Free Something Wicked by David Roberts Page B

insurance broker who’s always giving them grief.’
    Edward’s immediate reaction was one of sympathy for the landlord.
    ‘What does he do? Is he a film producer?’
    ‘Nothing, really. I mean, he’s tried his hand at practically everything you can think of but it never lasts. He’s opened an off-licence – a wine shop – in Maidenhead but I think he must be its best customer.’
    ‘It must be hard for his father.’
    ‘Not easy,’ Harry agreed. ‘He’s really taken with the Fascists. His great friend is Jacques Doriot. Have you heard of him?’
    ‘I don’t think so. Unless you mean the French politician . . .?’
    ‘That’s the one. He was a Communist. Then, a couple of years back he saw the light and founded the Fascist Parti Populaire Français . They’re a bit too violent for me – like most converts they go to the other extreme but they have the measure of the Communists. Oh, I forgot, sorry. Isn’t your girl a Communist?’
    ‘Yes,’ Edward said shortly, ‘and I remember she told me once that Jack Amery had been gun-running for the rebels in Spain.’
    ‘Yes, he’s one of Franco’s most fervent followers. He joined the Spanish Foreign Legion and I think he became a Spanish citizen – to avoid his creditors mainly. But you can ask him tonight.’
    ‘Tonight?’
    ‘Jack wants us to join him at this new place in Maidenhead – what was it called? I remember, the Hungaria. I bet it’s awful but at least he’s never dull.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking of having an early night.’
    ‘Not a bit of it. You must come. You can ask him about Herold.’
    ‘Herold? Why? Were they friends?’
    ‘Great chums in the old days. The one thing Jack can do is climb mountains. It satisfies his restless streak and it’s dangerous. He and Herold climbed in the Alps several years running.’

4
    Verity knew she must be getting better because she felt so cross. Here she was stuck in some kind of prison while outside everything that was important to her continued as if she didn’t exist. Lord Weaver had sent flowers with a note in his own hand wishing her a speedy recovery but she was ungrateful enough to think it might as well have been a wreath. As far as the New Gazette was concerned, she was history. Someone else was reporting from Prague – quite competently, she was forced to admit. There had been nothing from the editor. That was no surprise as he disliked her and resented her influence with his proprietor. But – more hurtfully – none of her colleagues on the paper had thought to visit her. She was enough of a realist to know that out of sight meant out of mind, but still . . .
    It was therefore with delight that she welcomed Adrian and Charlotte Hassel. Adrian was a painter whose work she did not particularly like but who was her oldest male friend. Charlotte was a novelist ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set’, as she had once put it. She went to parties at which Virginia Woolf appeared although she would only talk to her own little coterie. Charlotte – a kind person – put this reserve down to shyness rather than intellectual snobbery. Mrs Woolf hated being lionized or asked to sign books. Public speaking was torture to her but, since the huge success of Orlando which had been published ten years earlier, she had been famous whether she liked it or not.
    ‘So, Verity, imagine my surprise when she came over at the opening of Duncan Grant’s exhibition’ – Grant was a painter friend of Adrian’s – ‘and told me how much she had liked my new book. I was completely bowled over.’
    ‘What else did she say?’
    ‘Nothing really. Well, actually I mentioned you. I hope you don’t mind. It appears she reads your stuff and seemed genuinely upset to hear you were ill. She said she’d send you some books.’
    ‘That was kind of her.’
    ‘She said she and Leonard wanted to invite us to stay with them in Sussex. I’m sure she didn’t really mean it but it was so exciting.