In The Pink

By Serena Fairfax

In this wry, comic entertainment set in the early 1980s it’s just three years since art historian Anthony Blunt was publicly unmasked in 1979 as the fourth man in a ring of British spies that had worked for the Soviet Union as KGB operatives.
Dame Marjorie Sandringham is a delightful and distinguished former diplomat and later Mistress of St. Ethelreda’s College, Oxford, until her recent retirement. Now she’s Chair of ISAS (the International Sisterhood for Action and Solidarity) but there’s more to her than meets the eye...
Rhoda Ribteen, Chair of the ISAS Grants and Publicity Committees attends a conference in Washington and finds herself sharing a room with Winifred Hokeki, a matronly woman from Maphutsana in southern Africa. With a sudden flash of her native initiative Rhoda offers her the ISAS scholarship for developing countries for her daughter, Kezzia, to come to England and study rural development. Maphutsana is strategically the key to Africa, and is the last remaining British colony in Africa. It ‘s due to become independent and already the Maphutsana cabal headed by Dr Bible Uvengi is intriguing for power while Romeo Alfaemzo, the guerrilla leader is backed by China.
Dame Marjorie supports Rhoda's offer and it's not long before the plump and permanently bumbling Annie Pettifer, secretary to the ISAS Grants Committee has the task of making travel arrangements for Kezzia and meeting her off the international flight. Hovering over Annie’s every move like the sword of Damocles is sharp-tongued Verene Widmer, the Swiss General Secretary of ISAS.
Kezzia proves sublime. At the Agricultural College, the Honourable Eustace Darracott and Joe Lister fight for her favours and she runs away with the succeeding days. With this success in the bag, Rhoda backs Dame Marjorie for the Presidency of ISAS. Dame Marjorie is standing against Mrs Wilmer T. Swatz of the United States, who considerably stirred up the ISAS Congress in Brussels at the Palais des Nations by daily issuing campaign leaflets canvassing for herself.
Dame Marjorie wins the contest and the way is open for a fundraising drive for Maphutsana. Grace Crackenthorpe, now eighty and a member of the ISAS Grants Committee, who has spent most of her life as a science organiser in foreign fields, is despatched there. She gets a Maphutsana branch of ISAS off the ground, totally constitutional, and the money, thanks to Kezzia's impassioned advocacy pours in. Most of all there is Dame Marjorie's brainwave, the huge Sinking Fund out of which a preliminary cash injection is given to the hopeless and homeless to get them to participate in self-help.
Cut to the following Summer when Annie's friend, the journalist Francis Best, is being seen off at the airport by his girl friend, Honor Grenville, to cover Maphutsana for a television feature at the same time as ISAS is bidding farewell to Kezzia, who has Eustace and Joe in tow. Honor and Dame Marjorie recognise one another from the time Dame Marjorie was Ambassador to Ecuador and Honor's husband Colin (from whom she has separated) was Third Secretary. Eustace, whose father is Foreign Affairs spokesman in the Lords has pulled a string or two to ensure that Kezzia will be back as an Observer at the Constitutional Conference to be held at Marlborough House. Joe, not to be outdone, has volunteered for VSO in Maphutsana.
Nobody, least of all Francis, expects the result of the Maphutsanan elections to turn out as it does. Kezzia, who formed a Women's Party, only two weeks before polling day, sweeps to power in a landslide victory and is elected President of the country. She is self-confessedly non-aligned, but the day afterwards does the little favour she has agreed with Dame Marjorie.
You quick witted reader will have cottoned on before half the book and half the manoeuvring is completed... But everybody wins in his or her own way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serena Fairfax
• Release date: Aug 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9780956974877

Serena Fairfax

I qualified as a Lawyer in England and joined a large London law firm. My first romantic novel STRANGE INHERITANCE (published by Robert Hale Ltd in 1990) went into UK and USA large print editions in 2004 (published by BBC Audio Books Ltd and Thorndike Press) and is a Kindle and Smashwords eBook 2011. The next romantic novel was PAINT ME A DREAM (published by Robert Hale Ltd in 1991) which went into UK and USA large print editions in 2004 (published by BBC Audio Books Ltd and Thorndike Press) and is also a Kindle and Smashwords eBook 2011. Fast forward to a sabbatical from the day job when I embarked on WHERE THE BULBUL SINGS a time-zone saga set in India span-ning the last days of the Raj to the present day. This saw the light of day in 2011 as a Kindle eBook, Smashwords eBook and a printed edition. IN THE PINK (Kindle ebook 2011) is a departure in style and content. GOLDEN GROVE, another romantic novel, is a Kindle and Smashwords eBook 2011. WILFUL FATE is a Kindle ebook 2012 and is a romance with a horse riding theme.THE BOARDROOM is a short story. I'm now writing a new time-zone saga with an exotic backdrop.I am a member of the Romantic Novelists Association. It’s a wonderfully supportive organisation.I live in rural Kent (Charles Dickens said: Kent, sir. Everybody knows Kent. Apples, cherries, hops and women) with my golden retriever, Inspector Morse.

