A Bed of Scorpions (20 page)

I agreed, it wasn’t. ‘But it’s part of the reason that says we should keep her. Some of my oldest, most traditional authors love her. If she can make them see past her hair and the piercings … I keep thinking she’ll outgrow it. Which makes me sound like her mother.’

Olive laughed. ‘As long as you don’t tell her she’s just going through a phase.’ I liked watching Olive laugh. Her skin was dark, like her name, and she had deep crow’s feet around her eyes, as if she’d spent a lot of time laughing.

She continued smiling even after she’d had her laugh, although now it was turned on me. ‘You look like the child now. One who’s just brought a stray kitten home. “Can we keep him, Mum? I’ll feed him myself, and clean out his litter every day, I promise.” When does the decision need to be made?’

This was much better than I’d hoped. ‘The end of the week.’ It was the end of the week. Just not this week. But if I admitted that, then there would have been no reason not to wait until David got back next Monday. And then we’d grow old and die while he failed to make a decision.

I’d done what I could for the moment. I stood up. ‘Thanks.’ And escaped. A decent start, with a possible maybe in less time than it took for me to drink a cup of
coffee. Take that, David Snaith, I mentally toasted as I walked past his office. And then hastily lowered my cup as Olive put her head out of her door.

The lines around her eyes deepened again, but she pretended she hadn’t seen anything. ‘Will you ask for Miranda’s personnel file to be sent up?’

And she shut the door before I laughed.

It was good that I’d got that meeting in early, because the rest of the day might not have existed for all the attention I paid to it. Miranda came in around ten, and I told her to come in and shut the door, which meant I had news for her. She was too experienced to think it meant gossip, because what gossip could I have possibly heard at the weekend?

She looked worried, which was touching. I knew that we worked well together, and I knew that she’d rather stay at T&R than go to a smaller house, but I hadn’t realised quite how much she wanted it.

First the bad news, that Olive had confirmed that she wouldn’t let us create a job for Miranda. ‘But we knew that. And she sounded quite positive about the half-and-half job: that if you agree to be a half-assistant, half-junior editor for the moment, when a full editorial vacancy comes up you’ll be in line for it. Although until she jumps one way or the other, I didn’t discuss salary.’

I expected her to have to weigh up the option. She had been offered a full-time job that got her more firmly on the editorial ladder, and although she’d still be doing the admin work there that she was doing for me now, she’d be doing it for herself, not for someone else. And there’d be more
money. So when she said, ‘You’d do that for me?’ I wasn’t sure what she meant.

‘Do what? We agreed that this is what I’d suggest to Olive last week. Didn’t we?’

‘You didn’t say you’d lose half your assistant. Or if you did say it, I didn’t understand. I thought you’d be allowed to hire someone else.’

‘I told you, they aren’t going to let us make new hires or add salaries.’

‘But are you willing to do that?’

Clearly we were both speaking foreign languages. ‘Of course I’m willing. I’ve done it.’ I amended. ‘If Olive agrees, I’ve done it.’

Miranda’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t know what to say. You’re making your job harder, to help me.’

I qualified that overstatement. ‘I’m making my job a
little
harder, and no one except you helped you. You’ve done far more than your job description, and you’ve done it really well.’ I like to get brownie points when they’re due, and a lot of the time even when they’re not due, but this really wasn’t a case for making me out to be a saint. I don’t think I could even have got beatified for this morning’s contribution. ‘We don’t have to worry right now. It hasn’t happened yet. Olive might say no.’

‘You’re right. Chickens. Counting. Don’t.’ She nodded and stood up to go back to her desk. At the door, though, she stopped, turned and came back, and gave me a fierce hug. And at lunchtime a huge bunch of cornflowers and poppies silently appeared on my desk.

I remember that part, but otherwise, while I know I went to meetings, sent and received emails – I even participated
in an auction for a book – I only know it because I have the emails, and T&R is now the proud publisher of a new author. I have no memory of any of it. As far as I’m aware, I spent the day staring out the window and worrying away at the Stevenson question.

