Chapter 3 Miss Ogilvie
Miss Ogilvie
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
A woman, as the Boy was quick to point out. She already looked to be beyond retirement age in Flynn’s (often unreliable) estimation, her presence a mystery. Small and neat, she carried a handbag that was almost half her size.
“How d’you do,” they all murmured, even the Boy, who was not given to formal salutation.
Scottish, Flynn thought. A douce accent, not the harsh tones of the West Coast, nor the pinched refinement of Edinburgh’s Morningside.
Inverness or the islands, he judged. She slowly scanned their cluttered den, assessing both habitat and occupants.
“Are you collecting jumble for a sale?” she said, clearly bemused at the state of the office.
“The Eccentricities,” Badger murmured by way of apology.
“In my defence,” she said, “I’ve come from Typography.”
“Eh?” the Boy said. She might as well have said, “I come from Mars.”
“Tie-pog-ri-fi,” Evans said to him.
That explained her, Flynn thought. Typography were an orderly lot—finickity, some might have said.
He had been for a drink with a woman called Joan who was on the Typographic Panel, and she had spent the entire evening explaining to him why sans serif had been “debased” by the war because people associated it with “militaristic diktats,” and how the Festival was searching for an identity through the “rediscovery of eighteenth-century type.”
“Fascinating,” Flynn had murmured, resigning himself to the fact that Joan was never going to go to bed with him, more interested in talking about “the English vernacular style” and “two-dimensional letterform.” He didn’t remember women before the war being quite so keen on lecturing him.
“And don’t get me started on Gill Sans.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Flynn had assured her.
He had bought her another gin and orange in a fruitless effort to stop her typographic hymning.
“Playbill, Tea Chest, Keyboard and Chisel,” she chanted, a piece of staccato nonsense that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Festival Poems. “Egyptian slab serif lettering,” she cooed, and it dawned on him that letterforms might be how typographists courted.
“I’m fond of Walbaum myself,” he had countered seductively. “Faber and Faber use it for their modern poets. Nice and crisp, and I like the hairline serifs.” She began to look quite flushed.
Flynn knew about fonts, of course, not just from his time working at the printers.
At the beginning of the war, he had endured a brief stint in the Ministry of Information.
He had willingly volunteered for the Army but, although he considered himself fighting fit, an old rugby injury from school was deemed enough by someone to make him unsuitable for the front line.
A badly broken leg had put paid to his place in the cricket first eleven, but he had been surprised when it put an end to his war before it had even begun.
He hadn’t even been left with a limp, and he had wondered if his “unsuitability” stemmed from more than a badly broken bone.
No amount of arguing had been able to prevent him from being siphoned unwillingly into the MOI, where he was charged with creating those “militaristic diktats” that Joan sneered at.
The apotheosis of his short career in propaganda was to exhort the populace to Eat Less Bread.
Through some diplomatic chicanery (he suspected Gerald Barry that time as well), he was returned to the News Chronicle and his job as the crime correspondent on the night shift.
Within no time he was redeployed to cover the bombardment of the East End that had just begun.
No amount of clout, however, seemed enough to get him into the armed forces.
Active service was apparently to be denied to him for the duration.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
“Well, I think you should be grateful and stop moaning about it,” one of his girlfriends at the time said dismissively.
“You’ve been saved from the war. You might be dead on the beach at Dunkirk if you’d been in uniform.
” He couldn’t remember that girlfriend’s name.
She’d been in the typing pool, famous for her bust rather than her words per minute.
In Singapore, having been denied a service uniform, Flynn had been more than happy to wear the secondhand war reporter’s jacket that had been given to him by a stringer (Wilson?
Watson?) for the British tabloids. Watson—or Wilson—had been with the British troops in North Africa and had only just arrived in Singapore when he received the news that his wife and daughter had been killed in an air raid back home.
He had other children and took the long sea voyage back home to make arrangements for them.
“British War Correspondent,” the flash on the shoulder of the hand-me-down jacket announced.
