by Nick Hornby
Not only was there a God, but He was fair and just and wise: Dennis’s dealings with Gloria had somehow earned him another fifteen-minute cab ride.
Sophie took her mother for coffee at the Ritz, in a taxi, simply because she could, and simply because she knew it would make her mother uncomfortable.
‘Will I still be able to get the 11.30 train?’ her mother asked when it became obvious to her that the Ritz wasn’t just around the corner, as Sophie had airily promised.
‘Do you have to?’
‘If I miss that one, I’d have to wait two hours for the next.’
‘I suppose it depends how much you miss it by, doesn’t it? If you get there at 1.25, you’ll only have to wait five minutes. You never know, there may be a lot to say.’
This was Gloria’s cue to stare out of the window silently until they got to the hotel. As they walked in, the doorman greeted Sophie by name, and told her to keep a careful eye on Jim, and Sophie laughed and said she would. She’d been to the Ritz before and something similar had happened; that was one of the reasons she wanted to take her mother there.
They sat down on one of the sofas in the big lounge and ordered coffee and biscuits.
‘Is this what it’s like, then?’ said Gloria. ‘The Ritz, and so on?’
‘If I want it to be.’ And then, because that sounded too haughty, ‘But most of the time I’m at work. Or at home. I work hard.’
‘Oh. This is a very comfy settee, isn’t it? But it’s hard to sit up straight in.’
Sophie waited and waited for something, some further flicker of interest in the last fifteen years of her daughter’s life, but Gloria seemed lost in the soft furnishings and the admittedly mystifying residents of the hotel.
‘Is that all you can say?’ said Sophie. ‘That the settee is comfy?’
She’d promised herself that she would try to stay calm, but it was impossible.
‘I don’t know what to say, to tell the truth,’ said Gloria.
‘So why did you come down?’
Her mother shrugged.
‘I had to.’
‘Have you been in Morecambe all this time?’
‘No, we moved around a bit. He got a job in Bolton when … when we moved. And then another one in Lancaster. And then we’d just moved to where I am now when he went.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know. I think he might be back in Blackpool.’
‘Did you marry him?’
‘No. He was happy as we were. He could have his cake and eat it.’
Nobody walking past them in the Ritz would ever have described her mother as cake. She was bread and butter, Sophie could see that now. She’d always thought of her as cake, though. She’d grown up listening to her father talk about running off and fancy men, and so she’d dressed her up, put make-up and stockings on her, given her a cream and jam filling and slathered her in icing. But she was just a woman clutching a mackintosh and a shabby old-fashioned handbag that Sophie wanted to snatch from her and dump in the nearest bin.
‘I’ve got nothing to say, Barbara. Sophie. Really. Nothing. Nothing interesting, no secrets. I’ve just got a long boring story about nothing.’
‘So what was the point of all that, then? What were you hoping for?’
‘Only something better. I didn’t get it, if that’s any consolation.’
‘It isn’t really.’
It was, though. She understood the need for something better. Sophie hadn’t hurt anyone when she’d come to London, but she would have done, if she’d had to. And she could argue that she had talent, and if she’d let it swell and fester, then it would have killed her. But she hadn’t known for sure it was real, and she hadn’t known for sure it would save her. Her mother’s escape route struck her as something that was a part of the old days. Gloria would never have dreamed of moving to London and finding out what she was capable of, how far she could go. Her way out was to latch on to a man and move with him to Bolton. It had never occurred to Sophie before, but the worst thing about being Miss Blackpool was the title. Taking your husband’s name when you became his wife was one thing. Taking your town’s name when you became its beauty queen was something else again.
‘You know I’m sorry, don’t you?’ Gloria said.
‘No. How would I know that? You’ve never told me. You never even tried to get in touch.’
‘Oh, of course I did. But your father wouldn’t have it, and I felt so guilty anyway … He said it was for the best if I kept away. He told me you hated me.’
Sophie didn’t say anything. It was true: she’d hated her. This hatred had been a child’s hate, untrustworthy, carefully nurtured by her father, and therefore immature, but it was hatred nevertheless. She thought again about what she’d confessed to Dennis the previous evening, that she’d long dreamed of her mother turning up so that she could ignore her. The dream could never have been realized if Gloria had been a better, more determined, more desperate mother. They would have had a handful of unhappy meetings, and nobody would have felt the benefit, and there would have been no rage, no fire, no move to London. She would have become Miss Blackpool, and her mother would have been on a deckchair, clapping and crying. She would have married someone with a car showroom. And why stop there? What if Gloria had stayed married to her father? Where would she be now? In Blackpool, for sure. In R. H. O. Hills, probably.
She owed her mother everything and nothing, all at the same time. For a couple of hours, she wanted to celebrate the everything, so she took her mother shopping. Finally, once they were no longer looking at each other, they began to talk. It was much easier to fill in gaps and ask questions while they were going through racks of coats and rejecting handbags. Jobs, Marie, cousins, London, Bolton, back and back and back through cosmetics counters until they reached school. They didn’t talk about the day Gloria left, though. Sophie couldn’t imagine that she’d ever want to talk about that.
