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
inebriation, 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 Harvey in what sounded
like an exaggeratedly aggrieved manner. "In fact, it's the only truly
contemporary visual art."
"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
Harvey, feeling personally
affronted. "There's much more to
serious photography than merely pressing the button when you've got
something in
your lens! There are all sorts of
technical considerations to bear in mind."
"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 Harvey with a sort of republican fervour, as soon as his
amusement had
subsided.
"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.
