The Best Man

by Dianne Blacklock

  ‘Get Amy onto that. He’s her author.’

  ‘She’s on tour with Brad Mackie.’

  The footballer. ‘Damn, I forgot.’

  These were the times Madeleine missed only having to worry about her own stable of authors. At least then if something went wrong it was her fault or her problem and her direct responsibility. Now she was forever cleaning up other people’s messes.

  ‘Anything else?’ she said, less than enthusiastically.

  ‘Oh, you know, the usual. I can deal with most of this.’ Stacey was very good at picking up on tone. ‘Have you had coffee yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s your ETA?’

  Madeleine peered out the windscreen to the road ahead. ‘Ten, maybe fifteen?’

  ‘Okay, I’m onto it.’

  Bless her. Madeleine loved Stacey so much she would have married her if she wasn’t already marrying Henry. And if she wasn’t heterosexual. And if Stacey wasn’t. And if same-sex marriage was even allowed.

  Madeleine rang the library first, and had a chat to the event coordinator. In situations like these they could sometimes dig up relatives and friends to flesh out the numbers, but the woman said they’d already tried everything. They agreed it would be worse to go ahead, but Madeleine discovered that there had been one other author event cancelled in the last couple of months. That would help her to put an acceptable spin on it to Emily, to reassure her that this happened all the time. And in fact, it did happen all the time. But Emily would take it badly. On the other hand, Madeleine knew she’d be relieved that she didn’t have to get up and talk in front of all those people. The problem was, this would make it doubly difficult to convince her to do it next time.

  Madeleine put a reminder in her phone to email her – it was preferable to calling her: Emily wasn’t good on the phone, she would only be awkward and embarrassed. This way, Madeleine could carefully word an email, and Emily could take her time to digest it. And within a day or two, Madeleine knew she would receive a thoughtfully crafted response. Emily always wrote beautiful, lyrical prose that broke your heart. Her books just didn’t sell all that well, and that broke everyone’s hearts at Amblin Press.

  Lydia Carlyle was another story. Real name Lina Hammoud, she had taken a pseudonym that she considered would be more marketable in the current climate. Certainly no one at Amblin had put that on her, and Madeleine was pretty sure it had more to do with ensuring her books sat in a prominent position on the shelves. She sold well, but she was what was known in the trade as a ‘difficult’ author. Her writing was perfunctory, as were her storylines, so why her books were so popular was anybody’s guess. If publishers knew what made a bestseller, or even a respectable seller, obviously that was all they would publish. But nobody knew. The longer Madeleine worked in publishing, the surer she was that there was no such thing as a sure thing. Beautiful books failed, dreadful dross prospered, it might as well be on the roll of a dice. And once in a while an author came along who didn’t consider themselves lucky at all, but perfectly entitled, and everyone was forced to cajole and flatter and generally pander to them. The confounding nature of fate and success never ceased to bewilder Madeleine.

  Lydia was crisp when she first answered the phone, until Madeleine had performed the requisite amount of sucking up. Once Lydia had relaxed, Madeleine started to work through the ‘issue’. As predicted, she had not read Jane Eyre, though she didn’t exactly admit to that, instead brushing off the question with a vague, ‘Of course I did . . . I must have . . . years ago.’ Madeleine certainly had no idea why the events manager had made the comparison; she could only guess she hadn’t read more than the blurb of Lydia’s book and her imagination had taken flight with the reference to a male protagonist tortured by memories of a wife driven to suicide. But Chasing Butterflies was no Jane Eyre. It was a tired romance between a lepidopterist and an environmentalist, with pretensions to something more weighty indicated by a liberal sprinkling of pseudo-scientific ‘facts’ throughout.

  Madeleine proposed that Lydia read the classic novel again – she would even send her a copy – and then, if she still didn’t like the comparison, Madeleine promised she’d do something about the offending quote. But Lydia would have to be quick, she urged; the luncheon was only weeks away and the advertising copy had to go to press ASAP. Madeleine knew that Lydia wouldn’t read the book, but she would probably google Jane Eyre and read some critiques, and hopefully that would be enough to silence her. She’d had her fifteen minutes of attention, which was mostly what this was about. Lydia liked to remind her underlings on a regular basis that she was Important and they’d better not forget it.

