Born of Woman (21 page)

Slowly, she eased herself out of bed. She was allowed to go to the bathroom now—thank God—and by six o'clock this evening, she could get up altogether. She glanced at herself in the mirror—cheeks pink again, as if all the relief of Lyn's surrender and the thrill of the doctor's reference to her confinement had blossomed on her face. Lyn was none too happy yet about the baby, but he would come round in time. Even Matthew, who was stern and strange enough in many ways, still delighted in his children, and had even once admitted he would have gladly welcomed more.

She picked up one of the pillows, cradled it in her arms. It was May now, not July—May ten months away—and she was a mother and a media-person. She wasn't quite sure what she was meant to say, or where. Press conferences and sales conferences were all muddled up together in her mind. She imagined somewhere grand like the Albert Hall, with delegates and journalists jostling in the aisles.

‘Ladies and gentleman, I'm not much good at speeches, but …'

A sudden cramping pain zig-zagged across her belly. She lurched into the bathroom, leaned against the wall, tried to steady herself. A second spasm collapsed her on the toilet seat. She bent double, face in her lap, half sobbing, half imploring.

‘Help!' she called. ‘Lyn …'

Lyn was in Matthew's office, turning Susannah's drawings into Hester's, setting Hester's words.

The pains were stabbing now, continuously. She needed a doctor or an ambulance, but how could she get downstairs to phone one? No, mustn't panic. Better stay where she was and just let herself go limp, concentrate on breathing. She tried to inhale slowly and rhythmically while counting up to ten. That would calm her down. One, two, three … She shouldn't have got up at all. As soon as the pain had eased a bit, she would struggle back to bed—on her hands and knees, if necessary—and stay there until Lyn returned, insist he called for help.

Wait … things were calming now. She would count on up to twenty, then try to creep downstairs. Safer to phone immediately, not waste any time. Eleven, twelve, thirteen … A pain ripped through the fourteen, turned it into a gasp. She felt a violent urge to empty her bladder, void her bowels. She hardly knew which, because pain and urge and panic were now all mixed up and jabbing.

Groaning, she bore down, stared between her legs as the shining scarlet clots and lumps she had been nursing as her baby, plopped and slithered into the toilet-bowl.

November 21st.

London fumes and sleet outside, but green fields and country vistas within the glowing confines of the hotel room. The publicity department at Hartley Davies had never before lavished so much time and effort on a sales conference. Huge blown-up photographs of the Cheviot Hills rolled across the walls. Jennifer's home-made cheeses were piled like a golden harvest on the tables. Bowls of flowers stood all around the room—country flowers forced out of season in a London incubator.

Hartley Davies had booked this second, larger salon to hold the lunch. The conference room upstairs where the morning's less illustrious books were still being discussed over orangeade and biscuits, was hardly equal to the Publishing Sensation of the Year. Matthew sat waiting for the session to finish and for Hartley Davies's sales team, gathered there from every part of the British Isles, to troop downstairs for the most important item on the agenda.

Allenby was with him and his most trusted editor, Kenneth Rutherford, a man who could set him off without eclipsing him, and who combined good appearance with a sympathetic manner and articulate sincerity. All three of them sported large white daisies in their buttonholes—bogus, Matthew felt, but a gimmick suggested by Publicity to attract attention and create a country mood. Gimmicks
worked
in publishing. The whole business was a gimmick, in a sense, and yet with a book like theirs, the thing retained its dignity and style. Matthew Winterton could be seen to be furthering the cause of education, upholding art and style, raising publishing standards right across the board. He had always refused to work with trashy books. Profit didn't have to mean the gutter.

Christ, though, he needed profit at the moment. The boys' school fees had just gone up for the second time that year; his tax affairs might suddenly backfire; two of his younger editors were pressing for a rise; and the firm still had to recoup its losses from both
The Medieval Bestiary
and
Europe's Last Great Kings
. If cockatrice and crowns couldn't fill his coffers, then Hester Ainsley must.

Privately, he still thought of her as Ainsley. After the first raw shock of discovering the true facts of Hester's life and parentage, Matthew preferred to regard her as he always had—as housekeeper and nursemaid. It made it easier. Now that her diaries had become a job of work for him, the main hope and promise of his firm, he found it essential to drown all personal feelings as distracting and undignified, to forget pity or remorse and see Hester purely as a source of profit. On the other hand, the fact that she had become a Winterton could only help his own share in the monies. Thus she remained Ainsley in his memory, while signing her name as Mrs Thomas Winterton across his bank account.

