To my surprise, I was not required to sit for the statutory ten minutes in the reception room decorated tauntingly with flattering, smug photographic portraits of the more eminent of her authors as, through an open door leading to her office, the great agent spoke on the telephone to a succession of clients and punters whom I imagined racked up above her office like aircraft circling over Heathrow. Within a second of Simon putting his head around her door and announcing my arrival, Fay had terminated a call in characteristic manner – ‘Now fuck off, darling, someone important’s arrived’ – and had come billowing out of her office, wearing some kind of purple counterpane, in which, before I could take evasive action, I was enveloped.
‘You bastard.’ Fay pulled me against her. Inordinately proud of her considerable, free-swinging breasts, she had recently and with much publicity had them renovated so that they now felt alarmingly like two baseballs pressed against me. ‘You are a fucking bastard, Gregory Keays. Why have you been avoiding me?’
With a deft scrum-half wriggle, I extricated myself. ‘It was difficult,’ I said bashfully. ‘I’ve been busy. Working.’
My agent was looking at me, like a mother whose son has just returned from the war. At last she noticed the box-file, peaking proudly from my shoulder-bag.
‘Oh, my God, don’t tell me. You’re not … with novel.’
I nodded.
From behind me, Simon called from the reception desk. ‘Will returning your call.’
‘Hold all calls.’ Fay spoke evenly, as if, merely by raising her voice, she might scare me and my box-file away. ‘Beginning? Middle? End? Not a whole fucking novel, darling? Pass the fucking smelling-salts.’
To avoid another clinch, I extracted the box-file and passed it to her. Over the past fifteen years, various fragments – Accidents of Trust, Adultery in Hampstead, A Stranger Here Myself, Mind the Gap, A/The/Until, Giving It Large and others – had crossed her desk, receiving increasingly wan and sceptical notes of encouragement, so her frank astonishment at receiving an entire work was perhaps not as surprising as it might appear.
‘How did you do it, darling?’ Reverently, she held the box in front of her, testing the weight of its pages in her two hands. ‘Where did it come from?’
I hesitated. There were to be many such moments in the future. The natural difficulty of describing, within the framework of informal conversation, a complex, agonizing, artistic construct was compounded by the fact of this particular work’s unconventional provenance. In the end I opted for a formula borrowed from my wife.
‘It came from a place I never knew existed,’ I said.
‘Sure. I read you.’ Reverently, my agent lifted the lid of the box-file. ‘terpsichore 4:2,’ she said, a touch nervously. ‘Post-modern?’
I moved into pondering mode. ‘For some time I have believed that much of modern fiction, by obeying the unity of action, is like a narrow street down which the novelist drives his or her characters with a whip,’* I said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve tried to loosen things up.’
‘You haven’t gone up your own arse, darling, have you? Some of my clients are so far up themselves they could polish their own ulcers.’
I smiled, conveying the merest hint of disapproval at my agent’s vulgarity. ‘That wasn’t the place I was referring to,’ I said.
My agent closed the box gently and, for a few seconds, gave me the full burn, gazing into my eyes in a manner which, to one less used to her, would appear like a frank and open lustfulness. ‘I will read and I will call,’ she said. ‘In the mean time, I have two words for you.’ She extended her right hand and touched my cheek. ‘Thank you.’
‘Hope you like it,’ I said. ‘And I think you will.’
I turned and made my way through the hall, allowing Simon to scurry past me and open the front door. I nodded an aristocratic farewell. As the door closed behind me, I felt, for a brief second, overcome by feelings of elation and relief. I stood motionless, my hands clenched, my eyes closed.
I was on my way back into the literary fold.
There are few stranger moments in the novelist’s life than when, elated, bereft, he releases the work that has been the living centre of his creative and personal universe for months, years, into the hands of strangers. First, briefly, there’s the sheer relief of completion; then, quicker than one would believe possible, a feeling of searing emptiness and loss becomes all-encompassing. Add to this cauldron of conflicting emotions, intense feelings of anxiety and terror and you will realize that, as I drove through the streets of London, a stranger among the ordinary, non-writing people going about their practical business, preparing for a night of mindless clubbing or pubbing, I was in a peculiarly febrile state of being, both intensely of the world and outside it. It was, I imagine, the fact that in a real sense I was out of control, that led me not to Jesters, as I had intended, but to the Agency. Pia was not there but Annabel summoned Anisa, a stringy blonde with a distressingly professional air to her which, on any other occasion, would have made me feel cheap and exploited.
Today, though, it did the trick, just perfectly.
* * *
The Writer Speaks of … Publishers
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
H.G. Wells
It really is an extraordinary and infuriating fact that whereas Mr Watt, my agent, and Mr Faber, my publisher, have Daimlers and country cottages now and for evermore, I, the author, without whom they would be nothing but a heap of desiccated dogshit, haven’t a Daimler nor a country cottage now, and as far as I can see, never will have. Bastards!
Philip Larkin
It’s a goddam embarrassment, publishing.
J. D. Salinger
They are common, lying, low class, and foolish.
V. S. Naipaul
The more books we publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.
