The Care of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

country to New York City merely to discuss a project about which you knew less than nothing and in which you could very well have no interest at all.’
    ‘Beautifully put, Barbara. Superb.’
    ‘As a result, my dear, and after a show of reluctance on his part, I was given the following. The book – I quote – is to be in essence the history of a political movement. It will consist partly of a hitherto unpublished nineteenth-century memoir and partly of an informed commentary by a modern expert on the movement and its development over the years. Your function would be mainly editorial. The proposed title is – again I quote –
Children of the Twilight
.’
    ‘Doesn’t exactly grab you, does it.’
    ‘It may sound better in Italian. Anyway, titles can always be changed. The point is that, having screwed that concession out of him I felt bound to concede something in return.’
    ‘Such as what, Barbara?’
    ‘I have made a date for you to meet Mr McGuire in his office at three tomorrow afternoon. And before you start belly-aching, let me remind you that you will be listening to a proposal which you can accept or reject. If you fail me by not turning up, you will not be forgiven. Still, for the sake of old times, I hope that if you decide that you can’t be bothered you will be so kind as to call Mr McGuire’s secretary in good time and tell her so. Then, when you feel like it, you can let me know what happened, one way or the other. Goodbye, my dear.’
    I finished my drink and went to see what the daily woman had left for me in the refrigerator.
    Later, when I had completed the Williams changes for my secretary to fair-copy, I tried saying
Children of the Twilight
aloud. After I had said it several times I found that it became a tongue-twister. Only as I was getting ready for bed, though,did I wonder what the phrase was supposed to mean.
    What kind of human beings were there, or had there been, who could sensibly be called ‘children of the twilight’? A political movement? Surely not. They sounded more like the members of some remote Amazonian rain-forest tribe discovered by an anthropologist with a taste for journalese. My mind’s eye could see their pictures in the
National Geographic
. Fragile little creatures they were with lank hair, blankly terrified stares and willowy spears clutched in their hands. If the spears were used for killing anything larger or more dangerous than a guinea pig, the heads would have to be tipped with poison.
    As sleep came it occurred to me that the postcard picture must have been taken quite recently. Those big oleanders beneath the palms around the driveway of the Hotel Mansour had only just been planted when I had last been there.

TWO
    Not many of the old Wall Street firms live very near that street nowadays. I found the one of which Mr McGuire was a member located almost eight blocks away in the new Syncom-Sentinel building off Fulton. The firm occupied two entire floors and, by some miracle of the decorator’s craft, and the expenditure of vast sums on dyed leather, had managed to give them an appearance of old-world cosiness.
    McGuire was in his early fifties, a dark, thick-set man with rosy cheeks, bushy eyebrows and a beak-like upper lip that allowed him to give only very small smiles. I had looked him up in the books. He was a Princeton graduate, had been to Harvard Law School and had served in the Judge Advocate General’s department during the Korean war. He was an officer of the American Bar Association and a member of several professional bodies concerned with insurance. An authority on legal aspects of the international insurance business, he had lectured at Columbia on the subject and often read papers before the Investment Bankers Association and the Society of Chartered Life Underwriters. His qualifications as a commissioning editor (even in an acting capacity) for a serious Italian publisher seemed, unless the proposed book were to be a technical treatise