The Mule

by David Quantick

  ‘But if this word means “a rose”, then the rest of the sentence isn’t entirely clear,’ I said, as Frant removed his herbal teabag from his cup, squeezed it out between thumb and forefinger and raised it, unbelievably, to his nose. His nostrils flared copiously as he sniffed it and then let it fall onto the café table top.

  ‘How so, “not clear”?’ said Frant.

  ‘Well, you’ve said that the rose, in this context, grows upon the waves of the ocean,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, that passage,’ Frant said, and I was sure that in his mind he was being accompanied by a lute as he went on to quote himself. ‘Yna Roisa sor lis ellas ondas della marri, to be precise.’

  ‘So if it’s a rose,’ I pressed on, ‘how can it be growing on the waves of the ocean? Is it a sea rose?’

  ‘No,’ said Frant, his eyes narrowing as if in self-defence, ‘it’s not a sea rose, it’s a metaphor.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘please excuse me. What is it a metaphor for?’

  ‘I should have thought that that would be obvious,’ Frant said, but I noticed he didn’t offer an explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not especially poetic,’ I said, and thought for a moment. ‘No, I don’t get it. Can you tell me?’

  ‘My work is not a riddle to be deciphered,’ said Frant haughtily. ‘It stands and falls on its own.’

  He made his work sound like it was a drunk trying to get home from a bar. I decided not to press the point, but I did notice when I received the next draft of the Chronac that the words yna Roisa had been changed to yna lilia di agqua. Which I would have said made a mockery of the metaphor. Such as it was.

  I recount that little gem not just to reveal the depth of my feelings concerning Euros Frant as a person, but also because I believe it indicates what to me is the root problem with Frant and his kind. They are frauds. I admit that Madame Ferber has her moments of shall we say obfuscation and I don’t buy into her whole Inner Power of Triumphant Spirit hoo-hah, but compared to the idiocy and charlatanry of Euros Frant she is a fount of clarity and common sense. Also she at least believes in the stuff she pumps out, which to my mind is key in a writer. I very much doubt that Euros Frant used to sit down at the end of a hard day’s ellas and frondurondls and goodness knows what else and say to himself as he lit a cheroot, ‘Well done, Euros Frant. Today you have contributed to the sum of human happiness.’

  Then again, maybe he did. The man was awful enough.

  * * *

  Either way, you can appreciate that I wasn’t looking forward to calling him. In fact, when I got home, I discovered that I had actually made my views on this clear to myself by deleting all his contact details from my computer and mobile phone, as I soon found. If I’m honest, my actual address book is not what you’d call bulging. Sometimes I’m not sure why I have one, except that I have to write down the small number of essential contacts I do have somewhere. It’s always a tricky one, isn’t it? You don’t really need a full-scale contacts book – there are always, let’s say, going to be several letters of the alphabet with no names under them (and I don’t just mean X and Z; I worked out the other day I didn’t really need L, R, Q or T either) – and yet you can’t fit everyone you know on the back of an envelope (I did try once, but as it was a used envelope, some of the names went over the flap. I guess I could have got some under the flap too but that’s not the point here).

  Anyway, it didn’t take me long to flick through my address book, although I did do so, I must admit, with more than usual thoroughness because – well, what if the girl had written her number in there? We’d both had quite a bit to drink and while most of the evening is etched firmly into my brain, there was always the chance I’d forgotten or she’d done it on a whim while I was in the bathroom. But she hadn’t. There weren’t even any of those annoying numbers without any names attached, or penned next to a pair of mysterious initials, let alone a set of digits standing guard by the words ‘CALL ME! CARRIE X’. If indeed Carrie was her name.

  It was pretty clear, too, by the time I’d got as far as Y, that I’d never written Euros Frant’s details in the address book. This wasn’t too surprising; as I said, I didn’t like the man and maybe I was hoping that by keeping him out of my address book I was also putting some distance between him and my life. I tended not to put important clients in a book I might easily lose – there were no details for A.J.L. Ferber, for example (I had memorised those, though) – but I hardly counted Frant as important, unless he was an important idiot.

