Mr Toppit (4 page)

Even though he was an author of theirs and had remembered her name when she had not remembered his, the look of suspicion remained on her face. “If you’ll just hold on for a second,” she said, tapped at the switchboard in front of her, and picked up the receiver. When the other end answered, she turned on her swivel chair so that her back was facing him. Like the girls in the gardens, she had been sunbathing at the weekend, and he could see the white bikini lines running over her red back and shoulders. She spoke in a low voice, and as he was at the other end of the room, still standing by his dust jackets on the wall, he could hear only a mumble, then his name.

She put down the receiver, and swiveled back to face him. “Strictly speaking, he’s not in,” she said. “He’s in a meeting, but he can come down for a moment.” A few minutes later, from the top of the building, there was the sound of a door slamming and
the whole structure shook as a pair of feet ran down the stairs, as loudly as a crowd of children jumping them one by one.

Graham Carter, Arthur’s editor and son of his friend Wally Carter, came running in like an unkempt schoolboy, his shirt coming out of his corduroy trousers. “Arthur!” he said, then “Arthur!” again, as he shook his hand and pulled him into a fumbling bear hug with his other arm. Then doubt crossed his face. “We didn’t have an appointment? No, this is a terrible day. Sales conference. Reps. Christ!”

From behind her desk, Stephanie had put down her paper and was watching Graham and Arthur with her arms folded. There was a moment’s silence, and then the phone rang. “Carter Press. Good afternoon,” Stephanie said brightly. A cloud passed over her face and she glanced at Graham. He gave a little shake of his head. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid not … Well, we were expecting him … Yes. I did pass your … And the one yesterday, yes … Your agent? No, I don’t see a call from him here.” She ran a hand over her desk and rustled some papers. “Well, I will. Yes. Of course.” No sooner had she put the receiver down than the telephone rang again. Graham took Arthur’s arm and led him out into the corridor. As the door closed, Arthur heard Stephanie say, “No, I’m afraid there’s nobody in Accounts now. They’re all at lunch. No, Mr. Carter isn’t here today. He’s at the sales conference … Yes, I know.”

Graham sat on a packing case and rubbed his eyes. Arthur leaned against the wall opposite him. “It’s good of you to come, Arthur. No, it is, really,” he said. “It’s a nightmare at the moment. Cash-flow problems. Most people are setting their agents on to us. And that’s just the authors. Don’t even ask me about the bloody printers.”

“I don’t have an agent,” Arthur said.

“The advances are so high, these days. That’s the problem.”

Arthur shifted uneasily. “You’ve never paid me an advance.” Graham looked pained, and Arthur said quickly, “I mean, I never really asked for one.”

“Well, that’s why I feel so rotten about the royalty statements not being done. I hope we’ll have them out by the end of the month,” Graham said. Arthur hadn’t planned to say anything in response to this, but Graham had already put out his hand to prevent him speaking. “I know, I know how late we are. Bloody accounts department.” Graham’s long blond hair fell over his eyes, and he brushed it back over his head with his fingers. He seemed about to cry.

Arthur felt as if he had somehow got on a bus that was going in the wrong direction and could not work out how to get off. He had not even realized that the royalty statements were late. He couldn’t really remember why he had come to see Graham, but now he felt embarrassed that Graham might have thought it was to complain.

They looked at each other for an awkward moment and then Graham broke it by saying a little too brightly, “And the children—how are they?”

Arthur seemed slow to respond to the shift in tone. Graham waited for a second and then added encouragingly, “Rachel—she’s turned into a bit of a stunner, hasn’t she? What a gorgeous thing! And Luke—how old is he now?”

Arthur appeared not to have heard what Graham was saying, but then he looked up and said something in a soft voice. It sounded as if he had said, “The boy …”

Graham felt uneasy. He wondered whether Arthur was ill, but he had too much on his plate now to deal with him. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Christ! I’ve got to go,”
he said. “Actually, it’s not a sales conference. I’ve got the bank people upstairs. I’m trying to sweet-talk them into extending our line of credit.” He got to his feet and shook Arthur’s hand. “Good-bye, Arthur,” he said, “thank you for coming in,” and ran up the stairs two at a time.

