Publish and Be Murdered by Ruth Dudley Edwards Page A

other.’
    ‘But why then did Willie give him the job?’
    ‘He was his protégé initially. Fetch another bottle, will you?’
    Amiss did so guiltily. ‘Here you are, Henry. But don’t pour me any until I’ve checked at home. Hang on one minute. Don’t lose your thread.’
    Having learned from his answering service to his mingled relief and regret that Rachel was working late, he accepted another whisky. ‘OK, Henry. Tell me all about it.’
    ‘It is not unamusing, really.’ Potbury snorted. ‘On Willie’s last trip to the States he came back raving about this brilliant young man whom he just had to have to liven up the political coverage. He would pay for himself as he’d be able to write so much on American as well as domestic politics that we could cut down on the freelancers.
    ‘Dwight Winterton was a paragon, and a really useful paragon at that. He was one of those hybrids, half English and half American, brought up in the States but with frequent visits to Europe, went to Harvard and was then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Hugely well informed about politics and history. Right little prodigy, in fact. And nice, with it. I think Willie saw him as someone who could succeed me when I fall down the stairs or get cirrhosis of the liver or come to some other discreditable end.’ He laughed.
    ‘So?’
    It’s been a disaster.’
    ‘Why. Is he not as bright as Willie thought?’
    ‘Oh, yes. He’s hugely bright. Mad, of course, like most young right-wingers, wanting to stuff children back up chimneys, start a preemptive war against Germany, and take back India with ten battalions. All that sort of thing. But that’s all right. He’s young. He’ll settle.’
    ‘So are their differences political?’
    ‘No. It’s just that they hate each other.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘They’re a bit like a couple who had a one-night stand, flew to Las Vegas the following day to get married and found two days later not only that they were incompatible in their habits but that they hated each other’s values, and what’s more, he just wanted her for sex and she just wanted him for money.’
    ‘That’s an arrangement that I understood quite often worked – for short periods anyway.’
    ‘Not as short as this one,’ said Henry with a snort. ‘Dwight Winterton arrived to a hero’s welcome and within a fortnight they were fighting like cat and dog at the Monday meeting.
    ‘Essentially, Dwight quickly discovered that Willie is a self-indulgent poseur and Willie discovered that Winterton despised him and would like his job. And if there is one kind of person Willie can’t stand, it’s someone bright who wants to be editor of The Wrangler .’
    He paused and contemplated what was left in his glass. ‘It’s compounded by the fact that Dwight has principles and Willie has none, and because Willie, though he’s lazy, is pernickety, and Dwight, though he’s industrious, is slapdash. So Willie has countless opportunities to niggle and patronize and worst of all rewrite, which Dwight absolutely hates.
    ‘And then Willie is driven mad by Dwight’s habit of going AWOL because he’s decided to go off and see what Yorkshire or Northern Ireland are like. Willie resents this because he rightly fears that Dwight is building up a network and is growing in authority, but he can’t stop him because Dwight doesn’t even claim expenses. He’s got private money. So since Dwight gets the work done, Willie has no ground on which to fight.’
    ‘Can’t Willie just fire him?’
    ‘Dwight might sue. He is American, after all. And I doubt if Willie would have the trustees on his side if it came to a showdown. To do my colleagues justice…’
    ‘Your colleagues?’
    ‘Yes. Didn’t you know? I’m a trustee. It’s one of the reasons Willie puts up with me. The other two are a couple of pompous old Establishment bores, but they do believe in fair play and though they’re often taken in by Willie, he knows he’d have a lot of explaining