It stank of foreign spices and someone else’s sweat, but Flynn donned it willingly, unaware that to Japanese eyes, unfortunately, a uniform was a uniform and protestations that he was a non-combatant would fall on resolutely deaf ears when it came to herding him, along with the surrendered Allied troops, into Changi jail.
It seemed that Flynn had joined the Army after all, even if only by default.
He had not been “saved” from the war—far from it. He was not unaware of the irony.
Lois, he recalled suddenly now. That had been the name of that unsympathetic girlfriend.
—
“I believe Mr. Dangerfield asked Miss Ogilvie to help you out,” Denholm said.
“Are we in need of help?” Evans asked.
“Apparently,” Miss Ogilvie said. “I am told that you’re rather behind—with deadlines and so on.”
“Isn’t everyone?” Flynn said.
“Who’s this Dangerfield?” Evans enquired.
“The Great Panjandrum,” Mr. Denholm said. “The almighty Pooh-Bah. Also now known as my boss.”
“I thought you were our boss,” the Boy said, indignant that he had failed to ferret out such an important piece of information.
“Everyone has someone above them,” Miss Ogilvie said. “Even Gerald Barry has Lord Ismay to answer to.”
“So who’s Lord Ismay’s boss, then?” the ever-logical Boy asked.
“God,” Evans said.
“What’s Dangerfield’s background?” Flynn was curious after his encounter with him at the tea trolley.
“Well, a variety of things, really,” Miss Ogilvie said.
“He married well—Jocasta Hunt, her father made his fortune in minerals in South America. They have a house in Grosvenor Square, two children, both in their teens and away at boarding school. His wife’s money helps to fund his political ambitions.
For a long time he was seen as the coming man, but he never quite arrived.
Towards the end of the war, he was recruited into the Security Services, but it didn’t ‘stick’ with him.
He stood for the Conservatives in ’45 and lost by a narrow margin, and then went abroad with the diplomatic service.
I believe he intends to stand again. He will keep running until he’s first past the post. He is backed by some influential people—they want him to win. ”
“It seems you know him quite well,” Evans said drily.
“I pay attention, Mr. Evans-Jones.”
“Just Evans will do,” Evans said.
“What on earth is he doing here?” Flynn said. “He sounds like a fish out of water. Looks like one, too—I met him at the tea trolley.”
“The rumour is that Dangerfield blotted his copybook in some unspecified way, and he needs to be redeemed because he is to be put up as a candidate again in the next election.”
“That’s years away yet.”
“Not as far away as you might think. I believe there’s to be a snap election in the autumn.”
“How can it be ‘snap’ if people know about it now?” Flynn asked. “Surely the definition of snap is that it’s unforeseen. You’re not a clairvoyant, are you, Miss Ogilvie?” (Or a witch, he added to himself.)
“Dangerfield?” a frowning Badger said. He had been absent for most of this discussion but had turned up in time to hear the name. “Giles Dangerfield? He’s back from Northern Rhodesia?”
“You know him?” Flynn asked.
Badger shrugged, a careless gesture at odds with his furrowed features, but then he cast it off and said with what was clearly a faux nonchalance, “Came across him in the war.”
“What did he do in the war?” Flynn quizzed.
“I couldn’t possibly say.”
“Security Service?”
“I couldn’t possibly say.”
“Did you work with him?”
“I couldn’t possibly say.”
“I am told,” Miss Ogilvie interjected rather impatiently, “that Mr. Dangerfield has been brought in from the outside to gee things up a bit.”
“The outside of what?” the Boy said, laughing.
“What’s your name?” Miss Ogilvie asked, fixing the Boy with a look over her half-moon spectacles.
“Terence, miss.”
Her attention was momentarily diverted by the sight of the rabbit on Badger’s desk.
“It’s stuffed,” the Boy said, enjoying the word.
“Can you run along and do something useful?” Evans asked him.
“Okey-doke,” the Boy said, never one to take offence. “Get you something from the tea trolley, Miss Ogilvie?” he offered, blatantly currying favour. The overture was politely rejected.
“You can come with me,” Badger said to the Boy. “I’ve a meeting with an ornithologist.” (“Awn-i-tholl-o-jist,” Evans tutored.)
“What on earth for?” Flynn asked.