I’m not even sure how, or when, it became ‘the Stevenson question’. Two weeks ago, Aidan had told me that his partner Frank had died. Only fourteen days, and yet that dark figure in the dark room had vanished as though he’d never been. Werner Schmidt’s death had never been very real to me, in part, I think, because I didn’t know what he’d looked like, or anything about him except that he shelved his oil paints by date and drank too much. Instead it was the equally dead Edward Stevenson, and Celia Stein, who had taken over their space, and everyone’s attention.

By the time four o’clock rolled around, therefore, of course I was going to the preview at the Tate. I stopped by Miranda’s desk and dropped some things off: a list of proofs to be sent out to authors who might give us quotes to use for promotion; some sales material to be proofread; a reminder to nag at the design department to return the family photographs an author had lent us to use in her book. It was routine, mechanical work that I should have done myself, but which had sat, untouched, on my desk all day.

‘I’m out for the rest of the day. I’m going to a press view at the Tate, for a show by the woman from the Daylesworth Trust’s father.’ It was a convoluted explanation, but since there was no real explanation for why I was going, it would have to do.

‘Get you,’ said Miranda cheerfully.

‘Living the high life. Is there anything before I go?’

She shook her head, then reconsidered and changed it to a nod. ‘You’ve been sent a new novel by the scout from Jansen’s, who says it’s the newest thing in Scan-noir crime. Except that it’s not really Scan, because it’s Finnish. Shall I try and find us a Finnish reader somewhere? I’ve checked, and no one here uses one, but I can email a few friends at other publishers. Oh, and I’ve done the permissions and copyright forms for Carol Dennison’s book. I’ll leave them on your desk. I checked them, and they’re fine, but you need to authorise the payments.’

And she wondered why I thought she deserved promotion?

When I got to the Tate, the guard at the front door tried to stop me. The gallery was closing in half an hour, and admissions had just ended. But I said the secret passwords, ‘Esther Wolff’ and ‘press’, and he immediately stood back.

‘Go down to the bronze sculpture at the end of the hall,’ he said, pointing through the central foyer to the rear of the museum. ‘The entrance to the exhibition is on your right, and the warder there will find Esther for you.’

Open sesame.

Even half an hour before closing, the museum was filled with people getting their final thirty minutes’ worth of culture. But the school groups had long gone, and so had the people who had come up to London for the day. And the mothers with small children. The visitors now were, on average, older and quieter than the first and the last groups, and younger and more mobile than the middle ones. I stood and watched idly for a few minutes, wondering about these people assiduously art-ing around
the place at five o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Didn’t they have jobs? Could they all be self-employed? Or had they, too, just cut out of their offices early on a summer afternoon? I’d certainly left work early on summer afternoons, but I’d never thought to go to a museum. It was an enticing idea, but even as I played with the idea I realised that these were not office-skivers. They were tourists. London without tourists is as unimaginable as boiled eggs without toast soldiers. If you remove one half, is there any point to the other? At least, that’s the official view. On tourists and London, I mean. I don’t think there’s an official view on toast soldiers.

I stopped daydreaming and turned right as directed. Facing me was a temporary barrier with a poster for the Stevenson exhibition on it, and a pasted streamer over one corner: ‘Exhibition opens 16 June’. I stopped to look at the painting they had chosen. I was expecting
Poppity
Princess
, as the most famous, but it wasn’t that one. It was only a detail, a close-up of an eye and a nose made up of photographic negatives. Clever. It felt familiar, yet at the same time, you didn’t think you’d know everything, which you might have with
Poppity Princess
. I slid behind the roped-off section, with an entirely unreasonable feeling of being an insider.

The guard by the door did not share my delusion, and he kept a beady eye on me as he checked his list of names. But Aidan and Esther Wolff had done their work, and he was forced to let me enter, although his manner suggested that when he ran the museum, things would not be so slipshod. I squinted quickly down at my skirt. It was clean. Further down. My shoes were a pair. Was there more I was
supposed to be doing? I consoled myself that it was my scraped face that made the whites of his eyes show, not that I looked generally un-private-view-worthy. So when he handed me a folder marked ‘Press’, I took it as though I expected it. As soon as I’d walked through the foyer, though, I checked it out. Nothing exciting: thumbnails of illustrations that were available for the newspapers’ picture desks; a list of the pieces on show; a page of welcome blah from the gallery’s director, most of which was taken up by begging the journalists to mention the show’s sponsors as frequently as possible. Dull. I shoved it in my bag.

