The End Of Solomon Grundy (6 page)

Comic strips are prepared long in advance, and Theo had been drawing some of the final scenes of this particular series. Theo Werner was a few years older than Grundy, a puckish little Austrian whose family had fled from his country when Hitler took over. He pranced round the study now, showing the big drawings he had put on card.

“Here you are, Sol my dear, here’s Krosscross talking to Johnno, they’re going to shut Guffy up, Krosscross wants to seal him in the Crumlin, Johnno’s going to bury him in Castle Knocks. And there’s Hum-hum.” Theo giggled with pure enjoyment. Krosscross and Johnno were deep in discussion, and stiff-necked Hum-hum trailed behind them, holding up a tiny model of the Tower of London, saying: “Let’s stuff Guff in here.”

Grundy laughed half-heartedly. Werner broke off.

“What’s wrong, Sol? You’re not up to the mark, as they say.” Theo liked occasionally to drop in an “as they say” or “as you put it” to show that he was a foreigner.

“Nothing.”

“Yes. You haven’t got your usual zing, my dear. I shall tell Marion.”

“Perhaps she knows already.”

“What have you done to your face?”

“A cat scratched it.”

“We are in rapport, you and I, eh? When anything bothers you I know it.”

“Perhaps. These are fine. Clacton’s got the outline.”

Clacton was the editor of the paper that ran the strip, and he had the whole new story in rough outline. These were the finished drawings that would appear in the paper.

Werner cocked his head to one side. “And you do not know why he has asked to see us tomorrow, eh?”

“To talk about the next series, very likely. But he didn’t say.” Grundy rose from the desk, shook his shoulders as though he were dispersing rain. “Let’s have a drink.”

“A sooperdooperexcellent idea.”

Marion liked Theo, who always paid her extravagant compliments which she enjoyed, although she publicly disapproved of them. Theo stayed for half an hour talking to them both, had two drinks, then said, “I must get back to my Lily of Laguna, as they say.” Lily was the latest of the series of mistresses in occupation of his Earl’s Court flat.

Marion had become quite animated. “They don’t say anything of the sort.”

“Don’t they? I am an Austrian idiot.” He kissed her hand, then her cheek. “Goodbye, my charming hostess. Farewell, old Sol. See you in the morning.”

Grundy showed him out, then returned to the living room. He looked at Marion, seemed about to speak, then poured another drink. Then spent Sunday evening in finishing the papers, drinking, and watching television.

On Monday morning The Dell was transformed from its weekend leisure. From eight o’clock onwards affectionate fathers said goodbye to wives and children, and hallo to those other much-loved children, their cars. Slick, spry, jaunty, some wearing suits of uncommon elegance and carrying umbrellas, others a little more bohemianly dressed, they put on their business faces, got out their cars, revved them up, turned into Brambly Way, and were sucked into the metropolis. Dick Weldon went to his architect’s office, Felix Mayfield, smartest of the smart, to the elegant Georgian house recently acquired by his advertising firm, a local doctor to his surgery, and a dentist to face the array of bad teeth in his waiting-room. Jack Jellifer went to an appointment with an editor to whom he hoped to sell a series of articles on “Great Dishes of the East.” Mr Belando, one of those disturbing horses of a different colour, went to a job in his country’s consulate, and Mr Kabanga went – well, nobody yet knew exactly where he
did
go. Sir Edmund, watching the cars turning out of The Dell from the bow window of his house in Brambly Way, deplored the vehicular – as he deplored the architectural, the moral, and almost all the other – habits of the age. The Dell children went to school, the Dell wives did the necessary jobs around their wonderfully labour-saving houses, in which many of them were helped by dailies who obliged for a couple of hours. Then they went shopping in the High Street or arranged flowers or read the papers or went in for a chat over a cup of coffee. Their lunches were light, for the children stayed at school, and all except a few local husbands were up in London. Dinner was the meal of the day, dinner preceded by a cosy little drink, and it was towards dinner that the Dell wives bent their culinary thoughts.

