Still, they were nothing to do with me. I took a look in the mirrors again as I finally got my ke
y. Mallory and her young relative were just coming in through the glass doors of the main entrance. It was definitely them. Damn, I thought, and sped up the stairs. Here I was again delayed, this time by a row of people dispensing membership badges. The girl on the V-section clutched a teddy bear to herself and wanted to know what I wished to be called on my badge. A perspiring pair of lusty youths behind her were wrestling with the machine that made the things. They looked up expectantly.
“My name’s Rupert—” I began.
“Rupert Bear,” said the girl with the teddy. “Love it!”
“He looks more like Rupert of the Rhine,” said one of the lusty operators. A female, I realised.
“But he’s too cuddly!” said the teddy carrier.
“Venturesome as well,” said the operator firmly.
“Rupert Bear has lots of adventures,” the teddy carrier argued, injured.
The argument went on for some time. I was so unused to being discussed like this that I stood for a while, dumbly turning my eyes from speaker to speaker, until a loud, low voice with a sob in it, that could only be Mallory’s, sounded behind me on the stairs. I pulled myself together.
“Wrong, both of you,” I said. “Have you never heard of Rupert the Mage?”
They had not – which was not surprising, since I had only just made him up. “Who is Rupert the Mage?” asked the teddy one as she wrote it on the unmade badge.
“The preux chevalier of magicians,” I invented. “The books were all written in the twenties, so you may not have come across them.”
“Oh. A sort of magical Bertie Wooster!” the operator panted. She and her companion leant mightily on the machine to force it to make my badge.
I thought of Stan. “With an invisible butler,” I said. “Thanks.”
As I received my badge, Mallory advanced on the table for hers. I fled to the lift, where I rode to the top floor with a beautifully dressed transvestite boy, trying to think just where in my working I had let Mallory in instead of excluding her. I remembered those bursts of rage I had kept having about her. Those, I suspected, were the crux. They had caused me to be too preoccupied with her. Now, it seemed, I had to face the fact that I had entangled Mallory’s fateline with my own, and Andrew’s, and those of my four candidates. What a mess!
The beautifully dressed boy bowed gravely to me when we reached the top floor. I bowed back. He set off striding on spike heels one way and I in the other. The marvel of it was that we did not meet round the other side. I turned corner after mirrored right-angle corner on my way to my room. Seven of them. The room was near the lift on the other side. At the time, I was too bemused by what I had done to the fatelines to recognise the peculiarity of this. I simply slung my bags on the stand, noted that it was a fine, large room with a cocktail fridge and a big bed, and tastefully decorated for a hotel room, and changed into the most casual garments I had with me. I feared I was not going to be happy in the forthright weirdness of this convention. Now Mallory was here, I wished I could go home.
But I had work to do. I pinned on my badge to prove I was not a gate-crasher, studied the Alice in Wonderland sort of pamphlet that said “Read Me” under a portrait of a coy-eyed dragon, and discovered I was already late for the Opening Ceremony in Home Universe. I sped back downwards.
I missed some kind of interruption that happened at the beginning of this. The chairman, a guy called Maxim Hough, who wore his curly blond hair cut in the manner of an ancient Egyptian wig, was apologising for whatever it was when I slipped into a seat in the vast room. The event was otherwise prodigiously boring. I studied the folk on the platform, and those in the audience, with equal misgivings. Ted Mallory was the only one who looked halfway normal. He was a larger, healthier edition of the poor cancer-ridden man I had met in Kent, and this made it certain there was a family connection with Maree Mallory, as Stan had suggested. To confirm this, I spotted the Mrs Mallory who had opened the door to me in Bristol sitting in the front row, looking attentive. Her jumper, this time, had a bundle of pink satin roses sprawled down its left side. I played with the notion of tapping her on the shoulder and whispering that she was being attacked by man-eating sugar mice.
I would never have said such a thing, of course, not even to a third party. But people say this kind of thing at conventions. I was surprised and highly delighted when one of the very agreeable Americans I met over supper opined that Mrs Mallory seemed to have had an accident with some strawberry ice cream.
“No, no,” said her husband. “You didn’t examine them closely enough. Those are parasitic sea anemones.”
We talked of all sorts of other things as well. By the time we all got to the bar, where I met Rick Corrie and, through him, Maxim Hough, I was actively enjoying myself. I think it was on slightly false pretences. Maxim seemed sure I was some sort of hidden celebrity, and my friends from supper had obviously decided the same, but I am not sure that was important. My main feeling by then was annoyance with myself – exasperation that I had chosen to live so much out of the world. I hadn’t, until that evening, remembered the value of congenial company. True, I need privacy for my Magid work, but one can have that without isolating oneself.
Rick Corrie, who had rushed away, now rushed back, very much out of breath and aggrieved. “That was Thurless again,” he said.
“Oh what is it this time?” said Maxim.
“I think he’s settled now,” Corrie said, “but it cost the convention forty pounds—”
“Already? How?” Maxim wanted to know. “The bloody man’s only been here four hours! That’s ten pounds an hour, Rick!”
“Well, you know I let Maree Mallory have Thurless’s room,” Corrie explained. “Her fool aunt forgot to book for her. She looked as if she was going to cry when I got to her. And Thurless was late, so I had to find him a room at the Station Hotel, because all the other empties are needed for publishers – none of them have turned up yet, by the way – and I took Thurless down there myself in a taxi along with that unexpected Croatian and a Russian or so. And I went and looked at all the damn rooms and they’re OK. Just as good as the ones here. But next thing I know, Thurless arrives back here in another taxi, insisting his shower won’t work and demanding that we pay for his taxi. So I sort that one out, and back he goes in the taxi again—”
“Hang on,” I said. “It’s only about a hundred yards from here to the Station Hotel.”
“It’s longer with the one-way system,” Maxim pointed out. “Still – but forty pounds, Rick! How often did he come back and forth in that taxi?”
“And Thurless has got a car,” Corrie said. “It was because I’d given his room away, you see. I didn’t feel I should argue too much, and to tell the truth I’ve lost count of how many times Thurless turned up in that taxi. Ten times? Something like that. I just gave the driver a cheque in the end. Thurless turned up this time saying he was late for Esoterica and wanting the taxi to wait for an hour and I thought I’d better scotch that.”
“If he wants a taxi to go back in, tell him to come to me,” Maxim said. “Tell him I’ll find him a bicycle.”