Devices and Desires Read Free Page B

writing a poem about it?” “The love poems, is the woman you’ve written them to alive or dead?” Dalgliesh wondered whether Philip Larkin had been badgered about what it felt like to be both poet and librarian, or Roy Fuller on how he managed to combine poetry with law.
    He said: “All the questions are predictable. It would save everyone a great deal of trouble if I answered them on tape; then you could broadcast them from the bus.”
    “It wouldn’t be at all the same thing. It’s you personally they want to hear. Anyone would think you didn’t want to be read.”
    And did he want to be read? Certainly he wanted some people to read him, one person in particular, and having read the poems he wanted her to approve. Humiliating but true. As for the others: well, he supposed that the truth was that he wanted people to read the poems but not be coerced into buying them, an overfastidiousness which he could hardly expect Herne & Illingworth to share. He was aware of Bill’s anxious, supplicating eyes, like those of a small boy who sees the bowl of sweets rapidly disappearing from his reach. His reluctance to co-operate seemed to him typical of much in himself that he disliked. There was a certain illogicality, surely, in wanting to be published but not caring particularly whether he was bought. The fact that he found the more public manifestations of fame distasteful didn’t mean that he was free of vanity, only that he was better at controlling it and that in him it took a more reticent form. After all, he had a job, an assured pension and now his aunt’s considerable fortune. He didn’t have to care. He saw himself as unreasonably privileged comparedwith Colin McKay, who probably saw him—and who could blame Colin?—as a snobbish, oversensitive dilettante.
    He was grateful when the door opened and Nora Gurney, the firm’s cookery editor, came briskly in, reminding him as she always did of an intelligent insect, an impression reinforced by the bright exophthalmic eyes behind huge round spectacles, familiar fawn jumper in circular ribbing and flat pointed shoes. She had looked exactly the same since Dalgliesh had first known her.
    Nora Gurney had become a power in British publishing by the expedient of longevity (no one could remember when she had first come to Herne & Illingworth) and a firm conviction that power was her due. It was likely that she would continue to exercise it under the new dispensation. Dalgliesh had last met her three months previously at one of the firm’s periodic parties, given for no particular reason as far as he could tell, unless to reassure the authors, by the familiarity of the wine and canapés, that they were still in business and basically the same lovable old firm. The guest list had chiefly comprised their most prestigious writers in the main categories, a ploy which had added to the general atmosphere of inadvertence and fractionized unease: the poets had drunk too much and had become lachrymose or amorous as their natures dictated; the novelists had herded together in a corner like recalcitrant dogs commanded not to bite; the academics, ignoring their hosts and fellow guests, had argued volubly among themselves; and the cooks had ostentatiously rejected their half-bitten canapés on the near est available hard surface with expressions of disgust, pained surprise or mild, speculative interest. Dalgliesh had been pinned in a corner by Nora Gurney, who had wanted to discuss the practicality of the theory she had developed: Since every set of fingerprints was unique, could not the wholecountry be printed, the data stored on a computer and research carried out to discover whether certain combinations of lines and whorls were indicative of criminal tendencies? That way crime could be prevented rather than cured. Dalgliesh had pointed out that, since criminal tendencies were universal, to judge from the places where his fellow guests had parked their cars, the data would be