  I would have to go into the office to get the information I needed. I could look it up without anyone wondering why I wanted to get in touch with a man everyone wanted to avoid. I wouldn’t necessarily be detained in chat or get embroiled in some minor but vexing administrative conversation, I could just pop in, get the email address and telephone numbers I needed, and pop out again. It was a simple plan, which was fine by me; I had no intention of letting Euros Frant take up any more of my time than necessary.

  * * *

  The bus into town was extremely slow. It crawled towards the next set of traffic lights and slowed down, as if the driver were peering at them in the hope that they might turn red and absolve him of any responsibility for getting his passengers into town in time for their appointments. He was almost always right, partly because by the time he’d reached the junction, they’d gone from green to amber to red. I balled my fists in frustration as the same cyclist overtook us time and time again, and several times considered forcing the doors open and jumping out. Eventually the bus found its reluctant way into the city centre and now, even though I was several stops away from my destination, I did alight, shooting the driver an angry glance that I hoped he would see in his rear-view mirror. As I walked away, the bus seemed suddenly to lurch into life and accelerated down the high street with alarming speed.

  A few minutes later, I found myself in the reception area of Walker-Hebborn Publishing. I gave my name to the receptionist and to my surprise he said, ‘Go right up, please, Mr Walker-Hebborn is expecting you.’

  I was so surprised, I asked him to repeat what he had just said, and he did. I said, ‘I didn’t know I was expected,’ and the receptionist looked at me as if I’d tried to say something funny and slightly failed. He buzzed me in and I took the lift to the fifth floor. Once there, I didn’t entirely know what to do. Apparently I was supposed to be seeing Walker-Hebborn, although I had no idea why. Then again, I had come in for an entirely different purpose, and perhaps it was this that I should address first. It would only take a moment and besides I could go and see Walker-Hebborn afterwards.

  In the end, the problem was solved for me when, as I headed for the room in which Walker-Hebborn Publishing kept all their filing cabinets, Walker-Hebborn himself came out of the men’s room and headed towards me.

  ‘Good day!’ he said. ‘I’m glad you got my message.’

  As he turned and walked towards his office, obviously intending that I should follow him, I sneaked my mobile phone out of my pocket. I had turned it off after looking for Frant’s details, but now, as it lit up, I saw that there was a message from Walker-Hebborn, asking me to come into the office as soon as possible. Reflecting that I was unlikely to be popping in or out of anywhere today the way things were going, I followed him into his office and closed the door.

  Walker-Hebborn sat behind his desk, without inviting me to sit down.

  ‘What in the name of God did you say to A.J.L. Ferber?’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said. I didn’t like it when people sprang things on me.

  ‘She’s been on the phone to me three times this week,’ Walker-Hebborn said. ‘And every time she called, your name came up.’

  ‘I hope I haven’t caused any trouble,’ I said, but I knew that the pompous old authoress had almost certainly decided to take umbrage at my earlier queries, and I was certain now that the call in which she had thanked me was either a smokescreen or an example of her possible derangement. Either way, my goose was cook
ed. I was clearly about to be frog-marched from the building with the contents of my desk in a box. Not that I had a desk, it was more of an image in my head.

  ‘For a long time now, Madame Ferber has been a troublesome author,’ said Walker-Hebborn. ‘The prestige and sales her work brings to our imprint have always been balanced out by her difficult nature, which for some reason she seems to feel are part and parcel of the creative urge.’

  ‘I have never deliberately tried to upset Madame Ferber,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to,’ said Walker-Hebborn. ‘The slightest misunderstanding and the crazy old trout will be on the phone to me for hours. My God, a deliberate attempt to offend her would probably result in some form of

  world war.’

  Walker-Hebborn, while he was joking, wasn’t joking. Leaving aside the appearance or otherwise of a mountain on the cover of There Is No Mountain, there had also been an occasion when Madame Ferber had turned down a major literary prize on the grounds that it was only open to writers and she found that elitist. When it was pointed out to her that the only people who write books are, by definition, writers, and a writer is anyone who writes a book, she issued a statement defending what she called ‘those who write without knowing that they are writing’. The next year, when her new novel was perhaps understandably omitted from the shortlist for the same literary prize, she told the press that she was glad as the judges of the prize were clearly ‘against writing’. ‘One either writes,’ she announced to the world, ‘or one does not write. There is rarely a middle ground.’