Don DeLillo
I listen to the agent, I listen to the editor and then I close the door. If they hate what I’ve done, I take no notice.
Bret Easton Ellis
* * *
31
It must have been past midnight when I reached Jesters. Parking my car a block from the club, I walked up the Uxbridge Road. People hurried by, not alarmed – to journalists, it may be Murder Mile, but to us it’s just home – merely tired and eager to be behind closed doors and off the street. Shepherd’s Bush is not a place where you hang out late at night to savour the street life. Good times are rarely just around the corner.
Two men had turned into the alleyway leading to the club. I walked on by, keeping to the well lit main road, giving them time to go wherever they were going, playing safe. Round here, we tend to keep an eye on the Exit sign, particularly when carrying an envelope stuffed with cash to pay off an old debt. When I turned, fifty yards down the road, and made my way back, the path was clear. I rang the bell. Moments later, a low moo of acknowledgement issued from the intercom.
‘Greg for Brian,’ I said.
There was silence. I waited for the click of the door release. A minute, maybe two, went by – too long to be standing in a dark alleyway, even when you’re not making a delivery. I was about to move off when the flaring of a match down the path, some thirty yards away, revealed a figure – small, almost childish – leaning against the wall, silhouetted against the lights of the main road. The other end of the alley was too dark to see anything but it was not beyond the reaches of paranoia to imagine another presence, called up from some nearby rat-hole, gathering in the gloom.
The door swung open in front of me. Brian McWilliam stood in the dim hallway. ‘Glad you could make it,’ he said, standing back to make way for me.
I held out the envelope, eager to be rid of it. ‘Quits?’ I said, then laughed at the schoolboy phrase.
Brian looked down but made no move to take it. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said.
‘It’s been ki
nd of a long day.’
Ignoring my reluctance, he turned and made his way into the smoky subterranean gloom of the bar, striding between the tables where men sat in quiet conversation. The place seemed busier and darker than when I had last been here. Apart from Brian, who was wearing a leather jacket designed for man half his age yet looking good in it, most of the members were soberly dressed as if on a night out at an old-fashioned working men’s club.
He led me to a corner table and sat down facing the bar. Uninvited, I took the seat opposite. He drank from the glass of wine in front of him, watching me all the while. He put down the glass as if considering, then deciding against, the idea of buying me a drink.
‘Greg.’ He spoke with a sort of leaden sincerity.
I tapped the envelope which I had self-consciously slipped down the side of my seat. ‘Sorry we’re a bit late,’ I said, speaking low.
‘Greg.’
‘Been finishing a novel.’ Even in this unlikely benighted place, I felt oddly proud of my achievement. ‘I just delivered it to my agent.’
He glanced at his watch and, unsmiling, raised his eyebrows.
‘And I had to make an important social call.’
‘Let me ask you something.’ Brian carefully positioned his glass so that it sat precisely in the centre of a beermat. ‘Do I look like a cunt?’
‘No.’ I smiled, glad to be honest. ‘You’re nobody’s idea of a cunt.’
‘That’s what I had assumed. I’m not saying I’m popular. I’m not even saying I’m nice. But a complete and utter cunt? Probably not.’
As he took another almost ladylike sip of his wine, I smiled disarmingly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you quicker, Brian. I was racing for the finishing line.’
‘Three messages. Not one fucking reply.’
‘I’m sorry. I just had to go to ground for a bit.’
‘The novel comes before me, then.’ Suddenly Brian smiled and his even, bleached teeth seemed to glint in the darkness of the bar.
‘I just had to finish it,’ I explained. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else.’
‘I’m like that,’ said Brian. ‘Some people call it obsessive. We call it perfectionism, we call it getting a job done, don’t we?’
‘Yes.’ I shifted uneasily in my chair. Now seemed as good a time as any to take advantage of what seemed a moment of good humour. ‘Brian, something cropped up tonight. I had to dip in. I’m afraid –’ I tapped the bag beside me, ‘– there’s a bit of a shortfall.’
‘How much?’
‘£300. I’ll make up the difference next week.’
‘Dipped in. Cropped up.’ Brian seemed to leer in the darkness. ‘It was an expensive social call, then.’
I shrugged.
‘Special intimate celebration, was it?’
Not for the first time, I was startled by how well this untutored lowlife understood, as if by instinct, the artistic impulse. ‘Something like that,’ I said.
To my surprise, he stood up suddenly, almost as if he had forgotten to do something, walked quickly to the bar, then returned, smiling warmly. Moments later, the barman brought a tray bearing a bottle of champagne and two fresh glasses. With the fixed expression of goofy joyousness you might see on the face of a door-to-door evangelist, McWilliam watched the barman pouring, his belly stretching against a white shirt. He waited a few moments until we were alone, then raised his glass. ‘To literature,’ he said. ‘I hope your book’s number one with a bullet.’
I saluted him with my glass. It occurred to me in that brief, odd moment of comradeship, that, in a very real sense, we shared the edgy, honourable status of outsiders, each of us swimming against the tide of accepted behaviour, beyond the norms of conventional society, renegades, outlaws. ‘Cheers,’ I said simply.
