Six Day Week

Monday, 10:30am

"This is Lord Alperton. He's raising hell over that paragraph in this morning's column. Says he'll sue unless we print an immediate retraction. And he's demanding his lordship's home number as well as the managing director's. This..." she flourished the other grey instrument menacingly towards her employer, "is the Hon. Greville Slatt from Magdalene. Says he's being pressed by his bookie and unless you send him a cheque by return for the piece he gave us on those debs, who swam topless in the river, he reckons he'll be sent down. Do you care?"

Davis Troy dragged up a tubular steel chair and shuffled it alongside Bert West's so he could more comfortably join in the confusion around the diary table. It was invariably in a state of uproar but Bert, the Globe's diary editor, was utterly unmoved by the chaos which surrounded him. His secretary, Doreen, had two receivers off their hooks, one in each hand, and was waiting patiently, like a champion Persian at a tabby cat show, to discover if he would accept either of the calls.

Bert, who compiled the 'Harrington Drake' column, was seldom 'in'. He was either 'at editorial conference' or 'with the editor'. It depended largely on Doreen, and her remarkable economy of words in explaining a complicated problem of the moment sprang from a long, hard, rugged training as maidservant to the madhouse of gossip-writing.

Bert, drawing tensely on his thirtieth -- or maybe his fortieth -- Gauloise of the day, threw Troy an affected squint of anguish and signalled his Girl Friday to keep the mouthpieces covered. "Stall 'em, luv," he instructed. "The facts as printed on this particular lordship and the girl he's... ahem .. . promoting in show business are dead right. I mean, as usual, they came from his wife. And as for that Cambridge layabout -- he can go jump in the Cam. I sent him twenty quid last week for what turned out to be a dicey piece on one of his lecturers and a lion tamer's wife, a story that's caused me a hell of a lot of trouble with the lawyers --the parasitic sods. That boy must learn to reduce his bets or pick up better information. What he really needs to steady him up is a good woman three nights a week. How about it, Doreen?"

"I'm off sex," she retorted, "and anyway I hate men. The daily news flow across this desk is a caution to any girl with hot pants."

Doreen didn't twitch an eyelid as she said it. She'd heard it all before --on many days, in many ways. The perversions of the upper classes, the reversions of the middle set and the inversions of the rest. Today's 'phone calls were merely permutations on the age-old theme of human folly as commercialised by the Globe gossip team.

"It's not every day I get the chance of a natter with Our Golden Boy from New York," Bert continued, picking at his nails with a foot-long copy spike, a relic of the old days which he had refused to surrender to the management.

"How's things, Troy?"

Troy didn't answer at once. He was too interested in the techniques of the men beside him. Around the oblong table topped by some kind of green plastic that was even tougher than the gossip writers spread about it, the brains of the select and contentious élite who daily produced the Globe's most talked-about feature were at work collecting material for tomorrow's column... while Doreen explained that the kingpin of it all -- diary editor Bert -- was about his normal important business and therefore out.

"I will convey your message, sir," she said primly into each mouthpiece simultaneously, "and I have no doubt that Mr. West will call you back as soon as he returns."

"Like hell I will," muttered Bert, sipping filthy black canteen tea from a cracked cup. "If that old bastard wants to get a word with me he'll have to put a couple of FBI men on the back entrance. To hell with the terriers. How are you, Troy? --it's good to see you again. You've been doing a great job on the other side."

"It's so easy over there. The Americans love to talk and everybody likes the Press. After this country it's like robbing money boxes," confessed the Globe's New York correspondent.