‘I thought your opening chapters were brilliant,’ he said, without further preamble. ‘Is that the rest of it?’ He indicated the brown envelope under my arm.
I nodded, handing it over. ‘It’s not finished,’ I reminded him. ‘It’s not even half finished.’
Perhaps out of courtesy, he placed the package on top of the tray marked URGENT. ‘I don’t normally read works-in-progress,’ he explained. ‘But I got the sense from your letter that you might stall without some encouragement.’
‘I’d already stalled,’ I said, impressed by his acuity. I certainly didn’t remember intending to hint at any such weakness. ‘The funny thing is, since your reply, I’ve done my best stuff in ages. It seems to have inspired me again.’
‘Well, likewise. In this job I read so much drivel, sometimes I forget what good writing’s like. And then suddenly, out of the blue I read something really fresh and original, like yours, that makes me sit up and realise what it’s all about.’
We exchanged smiles of mutual admiration and gratitude. What a great guy! I thought.
‘But I don’t want you to think I’ve got you here under false pretences, so I’ve got to tell you now that even if I love what you’ve given me,’ he patted the brown envelope, ‘I wouldn’t make you an offer for an unfinished novel. All I’d be able to say is carry on, finish it, and whenever you’re ready to show it, I’ll be ready to read it. That’s all.’
I nodded. I don’t know if I’d really expected to walk out of the office holding a cheque or a contract, but I suppose I was a little disappointed.
‘Likewise you’re under no obligation, and if you get a better offer you should take it. Anyway, that’s the boring bit out of the way. Now tell me some more about yourself. Your letter didn’t give much away.’
I gave him a brief résumé of my uneventful upbringing and recent high-minded departure from university – at which he pulled a face – ending with the fish delivery, Brixton, and so forth.
‘I suppose it’s courageous to throw in your degree,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘But there’s no money in writing. Your sort of writing. You know that?’
‘I haven’t really thought too hard about anything beyond getting it finished,’ I admitted.
The coffee arrived, brought by the girl from reception. Now that she was out from behind the desk I could see that she was dressed in frayed jeans and jewelled flip-flops. I thought of the Chicago mobster’s suit that Mum would have had me wearing to work.
Owen jumped up to take the tray, and said, ‘How are you getting on with that manuscript, Bina?’
She gave him a thumbs-down sign. ‘Horseshit. I’ll give you a report.’
He nodded. ‘I thought so. Thanks.’
‘So even the receptionist has a say in what gets published,’ I said, when she’d gone. ‘That’s very democratic.’
Owen gave a dry laugh. ‘Oh Bina’s probably the best-educated person in the building. It’s not that we delegate important things down, it’s more a case of menial jobs going to the vastly overqualified. This isn’t a democracy, it’s a Hermanocracy.’
I smiled blankly.
‘Herman Kenway,’ Owen explained. ‘His is the huge office downstairs. You might have seen him on your way up.’
‘Small, angry man in a bow tie and loud jacket?’ I asked.
‘That’s him,’ Owen agreed. ‘I think it’s what’s called dapper.’
‘He was rude to the receptionist.’
‘Ah yes. He has an unfortunate manner. Or perhaps an unfortunate lack of manners. But his authors love him. He’s a good publisher.’
‘What about Mr Luff?’
Owen smiled. ‘Mr Luff is Herman’s Labrador. He liked the idea of having a co-founder, but didn’t trust anyone enough to go into partnership. So he named the firm after his dog. That’s not the original one downstairs. We’re onto the third Mr Luff now.’
‘He sounds quite eccentric, this Mr Kenway,’ I said. ‘Are all publishing houses like this?’
‘No,’ said Owen emphatically. ‘What on earth made you choose us?’
‘Ravi Amos.’
‘Oh, well, that’s not a bad reason.’ Owen reached over and pulled a slim volume from the shelf. ‘We’ve just got finished copies of his new book in. Here, take it.’
I turned it over in my hands. The Amazement of Dr Oberon.
‘Are you his editor?’ I asked, awestruck to be at one remove from the great man.
