Piranha to Scurfy (4 page)

21 Grove Green Avenue
London E11 4ZH

Sir,

Your new farrago of nonsense (I will not dignify it with the name of “novel” or even “thriller”) is a disgrace to you, your publisher, and those reviewers corrupt enough to praise your writing. As to the market you serve, once it has sampled this revolting affront to English literary tradition and our noble language, I can hardly imagine its members will remain your readers for long. The greatest benefit to the fiction scene conceivable would be for you to retire, disappear, and take your appalling effusions with you into outer darkness.

The errors you have made in the text are numerous. On page 30 alone there are three. You cannot say “less people.” “Fewer people” is correct. Only the illiterate would write: “He gave it to Charles and I.” By “mitigate against” I suppose you mean “militate against.” More howlers occur on pages 34, 67, and 103. It is unnecessary to write “meet with.” “Meet” alone will do. “A copy” of something is sufficient. “A copying” is nonsense.

Have you any education at all? Or were you one of these children who somehow missed schooling because their parents were neglectful or itinerant? You barely seem able to understand the correct location of an apostrophe, still less the proper usage of a colon. Your book has wearied me too much to allow me to write more. Indeed, I have not finished it and shall not. I am too fearful of its corrupting my own prose.

He wrote “Sir” without the customary endearment so that he could justifiably sign himself “Yours truly.” He reread his letters and paused a while over the third one. It was very strong and uncompromising. But there was not a phrase in it he didn’t sincerely mean (for all his refusing to end with that word), and he told himself that he who hesitates is lost. Often when he wrote a really vituperative letter he allowed himself to sleep on it, not posting it till the following day and occasionally, though seldom, not sending it at all. But he quickly put all three into envelopes and addressed them, Kingston Marle’s care of his publisher. He would take them to the box at once.

While he was upstairs his own post had come. Two envelopes lay on the mat. The direction on one was typed; on the other he recognized the handwriting of his cousin Frank’s wife, Susan. He opened that one first. Susan wrote to remind him that he was spending the following weekend with herself and her husband at their home in the Cotswolds, as he did at roughly this time every year. Frank or she herself would be at Kingham Station to pick him up. She supposed he would be taking the one-fifty train from Paddington to Hereford, which reached Kingham at twenty minutes past three. If he had other plans perhaps he would let her know.

Ribbon snorted quietly. He didn’t want to go, he never did, but they so loved having him he could hardly refuse after so many years. This would be his first visit without Mummy, or Auntie Bee as they called her. No doubt, they too desperately missed her. He opened the other letter and had a pleasant surprise. It was from Joy Anne Fortune and she gave her own address, a street in Bournemouth, not her publisher’s or agent’s. She must have written by return of post.

Her tone was humble and apologetic. She began by thanking him for pointing out the errors in her novel
Dreadful Night.
Some of them were due to her own carelessness, but others she blamed on the printer. Ribbon had heard that one before and didn’t think much of it. Ms. Fortune assured him that all the mistakes would be corrected if the book ever went into paperback, though she thought it unlikely that this would happen. Here Ribbon agreed with her. However, this kind of letter— though rare—was gratifying. It made all his hard work worthwhile.

He put stamps on the letters to Eric Owlberg, Kingston Marle, and Dillon’s and took them to the postbox. Again he experienced a quiver of dread in the pit of his stomach when he looked at the envelope addressed to Marle and recalled the words and terms he had used. But he drew strength from remembering how stalwartly he had withstood Selma Gunn’s threats and defied her. There was no point in being in his job if he was unable to face resentful opposition. Mummy was gone, but he must soldier on alone. He repeated to himself Paul’s words about fighting the good fight, running a straight race, and keeping the faith. He held the envelope in his hand for a moment or two after the Owlberg and Dillon’s letters had fallen down inside the box. How much easier it would be, what a lightening of his spirits would take place, if he simply dropped that envelope into a litter bin rather than this postbox! On the other hand, he hadn’t built up his reputation for uncompromising criticism and stern incorruptible judgment by being cowardly. In fact, he hardly knew why he was hesitating now. His usual behavior was far from this. What was wrong with him? There in the sunny street a sudden awful dread took hold of him, that when he put his hand to that aperture in the postbox and inserted the letter, a scaly paw would reach out of it and seize hold of his wrist. How stupid could he be? How irrational? He reminded himself of his final quarrel with Mummy, those awful words she had spoken, and quickly, without more thought, he dropped the letter into the box and walked away.

