Conversations With Mr. Prain (11 page)

“They asked us. They couldn’t survive. Airy-fairy ideas about pleasing the literati are not going to ensure a sound economic basis for your business when there isn’t a bread-and-butter product as well. You need to understand the whims of the average reader.”

“And then the average reader dictates what you publish.”

He shook his head. “As I said earlier, not necessarily. But Coymans is still not large enough and secure enough to resist the whales: Harper Collins, Penguin, Random House, Hachette. They’ve made offers.”

“So you could have sold out and retired.”

“Quite. But instead I’ve played the game and built up Coymans to withstand attack, as much as possible. My grandfather did well enough from publishing, but my father didn’t put much into the firm and there were hardly any profits to speak of. I sometimes wonder if it was more of a hobby to him than a business, but he was a sentimental man, and he hoped I might do something to restore its credibility.”

“I gather your family didn’t make its money, originally, from books.”

“Good Lord, no.” He genuinely scoffed at the suggestion.

“From what, then?”

He smiled, sardonic. “Tea.”

“Your ancestors were tea importers?”

“My ancestors brought tea from India. They were Dutch, but settled in England with the entourage of William of Orange. All those portraits I showed you downstairs—they were Kooijmans.” He pronounced the name in what I presumed to be a Dutch accent. “They anglicised it to Coymans. They were all tea people, but then they became landed gentry, I suppose, and land and horses were ever since the foundations of the family. My grandmother was the only heiress to all and she married, out of love, George Gordon Prain, a marriage a touch beneath her. My grandfather liked books, and set up Coymans. He spent the next thirty-five years working tirelessly in publishing, and left all the concerns of hearth and home to my grandmother. When my father took over, I think he saw himself as a bridge between my grandfather and me.”

“And what will happen after you? Don’t you feel you have to produce an heir?”

He smiled. “You make me sound like the King of England.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I had said what had entered my head.

“No, I don’t mind answering. Quite frankly, the firm has a life of its own. Someone will take over, someone else who loves the business. I wouldn’t want a son just to march in my footsteps, poor fellow.”

“But what about all this?” I looked around, indicating the house, contents, grounds, and whatever fortune I had yet to hear about.

“If I don’t have a child, it’ll go to my niece and nephew. Death duty will take some of it anyway. Or perhaps I’ll give everything to the Arts and become a knight in the process. That would be rather interesting.”

“You could still marry,” I said.

He threw me a glance that seemed impenetrable and slightly hostile. Had he no faith in love? I felt uneasy, because in that glance I detected there was recrimination against me. You do find me attractive, I thought. It isn’t just because of the photograph. You have been drawn to the begrimed corners of Camden Market just to see me, and you loathe me subconsciously for an effect upon you that you cannot understand, or conquer. You want to keep control of your feelings, and of me, and so all this. Perhaps I should stop right there and say no more. Perhaps I should leave, I wondered, soon, get your opinion on my work and dash. I took a sip of gin and decided to persevere. Just a few more probes before the assessment.

“You’re very eligible though,” I said. “You said you meet a lot of attractive women. There must be hundreds of women ready …” Ready for what? To have him sire their offspring, to play companion without asking for love, to give him a good time and put up a show? “… who would consider you the perfect catch.”

“You do say peculiar things.”

“Well …”

“I’ve been engaged twice,” he admitted, looking into his glass.

“Who broke the engagements?”

Again, a flash of resentment.

“You don’t need to answer. You have the right to remain silent,” I assured.

A cagey smile. “Once me. Once her. The second one broke my heart. The first one was ridiculous. It was a conjuring trick of my mother’s.”

“Is your mother still alive?” I’ve got to stop this, I thought. Three more questions maximum and then sit down. I felt like I was turning into a television interviewer, a talk-show host. I could go on and on with affable queries into his life.

