The Blackmailer, page 1
ISABEL COLEGATE was born in 1931. As well as working as a literary agent, she is the author of thirteen novels (including The Shooting Party, which was adapted into a film in 1985), and one collection of short stories. She lives in Somerset.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Man of Power
The Great Occasion
Statues in a Garden
Orlando King (first published as Orlando King, Orlando at the Brazen Threshold and Agatha)
News from the City of the Sun
The Shooting Party
A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory
Deceits of Time
The Summer of the Royal Visit
Winter Journey
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
ALSO AVAILABLE BY ISABEL COLEGATE
FOREWORD
The Blackmailer was first published in 1958. Anthony Blond had just started his own publishing firm. I think The Blackmailer was in his second swathe, the first having consisted of Simon Raven’s The Feathers of Death, Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies and I think Gillian Freeman’s The Liberty Man. Anthony had previously been a literary agent, in which capacity I was his partner, on the strength of having contributed £50 towards the initial expenses. We had an office in New Bond Street, at the top of a small building behind Barclays Bank. On the floor below was the office of Goya Perfumes, whose products sometimes suffused the air with floral essences, competing with the smell of burnt milk which came from the room beyond ours, where Major Clare, the theatrical agent, liked hot milk with his coffee. On the other side of the passage was a solicitor whose son, the actor David Tomlinson, would occasionally bound energetically up the stairs quite as if he were still playing a part in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Major Clare and his partner Mr. Fitch had to walk through our room to reach their own, and most considerately would do so on tiptoe so as not to disturb my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, asleep in front of the gas fire. The dog in The Blackmailer is a real dog, but the other characters are not real people. Fiction is not at all the same story as biography and there has to be room for invention as well as for manipulation in the service of a theme. I suppose most characters in novels are likely to be composites of people one has known or met, people one has read about or glimpsed on a bus, and oneself. Sometimes readers find this hard to believe. Certainly the editor at Jonathan Cape who rejected The Blackmailer before Anthony published it was convinced that I must have known André Deutsch, a well-known contemporary publisher whom I never met. Jonathan Cape himself seemed keen to publish the book, though he warned me that no one could expect to earn any money from a first novel, and that though some people said things might look up at the third, he himself thought one usually had to wait until the fifth. I was quite happy at this prospect, but unfortunately at a subsequent interview his chief editor Robert Knittel told me that Jonathan Cape was on the point of retirement and that he himself believed that there was no good fiction to be found in England and that America was the only hope. He said that I could console myself by the thought that he had rejected Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, a current best seller. I was not at all consoled, but other things intervened. In 1956 my daughter was born and in 1958 Anthony, having briefly worked for Allen Wingate while we wound down the agency, began his own imprint.
Looking back at the book fifty-seven years later I can see that the character of Feliks Hanescu must in fact have emerged from something in the air in our upstairs room. I was incapacitated by shyness in those days and seldom emerged into the outside world except to take the dog for a walk in Green Park. Otherwise I dealt with the correspondence in the office, assumed a fearsomely cool and repressive voice on the telephone which I felt implied a large staff behind me, and read and reported on the manuscripts which were sent to us. The reports must have been depressing for the writers to read because my standards were impossibly high. Anthony meanwhile would venture out into the cut and thrust of the literary world, returning with the tales which I suppose provided the material for the character of Feliks. That world has changed, become more professional, more fiercely commercial and more conventional. Feliks of course is a creature of fantasy but characters not immeasurably different could adorn the publishing trade in those days. After all Robert Knittel believed Feliks Hanescu to be a portrait of André Deutsch.
At the time I was writing the book the French troubles in Indo-China had been in the news. The battle of Dien Bien Phu, which put an end to French influence in Vietnam, featured at some point a siege and a gallant officer. Was there some kind of rumour about that gallant officer? Perhaps that started me thinking about different forms of betrayal and then perhaps the soup of the stuff of dreams began to bubble. It bubbles less easily now that I am old, which is why I look back on The Blackmailer with a certain affection.