At least they didn’t have to put up with that ghastly old woman, Susan Ribbon remarked to her husband as she prepared to drive to Kingham Station. Old Ambrose was a pussycat compared to Auntie Bee.

“You say that,” said Frank. “You haven’t got to take him to the pub.”

“I’ve got to listen to him moaning about being too hot or too cold or the bread being wrong or the tea or the birds singing too early or us going to bed too late.”

“It’s only two days,” said Frank. “I suppose I do it for my uncle Charlie’s sake. He was a lovely man.”

“Considering you were only four when he died, I don’t see how you know.”

Susan got to Kingham at twenty-two minutes past three and found Ambrose standing in the station approach, swiveling his head from left to right, up the road and down, a peevish look on his face. “I was beginning to wonder where you were,” he said. “Punctuality is the politeness of princes, you know. I expect you heard my mother say that. It was a favorite dictum of hers.”

In her opinion, Ambrose appeared far from well. His face, usually rather full and flabby, had a pasty, sunken look. “I haven’t been sleeping,” he said as they drove through Moreton-in-Marsh. “I’ve had some rather unpleasant dreams.”

“It’s all those highbrow books you read. You’ve been overtaxing your brain.” Susan didn’t exactly know what it was Ambrose did for a living. Some sort of freelance editing, Frank thought. The kind of thing you could do from home. It wouldn’t bring in much, but Ambrose didn’t need much, Auntie Bee being in possession of Uncle Charlie’s royalties. “And you’ve suffered a terrible loss. It’s only a few months since your mother died. But you’ll soon feel better down here. Good fresh country air, peace and quiet—it’s a far cry from London.”

They would go into Oxford tomorrow, she said, do some shopping, visit Blackwell’s, perhaps do a tour of the colleges, and then have lunch at the Randolph. She had asked some of her neighbors in for drinks at six; then they would have a quiet supper and watch a video. Ambrose nodded, not showing much interest. Susan told herself to be thankful for small mercies. At least there was no Auntie Bee. On that old witch’s last visit with Ambrose, the year before she died, she had told Susan’s friend from Stow that her skirt was too short for someone with middle-aged knees, and at ten-thirty informed the people who had come to dinner that it was time they went home.

When he had said hello to Frank she showed Ambrose up to his room. It was the one he always had, but he seemed unable to remember the way to it from one year to the next. She had made a few alterations. For one thing, it had been redecorated, and for another, she had changed the books in the shelf by the bed. A great reader herself, she thought it rather dreary always to have the same selection of reading matter in the guest bedroom.

Ambrose came down to tea, looking grim. “Are you a fan of Mr. Kingston Marle, Susan?”

“He’s my favorite author,” she said, surprised.

“I see. Then there’s no more to be said, is there?” Ambrose proceeded to say more. “I rather dislike having a whole shelfful of his works by my bed. I’ve put them out on the landing.” As an afterthought, he added, “I hope you don’t mind.”

After that, Susan decided against telling her husband’s cousin the prime purpose of their planned visit to Oxford the next day. She poured him a cup of tea and handed him a slice of Madeira cake. Manfully, Frank said he would take Ambrose to see the horses and then they might stroll down to the Cross Keys for a nourishing glass of something.

“Not whiskey, I hope,” said Ambrose.

“Lemonade, if you like,” said Frank in an out-of-character sarcastic voice.

When they had gone Susan went upstairs and retrieved the seven novels of Kingston Marle’s that Ambrose had stacked on the floor outside his bedroom door. She was particularly fond of
Evil Incarnate
and noticed that its dust jacket had a tear in the front on the bottom right-hand side. That tear had certainly not been there when she put the books on the shelf two days before. It looked too as if the jacket of
Wickedness in High Places
had been removed, screwed up in an angry fist, and later replaced. Why on earth would Ambrose do such a thing?

