"Well, I don't suppose her stepping on the Ack-Emma bandwagon will have much effect one way or another."
"The Ack-Emma! It isn't the Ack-Emma. It's the Watchman. That mental deficient she calls father has written a letter about it for Friday's issue. Yes, you may well look squeamish. As if we weren't coping with enough without that highfalutin nugget of perverted sentimentality putting in its sixpenceworth!"
Remembering that the Watchman was the only paper ever to have published any of Nevil's poems, Robert thought this showed slight ingratitude. But he approved the description.
"Perhaps they won't print it," he said, less in hope than looking for comfort.
"You know very well they will print anything he chooses to send them. Whose money saved them just when they were going down for the third time? The Bishop's, of course."
"His wife's, you mean." The Bishop had married one of the two grand-daughters of Cowan's Cranberry Sauce.
"All right, his wife's. And the Bishop has the Watchman for a lay pulpit. And there isn't anything too silly for him to say in it, or too unlikely for them to print. Do you remember that girl who went round shooting taxi-drivers in cold blood for a profit of about seven-and-eleven a time? That girl was just his meat. He sobbed himself practically into a coma about her. He wrote a long heart-breaking letter about her in the Watchman, pointing out how under-privileged she had been, and how she had won a scholarship to a secondary school and hadn't been able to 'take it up' because her people were too poor to provide her with books or proper clothes, and so she had gone to blind-alley jobs and then to bad company-and so, it was inferred, to shooting taxi-drivers, though he didn't actually mention that little matter. Well, all the Watchman readers lahved that, of course; it was just their cup of tea; all criminals according to the Watchman readers are frustrated angels. And then the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the school-the school she was supposed to have won a scholarship to-wrote to point out that so far from winning anything was she that her name was 159th out of two hundred competitors; and that someone as interested in education as the Bishop was should have known that no one was prevented from accepting a scholarship through lack of money, since in needy cases books and money grants were forthcoming automatically. Well, you would have thought that that would shake him, wouldn't you? But not a bit. They printed the Chairman's letter on a back page, in small print; and in the very next issue the old boy was sobbing over some other case that he knew nothing about. And on Friday, so help me, he'll be sobbing over Betty Kane."
"I wonder-if I went over to see him tomorrow—"
"It goes to press tomorrow."
"Yes, so it does. Perhaps if I telephoned—"