Isabel Colegate
February 24, 2014
1
‘Brilliant performance,’ said the brown man, expansively. ‘Masterly, I’d have said. Never thought you’d do it, quite frankly. You must meet all my errant acquaintances.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I meant to do better for you,’ said Baldwin Reeves, who looked indeed disgruntled and rather puffy in the face. ‘I thought I’d get you off altogether; but Fortescue’s always hard on motoring offences. We’d have been all right with Lamb.’
‘Nonsense, my dear fellow, I’m delighted,’ said the other. ‘What’s a tenner between enemies? I really thought I’d lose my licence this time.’
They paused at the bottom of the steps of Bow Street Magistrates Court. Mr. Parker was just back from a skiing holiday, was off again to the south of France to lose his manly tan in the casinos while the spring crept north. Baldwin had had a hard cold winter, and it showed in his face and his frame of mind. Parker had hit an old woman on a pedestrian crossing on his way home one evening in his new Ford Thunderbird from some boisterous outing with the boys. The old woman had luckily lived, but Parker had a nasty driving record, so Baldwin’s case had not been easy. Baldwin disliked, despised and envied his client, but would have liked to have got him an absolute discharge because he was the sort of person whose partisanship was not to be sneezed at.
‘I must be getting along,’ said Parker. ‘Lunching with some old fiend of an ambassadress—ah well, big lunch . . . I really can’t thank you enough, really most grateful. See you in the club some time.’
Baldwin thought, rich people are always mean. Outwardly affable, he watched the brown man stride springily away from him towards his car. ‘You’d have thought he’d have given me lunch,’ he thought, ‘and anyway I know ambassadresses too.’
He took a taxi to Fleet Street, meaning to walk down to his chambers in Paper Buildings. It was a cold, bleak, hopeless sort of day, and he had a case coming up that afternoon which he knew he was bound to lose. The taxi put him down in Fleet Street: on his way towards the Inner Temple he went into a pub and asked for a sandwich and a glass of beer.
The place was full of newspaper men and lawyers of one sort or another. Baldwin sat down at a table next to a group of students engaged on just recognisable imitations of a well-known law tutor.
He disliked eating alone. It was partly a question of appearances: he would rather people saw him with someone else, because it gave a better impression and made him seem busy and sought-after; but there was more to it than that. Eating alone reminded him of the bleak years of the beginning of his struggle, of the baked beans consumed in Lyons Tea Shops in those unrelievedly awful days when no one had heard of him, when he looked round at the old women, the shop-girls and the workmen, the intellectuals, the lunatics, the lovers, and thought, with a depth of conflicting emotion which brought tears to his eyes, ‘I’ll show you, you wait, I’ll just show you,’ and at the same time, ‘I’ll help you, I’ll look after you, leave it to me,’ and ‘You’ll acknowledge me, everyone of you, not a life but will be touched by mine,’ and at the same time, ‘I will get you out of this, I will give you hope.’
But his own hopes were perhaps not quite what they had been. The struggle was turning out harder than he had anticipated, or if not harder (for he had been prepared for anything) then longer; and there was a bitterness and a doubt of misdirection which he had not used to have. There seemed to be a lack of response, an indifference, at the heart of things, which gave his earlier ambitions, ruthless though he had meant them to be, the aspect of ideals.
Of course this was a bad day, a sour unprofitable day, to be got through and forgotten as quickly as possible. At least he could have a very small lunch, and that might count as an achievement, since he was greedy though anxious not to be fat.
Finishing his sandwich, he took an exercise book out of his dispatch case and looked at the notes he had scribbled that morning for his big speech the next day. He was nursing a ‘marginal’ constituency, and reading through his notes his spirits suddenly rose—they were not so bad after all, the agent was sure there would be a big attendance for once, and that television fellow was going to be there so as to have a word with him afterwards; he could do with a television appearance just at the moment.