Earlier in the day Aidan had sent Helena a list of all the Stevensons the gallery had sold over the last ten years, as he’d promised, and had copied me in. I hadn’t looked at it. The titles meant nothing to me, and it was only my specialist geekery that had meant I’d been able to spot the problem with the collage at the Arts Council panel. I’d look again at the ones with the book jackets, but it wouldn’t add anything to what I’d done yesterday. In fact, I had no real reason to be here, so I decided to just go through as though it were any other show, only with fewer people about.

I started off with good intentions. I looked around the room I was standing in. A wall panel introduced Stevenson, and outlined the early part of his career after he got to art college in London, and before he moved to the States. The walls were hung with a handful of early works, oils rather than collage, and mostly muddy brown, probably chosen to make viewers grateful that he’d given up painting. I moved quickly on to the next room, which was a long, top-lit gallery holding more than twenty
pictures, and some ceramic-and-iron assemblages from the 1960s. It was also holding Aidan and Jim, who were in a heated discussion with a man wearing a suit and a pair of white gloves. He was pointing at one wall with a spirit level, so I assumed they were discussing the arrangement of the pictures, and didn’t interrupt, just waving furtively to Lucy as I passed.

I moved slowly through the next rooms, enjoying the show with the front of my brain. Colophons aren’t my only area of nerdiness. I also classify exhibitions. It’s not something I mention in public, but privately, the Sam Clair Theory of Retrospectives sums up all shows in just three categories: 1) Wow, I had no idea s/he was so great!; or 2) Wow! I had no idea (s)he was so terrible; or, the killer, 3) Yep, I knew that s/he was great/terrible/meh. (Select one only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.) This is not the world’s most thrilling insight, but I put it out there, because the Stevenson show was falling into the second category. I’d gone in admiring Stevenson’s work, and some of the pictures I was looking at I still thought were terrific. But they were few and far between. And between the in-between were endless variations on a theme. Aidan had said the prices of Stevensons had never risen the way his pop contemporaries had. Maybe it was because, although at his best he was very good, his best didn’t come along very often.

I’d been there more than an hour, and I hadn’t seen even half the show yet. And in all that space, I’d passed maybe six people. A few of them had the press packs open and were scribbling industriously, breaking off only to take photographs with their phones. Others were guards, although they weren’t
in every room. We had been invited, vetted, and were known by name. We weren’t a threat to the art.

I was beginning to flag. I walked into the next room, and looked around. I know it makes me a philistine, but all I could think was, ‘More?’ I was about to skip ahead to the next room when I saw Aidan again, still with Jim and Mr White Gloves. If he saw me, I’d have to be polite about the show, and I was tired and cranky. So instead I moved back to the room I’d just left, fixing my eyes on whatever was nearest the door. As soon as Aidan headed off, I’d zip quickly through the next few rooms. He did and so I did.

Three rooms on, I paused to look back and make sure he couldn’t see me skimming past his livelihood. And there, at the end of the next room, stood Celia Stein. My heart did a peculiar leap, as though something extraordinary had occurred. I spoke to myself severely.
She represents the estate, you fool. Where else would she be?
I peeked back.
See?
I went on.
She’s talking to Myra and Lucy. It’s gallery business. Now just stop this silliness.

My body parts were not listening. By the time I’d formulated the thought, I found I’d taken three giant steps into the next room, removing myself from her sight line, and I was staring blindly at a painting.
Well
, I told myself snarkily,
you can either stand here forever, becoming the world expert on
– I peered at the label –
on Untitled #38, or you can act like an adult and move
. Apparently my body parts were still not on speaking terms with my brain.
World expert sounds good
, my feet said. They weren’t going anywhere.