‘I told your Dennis I wasn’t after anything,’ said Gloria as they were walking into Selfridges. ‘And it’ll be much more expensive here than at home.’
‘Who told you he was my Dennis?’ said Sophie.
‘Isn’t he?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m engaged to Clive.’
‘You’re engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re going to get married?’
Why did everyone insist on treating her engagement and her future marriage as two separate, independent events? It was as if one was a kiss and the other a pregnancy: one could lead to the other, but only if a lot of other things happened in between. And yes, she sometimes thought that the chances of her and Clive becoming man and wife were slim, but when other people took the same view, she felt patronized.
‘Yes. We’re going to get married.’
‘Really?’
‘You didn’t see me with Clive. You didn’t meet him.’
‘No, but I saw you with Dennis … He looks after you.’
‘That’s his job.’
‘He’s supposed to run after long-lost mothers and get their address?’
‘That was him poking his nose into where he doesn’t belong.’
‘He’s soft on you, though, isn’t he?’
Sophie felt a sudden catch in her throat.
‘Well, he’s very nice.’
‘You didn’t know anything about me and Clive?’
‘What would I know?’
‘Oh, there have been a couple of magazine articles and so on.’
There had been hundreds, or so it seemed to her. The agency sent her cuttings, and something came in the post every other day.
‘I haven’t seen any,’ said Gloria.
‘What do you see?’
‘I don’t get a paper. I watch the news.’
Her relationship with Clive had not been on the news.
‘Doesn’t anyone ever tear something out and give it to you?’
‘No,’ said Gloria. ‘Nobody knows you’re my da
ughter.’
Gloria’s secrecy, her willingness to forgo the pleasures of pride in order to atone for the sins of her past, could have been winning, if Sophie had been paying attention, but she was momentarily distracted by her mother’s ignorance. It had stung her. People like her mother should know that she was engaged to Clive. They were celebrities, and they were together, and their togetherness was a part of it all. Before she said goodbye, Sophie bought her mother a whole pile of magazines from the kiosk outside the station. There was bound to be something in one of them.
Later that week she called Diane, who came to the flat with a photographer, and the photographer snapped away while she made Clive pork medallions in Madeira sauce. After they’d finished the meal (more photos, toasting the camera with a glass of wine), they sat down on beanbags and pretended to examine her LPs (more photos, pretending to argue about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by pointing angry fingers at each other and smiling), while they talked to Diane about the future. Diane wrote two pieces, one for Crush and one for the Express. And yet when the articles appeared, Sophie was left wondering whether she’d missed the point of her conversation with her mother somehow.
19
Bill didn’t know what you were supposed to do with books you’d written yourself. He didn’t know any publishers. He didn’t know any literary agents. And he didn’t know whether you could just heave a four-hundred-page manuscript at friends and colleagues and ask them to lug it home and then provide a kind but honest – but above all kind – assessment of your worth as a novelist and therefore as a human being since this book was the closest he’d ever come to pure self-expression. There weren’t that many friends and colleagues he could ask. Diary of a Soho Boy wasn’t for the faint of heart, he could see that: he’d written the kind of book he wanted to read, and he’d told what he knew to be the truth about men like him. He hadn’t described what went where, but neither had he made it all so opaque that nobody would be able to tell what was going on. He didn’t even know whether it was publishable. The kind of love he had described was still illegal, so did that make the descriptions illegal too?
In the end he decided to tell Tony he’d finished, just to see what happened next.
‘Can I read it?’
‘What do you want to read it for?’
‘Because I want to read everything you write, you twerp.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know that.’
‘What if you hate it?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘So what’s the point of reading it?’
‘What’s the point of reading anything? I wouldn’t tell Graham Greene I didn’t like his last book either.’
‘But presumably you don’t write comedy scripts with Graham Greene.’
‘All the more reason not to tell you if I don’t like it.’
‘So you’re just going to tell me I’m a genius?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Can we start again, then?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Tony, will you read my book? And tell me what you think of it?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Before, you asked me. Now I’m asking you. As a favour.’
‘I’m not Vernon Whitfield. I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with it. Not that there will be anything wrong with it.’
‘I don’t want Vernon Whitfield stuff. Just tell me it reads like a book. Whether there are boring bits. Whether I should put it in the bin or show it to someone else. Whether I’ll get arrested.’
‘I’m not a legal person either.’
‘All right, whether I’ll get fired from the BBC. Thrown out of pubs. That sort of thing.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘And …’
‘I’ll just read it,’ said Tony.
‘How long will it take you, do you think?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’
‘Do you mean how long is my book?’
‘I suppose I do, yes.’
‘Four hundred pages. Double-spaced.’
‘And how boring is it?’
‘Fuck off.’
Tony read it twice in the next three days, while telling Bill that he hadn’t had time to start it yet. He read it so quickly the first time that he could think of nothing to say, except that he had taken himself off to the bedroom after the baby had gone to sleep, and was still there when June switched the TV off and came in to get undressed.
‘What’s it like?’ she said.
‘It’s … Well. Blimey. I dunno.’
‘If I may state the obvious, you’re finding it impossible to put down.’