  As her cab pulled up outside the offices of Amblin Press, Madeleine was just wrapping up her standard spiel to Peter Norris re the bad review – in essence, all publicity was good publicity (even though that had never actually been proven with hard data). She told him that his name and the name of his book would stick in people’s minds, so that when they saw it in a store they would think, ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of him,’ and not remember the details of what they had actually heard, or rather read.

  ‘Sorry, Peter, I’m heading for the elevator, so I’ll probably lose you. Would you like me to call you back?’

  ‘Oh no, don’t worry about it any further, Madeleine,’ he assured her, in a tone far less vexed than when they’d started the conversation. ‘It was good of you to call me back so promptly.’

  ‘Well, of course, you’re very important to us. Anything I can do, ever, you only have to call. I hope you know that.’

  ‘I do. Thank you, Madeleine.’

  Peter was all right, he was just insecure. He was an author; that was their default position.

  As Madeleine rode the lift to her floor, she remembered an interview with a director who made the remark that filmmaking would be a lot easier without actors. It could be a little like that in publishing.

  ‘Morning!’ Stacey greeted Madeleine with a coffee as she came around the corner into the bustling publicity department. Whatever problems she knew she had waiting for her, Madeleine still got a buzz whenever she walked into the open-plan office.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, taking a sip of the coffee and experiencing instant relief. She knew the caffeine couldn’t have hit her bloodstream that quickly, so it had to be some kind of Pavlov’s dog effect – the aroma and taste were enough to produce the physiological response. Whatever it was, Madeleine was grateful. It was really too late in the morning for her first coffee.

  ‘I sorted out the delivery for the Taste launch,’ Stacey said, following Madeleine to her desk.

  ‘Great, and I’ve more or less dealt with the others,’ said Madeleine. ‘Have any more catastrophes occurred in the last ten minutes?’

  Stacey smiled. ‘No, you should have time to drink your coffee.’

  Madeleine dumped her bag on the desk and dropped down into her chair.

  ‘So, what’s he like?’ Ren popped her head around the wall. Madeleine didn’t have an office, as such. She was tucked into the space created by a nib wall, providing an annexure of sorts.

  ‘What’s who like?’ Madeleine asked blithely.

  ‘The best man, of course!’ Sarah exclaimed, wheeling her chair over.

  ‘He has a name,’ Madeleine reminded them.

  ‘Aiden.’ Natalie pretended to swoon as she did a kind of pirouette across the floor.

  Seriously?

  ‘Is he like Aiden from Sex and the City?’ asked Sarah, almost bursting from the very idea.

  ‘Yes,’ Madeleine said, deadpan. ‘Because all babies who are named Aiden grow up to look the same. Even fictitious ones. That’s how it works.’

  Stacey smiled.

  ‘Oh, come on, give us something!’ Natalie stamped her foot. ‘Did you take a photo of him?’

  Madeleine hadn’t shown them Aiden’s picture online, or mentioned his surname, so they couldn’t google him themselves. She had intentionally kept as many Aiden-
related details to herself for now. It was enough for these girls that he was a single male; they’d become rabid once they actually got a glimpse of him.

  ‘Did I take a photo?’ Madeleine pondered. ‘Sure, as he came through the arrivals hall, I said, “Hi, Aiden, nice to meet you. Now would you mind posing for a photo so I can show you off to my desperate colleagues?” ’

  ‘You know sarcasm is the refuge of the . . .’ Natalie bit her lip. ‘What is it again?’

  ‘The smart-arse,’ Ren finished for her. ‘Why are you being so secretive, Mad? We’re going to meet him soon enough at the wedding.’

  ‘And you can’t keep him for yourself anyway,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘You’ve already got Henry.’