She returned the books to her own bedroom. Of course, Ambrose was a strange creature.You could expect nothing else with that monstrous old woman for a mother, his sequestered life, and, whatever Frank might say about his being a freelance editor, the probability that he subsisted on a small private income and had never actually worked for his living. He had never married nor even had a girlfriend, as far as Susan could make out. What did he do all day? These weekends, though only occurring annually, were terribly tedious and trying. Last year he had awakened her and Frank by knocking on their bedroom door at three in the morning to complain about a ticking clock in his room.Then there had been the business of the dry-cleaning spray. A splash of olive oil had left a pinpoint spot on the (already not very clean) jacket of Ambrose’s navy blue suit. He had averred that the stain remover Susan had in the cupboard left it untouched, though Susan and Frank could see no mark at all after it had been applied, and insisted on their driving him into Cheltenham for a can of a particular kind of dry-cleaning spray. By then it was after five, and by the time they got there all possible purveyors of the spray were closed till Monday. Ambrose had gone on and on about that stain on his jacket right up to the moment Frank dropped him at Kingham Station on Sunday afternoon.

The evening passed uneventfully and without any real problems. It was true that Ambrose remarked on the silk trousers she had changed into, saying, on a slightly acrimonious note that reminded Susan of Auntie Bee, what a pity it was that skirts would soon go entirely out of fashion. He left most of his pheasant en casserole, though without comment. Susan and Frank lay awake a long while, occasionally giggling and expecting a knock at their door. None came.The silence of the night was broken only by the melancholy hooting of owls.

A fine morning, though not hot, and Oxford particularly beautiful in the sunshine. When they had parked the car they strolled up the High Street and had coffee in a small select café, outside which tables and chairs stood on the wide pavement. The Ribbons, however, went inside, where it was rather gloomy and dim. Ambrose deplored the adoption by English restaurants of Continental habits totally unsuited to what he called “our island climate.” He talked about his mother and the gap in the company her absence caused, interrupting his own monologue to ask in a querulous tone why Susan kept looking at her watch.

“We have no particular engagement, do we? We are, as might be said, free as air?”

“Oh, quite,” Susan said. “That’s exactly right.”

But it wasn’t
exactly
right. She resisted glancing at her watch again. There was, after all, a clock on the café wall. So long as they were out of there by ten to eleven they would be in plenty of time. She didn’t want to spend half the morning standing in a queue. Ambrose went on talking about Auntie Bee, how she’d lived in a slower-paced and more gracious past, how, as much as he missed her, he was glad for her sake she hadn’t survived past the dawn of this new, and doubtless worse, millennium.

They left at eight minutes to eleven and walked to Blackwell’s. Ambrose was in his element in bookshops, which was partly, though only partly, why they had come.The signing was advertised in the window and inside, though there was no voice on a public-address system urging customers to buy and get the author’s signature. And there he was, sitting at the end of a table loaded with copies of his new book. A queue there was, but only a short one. Susan calculated that by the time she had selected her copy of
Demogorgon
and paid for it she would be no farther back than eighth in line, a matter of waiting ten minutes.

She hadn’t counted on Ambrose’s extraordinary reaction. Of course, she was well aware—he had seen to that—of his antipathy to the works of Kingston Marle, but not that it should take such a violent form. At first, the author and perhaps also the author’s name, had been hidden from Ambrose’s view by her own back and Frank’s and the press of people around him. But as that crowd for some reason melted away, Frank turned around to say a word to his cousin and she went to collect the book she had reserved, Kingston Marle lifted his head and seemed to look straight at Frank and Ambrose.

He was a curious-looking man, tall and with a lantern-shaped but not unattractive face, his chin deep and his forehead high. A mass of long, dark womanish hair sprang from the top of that arched brow, flowed straight back, and descended to his collar in full, rather untidy curves. His mouth was wide and with the sensitive look lips shaped like this usually give to a face. Dark eyes skimmed over Frank, then Ambrose, and came to rest on her. He smiled. Whether it was this smile or the expression in Marle’s eyes that had the effect on Ambrose it apparently did, Susan never knew. Ambrose let out a little sound—not quite a cry, more a grunt of protest. She heard him say to Frank, “Excuse me—must go—stuffy in here—can’t breathe—just pop out for some fresh air,” and he was gone, running faster than she would have believed him capable of.