Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White. Rosie Thomas
her with him. She would look for her father. Perhaps he would come and walk with her, or ride up over the ridge and gallop down the other side into the cool wind.
*
Outside the offices of Randle & Cates at exactly one p.m. a taxicab drew up. A young man in a white linen jacket with a loosely knotted, pale pink tie sprang out, paid the driver and dashed up the steps.
Tony Hardy, watching from the window of his first-floor front office, drew back a little and frowned.
A moment later his secretary came in to announce the visitor. ‘Mr Lovell.’
Richard breezed in immediately. ‘Tony. Here I am. It looks divine, you know. I’m thrilled to death. Everyone will buy it, I’m quite certain.’
‘Everyone will talk about it. That isn’t quite the same as shelling out the necessary for a copy, I assure you.’
Tony picked up a book from a little pile of identical volumes stacked neatly on his desk. The jacket was plain pale grey, and the tide stared out in bold black type. The Innocent and the Damned. Beneath, in smaller letters, it proclaimed itself Nearly a Novel, by Richard Lovell.
Richard came to stand beside Tony, admiring the effect at arm’s length.
‘So un-innocent looking. It could so easily have looked like a cheap romance, don’t you think? And I think we were so right not to go for some fussy picture that would have lessened the impact.’
Tony sighed. ‘I’m not worried about the impact it will have.’
Richard rounded on him at once. ‘What’s the matter? Losing your nerve?’
‘Not on our behalf. It won’t be the first risk I’ve taken, nor the first succès de scandale we’ll have suffered. I was thinking more about the effect on you, as it happens.’
Richard laughed delightedly. ‘My dear, just look at me. Do I look too fragile to cope with a brickbat or two?’
Tony did look. Richard Lovell had grown from the detached, clever little boy he had tutored into an even less knowable adult. And Tony thought that he probably knew him as well as anyone else in the world, outside his family. Richard had cultivated his flair for the ridiculous to the point where he was an invariably amusing companion, the expected life and soul of any of the unconventional gatherings he chose to frequent. He was determinedly cheerful, and seemed dedicated only to enjoying himself. In that respect he was like his mother. But Tony knew that behind his half-closed eyes Richard hid a much more complex nature. He was adept at disguising himself. Even his age was difficult to guess at. With his cultivatedly weary, cynical or occasionally puckish manner Richard, at nineteen, might have been taken for anything between twenty and thirty.
And now there was his extraordinary, risky, pyrotechnic novel. Thousands of copies of it, delivered this morning to the Randle & Cates warehouse from the carefully indemnified printers.
‘Well?’ Richard prompted. ‘Do I?’
‘No,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t think you’re too fragile to cope with whatever they fling at you. What about your family?’
‘Amy already knows that I have written a novel. I don’t think, given what she knows about you and me, that she will be shocked into insensibility. Adeline loves me to the point of idolatry and would continue to do so even if she heard I was a mass-murderer. I don’t think poor Bel is in a position to care.’
The omission was all too clear.
‘And Lord Lovell?’
Unusually for Richard there were two or three seconds of silence before he answered. And then his voice was measured, without the light sparkle of flippancy. ‘I hate everything that my father stands for. I don’t hate him, although I easily could. I can’t take any responsibility for what Gerald might feel.’
Tony replaced the new book on the pile.
‘And the other risks?’
Richard was growing impatient. ‘It’s rather late, isn’t it, to be beating our breasts about all this? If you mean the gendarmes, I don’t intend to hang about for long enough to be clapped in the cells. And I’m still a minor, remember, and so the innocent party. Your own lawyers have assured us that I have been as discreet as fiction demands about the less innocent. Enough.’
Tony was putting on his tweed jacket that had been hanging on the back of his office chair, and glanced at Richard’s turnout as he did so.
‘You don’t exactly dress discreetly.’
‘Oh dear.’ Richard fluffed out his pink tie. ‘I am in the kennel today. And I thought we were supposed to be celebrating. I shall pretty myself up as much as I please. It’s one of life’s least damaging pleasures, and one that you, in those frightful tweeds, clearly don’t take enough account of. Tony, you know that you are my dearest friend, and I am grateful unto death for what you’re doing. But just sometimes you can be just a little too much the old maid. Now, let’s go and have this famous publisher’s lunch. I’ve struck everything else out of the diary for the rest of the day.’
‘God help us,’ Tony murmured, as they went down the stairs together.
In the restaurant Richard ordered champagne ‘to begin with’. He watched the waiter pouring it and then leant back, stroking the side of his glass.
‘Are the review copies out?’
‘Of course. Two hundred of them. I’ve tried to make sure that enough have gone to people likely to be sympathetic.’
‘The old queers’ network? I don’t want sympathy.’
‘Don’t be a fool. You want good reviews.’
‘And the bookshops?’
‘Are taking copies in cautious quantities. Waiting for publication and the reviewers’ reactions.’
Richard lifted his glass. ‘One more thing. You’ve never really admitted it. Is it a good book?’
Tony smiled and picked up his own glass. ‘It’s a brilliant book. It’ll probably land us both in gaol, even so.’
‘Thank you. Here’s to publication day, then.’
‘To next week,’ Tony said, and they drank together.
Gerald was reading the newspaper on the shady side of the long terrace at Chance. His leg was propped stiffly on a footstool in front of him. Amy sat down close to him on the stone balustrade, feeling the warmth of the pitted stone under her fingers and the tiny, crumbly yellow lichens.
‘Is your leg bad today?’ she asked.
Gerald rustled his paper. ‘The same.’ He was curt in discussing what he regarded as physical weaknesses.
Amy tried again. ‘Is it well enough for us to have a walk together after lunch?’
He put the newspaper down and folded it up with an air of patience in the face of constant interruption. ‘A walk? A walk to where?’
‘Just across the park. Over the ridge, if you felt like it.’
‘Felled a lot of oaks, over the other side. Sign of the times.’ Gerald sighed gloomily and took his watch suspended on a gold chain out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘Time for luncheon. I’ll see how much I’ve got to do afterwards.’ But when he had heaved himself upright he offered his arm companionably to Amy and they strolled back into the house together.
The route to the dining room took them through the long, brown-leather and faded gilt expanse of the library. Amy glanced up at the heights of shelving and the thousands of books in their locked cases.
‘Papa, where are the botany books? The ones Great-grandfather collected? I remember we used to look at the paintings of orchids when we were children.’
‘End bay, on the right, I believe. Why do you ask?’