‘Oh – Nye Bevan, of course. He’s done the most incredible things for this country and its people. He’s not just a visionary, he makes the visions come true.’
‘Right.’ Jim Dunne put his notebook away. ‘Thank you. You’ve been very helpful, Tom. Keep me posted on your progress.’
‘Alice, do stop crying,’ said Jillie, her patience just slightly tested as the hour for her guests’ arrival drew nearer and Alice continued to demand her full attention.
‘I know it’s awful for you, but I really must get on a bit now. I haven’t started on the mince pies and I need to ring my cousin Dan –’
‘I thought it was Josh who was coming.’
‘He is, Dan’s another cousin. He’s making the punch and I have to ask him to get some more rum. Then there’s all the cheese to put out and . . .’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Alice, blowing her nose. ‘Really sorry. Look, I’ll do the mince pies, it’ll take my mind off it all a bit. Just as long as you do think I did the right thing –’
‘I really do,’ said Jillie, moving towards the larder door before Alice could collapse in a heap on her again. ‘Now look, here’s the pastry, the mincemeat’s in those jars. I got it at Selfridges, so it should be all right, and I’ve already got the oven at the right temperature. I’ll start chopping the fruit for the punch – oh, there’s the door now, that’ll be Dan, so too late to get any more rum.’
Alice only planned to stay at the party for a short time – Jillie wouldn’t let her duck out altogether, saying it would do her good. She had never felt less festive and she looked awful, she thought, as she studied her ravaged face. She had a quick bath in Jillie’s bathroom, and pin-curled her hair, put on the dress she’d bought specially for the party. It was a waste not to wear that, a navy taffeta that made her eyes look bluer still. By the time she’d put on some foundation and some mascara and some coral lipstick, which she also dabbed on her cheeks, she had to admit she didn’t look too bad.
She ran down the stairs and bumped into Dan, who was carrying the huge silver punch bowl into the dining room. He gave an appreciative wolf whistle.
‘You look lovely, Alice,’ he said and suddenly life didn’t seem quite so bad.
Tom felt less depressed after his encounter with the journalist. He always enjoyed talking about the party and what it had done for the country. He felt that not enough people recognised it. And it was very nice to hear that other members – all right, only local ones – thought he had a future within it. Maybe he did. Maybe he should be more pushy.
He looked at his watch. Only just ten. If he went home now, he’d never be able to go to sleep. In fact, he felt rather alert and psyched up as Betty Foxton from Pemberton’s used to say. Dear Betty, he missed her and her mothering, which had increased after Laura died. He had no one to mother him now, or even care about him; it formed a huge part of his loneliness.
The people downstairs in his house were having a party. They’d asked him, but they really weren’t the sort of people he’d want to party with. The man was an estate agent – who Tom regarded with almost as much suspicion as he did the landlords they worked for – and his wife was a secretary to some civil servant who were all, in Tom’s view, in spite of their supposed neutrality, Tories. They all went to public school for a start. It was either home or walking the streets, a dismal choice. And then he remembered Jillie Curtis, and her invitation to her party. Could he go? All those posh people, but maybe – you never knew – he might meet an influential champagne socialist.
He stood still, trying to decide, and then a bus came along that said Highbury Road and that seemed like fate giving him a nudge. Taking a deep breath, he got on it.
Josh Curtis, Jillie’s other cousin, was on the same bus. Unlike Tom, he was keenly looking forward to getting to the party. It wasn’t just that it would be fun, and he liked his aunt and uncle very much, and Jillie too, but it would be absolutely packed with the sort of important and influential people he could use as future contacts.
The Daily News, the paper he worked for, was a middle-market broadsheet, edited by Harry Campbell who had been raised and trained on some of the finest newspapers in Fleet Street; and the Daily News, very much Harry’s creation, was hugely admired. His proprietor, the eccentric Scottish millionaire Jarvis McIntyre, who had bought it as an ailing weekly just after the war, was determined to produce a first-class daily and had given him his head; and Harry had hired an extraordinarily talented team. A picture editor, who had poached half a dozen of the best photographers in Fleet Street and then displayed superbly the rich haul of pictures they supplied him with every day; a news editor with an incredible talent for giving every major story some unexpected twist; a fashion editor who saw her job as something of a daily war in itself, to be waged against every other fashion editor in the business; and a bank of writers, some staff, some freelance, whose words were not only devoured by the paper’s readers, but also quoted and re-quoted in every weekly periodical, and most news programmes on the BBC.
It was, in its politics, slightly right of centre. Its political editor, Clive Bedford, was renowned for his extraordinary ability to express a complex argument in, at the most, two comparatively brief sentences; and its sports writers were the envy of even the tabloids. Most important of all, Harry Campbell had that most precious of editorial skills: he knew what his readers were thinking almost before they did. He understood their dreams and aspirations, recognised their fears.
At a time when circulations were measured in millions, the Daily News was running out in front with the best of them, behind the Daily Mirror and the invincible Express of Lord Beaverbrook, but giving the other popular mid-field papers, the Mail, the News Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian and the Sketch, a very good run for their money.
Josh knew he was lucky to be on the Bedford team. He was extremely ambitious, he wrote well, and had a talent for ferreting out a story that makes an excellent journalist out of a good one. After a year of working for the paper, he was only just beginning to relax and not expect to be fired every day.
Alice was just deciding she could slip away. The party was at full throttle, everyone was quite drunk, and although she’d had not too bad a time, and even felt almost cheerful for a bit, it was wearing off now and she really wanted to creep under the bedclothes in her room at the nurses’ home, do a bit more crying and go to sleep. The violent emotion had left her terribly tired. Also, she had just drunk at least three glasses of champagne and they had had a very strong effect.
She looked at her watch. Nearly eleven. She excused herself from the rather earnest spotty chap she’d been talking to and went upstairs to find her things. There was a bus in ten minutes from the end of the road, she’d catch it easily if she left now.