A Splash of Red (7 page)

'Now tell me about yourself,' he continued kindly. 'And by the way shall we sit down on the Stygian carpet as we get to know each other better. Or would you prefer to entertain me in whichever corner of Hades you have chosen?'

'No, no, not upstairs,' said Jemima hastily. She had had enough of unwanted visitors for one day; even though Adam Adamson might prove an amusing addition to her life. Caution also dictated the minimum of involvement with squatters - even revivifiers.

Chloe Fontaine was after all a legal tenant at
73
Adelaide Square. No revivifier she, as
Time
magazine would put it. Having leased or bought such an expensive flat - Jemima wasn't sure which but if it was a lease presumably it was a long one, acquired with the proceeds of the sale of the Fulham house - Chloe had a vested interest in the maintenance of law and order in the building.

So far Adam Adamson presented an orderly front; but this was on the basis of one day's occupation. Jemima had seen what the most amiable squatters could do to an interior within a very short space of time. Did Adam intend to dwell here alone and if so for how long? A single rather slight man would not be very difficult for Sir Richard Lionnel's minions to eject. Perhaps he envisaged moving in some allies. On the other hand it was possible he contemplated a mere token occupation and would depart, leaving as he had suggested blow-ups of the original Adam designs on Sir Richard's dark blue walls as an artistic reproach.

Jemima's loyalty was towards her old friend. If squatters occupied number
73
in earnest, so that there was a prolonged siege, the value of Chloe's property stood to diminish drastically. Chloe, with all her faults, was a woman alone in the world supporting herself by her own -hard - labours. She probably also contributed to the welfare, if not the happiness, of the Stovers of Folkestone. Since it was not suggested that number
73
was to be left empty - indeed the Lion of Bloomsbury was intending to occupy one portion of it personally - she was not at all sure that a squat was morally justified by her own standards, if it proved financially damaging to Chloe. This was after all an aesthetic protest, not the housing of the homeless.

At the same time the architecture of this latest addition to Adelaide Square
was
brutally displeasing. If Sir Richard proposed further similar intrusions and had somehow bamboozled the powers-that-were into accepting them, there was a case to be made for popular protests. That might secure what lawful authority had failed to protect.

Jemima found herself toying with the problem, despite herself, in professional television terms. 'The Lion of Bloomsbury or Sir Richard the Lionnelheart?' (She had read some colour magazine article about the tycoon under the latter heading.) Excellent visual material available; an entertaining interview with Adam Adamson; a cool deliberately low-key one with Sir Richard Lionnel: let him damn himself out of his own mouth if necessary: Jemima Shore, Investigator, knew exactly how to conduct that kind of interview. Guiltily she remembered the claims of the British Library and the Edwardian lady philanthropists.

Gathering Tiger into her arms, Jemima said hastily: 'No time for the present to talk about me. But I've much enjoyed hearing about
you.
’
Tiger wriggled in her arms and his fierce green eyes gazed at her with indignation. 'Look, I must be off. I hav
e an appointment.' Let her sort
out her correct attitude to Adam Adamson and his fellow Friends of the House in peace, rather than under his enquiring squirrel's gaze. She did not, for one thing, like the sound of that future project, whatever it might be, planned by the demonstrators. It might be her duty to Chloe to find out a little more about it.

'Yes, why don't you think it over by yourself?' said Adam with a smile as though she had spoken. 'And then, my dear goddess, I am convinced that you will join us in our cause, bringing all the powers of your fellow gods and goddesses to our aid.' Was he mocking her and was that a glancing reference to the might of Megalith Television?

'But do tell me before you go, exactly what brought you, you with your archaic smile, to Adelaide Square from Mount Olympus? Or wherever it is you generally inhabit. I sense a mystery here.'

'I had better tell you plainly that I am not a squatter - revivifier,' Jemima said quickly as she left the flat. 'I've been lent the penthouse by a friend as a matter of fact. A straightforward tenant. They do exist.'

