Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

price. I must know the price. It’s possible I can’t afford your services.’
    He put aside the form and brought out of the front drawer of his desk, tilting backward in the process, a stack of small oblong folded cards. They were unused, and in style similar to place-cards set out on the table at large and formal dinner-parties, with the names of the guests. Mr B. silently made a row of three cards on the desk in front of him, and behind them a further row of six. He had set about making yet a third row when he spoke. ‘The price,’ he said, ‘depends entirely on what you want, where you want it done, and how long the service will take. You must first give me some rough details before we can discuss the fee’; and as he spoke the word ‘rough’ he seemed to smile more than nature had predestined him to do.
    ‘Oh, well,’ said Anthea, ‘I didn’t want to waste your time, that’s all. I just want you to know right from the start that I don’t own a fleet of yachts and I haven’t got big money, diamonds. …’
    ‘GESS is here to help you,’ said Mr B. ‘Let’s leave the Rolls-Royces out of it and not delude ourselves. Would it be a matrimonial difficulty?’
    Anthea agreed that it was that kind of question. He wrote something on one of the little cards and set it in another place on the desk. ‘Tell me the whole story,’ he said. She went on with the whole story for about twenty minutes, during which time he smilingly lifted the cards, one by one, to make notes on them. The first time he did this she halted; but he said, ‘Don’t mind me. Carry on.’
    She might have been lying on a couch, and he taking notes where she couldn’t see him. She looked at him with disapproval as much as to say some of his questions were precocious at this first meeting.
    ‘Are you in love with your husband?’
    ‘I don’t think that has anything to do with any arrangement we may come to.’
    ‘It’s only that we do try to discourage clients from embarking on an investigative venture if, in fact, they have no significant final interest in the pursuit.’
    ‘I asked you to name the price,’ she said.
    ‘I can’t possibly tell you yet,’ said smiling Mr B. ‘But your husband having gone abroad with this other lady, well, bang goes a pretty penny to start with. We have to send a man abroad to consult with our expert on the spot, and we need to have local informers, very expensive and somewhat—shall I say?—a local hazard in the area concerned. We have no territorial rights. Expenses here, expenses there, they mount up.’
    His cards were all over the clear table like a regatta assembling on a calm bay, outside which the infinite sea chopped everywhere.
    He smiled a real smile, which was not much different from the normal. ‘Mrs Leaver,’ he said, ‘we haven’t yet got all our cards on the table, have we?’
    She didn’t smile back.
    ‘Or haven’t we? I want to find out, you see, if it’s worth your money investigating your husband’s activities in Venice. Do you really care?’
    ‘Of course I do,’ she said.
    ‘You’re still in love with him?’
    ‘That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘He’s my husband.’
    ‘A possible divorce? Alimony?’ he said. ‘We are counsellors, you know, counsellors. Do you depend on him entirely, financially?’
    She said nothing for a while, only watching him distrustfully. Then as if by a stroke of lucid madness she nevertheless went on eagerly, ‘He holds most of the property and his lady-friend is supposed to be rich.’
    He made notes on two cards, smiling, perhaps as if thinking: She says he has most of the property but it could be the other way round. Or perhaps he was only smiling because he couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Lady-friend supposed to be rich.’
    ‘I don’t care how rich she is or attractive,’ Anthea said, speaking rapidly. ‘I just want to know what my husband’s up to. He’s my husband. I want to know. Do you understand? I believe in one