‘Nominally. I inherited him when his original editor retired. But you don’t really edit him. I don’t think I’ve ever had to alter so much as a comma. There aren’t many like that,’ he added hastily, leaving me in no doubt that I shouldn’t consider myself similarly blessed.
‘What’s he like?’
‘Well . . . um,’ Owen made throat-clearing noises. ‘Let’s just say he’s a genius so we make allowances.’ He asked me what other novelists I particularly admired, and in the ensuing discussion it came up that we were both fans of John Cowper Powys, considered him unjustly overlooked, etc. Shared enthusiasm for a writer – particularly a neglected one – is a great accelerant of friendship, and within a quarter of an hour we were talking and laughing like old buddies.
There was a tap at the door and a tall woman with fluffy blonde hair peeped round. ‘Meeting,’ she said, in a sing-song voice, and as if at a signal there was a distant rumble of feet, as people all over the building emerged from their burrows, drawn by some herd instinct down the stairs.
Owen stood up and I followed suit a fraction later. ‘Isobel, this is Christopher Flinders, who has just sent in something rather wonderful. Isobel is our sales director,’ he said to me, with that easy, courteous way he had of making everyone from highest to lowest feel significant. Perfect manners, I suppose you’d call it. Isobel looked at me with the sort of ravenous admiration that could only be put on.
‘How exciting,’ she purred, emitting powerful signals from her green eyes. For a moment I was convinced that if Owen hadn’t been present she’d have taken me right there on the office floor, but I came to my senses as she snapped her attention from me to an unseen figure approaching along the corridor, and hailed him or her with equal intensity.
‘I’m sorry. I’ve overstayed,’ I said, tucking Dr Oberon in my jacket pocket and making for the door.
‘Not at all,’ said Owen. ‘It was great to talk. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve read this.’
‘No hurry,’ I said bravely.
As I left he pressed me to accept another half a dozen hardbacks plucked from the shelf. ‘Try these, though I should be encouraging you to write, not read. This one’s superb.’ He tapped the topmost volume, The Magenta Staircase by Lawrence Canning. ‘Sunk without trace. Not a single review.’
Over the next weeks and months I would pick up this book many times with the intention of starting it, but something in me always shrank from it. I didn’t want the taint of failure to rub off on me.
13
AS I LEFT the building, the sun was shining, its warmth leaping from the pavement. The trees in the square were newly in leaf, an astringent yellow-green against the sky. It was lunchtime and students were emerging from the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine into the brightness and heat of the street. London looked beautiful and benign as never before.
Even though I had come away from Kenway & Luff with nothing, I was brimming with confidence, in my own talent, in Owen’s sound judgement and integrity, in the random favouritism of a universe which had chosen to settle its riches on me. I wanted to share my news with someone, but I couldn’t think of anyone to call and, besides, I had no real news, nothing firm or impressive, just hopes perilously raised. I thought of Gerald, busy processing windscreen claims in Croydon, and decided to wait.
I wondered how long it would take Owen to read my extra chapters: no more than three hours if he was as keen as he’d claimed. But then I remembered the tower of manuscripts in his office, clamouring for attention. If there was any s
ort of queuing system it might be weeks, months, before mine reached the top.
The only thing to do, I decided, was to harness these feelings of optimism and spend the interval working as hard as possible on the remainder of The Night Wanderer, since a negative response from Owen would surely chase inspiration away for good.
I immediately handed in my notice at Mecca Bookmakers – I had a month’s rent saved, and funds for subsistence, no more than that – but I’d noticed that when I was happy and working well, I hardly needed to spend.
The next four days passed in a storm of creativity. I was writing for twelve, fourteen hours a day, uninterrupted, curtains drawn against the world. When at last I surfaced, to buy milk, or something equally ordinary, I was disorientated to find myself stepping out into a Brixton side street, and not the fictional universe I’d been inhabiting so completely. How much longer this level of productivity could have been sustained I never discovered, because on the fifth day Owen rang.
‘Hello. Christopher? I’m just ringing to tell you I loved it.’
