The Journal of Dora Damage(36)

However, I needed not have worried all those long days. When I finally returned to Holywell-street and presented it to Mr Diprose, he looked over it with disinterest, his forefinger curled in the furrow between nose and upper lip, and his thumb stroking his beard.

‘Fine, fine. Hmm.’ He spun his chair round away from his desk, and thought some more. ‘Bon. I think we should go now.’

‘Go, Mr Diprose? Where?’

‘I informed my client, Sir Jocelyn Knightley, about the unfortunate matter of your sex, and much to my horror, it does not seem to perturb him in the slightest. On the contrary. He seems to take delight in the fact. He wishes to continue relations with Damage’s. It goes entirely against my better judgement. Your timing is felicitous. We can see him this morning.’ He clipped his vowels and spat his consonants; it was as if the vowels were dangerous, open spaces, which needed to be reined in and ordered by fixed, predictable consonants, which dictated the confines of the vowel.

He pulled on his coat and hat and led me outside. We walked quickly to the Strand, where he raised his arm and hailed a hansom. He let me ascend, then followed me in, although he was ungainly and creaked, as he would have found bending difficult. I dare say we would have been quicker walking, at the pace the cab lumbered along in the slow-moving Westminster traffic. As we headed westward, the horses and carriages thinned, but the pace of those on the pavements was slower: swells and high-bred ladies strolled in the streets towards the daffodils of Green Park; dubious dandies and demi-reps laughed in the spring sunshine; the perfume of fashion and the gleam of grooming abounded around us.

‘Tell me about Sir Jocelyn,’ I said to Mr Diprose.

‘Is one anxious that one will reveal oneself to be something of a parvenue in the face of one who is the dernier cri, the ne plus ultra, of the elegantly patrician world one is now entering?’ He chuckled at his facetiousness.

‘I have no pretensions even to being a parvenue, Mr Diprose. I was not aware that I had recently arrived somewhere of note.’

‘Oh but you have, my dear, now that you are in the employ of Sir Jocelyn Knightley.’

‘I thought we were working for you.’

‘I am little more than a hawker,’ he said with a wryness that implied that he considered himself nothing of the sort. ‘A procurer, if you will.’ He pouted his lips on the second syllable. ‘And I have procured you for Sir Jocelyn, against my better judgement, I hasten to add. You will continue to work for me and through me, but he is our client, and it is him to whom we both report.’

‘You are unhappy with this arrangement?’

He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

‘It remains to be seen. There will be plenty of commissions coming your way: rare books, curiosities, literary arcana. You are most fortunate. We shall do well.’ But his tone betrayed that he was not altogether delighted with this happy turn of events. ‘We shall see. Vigilate et orate. We shall watch and pray.’

‘What shall we see?’

‘I wish I shared Sir Jocelyn’s confidence in his plan. You are, after all, a woman. Where there is trouble, cherchez la femme . . .’

The hansom took us to the west side of Berkeley-square, and pulled up outside a grand white building. We had to ascend seven broad steps, wider than my kitchen; two ball-shaped miniature trees in square planters stood sentry on either side of the door. Diprose rang the bell, and immediately, a tall, grey-haired butler answered the door.

‘Good morning, Goodchild,’ Diprose said.

‘Good morning, Mr Diprose,’ Goodchild replied with the slight nod of the head which, I was to learn, he reserved for those who were not of the upper set, but were nevertheless due certain recognition. His voice was low and soft; it was the tone one would use in a reading room conferring on a book, not standing on a door-step in one of the finest squares of the metropolis.

‘May I introduce Mrs Peter Damage.’

‘How do you do, Mrs Damage. But Lady Knightley is not receiving today. Would you care to leave your card?’

‘No, Goodchild. Would you be so kind as to tell Sir Jocelyn that the bookbinder is here, and that we have the leisure to wait?’

Goodchild stepped aside to let us in. Behind where he had stood was a waist-high Negro boy, alarmingly life-like but blessedly inert, holding a white wire birdcage up with one hand; on the other perched three exotic yellow birds. His loincloth drooped precariously down towards his right knee, but his decency was preserved, as well it might have been, for there was no hitching up to be had of bronze and glass. I wondered if Diprose had stared, like me, on their first encounter, or whether he had always thrown his coat on him as he did now.