Jessica was no longer smiling. “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked, coldly.
“Oh, and we’ve been engaged for the last eighteen months,” said Richard.
Jessica smiled nervously. Perhaps this really was some kind of joke: one of those jokes that everyone else seemed to get and she never did. “I rather think I’d know if I’d been engaged to someone for eighteen months, Mister um,” said Jessica.
“Mayhew,” said Richard helpfully. “Richard Mayhew. You dumped me, and I don’t exist anymore.”
Jessica waved, urgently, at no one in particular all the way across the room. “Be right there,” she called, desperately, and she began to back away.
“I’m a believer,” sang Richard, cheerfully, “I couldn’t leave her if I tried . . . “
Jessica snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray, downed it in a gulp. At the far end of the room she could see Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur, and where Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur was . . .
She headed toward the doors. “So who was he?” asked Clarence, edging alongside her.
“Who?”
“Your mystery man.”
“I don’t know” she admitted. Then she said, “Look, maybe you ought to call security.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Just . . . just get me security,” and then Mr. Arnold Stockton entered the hall, and everything else went out of her head.
Expansive, he was, and expensive, a Hogarth cartoon of a man, enormous of girth, many-chinned and broad-stomached. He was over sixty; his hair was gray and silver, and it was cut too long in the back, because it made people uncomfortable that his hair was too long, and Mr. Stockton liked making people uncomfortable. Compared to Arnold Stockton, Rupert Murdoch was a shady little pipsqueak, and the late Robert Maxwell was a beached whale. Arnold Stockton was a pit bull, which was how caricaturists often chose to draw him. Stocktons owned a little bit of everything: satellites, newspapers, record companies, amusement parks, books, magazines, comics, television stations, film companies.
“I’ll make the speech now,” said Mr. Stockton, to Jessica, by way of introduction. “Then I’ll bugger off. Come back some other time, when there aren’t all these stuffed shirts about.”
“Right,” said Jessica. “Yes. The speech now. Of course.”
And she led him up onto the little stage, up to the podium. She tinked her fingernail against a glass, for silence. Nobody heard her, so she said, “Excuse me,” into the microphone. This time the conversation quieted. “Ladies and gentlemen. Honored guests. I’d like to welcome all of you to the British Museum,” she said, “to the Stockton-sponsored exhibition ‘Angels over England,’ and to the man behind it all, our chief executive and chairman of the board, Mister Arnold Stockton.” The guests applauded, none of them in any doubt as to who had assembled the collection of angels, or, for that matter, paid for their champagne.
Mr. Stockton cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said. “This won’t take long. When I was a small boy, I used to come to the British Museum on Saturdays, because it was free, and we didn’t have much money. But I’d come up the big steps to the museum, and I’d come down to this room round the back and look up at this angel. It was like it knew what I was thinking.”
Just at that moment, Clarence came back in, a couple of security guards beside him. He pointed to Richard, who had stopped to listen to Mr. Stockton’s speech. Door was still examining exhibits. “No, him,” Clarence kept saying to the guards, in an undertone. “No, look, there. Yes? Him.”
“Anyway. Like anything that’s not cared for,” continued Mr. Stockton, “it decayed, fell apart under the stresses and strains of modern times. Went rotten. Went bad. Well, it’s taken a shitload of money,” he paused, to let it sink in—if he, Arnold Stockton, thought it was a shitload, then a shitload it certainly was—“and a dozen craftsmen have spent a great deal of time restoring it and fixing it up. After this the exhibition’ll be going to America, and then around the world, so it maybe can inspire some other little penniless brat to start his own communications empire.”
He looked around. Turning to Jessica, he muttered, “What do I do now?” She pointed to the pull-rope, at the side of the curtain. Mr. Stockton pulled the rope. The curtain billowed and opened, revealing an old door behind it.
Again, there was a small flurry of activity in Clarence’s corner of the room. “No. Him,” said Clarence. “For heaven’s sake. Are you blind?”