‘Don’t worry about the money.’ McWilliam spoke casually. ‘I mean, in your own time. And, when you do, add on a three spot for the drink and petrol.’
‘Thanks, Brian. That’s – that’s helpful.’
‘Nah.’ He swatted at the air with a squat, well-manicured hand. ‘I know how it is when you finish a job. You’ve done the research. You’ve looked at how best to approach the thing, maybe tried one way, then another. You’ve gone for days, weeks, agonizing about the fucking thing. Then, suddenly, you see it. There, before your eyes, is the solution. Now all you can think of is how to get the job done. You’re obsessed, driven.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly how it is.’
‘Then, when you’ve done it – the book, running some little cow into a ditch, whatever – it takes a while to get tuned back in to normal life. You come down slowly. I’m like you, my first need is to get the old ashes hauled. Re-entry, I call it. Guess it’s a sort of primal, warrior-returning sort of thing, eh, Greg?’
‘Maybe.’ Although there were elements of truth in Brian’s version of the creative act, I found the idea that, within moments of popping the final full-stop, the writer (Anita Brookner, Kazuo Ishiguro, A. S. Byatt, Harold Pinter, Gregory Keays) became a bug-eyed sex-machine in search of immediate release, somewhat reductive. ‘For me, the shag’s not obligatory,’ I said carefully.
‘Writing, murder. It’s not that different, is it?’
I tried to laugh but, even to me, the sound that emanated from me seemed nervy, unconvincing. ‘I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.’
Brian watched me for a moment.
‘What was the stuff about running the little cow into a ditch?’ I asked, anxious to break the silence.
Brian smiled. ‘You’re not actually very fucking bright, are you? Not for someone who has read all those books. Not for someone who spends every fucking day fucking cogitating.’
I shrugged uneasily. ‘I just hadn’t heard the expression.’
‘A three spot for petrol. Didn’t that seem just a bit on the large side?’
‘I’m not very good on the practicalities of motoring costs.’
‘Fuck off, Greg, you shit-faced lying little cunt.’ McWilliam sat forward suddenly as if he were about to hit me, and the lights from the bar glittered in his eyes. ‘You may fool your precious little writing friends but don’t you ever try to bullshit Brian McWilliam, all right.’
I remained silent for a few seconds, allowing the moment of tension to pass. ‘So,’ I said eventually. ‘Why did you need to spend so much on petrol?’
‘I was driving round the fucking campus, checking where little Mary went on that student bike of hers. And then running the little cow into a ditch.’
He said the words without dropping his voice. I glanced around us but no one seemed to have heard.
‘That was a bit dramatic,’ I said. ‘Is she –? I mean, which hospital is she in?’
He exhaled, looking, for the first time, seriously pissed off.
‘Brian,’ I spoke quietly. ‘When I said discourage her, I thought you understood what I meant. I was talking about a, well, a dislocation between her and Peter Gibson.’
‘She got fucking dislocated all right.’ Brian poured himself another glass of champagne. ‘Plump little thing,’ he said quietly. ‘Nice face and all. But the body – oh dear. Not my type. I’m not saying I didn’t think about it. No one around. Loads of cover – trees and bushes and that but I couldn’t summon the enthusiasm. Struggling with those smeggy, studenty jeans. Puppy fat lolling all over the place. You’d understand all that, being a novelist, a student of human nature. So I just drove on.’
‘Where was this?’ In spite of the champagne, my mouth felt dry. I suppose that, absorbed in creative frenzy, I had not until now imagined quite how McWilliam would interpret my admittedly vague instructions. Now I saw it all. This trim, neat, grey man standing over Mary’s body on a dark country road, the wreck of her bicycle like a smashed toy nearby, the engine of his car murmuring as he considered whether he should take one last prize from her dying body.
‘You all right?’ Brian smiled. ‘You look a bit peaky.’
‘I hadn’t meant … that
.’
‘Don’t worry, Greg, it’s history. No witnesses. The car had been nicked by a colleague of mine. False number plates. It’s in the crusher now. Just one of those tragic hit-and-run accidents.’
I closed my eyes for a moment, then reached for the envelope.
‘Not here,’ Brian spoke sharply, then frowned, as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him. ‘As it happens, I had a proposal for you which might enable you to keep that little brown envelope of yours.’
Somehow I knew that any proposal Brian made would not be one that I would welcome. ‘Shoot,’ I said with a polite lack of enthusiasm.
He pointed a finger at me. ‘Never say that to someone in my line of business. We might think you mean it.’
I laughed wearily.
‘No, but what I had in mind was a sort of exchange of expertise. I like to think that, in my small way, I’ve helped you resolve a problem.’ He shrugged. ‘Quite why you wanted to eliminate a porky but apparently harmless little girl it wasn’t within my remit to enquire.’
‘I didn’t want her –’
‘I know nothing of the ways of creative folk. You told me you needed a bit of an assist on a practical matter. No problem, Greg, I said. And I delivered. Didn’t I?’
‘Yes. You did.’
‘Greg, I want to write a book.’
‘Another one?’
‘Too right. I like the book business. Easy cash, nice people and – well, you know about the fringe benefits.’
‘You’ve already got a writer.’
Kill Your Darlings Page 24