Neverwhere

left Jessica’s mother quite disgruntled.
It was driving Jessica to distraction. «Who are those people?» she asked Clarence.
«Them? Well, he’s the new editor of Vogue, she’s the arts correspondent of the New York Times. The one between them is Kate Moss, I think . . . »
«No, not them,» said Jessica. «Them. There.»
Clarence looked in the place that she was pointing. Hm? Oh. Them. He couldn’t understand how he had failed to see them before. Old age, he thought; he would soon be twenty-three. «Journalists?» he said, without much conviction. «They do look rather trendoid. Grunge chic? Please. I know I invited The Face . . . »
«I know him,» said Jessica, frustrated. Then Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur phoned from Holborn to say that he was almost at the British Museum, and Richard slid out of her head, like mercury trickling through her fingers.
«See anything?» asked Richard. Door shook her head and swallowed a mouthful of hastily chewed chicken leg. «It’s like playing ‘Spot the Pigeon’ in Trafalgar Square,» she said. «There’s nothing that feels like the Angelus. The paper said I’d know it if I saw it.» And she wandered off, inspecting angels, pushing her way past a Captain of Industry, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, and the Highest-Paid Call Girl in the South of England. Richard turned away and found himself face-to-face with Jessica. Her hair was piled on her head, and it framed her face perfectly in corkscrews of chestnut curls. She was very beautiful. She was smiling at him; it was the smile that did it. «Hello Jessica,» he said. «How are you?»
«Hello. You won’t believe this,» she said, «but my assistant failed to make a note of your newspaper, Mister uh.»
«Paper?» said Richard.
«Did I say newspaper?» said Jessica, with a tinkling, sweet, and self-deprecating laugh. «Magazine . . . television station. You are with the media?»
«You’re looking very fine, Jessica,» said Richard.
«You have the advantage of me,» she said, smiling roguishly.
«You’re Jessica Bartram. You’re a marketing executive at Stocktons. You’re twenty-six. Your birthday is April the twenty-third, and in the throes of extreme passion you have a tendency to hum the Monkees song ‘I’m a Believer’ . . . »
Jessica was no longer smiling. «Is this some kind of joke?» she asked, coldly.
«Oh, and we’ve been engaged for the last eighteen months,» said Richard.
Jessica smiled nervously. Perhaps this really was some kind of joke: one of those jokes that everyone else seemed to get and she never did. «I rather think I’d know if I’d been engaged to someone for eighteen months, Mister um,» said Jessica.
«Mayhew,» said Richard helpfully. «Richard Mayhew. You dumped me, and I don’t exist anymore.»
Jessica waved, urgently, at no one in particular all the way across the room. «Be right there,» she called, desperately, and she began to back away.
«I’m a believer,»
sang Richard, cheerfully, «I couldn’t leave her if I tried . . . »
Jessica snatched a glass of champagne from a passing tray, downed it in a gulp. At the far end of the room she could see Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur, and where Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur was . . .
She headed toward the doors. «So who was he?» asked Clarence, edging alongside her.
«Who?»
«Your mystery man.»
«I don’t know» she admitted. Then she said, «Look, maybe you ought to call security.»
«Okay. Why?»
«Just . . . just get me security,» and then Mr. Arnold Stockton entered the hall, and everything else went out of her head.
Expansive, he was, and expensive, a Hogarth cartoon of a man, enormous of girth, many-chinned and broad-stomached. He was over sixty; his hair was gray and silver, and it was cut too long in the back, because it made people uncomfortable that his hair was too long, and Mr. Stockton liked making people uncomfortable. Compared to Arnold Stockton, Rupert Murdoch was a shady little pipsqueak, and the late Robert Maxwell was a beached whale. Arnold Stockton was a pit bull, which was how caricaturists often chose to draw him. Stocktons owned a little bit of everything: satellites, newspapers, record companies, amusement parks, books, magazines, comics, television stations, film companies.
«I’ll make the speech now,» said Mr. Stockton, to Jessica, by way of introduction. «Then I’ll bugger off. Come back some other time, when there aren’t all these stuffed shirts about.»
«Right,» said Jessica. «Yes. The speech now. Of course.»
And