“Only if it’s accompanied by a large whiskey,” Bruce retorted rudely.
Eunice went to put the kettle on anyway.
“Now, what’s brought all this on?” Bomber was genuinely interested to find out who had managed so thoroughly to infuriate Bruce. Bruce’s hair, in the style of Barbara Cartland, but the color and consistency of cobwebs, quivered his indignation.
“Damn that Anthony Peardew! Damn and blast the man to hell.”
Bomber shook his head.
“I say. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? Unless, of course, he’s passed the port to the right or ravished your only daughter.”
When first confronted by a man as camp as Bruce, Eunice had assumed that he was gay. But Bruce was married to a large German woman with Zeppelin breasts and the suggestion of a mustache, who bred fancy mice and entered them into mouse shows. Astonishingly, Bruce and Brunhilde had managed to produce offspring; two boys and a girl. It was one of life’s great mysteries, but not one upon which Eunice was inclined to dwell.
“He’s gone completely round the bend,” expostulated Bruce, “deliberately writing the kind of subversive codswallop he knows I won’t publish, full of dark deeds and weird endings, or no proper endings at all. I suppose he thinks it’s clever or fashionable or some sort of catharsis for his personal grief. But I’m not having any of it. I know what normal, decent people like, and that’s good, straightforward stories with a happy ending where the baddies get their comeuppance, the guy gets the girl, and the sex isn’t too outré.”
Eunice plonked a cup of tea down in front of him, deliberately sploshing some of the dishwater-colored liquid from the cup into the saucer.
“So you don’t think that any of your readers might like to be challenged at all? Flex their intellectual muscles, so to speak? Form their own opinions or extrapolate their own conclusions for once?”
Bruce lifted the cup to his lips, and then seeing its contents close to, changed his mind and set it down again with an irritated clatter.
“My dear, the readers like what we tell them they will like. It’s as simple as that.”
“Then why can’t you tell them to like Anthony Peardew’s new stories?”
Bomber kept the “touché” under his breath. Just.
“Anthony Peardew. Wasn’t he the chap whose collection of stories did rather well for you?”
Bruce raised his eyebrows so high in exasperation that they disappeared into his cobweb coiffure.
“For God’s sake, Bomber! Do try and keep up. That’s what I’ve been saying. The first lot did really well; happy stories, happy endings, happy bank balances all round. But not anymore. He’s gone from The Sound of Music to The Midwich Cuckoos. But I’ve drawn the line. I’ve told him. It’s either ‘Doh, a deer’ or out on your ear!”
Bruce had once worked from offices in the same building as Bomber, and still visited for a free cup of tea and a gossip if he was passing. However, failure to enlist Bomber in his condemnation of the villainous Anthony Peardew and scant sympathy from Eunice meant that, on this occasion, Bruce’s visit was a short one.
“I wish we’d managed to sign poor Anthony before Bruce did.” Bomber sighed. “I liked his first collection, but his new stories sound intriguing. I wonder if I should try a spot of poaching . . .”
Eunice took a small parcel from the drawer in her desk and handed it to Bomber. It was wrapped in thick, charcoal-gray paper and tied with a bright pink ribbon.
“I know it’s not your birthday until next week”—Bomber’s face lit up like a small boy’s; he loved surprises—“but I thought that after a visit from Bruce the Bogeyman, you could do with cheering up.”
It was a copy of The Birdcage. They had been to see it on Bomber’s birthday the previous year, and he had laughed so hard that he had almost choked on his popcorn.
“I wish Ma could have seen it,” he had said. “It’s a damn sight more cheerful than Philadelphia.” Grace had been dead for eighteen months now. She had survived Godfrey by just over a year, and then died suddenly but peacefully in her sleep at Folly End. She had been buried next to Godfrey in the grounds of the church where they had been members of the congregation and stalwarts of the flower-arranging team, and Summer Fête and Harvest Supper Committees, for almost half a century. As Bomber and Eunice had stood side by side in the sun-and-shade-dappled churchyard on the day of Grace’s funeral, their thoughts had turned to their own leaving ceremonies.
“I’m for burning not burial,” declared Bomber. “Less room for error,” he added.
“And then I want you to mix my ashes with Douglas’s and Baby Jane’s, providing, of course, that I outlive her, and scatter us somewhere fabulous.”
Eunice watched as the funeral party wandered slowly back to their cars.
“What makes you so sure that you’ll die before me?”
Bomber took her arm as they too began to make their way out of the churchyard.