CHAPTER
FOUR
A sustained buzz from
the doorbell of Martin Osbourne's
Hunt obligingly scanned the room, in which four other men were
comfortably gathered, and shouted the name of Anthony Keating after the
door-bound figure. To his surprise,
however, in walked Neil Wilder, who ironically saluted everyone before taking a
seat in the chair just vacated by Osbourne.
"I trust you've fully recovered from the flu?" Osbourne self-protectively inquired of him, while fetching
his latest guest a drink.
"As much as can be expected for the time being,"
replied Wilder, smiling ingratiatingly.
"Though, between ourselves, I think it
expedient for me to stay off work until Monday.
There's no desperate need for me to rush back, is there?" He directed this question as much at Hunt as
at Osbourne.
"Not that I'm aware of," the junior sub-editor
responded, with an ironic snigger.
"As far as I can gather, things have never been better."
"Then you haven't gathered much," Osbourne
opined, simultaneously handing the new arrival a glass of medium-sweet
sherry. "The way I see it, things
have never been worse!"
"He says that every week," Wilder playfully
objected. "Perhaps that's the main
reason why his booze cabinet is always so well-stocked. Nothing like regular hardship for promoting
inebriety, is there?"
"It depends on the nature of the hardship," rejoined Osbourne humorously, as he took a seat beside his fellow
sub-editor on the room's only settee and lit himself a
thin cigar. Now there was only one
person still to come, though, as far as the creation or maintenance of an
informal atmosphere was concerned, he had to be the least important. The 'stag party' was already an hour old and
proceeding quite pleasantly.
A few yards to Osbourne's left, a
little group comprised of a photographer, an artist, and a journalist was
continuing the rival conversation on pornography that had formed a kind of
counterpoint to the one in which he had been engaged with Hunt, prior to Wilder's unexpected arrival. The photographer, a stocky Scotsman by name
of Stuart Harvey, was denouncing the existence of homosexual pornography and
emphasizing, in no uncertain terms, his preference for attractive females,
whether heterosexual or lesbian.
Apparently, his profession had transformed him into a specialist in nude
and partly-clothed women, and had provided him, moreover, with more than a few
erotic perks. But there were drawbacks,
not the least of which being the fact that the women he was obliged to
photograph in a variety of postures weren't always to his taste. Indeed, the sight of too many nude or
partly-clothed bodies over a relatively short period of time was not only
boring, he hastened to assure his immediate listeners, but downright
depressing, to boot! It was a relief to
be able to wash one's hands of them, so to speak, and concentrate on something
else every once-in-a-while - for example, buildings or sunsets.
"Oh, I quite agree," Michael Haslam,
the artist, sympathized. "One
requires professional variety if one isn't to stagnate. For there's no surer way of disillusioning
oneself with the opposite sex than to be in their company either too long or
too often."
The journalist sniggered in implicit agreement, but declined to
comment.
"When I was an art student," the tall, fair-haired
artist continued, "I used to dream of painting nude women all day. I saw myself as a combination of Etty and Rubens, dedicated to the sensuous delineation of
the female form. What could be better, I
used to think, than a lifetime spent in the company of beautiful women? Well, after a couple of years of it, I found
myself asking: What could be worse? I
found myself seeking the company of men in the evenings."
"A time, ideally, when one should be enjoying the company
of women,"
"Quite! And not
necessarily nude ones, either," Haslam insisted,
as though to preclude implications of impropriety. "So, growing disillusioned with my
professional habits, I gravitated to painting fully clothed men during the day
and to entertaining nude women at night.
And, suddenly, life seemed a lot more supportable." He knocked back an ample mouthful of white
wine and smacked his lips in sensuous appreciation of its vinegary tang. "But these days I paint neither men nor
women, specifically, but things like that." He pointed towards a small canvas which hung
against the opposite wall, a canvas Martin Osbourne
had bought from him some six months previously for the comparatively modest sum
of £500. Not that Osbourne
was particularly keen on it. On the
contrary, he could hardly bear the sight of it these days. But, for sentimental and egotistical reasons,
he had considered it worth his while to be 'up with the times', as it were, and
accordingly the possessor of a work by a man whose friendship he had secured
only a short time before - compliments of 'Arts Monthly'. "My friend the painter," he would
boast to the various junior correspondents and other artistic young men whom he
lured along to his weekly stag parties on the pretext of a friendly tête-à-tête. And he would point out the various aesthetic
subtleties of the work, drawing especial attention to certain dubious
technicalities which he enigmatically described as 'modern', whilst
endeavouring to explain and, in some degree, justify the strange juxtapositions
of subject-matter which confronted the startled gazes of all who stood in front
of it for the first time.