“No. She died four, almost five, years ago. This space used to comprise part of her rooms, drawing room and bedroom mainly. She died over there.” He pointed to the north-west corner. His tone was not emotive. It was almost callous. “After she died I had the walls knocked down to make this gallery.” He turned away, casting about glances, sipping. His footsteps padded softly on the grey carpet as he wandered. He saw there the bed, there the wardrobe, there the dressing table, and then he turned to look at me. “She had a stroke. Nothing dramatic. Nothing my mother did was dramatic, not even her death. I hope you don’t think me cold, but I was never close to her.”

A talk-show host would here have had a perfect response, or found a way to take the conversation back to a pleasant, light mode that would have been both entertaining
and insightful. I was overcome with an image of a little boy waiting for his mother to notice him and say something kind. I wanted to ask that little boy questions, and follow him to his childhood bedroom, to see what he played with, and how he coped with his loneliness. No question formulated itself.

He sighed. “Ah Stella, don’t you know that boys from the English upper classes are brought up by their nannies? Mother one is devoted to. One worships, one adores, her. When one becomes a man, she considers it her role to manoeuvre behind one’s back, to block, to whisper, to surprise. And one finds one doesn’t adore her anymore. She is like an old goddess who once commanded a million devotees, but who, in a technological age, is suddenly perceived by everyone to be a sham, an image without substance.”

“That does sound cynical, you know. She was only human,” I said, awkwardly, noting his “one,” as if every man like him had exactly the same experience.

He was ruffled, stirred up by memories of his mother and feelings he had long learnt to suppress. He had to attack. “I’m cynical?” he said, smiling. “You ask me direct questions but when I answer directly you immediately pronounce judgement upon me. Very interesting. I’ve always found people like you to be atrociously judgemental.” Still the smile.

“People like me.”

“People who espouse grand causes like ‘saving the planet,’ you ‘eco-warriors’ as I believe you call yourselves. Such people are horrendously judgemental of anyone who
doesn’t fit into the ‘touchy feely’ rubric. It’s not considered good form to feel nothing for your own mother.” His face was presenting a humorous mode, but his voice was not.

“But you don’t feel nothing.”

Oh Christ, I thought. I am not exactly priming him to be nice to me regarding my writing. Say something else, very sweet and non-threatening, for God’s sake, right now. My head was empty.

And then the phone rang.

A phone, a phone.

It was not a mobile. The white phone was attached to the wall near the bar. Mr. Prain looked at it with irritation. He strode over and picked it up as if he was clouting a child over the ear. “Hello, Prain,” he said, with a voice designed to clobber whomsoever had dared to call. He had succeeded in business, I reminded myself. It was no wonder he had such a voice up his sleeve. He listened, but reticently, miffed.

“Can’t you deal with it?” he snapped.

I discovered to my amazement that I had already finished half of my martini. I must have been sipping it, unconsciously, as he spoke. Ooops. For all I knew he could have mixed his martini differently from mine to ensure that I fell under the table long before he did. I had to keep my wits about me. No more.

“I said only emergencies.”

Only emergencies, he had said. He wanted to be disturbed only if there was a major crisis, not for anything.

And then some kind of jolt went through me. I realised something I had not thought about before. It was Monday afternoon.

Monday afternoon. Now meeting someone on Monday afternoon is really not so strange when half the people you know are working nights playing rock music or unemployed, but he was not one of them. He had set aside this afternoon for me. A weekday. A Monday. My day off, not his. He was a busy man. He was chairman and managing director of Coymans Publishing Company. He did not take an afternoon off to entertain young women from Camden for no reason. He did not want to be disturbed, because it was more important to have a few hours of uninterrupted time with this woman than to deal with the concerns of his business when he should have been at the office.

Jesus Christ. There was more to it than my writing. There was more to it than showing me the photograph, or the sculpture. But I had to bear with him. He had something to ask me.

“We can do this tomorrow,” he said to the caller. “Tell them I’m considering it.”

His correspondent clearly felt it could not wait. I went over to the window and looked out through the blinds to the verdant countryside outside the gate. I saw the gardener walk across the driveway below me. Had the lawnmower broken down again?

“Stella, excuse me.” Mr. Prain was holding down the silencer button and addressing me like a new secretary.
I turned to him and raised my eyebrows in expectation. “I have to deal with a business matter, an urgent matter, right away, and it’s rather delicate. Would you mind stepping outside for a moment. This shouldn’t take long.”