In this more hopeful frame of mind he greeted with a polite smile the girl who, disengaging herself from the group of now departing studen
‘You want my autograph I suppose?’ said Baldwin, appreciating with his mind’s eye the charmingly quizzical lift of his eyebrows.
‘Oh well,’ the girl said, embarrassed. ‘Really, I wanted to ask you about—that is, Lucy Fuller said she knew you—d’you know her?’
‘Of course, dear Lucy,’ said Baldwin. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh terribly well,’ said the girl, her nervous soft glance sliding away from him. ‘She’s having a baby. Did you—did you know Anthony Lane?’
‘Yes,’ said Baldwin, less affably.
‘Oh,’ she blushed. ‘Yes, she said you did. I only met him once, just before he went abroad. I thought he was wonderful. It must have been wonderful to have known him properly, I mean like you did.’ She spoke in a rushing series of gentle gasps.
‘I see it’s not me you admire after all,’ said Baldwin sadly. Seeing she still awkwardly stood there, he added: ‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘Oh well really I must go,’ she said, sitting down.
‘Have a drink?’ said Baldwin. She was quite pretty, but her approach annoyed him—its immodesty was too coy. He put her down as a creature of no account: so, for that matter, was Lucy Fuller.
‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you don’t like talking about it.’
‘About drink?’ said Baldwin. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘No, Korea,’ said the girl. ‘I mean, it must have been so awful.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Baldwin, indifferently. ‘Awful.’ He began to draw a very bad likeness of her in the margin of his notes.
She looked hurt. ‘I suppose you get tired of people gushing about him,’ she said humbly. ‘Only after all there are so few heroes these days and he is the one person everyone agrees was wonderful. I mean, isn’t he?’
‘He was a proper hero,’ said Baldwin, still drawing. ‘A proper hero.’
‘You were with him all the time, I suppose—out there, I mean?’ she said, her voice a little hushed.
‘Not all the time,’ said Baldwin, in the same sort of tone. ‘There were times when he was where none of us could reach him—times when though we were there he was alone.’
‘I see what you mean,’ she breathed.
‘My poor child,’ said Baldwin, putting down his pencil and leaning back in his chair. ‘Keep your hero—do you kiss his photograph every night?—but leave me out of it. I am a bad man.’
He suddenly leered at her, an awful base lecherous leer, and leaning towards her with a sort of buzzing sound, pinched her on the thigh. Then he burst into a great shout of laughter.
She stood up, blushing again and quite at a loss. ‘Well, I’ll—I’ll tell Lucy I’ve seen you,’ she said, beginning to edge away.
He waved foolishly, and she hurried out of the pub after her vanished friends. He went on laughing, his horrid gesture having given him a sense of huge release.
‘Life’s a splendid business,’ he said to the small journalist who, passing on his way to the bar, had stopped to stare. ‘A splendid business.’
‘Come into money?’ said the journalist, turning away to ask for a glass of beer.
‘No,’ said Baldwin.
The journalist came back with his beer. Baldwin knew him quite well in a casual sort of way without being able to remember whether his surname was Harman or his Christian name Herman.
‘As a matter of fact I’ve merely been very rude to a wholly inoffensive girl,’ said Baldwin. ‘It was unkind, but she unwittingly caught me on the raw, as the saying is. I’m a most resentful person, I’m afraid. I bear malice. Do you? Probably not, I should think.’
‘Can’t afford to in my job,’ said Harman, (for it was, in fact, his surname). ‘Got to have a rhinoceros hide. How’s business? Anything juicy?’
‘Nothing much for you I’m afraid,’ said Baldwin.
‘Nobody’s nice confession?’ Harman asked. ‘A good, hot serial—that’s what I want. You know we pay the top.’
‘I don’t believe you do,’ said Baldwin. ‘They paid me practically nothing for the only article I ever did for your paper, and then they mutilated it beyond recognition.’
