Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [39]
The Lionheart News Group’s Daimler reached the Mainstream Mile restaurant at seven thirty-five and the proprietors walked stiffly into the bar. There were several sets of people sitting at little tables with no one approximating Mrs Robin Dawkins’ idea of a newspaper editor in sight. Her glance swept over the young man standing to one side, holding a file-folder, and it was with depression that she realised, as he came tentatively towards her, that this, the personification of a waste of time, was the person they’d come all that way to meet.
F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley shook his hand, introducing themselves, and both were dismayed by his youth. In dark trousers, white shirt and navy blazer he looked right for a summer Thursday evening dinner by the Thames, but wrong for their idea of bossing a news room. Bill Williams, more anxious than he would admit about his job prospects, was also disconcerted by the restaurant’s on-going hostility towards him, for which he saw no logical reason. Why ever should he not arrive in a punt?
In the bar Bill Williams seated his guests at a small table and ordered drinks, which were a long time coming. The bar filled up with people and then began to empty again as the head waiter in a formal dinner jacket began distributing menus and taking orders and leading guests away to seat them in the dining-room. Other guests: not the Williams party.
Irritated at being overlooked, Bill Williams asked the head waiter for menus, as he passed by with smiling customers in tow. The head waiter said, ‘Certainly,’ frowning, and took five minutes over returning.
Mrs Robin Dawkins seethed at the off-hand treatment and waited, fuming, for her host to assert himself. Bill Williams twice insisted that the head waiter seat them for dinner, but he and his guests were last out of the bar and last in the dining-room, and were allocated the worst table, in a corner. Bill Williams came near to punching the smugness off the head waiter’s face.
Unbelievable, Mrs Robin Dawkins thought. The food she ordered came late and cold. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley tried to assess this Williams boy’s capacity to run a newspaper, which was what they had come for, but were distracted by the restaurant staff’s ungracious service at every turn.
Bill Williams, with bunched but helpless fists, furiously demanded an improvement in the waiters’ manners and didn’t get it. When Mrs Robin Dawkins requested coffee, she was told it was available in the bar.
Every table in the bar was by that time filled. Mrs Robin Dawkins headed straight out of the exit door to the car park without looking back. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley judiciously shook their heads at Bill Williams and vaguely said they would let him know. Bill Williams thrust into F. Harold Field’s arms the file-folder he’d been nursing all evening, and F. Harold Field, though looking at it as if he thought it contained dynamite, held onto the file, gingerly at first, and then strongly gripped it, and followed Mrs Dawkins and Russell Maudsley out to their car.
‘I told you so,’ Mrs Robin Dawkins ground out, thrusting out her jaw and driving fiercely away, ‘a wimp of a boy who couldn’t organise a sandwich.’
F. Harold Field said, ‘I got the impression that Williams would have hit that head waiter if we and everyone else hadn’t been watching.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Dawkins contradicted, but F Harold Field knew what he’d seen. He fingered the file that had been pushed into his arms and decided to read the contents in the morning.
Bill Williams returned to the dining-room, which was now empty of guests and being set up for the morning, and demanded to see the head waiter. None of the busy under-waiters hurried to help him, but one finally told him that the head waiter had gone home, his work finished for the night.
Bill Williams, rigid with unvented anger, stood as if planted immovably and insisted on seeing whoever was now in charge. The waiters shuffled a bit from foot to foot. People on boats were supposed to go quietly, not look as if at any minute they