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Back The Tin Men Save as PDF
Chapters (41)
  1. By the Same Author
  2. Copyright
  3. Introduction by the Author
  4. 1
  5. 2
  6. 3
  7. 4
  8. 5
  9. 6
  10. 7
  11. 8
  12. 9
  13. 10
  14. 11
  15. 12
  16. 13
  17. 14
  18. 15
  19. 16
  20. 17
  21. 18
  22. 19
  23. 20
  24. 21
  25. 22
  26. 23
  27. 24
  28. 25
  29. 26
  30. 27
  31. 28
  32. 29
  33. 30
  34. 31
  35. 32
  36. 33
  37. 34
  38. 35
  39. 36
  40. 37
  41. About the Author

After his fiver had definitely gone down the drain, Nunn withdrew to his office for prolonged meditation on the matter, surrounding himself with all his golf clubs, lacrosse sticks, punchballs, running spikes, and scrum caps as a sort of dam to protect himself from the gradual seepage of Goldwasser into every corner of the universe. He pulled them all closely about him, like bedclothes. He was a lone wolf, and he would lie low high up here in his eyrie until the iron was hot, and when the iron was hot, wham! – he would come out like a tiger and knock it for six. The hour would strike, and in that hour he would be terrible!

‘Jolly good,’ he told the spoons and the drivers quietly.

27

27

Rowe had moved on to Chapter II, but to signify his abandonment of the outworn style in which Chapter I was drafted he had retitled the novel The Skulls of Glass.

When Rick and Nina joined the others [he wrote] on the terrace in the shade of the great jeroboam tree, there was plainly a certain tension in the air. Fiddlingchild, the immensely rich oil magnate who was their host, looked thunderous. His mistress, the dark, sinuously beautiful Anna Riedl, impatiently tapped the immense emerald on her finger against the side of her cocktail glass, as she watched Stavros Nunopolos, the Greek playboy, loll back in a basket chair and joke with a studied fatuousness that was more polished than usual.

Watching Nunopolos, Rick knew that he was almost certain that Anna felt a passionate contempt for Fiddlingchild’s failure to understand his, Nunopolos’s, motives. Anna plainly knew that Nunopolos understood her feelings about Fiddlingchild, and she knew too that Nina knew she knew about Nunopolos’s knowledge – and that if Nina knew, one must assume that Fiddlingchild could guess from the meaningful glance Nina shot at Rick that Nunopolos had divined­ emotions in Anna which could only relate to some failure of understanding in himself vis-à-vis Nunopolos.

All this Rick read plainly in Anna’s eyes.

What took him a fraction of a second longer to realise was that Fiddlingchild’s depression was caused not by his intuition of Nunopolos’s guess at Anna’s feelings towards himself, but by his realising, from Nunopolos’s skilful over-fatuousness, that Nunopolos was infinitely diverted by the fact that Fiddlingchild had not guessed exactly what he was failing to do to arouse the scorn in Anna whose existence had been so brutally brought home to him by that glance of Nina’s.