She did not wait to see Adam Adamson's reaction to this bold announcement. Back in the penthouse she deposited Tiger, fed him and checked that the balcony window was open for his egresses during her absence. How delightful and bleached and open the penthouse seemed! Like a glorious sandy seaside after the murky cavern of the third floor. Not all the works of the Lionnel Estate were bad.

She would have preferred to have eaten a quick meal there; but she had finished all the salad the night before. Jemima decided on a local cafe instead, somewhere where she could enjoy a glass of wine and read a book.
Fallen Child
might be dipped into again, as a tribute to her hostess. She selected a copy from the neat little row of Chloe's novels, stored modestly and inconspicuously at ground level. As usual, she admired the author's photograph which occupied the entire back of the jacket. Chloe really was amazingly photogenic: Valentine was right to take advantage of the fact. All the same, why on earth had a lace parasol seemed an appropriate accessory for this particular picture? No wonder the reviewers sometimes sneered.

Jemima carefully locked the flat behind her with the second Chubb key.

But as she returned down the stairs to re-enter the outside world, she found Adam Adamson waiting for her on the landing of the third floor. He was not smiling quite so broadly, a mere curve of his lips saluted her. He was in fact blocking her way.

'Just one more thing, green-eyed Pallas Athena, oh wisest one. What is the name of the obliging friend who lent you the flat?'

There seemed no point in keeping it from him. For all she knew, there were letters addressed to Chloe in the hall below.

'She's called Chloe Fontaine. The writer. You may have heard of her.' She was carrying
Fallen Child.
'Look, you might recognize her, even if you don't know the name. She sometimes appears on television.' Chloe's large sloe-like eyes gazed at them, provocative, enigmatic, beneath the white frame of the absurdly pretty parasol.

Adam Adamson gazed down at the photograph. He looked utterly disconcerted. He still smiled but as she analysed it later it was a smile of genuine surprise, even disbelief. In some way she had astonished him.

All he said was: 'Chloe: a nymph's name. But for a writer, one of the muses might have been more appropriate, Calliope, perhaps, the muse of tragedy. Still, she's certainly very beautiful.' And on that enigmatic and faintly disquieting note, Adam Adamson went back into the flat and closed its heavy mahogany door.

6

B for Beware

The Reading Room of the British Library, lying inside the British Museum, was very hot. Not unlike the summer streets of Bloomsbury through which she had passed, the Reading Room exuded an atmosphere of dust; it was also airless being without air-conditioning or open windows, the sun beating on the great glass dome which surmounted it. As a result, an aroma of faint dampness met Jemima as she presented her pass at the entrance. For a moment she was tempted to abandon this humid temple to literature in favour of the cooler halls of the Museum itself, presided over by huge wide-mouthed slant-eyed Egyptian monarchs and eagle-headed Assyrian deities. Other vast feline figures were guarding temples which had long ago disappeared. Here tourists worshipped with wondering eyes.

The Reading Room on the other hand was full of up-to-date activity. No one wandered. People strode. Unlike the tourists, the readers, carrying briefcases and rolled copies of the
Guardian,
gave an unmistakeable air of knowing where they were going. Because the Reading Room constituted its own busy little world in the midst of the great sprawling castle of the Museum, with its staircases and salons and guards, it always seemed to Jemima peculiarly appropriate that it should be built in the shape and design of a spinning-wheel in a fairy story. So one might fancifully imagine its toilers bent over intricate webs.

There were however a great many toilers already present this Saturday afternoon in August, and that particular idle fancy quickly gave way to irritation as Jemima embarked on the notoriously long-drawn-out process of finding an empty seat. Doggedly, she inspected the rows of seats, which radiated
out from the central enclosure,
forming the spokes of the wheel. After a while she gazed at those fortunate enough to possess them with the hostility of one searching for an empty taxi. The trouble was that the British Library system of sending for a book from the stacks necessitated the possession of a seat before you could fill in a request slip.

