The Tumbled House Read online

  “It’s bound to be inconvenient sometimes in the future, apart from any immediate problem.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “I was careless. My son is friendly with Marlowe’s sister.”

  “Too bad.”

  There was silence for a few moments. Robinson pushed across a box of cigarettes, but Roger shook his head.

  “Here’s the letter I got from him,” the editor said. “Of course he’s spoiling for a fight.”

  Roger read the letter. “ Yes. This is why I thought I’d call in. I presume we have to concert some sort of policy in the changed circumstances.”

  Robinson lit a cigarette himself. “Have you done that stuff on the Leader of the Opposition for this week?”

  “Yes, but if necessary it can wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Marlowe wants his medicine in greater detail.”

  Robinson flicked out his lighter, and his large loose-skinned face was temporarily without expression. “ Why bother?”

  “Why not?”

  “I can tell you why not. A nine days’ wonder in this competitive age is lucky if it lasts three. We’ve done our best for Mr Marlowe by sketching him over two Sundays, but that’s the limit. I don’t like him and his arrogant ways any more than you do, but we’ve achieved our object, and that’s all that counts.”

  Roger patted his shirt cuff where some raindrops had fallen. “ Is it?”

  “Well, it’s the main thing. We’re a national newspaper, and we’ve taken a little time and trouble to debunk a national figure. O.K. But going on bickering now would reduce it all to a parochial squabble that only about one per cent of our three million readers would be interested in. It was a good scoop while it lasted. Now it’s on the spike. Pass on.”

  “You saw his letter in The Times today?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t cut any ice. Any more than this does.” Robinson flipped the letter in front of him. “We’re not in a court of law. Nobody’s compelled to do anything about it.”

  Roger said: “There may be a certain amount of pressure brought on me—now that I’m known.”

  “What sort? Moral pressure? A box of squibs. In another ten days everyone will have forgotten all about it.”

  “I shouldn’t necessarily want them to do that,” Roger said quietly.

  “I mean forgotten the pettifogging details. You’re more likely to be regarded as a journalist who at the risk of unpopularity has performed a public duty.”

  “I thought that’s what we agreed it was.”

  “Yes, well … let’s be modest about our angel’s wings. We both thought John Marlowe’s reputation due for a little sweating down. I was given to the idea because of those remarks he made about The Gazette in the Foster-Rugby action. Maybe you were because you envied the son or didn’t like his success or wanted his wife or something. Motives don’t matter. The result has been satisfactory. We found more than enough grapeshot lying around, and however Don Marlowe squeals his father’s reputation has gone out of the gun. What more do you want?”

  “Personally nothing.”

  “Good.”

  Roger frowned thoughtfully out at the rain. “I take it The Gazette isn’t pulling out of this quarrel irrespective of what happens next?”

  Robinson leaned back again and drew in smoke. “ The Gazette stands where it always does, behind its staff and behind its contributors. Particularly so where it doesn’t like the people on the other side. It would give me pleasure to sit on young Marlowe’s head and listen to him squeal. But I think—no I’m damned sure—the way to make him squeal loudest here and now is to ignore all his protests and maintain a lofty silence. And that goes even more for you personally than for The Gazette. The fact that you’ve got yourself known isn’t my pigeon. But you can still ignore him and move on.”

  Roger was silent a moment, “ If I need it, will you give me space?”

  “If you need it, come to me and we’ll see,” said Robinson. “But I think you’d be insane to start in-fighting over details. That’s playing him at his own game. You’d get bogged down with proofs and counter proofs. You lose all the advantage that can be gained from John Marlowe being dead.”

  Roger looked mildly amused. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. You’ll let me have Sunday’s column by six or seven this evening, won’t you?”

  “It’s written. I’ll phone it through to Stamp.”

  “Good. Good. Lunch with me sometime. One day next week.”

  Roger looked at the editor and their exchanged glances were an unspoken cognisance of a changed situation, just as the original one had never found its way into words.

  “Thanks,” Roger said briefly. “ We’ll do that.”

  So The Gazette on Sunday carried no reference to John Marlowe or Don Marlowe or the feuds of last week. One paper rather disingenuously carried an article by a barrister on the procedure and enforcement of discipline within the Bar by the Inns of Court and by the Professional Conduct Committee of the Bar Council. Atticus in The Sunday Times had a paragraph on the dispute and made a comment on the ethics which should govern “gossip columns by pseudonym”.

  Don did not go to the Hanover Club for several days. Work on the new ballet had started in earnest, and he was to conduct three times in the following week. He worked hard but felt his creative concentration in short supply.

  Almost the first person he saw in the club when he went in was the honorary secretary, Laurence Heath, who at once came across and invited him to the bar for a drink. “We had a meeting of the committee on Monday, Marlowe, especially to consider your letter. I thought of writing you about it, and then it seemed better if we could talk it over.”

  Don sipped his Martini and looked at Laurence Heath.

  Heath said: “Perhaps I ought to make it clear at once that there was no division of opinion whatever as to our sympathy for you, and our dislike of this attack on your father.”

