The Care of Time Read Online Free PDF

dealing with insurance law, to be virtually non-existent.
    If he was aware of that fact, however, he was undaunted by it. His self-confidence appeared total. His manner was relaxed, genial and patronizing.
    He had a conference table as well as a desk in his office. ‘I am told,’ he said breezily as he waved me to a chair at the table, ‘that I must be very careful, in putting the Pacioli proposition to you, not to offend your professional sensibilities.’
    ‘Told by whom?’ I asked. ‘Not by Mrs Reynolds, I’m sure.’
    ‘Naturally, I am interpreting what she said. What she actually said, I think, was that you were very “choosy” – would that be her word? – about the kind of assignments you accepted. I gathered that you have certain strict rules and some prejudices. In my own choosy way I call them professional sensibilities. Isn’t that what they are?’
    I was getting the small smile and its message was plain.
Halliday, we both know that what I’m doing is hiring a hack for fifty thousand bucks to do some scribbling for an important client. Let’s not waste time analysing your literary conceits
.
    So, I answered the unspoken appeal as well as the spoken question. ‘I have prejudices against some things, certainly, Counsellor, and imprecise language is one of them. That’s a prejudice I would have thought we might have shared.’
    I was pleased to see him wince at the word ‘counsellor’. When you have had as much to do with lawyers as I have in my work, you get to know that quite a lot of the good ones, even the good trial lawyers, don’t like being addressed as Counsellor. One of them told me that it always made him feel like a character in a TV series. As an honorific it has become debased.
    McGuire changed his tune slightly, but without noticeable loss of countenance. When people proved touchy, he was reminding himself, you just let them think that they had scored a point.
    ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘there’s no need for
me
to tell
you
that I haven’t had much occasion to do business with authors. Shall we just take it as understood, then, that you always have, in making your choice of a subject, a set of criteria to apply and that fifty-thousand-dollar fees aren’t going to change the fact?’
    ‘That’s about it, yes. All I’ve heard so far is that the Pacioli book is to be the history of a political movement. It is to be organized around a hitherto-unpublished nineteenth-centurymanuscript with an informed commentary by a modern expert on the movement. I assume that this expert is not a scholar.’
    ‘Why should you assume that?’
    ‘A scholar wouldn’t accept the kind of editorial assistance that I have to give. He would believe, rightly or wrongly, that he could do the whole job himself.’
    ‘Then you have no objection to the basic proposition?’
    ‘I find the proposed title meaningless and a bit off-putting, but I’ll be able to judge better how valid that objection is when I know whose memoir we’re talking about and which political movement.’
    ‘Cards on the table then. I must put it to you as best I can and then attempt to answer the questions that your experience will prompt you to ask.’ He had a file on the table in front of him and he smoothed down the cover of it before he went on. ‘As you may know, we in this office have among our clients a multinational corporation with extensive interests in some of the more politically conservative and stable areas of the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states. Obviously, our client likes, when it can, to oblige its friends in those countries. So, when word came through that there existed a book which a high personage considered to be not merely worthy of publication in the west, but of potential importance to the west’s policy-makers, our client took notice. Are you with me, so far?’
    ‘I think so. When your client had its people at Pacioli look into the matter, they came back with the bad news