Arthur waited, and then, as Graham had vanished from the landing up to the next flight of stairs, he called his name. Graham reappeared, his face apprehensive.

Arthur was looking down at his shoes when he spoke. “I’m sixty-six years old, Graham,” he said. He cleared his throat, then continued: “Your father is my oldest friend. You’ve published my books, all five of them. Nobody else wanted to, except you. They’re the only things of mine that seem to have lasted. I think I came to say Thank You.”

Arthur let himself out of the front door, stepped from the shade into a pool of warmth and walked back along Meard Street towards Dean Street. Just before 2:00 p.m., he turned the corner and headed south.

Bunny Jones was just coming out of the newsagent’s on the opposite side of the road and saw Arthur. He had just looked at his watch because he knew he had to be back at work by two fifteen for a screening. He had been one of the senior projectionists at Elstree when Arthur was there and now, in his late seventies, he worked part-time at one of the post-production houses up the road. Actually, all he saw was Arthur’s back, but even though he had not spoken to him for maybe thirty years he knew immediately that it was Arthur, whom they had sometimes called Artie when he was young and doing odd jobs around the studio. What he couldn’t remember was his last name, and as he walked back up the street he tried to think what it was, but it was only when he read the late edition of the
Standard
on the tube home the next day that it came to him.

People had spilled out of the bars and restaurants into the heat and were standing in the street or sitting on the pavement. It was hard for Arthur to walk in a straight line, and he had to keep weaving from the center of the pavement out to the curb and back again. Ahead of him, bathed in sunlight, Old Compton Street cut across Dean Street, and beyond that he could see as far down as Shaftesbury Avenue, where he and Martha had once rented a flat. As he stepped off the pavement, a thought came into his head when he saw for a brief second what was about to happen to him.

I have no idea what that thought might have been. I’ve imagined what happened on Arthur’s last day and reconstructed parts of it from what Graham Carter told me later and from the newspaper reports that Lila clipped exhaustively and stuck into The Big Book of Hayseed with the right kind of glue that didn’t come through the newsprint. Laurie’s part was about to begin, but at that instant she was walking up from Piccadilly Circus and it would still be five or six minutes before she reached Arthur.

So there is nothing that covers that particular moment. All I see is an old man, dressed in gray flannels, a tweed jacket, and handmade shoes, stepping off the pavement onto Old Compton Street just as the girls in the park in Soho Square were putting their suntan lotion back into their handbags and dropping their sandwich wrappers into litter bins, and the men were pulling on their shirts in order to head back to work, and Bunny Jones was threading the first reel through the projector in the viewing theater, and Stephanie was telling someone that Mr. Carter was at a sales conference, while, in fact, he was in the boardroom at the top of the building in Meard Street talking about cash flow to the men from the bank on the Monday after the first hot weekend of the year.

A strange thing had happened to Laurie Clow, recently arrived in London from Modesto, California: she had become mesmerized by the walls of her hotel room. White paper had been pasted over thousands of tiny bumps of varying shapes and sizes. It looked like an unending Arctic landscape. Laurie lay in bed, where she had spent most of her time since she had been in England, and ran her hands up and down the wall. The texture tickled her fingers, but she had been doing it for such a long time that they had become almost numb.

She had been lying awake for a while, trying to feel some sense of excitement about being on vacation in a new city. She couldn’t even remember why she had wanted to come to London in the first place. Other places had filled her with anticipation. In Rome, they had dumped the bags at the hotel and had immediately set off for the Forum even though they had been flying all night. On Cozumel, they were at a beach bar drinking margaritas and listening to a mariachi band within an hour of touchdown. Of course, she had been with Marge then. Now she was on her own in a strange city with no desire to even get out of bed, staring at the walls of her room as if she was a mad person.

While she was sleeping she had had an odd dream. She had seen a man decorating the room. He had covered the walls with glue and then, from a bucket that he held in one hand, had taken little wriggling bugs one by one and stuck them onto the walls.
When he had finished, he covered the walls with long rolls of thin white paper that hid the bugs. Even before the man turned round, she knew with weary certainty that he would be her father.