  Don nodded his acknowledgement.

  “On Monday, Marlowe, while the committee was meeting, I telephoned Roger Shorn and gave him the general trend of your letter. He said to me that he did not feel it necessary at present to go into further details about the charges he had put down. His view was that the detail was sufficient and that no further onus of proof lay on him. Naturally that isn’t my view and it isn’t one that the committee held.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I hope you won’t misunderstand me, though, when I say that, in spite of this, we concluded we were not justified in taking official action. We can’t expel or censure a member for his behaviour outside the club. The only way it really affects us is that John Marlowe was chairman and we resent this slur on his good name. But we can’t be judges of the private lives of our members.… Last year, as you may know, one of our members was cited as co-respondent in a divorce case by another. A lot of ill-feeling existed between the two men at the time, but we were not entitled to pass judgement on the one at fault.” Heath finished his drink and pressed the bell on the bar for the waiter. “On the other hand the member who got drunk so often that he used to go to sleep at the dinner table we had to ask to resign. Another of the same?”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s against that background that we have had to assess this case.”

  “And your crockery?” said Don.

  “Crockery?”

  “There will be danger to your furniture and fittings if I meet him here.”

  Heath blinked. “ I think it would be a great mistake, Marlowe, to prejudice your case by any action of that sort. What happens here we have to take notice of.”

  “So I gather.”

  “If you’ll take my advice you’ll allow the thing to rest so far as this club is concerned. I firmly believe”; Heath lowered his voice as other drinkers came up and moved around him: “I firmly believe that members here will show their feelings towards Shorn in their own way when they meet him. I know I shall.”

 
; Don spent a long time over lunch. He half-regretted having written to the club in the way he had. It would have been better to have up-ended the table over Roger that first day. Now that he had half-threatened the committee it made the fracas when it came deliberate and not spontaneous. It wouldn’t do. And yet he was not prepared to sit down and be a good boy under Laurence Heath’s veto. Henry de Courville’s suggestion was the only answer.

  After lunch he ordered three double whiskies in separate glasses and carried them on a tray up to the library, which was as usual deserted at this time of the day. Then he got paper and took out his pen and clicked his teeth together on the end. At school and in the army he had gained a reputation for mildly bawdy verse about the particular abuse or grumble of the moment. They had amused his companions a lot; but he had done nothing like it for six years. Now he sipped his first whisky and began to scribble a few lines at random.

  After half an hour he stopped and read what he had written. It was rubbish and went into the waste-paper basket. Stop or go on? In reaction he was tempted to give it up altogether. He knew, although she didn’t say so, that Joanna wanted him to let the calumny alone. Already the second article was ten days old. People would quickly forget. Who was to care? The recognisable person of John Marlowe was already unrecognisable in Midhurst churchyard. If his shade still existed, then surely it had passed beyond emotions of anger or resentment. There was only himself and Bennie.

  But what of the book? The thing was there, the impact was there, the impression it had made on people; he had come on it again and again during his Canadian tour. Crossroads, whether one liked it or not, had made itself felt, was something to be reckoned with. And was not the fate of the book concerned here? An artist of course was judged by his art, not by his life. It didn’t matter twopence if Rembrandt was a rogue or Beethoven a bore. But in Crossroads among other things was a code of behaviour and a reason presumably for following that code. If a man was a thief and a cheat, by all means write him off, and his book with him. If he was not, should the thing he created be wilfully destroyed by lies that were allowed to go by default?

  Don went to the shelves and took down a copy of the book, which had been given to the club by his father. It was a third edition, and some notices were included on the back. “ In this witty and profound book John Marlowe has written the most vital restatement of moral truths produced in our time.” “It is quite impossible within the limits of this review to do any kind of justice to a book which will certainly become a classic of its kind.” “Brilliant and challenging.”

  Don opened a page at random and glanced down it. “The atom is composed of positive and negative electrical charges achieving an equipoise by opposition. So men achieve an equipoise by the striking of a balance of the opposing sides within themselves. Division and stress within the human mind is not a disease, it is a necessity of growth. But humanity can exist in all stages and states from the fissionable condition of the psychopath, through normality, to the apathy and disillusion which scientists in another sense might call heat death. It is with these last that we are dealing now, and I would suggest that they present the biggest problem. For there is not safety in numbers but danger …”

  Don put the book back and finished his second whisky. Then he began to write again. It was a pretty reflection, he thought, that the son of a man who could write about that sort of thing had to descend to abusive doggerel to gain his point. An hour later he left three empty glasses in a row on the desk and a few crumpled papers behind him and quitted the club with a rather mixed feeling in his mind but with the sense of a duty discharged. He took the Bond Street tube to the house of his friend Derek Mackie, and they spent a couple of hours playing sonatas together. Afterwards Mackie confided to his wife that Don had thumped all afternoon and that his Canadian trip had not improved him.

