Publish and Be Murdered (2 page)

‘Take the monarchy, for instance. Fat chance the poor old royals have to be complacent these days, what with journalists pointing out their shortcomings from dawn to dusk, doing shock exposés, invading their private lives and crying “scandal” and condemning them for being out of date and wasteful of taxpayers’ money. And we’re the same in the Lords, with all the abuse thrown at us and no recognition of what we do that’s good.’

He thrust out his lip pugnaciously. ‘But of course it’s all different when the institution in question is a newspaper, magazine, journal, call it what you will. You don’t get any of that. Oh no. Journalists are beyond criticism. Dog doesn’t eat dog. Hack doesn’t eat hack. They hardly ever attack each other because they never know who they’ll be working with next week or begging a job from.’

He snorted. ‘Find me any shock-horror analysis of the dreadful management of
The Wrangler
, and I’ll give you a thousand quid. But don’t waste too much time looking. Because no journalist or editor will have taken the risk.’ He snorted again. ‘Hacks look after hacks and hunt in packs.’

His head fell on his chest: the diatribe appeared to be over.

‘So you’re not very keen on the profession which you so generously endow?’ proffered Amiss.

Papworth sat up straight. ‘I’m keen on
The Wrangler
for reasons of sentiment and habit and because I genuinely approve of its ideals. Like the paper, I believe that tradition’s good, change for change’s sake is bad and I applaud honourable intellectual enquiry with a big dash of humour. We’ve got to have a journal that’ll stand up to those puritan lefties who infest the chattering classes of every generation. God, how I hate liberals!’

Amiss wriggled uncomfortably. ‘Lord Papworth, I have to tell you that fundamentally I’m a liberal.’

Papworth shook his head. ‘Bertie put me right on that. Said you were sound through and through, just sometimes had to recite mantras about your liberal instincts to reassure yourself that you hadn’t sold out to the forces of reaction.’ He patted Amiss’s knee consolingly. ‘Don’t worry about that, dear boy. Shan’t hold it against you. Whatever you call yourself, you’ve obviously got the right stuff in you. Bertie told me of the great work you and that splendid Troutbeck battleaxe did to scupper that anti-hunting bill. Don’t you worry about that liberal nonsense. You’ll slough it all off soon enough.’

The words, ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ rose to Amiss’s lips, but remained unsaid. He needed a job, so he swallowed his scruples along with some more gin.

Papworth ruminated some more. ‘Mind you,
The Wrangler
trust hasn’t exactly been a spur to modernization.’

‘I hadn’t realized there was a trust. I thought you owned it outright.’

‘Oh, I own it. But I can’t meddle with it without the approval of the trustees.’

‘So you’ve got the worst of both worlds. How did that happen?’

‘Sometime in the late ’twenties, some ghastly jumped-up merchant was showing an interest in buying it and there was a mass outbreak of panic among the journalists: cries of doom and disaster and the death of editorial freedom and all that.

‘Of course, Papa reassured them that he wouldn’t dream of selling, but then they pointed out that he could die tomorrow and there was absolutely nothing to stop me selling up the day after. And despite Papa’s protestations and my reassurances the outcry continued.’

He laughed. ‘Mind you, in fairness, they had some justification for being worried about me. I was only ten and there was no knowing how I was going to turn out; indeed, I’d been heard to express a few bolshie opinions. The upshot was that Papa set up a trust to guard the soul of the paper. Very high-minded, my old father.’

‘What is the role of the trust?’

‘Protects the editor against the proprietor essentially. I can neither hire nor fire an editor without the trustees’ approval. And if I behave towards the editor in any way that he regards as interfering with the ethos of the paper, he goes off whingeing to the trustees and they rebuke and overrule me. They’ve got total editorial control, which in practice they cede to the editor.’

‘Does the system work?’

‘Oh yes. It works. For the editor, anyway. The proprietor is impotent. D’you know, thoughtlessly I once asked a
Wrangler
editor if he wouldn’t mind being kind to a book by my mate Freddie Dalrymple and he promptly gave the book for review to Freddie’s greatest enemy.’

Papworth chuckled genially. ‘I didn’t mind really. Should have known better. Still, sometimes it’s hard not to feel a bit fed up at the high-handed way some of these buggers treat me. In the view of
Wrangler
staff, the proprietor’s only role is to pick up the bill. Oh, yes, and to host the annual party and give the odd dinner for the trustees, the staff and various notables they’d like to meet. And they’ll give me an affectionate obituary when I turn up my toes.