That name had been tattooed into his soul, branded across the foreheads of his staff, scrawled up and down his office walls, written in the sky. He had worked so hard on Hester Winterton that he found, even in his sleep, the letters of her name would hover huge above his pillow and shrill till they had woken him. He had got the price he wanted in the auction, but then followed weeks of unrelenting slog. He had far too short a time to produce the materials needed for this conference and for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, where he aimed to clinch his US deal. Allenby advised postponing publication till autumn the following year, instead of May, but Matthew was obsessed now and refused to brook delay. He bribed his staff to cut down on holidays, extend their working day, and fit in all the extra overtime they could.

Matthew had learnt, only late in life, that it paid to be munificent. That way he kept tighter discipline, yet still retained his staff. One man, highly paid but working well, still cost less than two middle-range salaries for virtual layabouts. He also believed in his own brand of incentive scheme, whereby extra work was handsomely rewarded. He had observed that his staff's absorption in a project increased in direct ratio to the size of the carrot dangled in front of them. He had been dangling giant-sized carrots these last few months. Even so, he was impressed by their loyalty and sheer hard labour. It was as if the book itself had brought out the best in them.

He glanced at Kenneth sitting on his right. He looked pale, drawn, short of sleep. He suddenly longed to grip his hand, embrace him, blab out an ardent thank you for his efforts. He had thanked his colleagues formally, of course, in a brief typewritten memo. Emotions were always safer when channelled through the barrier of dictaphones or secretaries. All the same, it would be nice to risk a word or two in person. He cleared his throat. ‘I've … er … been meaning to say …'

‘They're coming!' Kenneth rose to his feet, brushing down his already immaculate suit. The doors were opening and the tide of representatives shambling in, with the Hartley Davies team snapping at their heels like sheepdogs. Matthew glimpsed receding foreheads, flabby stomachs, inferior dental work in ill-shaped mouths. The human race resembled a badly executed book put together by an idle or even malevolent production team. If
he
had been its managing director, he would have made a better job of it. His own dark hair might be silvering at the edges, but had neither receded nor thinned. He weighed less now than when he was a youth. His teeth were all his own and had never been allowed to glut themselves on sweets. He had never smoked, drank only as a social duty and made a principle of refusing second helpings.

The Hartley Davies chairman, Sir Basil Brooks, wore his second helpings like a padded lining to his suit, and would have failed a medical on girth alone. His fat cigar was a permanent eleventh finger, the other ten jaundiced with nicotine.

‘Ah—Matthew—good to see you.'

‘You're looking well, Sir Basil.' Matthew shook the stained hand, tangled a moment with the mingled waft of Havanas, sweat and Aramis, and was swept into the circle of salesmen, several of whom he recognised from a previous Hartley Davies sales conference. Packagers rarely attended sales conferences, in fact. It was more common for the publishers themselves to present the books to their representatives. But Matthew had always insisted on full involvement. Like a mother with her baby, he trusted no one else. It was also helpful to get to know the reps in person, make sure they understood the full value and importance of his projects.

Sales had never been so vital.
Born With The Century
had cost him more, so far, than any book he had ever handled before. He had to recoup that cash. Hartley Davies had committed themselves to a substantial order, of course, but they were so large and successful a company, failure could only graze or ruffle them, not kick them in the gutter.
He
needed success, not only for his status, but for survival.

He glanced swiftly around to make sure his staff were earning their inflated salaries. They were. Kenneth was thawing the notoriously moody Scottish representative, and Jim had taken on the clown who covered Derby and South Yorkshire who had two wives, six children and a fund of dirty jokes. The Hartley Davies mob were equally hardworking. Their publicity manager was filling glasses—mixing sherry with sales promotion puffs—while the marketing director rounded up the stragglers and swept them towards the loaded tables.

It was almost time for lunch, not just a stop-gap sandwich, but a campaign and celebration in itself, planned as a vital part of the whole promotion. Rustic serving wenches in low-cut gowns had been hired from Party Promotions Limited and were carrying in home-cured hams and duck terrine, pigeon breasts and turkey galantine. Many of the dishes had been prepared from Hester's own rural recipes, but enlivened by additional ingredients which she herself could never have afforded, and washed down with country wines in a quantity she would have strictly disapproved of. Each table had its centre-piece of a huge pheasant pâté—moulded in the shape of the bird itself, with real feathers streaming from its tail, legs and claws fashioned out of asparagus spears, and glistening black olive eyes. Everyone was crowding round the tables exclaiming and admiring. Hester Winterton had transformed the standard conference fare of tasteless chicken and tinned fruit salad into this lavish country spread.