AdArt Associates, the firm owned by Grundy and Werner, occupied three rooms on the second floor of a street in the dubious area between Long Acre and the Strand. Two girls, or women, or secretaries sat at typewriters in the outer office, and the partners had a small room apiece. Since AdArts’ business consisted essentially of selling the work produced by other people, nothing more was necessary. On this Monday morning Theo Werner, bow-tied, and wearing a dashing cardigan and what almost looked like winkle-picker shoes, was ebulliently cheerful, Grundy more uncommunicative than usual. They went together to see Clacton.

Clacton was a big rumpled man, an able editor who, like so many editors in these days, exercised little real power. When challenged about this in a television interview, Clacton had said that he made his own decisions, and no doubt in a sense this was true, but it was truer and more important that his individual decisions had to accord with the policy of managers who had a collective, not an individual, face. As soon as they entered his office, Grundy, whose sensibility in such matters was acute, realised that Clacton had something disagreeable to tell them. Theo, who was oblivious to such fine shades of feeling, was still smiling when the blow fell. Clacton delivered it with the briskness which is really kind. The paper didn’t like “Guffy’s Sooperdooper Bomb,” and wasn’t going to use it.

Theo’s look changed almost comically. “Not to use it? But it was agreed, you agreed yourself. It has been drawn, it is finished.”

Clacton nodded. “I know. It’s tough.”

“But what is the matter with the series?”

“It doesn’t
feel
right.” Clacton hesitated. “I’ll tell you what’s been said upstairs. It’s subversive.”

“Subversive.” Grundy laughed. “A comic strip. How timid can you get?”

Theo, however, looked thoughtful, even grave.
Subversive
was a word he understood, one that carried a heavy weight of emotional meaning from the past.

“That’s all very well, Sol, but you’ve got to see it their way.” Clacton was earnest. “Krosscross is Kruschev, right, and Johnno is Johnson. You’re putting them on the same level, aren’t you, the same moral level I mean. They both do everything they can to stop the chap who wants disarmament. We’re a radical paper, you know that, but they don’t like it upstairs and I can see what they mean.”

Grundy roared with laughter. “Come off it, Clack.”

“I’m serious.”

Theo also was serious. “So we change this a little and make it okey dokey, as they say.”

“I’m afraid not. They’ve turned down the whole of this one, just like that.”

Grundy was about to speak, but stopped as a boy came in with coffee. When the door had closed he said, with brow corrugated and lower lip thrust rebelliously out,

“This is all balls, Clack. We’ve got a contract.”

“Yes. For a year.”

“Supposing we push it, suppose we say that we like this and we don’t agree to scrapping it.”

Theo made a deprecatory gesture. Clacton looked lugubrious.

“There’s something else I ought to tell you boys. There’s a general feeling that the whole tone of Guffy over the last year or so hasn’t been right. That one about the elections, you remember, and the series about the crooked building contractors, they weren’t right.”

“You’ve changed your mind. You liked them at the time,” Grundy said sarcastically.

Clacton spread out his hands. “I’m on your side, boys, you know that. But we all have to face the facts of life.”

“You mean you haven’t got a mind to change, they make it for you upstairs?”

Clacton was not a man to lose his temper, but his voice hardened perceptibly. “All right. You don’t want it easy, you can have it hard. The view upstairs is that the last four Guffy stories stink. They’re preaching some sort of phoney radicalism, and what’s worse they’re not funny any more. This isn’t just somebody blowing off, it’s based on several samples of reader reaction. You can try to get back to your old style if you like, though they doubt if you can do it. So do I, to be frank. Otherwise we finish with the story that’s running now, and you’ll get a cheque for the rest of the year.”

“Why, you crumby lot of bastards,” Grundy said.

“Sol. Please, Sol.” Theo had his hands clasped in entreaty.

“That goes for you too, Clacton.” Grundy in anger, ginger-haired and red-faced, arms hanging apelike out of a jacket that seemed too small for him, was a terrifying figure. “I thought you were one of the editors with guts around Fleet Street. I see I was wrong.”

“Please. He doesn’t know what he is saying,” Theo said.

Clacton stood up. “I think you’d better get out.”

Grundy glared at him, his mouth and eyebrows twitching. Then one of his big hands swooped down, as though it was a creature with a life of its own, picked up a glass ashtray on the desk and flung it. Clacton ducked but in any case Grundy’s aim was bad. The ashtray crashed through one of the glass panels behind the editor, and landed with a clatter in the press room outside. Grundy marched out like a Great Dane, trampling broken glass. Theo, a protesting poodle, followed him.