  None of this was any fun for her publishers, who were constantly being asked to defend not just the indefensible but also the incomprehensible. Despite this, Madame Ferber was always threatening to leave Walker-Hebborn and sign up with a more globally noteworthy publisher; and from time to time, when her contract had expired, she had been seen with the representatives of some glossy multinational. Yet whenever crunch time came, the lawyers of A.J.L. Ferber were once again crowded into Walker-Hebborn’s office, thrashing out contracts that half resembled the whims of pop singers and half the demands of fairy-tale witches.

  ‘You realise,’ said Walker-Hebborn, as if reading my thoughts, ‘that A.J.L. Ferber’s contract is once again up for renewal. With this in mind, we are very keen not to offend her. We have been sweet-talking the old maniac for months now with gifts and assurances. And the end of this week is the deadline for signature.’

  I knew what he was driving at. Unlike writers who base their self-image on what they have read about writers in books (possibly their own books), A.J.L. Ferber was a stickler for deadlines. She would be silent for months and then, at the very last minute, deliver a novel the size of a surgical boot. It was as if she were able to vomit up millions of words in a single session (and some of her critics suggested that this might indeed be her preferred method of working). The same applied to any business deals. As a deadline for signing loomed, there would be silence from Madame Ferber until the very last minute, when she would appear in a cloud of lawyers and sign on the dotted line. But until then, not a peep.

  Until now. ‘She’s been calling you,’ I said, ‘about me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker-Hebborn. ‘It’s very clear that the present situation is entirely down to you.’

  I didn’t know what to say. With everything else going haywire in my life, the last thing I needed was to lose my work with Walker-Hebborn.

  ‘I’m extremely sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to clear up a couple of minor issues in the translation.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Walker-Hebborn. ‘But I don’t care. I’m a publisher, and the odd garbled sentence in a book means nothing to me.’

  This was true. In one of Walker-Hebborn’s early purchases, a novel by an Italian detective writer had been translated (by my predecessor, who drank) so hastily that the last chapter – the murderer’s confession – actually made no sense at all. Fortunately, the murderer was an escaped lunatic and most reviewers praised the author for his insight into the mind of a psychopath.

  ‘What I do care about is the contentment of my authors. And in this case, you have made Madame Ferber very happy.’

  ‘I can only apologise again,’ I said and then found myself doing a double-take, like a hunter in a cartoon when his prey taps him on the shoulder and asks him what he is hunting. ‘Excuse me, I think I misheard you.’

  ‘You have made Madame Ferber very happy,’ said Walker-Hebborn. ‘She told me she admired your work and your attitude. She said that although you were only a satellite of her planet, your contributions and your effort were all to the greater good of her work and her work alone. And for that reason alone, she would be signing with Walker-Hebborn again.’

  * * *

  There were people in Walker-Hebborn’s office and there was cava in plastic cups. There was a toast involving my name and a couple of jokes about ‘translating success’ and ‘talking our language’. I hadn’t been the centre of so much fuss since I came off my bicycle as a boy, and even then nobody signed my cast apart from my mother. Today if I’d been wearing a cast, it would have been covered with more signatures than an important treaty. Instead Walker-Hebborn explained again and again to the people in his office how I had kept the wolf from the door by somehow luring Madame Ferber back into the fold. There were hints of a sexual nature and much winking until finally Walker-Hebborn signalled that everyone should return to work and then, as the room emptied, said to me: ‘I hope that when Madame Ferber comes to sign her new contract, you’ll be there to hold her hand, as it were.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, although this was not a hope of my own. Leaving aside the fact that I was a translator and not a chaperone, looking after Madame Ferber wasn’t something I felt I would enjoy at all. If anything, I would be more worried that some chance remark on my part might undo all the good work I had apparently and accidentally done so far. I must have said as much to Walker-Hebborn because he made a remark about me being too modest and not to worry and managed to suggest, without actually naming a specific sum, that there might be some kind of remuneration for me. ‘A finder’s fee’ was the exact phrase he used, as though Madame Ferber was a rare document that I had unearthed in the course of my researches.