As a child during the war, living in Los Alamos in the hills of New Mexico, there had been bugs everywhere. Hiding from the dry heat in the daytime, they scuttled around the apartment lurking in corners and under the beds. At night, big flying things like june bugs crashed into the screens. One morning Laurie had seen a little scorpion in the kitchen. She ran to the apartment next door to find Paully, the son of another of the lab technicians who worked with her father. They played together sometimes, not as often as Laurie would have liked because Alma said he was sly. When they got back, the scorpion was still in exactly the same place, and after Paully had prodded it with a fork to ascertain that it was still alive, he told Laurie to find a rag. Then they went into the bedroom where Laurie’s mother, Alma, was still asleep. They tiptoed to the wardrobe where she kept her supply of liquor and took out a bottle of gin. Back in the kitchen, they took the cap off the gin and poured it over the rag. The room filled with a heady, sweet smell and, catching each other’s eye and giggling, they licked the gin off their fingers.

Kneeling down, Paully placed the wet rag in a circle around the scorpion, and then, with a glance at Laurie who was standing up against the wall as far as she could get from it, he struck a match. Laurie thought that the gin would burst into flame like gasoline, but in fact Paully had to prod the rag several times with the burning match before it lit. The flame was very blue, and it crept slowly along the rag. At any minute they were expecting the scorpion to do what they had read about—lift its
tail and sting itself to death—but it seemed oblivious to the fire. Then, suddenly, it twitched and lumbered groggily towards the flame. To their horror it climbed onto the rag, sat balanced there and, with an awful crackling sound, began to burn. They screamed and Alma, dressed in the blue housecoat she had slept in, appeared at the door of the bedroom. She was looking for her cigarettes, raised a hand and said, “Wait, hold it, just wait,” when they tried to tell her the story, but by the time she’d found the pack, lit one and sat down, the moment had passed. It was left to Laurie’s father to remove the scorpion when he came back from the lab to make their lunch.

He always came in for lunch exactly at midday. “Hubba, hubba, hubba!” he called, as he pushed open the screen door, then put out his arms for Laurie. Unless he got a lift from someone, he walked home from the lab, and his shoes were always dusty from the unpaved roads. When he took his hat off, his forehead and hair were damp with sweat. Sometimes Alma was there and sometimes she wasn’t. If she was there, she was normally in the bedroom. She complained a lot of the time. She hated their quarters. “This is just a shanty town,” Alma would shout but what she really hated was living next door to Paully’s family because they were Jewish.

Her father was always cheerful. “You Princess Tuna or Princess Chicken Salad today?” he said, as he stood in the kitchen making their sandwiches, and she giggled and said, “I’m Princess Cookie,” or “I’m Princess Chocolate Chip.” He had other names for her, Princess Poodle or Princess Peach, and sometimes he made up names that sounded as if they came from
Hiawatha
, like Princess Alamita.

When their first winter came, he wore a felt hat and stayed up at the lab for lunch. He said it was too cold to walk back
and that his shoes would get muddy, even though duckboards had been put down over the paths. Then Laurie made lunch for herself and Alma, but Alma always left the sandwiches untouched. When spring came and the snow melted, he seemed to have lost the habit of coming home for lunch and stayed at the lab.

He was much less cheerful after they left Los Alamos and lived in Bakersfield. He taught math part-time in a high school there. Before Bakersfield they were in Fresno where he worked in a photo lab. In Fresno he was sad most of the time. For Laurie, he began to recede, to simply go out of focus, like some of the photos that had been thrown away in the shop and he brought home to show her—whole rolls where the camera had been set wrong and the figures were gray blurs or there were great moon-shaped faces staring at the lens. By the time they left Bakersfield and got to Modesto, he didn’t seem to be there at all. He had vanished, like a suitcase that had fallen out of the trunk while they were bumping along the highway. Then there was just her and Alma.

Laurie couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a vacation without her friend Marge, who was a Patient Care Operative at Holy Spirit Hospital where Laurie worked afternoons in the radio station after she had finished her morning show at KCIF. Marge had always planned them and booked them and organized them, had gotten a rough schedule for what she called “the May trip” before January was through, and when they met up on Friday nights, there was always a new map for Laurie to look at or a variation on the itinerary or a list of suggestions from someone else at Holy Spirit who had visited Barcelona
or Machu Picchu or Maui. This year, Laurie had organized everything on her own. She had not had a conversation of any length with Marge since they had got back from St. Barts the year before.