By tea-time, Wilfrid was behaving so tiresomely that Harriet put him away in a rage and sallied out to attend a literary cocktail party. The room in which it was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the assembled authors were discussing (a) publishers, (b) agents, (c) their own sales, (d) other people’s sales, and (e) the extraordinary behavior of the Book of the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater’s Mock Turtle. “I finished this book,” one distinguished adjudicator had said, “with the tears running down my face.” The author of Serpent’s Fang confided to Harriet over a petite saucisse and a glass of sherry that they must have been tears of pure boredom; but the author of Dusk and Shiver said, No-they were probably tears of merriment, called forth by the unintentional humour of the book; had she ever met Hepplewater? A very angry young woman, whose book had been passed over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher’s list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher’s imprint had been honoured in the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was. at the bottom of it: had they heard how the Daily Flashlight had tried to blackmail Humphrey Quint into advertising with them? And how, on his refusal, they had said darkly, “Well, you know what will happen, Mr. Quint?” And how no single Quint book had received so much as a review from the Flashlight ever since? And how Quint had advertised that fact in the Morning Star and sent up his net sales 50 per cent. in consequence? Well, by some fantastic figure, anyhow. But the author of Primrose Dalliance said that with the Book of the Moment crowd, what counted was Personal Pull-surely they remembered that Hepplewater had married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. The author of Jocund Day agreed about the Pull, but thought that in this instance it was political, because there was some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda in Mock Turtle and it was well known that you could always get old Sneep Fortescue with a good smack at the Blackshirts.
“But what’s Mock Turtle about?” inquired Harriet.
On this point the authors were for the most part vague; but a young man who wrote humorous magazine stories, and could therefore afford to be wide-minded about novels, said he had read it and thought it rather interesting, only a bit long. It was about a swimming instructor at a watering place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he married her and brought her back to live in a suburb, where she fell in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband went slightly mad and contracted a complex about giant turtles, and spent all his spare time staring into the turtle-tank at the Aquarium, and watching the strange, slow monsters swimming significantly round in their encasing shells. But of course a lot of things came into it-it was one of those books that reflect the author’s reactions to Things in General. Altogether, significant was, he thought, the word to describe it.
Harriet began to feel that there might be something to be said even for the plot of Death ’twixt Wind and Water. It was, at least, significant of nothing in particular.
Harriet went back, irritated, to Mecklenburg Square. As she entered the house, she could hear her telephone ringing apoplectically on the first floor. She ran upstairs hastily-one never knew with telephone calls. As she thrust her key into the lock, the telephone stopped dead.
“Damn!” said Harriet. There was an envelope lying inside the door. It contained press cuttings. One referred to her as Miss Vines and said she had taken her degree at Cambridge; a second compared her work unfavorably with that of an American thriller-writer; a third was a belated review of her last book, which gave away the plot; a fourth attributed somebody else’s thriller to her and stated that she “adopted a sporting outlook on life” (whatever that might mean). “This,” said Harriet, much put out, “is one of those days! April the First, indeed! And now I’ve got to dine with this dashed undergraduate, and be made to feel the burden of incalculable age.”
To her surprise, however, she enjoyed both the dinner and the show. There was a refreshing lack of complication about Reggie Pomfret. He knew nothing about literary jealousies; he had no views about the comparative importance of personal and professional loyalties; he laughed heartily at obvious jokes; he did not expose your nerve-centres or his own; he did not use words with double meanings; he did not challenge you to attack him and then suddenly roll himself into an armadillo-like ball, presenting a smooth, defensive surface of ironical quotations; he had no overtones of any kind; he was a good-natured, not very clever, young man, eager to give pleasure to someone who had shown him a kindness. Harriet found him quite extraordinarily restful.
“Will you come up for a moment and have a drink or anything?” said Harriet, on her own doorstep.
“Thanks awfully,” said Mr. Pomfret, “if it isn’t too late.”
He instructed the taxi to wait and galumphed happily up. Harriet opened the door of the flat and switched the light on. Mr. Pomfret stooped courteously to pick up the letter lying on the mat.
“Oh, thank you,” said Harriet.
She preceded him into the sitting-room and let him remove her cloak for her. A moment or two later, she became aware that she was still holding the letter in her hand and that her guest and she were still standing. “I beg your pardon. Do sit down.”
“Please-” said Mr. Pomfret, with a gesture that indicated, “Read it and don’t mind me.”
“It’s nothing,” said Harriet, tossing the envelope on the table. “I know what’s in it. What will you have? Will you help yourself?”
Mr. Pomfret surveyed such refreshments as offered themselves and asked what he might mix for her. The drink question being settled, there was a pause.
“Er-by the way,” said Mr. Pomfret, “is Miss Cattermole all right? I haven’t seen very much of her since-since that night when I made your acquaintance, you know. Last time we met she said she was working rather hard.”
“Oh, yes. I believe she is. She’s got Mods next term.”
“Oh, poor girl! She has a great admiration for you.”
“Has she? I don’t know why. I seem to remember ticking her off rather brutally.”
“Well, you were fairly firm with me. But I agree with Miss Cattermole. Absolutely. I mean, we agree about having a great admiration for you.”
“How nice of you,” said Harriet, inattentively.
“Yes, really. Rather. I’ll never forget the way you tackled that fellow Jukes. Did you see he got himself into trouble only a week or so later?”
“Yes. I’m not surprised.”
“No. A most unpleasant wart. Thoroughly scaly.”
“He always was.”
“Well, here’s to a long stretch for comrade Jukes. Not a bad show tonight, don’t you think?”
Harriet pulled herself together. She was all at once tired of Mr. Pomfret and wished he would go; but it was monstrous of her not to behave politely to him. She exerted herself to talk with bright interest of the entertainment to which he had kindly taken her and succeeded so well that it was nearly fifteen minutes before Mr. Pomfret remembered his waiting taxi, and took himself off in high spirits.