The Silent Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

wash up? ‘Why do you say them? You don’t know me at all.’
    ‘I know Mrs Tyler. I would do anything for her. You are her niece. Come, I want to help you. We will speak to Stephen together, when he finishes with that bitter old man Ford. Twenty-four novels, ha. The same novel twenty-four times, is what I say. Give the money to someone who deserves it.’
    ‘Shh, he’ll hear you,’ Isabel said, giggling, but the big moustached man was rambling away to Stephen, impervious to distraction. Finally, Berec persuaded Mrs Symmonds to intervene.
    ‘Stephen,’ Berec said, catching his sleeve, ‘come, I must speak to you seriously. You have an opportunity. This young lady, you can’t turn her away.’
    Isabel, seeing the expression on Stephen’s face turn from polite good humour to annoyance, couldn’t help bursting out, ‘Please, Mr Berec. Mr McKinnon isn’t interested, it’s quite clear. And I couldn’t work for anybody who didn’t really want me. I would simply die.’ She spoke with such passion that she found both men silent, staring at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. She put down her glass clumsily, so Stephen had to steady it. ‘Perhaps I should go home now. I’m really quite . . . exhausted.’
    She started to move away, but Stephen touched her arm. ‘Wait.’ He was perusing her as though he hadn’t seen her properly before.
    ‘I want to help you,’ he told her, ‘but I stand by what I said. There is no position at the present time that I can offer you. I simply have no spare money. I rely on the financial support of a gentleman whose factory makes ladies’ shoes. Every book I publish seems to lose money.’
    ‘Except Miss Briggs’s romances.’ Berec put in.
    ‘What the Daily Mail calls Maisie Briggs’s “enterprising heroines” may indeed prove to be our salvation,’ Stephen McKinnon said, his eyes twinkling.
    ‘My mother simply devours Maisie Briggs,’ Isabel told him, cheered by this change of mood.
    ‘Devours her, does she?’ Stephen grinned. ‘And what is it that you devour, Miss Barber?’
    ‘Oh, I like anything,’ Isabel said, filling up with happiness at his attention. ‘I mean, I’ll try anything. My parents don’t understand at all. If my father sees me reading, he tells me to go and do something. I say I am doing something – I’m reading – but he thinks that’s being pert.’
    At this, Stephen threw his head back and laughed, but Berec’s expression was horrified. ‘You poor child,’ he breathed. ‘Stephen, you must do something. The forces of ignorance must not be allowed to triumph.’
    Stephen assumed an expression of amiable defeat. ‘Look here, I must go and speak to my other guests,’ he said. ‘Miss Barber, please. Would you come and see me tomorrow? I can at least give you some advice. Audrey,’ he called. A poised young woman with a pretty upturned nose pushed herself off the desk she was sitting on and sauntered across. ‘Audrey, what am I doing tomorrow morning?’
    ‘Chuck over my diary, someone.’ Audrey consulted a black notebook and read out, ‘Mr Greenford with the quarterly accounts at ten, the man from Unicorn Printing at eleven-thirty, lunch at La Scala with James Ross’s agent.’
    ‘Eleven then, does that suit?’ he asked Isabel, who nodded. ‘Audrey, this is Miss Isabel Barber. Put her down for interview at eleven.’
    ‘Interview?’ Audrey gave Isabel a cool up-and-down stare, then scribbled what looked like Isabelle Barba in the diary. Isabel didn’t dare correct her.
    ‘You see?’ Berec said later, as he put her in a taxi and pressed into her hand the ten-shilling note he’d just cadged. ‘I knew Stephen would see sense.’
    Isabel, riding the cab through the dark, unfamiliar streets, was not so sure . Mr McKinnon was humouring Berec. It seemed that everyone succumbed to his charm. As for her, she was wound up to a pitch of intensity that only a very young person can feel. In that untidy office with its interesting