In the past, Jemima had enjoyed one concentrated and instructive spell working in the Reading Room. During a temporary lull in her television career, she had supported herself for three months researching in the Reading Room on behalf of an enterprising publisher who wished to launch a series composed of abridged versions of Victorian classics - out of the public mind, and also out of copyright. The series had never appeared and the publisher had disappeared. Jemima had gone back to television. But during the long days, Jemima had surreptitiously begun to study, on her own account, a topic more congenial to her own taste. This was the genesis of the book on the Edwardian lady philanthropists.

She still remembered the curious stifling anonymous freedom of working in the Reading Room every day, as though going to some office where one was at the same time totally unknown and yet expected. She had also, during that original sojourn, learnt the Reading Room rules about looking up books, which had their own logic, not readily assimilable on the first visit, but like riding a bicycle, once learnt never forgotten.

Jemima turned left and began to pace round the semicircle of seats radiating out from the central desk. They were arranged alphabetically, and she found herself beginning at L. The despised little central row of seats between each spoke were marked double L, double M, and so forth. The first three or four sections were too full to be inviting.

From an old girlhood habit, she began to tick off the letters of the alphabet in her own personal superstitious terms - L for Love, M for Marvellous, N for Naughty but Nice, O for Optimism, P for Peace, R for Romance
...
But as she searched for an empty seat, aware of a few people looking up at her with an air of vague disapproval as she passed on her high heels (or perhaps it was recognition or perhaps in the Reading Room the latter quickly turned into the former) she found imperceptibly that her litany was turning into something more macabre. V is for Violence, said the voice inside her head, and double V is for Victim of Violence. But V in Jemima's alphabet had always been for Variety, one of her favourite words, so much more diverting to the curious mind than the certainty of Victor)', the bull-headed sound of Valour.

And then as she crossed over the entrance to the corridor which led to the North Library and began the alphabet again - this time at the beginning - she found herself reciting A is for Accident, B is for Beware
...
C is for Chloe
...
she found her mind automatically continuing. But at B for Beware and before C for Chloe was reached, Jemima suddenly found that
B9
- the first end seat and thus her favourite for its slight extra feeling of space - was empty. Someone must have recently vacated it, for such a desirable position to be available so late in the day, by British Museum standards.

August after all was notorious for an influx of overseas scholars. Valentine Brighton had warned her as much when she announced her intention of using the summer season to work on those ladies inevitably christened by him, with his characteristic penchant for trivialization by nickname, 'Goodies of the Golden Age'.

'I assure you that you will find a mob of sweating scholars from Minnesota: they run package tours to the Reading Room in August.'

'You've never been seen in the British Library in August,' retorted Jemima. 'You simply sit at Helmet in the world-famous Elizabethan garden, having patrician nightmares about the proletarian professors.'

'My God, how wrong can you be? And I thought you were supposed to be an acute social observer, Jemima Shore, Investigator. I shall think twice about entrusting my Golden Goodies, to you, let alone old Aunt Emma Helmet's deeply philanthropic diaries about stamping out sex among the Sussex poor. ["But the book was my idea, Valentine," thought Jemima.] My dear girl, throughout the whole of August, I just can't wait to leave my world-famous Elizabethan garden for the ordered tranquillity of my Bloomsbury office. Those same sweaty professors from Minnesota also hie themselves inexorably to Helmet. Weekends, when the office isn't functioning, are pure hell. It's not so much them asking questions about the history of Helmet - Mummy always insists on answering them by the light of invention anyway - as
telling
me things about the place. And there I am, at one and the same time a cringing victim and the unworthy possessor. At Helmet in the summer they have me at their mercy; I much prefer the anonymity of Bloomsbury.'

It struck Jemima, glancing from her new vantage point of
B9,
that for the purposes of disappearing in London, the Reading Room would be ideal; for everyone, that is, except the very few physically famous. It was not ideal for Jemima Shore, for example.

As she looked up the press marks of the books she needed in the lumbering leather catalogue, a girl with long brown hair and a sharp nose spoke softly at her elbow.