At Paddington he pushed through the ants rushing around the forecourt, glad that he had chosen the closeted life of a university or, more accurately, that it had chosen him. Stephen had never come to terms with London — he found the city large and impersonal, and he always took a taxi everywhere for fear of getting lost on the buses or the underground. Why didn’t the English number their streets so Americans would know where they were?
‘The Times office, Printing House Square.’
The cabby nodded and moved his black Austin deftly down the Bayswater Road, alongside a rain-sodden Hyde Park. The crocuses at Marble Arch looked sullen and battered, splayed wetly on the close grass. Stephen was impressed by London cabs: they never had a scrape or mark on them. He had once been told that cabdrivers are not allowed to pick up fares unless their vehicles are in perfect condition. How different from New York’s battered yellow monsters, he thought. The cabby proceeded to swing down Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner, past the House of Commons and along the Embankment. The flags were out in Parliament Square. Stephen frowned. What was the lead story he had read over so inattentively in the train? Ah yes, a meeting of Commonwealth leaders. He supposed he must allow the world to go about its daily business as usual.
Stephen was unsure how to tackle the problem of checking Harvey Metcalfe out. Back at Harvard he would have had no trouble, first making a beeline for his father’s old friend Hank Swaltz, the business correspondent of the Herald American. Hank would be sure to have supplied him with the inside dope. The diary correspondent of The Times, Richard Compton-Miller, was by no means as appropriate a contact, but he was the only British press man Stephen had ever met. Compton-Miller had been visiting Magdalen the previous spring to write a feature on the time-honored observance of May Day in Oxford. The choristers on the top of the College tower had sung the Miltonian salute as the sun peeped over the horizon on May 1st:
On the banks of the river beneath Magdalen bridge where Compton-Miller and Stephen had stood, several couples had clearly been inspired.
Later, Stephen had been more embarrassed than flattered by his appearance in the resulting piece written by Compton-Miller for The Times diary: academics are sparing with the word brilliant, but journalists are not. The more self-important of Stephen’s Senior Common Room colleagues had not been amused to see him described as the brightest star in a firmament of moderate luminescence.
The taxi pulled into the forecourt and came to a stop by the side of a massive hunk of sculpture by Henry Moore. The Times and the Observer shared a building with separate entrances, The Times’s by far the more prestigious. Stephen asked the sergeant behind the desk for Richard Compton-Miller, and was directed to the fifth floor and then to his little private cubicle at the end of the corridor.
It was only a little after 10 am when Stephen arrived, and the building was practically deserted. Compton-Miller later explained that a national newspaper does not begin to wake up until 11 am and generally indulges itself in a long lunch hour until about 3. Between then and putting the paper to bed, about 8.30 pm for all but the front page, the real work is done. There is usually a complete change of staff, staggered from 5 pm onward, whose job it is to watch for major news stories breaking during the night. They always have to keep a wary eye on what is happening in America, because if the President makes an important statement in the afternoon in Washington they are already going to press in London. Sometimes the front page can change as often as five times during the night; in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy, news of which first reached England about 7 pm on the evening of November 22nd, 1963, the entire front page had to be scrapped to make way for the tragedy.
‘Richard, it was kind of you to come in early for me. I didn’t realize that you started work so late. I rather take my daily paper for granted.’
Richard laughed. ‘That’s O.K. We must seem a lazy bunch to you, but this place will be buzzing at midnight when you’re tucked up in bed and sound asleep. Now, how can I help you?’
‘I’m trying to do a little research on a fellow countryman of mine called Harvey Metcalfe. He’s a substantial benefactor of Harvard, and I want to flatter the old boy by knowing all about him when I return.’ Stephen didn’t care very much for the lie, but these were strange circumstances he now found himself in.
‘Hang on here and I’ll go and see if we have anything in the cutting room on him.’
Stephen amused himself by reading the headlines pinned up on Compton-Miller’s board — obviously stories he had taken some pride in: ‘Prime Minister to Conduct Orchestra at Royal Festival Hall,’ ‘Miss World loves Tom Jones,’ ‘Muhammad Ali says “I will be Champion Again” ’.
Richard returned fifteen minutes later, carrying a thickish file.
‘Have a go at that, Descartes. I’ll be back in an hour and we can have some coffee.’
Stephen nodded and smiled gratefully. Descartes never had to solve the problems he was facing.
Everything Harvey Metcalfe wanted the world to know was in that file, and a little bit he didn’t want the world to know. Stephen learned of his yearly trips to Europe to visit Wimbledon, of the success of his horses at Ascot and of his pursuit of Impressionist pictures for his private art collection. William Hickey of the Daily Express had on one occasion titillated his readers with a plump Harvey clad in Bermuda shorts and a report that he spent two or three weeks a year on his private yacht at Monte Carlo, gambling at the Casino. Hickey’s tone was something less than fulsome. The Metcalfe fortune was in his opinion too new to be respectable. Stephen wrote down meticulously all the facts he thought relevant and was studying the photographs when Richard returned.
He took Stephen off to have some coffee in the canteen on the same floor. Cigarette smoke swirled mistily around the girl at the cashier’s desk at the end of the self-service counter.
‘Richard, I don’t quite have all the information I might need. Harvard wants to touch this man for quite a large sum: I believe they are thinking in terms of about $1 million. Where could I find out some more about him?’
‘New York Times, I should imagine,’ said Compton-Miller. ‘Come on, we’ll give Terry Robards a visit.’
The New York Times office in London was also on the fifth floor of The Times building in Printing House Square. Stephen thought of the vast New York Times building on 43rd Street and wondered if the London Times had a reciprocal arrangement, and was secreted away in their basement. Terry Robards turned out to be a wiry American wearing a perpetual smile. Terry immediately made Stephen feel at ease, a knack he had developed almost subconsciously over the years and which was a great asset when digging a little deeper for stories.
Stephen repeated his piece about Metcalfe. Terry laughed.
‘Harvard isn’t too fussy where they get their money from, are they? That guy has discovered more legal ways of stealing money than the Internal Revenue Service.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Stephen innocently.
The New York Times file on Harvey was voluminous. ‘Metcalfe’s Rise from Messenger Boy to Millionaire,’ as one headline put it, was documented admirably. Stephen took further careful notes. The details of Sharpley & Son fascinated him, as did the facts on some wartime arms dealing and the background of his wife Arlene and their daughter Rosalie. There was a picture of both of them, but the daughter was only fifteen at the time. There were also long reports of two court cases some twenty-five years past, in which Harvey had been charged with fraud but never convicted, and a more recent case in 1956 concerning a share transfer scheme in Boston. Again Harvey had escaped the law, but the District Attorney had left the jury in little doubt of his views on Mr Metcalfe. The most recent press stories were all in the gossip columns: Metcalfe’s paintings, his horses, his orchids, his daughter’s success at Vassar and his trips to Europe. Of Prospecta Oil there was not a word. Stephen had to admire Harvey’s ability to conceal his more dubious activities from the press.