A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  ‘That works. Let’s think about what you want, and what might be feasible.’ I put my sandwich down. This was serious. There was no point, though, in holding out false hopes. ‘Probably the best we can do is an interim solution until a vacancy comes up. I could try to get David to agree that you’d work as my assistant for most of the time, and you could acquire a couple of books on your own. And I can hand over a couple of my authors to you to look after. What do you think?’ It wasn’t much of a counter-offer.

  Miranda was shrewd. ‘It’s worth a try. At Apollo I’d have my own books, but the advances I’d be able to offer would be so low I couldn’t compete. Anything I bought would be because people like you had already passed on them. And if you didn’t want them, what was wrong with them?’

  ‘You want to do my kind of books?’ I was ridiculously pleased. Most people in publishing want to do literary fiction, or, if their interest is in commercial publishing, it’s often in genre – science-fiction, or fantasy, or crime. Apart from anything else, those are more easily defined than my beat, which is vaguely referred to as commercial women’s fiction, whatever that means. The negative side of my kind of books is that people in publishing often look down on them; the positive is that since no one knows what it means, I can make of it what I want. Oh, and my kind of books tend to make money. Even the sneerers like that part.

  ‘Absolutely.’ She nodded so vehemently her nose-piercing strobed wildly in the sun.

  ‘Then if you’ll be happy, for a while at least, to work in a half-and-half job, I’ll do my best. And I’ll see if I can extort a salary increase as well.’ I was hesitant. ‘Do you want to tell me what they’ve offered? You don’t have to, but I might be able to use it as a lever to pry out a bit more money for you.’

  She was carefree. ‘The increase is so small I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you.’

  She did, and I flinched. If that was the going rate for new editors, we were all doomed. I gathered my thoughts. ‘Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll tell David you’ve been offered more than that, and then maybe we’ll be able to match what you have really been offered.’ We smiled at each other: editorial solidarity against The Man. That made me realise it was the man who was going to be the problem. ‘It’s David. He’ll haver over this for weeks. I’ll try and prod him along by saying you need to confirm one way or the other next week, but you know what he’s like. There’s no real way to know if, much less when, he’ll ever reach a decision.’

  ‘And he’s on holiday next week, too. There’s no time.’ She plunged straight down to gloom.

  But the news moved me in the opposite direction. ‘That’s the best we could have hoped for. If he’s away, I’ll have to go over his head to Olive, because you need a decision right away. Olive at least will say either yes or not, not, I’d like to, but let’s talk again soon, maybe just before the death of the solar system.’

  ‘But what if she says no?’

  ‘Then you have a bright shiny new job at Apollo. And we can keep our eyes open for something else, either at T&R or elsewhere, to move to after a year or so. You won’t become invisible. But that’s if it’s no. We’re not there yet. I’ll see Olive first thing on Monday, when you’ll “just” have told me your news.’

  She gave a little skip as we walked back to the office. ‘Office manoeuvring. I’ll have to learn some of that, as well as editing.’

  I gave her an I-am-a-modern-Machiavelli smile, but she wasn’t fooled. She was young, she wasn’t a moron.

  I spent the afternoon prepping for the Arts Council panel. I’d decided it would be good if people had some pictures to look at while I droned on. Finding images that related to the various points I was making on behalf of Neil and Emma was straightforward. They were talking about current books, so I could just lift the jacket covers off Amazon and use them, and I raided the T&R archives for some twentieth-century examples to compare them to. For Celia’s part of the talk, she’d mentioned a few books on artists that the trust had subsidised, and I easily found examples for them too, if you didn’t mind the fact that they were nicked off the internet without paying a copyright fee, and I didn’t. Celia probably would, though, since it was her job to stop people like me doing things like that. I hesitated. Could I really give a quasi-government-funded talk on how to protect artists’ and writers’ copyrights, while using stolen reproductions to illustrate said talk? I moved the jpegs to the recycle bin and rang her office.