To be sure, it wasn't every day that one encountered the
paradoxical spectacle of a Greek temple standing in a desert with a statue of
the Buddha squatting complacently on its top step and, at the foot of the
steps, two figures - one dressed in armour and wielding a mace and the other
garbed in Oriental robes and wielding a scimitar - engaged in mortal combat,
whilst, to either side of the temple, an impassive sphinx and a fierce
Byzantine deity looked on, as though transfixed. There was certainly something unusual, not to
say radically incongruous, about all that!
And the bemused minds of those who had never met with such a work before
and could only, in the circumstances, have the most hazy idea as to its
philosophical implications, were nonchalantly informed by the host-owner in
person that it was one of Michael Haslam's 'Cultural
Chimeras', and that he was a kind of latter-day Alma-Tadema
who specialized, with eclectic zeal, in depicting aspects of all the great
cultures of the past at once, through a sort of multi-dimensional montage. In short, someone who, whilst hardly eligible
for inclusion within the West's own great artistic tradition, would
nevertheless be remembered as a highly talented outsider and possibly even
minor genius.
"You could say that I've gone from one extreme to
another," Haslam continued, staring up at his
fifth 'Cultural Chimera' with pride.
"I began by over-specializing and I've ended-up by taking the adage
'Variety is the spice of life' to its utmost possible painterly
realization. If you could only see my
most recent paintings! Never such diffusion as now!"
'Never such confusion as now' would have been a more apposite
confession, Osbourne was thinking, as he savoured the
aroma of his mild cigar and stared at the canvas about which the artist, at
that moment, was being so immodestly and shamelessly enthusiastic. Things were certainly coming to a low ebb when so-called serious artists could take pride in
drawing inspiration from alien cultures, and cultures, moreover, which had been
in decline, if not extinct, for thousands of years. That was even worse than turning to science
and technology for inspiration!
"What's wrong, Martin?" Hunt was asking, as though
out of the blue. "Have you become
hypnotized by your painting or something?"
He waved a saving hand backwards and forwards in front of his
colleague's long nose.
"Not quite," the latter hastened to assure him. "Why, have I missed something?"
"You will if you don't listen to what Neil's going to tell
us about a cucumber," Hunt rejoined.
"A rather special cucumber, apparently."
"Why 'special'?" queried Osbourne,
his lips expanding into a sceptical smile.
"Because it was used as a dildo," Wilder calmly
informed him. "You know what that
is, don't you?"
Osbourne irascibly pondered a moment
this slight to his intelligence, but simply said: "Sure, it's a kind of
vibrator minus the vibration, an ingredient in the Tao te
Ching, a sort of artificial phallus."
This answer, though purposely over-intellectualized, evidently
satisfied Wilder. "Yes, good!"
he averred. "Well, this more
naturalistic dildo was long and gently curved, see,
and belonged to a Mrs X."
"Who's she?" asked Osbourne.
"That doesn't matter," retorted Wilder. "What does is that she and her husband,
a Mr X, had invited some important guests to dinner."
"Oh, really?" Osbourne's tone was
vaguely contemptuous, but he was mildly intrigued all the same.
"Well, Mr X saw his attractive young wife rinsing a
cucumber in preparation for the salad that was going to form the main course of
the meal and, struck by a bright if perverse idea, he snatched it from his
beloved's hands and commanded her to stretch out on the kitchen table, which at
that moment was conveniently empty."
Simultaneous sniggers broke loose from the throats of the two
sub-editors of 'Arts Monthly'.
"Being a ductile and exemplary wife, Mrs X climbed onto
the table and, at her husband's perverse bidding, hitched up her skirt. Mr X thereupon greased the cucumber and
proceeded to manipulate it, albeit tactfully, in the manner of a dildo. You follow?"
"Perfectly," Osbourne
admitted through the fumes of his latest cigar which, in circumstances like
this, served as an extension of his temper.
"He thrust it between his wife's thighs."
"Indeed he did!" came the
amused response from an incipiently sherry-merry correspondent. "And when he withdrew it a couple of minutes later, funky cucumber! It smelt unmistakably feminine."
Unrestrained laughter erupted from the occupants of the
settee. Even the little group of persons
who weren't quite involved with them became, for the nonce, noticeably
intrigued. The division between Osbourne's colleagues and friends became momentarily
non-existent.
