much she might enjoy doing at least a little less, suggesting she travelled, took up some hobby, spent more time with her children and grandchildren, while finding it hard to comprehend properly what they were saying. It was as if they were speaking in some foreign language, or at least in some complex dialect; it simply made no sense to her. Life was about work and success and, to a lesser extent, personal glory, and if she could not have those things, then she would quite simply rather be dead.

Oliver, she knew, saw things just a little differently. And she was very afraid of the consequences for herself . . .

Oliver had been growing weary. He hated the new building—a modern one just off Oxford Street, very near the rebuilt John Lewis. Lyttons occupied the lower three floors; an engineering company the top three. He felt utterly miserable there, displaced indeed; he hadn’t liked working from Curzon Street, but that at least had some style. This building, with its square rooms, devoid of cornices, picture rails, fireplaces, its plain corridors, its dreary entrance hall, shared with the engineering firm, seemed to him an absolutely unsuitable home for a publishing house. He had wanted, desperately, a lovely house in Grosvenor Square, but it was three times the cost.

‘It’s just out of the question, Father,’ Giles had said, ‘things are very tight as it is, and really what difference does the building make? It certainly won’t affect the quality of the books we put out.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ said Oliver.

He grieved for Paternoster Row as for a person; his heart was still there, he would think about it, about his days there, over more than three decades, the tears rising in his eyes. He had made enquiries about rebuilding there, but it was as yet unplanned.

Boy Warwick had found the new building; property was now his business. He had come home from the war, uncertain what to do, bored, restless, had gone for a walk one day exploring the ruins of London, had noticed the feverish rebuilding going on—and begun to buy. Quietly, carefully, a few houses here, a couple of buildings there, sometimes developing them, sometimes just holding on to them. He was particularly skilful, Venetia told Adele, at spotting what he called development potential; ‘that means he’ll buy some place in between, maybe, two others, and sit and wait. A bigger firm will come along, wanting to develop the row, and he’ll hold out for a bit while their price goes up and then sell. Very clever.’

Venetia had actually been with her father, in wanting the building in Grosvenor Square; she hated 45 Clarice Street herself, but she had a greater regard for a balance sheet than he did and had allowed herself to be talked round.

Giles, on the other hand, liked Clarice Street, he said it was modern and streamlined, and suitable for a modern, streamlined business.

Only of course Lyttons wasn’t modern and streamlined at all.

The book trade altogether was finding life difficult; the end of the war had not brought an end to wartime problems. Paper rationing continued; indeed the quota had been reduced still further. There was a wave of strikes, as people returned from the war with higher expectations than the country could afford; the cost of paper, along with other overheads, soared, and production slowed.

It was generally accepted that it now took a year for a book to pass from manuscript phase to publication. The public, requesting particular books from booksellers, was very frequently disappointed. Also, the War Economy standards for books still held, so that British books had a shabby utilitarian appearance; this affected exports, and American books in particular, so much glossier and more attractive, were in high demand.

The boom in books during the war years was over too; people needed to escape less, were more discriminating. Stock piled up in warehouses and on booksellers’ shelves.

But these were difficulties Lyttons shared with other publishers; their greatest problems were peculiar to them.

The worst was the constant conflict: the over-cautious reactionary approach of Oliver and Edgar Greene, set against the high-risk instinctive impulses of Celia, backed by Barty and the young women editors. New books by promising authors, were either rejected or over-debated by Oliver and Edgar and snapped up by other publishers with more foresight and faster reactions.

Schemes dreamed up by Venetia for deals, promotions, advertising campaigns, were rejected by Oliver and Giles as vulgar, distasteful, over costly.

The great money spinners for Lyttons in the old days, the Meridian books, the Buchanan saga, were no longer in such demand, there was a new gritty realism in literature, and the world which had made
The Snake Pit
, Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
and
Cannery Row
bestsellers, did not have a place any more for the gentle nostalgia and humour of
Grace and Favour
.

Barty, working again at very much full strength, the small Jenna cared for by an excellent nanny, had found two books which she had longed to buy, one a black comedy of a thriller, the other an intensely raw story of a family struggling to come to terms with post-war life, but she had been voted down both times.

‘I’m so sorry, Barty,’ said Celia, ‘in the old days I would have paid for an advance from my own money, but it just isn’t possible any more, the amounts are too large.’

Two of the younger editors were intensely demoralised, finding no outlet for their energies and brilliance; one had an offer from Macmillan and one from Cassell. Celia had managed to persuade them to stay, but with great difficulty.

Jay was not yet back; he was not due for his demob until Christmas at the earliest. But his return, Celia could see, would create more conflict still, another young impatient talent, pitting itself against the old guard.

And then there was Giles. He had come back to Lyttons after leaving the army early, because of his leg, filled with his new confidence—but still with all the old resentments.

He spent his days raging, sometimes silently, sometimes more openly, at what he saw as the swift, easy progress of Venetia, and of Barty, backed by Celia’s determination for Lyttons to pursue her own editorial policies. He had some support from his father and Edgar Greene, but he was aware this was not in itself a permanent solution. These were the old guard, he needed space and backing for his own progress.