I could hardly hear what he was saying because there was loud reggae music pulsing from the open door of one of the ground-floor rooms. In the end I took the receiver outside and shut the front door on the noise, stretching the telephone cable almost to snapping point.
I’d missed a whole slew of compliments during this process, but I could hardly ask him to repeat them, so I just thanked him for responding so quickly.
‘I didn’t want to keep you waiting. I know it’s distracting, when you’re hanging around waiting for a verdict.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ve been working like a crazy man. I’ve never written so much so quickly.’
‘Good for you. Keep going. I’m really intrigued to see what you’re going to do with Gareth – he’s a great character.’
‘Oh . . . well . . .’ I had, in fact, just killed him off in an industrial accident. Now I resolved to resurrect him.
‘Christopher.’ Owen cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know how you feel about this, but we’ve got Ravi Amos coming for a meal in a couple of weeks, while he’s in London. I wondered if you’d like to come along and meet him. He’s always interested in new writers. It’ll be very informal – just me and my wife Diana, and maybe one other.’
For a moment or two I couldn’t answer because a whole crowd of people were now leaving the building, bidding each other noisy farewells, hampered by the tripwire of telephone cable across the hallway, some clambering over it, some ducking under, while I raised and lowered the receiver accordingly.
‘Sorry . . . Owen . . . some people . . .’ I stuttered, each time the mouthpiece came within range.
‘Look, don’t worry if it’s not your thing,’ he said, misinterpreting my hesitancy.
‘No, no, it is my thing. I’d love to,’ I said, when at last the crowd around me had dispersed. In the space of a week I had been elevated from ex-fish-delivery boy and bookie’s clerk to a protégé of Ravi Amos. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself bursting into laughter at the absurdity of it all.
‘Great. I’ll drop you a card with my address. In the meantime – keep writing.’
As I hung up I caught sight of myself in the speckled mirror on the wall beside the empty hat rack. My face was split into a wide, deranged smile, which I couldn’t shift. I bounded up the stairs to my room and experienced a curious lurch of disappointment that at this moment of triumph I should be alone, with no one to tell.
It was no use ringing Mum and Dad: they would shower me with parental congratulations without knowing whether Ravi Amos was a man or a horse. Gerald would probably have heard of him, but might pretend that he hadn’t, just to annoy me. Then I thought of Zoe, the girl who had rubbished Ask Your Mother to Pass the Salt, and decided she would be just the person to share my news. Good fortune must like company, as she was in when I rang, free to meet me for a drink that evening, and later, when the pub had turned us out and we had meandered back to my room in Alma Road, ready at last to be talked into bed.
14
THE GODDARDS LIVED in Dulwich village, in a narrow street of Victorian cottages just off the main parade. Come at eightish, don’t bring anything except yourself. Dress: as casual as you like, read the card which accompanied the return of my chapters from Owen. Even so, I had fretted over what to take, and to a lesser extent what to talk about. No one could have faulted me on my knowledge of Ravi Amos’s novels, but I wasn’t sure whether Great Writers particularly relished discussions of their work when off duty. Anyway, it wasn’t him I wanted to impress, but Owen.
I cycled over to Dulwich on Gerald’s bike, which I’d inherited now that he had a new moped – one of the trappings of his status as a salaried insurance clerk with General Accident. I’d done a dry run the night before to make sure of my timing, and arrived punctually at Aysgarth Terrace, dressed as casually as I dared in jeans and an ironed shirt, and holding a bulbous bottle of Mateus Rosé. I wasn’t much of a wine drinker myself, but you had to take a bottle of wine to dinner, even if you didn’t drink the stuff, and even if your host said don’t bring anything. That much I knew.
The door was opened by a tall woman of about forty with a severe black bob and dark lipstick. She was wearing a long, skinny woollen dress which showed off a curveless figure terminating in a large pair of men’s brogues. Not my type. She took a drag on her cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke.
‘You must be Christopher. Come in,’ she said, with a jerk of her head that wasn’t especially welcoming.