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In the pink

By Serena Fairfax

Copyright ©2011 by Serena Fairfax

Smashwords Edition

www.serenafairfax.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, place and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

The right of Serena Fairfax to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, digital, cyber, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN: 978-0-9569748-7-7

IN THE PINK

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

IN THE PINK

CHAPTER 1

It was difficult for Annie Pettifer, in fevered retrospect, to decide from which little acorn the pervasive influence of ISAS - the International Sisterhood for Action and Solidarity - had sprung. She did her thinking on her computer and had written down various beginnings, in code. Was it the time after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when ISAS was founded? Was it, on the other hand, when it had broadened its appeal to the anti-suffrage women after the Dorking Congress in 1889? Was it when it settled to social uplift in 1918?

Verene Widmer, the General Secretary of ISAS, had a tendency to breathe over Annie’s shoulder when she seemed not to be occupied, and as long as Annie looked busy, she was free from that extra unwanted attention. Annie searched restlessly until she ultimately decided it had really begun the month after she’d started work at ISAS, in the shape of an international fax signed simply HAIG.

‘That’s from the Secretary of the State Department,’ Verene told Annie unnecessarily. In her late thirties, Verene, who wore no makeup, was sharp featured and too muscular to be graceful, her criminally cropped, blonde hair looking as if it had been savaged by a rusty nail file which it had. She wandered over to the window and glanced across Russell Square where the trees stood gaunt and leafless defying the strong January wind.

‘Gosh,’ said Annie, knowing her response was inadequate and never sure, as usual, how it could be otherwise. A plump, pale, endlessly striving forty year old with silky ginger hair that fell yak-like over her face, she bought slimming magazines by the armful and read them while munching her way through crisps and bars of chocolate. Her entire existence, it seemed to her, was spent in trying to divine what response was expected of her and then miserably failing to provide it.

‘Not that he knows anything in particular about us, of course,’ Verene said the razor edge precision of her native Zurich more than usually apparent. ‘It’s just common form for a conference organised by the U.S. government.’

‘Still, it means it’s official, doesn’t it?’ murmured Annie, more inadequately than ever.

Verene experienced one of her frequent surges of irritation and wondered, not for the first time, why she and Rhoda Ribteen, the Chair of the ISAS Publicity and Grants Committees had ever hired Annie. Academically she’d achieved - she possessed three degrees - B.A. (Oxon), M.A. (London) and PhD (Oxon), could type at the speed of light and said she had committee experience. None of this could compensate for the deep depression she exuded when faced with a situation that demanded a modicum of initiative. She was exuding now.

‘Oh it’s official all right.’ Verene gave a superior sniff. ‘The Americans are organising a conference of Women’s International Non-Governmental Organisations for Development, and as the oldest WINGO of all, it goes without saying that we’d get an invitation. The question is who shall we send from this end?’

‘What about you?’ Annie asked. Somewhere outside a car alarm suddenly jangled raucously into life making her jump a little.

That is exactly what had leaped to Verene’s mind when she first read the fax. She shrugged, however. ‘Not a chance.’ Her gloom was evident. ‘The powers that be won’t wear it. It’ll have to be one of the members, not a paid official. They still have this thing of gentlewomen and players.’

When Verene used colloquialisms, which she did quite often to demonstrate her habitual and total mastery of everything including the English language, her Swiss accent made them sound newly-minted for the occasion.

‘How about Mrs Ribteen?’ Annie said, crushed. She prayed she was putting forward a plausible, a passably tolerable response.

Verene was resigned. ‘Oh she’s the obvious choice as Chair of the Publicity and Grants Committees. I’ll call her and then let the Americans know.’ She vanished out of the general office to her own room at the end of the corridor.

And that was how a fax went back to the State Department reading: Your fax received. Mrs Rhoda Ribteen representing ISAS. We await further details from you.

Rhoda Ribteen, after a lifetime of attending international conferences, hadn’t succeeded in being anything but enthusiastic about them. There wasn’t a hint of the blasé or the déjà vu about her as she put down the telephone at her home overlooking Clapham Common after Verene’s call.

Hugging herself with satisfaction she turned to her husband Ray. ‘They want me to go to Washington.’

Her thoughts flew ahead buzzing with arrangements and plans. Leaving Ray was no problem - he was adept at coping for himself - indeed could bake a creditable soda-bread loaf.

‘Good for you and quite right, too.’ Ray was balding and that day wore a maroon cardigan. He glanced at his watch. 11:55 a.m. The siren call for a drink couldn’t be ignored. Moving slowly rather like a tanker through the Bosphorous, he got up and mixed the ritual gin and tonics for them both.