Mrs Langham, who liked to think of herself as a sort of confidential secretary, was really rather shocked by the events of that day, after the partners had returned from their interview with Mr Clacton. There was first of all the sound of angry argument in Mr Werner’s office, argument of a kind she had never heard there before. Then, just after midday, Mr Grundy burst out of Mr Werner’s office, grabbed his coat, barked something unintelligible at her, and went out, slamming the door. Two or three minutes later Mr Werner came out, and he – he who was always so pleasant, so happy, so much one for a joke – brushed past Mrs Langham and her associate Miss Pringle, without so much as a word. He was wearing his camel-hair coat and his smart little Tyrolean hat, and when he turned at the door they could see that his bow tie was sadly out of place. “I shall not be back today,” he said.

Mrs Langham did not reply, feeling that least said soonest mended. But Miss Pringle could not resist remarking, “Your tie, Mr Werner, it’s not quite straight.”

“My tie,” he responded with an agonised look, “is
ruined,
Miss Pringle, ruined.” Then he was gone.

The stresses of the day were not yet over. Half a dozen people rang up during the course of the afternoon, artists and people from advertising agencies, and Mrs Langham had to employ her stalling technique of saying that both partners had been called out urgently in connection with something – as she hinted, naming no names – really big. It was five o’clock when Mr Grundy came back and he was obviously, as Mrs Langham discreetly put it to herself, the worse for wear. When she told him about the messages he looked at her with bloodshot eyes and said nothing. When she said that Mr Werner would not be back, and suggested that he should make some telephone calls he spoke one word only: “Later.”

At half past five she and Miss Pringle put the covers over their typewriters, and she opened the door of his office. He glared at her, and said again: “Later.”

Mrs Langham was offended. “Miss Pringle and I are going, Mr Grundy. Shall I put the line through direct to your office?”

He smiled, and she melted at once. She thought he had a very nice smile. “Sorry to be snappy. Had a hard day.” His speech was just a little blurred. “Put the line through. And let me have the Guffy file, the drawings.”

She took in to him the Guffy McTuffie file, which contained the last four series of Guffy strips, covering a year. When she closed the door he had propped them on the desk and was staring at them.

Grundy often had a drink with an artist on the firm’s books after office hours, but he was usually home by seven. It was a quarter past seven on that Monday evening when he rang Marion and said that he would not be in to dinner.

She had spent part of the day in brooding on the defects in their relationship and had decided, as she often did in his absence, that they were largely her own fault. His call left her determinedly unruffled.

“It doesn’t matter a bit,” she said. “It just does not matter one bit.”

“I hope you haven’t made anything special.”

It would have been the part of wisdom, no doubt, to say that there was only cold meat and salad, but honesty demanded that she should mention the rice dish, with lobster claws, mussels and chicken, that was in the oven.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

To ask exactly what he was doing would have been against Marion’s principles. She said obliquely, “You’ll be having dinner?”

“I’m in the office working on Guffy. There’s been a bit of trouble with the paper.”

“Oh, well. You’d like something when you get back.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll have some sandwiches.”

“You’ll be home about ten.” Again she refrained from putting it in the form of a question.

“I expect so.”

He rang off. Marion ate the rice dish alone. It occurred to her while she did so that he had sounded a little odd.

Jack Jellifer had had an agreeable day. The series about “Great Dishes of the East” had been approved in principle, he had spent the afternoon in looking up some of the dishes and subtly modifying the details in them so that they became his own. He had then met Peter Clements in company with some other television administrators to discuss the idea of a programme called
Two Minute Meals,
and this too had been favourably received. Since Arlene had gone to see her mother and Rex Lecky was rehearsing in some distant part of London, Jack took Peter Clements to dinner at a new and rather special little restaurant. They discussed – it was almost impossible for Dell-dwellers not to discuss – the errors of Grundy, and they had only just stopped talking about him when they emerged into the street. Jack felt on good terms with the world as they walked down Curzon Street towards Shepherd’s Market. He strode along jauntily, looking about him, not paying much attention to Peter Clements who was saying something rather boringly technical about television.