Mr Toppit Read Online Free Page B

top floor where Jimmy the barman would greet them—the greetings somewhat more vociferous for the others than for Arthur—and they would settle down for some serious talk as lunchtime folded into teatime and the sandwiches sat untouched on the tables.
    Although Arthur was included because he was—nominally at least—one of them, he knew that his major contribution was to offer news of Wally Carter, one of his oldest friends, who was now a successful director in Hollywood. Occasionally he made it up if he had not heard from him. Actually, he almost never heard from Wally, these days. It was Wally through whom he had met his wife Martha, then Martha Jordan, who had been detached from her long-gestating PhD on the Crusades to do research on a film Wally was planning about Richard the Lionheart. Terry Tringham, who had worked with Arthur and Wally in the old days, was always particularly keen to know what was happening: “How’s Wally? How’s old Wally? Raking it in?
Talented
boy.”
    The trouble was, once Arthur had passed on any snippets of information about Wally, he felt he was there under falsepretences. He was, anyway, slightly nervous in either of the two camps that tended to congregate there. He did not feel he had the credentials to be part of the more successful—and significantly smaller—crowd who, if they hadn’t moved on entirely to smarter clubs than the Sphinx, might drop in for a couple of rounds. They had the air of people just passing through for form’s sake, glancing at their watches, which had become slimmer as their stature in the film business had grown, and downing the last half of their gin in one gulp as they murmured, “Got a bit of a lunch,” and headed for the thinner air of Mayfair, knowing they would have walked off their drinks and be clear-headed enough by the time they reached Les A or the White Elephant to be at their best when they met the visiting dignitaries from Hollywood, who had flown over the Pole through the night but were up and running for business by lunchtime.
    Nor was he witty or hard-drinking enough to fit in with the gang headed by Terry Tringham, who might pick up the odd editing job on a documentary but had generally given up all pretense of work. Sometimes as the day wore on, waiting for the moment when the conversation had one of its cyclical upswings, Arthur would get up as if to go to the lavatory and, with a glance over his shoulder, go round the corner towards the lift and simply vanish.
    As chance would have it, his publishers had a ramshackle office just round the corner from what had once been the club, which was why, many years later, now that he was no longer in the film business, Arthur still came to Soho.
    Just after one fifteen, he turned into Meard Street. Standing outside the door of the Carter Press, he pressed the bell and lowered his face to the entryphone in preparation to speak, but the buzzer went immediately, without anyone asking who hewas, and the door clicked open. The receptionist, Stephanie, was eating a sandwich and reading the paper. She looked astonished to see him, as if someone arriving in the office was the very last thing she might have expected on a working day.
    He stood awkwardly for a moment, then said, “Would Graham be in?”
    She waited before speaking, as if she was deciding whether to answer yes or no. Instead, she hedged her bets: “Is he expecting you?”
    “Well, no—not exactly. I was just passing.”
    She nodded slowly, as if giving herself time to think, “And you are Mr.…?”
    “I’m Arthur Hayman, Stephanie,” he said gently. “I’m …” He moved to the wall and placed his finger on the cover of
Darkwood
, which was framed on the wall below the other four books in the series.
    Even though he was an author of theirs and had remembered her name when she had not remembered his, the look of suspicion remained on her face. “If you’ll just hold on for a second,” she said, tapped at the switchboard in