  Denise-with-the-sexy-voice said that Celia was away, so I explained the problem to her and she promised to hunt around in Celia’s files and see if she could find me something. She was as good as her word, emailing me just before five. But she’d only located a few images. Not enough. I eyed my recycle bin, but the moral case hadn’t got any better in the intervening hour. Then I had a bright idea, and emailed Jim. Sorry to trouble him and all that, went the gist of it, but could I use some of the Stevenson pictures? Twenty minutes later, and I was done. As far as I was concerned, the CultCo panel, and my contribution to it, were over. I’d make the presentation in the morning, and after that, if anyone said the words ‘arts council’ to me ever again, I would stand up on my chair and howl like a wolf until they stopped. Or I got locked up. Whichever came first.

  Jake hadn’t said anything to me about how I was supposed to get home. I’d noticed that he worried about me getting to work, but not back again, which didn’t make any sense. I had had the wisdom, however, not to point this out to him, although I thought about it again as I left the shelter of the office. As I walked from the Tube station to my flat I gave only a single backward look over my shoulder. I hadn’t looked even once between the office and the Tube, the West End being much too crowded even for a person who knows what they’re doing to spot anyone who wants to follow them discreetly. While I probably would have noticed a bare-chested Turkish janissary in full Ottoman Empire rig if one had materialised beside me, that was the outside limit of my sleuthing abilities. No janissaries, bare-chested or otherwise, appeared between the Tube and home, though, so things were definitely looking up.

  When I got in, there was a postcard taped to the door of my flat. I knew even before I pulled it off to read it that it was from Mr Rudiger. He not only didn’t do texting or email, he wasn’t a fan of voicemail, either. Or maybe he thought leaving a phone message for someone you share a house with is rude. Anyway, when he wanted to be in touch, I got a postcard. This one was longer than usual, saying he hoped that the funeral hadn’t been too stressful. The important point was in the P.S., as is so often the case, even in business letters: would ‘you’ – whether this was just me, or Jake and me, was left courteously vague – like to come up for a drink, ‘if you have time’. Mr Rudiger always included an opt-out, to allow me to decline without feeling I was being rude.

  I rarely did decline. I liked him, and right then, more specifically, I wanted to talk to someone who knew what was happening, but was not involved. Helena was no good. She would list out, in bullet points and subsections, what I ought to have done, what I ought now to be doing, and what I ought to do in future. Everything she said would be right, and sensible, but I didn’t want to be set right sensibly. I just wanted a listener.

  I dumped my bag, added a line for Jake in case he got home early, saying, ‘Invitation accepted, I’m upstairs’, and stuck the card back on the door frame. I knew Mr Rudiger would have heard me come in, so I went straight up. And it was exactly the right thing to do. We sat on his tiny terrace, which he tended as carefully as a baby. It was filled with herbs and flowering plants in pots, and even tomatoes and courgettes in grow bags. I told him about Viv, and suggested they start a neighbourhood plant-swap. I hadn’t seen him since I’d fallen off my cycle, so we went through all of that, but I was getting used to it by now, and it helped that he didn’t make the kind of noises of gratified horror that most people did, half shock, half a told-you-so triumph that I think is mostly relief that it didn’t happen to them. Instead he told me about the Vespa he�
�d had in Rome in the 1950s. I’ve only seen him outside the house once, and that was an extreme emergency. So I was especially taken with the idea of him dashing about, and I immediately dressed him in my mind as Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, with Audrey Hepburn riding pillion behind him. He smiled at me quietly, a smile that said, I know exactly what you’re thinking. I smiled back at him, and we moved on to the funeral.

  I told him, in a faintly scandalised tone, about my enabling Jake’s interviewing techniques with Delia, and then I moved on to Celia. ‘They look a lot alike,’ I finished, ‘but they couldn’t be more different. You know that a Vermont hippie-chick still lurks under Delia’s silver suits. Celia, well, she wouldn’t faint if you suggested that she had a hippie vibe, but that’s only because I can’t imagine her doing anything as spur of the moment as fainting. She’d probably …’ I frowned, trying to work out how Celia would show her disapproval. ‘She’d probably look at you very severely.’