  Roger had had a surprisingly irritating few days. On Monday several newspapers had called him asking why his column in The Gazette had had no reference to John Marlowe and offering him space to state his case in detail. Then on Tuesday he had met the editor of The Sentinel at the Press Club. John Alexander was a sober young man who liked to feel that he represented the intellectual, uncommitted Middle Classes, the rather timorous avant garde of suburbia and the commutors. They had been standing at the bar together, and Roger had made a jocular remark that he hoped Alexander was not too upset at having discovered there was a Mr Hyde on his staff. He had expected an amused disclaimer; instead Alexander had turned rather stiffly to someone else, and an hour later Roger had got a note saying that while he, Alexander, after a very full consideration did not propose to take the matter further, he could not pretend to anything but extreme distaste and disappointment on finding that an important contributor to his paper should be writing anonymously etc., etc., and in such a way.

  Roger had restricted his visits to the Hanover Club to the evenings, knowing Don was seldom there then; but he found the story was all over the club. Some of the older members obviously didn’t like it, a few chaffed him heavy-handedly and asked for the latest details of the Marlowe feud, some were clearly impressed, a half-dozen went out of their way to congratulate him, but these were men of no account who had been waiting the opportunity to ingratiate themselves.

  Much of this reaction could be treated with his usual amused detachment. The has-beens, the arthritics, the distinguished but retired, cut no ice anyway. But two men who were still influential went out of their way to avoid him. Roger persuaded himself that all this would pass over in a couple of weeks. But he had made a study of being liked among those whose liking he wanted, so he was a sensitive plant when the wind blew chill.

  On the Wednesday he was due to dine with Sir Percy Laycock and Marion.

  Roger had seen Marion again last week, when he had taken her to the theatre. He had made the excuse that it was a play he had to see and write on and had explained subtly that he had a second seat if by any chance she was free to come.

  He found Sir Percy in an unpredictable mood. Marion greeted him shyly, but there was just a suggestion of a look in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  “We’ve been learning a lot about you this week,” said Sir Percy over cocktails. “I’d no idea in the world that you were Moonraker. Dangerous man!”

  “One hides one’s light,” said Roger. “ Not merely for reasons of modesty. If people know they’re in the presence of a columnist they guard their tongue too closely.”

  “Well, it certainly surprised me,” said Laycock. “ Must say it rather shocked me too.”

  “Shocked you?”

  “Well, yes. Not a very savoury job, is it?”

  Roger flushed. “In one sense it’s not a column I relish doing. In another sense it’s a challenge.”

  “Yes. Knowing you, I can see that. Have you been doing it long?”

  “Not long.”

  Marion said something and the subject was changed; but later in the evening Sir Percy returned to it.

  “I don’t often read The Gazette, you know. It’s not quite my sort of paper. But Moonraker’s a name one hears about, and I got my secretary to get some back-numbers yesterday so I could read your column.”

  “I’m complimented.”

  “Well.… it’s important to me.”

  “How do you mean, important to you?” asked Marion.

  “Mr Shorn knows.”

  “I’m not sure that I altogether do,” Roger said, smiling.

  Sir Percy took off his eyeglasses and polished them. “ Well among other things, you’re advising me on my first contact with the directors of The Globe.”

  “I hope you don’t think my writing this column makes me any less likely to give you good advice!”

  “No … certainly not.” Laycock put his eyeglasses back and re-focused through them. “But I had thought that my contacts with you might not have stopped at the exchange of advice.”

  “I’m flattered to hear it.”

  “I’m sure you’re not—or
you shouldn’t be. However, that’s all very much in the air as yet, isn’t it? Let me recommend this port. I think it’s a bit of good stuff.”

  When Marion left them Sir Percy began to talk about The Daily Globe. It was plain that the idea of gaining a controlling interest in it had got under his skin.

  “You don’t think I’m a fool, considering breaking into the newspaper world—with my background?”

  “My dear Sir Percy,” Roger said, “ if you look at the history of journalism you’ll find that almost all the great newspaper families have sprung from roughly your background—Liberal and Nonconformist, that is. Whatever happened to them later, that is where they came from: the Berrys, Beaverbrook, the Harmsworths, the Cadburys. It’s much the same in America. You have every precedent in your favour.”

  “That’s very heartening.”

  “But it doesn’t mean you must rush into anything. You’ve indicated your interest; now let the idea sink in. In a month or so have the Mander brothers to dinner. I’ll be glad to be present. Then, if anything can be provisionally worked out with them that night, it will be time to call in a really first-class lawyer.”

  Sir Percy puffed at his cigar in silence. “ You can read between the lines as well as anybody, Shorn. I don’t need to say what the prospects might be in this for you. That’s why I was put a bit off balance by discovering that you wrote the Moonraker column. And still more so by this particular Marlowe affair. What was behind it?”

  “Nothing more than you read. The editor of The Gazette had collected some information which suggested Sir John Marlowe was a humbug. He asked me to do the rest.”

  “You’re sure of your facts?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “That’s good,” said Laycock. “In a sense of course it was a fine journalistic scoop; only I could wish it hadn’t been written the way it was. I wouldn’t like that said about my father after his death, however much he might have deserved it. What are you going to do now?”

  “In what way?”