"What about Mrs X's panties?" objected Hunt
pedantically. "You haven't
mentioned any."
"Primarily because she wasn't wearing any," declared
Wilder, his face flushed with excitement, "her husband being something of
a compulsive lecher! Anyway, getting
back to the gist of things, he then instructed Mrs X to slice the cucumber as
usual, to evenly distribute it among the five guests, and under no
circumstances whatsoever to either wash it again or put anything on it. He wanted it to retain the flavour of her
carnal person. So the duty of preparing
the salad was resumed by Mrs X more or less from where it had been so rudely
interrupted, she naturally obeying her husband's perverse instructions. Now when, finally, the guests arrived and
they all sat down to dinner, Mr X's anticipatory excitement was so intense that
he could scarcely keep a straight face.
Even his wife wasn't quite her usual innocent self as each of the
distinguished visitors helped themselves to their slices of cucumber and
commented approvingly on the meal, which also included roast chicken. Unfortunately, one or two of them, for
reasons best known to themselves, quite spoilt Mr X's pleasure by swamping
their slices of the carnal cucumber in copious dollops of mayonnaise. But the remaining guests provided his
imagination with the sadistic titillation it evidently required, as he lavished
especial attention upon the progress of their forks whenever a slice of
cucumber was in evidence. Now there was
one old lady among them who just about crowned his felicity when she ..."
he struggled bravely against the temptation to explode with laughter "...
sniffed suspiciously at one such slice and involuntarily raised her brows in
horrified surprise. It was as much as Mr
X could do to refrain from asking her point-blank whether there wasn't
something wrong!"
Renewed bursts of laughter shook the rib cages of the
recipients of this slightly scurrilous and more than vaguely implausible
anecdote, connected, as some thought, with Nicholas Webb, and promoted further
good fellowship. Glasses were refilled
with whatever was available and verbal inhibitions
shed with an alacrity that would have flabbergasted anyone not sufficiently
well-acquainted with Martin Osbourne's little weekly
gatherings. There was even room for a
joke about a certain female at 'Arts Monthly' being 'well-organized', and a
certain male no less well-known to them being a 'good organizer', as well as a
slight variation on Havelock Ellis' first name, which replaced the 'l' with a
'c'.
"Consummate frivolity!" exclaimed Haslam
by way of congratulating Osbourne for one such joke,
which transformed even his ordinarily sober mien into a transmitter of radiant
hilarity. "Strictly
men only!"
At that moment there came a short, sharp buzz from the
doorbell.
"Ah, that must be Tony!" conjectured Osbourne, suddenly turning serious. "It's so late that I'd begun to wonder
whether he was coming, the little twit!"
A slightly flushed and nervous Anthony Keating entered the room
and offered formal apologies for not being able to arrive sooner. Unfortunately business had held him up, he
claimed.
"I suppose you mean that interview with old Howard Tonks," the officiating host responded, offering him,
at his request, a glass of white wine.
Keating frowned sullenly and, feeling slightly compromised,
tentatively nodded his head. He couldn't
bring himself to disclose what had actually happened, so he mumbled something about
the composer keeping him to dinner and generally making a meal of things.
"Sounds as though he's a pretty garrulous fellow,"
concluded Osbourne sympathetically. "Either that or just good at talking
about himself, the wanker," he added, as a
malicious afterthought.
The junior correspondent nodded his head and frowned
again. "A bit of both," he
admitted, by way of keeping up appearances.
Then, catching sight of Neil Wilder, whom in his perplexity he had
failed to notice on first entering the room, he waved across at him and quickly
changed the subject to his health.
"Yes, he's sort of back to normal now," Osbourne confirmed, with an ironic snigger. "Well enough to drink sherry and be
merry here, at any rate. However, now
that you've carried off the Tonks interview, you
needn't worry about being asked to deputize for him again. Tomorrow you've got a review at the Merlin
Gallery, I believe."
"So I realize," responded Keating, and he frowned
more sullenly than before. How could he
review the work of some crackpot artist and simultaneously interview Mr Tonks as well? The
dates couldn't be altered, and neither could the assignments be cancelled - at
least not now. For bossman
Webb was dead set on getting the review done as quickly as possible in order to
have it sent on, by special arrangement, to the printers and accordingly ensure
its publication in the forthcoming edition of their magazine. It would be the last thing printed the following
week and, as such, would have to be dispatched on Friday evening at the
latest. A shade
inconvenient for the printers perhaps, but, being a relatively short article,
something for which they could apparently reserve a space. "Not the kind of arrangement we can get
away with too often," Webb had reminded his senior sub-editor shortly
after receiving assurances from the printers in question that some degree of
compliance could be expected, "but likely to win us more respect and
approval from the public than would any retrospective review for which we might
otherwise have had to settle." And
with a reference to Keating's eligibility for the job, he had dismissed Osbourne on an uncharacteristically optimistic note. Things were turning out quite differently, it appeared, from what he had initially
expected!