‘However, bearing in mind what my son said so trenchantly, I have to accept that I’m being a touch profligate in paying over two hundred thousand pounds a year for the few privileges I’ve just outlined. I’d be glad if you’ll do what you can.’

‘Am I replacing anyone?’

‘No, you’re a new appointment.’

‘But that means that in hiring me you’re adding another thirty thou to your outgoings.’

‘My dear boy, from what Bertie tells me of your resourcefulness and from what I know of the staff’s inefficiency, you’ll have no difficulty whatsoever in rapidly making savings that will more than compensate for that. Just remember I want no blood on the carpet.’

He rose. ‘Now come along and let us dine and I’ll tell you a bit more about my tribulations with the inhabitants of Number ten, Percy Square.’

2

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Wrangler
HQ was a shabby five-storey house in a Georgian terrace. When Amiss pulled the bell, the door was opened immediately by a small teenager in livery, who ushered him into a splendid panelled hall chock-a-block with Georgian and Victorian artifacts. The effect was somewhat marred by mid-twentieth-century office interpolations.

There were, for instance, several nineteenth-century portraits, a heavy Victorian glass-fronted bookcase, two elegant chairs that Amiss tentatively identified as Chippendale and a fine Victorian desk incongruously topped by a 1950s switchboard, whose operator who looked as if she had been delivered with the equipment in a package marked ‘Dragon’.

The youthful flunkey took Amiss over to the desk, nodded at the dragon, who was talking briskly into a receiver, and said, ‘Miss Mercatroid will sort you out.’ She did not look up. The lad abandoned his charge and returned to his lair – a large Victorian carver, in which he curled up cosily with what looked like a football fanzine.

Amiss stood in front of Miss Mercatroid trying to look nonchalant and after a couple of minutes she ceased doing things with plugs, looked up and barked, ‘Yes?’

He simpered ingratiatingly and received in exchange a withering glance.

‘Robert Amiss. I’m here to see Mr Crump.’

She looked at him in shock and distaste. ‘You mean Mr Lambie Crump. He is never, but never, referred to as Mr Crump.’

She pointed to a fragile gilt chair, on which Amiss seated himself gingerly. ‘Ay will see if he is at home.’ Her vowels were so fluted as to give her accent a quality of ultra-refinement not heard in England in forty years outside Buckingham Palace.

Switchboard activities prohibited Miss Mercatroid for more than ten minutes from getting through to William Lambie Crump, during which time Amiss contented himself with dipping into parts of
Challenging Change: The Wrangler, 1805-1955
, which lay on the Sheraton table beside him.

He had just learned of the duel between the co-editors in 1829 over Catholic Emancipation (the duelling pistols were still among the treasures of the journal) when Miss Mercatroid looked at him frostily and told him to go upstairs where someone ‘will attend to you’.

The someone turned out to be a woman in her mid-seventies, wearing a high-necked white lace blouse, a dirndl skirt of mauve gingham and a crocheted cardigan. The enamelled brooch at her throat featured a ferocious-looking bulldog – designed, presumably, to ward off unacceptable advances.

‘I will take you to wait in the editor’s anteroom,’ she said. Her voice took on a note of awe: ‘Mr Lambie Crump is writing, so he cannot be interrupted.’ She turned and led Amiss into a magnificently proportioned room disfigured by a partition which cut in half a magnificent bay window. It was occupied by five elderly women who sat in rows in front of stout manual typewriters: the clatter was overwhelming.

Facing them sat a large woman in battleship-grey – clearly the supervisor. She was jabbing her finger at a page of typescript annotated in red ink. ‘Are you going quite blind, Mavis?’ she asked the crone standing before her. ‘Redo.’ Shaking visibly, and looking on the edge of tears, her victim tottered away.

Amiss was led through the door in the partition and placed in a Victorian button-back armchair beside another Sheraton table bearing a copy of
The Wrangler
’s history. ‘Would you care for afternoon tea?’ she asked.

‘How delightful. Yes, please.’

She vanished and reappeared fifteen minutes later with a tray bearing a teapot, water jug, strainer, milk jug and sugar basin complete with tongs: all looked Georgian and silver. There were also doilied china plates of cucumber sandwiches and what in Amiss’s youth had been called fancy cakes.

