The door opened and Lana appeared to say that a young man had called to see Miss Ashby and she had put him in the library.
"Oh, what a nuisance," Bee said. "What does he want, do you know?"
"He says he's a reporter," Lana said, "but he doesn't look like a reporter to me. Quite tidy and clean and polite." Lana's experience of the Press, like Brat's knowledge of middle-class life, was derived solely from films.
"Oh, no!" Bee said. "Not the Press. Not already."
"The Westover Times he says he is."
"Did he say why he had come?"
"Come about Mr. Patrick, of course," Lana said, turning her thumb in Patrick's direction.
"Oh, God," Simon groaned, "and the fatted calf not half-way down our gullets. I suppose it had to come sooner or later!"
Bee drank the remains of her coffee. "Come on, Brat!" she said, putting out her hand and pulling him to his feet. "We might as well go and get it over. You too, Simon." She led Brat out of the room, laughing at him, and still hand in hand with him. The warm friendliness of her clasp sent a rush of emotion through him that he could not identify. It was like nothing he had so far experienced in life. And he was too busy with thoughts of the reporter to pause to analyse it.
The library was the dark room at the back of the house where Bee kept her roll-top desk, her accounts, and her reference books. A small young man in a neat blue suit was puzzling over a stud book. At their entrance he dropped the book and said in a rich Glasgow accent: "Miss Ashby? My name is Macallan. I'm working on the Westover Times. I'm awfully sorry about barging in like this, but I thought you'd have finished eating this long time."