"Still, you've got more experience of reviewing art
exhibitions than of interviewing composers," the host rejoined, in an
encouraging tone-of-voice, "so it shouldn't prove too difficult for
you. You're more or less back on your
own professional territory again."
"Yes, I guess so," conceded Keating, forcing a late
smile to camouflage the spiritual discomfort he was experiencing. For 'more or less' was no small exaggeration,
and one that, in the circumstances, provided scant encouragement! In truth, he knew full-well that the
exhibition he would be reviewing, or was expected to review, was essentially
anything but his professional
territory. Indeed, it was even further
removed from it, in some ways, than Mr Tonks'
music! But art criticism was his second
string as a junior correspondent and, that being the case,
he had little option but to indulge it, for better or worse. The reviewing of books, principally aesthetic
and literary ones, would have to wait, seemingly, until the following week -
assuming he would still be working for the magazine then. For the way things stood at present, he
couldn't be too confident. Unless, however, he could come to some kind of alternative
arrangement...?
Yes, that possibility suddenly struck him like a revelation
from On High! Perhaps Neil Wilder would
be able to help him out of the double-dealing fix he now found himself in,
compliments, in no small measure, of the man himself. After all, it was largely Wilder's
fault that he happened to be in such a predicament to begin with! A bud of incipient optimism sprouted from his
soul and gently spread its enlivening aura across his face. If there was going to be trouble at the
composer's house, the following day, over the housekeeper's shameful discovery
that afternoon, why should he walk straight into it? Wouldn't it be wiser to induce Wilder to take
his place and conduct the interview instead, bearing in mind that he was better
qualified to do so anyway, and probably wouldn't invite further trouble? Yes, that had to be the solution! For if Wilder wasn't due back to work until
next Monday, no-one would know what he was doing on Friday. And if no-one would know that, then neither
would anyone have cause to suspect that he had been enlisted by Keating to take
care of an assignment which should have been wrapped-up on Thursday! With Wilder seated in the music room at Tonkarias, asking the simple questions he had
hurriedly and somewhat facetiously prepared in the first place, Keating would be
free to dedicate himself to the fiasco at the Merlin Gallery. As long as the tape-recording was kept away
from the ears of Webb, Osbourne, Hunt, et al., the
transcription onto paper wouldn't give anything away. With Keating's signature appended to it, there
would be little cause for suspicion. And
even the tape-recording could be redone, so that one heard Keating asking the
questions instead of Wilder.
Yes, there was indeed a way out of the fix circumstances had
landed him in, after all, a way that depended on the co-operation of the
cheerful character who was now approaching him through
the haze of cigar smoke. But he needed
to get rid of Osbourne, since it would be impossible
for him to unfold his plan with the senior sub-editor standing blithely in the
way. Indeed, it would probably be
impossible for him to unfold it anyway, since there were only seven of them in
the room, which wasn't a particularly large one. Unless.... His eyes alighted on the stereo
system to the left of the wine cabinet.
Why wasn't it on?
"What's happened to the music tonight?" he exclaimed,
pointing a gentle finger in the direction of Osbourne's
sound system. "I'd hoped that you'd have a new disc or tape to boast
of."
"As a matter of fact I have," declared Osbourne, his patrician countenance instantaneously
betraying a degree of collector's pride.
"Would you like to hear it, then?"
"Of course I would!" responded Keating
enthusiastically. "I've got great
faith in your taste. As does Neil, don't
you mate?"
"If you say so," said Wilder sheepishly, smiling
vaguely.
"Actually, I was so preoccupied by my friends'
conversation, before you arrived, that it just didn't occur to me to play
anything," confessed Osbourne, striding across
to the midi. "But now that you've
raised the issue." He bent down and
began to sort through his audio cassettes, many of which were piled together in
heaps on the floor.
Meanwhile, Anthony Keating was manoeuvring himself in the
direction he wanted things to go.
"I hear you've recovered from your flu bug," he revealed to
Wilder.
"Just about," the latter conceded. "I'm well enough to drink sherry
anyway."