  ‘Gosh, thanks for reminding me,’ said Madeleine, ‘or I might have accidentally married Aiden as well.’

  ‘What’s with all the snark?’ said Ren. ‘We’re just interested.’

  ‘All right,’ Madeleine relented. ‘For the five minutes I got to spend with him walking through the terminal, he seemed very nice.’

  ‘Is he good-looking?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How good-looking?’

  ‘Very.’

  That was met with a collective gasp.

  ‘What part of the States is he from?’ said Ren. ‘I love a Boston accent. What’s his accent like?’

  Madeleine thought about it. She hadn’t really noticed an accent, maybe because she was so used to Henry. Or perhaps with all the travelling he did Aiden had developed one of those neutral, transatlantic accents. ‘It’s not that strong,’ she said finally. ‘I know he’s originally from New York state – Long Island, I think. But he travels a lot.’

  Natalie’s eyes lit up. ‘What does he do?’

  Okay, this had gone far enough. ‘Listen, what’s with the twenty questions?’

  ‘He’s a single man,’ Ren said flatly. ‘We work in publishing. We don’t come across many of his kind.’

  This was true. The publishing industry was dominated by women, until you got to the upper echelons of management, and then there were suddenly men everywhere. No one knew where they came from, but they were usually older and mostly married, so it was not a workplace where one was likely to find a husband. Or even a boyfriend. Or even a date. Aiden was going to be fair game at the wedding. Poor man, what had she dragged him into?

  ‘Right, girls, can we just get on with it?’ said Madeleine. ‘I have not one but two gorgeous men waiting at home for me, so I want to get out of here at a reasonable time.’

  ‘You don’t have to brag,’ Ren muttered, as they all turned back towards their desks and work.

  Liv

  The plane trip home was one of Liv’s favourite parts of any book tour. On the final leg she never travelled with the author, usually able to concoct an excuse that there was business to wrap up at their last port of call and she would have to catch a later plane. This was as much for the author’s sake as hers. The publicist–author relationship was a funny one – it involved spending an inordinate amount of time together, but in short, intense bursts, which led to a level of intimacy that could be trying, especially if you weren’t a natural fit. As head of publicity, Liv did her darndest to match the author to the right publicist, and she generally took on the more difficult contenders. However, for her troubles, she also kept one or two of the best for herself. Cameron West was adorable, easygoing, a sheer delight to tour with, and Liv genuinely enjoyed his books. Maybe because she had boys she had developed an appreciation of the action-adventure genre. Over the last year she had introduced Cameron’s books to the twins and they were now hooked – even Lachie, who was a reluctant reader at best.

  As things had turned out, Cameron was taking a couple more days in Melbourne to catch up with friends, so there was no need for any kind of ruse on her part. Liv boarded the plane as soon as it was called, took her seat by the window and set about organising herself for the flight. She took out her e-reader, though unfortunately, due to somewhat draconian airline rules, she couldn’t turn it on until after take-off, and that was a pain in the backside. It wasn’t that she couldn’t cope without being plugged into an electronic device for twenty minutes – she loved that she had a legitimate reason to turn off her phone, for example. No, it was that she wanted to look like she was occupied, so that whoever sat in the adjacent seat didn’t think they had an invitation to chat. For the entire flight. Liv had worked out long ago that she must just have one of those faces: people were always striking up conversations with her, mistaking her for a salesperson in shops, asking for complicated help or directions in the street, talking to her from the next table in cafés. Crazy people seemed particularly drawn to her, all the more so in confined spaces where she had no means of escape. So on planes she always made sure she had her head buried in a book. But these days she only carried a Kindle or an iPad, largely to keep up with her reading for work. Liv needed to read books before they were printed, and she could carry a veritable truckload of manuscripts in one slim little device.

  So the rule about e-readers was just plain annoying. The flight home was Liv’s last chance to be alone for a while. No more nights in hotel rooms on her own, with no washing or homework, or meals to cook. She missed the boys when she was away on tour, desperately at times, but once she was home it didn’t take long for her to crave solitude, and room service.

