Mr Toppit Read Online Free Page A

your father. Has that progressed? It’s important that she has a project, something that will build her confidence.”
    “No, she’s not writing his biography,” I explained patiently. “She went to see the publishers and told them she wanted to do it. They’ve made a fortune from the books so they could hardly say no. If she’s written half a page I’d be surprised.”
    “I sense you have a sort of ambivalence about her work. Doyou feel that it might be more appropriate for you to write his biography?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.
    I couldn’t help laughing as if it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. Which it was. “It isn’t ‘her work.’ It isn’t anything.”
    He seemed hurt. “I can’t help feeling you’re competing with Rachel in some way,” he said. “Surely you can both share in the riches—I don’t mean material riches—of your father’s books. His extraordinary heritage, if you will.”
    “It’s not about sharing. That’s the problem.” I stopped because I saw something now more clearly than I ever had before. “You’ve read the books,” I said. He nodded. “There’s one omission from my father’s heritage. The books are about me. I am Luke Hayseed. The thing is, there’s no Rachel Hayseed in them. Not a walk-on part, not a guest appearance. How would that make you feel? Don’t you see? She just isn’t … there. Somewhere in that area I think you might locate her issues. That’s why she’s not a functional person, to use your jargon.”
    When I went back to Rachel’s room, she was asleep, her head tilted up against the headrest of her chair. I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
    As I said, her problems were quite different from mine.

Arthur
    On a spring day in 1981, Arthur Hayman, now in his sixties and lately the author of an obscure set of children’s books, but when younger general factotum to the British film industry in the shape of sometime editor, sometime scriptwriter, and one-time director of the 1948 film entitled
Love’s Capture
, not well reviewed at the time and not remembered precisely as a milestone in the oeuvre of the lead actress, Phyllis Calvert—so tenuously remembered, in fact, that the title, having once been misprinted in a
Festschrift
to its star as
Love’s Captive
, now tended to be referred to, when it was referred to at all, as
“Love’s Captive
(a.k.a.
Love’s Capture
)
”
—was walking through the gardens in the center of Soho Square. It was two minutes before one o’clock on the Monday after the first hot weekend of the year and some of the men lounging on the grass eating their sandwiches had already taken off their shirts. The girls, in short-sleeved dresses or scoop-necked tops, were rubbing suntan lotion on their shoulders and arms, still red from sunbathing over the weekend.
    As Arthur walked through the gate at the southern end of the gardens and crossed the road to the top of Greek Street, a church bell struck one. The reverberation of the chime hung in the still air and he looked up, wondering which church it had come from. When he was younger he had spent most of his time in and around Soho. He still banked there—indeed, had just walked past his bank where, in the days before he had had money, the manager would proffer a cup of tea and givehim and the other young men who looked as if they might have promising careers in the film industry one last chance before bouncing their cheques while they waited for the accounts department at Rank or Ealing or Gainsborough to pay the money that would clear, or at least reduce, their overdrafts.
    Now he rarely ran into anyone he knew in Soho. Once, in the fifties, he might run into any number of people, normally either leaving the Sphinx Club, heading for lunch somewhere else, or heading for the Sphinx to drink their way through lunch. He would sometimes be sucked into their wake and cram himself with them into the rickety lift, with the peculiar smell and judder, to the