Osbourne found the cassette he
intended to play and inserted it into the tape deck with a loud retort. There was an uneasy silence of anticipation
as it got under way, but then the first notes of a composition with a powerful
beat and an elastic electric guitar exploded upon them. "Any guesses?" he asked.
Keating didn't have to guess.
He recognized the music immediately and confessed as much.
"So you're familiar with Jeff Beck's latest release
too," Osbourne rejoined, as the heavy rock riff
ground its way through the track in question.
"Too familiar!" shouted Keating, to the amusement of
Wilder, who was also vaguely familiar with it.
However, with Osbourne still standing in close
proximity to them, it was impossible for Anthony Keating to reveal his plan,
so, fearing that if he stayed put the senior sub-editor would engage him in
conversation about his latest tape or some other musical irrelevance, he ambled
across, glass in hand, to the other side of the room, where Michael Haslam had just that moment launched himself into a defence
of contemporary art, 'Cultural Chimeras' and all, at the expense of the little
Scots photographer, Stuart Harvey. A
copiously stocked bookcase standing against the wall a couple of yards behind
them presented him with the pretext he felt he would require to justify his
presence there, and, bending down, he pretended to scan its predominantly
literary contents.
"But if one painted landscapes like Constable, these days,
one would be laughed at," Haslam was protesting
in a tone bordering on exasperation.
"All this return-to-nature-business is irrelevant, outdated, irresponsible. You've
got to paint in a way that's chiefly if not entirely your own. The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on
painters is now virtually extinct.
You've got to change with the times, to lead the times, which is
something photography can't do. So
photography isn't an art."
"It is an art," retorted
"Bullshit!" exclaimed Haslam,
clearly the worse for drink. "It's
not a fine art."
"It's a damned sight finer than the crude muck you
painters dredge-up, like puke, from your frigging subconscious and apply to the
canvas, or whatever, with the aid of your boots!" asseverated the
photographer on the crest of Scots arrogance.
"Crude or not, it would still be more of an art than
photography," Haslam countered, not a little
flushed, "because photography is too impersonal and doesn't change all
that much. The photo you take today can
be taken in twenty or in thirty years' time and, providing the subject-matter
hasn't changed dramatically, it won't look all that different. Admittedly, the photographic material may
have changed a little and the technological quality of cameras been improved in
the meantime, but the photo would still be the same, or approximately so. With art, however, everything changes. Blake is different from
Turner, and Turner's different from Bourne-Jones, who is different from
Beardsley, etc. Individualism is
the key to genuine art. It has the
personal touch. But your celebrated photographers ... where's their personal touch,
eh? They have a machine and they're
dependent on the way that machine, the camera, functions for the results they
get. One of them specializes in
brothels, another in castles, a third in models, a fourth in nature, and that's
about as much individualism as you get from them. In short, not enough to
justify the term 'art'!"
"Nonsense, man!" objected
"Yes, but all that has nothing to do with genuine
art," came the impatient rejoinder from the
self-respecting artist. "In the
final analysis photography is little more than the average philistine's
approach to art, the nearest he can get to it.
For fine art demands skills which you photographers wouldn't even be capable of imagining, let alone realizing!"
Stuart Harvey suddenly gave vent to an explosion of sardonic laughter. What was all this nonsense about fine art and
skills! As if they still existed! It was more than he could bear to hear
someone endeavouring to equate the latest 'experimental' developments in
painting with fine art! What was
particularly 'fine' about different-coloured paints that had been haphazardly
splashed across a canvas, a number of straight or curvy lines which made one
dizzy to behold, simple geometrical shapes that had been painted with a naiveté
which made even the 'naives' appear sophisticated, or anything else which could
be unequivocally equated with late twentieth-century 'art'? Wasn't there a chronological divide between
fine art and crude art, a time, so to speak, when fine art had generally ceased
to be painted and been supplanted by the sort of arcane, not to say inane,
rubbish all-too-frequently encountered in exhibitions of so-called contemporary
art? And wasn't the term 'art' something
of a misnomer when applied to such rubbish - a cunning deception on the part of
its purveyors which served their purely exploitative purposes? Surely the terms 'sham art' or 'anti-art'
would have proved more apposite?