Sir Basil Brooks waved his cigar for silence. Babble and brouhaha were replaced by a sudden shrill from the Northumbrian pipes, as Jennifer swept in. Her entrance had been staged, like every other detail of the promotion. She was dressed demurely in a becomingly old-fashioned skirt and high-necked blouse, with her hair piled up on top and make-up as artlessly natural as art could make it. Round her neck gleamed a cameo of Mrs Winterton senior, scaled down from one of the photographs. She carried a wicker basket piled high with fruit and flowers, and fragrant with sprigs of lavender and thyme. Matthew felt this was taking things too far and cheapened Jennifer as some latter-day Nell Gwyn. But Hartley Davies's new publicity girl had spent three years in New York, where even full-grown authors prancing around as bunny-girls or spacemen were not considered vulgar, so long as they helped sales.

Certainly Jennifer was the centre of attention as she was led blushing to her seat beside Brendan Holdsworth (London North) who had won the award for Top Salesman of the Year. Matthew prayed she wouldn't let them down. Jim Allenby had been strictly opposed to involving her at all. He claimed the book was Hester's and needed no one else. He also feared that Jennifer had not the force and personality (‘oomph' he called it, vulgarly) to launch so vast a project. But Hartley Davies had backed Jennifer from the start. They felt she gave the book a contemporary relevance, linked it to the present, provided an appeal to the younger, modern woman for whom nostalgia meant little. Not that Jennifer was modern. That was the charm of it. She was inherently so home-spun and domesticated, it was simply natural casting to turn her into Hester's mouthpiece, the female who ran an empire from her cottage, could cope with anything from chickens to chicken-pox, and who fused nature and nurture in a new appealing package.

Matthew glanced across at her, smiled encouragingly from his own adjoining table. Hartley Davies's staff and his had been deliberately seated among the salesmen to prime and rally them. The serving girls presented each representative with a pewter goblet of home-brewed country wine. Goblets, wine and wenches had all come from the same promotions firm. It was that fine attention to detail which had won Hartley Davies respect; the way they could turn a book into a fanfare or a conference into a carnival. The representatives would not forget this lunch. Hester Winterton would sit in their stomachs all through the winter months, and gently remind them she deserved their support and sales until her Second Coming in the spring.

Matthew himself was toying with half a slice of ham and a glass of Evian water. Let the rest upset their stomachs while he retained his control and confidence. There could still be tricky questions. London Central's Larry Barker was already on the attack.

‘Isn't it a little strange promoting a book that's based on your own family?'

Matthew smiled at the sallow face and heavy spectacles. He had feared that question from the start. The whole Hester Winterton project could be seen all too easily as vulgar profiteering, marketing his own family house and history in return for hard cash.

‘Well, not strictly
my
family.' Matthew filled Barker's glass. The country elderflower was a strong and tactful wine, ideally suited to covering awkward pauses. ‘Only part of the book deals with my father and his farm at all and even then it's really Hester's story. I did have qualms, of course, about publishing the material. In fact, I wondered once or twice if I shouldn't hand the whole lot over to someone else—someone completely detached from it. But then I feared we might lose that very emotional involvement which gives the thing its charm. Besides, I wanted to ensure a really high standard for the book. Another firm might have trivialised it or tried to cut corners or save on costs. We decided on the highest quality for every single aspect of it—paper, printing, production, photographs. And we've designed a whole country range of … Ah, but I'm giving away my secrets, aren't I? Those must wait till after lunch.' Matthew's smile ached. These junketings could be more of a strain than the presentation itself. The noise was roaring round him like a tide. Wherever he looked, mouths were rudely masticating, laughs exploding like wine-corks, wine flushing faces, food swelling girths. Pheasant pâtés were now empty plates of feathers, pigeon breasts pathetic piles of bones. The crisp white tablecloths were stained with wine and strawberries, crumbs and olives trampled into the floor. He had often wished the human race had been programmed differently, so that it required not these slavering blow-outs, but merely a pill or two washed down with a glass of water between one meeting and the next. But at least this lunch had proved successful. Hester Winterton was no longer simply Item Twenty on a tedious agenda, but a woman who had wined and dined them, made them feel important, left them happy sated suitors.