“Thought everyone knew that story,” said Waldegrave on another faint hiccup. “In a nutshell, Michael’s first wife Elspeth wrote a very bad novel. An anonymous parody of it appeared in a literary magazine. She cut the parody out, pinned it to the front of her dress and gassed herself,
The redhead gasped.
“She
“Yep,” said Waldegrave, swigging wine again. “Writers: screwy.”
“Who wrote the parody?”
“Everyone’s always thought it was Owen. He denied it, but then I suppose he would, given what it led to,” said Waldegrave. “Owen and Michael never spoke again after Elspeth died. But in
“
“Speaking of Fancourt,” said Waldegrave, glancing at his watch, “I’m supposed to be telling you all that there’s going to be a grand announcement downstairs at nine. You girls won’t want to miss it.”
He ambled away. Two of the girls ground out their cigarettes and followed him. The blonde drifted off towards another group.
“Lovely, Jerry, isn’t he?” Nina asked Strike, shivering in the depths of her woolen coat.
“Very magnanimous,” said Strike. “Nobody else seems to think that Quine didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Want to get back in the warm?”
Exhaustion was lapping at the edges of Strike’s consciousness. He wanted passionately to go home, to begin the tiresome process of putting his leg to sleep (as he described it to himself), to close his eyes and attempt eight straight hours’ slumber until he had to rise and place himself again in the vicinity of another unfaithful husband.
The room downstairs was more densely packed than ever. Nina stopped several times to shout and bawl into the ears of acquaintances. Strike was introduced to a squat romantic novelist who appeared dazzled by the glamour of cheap champagne and the loud band, and to Jerry Waldegrave’s wife, who greeted Nina effusively and drunkenly through a lot of tangled black hair.
“She always sucks up,” said Nina coldly, disengaging herself and leading Strike closer to the makeshift stage. “She comes from money and makes it clear that she married down with Jerry. Horrible snob.”
“Impressed by your father the QC, is she?” asked Strike.
“Scary memory you’ve got,” said Nina, with an admiring look. “No, I think it’s…well, I’m the Honorable Nina Lascelles really. I mean, who gives a shit? But people like Fenella do.”
An underling was now angling a microphone at a wooden lectern on a stage near the bar. Roper Chard’s logo, a rope knot between the two names, and “100th Anniversary” were emblazoned on a banner.
There followed a tedious ten-minute wait during which Strike responded politely and appropriately to Nina’s chatter, which required a great effort, as she was so much shorter, and the room was increasingly noisy.
“Is Larry Pinkelman here?” he asked, remembering the old children’s writer on Elizabeth Tassel’s wall.
“Oh no, he hates parties,” said Nina cheerfully.
“I thought you were throwing him one?”
“How did you know that?” she asked, startled.
“You just told me so, in the pub.”
“Wow, you really pay attention, don’t you? Yeah, we’re doing a dinner for the reprint of his Christmas stories, but it’ll be very small. He hates crowds, Larry, he’s really shy.”
Daniel Chard had at last reached the stage. The talk faded to a murmur and then died. Strike detected tension in the air as Chard shuffled his notes and then cleared his throat.
He must have had a great deal of practice, Strike thought, and yet his public speaking was barely competent. Chard looked up mechanically to the same spot over the crowd’s head at regular intervals; he made eye contact with nobody; he was, at times, barely audible. After taking his listeners on a brief journey through the illustrious history of Roper Publishing, he made a modest detour into the antecedents of Chard Books, his grandfather’s company, described their amalgamation and his own humble delight and pride, expressed in the same flat monotone as the rest, in finding himself, ten years on, as head of the global company. His small jokes were greeted with exuberant laughter fueled, Strike thought, by discomfort as much as alcohol. Strike found himself staring at the sore, boiled-looking hands. He had once known a young private in the army whose eczema had become so bad under stress that he had had to be hospitalized.