  He smiled again, but the personalities of the women didn’t engage him the way Stevenson’s had. He merely said, ‘It’s getting cool now the sun is off the terrace. Shall we go inside?’ We did, and by the time we’d sat down again, the subject was somehow closed. I moved on to the CultCo presentation.

  And that was a revelation. I’d known Mr Rudiger had been an architect, but I’d never thought of architecture as having anything to do with subsidy, which is imbecilic of me. Museums, libraries, any civic building, really, is entirely subsidised if that’s what you call government funding. And so are private houses, if they’re built by the very rich. The rich don’t think they’re subsidising the architect, they think they’re buying what they want. But according to Mr Rudiger, a commission from a rich client, if you can make them sympathise with, or even share, your aims, is the very best kind of subsidy there is.

  After only five minutes I called time – ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute’ – and rushed downstairs to grab my laptop. I raced back up, opened it up to the presentation and thumped myself down on the sofa next to him. ‘Start at the beginning,’ I demanded.

  And, God bless him, he did. He tore apart my presentation, made me really think about what I had previously only been parroting. He asked sensible questions, and made me come up with sensible, not fashionable, answers. His fastidious avoidance of comment made me shamefacedly remove the jargon I’d so snidely put in. It was like having a private tutorial with your own resident genius. It was thrilling, and what had been a chore had turned into something that was worth doing.

  I showed him the images I had chosen. He liked the 1950s and 1960s typographical covers I’d pulled from the T&R files to use as examples of the way publishing houses could make brands out of their books – the way publishing houses had made brands out of their books, long before anyone had thought to call books ‘brands’ – and he suggested good ways to carry that idea through with products from other arts. Architecture was his area of expertise, but he made suggestions for theatre design, film, and television, about all of which he had an encyclopaedic knowledge.

  I went onto WikiCommons and pulled out some pictures to illustrate his new points. He’d never seen that before, but within four minutes he had the hang of it and was mousing about, suggesting more and more material.

  ‘I only have twenty minutes,’ I finally said. ‘We need to stop.’

  I was saving the new material when he lifted his head. ‘Jake’s home.’

  I listened too. Nothing. Really, the government should give my neighbour security clearance and then they could decommission GCHQ. A huge budget saving.

  ‘He’s on his way up.’ And Mr Rudiger, ever polite, was already on the way to let him in.

  I watched the two greet each other, talking quietly by the door. Jake had taken to Mr Rudiger right away, even before I had got to know him properly. He kept his distance, respecting Mr Rudiger’s fierce privacy, yet from the beginning they had also acted as … I considered. As colleagues, I thought, although I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by the word when applied to the two of them. Allies, maybe. And their alliance was about me: how to take care of me.

  I pressed my lips tightly together. I didn’t need taking care of. But I didn’t doubt what I was seeing, either.

  As they walked back into the sitting room, I shook it off. What was I going to do, shout ‘I’m not feeble-minded, you know’ at them? That would make me sound feeble-minded, if anything did.

  Jake saw my laptop and raised an eyebrow. ‘Picking up editorial tips?’

  I grinned. ‘Much better. Mr Rudiger just rewrote my CultCo presentation. It makes sense now. It might even be interesting.’

  That merited a double-eyebrow raise. ‘A government-sponsored event, interesting? You’d better watch out. They’ll either run you out of town, or make you do it again.’

  ‘Oh dear God, don’t say that.’ I closed my eyes in terror. I knew he was joking, and so was I, but even a joke about having to do another committee made me want to lie on the floor and scream like Violet Elizabeth Bott.

  It was too horrific, so I changed the subject. ‘Did you bring any supper home? Because we’re almost at the end of whatever food was salvaged when I had my accident on Saturday. I don’t think there’s anything except some pasta sauce in the freezer.’

  ‘Pasta it is, then. I didn’t stop because I didn’t know we needed anything. And we have to eat soon-ish, so pasta works. I’m due back at the office.’