With hand on stomach the stocky Scotsman laughed more
spontaneously and pleasurably than he could remember having done for some
considerable period of time. How
pretentious of Michael Haslam to suggest that
contemporary painting, which included most late twentieth-century abstracts,
was genuine art, and that photography, by contrast, was merely the average
philistine's approach to it! As if he were some kind of Raphael or Rubens or Rembrandt or even
Dali with a special set of painterly skills inaccessible to anyone else! Why, when one considered the nature of his
'Cultural Chimeras', wasn't it better to be a relatively unpretentious
photographer? If Haslam
had been capable of excelling in Modern Realism, and could produce portraits or
interiors virtually indistinguishable from photographs, it would be quite
another matter, irrespective of the absurdity of slaving-on in an objective
painterly manner in an age of photography, which could do the job so much
better and quicker and which, in any case, was doubtless the real reason why
most so-called avant-garde artists were unable or unwilling to carry-on
painting in an objective manner at the risk of appearing even more
anachronistic and redundant than they were already, the quasi-mystical
transmutations of anti-art notwithstanding!
Rather than admit defeat and abandon art for photography or some other,
more relevant and truly contemporary mode of perceptual objectivity, the
reactionary bastards persisted in their paradoxical creations quite as though
they were really contemporary and not cultural anachronisms who, in consequence
of middle-class prejudice, attested to the moral bankruptcy and aesthetic
degeneration of painterly art to a level which made photography seem
comparatively beautiful, irrespective of its subject-matter.
"Photography is superior to crude art,"
insisted
"Bullshit!" Haslam
protested. "Painting can only be a
fine art, not a crude one like photography.
What you're in fact implying is that photography isn't a crude art, but
something superior to that, superior, in other words, to cooking or gardening
or dress-making or ..."
Anthony Keating had heard more than enough by now! The polemical obsessions of these two
semi-drunken friends of Martin Osbourne were becoming
more than a trifle exasperating, particularly since, like monarchs and
presidents, they tended to cancel one-another out in a mutually exclusive
context of old- and new-brain perceptual objectivity, so to speak, with or
without incompatible class implications.
Thus with the fragile hope that by moving to another part of the room
they wouldn't exasperate him so much, he straightened up and, abandoning the
bookcase, strode across to where Andrew Hunt and his journalistic protégé,
David Turner, were discussing spiritualism.
But even there, whilst he stood in front of Haslam's
'chimera' and pretended to scrutinize one of its 'cultural' components, he was
still too close for comfort to the men who considered themselves the successors
of Brassai and Dali, and accordingly felt obliged to
abandon his intention of listening to the advantages of spiritualism over
materialism by returning, tout de suite, to the proximity of the midi system. There, thanks to the tape that was still
playing, one could only hear snatches of what was being said or, rather,
shouted in defence of the visual arts.
But, more importantly, Osbourne had left the
room and Neil Wilder was squatting down beside a pile of audio cassettes
through which he was searching with the look of someone who, given on principle
to CDs, only touched tapes as a last resort.
"Where's Martin?" he asked, drawing closer to the
midi, where he pressed the volume increase a couple of times before going
across to Wilder.
"Gone to the loo," the latter replied.
"Oh, good," sighed Keating with a look of relief,
and, seizing the opportunity of Osbourne's temporary
absence, he made mention of the interview with Howard Tonks,
adding: "I have to speak to you about it in private, as soon as
possible!"
"What's wrong with now?" asked Wilder, looking a
shade perplexed.
"Shush! keep your voice down!" pleaded Keating, as
side one of the tape came to an end and momentarily exposed their conversation
to the ears of anyone who might have been interested in overhearing it. Fortunately, Andrew Hunt, the only other real
threat to Keating's plan besides Osbourne, was still
preoccupied, like some old woman, with his conversation on the spirit world.
"Did something go wrong?" Wilder asked him in a lower
and more apprehensive tone-of-voice.
"Yes, dreadfully!" confessed Keating. "So I need your assistance."
"In what way?" Wilder wanted
to know.
It was difficult for the young correspondent to broach the
subject, so: "I'll explain later," was all he would say at this
point. "First, I want to ensure
that no-one overhears, okay?"
"Sure. But couldn't
we arrange to discuss this, er, problem somewhere
else?" suggested Wilder, frowning.
At that moment Martin Osbourne
returned from the lavatory and, gently closing the door behind him, began to
advance towards them. Keating pursed his
lips in dejected anticipation of the senior sub-editor's intrusion but, to his
relief, the man halted half-way across the room, turned with a look of
annoyance towards the two loudest conversationalists, who were still
intellectually at one-another's throats, and advanced towards them instead,
evidently with a view to restoring the party spirit. With an involuntary sigh of relief, Keating
took his colleague by the arm and led him towards the furthermost corner from
them, where, in a low voice, he proceeded to divulge some details about his
little problem.
