hand. ‘I’ve got a better idea, I told you.’ Lang looked sick, then profoundly annoyed, then, with an effort, attentive - that smiling, wide-eyed look that women learn to put on when men talk. ‘It’s called The Machine,’ Denton said.
‘The Machine. A little too H. G. Wells?’
Denton sketched it for him: a young husband and wife who build together the machine that destroys them, their marriage.
‘But a machine? I’d think something organic would be more likely, something that they nurture—’
‘I see it as a machine.’
‘Well - of course, it’s your idea—’ Lang sounded dubious. ‘Rather fashionable, perhaps - machines, I mean. Fear of the clang and bang of modern life, the dark Satanic mills, all that. Motor cars.’ He raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. ‘But a machine as the embodiment of horror, Denton—’
‘Oh, forget your damned horror!’
‘Oh, dear, oh, no—’
‘Lang, the horror is something you’ve all read into the books. I write about people, about suffering, about—’
Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear—’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’
Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’
‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’
‘It’s exactly that way.’
Lang looked about as if for a secret exit he’d forgotten the exact location of. ‘I suppose we could do something—’
‘My royalty account.’
‘Statements aren’t due yet, you know.’
‘But there’s money you owe me. There always is!’
‘Well, I suppose—Oh, well, of course - as you’re such a pillar of the backlist—’ He rang a little bell. Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a young man materialized in the doorway. Lang cleared his throat. ‘Ask Mr Frewn to step around, please, Meer.’
The heavy footsteps went away, went up some stairs, faded. Lang tapped on his desk. He said, ‘Frewn doesn’t get around as well as he used to.’ Denton put his coat and hat on the floor and crossed his legs. When slow, light footsteps sounded overhead, Lang smiled and murmured, ‘There we are,’ but it was another long silence, marked by increasingly loud footsteps, before a white-haired, bent man looked in. His black suit hung on him, giving him the look of a wet raven. In a surprisingly deep voice, he said, ‘You wanted something?’
‘Mr Denton - you know Mr Denton, one of our best authors, one of our most successful authors, Frewn - would like a cheque for the balance current in his account.’
The old man stared at Lang, then at Denton, as if he couldn’t believe his own rather large ears. ‘A cheque?’
‘Yes. Now, we’ve done this before, Mr Frewn - you remember, I’m sure, it can’t have been more than half a dozen years ago—’
Frewn shook his head. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’
Lang smirked at Denton and muttered, ‘We’ve done it again and again; it’s just—’ He smiled at Frewn. ‘Of course there’s a balance in Mr Denton’s account, Mr Frewn.’
‘No idea.’
‘There is, of course there is. So please, have Mr French write a cheque for the full amount for Mr Denton to take with him when he goes.’
The old man sucked in his breath. ‘Today?’
‘Now, Mr Frewn, this is too bad of you - of course, today - look here, I’m writing it out so you’ll have something on paper, eh? An authorization, all right? “Balance of account to this date, to be paid by cheque—” That’s quite clear, eh?’
He came around the desk and put the sheet of paper into the old man’s hand; he brought it close to his eyes, and his breath hissed in again. He muttered something, in which Denton caught only ‘ruin’, and patted off up the corridor, his voice mumbling on. Denton saw, as he left the doorway, that he was wearing carpet slippers that were almost hidden by remarkably long trousers, possibly somebody else’s, possibly his own from some earlier, longer-legged self.
‘Mr Frewn is rather a character,’ Lang said. ‘Quite the stuff of legend in the firm. I don’t know what we’d do without him.’
‘He’s the accountant?’
‘Ah, no, not—He’s actually a, mm, the—Mmm. Hard to explain - rather a vestige of an older way of—’ He smiled wanly. ‘He’s a kind of bottleneck for anything one wants to get done.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘But things do get done. They really do. You’ll see—’ He tapped some more