‘You must be full of society scandal, the way you get around,’ said Harman.
‘I only know one scandal, and that’s an old one,’ said Baldwin.
‘How old?’ asked Harman.
‘Oh, years,’ said Baldwin. ‘It involves quite a lot of important names, though mainly military ones; it involves one hero and/or one traitor, and could be made to imply that the war in Korea was grossly mismanaged, and that all sorts of people were incompetent. I could make it quite dramatic, spin it out to quite a good length, and apart from anything else I’d be paying off an old score, an old sore score.’
‘Write it,’ said Harman. ‘Write it, for God’s sake.’
‘Will your paper print it?’ said Baldwin.
‘How can I say if you don’t tell me any more?’ said Harman. ‘Give me one name, one name involved.’
‘Anthony Lane,’ said Baldwin.
Harman looked surprised, then nodded.
‘Sounds excellent,’ he said. ‘Excellent. Anthony Lane, eh? You know your facts, I suppose? You were there, of course.…’
‘How much would they pay for that sort of thing?’ asked Baldwin.
‘A lot, if it’s good,’ said Harman. ‘Look, write a synopsis, get a bit of authentication—you know the laws of libel better than I do—give me a ring and I’ll arrange for you to see Blow, the Features Editor—nothing easier. Now do that, for God’s sake. I like the sound of it very much, very much indeed. Anthony Lane, yes. He really was made into a hero, no one’s forgotten him—and all that upper-class, smart regiment stuff—yes, I like the sound of some low-down on that very much indeed, just the stuff for us. We’ll discuss how I come into it later, eh? I know you’re on the level.’ He finished his beer and stood up. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Write it. I’ll see you get top rates, big money, really big, you take my word.’
When he had gone, Baldwin picked up the pencil which was still lying on the table in front of him, and turning over the page on which he had written the outline of his speech and drawn so unflatteringly Anthony Lane’s admirer, he began casually to scribble some other notes. Even as he wrote he was not sure who, if anyone, would ever read what he was writing.
2
He was a little taken aback when the door was opened by a half-sized man wearing a beret and a mackintosh: it hardly seemed in keeping with the conventional exterior of the house, the clean olive-green door with its glittering brass-work, the rather self-conscious terracotta window-boxes full of frost-bitten primroses.
‘Madame is upstairs. If you wait in here I will tell her.’ So he was foreign as well as a midget, and perhaps it was one or other of those facts which had embittered him, for the look which he gave to the visitor before stumping out of the room was certainly venomous.
Baldwin looked about him, speculating. This French defor mity—was he a servant, or what? He found it hard to imagine anyone wilfully choosing such an unattractive employee. It seemed therefore more likely—and the thinker hardly noticed the paradox—that he should be her lover. Besides, if he were a servant, surely he would be better dressed? The too-large navy-blue beret, the shabby brown belted mackintosh, floppy trousers and short thick shoes seemed by their audacious nastiness to indicate someone who was quite at home. Unless of course he was not a resident there at all, but someone called in to mend the electric light or clean the windows, and whose curious aspect would probably lose him her custom. He hoped so, because a lover, however small, would not suit his purpose; and indeed it seemed the most likely explanation, for the room in which he waited showed no sign of being lived in by an eccentric—nor even, on second thoughts, by a woman, for it was an austere greyish-brownish room with few pictures, many books, and an untidy desk in one corner. It was not, he was pleased to see, a shabby room: there were no outward signs of poverty. The white paintwork was too clean to have been done long ago, London dirt being what it is, and the furniture, though there was not much of it, was good. On the other hand there was no luxury: there were no flowers, for instance, and the cigarette boxes were empty. There were no shiny magazines, no gramophone or television set, and the Persian rugs on the floor, though good enough, might easily have come from one or other of the parents—the Lanes probably, since he had heard that hers were nothing to speak of—and he noticed, using a simple means test he had often found valid, that there was no fitted carpet.