  Just when she was thinking she might have been lucky enough to have scored an empty row, she became aware of someone rummaging in the overhead locker. Damn, she should have grabbed the inflight magazine and pretended to be absorbed in it; not that anyone would believe that. Instead she turned away and stared resolutely out the window as the guilty party dropped heavily into the aisle seat. Without moving her head, Liv peered out of the corner of her eye and glimpsed a pair of men’s shoes. At least there was still a seat between them. That usually provided enough of a buffer.

  ‘You use an e-reader too,’ said the owner of the shoes.

  Not so much of a buffer after all.

  Liv shifted a little to better see what he was doing. He was sliding his device into the seat pocket in front of him, as Liv had done with hers; he’d obviously noticed her Kindle protruding.

  ‘Crazy how they don’t let you turn them on till after take-off,’ he continued. ‘They’re completely innocuous, especially with wi-fi turned off.’

  Liv offered a faint murmur of agreement. While she valued her privacy, she was incapable of being rude. Years as a publicist had trained her to be assiduously polite; maybe that’s why the crazies always talked to her. She stole a quick, furtive glance at her neighbour. He seemed normal enough – he was a reader, so he couldn’t be all bad – and she knew now that he had something to occupy him for the trip. So she decided it was safe to engage, for the moment.

  ‘I heard it’s because flight attendants can’t be expected to check everyone’s device individually, to make sure the wi-fi is turned off,’ she said. ‘So they have to institute a blanket rule.’

  ‘How much longer do you reckon they’ll get away with that?’ he said. ‘People can barely go five minutes without checking their smartphones. I foresee an uprising: “You can take away our freedom to move around the cabin, but you’ll never take away our right to be plugged in twenty-four/seven.” ’

  Liv smiled. ‘I’m more than happy to have an excuse to turn off my phone.’

  ‘I take your point,’ he said, turning to face her fully for the first time. He was actually not bad-looking for an old bloke. ‘Old bloke’ being anyone in her general age group. Though blokes over forty did get out of it so much better than women. The salt and pepper hair looked great on him; the creases around his blue-grey eyes as he smiled, damned attractive.

  Liv suddenly realised she was staring. She cleared her throat. ‘Anyway, could you imagine a flight where everyone was taking calls the whole time?’ she said. ‘That would do my head in. A plane trip is respite for me.’

  ‘I take it your w
ork involves a lot of time on the phone?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone’s?’ she said, and left it at that. Liv tried to avoid revealing what she did for a living, at least with strangers. Everyone believed they had a book in them, and as soon as they discovered she worked in publishing they wanted to tell her all about their fabulous idea. And a plane was the perfect place to do just that: she was a captive audience.

  They were conveniently interrupted by the pre-flight announcements over the PA.

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ her neighbour said, his voice lowered. ‘But I always try to pay attention to the safety demonstration.’

  ‘Oh, do you have a fear of crashing?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘Does anybody like the idea of crashing?’

  Good point.

  ‘Actually, I try not to listen too closely,’ he said. ‘It does kind of freak me out when they show you the light and whistle in case you end up in water in the dark. No one really wants that image in their head when the plane’s about to take off.’

  ‘Yet now I do,’ said Liv.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said with a self-conscious smile.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she assured him.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I feel a little sorry for the flight attendant, standing up there doing her act and being ignored. I just like to show some respect.’

  Liv was oddly touched by that.

  ‘Besides, I reckon if I make eye contact, she’ll be more likely to come to my aid in the event of an accident, when everyone else who ignored her has no idea.’

  That made her smile. ‘So there’s method in your madness?’

  ‘Always,’ he said, returning her smile. ‘I’m David, by the way.’

  Were names really necessary? But it would be rude if she didn’t respond now; it was a slippery slope once you decided to engage. ‘Liv,’ she said finally.

  He nodded. ‘Is that short for anything?’

  ‘No, my mother named me after the actress Liv Ullmann. She’s Norwegian.’