A Quarter Past Dead. TP Fielden
Judy, I am in agony. The sorrows of the world! All here! On this desk!’
‘He didn’t tell me he was going to do that.’
‘He wanted it to be a secret. He said he had been keeping back letters from readers who had special problems. He said he knew that if anybody could solve their woes it would be me! But I can’t, Judy, I can’t!’
In an instant Miss Dimont had grasped the problem. Agony aunts dispense their wisdom with breezy disdain, exhibiting a dangerous lack of contact with human misery, safe in their comfy chair and with a loving husband in the kitchen making them a cup of tea. They are secure, emotionally and financially, and disengaged from the plights and problems of ordinary folk. It is these very qualities which allow them to issue lifesaving instructions to those pitched into life’s ocean without a hope.
Athene possessed none of these attributes. Gentle, sensitive, the merest shadow of a being, she was too fragile to sustain a marriage, too unsure to issue instructions, too caring to dismiss the cries for help. Her great triumph was her personal joyousness, her upbeat message, told simply, carried from the stars, to every Sagittarian and Capricorn and Piscean in Temple Regis. To ask more of her was to ask too much.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Mr Rhys,’ said Judy decisively. ‘I can’t have you upset. And for heaven’s sake, Athene, drop the purple – nobody died!’
‘Only me, Judy. Only me.’
The editor was back from lunch and wrestling with his disgusting briar pipe. His wardrobe was particularly ambitious today – rumpled tweed suit, old brogues, grey shirt and woollen tie. The suit was ancient and its exposure to the elements over the years meant the trousers had shrunk and no longer reached his ankles.
Miss Dimont shut the door. An ominous sign, for Rudyard Rhys preferred it left open.
‘Richard, a word about Athene.’
‘Rr… rrr!’ came from behind the briar pipe. The great man did not like to be reminded he’d been born with a less glamorous first name than the one he now bore.
‘She can’t do it. The agony column. It’s making her unwell.’
‘Rr… rrr.’
‘Richard, why didn’t you ask me? I could have told you she’s not up to it – she’s in despair.’
‘We have to move with the times. Everybody’s got an agony column these days. We have to keep up-to-date.’
Miss Dimont looked down at her wartime comrade and wondered whether, in the thirteen years since peace was declared, he’d entertained a single ‘up-to-date’ thought.
‘Well, Athene can’t do it. You’ll make her ill.’
‘Somebody has to.’
‘There’s a crowded newsroom out there brimming with talent. Pick one of your reporters or sub-editors and let them have a go at the column. Any one of them would love to do it.’
Rhys looked out of the window at the circling gulls as if they were waiting for his corpse to be tossed on to the promenade.
‘Betty then.’
Judy blinked. Rhys’s capacity for making the wrong judgement knew no bounds.
‘Well, she’d love it. But consider this – is a woman who’s never been able to sustain a relationship with the opposite sex qualified to tell others how to sort out their love lives? Should someone who never knows what time of day it is tell people how to live a more orderly life? Is a person who wears a dead cat on her head qualified to hand out fashion advice?’
This last question briefly stirred the editor out of his post-prandial torpor. Friday lunch at the Con Club was the high point of the week, a moment when Rhys could sit as an equal with the city fathers while they discussed matters far too important ever to get an airing in next week’s paper. The lunches were heavy and long.
‘Rr… rrr, dead cat? What’re you talking about?’
‘A figure of speech, Richard.’
‘You’d better write it this afternoon for next week’s paper. I’ll get someone else on Monday.’ His body language intimated there was not enough room in his spacious office for two.
‘Another thing, Richard.’
‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.’
‘The murder over at Buntorama. I doubt we’ll be able to keep it to ourselves until next Thursday. You’d better prepare yourself for the usual Fleet Street hue and cry.’
Rhys looked desolate. If there was one thing he couldn’t bear it was an invasion of the national press into Temple Regis – shouldering and bullying their way around, noisily filling up the Palm Court at the Grand Hotel, bribing people to tell half-truths which made his own printed version of events seem tame – inaccurate, even – when the versions delivered by the national and local press were compared by the readers.
‘What have you got?’
‘I saw Bobby Bunton this morning and that dreadful woman he tugs around – Fluffles.’
‘The one who was thrown out of the Marine?’
‘Yes. She’s the latest sweetie-pie. That woman who was shot over at Buntorama was part of that incident. There was a dust-up in the Primrose Bar involving her and Bunton and Fluffles. Bunton spent the evening talking to her and ignoring Fluffles, and there was a fight. Then two days later, the woman was dead.’
‘She was a holidaymaker at Buntorama but drinking in the Marine? That’s unheard of. Two different classes of people altogether. The Marine doesn’t allow Buntorama customers inside their doors if they can possibly avoid it.’
‘She was a prostitute, according to Bunton.’
‘A prostitute? And he spent the evening talking to her? We can’t have that in the paper.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because,’ said the editor wearily, ‘first, he’s an important employer in Temple Regis and we don’t want the town thinking he’s a wrong ’un. They may start questioning why he was allowed to start up the camp in the first place.’
‘Ah, the Express backed those plans, of course.’ The faintest drop of acid in her voice.
The editor ignored this. ‘Second, I want no mention of prostitutes in Temple Regis. It will only encourage the others to flock back. Third, I’m really not keen on suggesting there’s been a fight at the Marine, given its remarkable reputation, and fourth, I think the least said about the dead body in Buntorama the better. It’ll soon go away.’
‘Not if Fleet Street gets hold of it.’
Rudyard Rhys groaned horribly.
‘Look, all I’m saying is – use the soft pedal, Miss Dimont.’ He did not like to use her first name. ‘The summer season’s starting up, and there are those new attractions over in Paignton and Torquay. Heavens, people are even going to Totnes now – and Salcombe! Soon they’ll have deserted Temple Regis altogether!’
If she could, Miss Dimont would have felt pity for her editor. But long experience told her this was a vacillating, fearful man who only made problems for himself by virtue of his nervousness. If there was an important decision to make between two choices, he’d always pick the wrong one.
‘Here’s the story, Richard. The Marine Hotel knowingly allows a prostitute to ply her trade in their bar. It allows its business rival, heaven knows why, to sit drinking in the same bar until his piece of stuff topples off her high heels and exposes herself to the world, then it kicks them both out.’
‘Bunton’s not a rival,’ growled Rhys. ‘Different ends of the business – carriage-trade versus knotted handkerchief brigade.’
‘Precisely my point,’