He had done his time as an apprentice at the firm, he was forty now, he had had a superb war, he had proved himself as an inspirational leader, and he had a right to do so again. He was used to a chain of command, to decisiveness, to absolute obedience from those below him and he found the dithering and arguing that went on at Lyttons almost unbearable. The solution seemed to him perfectly simple; his father was an old man, clearly no longer able to run Lyttons, and it was time he moved over, and made way for him, as his heir. Every time he heard that Venetia had pulled off some brilliant new deal with a bookshop, or Barty had tied up some wonderful young author, and every time he heard his mother say how much she was looking forward to having Jay back with them, he felt angrier and more impotent—and more ill-used.

And none of it made for a very happy ship: and Oliver feeling it, and feeling unable to do anything about it, was unhappy too.

‘I think actually he’s quite relieved that he’s got an excuse to go,’ said Celia to Sebastian, ‘but of course at the same time he doesn’t want to go.’

‘Of course not.’

‘And it means either handing over to Giles, which even he can see is a mistake, or causing terrible problems, splitting the company up.’

‘Which he can do?’

‘Oh yes. Oliver can do what he likes. He owns all—well nearly all—the shares.’

‘Oh, I know. I always thought it was outrageous. You only having ten per cent.’

She shrugged. ‘I never thought it mattered. What mattered was running Lyttons. The only time I was scared was when he wanted to sell out to Brunnings. Remember?’

‘I remember everything about that time,’ he said, his eyes very intense as he looked at her.

‘Yes, well. We survived.’

‘What about LM’s twenty per cent? Didn’t Jay get them?’

‘No. They reverted to Oliver. That was how Grandpa Edgar set it up. He was terrified of the power becoming diluted, of the firm falling into other hands. His father had founded it, and his son was going to own it and that was that.’

‘It’s feudal.’

‘I know it is. But—somehow it hasn’t mattered before. I haven’t minded, Venetia has plenty of money . . .’

‘And a very hard-headed businessman of a husband. I doubt he’ll be happy to see this going on indefinitely.’

‘Maybe not. Anyway, decisions have to be made. And Oliver knows it.’

‘What about you? Are you going to retire? All right, all right, I’m only teasing. They’ll need you there more than ever.’

‘Well that’s another thing. Oliver doesn’t approve of my editorial judgment. He never has.’

‘Even though it’s made Lyttons famous and successful.’

‘Even though. Anyway, they must all get an equal share. With me as caretaker for a bit. Well, for a long time. Only of course Oliver would like to have me at home with him.’ She sighed, visualising the new pressure of a lonely, bored Oliver demanding her presence, jealous of her continuing involvement with Lyttons, a fretful shadow hanging over everything she did.

‘What about Barty?’

‘Well, that’s a difficult one. She’s terribly clever, hugely talented, the best all-rounder, I’d say, but—well, she’s not a Lytton. And there would be terrible trouble if Oliver tried to give her a share. Certainly a sizeable one.’

‘That doesn’t seem fair.’

‘No, I know. It isn’t. But—they all resent her in their different ways. Always have. For different reasons. I just can’t see a solution to that one.’

‘And do you think Oliver will try to force you to retire?’

She stared at him. ‘Why should he?’

‘That’s not the point. Could he?’

‘Of course not.’

‘In theory he could. He could compel you to sell your shares and then vote you off the board.’

‘Don’t frighten me.’

‘I’ll try not to. Anyway, it wouldn’t make for a very happy retirement situation.’

‘No. It’s simply nonsense. Now, Sebastian, there’s something else we have to talk about. Isn’t there?’

He sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, there is. I did have one idea—’

‘Isabella, I’ve been thinking.’

‘Yes, Father?’

‘How would you like to go abroad for a year?’

‘Abroad? I’d absolutely hate it. I hate abroad.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ve never been. You don’t know. Travel broadens the mind, especially at your age. I was thinking of America.’

‘America!’

‘Yes. We could go together. I thought we could spend a year there, I’m always being asked to give lectures there. You could meet the American Lyttons, Robert, Oliver’s brother, and Maud, whom you’ve heard so much about—’

‘Father, I told you, I’d hate it. I’d hate it and I’m not coming.’

‘You are if I say so, Isabella, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘That went down very badly. She became practically hysterical. I’m afraid there may be something in all this. We shall have to go, I can see.’

‘Barty’s going over there after Christmas.’

‘She is?’

‘Yes. She wants to show Jenna to her American relations—those of them who will welcome her. I think Maud will still resist. And visit the New York office. She still feels a certain interest in it. She did very well there.’

‘I remember. Incidentally, whatever happened to the shares in Lytton New York, the ones Elliott owned?’

‘Oh—he left them to the wife. Oliver was speaking to Stuart Bailey the other day.’

‘Really? She shown any interest yet?’

‘No, none at all apparently. She’ll probably sell them. But it’s a terribly complicated will apparently, as you’d expect. Nothing’s been properly sorted out.’

‘Father wants me to go to America.’

‘America! Why?’

‘I don’t know. He says it will be good for me or something. Broaden my mind. I’m not going, Kit, I won’t, I won’t. Imagine not seeing each other for a year. I’d rather die.’

‘I can’t imagine it. Don’t worry. I’ll think of something. I love you, Izzie.’

‘I love you too, Kit.’