The New Countess by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781781851661
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part 2

What Happened Next

…in Minnie’s Life

Minnie marvelled at how quickly things could change. Three weeks after her flight from Dilberne Court, she stood in her stockinged feet in front of an easel and pasted up next month’s edition of the The Modern Idler.

‘I could spend my life doing this, and be happy,’ she thought.

‘Pasting-up’ was a simple matter of working out in your mind’s eye what the page would look like; making what was important bigger and what was less important smaller, cutting up typewritten columns into pieces and pasting them down with Mendine glue onto the large page sheets, getting the matching wood blocks in place, fitting it all together so it was aesthetically pleasing, and taking the finished sheets and a couple of white five-pound notes down to the Daily Mirror (where Anthony had a friend) and the typesetters could do 2,000 copies of The Modern Idler on good-quality paper in two hours using an old-fashioned flatbed. Minnie could do in three days what it took everyone else five. She just had a talent, rare in women she’d been told back at art school in Chicago, for spatial arrangement. The others waved scissors around and panicked and scattered the floor with bits of screwed-up paper and blobs of glue, and took days when Minnie took hours.

‘You’re a genius,’ Anthony Robin said. It was a long time since anyone had said that to her. She thought she was probably in love with him. His face was all planes and angles.

They’d put her to work straight away, ‘to stop her brooding’. She slept on the sofa the first night and after that she had a little back room of her own. She could see down to the Inner Temple church and gardens and even got a glimpse between rooftops of the river. They’d been astonisinghly nice to her. Rosina had moved out of the spare room to make room for her when she’d turned up in the middle of the night, and now Rosina shared with Diana and said it was okay by her if it stayed like that.

People came and went all the time at No. 3: artists and writers. Conversation was lively, food came when people were hungry, not when mealtimes dictated. Rabbit pie was a favourite and the Fleet Street butcher sold blocks of pastry to go on it. Diana did the cooking when she was not cleaning up after everyone, and now Minnie could help her keep up with the secretarial work. She worked and she was welcome.

Every now and then Anthony would emerge from his room and wander around, and if she was pasting up would stroke her head a little and turn her chin towards him and look into her eyes as if he saw her soul there, and then wander off.

Rosina slept in late and would then go round to Longman’s in Paternoster Row to prepare her book for the printers: Minnie had begun engraving a couple of wood blocks for the illustrations:

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