Another problem that required his immediate attention. “No worries,” I said, walking to the mahogany table. I placed my glass down there, beside the chess board, above my black box of typescripts, and paced past the horrible head of Medusa. “I’ll be outside,” I said, as I closed the door behind me. He would think I meant outside the room, in the hallway, but I would be outside the house, in the garden. I could say this is what I had meant all along. He would have to find me there. I needed air, sun, the smell of grass and flowers. Let me out!

I walked quickly along the hallway and down a narrow flight of steps, whisked along the first floor corridor to the grand sweep of stairs which led up from the entrance hall, ran down, opened the front doors and was at last breathing the country air and feeling the warm sun on my skin. In case he should see me immediately, I kept close to the house until I turned the corner around the west wall. I paced to the back grounds.

An expanse of lawns descended towards the wood, which lined the gardens on three sides, forming a kind of frame. There was the abandoned tractor lawnmower, silent. Crickets chirped and birds twittered, and the air was scented with roses.

Liberation, I thought. I am free.

Then there was a memory of such a time as a teenager. I went to a private church school in Wellington, Marsden Collegiate, which prided itself on turning out nice girls. It was the sort of school in which you had Anglican priests visiting to tell you how to achieve this goal by hard work and perfect manners. During one of these talks, I had made an excuse, said I didn’t feel well, and asked if I could go to the sick room to lie down. Yes. My teacher understood such things. Girls have periods. You could use that. Cramps. Let me go. I walked out of the classroom, along the hushed corridor, past school staff who did not see me, through the door, down the concrete steps, through the school gate, and along the road to a small park. There I lay on the grass under the summer sky. In my green uniform, camouflaged against the vegetation and hidden by trees, surrounded by buttercups, daisies and clover, I day-dreamed, made up a story of love and passion, kissed my beloved, went through a perilous adventure in Africa, fought bravely in a revolution, and returned in time for French.

The August afternoon was past its prime and fading. The days were contracting and the late, light evenings of summer were being snipped away. All around, the leaves of the trees were mature and dark, and had a heaviness that would soon become too great. With the frost of autumn, all this vegetal clothing would fall, leaving the branches bare. There was a whiff of it even now.

The shadow of the old house darkened the closest part of the garden, beyond the terrace and the steps flanked by urns, and, as the evening descended, the shade would progress to dull the colours of the flowers and the grass. I walked along a gravel path. Small butterflies danced around the flower-beds. I breathed the warm, perfumed air. Had I been sure of not being seen, I would have sat down on the lawn to bask in the glory of the day. Instead, I kept to the designated tracks, wondering when Mr. Prain would find me. It was rude, of course, to dash away like this, to make him have to search. It was not the proper thing to do at all. But I could not tolerate being indoors
any longer. I felt sure now that discussion of my writing was imminent. Now I could afford to get lost.

I looked at the shaded back part of the great house, with ivy creeping up its walls like algae. I identified the window of the room where we had been sitting at the tea table, and the bedroom window at the top. Somewhere around the other side Mr. Prain was speaking on the telephone.

Then I caught sight of Monique. She came through a doorway downstairs, which I presumed belonged to the kitchen, went down some steps, then turned right towards the outbuildings. I froze and stood as motionless as the bird-bath nearby. She did not see me. She opened one of the shed doors and disappeared within. Again, I noted the graceful way she carried herself. She was an attractive woman. He must see that, I thought. What was their relationship? Could they have been using
vous
for my benefit alone?

But what was my relationship with him? I looked up at the house once more, the house in which my typescripts were still held captive. Was I not being just a little too accommodating in permitting him to dictate the pace of this afternoon? Why did I not pick up the black box and demand a decision: yes or no? Why did I myself undertake a detour? Was I afraid of rejection? Or was I entranced by being taken for a ride? Was I somehow enthralled by a kind of unusual story he was revealing about himself? He let me have it in dribs and drabs, and I was afraid that confrontation would silence him. He interested me.