  I looked enquiring. He looked put-upon. ‘You know I can’t talk about work, Sam.’ He turned to Mr Rudiger for some male solidarity, but Mr Rudiger smiled benevolently at both of us. Not getting involved, said the smile.

  I didn’t smile benevolently. I scowled fiercely. I also thought, You couldn’t talk about Frank’s death to me, but you did. Or Schmidt’s. Or have me run interference at the funeral. And while we’re on the subject, you aren’t supposed to fuck your interviewees, either, but you did that when you met me. So don’t piss me off, buster.

  Luckily Jake was adept at thought-reading. He grinned at me, and said, ‘I know,’ as if I’d handed him the whole list on an inscribed tablet of stone. Mr Rudiger looked amused again.

  I wasn’t going to leave it there, though. ‘And?’

  He scrubbed his hands over his face. ‘Not a lot. We started late, so we’ve only just finished most of the interviews. They’re being collated now, and I want to go through them with the team, plot out a timeline. We’re still trying to track down the source of the glue. Although, I went to look at Schmidt’s studio this afternoon, after the technicians finished, and it looks like he never threw anything out. It could have been there forever.’ He sighed. ‘It was like he was two people. On one side, his life was shambolic. Everyone said he drank, and was getting worse. He was a good restorer, but he didn’t deliver on time, so galleries were beginning to fight shy. His bank accounts look all right: he was keeping his head above water, and he paid his bills, mostly. He had no system of bookkeeping, and payments came in irregularly. On the other side his studio—’ he smiled, ‘I had this idea that an artist’s studio would be chaotic, with old dirty rags and paintbrushes all over the place. Instead Schmidt’s life was chaos, but the studio was like a chemistry lab. Everything was slotted into a specific place, and labelled. Not just “paint”, but “acrylic resin 1960s”, or “oil, no titanium dioxide 1980s”. Even the damn glue that killed him had its own slot: “polymer resin, 1992”.’

  Mr Rudiger cleared his throat. Both our heads swivelled round. He looked apologetic for chipping in, but this was a field he knew. ‘He was a restorer. The chemical make-up of the materials he used mattered. Paint degenerates, or discolours, as it ages. He needed to know that the layers he added to a painting would age in sympathy with the original material.’

  Jake considered that for a moment. ‘So a tidy professional existence and a chaotic private life. Not exactly unheard of. If it weren’t for the connection with Compton, we wouldn’t be looking at this twice. He was drunk and using a dangerous,
banned substance, however carefully labelled. And he died from it.’

  On that cheerful note we went downstairs. Supper was a quiet meal. We were both preoccupied. The day had been busy enough that I’d managed to push thoughts of Reichel and Celia out of my head. Now, if Jake was going back to work, I’d have time to look further; and if he wasn’t home, I wouldn’t have to decide whether to tell him or not.

  We did the dishes – he was remarkably housebroken, and I’d often silently thanked his mother, or his ex-wife, or maybe just years of living alone – and after we finished Jake apologised for his preoccupation, not having noticed mine. ‘I’ll be very late. Should I go back to Hammersmith tonight?’

  ‘As you like. You don’t wake me when you come in. Or at least, I don’t mind being woken when you do.’

  He was barely listening. I got a fast kiss, and ‘I’ll see how late it is’, and that was it.

  There was nothing to stop me returning to that morning’s computer searches. Instead I watered the plants. I made a shopping list. I even thought I might do some ironing. For some reason, I didn’t want to find any answers. But I didn’t want to do the ironing even more, and that would have been next on my list. So I made some coffee and settled down in front of the computer. Delaying further, I went through the new material Mr Rudiger had suggested for CultCo, like a small girl with a new pile of Barbie clothes, taking them out one by one and admiring them. That could only last so long. Sooner rather than later I’d gone through the fun, sparkly stuff, and was staring at the rest, more Ken’s safari suit than Barbie’s sequinned disco mini.

  I reminded myself that I had no idea what I was looking for, and that there was nothing to say that what I had already found would be considered unusual by anyone who knew what they were talking about. Bolstered by this reiteration of my own incompetence, I opened up the websites I’d bookmarked that morning.