‘Yeah, but he’s my best friend.’
‘I’ve read lots of scripts by best friends. I’ve put a lot of them down. And scripts are short.’
‘OK, then. It’s good. But blimey.’
‘What’s the blimey bit?’
‘It’s … Well. Bloody hell.’
‘Whatever job you decide to do when you get older, make sure it doesn’t involve the English language.’
‘It’s … I haven’t read anything like it before.’
‘Is it well written?’
‘I dunno. It’s just … him.’
‘So he has a voice.’
‘Well, if that’s a voice, everyone’s got one.’
‘No, not everyone’s got one. Most people can’t get it out on to the page. I had a go once and I sounded like an A-level literature student being strangled while writing an essay about Jane Austen. So he’s more than halfway there. I want to know about the blimeys and the bloody hells.’
‘The, you know. All that. It’s pretty steamy stuff. D’you know what? I don’t think I do go both ways.’
‘So it’s a handbook as well.’
‘I don’t know about the hand bit. It didn’t do much for me.’
June rolled her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ said Tony. ‘It isn’t half going to cause a fuss, though, if he can find someone to publish it.’
‘It’s that … honest?’
‘It’s not like Lady Chatterley, or Fanny Hill. But it’s still blokes kissing blokes.’
‘So what are you going to tell him?’
‘I’m going to tell him what I told him I was going to tell him: it’s a work of genius.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Bill.
‘I mean it.’
‘A work of genius like who? Dickens? Tolstoy?’
‘It’s different from them.’
‘Have you ever read Tolstoy?’
‘No, but I’m guessing he didn’t go in for the homosexual passion bit. I don’t know, Bill. I don’t read a lot of books. All I can say is that it wasn’t boring in the least, you have a voice, and I can’t imagine there’s anything else out there like it.’
They talked about characters for a little bit – it was, Bill said, supposed to be a picaresque novel, although he had to explain the word, and it was stuffed full of memorable, hilarious rogues, Soho chancers, down on their luck artists, the kind of people you could find in the Colony Room, according to Bill. And they talked about a section in the middle, a long description of the narrator’s childhood, that Tony thought was the only place where he’d started to feel as though he were reading a book.
‘It is a bloody book.’
‘It never felt like that. I never felt I was reading. And that bit was, you know. “Oh. Here I am, ploughing through an Important Novel of Today.” ’
‘I hate that bit,’ said Bill eventually. ‘It took me fucking for ever, and it didn’t come naturally. I just didn’t want to cut it because of all the work.’
‘What are you going to do with it now?’
‘I’m going to give it to Hazel.’
Hazel was now their agent as well as their secretary. Every year, when Dennis phoned to make an offer for a new series, Tony and Bill made Hazel talk to him about money, because she could be bolshie on the subject and Dennis was sca
red of her, so they’d started to give her 10 per cent instead of a salary. She was gentle with Dennis, which Bill and Tony wanted her to be. But she was ferocious with anyone they didn’t know, the ITV producers who had commissioned Reds Under the Bed, and the film producer who wanted them to write the Anthony Newley script. Bill and Tony couldn’t bear to be in the same room when she talked to them.
‘Will she have to read it?’
‘I suppose so. I just want her advice. Her sister works in publishing.’
‘Right,’ said Tony doubtfully.
‘She’s made of stern stuff,’ said Bill. ‘And it’s not like I keep things a secret.’
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘But you don’t shout them from the rooftops either.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Bill. ‘She’ll know what to do with it.’
‘Give it to Michael Braun of Braun and Braun,’ said Hazel the following morning.
She didn’t make eye contact with him as she handed him the bag containing the manuscript.
‘Right,’ said Bill. ‘Michael Braun.’
Hazel sat down at her desk and picked up the telephone receiver, ready to start her day’s work.
‘Is that … it?’ said Bill.
‘Yes,’ said Hazel.
‘Thanks,’ said Bill. He started to walk towards the back office and then stopped. ‘What did you think?’
‘Braun and Braun,’ said Hazel.
‘If they’re interested, will you represent me?’
‘No,’ said Hazel.
‘Thanks for reading it.’
‘I didn’t read it. Not all of it. Just enough to know that you should give it to Michael Braun.’
Bill gave it to Michael Braun, and never mentioned the book to Hazel again.
There was only one Braun. Michael Braun didn’t think Braun sounded like a proper publisher, so he simply made up another one. ‘Who’s the other Braun?’ people would ask him sooner or later. ‘Oh, they’re both me,’ he would reply airily.
He was ten years older than Bill, handsome, loud, almost certainly a drunk, certainly queer, and he took great interest and pride in books that upset people, including but by no means limited to Hazel. He published French novels about incest, and American novels about drug addicts, and he very much wanted to publish an English novel about homosexuality. He spent a lot of his time preventing his books from being seized by various authorities, customs officers, the police and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, but he didn’t seem to mind much. Indeed, he seemed to regard legal battles as the quintessence of a publisher’s job. As far as he was concerned, publishing a book that caused no offence to anyone was a waste of his time and energy. ‘That’s what everyone else does,’ he said.