By the time Lambie Crump deigned to emerge from his office and shake hands with his guest, Amiss was replete and had progressed in his studies to the great scandal of the 1840s when the editor put the journal’s spare cash into railway shares: in the resulting crash the Papworths had to stump up a vast sum of money to keep the journal afloat.

‘Just a moment.’ Lambie Crump darted through the partition and came back divested of the several sheets of handwritten paper he’d been carrying. ‘Sorry about that. One had to finish a rather tricky analysis of the latest New Labour proposals for creating constitutional mayhem. Pray, come in.’

Amiss followed him into a room far too grand to be described as an office. Had the effect not been slightly spoiled by the shabbiness of the paintwork, its spaciousness, ornate gilt decoration, fine furniture and splendid fireplace dominated by a magnificent gilt-framed rural landscape, would have been appropriate to a foreign secretary.

Lambie Crump suited his surroundings, being the epitome of those known popularly as Young Fogeys, although he was taller and skinnier than the norm and being by now in his forties was perilously close to graduating to full-blown fogeyhood. His blond hair flopped Byronically over his brow, slightly obscuring the right side of his pince-nez; across his three-piece, hairy, yellowish suit and check shirt was strung a heavy gold watch chain; his tie was that of a gentleman’s club known to Amiss as the Highest of all High Tory fortresses; and his brogues looked both handmade and ancient.

On the coatstand was a brown trilby hat, a long cashmere coat and a black umbrella, and nestling beside Lambie Crump’s desk was a Gladstone bag of considerable age. The glass-fronted bookcase contained hundreds of leather-bound volumes.

Lambie Crump fussed around Amiss as he seated him and then threw himself into the vast chair behind his desk, which looked to be the twin of the doorkeeper’s. ‘It is good of you to call, Mr Amiss. Good of you to call.’

‘Not at all, Mr Lambie Crump. A pleasure.’

Lambie Crump placed the tips of his fingers together and looked portentous. ‘One is reluctant to begin crassly, but it is proper to mention that one has a veto over your appointment. While one’s freedom of action is confined to matters editorial, in practice it is so closely combined with the managerial side of the paper that the trustees would not countenance having imposed upon one anyone with whom one could not work.’ He leaned his chin on the tips of his steepled fingers and peered at Amiss over the top of his glasses. ‘For some reason that eludes one, the trustees appear to think one’s welfare is their concern.’

He threw back his head and emitted a sound which Amiss thought was intended to express amusement, but which more resembled the distress call of an anxious horse. When the sound had faded away, he balanced his head again on his fingers and looked solemn. ‘You will understand, therefore, that while one was happy to leave it to Charlie Papworth to suggest the name of someone who might assist, one could accept no one who fails to understand that one can accomplish nothing without tranquillity. A manager will have to understand that editorial takes precedence over managerial at all times.’

‘Of course, Mr Lambie Crump. I should wish it to be no other way. My concern is to make your life easier, not add to its vexations.’

That circumlocution went down noticeably well with Lambie Crump, who now went to the trouble of looking at Amiss appraisingly. Having taken in the inoffensive tweed and the check shirt, his gaze lighted on Amiss’s tie. ‘Ah, how interesting. You are a member of ffeatherstonehaugh’s. That is a club one has occasionally been tempted to join. Wonderful cellar, one is told, though, forgive me, do its members not have a somewhat licentious reputation?’

‘Less so, these days, I think. I joined simply to oblige an old friend.’

‘Would this be a friend one might know?’

Amiss resisted the temptation to explain brightly that his friend had been head waiter at ffeatherstonehaugh’s when he had been a gallery steward; he chose instead to lie.

‘Baroness Troutbeck.’

‘Really!’ Lambie Crump almost squeaked. ‘Goodness gracious. Our paths have never crossed, but one cannot but respect the lady. Perhaps you might bring her to luncheon someday.’ He recollected that he was conducting an interview. ‘If you join us, that is, of course.’

His gaze swept again over Amiss, who sat there trying to look like the persona he was now adopting: amiable, unthreatening, conservative, intelligent but not too intelligent and an efficient but not too efficient mopper-up-of-messes, while not too innovative. In other words, someone who would serve Lambie Crump, make his life easier and make painless savings on the cost front sufficient to shut up the proprietor without threatening any aspect of the cushy life enjoyed by the
Wrangler
editor.