‘Here you are, dear.’ He leaned back restfully in his chair. Consul in Spain until his retirement to an MBE and their double-fronted house, he hadn’t been a distinguished diplomat by any means but his wife made up for it by slugging all their diplomatic connections with the sheer weight of her voluntary activities and status in ISAS.

Rhoda was generally referred to, not always by men, as a wonderful woman and she generally acknowledged it with a deprecating gesture of her hand and a sudden exhalation of punctured and puncturing breath. ‘Whoosh. No flattery.’ To look at her she was rather like a pigeon with slim legs in spite of her sixty plus years, stiffly set iron-grey hair, a vast bosom and a definite pecking movement of her head and neck when deeply moved, which wasn’t often. She prided herself on her unruffled demeanour coupled with her informality. She’d terrified Annie at first sight, as Annie was congenitally scared to the gills of meeting anyone who prided themselves on their informality as it generally co-existed with a well developed sense of enormous and egotistic dignity upon which they tended to fall back if their informality were misconstrued. Annie had tried not to misconstrue her with the result that Rhoda had got her number immediately.

A bit of a bully if not checked, Rhoda had met plenty of people, including Verene, who had the same streak and measured up to her. It was with the totally unfit, like Annie, that she really took the measure of her full dominance. She spoke to her as though she were the skivvy that she’d never had, owing to unfortunate pecuniary circumstances in England, and totally without the saving grace she’d invested in her dealings with her Spanish maids, where she’d added a soupçon of civility in the cause of international relations. She divined, correctly, that Annie was one of nature’s non-coping victims, who’d have to be kept up to scratch with constant applications of whip and spur and edged consonants.

But easy to manage, oh eminently easy to manage, Rhoda thought, rightly, at the final interview when Annie was asked to join ISAS as Administrative Committee Secretary.

‘When do you go?’ Ray asked in his quarter-deck manner and they were back in the totally enjoyable ethos of making plans.

Rhoda made a feature of being happily married and was often heard to say, ‘Ray’s far more popular than I am,’ with great satisfaction. ‘It’s true,’ she would continue. ‘Everyone adores Ray,’ and her paunchy Ray fond of his sundown Scotch would smile modestly and reminisce over his days in Barcelona. He was indispensable to her as she was to him. They made a remarkable team. It was as a team that they tended their one hundred foot garden and the Victorian conservatory which they both loved, and for which they were always on the lookout for new and original ideas. Only the other day they’d gone to the hothouse in Kew and seen the tropical grasses and beautiful flowers, all out of season, out of continent, all out of history, almost.

And it was as a team that they discussed her future movements. In doing so Rhoda found she needed some external advice as well, and rang the ISAS office promptly at 9:30 the next morning.

The ISAS office in the heart of Bloomsbury consisted of several rooms on three floors in a period building, reached by a fine, narrow staircase with curved iron balusters but the nerve centre of the administrative section was a large open-plan office, complete with the original carved wooden chimneypiece, which wouldn’t, however, have been large enough to escape the censure of the Health and Safety at Work Executive had anyone been embittered enough to complain.

Verene, who had her own room - austere and businesslike sporting a single sombre poster of the Matterhorn in winter - a mountaineering challenge she’d yet to accomplish - nevertheless believed in spending most of her time in the cluttered general office in order to keep her finger on the pulse of things.

In addition to Annie’s desk – a sea of papers - there were those of Miles Myddleton, the accountant and Tim Fanshawe, the membership secretary. Miles, married to an artist, who still waited, as she’d been doing since her days, 10 years earlier, at the Slade to become an overnight success, was thirty two, a gentle, bearded man, in shabby cords and tweed jacket from which a button was missing, who commuted from Essex every morning and who dreamed of winning the pools and founding his own nature reserve. Till then he clocked in with admirable punctuality and the only sign of his dreams was a photograph on his desk of the toad that inhabited the pond in his back garden, and a list headed Birds Sighted in Squares of Bloomsbury, W.C.1.

Tim, 6’ 2", heartbreakingly rugged, with jade green eyes and a mane of dark hair, cycled to work every day from the spacious squat in Kentish Town that he shared with four others.

‘I’m following a long and honourable tradition’ was his enlightening response to anyone daring to question his morality. ‘The neighbours waltzed round with chicken sandwiches and flasks of coffee when we moved in as they said they’d hated having to live next door to a derelict, vacant place. And its heaven compared with the bedsitter I rented when I came down. That was terrible. Nobody in that house spoke to anyone else - not even to say good morning if they passed you on the stairs. They were so terrified of getting involved, I think.’

‘Probably so lonely they’d forgotten how to,’ Miles said.

Tim wanted to set up a bicycle sales and repair shop and be free of ISAS which he totally despised from the day he was hired, much as he’d written off