  Which reminded me. I made my excuses to Walker-Hebborn and left. The key to the filing cabinet was on the shelf above it (there are some advantages to working in a small publishing house) and within seconds I was able to extract Euros Frant’s personal details and copy them into a notepad. I replaced Frant’s details and was about to lock up when I saw, filed neatly and predictably in front of his, a sheaf of papers marked MADAME FERBER.

  * * *

  I don’t know if you are familiar with the story of Pandora and her box, a cautionary tale that has always seemed rather unfair to me, as poor Pandora was tempted beyond endurance to investigate its contents, and in fact I’ve always suspected was set up for a fall by her creator who did everything he could bar handing her the keys to ensure she would open it. I didn’t feel quite such a temptation on this occasion but the coincidence of the news I’d just received concerning A.J.L. Ferber, combined with the appearance of her name right under my nose, was too striking to ignore. There was something I’d always wanted to know and now, unless Madame Ferber and I became intimates, was possibly my only chance to find out. Carpe diem as the Romans said, a motto with which Pandora would have agreed heartily as she was chased about the room by various emotionally coded demons.

  There was nobody about, the office having decided to continue its drinking in nearby bars. Quickly I removed the sheaf of papers and riffled through them. There were letters from Madame Ferber to Mr Walker-Hebborn, some vexed emails and one or two angry telegrams to his lawyers. There was in short a wealth of correspondence, most of it headed with Madame Ferber’s personalised letterhead – the address of her apartment in Paris and a fat-headed lion crest which she had claimed in some interviews to be the ‘Ferber arms’. A crest is not the same
as a coat of arms, but Madame Ferber could hardly be expected to be an expert on heraldry as well as politics, theology and philosophy. The address, I was interested to note, was that of an apartment on a well-known street in Paris, as well known as, say, Whitehall in London or Unter Den Linden in Berlin.

  I riffled on through the correspondence, the fat-headed lion and the letterhead a ridiculous static flick book. Soon, though, not every item of correspondence was headed with the crest but every single one was signed the same way: ‘Cordial regards, A.J.L. Ferber’. Several contracts nestled at the back of the cabinet and, while I avoided looking at their details, once again I flicked through to see the signature, which in each case was A.J.L. Ferber (Mme). The woman appeared to have no first name whatsoever. By now my curiosity had turned to slight guilt. Admittedly, all I wanted to do was find out what Madame Ferber’s name was, but clearly this was something she wished to conceal and I had not done the right thing by snooping. What if I had found it out anyway? Would I have had said casually, ‘Oh by the way … Annette …’ as we sipped cocktails on a balcony? I very much doubted it.

  Once again my curiosity had shamed me. At least in this instance nobody had come in and demanded to know what I was doing and this time my punishment was just knowledge of my own wrongdoing. I put the papers back, silently apologised to Madame Ferber, whatever her first name was, locked the cabinet, replaced the key, and left the building.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wish there was a kind of menu or screen you could use to plan or at least direct your dreams. Mine are always ridiculous and so far as I can tell would never be any use to a psychiatrist. Tonight’s was no exception. I woke up in the early hours of the morning from a dream in which a fat-headed lion kept tugging at my shoulder and announcing that its name was Lizzy. The significance of this dream would not have taxed Sigmund Freud, to be frank. I looked at the watch by my bedside cabinet. It was 9am. I had slept in. I got up and toasted a bagel and sat down at my desk. The notebook with Frant’s details in it sat by my computer, next to the absurd translation of Alice Through the Looking-Glass and the second notebook of Carrie’s reviews that I had been told to give to the police. I was if nothing else amassing a small and peculiar library. I imagined myself vanishing and my landlady telling the detectives investigating my case that I was a man with few possessions and fewer friends, while they scratched their heads over the three disparate items on my desk.