‘You must be Diana,’ I said, holding my bottle out as if it was my ticket to the event.
‘No, I’m Leila Ferris,’ the woman said, taking the wine nevertheless, with a slight smirk. She stood back to let me past, into a narrow hallway, made narrower by the presence of a huge wooden rocking horse, now serving as a coat rack. I was oddly relieved to discover that she wasn’t Owen’s wife. From above came the click of a door, and a blonde-haired woman in a blue summer dress came down the stairs, barefoot, a pair of sandals hanging from one finger.
‘Hello,’ she said, pausing on the bottom step to hook her shoes on, leaning on the rocking horse for support. ‘Christopher? I’m Diana.’ She offered me a cool hand to shake. ‘Sorry. I’ve been trying to calm the girls down. Owen read them Sinbad earlier and now they’re too scared to sleep.’
She was much more presentable, pretty even, in a pale, English way, but again Not My Type. There was a Mary Poppins purity about her that made you feel your hands would never be clean enough.
‘What is that thing doing there?’ Leila asked, as Diana held her breath to squeeze between the rump of the rocking horse and the newel post to join us in the hall.
‘Owen’s father made it for the girls. He’s quite handy with wood. But it’s too big to go up the stairs. A minor detail. We’re stabling it in the dining room until we think of a plan, but we’ve had to move it out here for tonight.’
Leila pulled a face. At the mention of his name, Owen had come out of the kitchen carrying an uncorked bottle of wine, which he raised in greeting. Over his shoulder, on the kitchen table, I could see two bouquets, still in their wrappers, and wished I’d thought to bring flowers. ‘Are you going to stand in the hall chatting all evening?’ he said amiably.
‘We’ve been admiring Equus,’ said Leila, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stump of the last.
Owen grimaced. ‘Come in and meet Ravi,’ he said to me, ‘while I do some drinks.’
The Great Novelist was already ensconced in an armchair reading a copy of The London Review of Books. He looked considerably craggier than in the famous publicity photograph that appeared on all his books. The image must have been thirty years out of date.
Diana introduced me as Owen’s latest discovery, and Ravi took my hand between his soft smooth palms and squeezed it in the manner of a vicar greeting parishioners at the church door. ‘So nice to meet you,’ he said in a rich, slightly foreign voice, looking
up at me from beneath a pair of dramatic black and white eyebrows.
I don’t know quite what signal I picked up in those few seconds, but my first thought, instantaneous and unplanned, on at last meeting my idol, was ‘he’s gay!’ My second thought was one of profound shock, that I could have intuited within moments of meeting him something that I had not managed to pick up from reading a dozen of his novels. I consoled myself with the thought that there are writers who are inside their books and writers who are outside them, and Ravi Amos was clearly of the latter variety.
Owen poured him a glass of the blackest wine I had ever seen: at the sight of my bottle of Mateus Rosé, which Leila was still holding, he had put one hand firmly over his glass.
‘We used to make lamps out of these at Oxford. Do you remember, Di?’ Leila said.
‘Candle holders,’ Diana corrected her. ‘I wouldn’t have been clever enough to wire up a lamp. They were the best sort of bottle because they don’t topple over.’ The merits of the container discussed, the wine was borne away to the kitchen, never to reappear.
In spite of there being plenty of comfortable chairs, Leila chose a low footstool, hugging her bony knees. Her large black shoes were splayed out so that she resembled some sort of pop-up toy: a frog, perhaps. I wasn’t sure whether it was her appearance or her manner that was the more intimidating, but I disliked her just as impulsively as I had liked Owen. She was drinking a pint of bitter, which fuelled my suspicion that she was a lesbian, but at least gave me the courage to refuse the black wine and ask for a beer instead. Around me a conversation about modern poetry had sprung up, to which I couldn’t contribute. They seemed to be discussing someone called Dunn or Gunn, or possibly two poets by those names. I sat, tense with embarrassment, waiting for somebody to demand my opinion of him or them, but presently Diana, who was sitting beside me on the couch, came to my rescue.
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