A Bed of Scorpions (8 page)

We all refused coffee. ‘No, thank you,’ seemed so much more polite than shrieking, ‘Are you kidding me? Just get me out of here!’ at Helena when she asked. And for some reason we then sat silently on. Dinner was over, we could consider ourselves released back into the community, but instead we stayed at the table, playing with our cutlery, until Jake tossed his napkin onto the table and stood up. ‘We’re going,’ he told me.

I’ve actually won prizes for bad temper, and being ordered around by strong silent types has never been one of my schoolgirl fantasies. But I told myself, the way harried mothers do,
Choose your battles
. So I stood up without answering, and went to find my bag.

We got in the car and I braced myself, but he still didn’t
say anything. I wasn’t going to volunteer, so we made the short trip in silence. As far as I was concerned, I told myself, he could stay silent till the crack of doom. But that was too much to hope for.

I knew he wasn’t angry with me. He was just angry I was involved. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. We went inside, still in total silence, and I was halfway down the hall when I heard a thump. I jumped and turned. Jake had kicked the door – I could see the black scuff-mark.

‘You’ve slept with him.’

I regrouped. ‘Aidan?’

Back to the strong silent type. He just stood, chin out, hands on hips. If all other forms of income failed, he could get a job modelling ‘male fury’ in a life-drawing class.

The direction of the attack had taken me by surprise, and I couldn’t even be angry. ‘Can we back up here? I’m happy to have a fight, but I’d like to know what we’re fighting about. Last time I checked, you were pissed off because you didn’t want me involved in your enquiry. I understand that, and I even agree – I wouldn’t have chosen this. But.’ I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. ‘But you’re angry because I slept with someone twenty years ago? Or, as I tend to think of it, I slept with someone
nineteen fucking years and ten fucking months before I ever fucking fucked you?
Are you fucking
nuts?’
Let me revise. Possibly I was angry.

My stance was now a mirror image of his, hands on hips, chin out. ‘Here’s a sensible way to avoid this kind of problem in the future.’ My voice was saccharine with false helpfulness. ‘Next time the business partner of someone I slept with two decades earlier dies in a way that triggers
a police investigation, I’ll know that I need to go down to Scotland Yard very first thing and make a statement. Or maybe I can find it on the Met’s website? It must be a routine scenario, so your office will have pre-printed forms, right?’

Jake hadn’t moved. He didn’t look as if he’d heard a word I’d said. I was about to launch into a new chorus of the ‘are you nuts’ song when he turned and kicked the door again. He stood staring at it, which made a change from staring at me. Then he walked out, closing the door very quietly, and very carefully, behind him.

I was filling the coffee pot when Jake came into the kitchen the next morning. He pulled me against him and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

I nodded, but didn’t turn around. I didn’t know yet what he was sorry for. He’d come back sometime the previous night. I’d briefly woken when he got into bed, but he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either.

He knew I was waiting, and he went on. ‘I’m sorry for shouting. I’m sorry for walking out. I’m sorry for being angry about Aidan and you before I even knew you. I’m not sorry for being hurt that you didn’t tell me, but I am sorry for being angry.’ He pulled away and looked at me. ‘Does that cover it?’

I wasn’t sure it did, but I couldn’t figure out a way to say so without sounding petty. ‘It’s pretty comprehensive.’

‘It was the figuring it out on my own. That you didn’t tell me once Compton was found dead.’

I looked at him for the first time. ‘I get that part. But it never occurred to me because it was so long ago. If it had
mattered, I would have thought, I have to tell Jake. But the sex was so long ago, and so unimportant, I just never thought of it. The friend part, which is important, I told you right away.’

He smiled slightly, which was a relief. ‘“The sex was so unimportant”? You really know how to bolster a guy’s ego, don’t you?’

I went back to the coffee. ‘It was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’

‘Having a conversation with you literary types is always fun, but what the hell does that mean?’

‘It means that that was then and this is now.’

‘This.’

I nodded.

‘I know talking isn’t your favourite thing, which is why you end up quoting from books, but do we know what we’re talking about here?’

I thought we probably did.

‘OK. Let’s let it go. If you have accepted my apology … ?’ He waited until I nodded again, then he went and got down two cups.

I hunted through the fruit bowl for a banana that wasn’t entirely black. I wondered if bananas were cunningly genetically modified by scientists in the pay of fruit companies so that they moved from green to black with nothing in between. Then I decided that this was probably not the ideal time to have a chat about that insight. Instead, ‘Do we need to talk about Celia Stein? I don’t know why she popped up, what she wanted, or even if she really did want something.’

Jake stood at the table, leaning on his hands where he’d
put the cups down. I poured out the coffee and put his cup back in front of him and sat down. He didn’t move. ‘I don’t know either, but it doesn’t matter. The weight of evidence suggests suicide. Unless the inquest returns a suspicious-death verdict, that’s it for us.’

I stilled. The bastard had let us jump through all those hoops last night when he’d known this?

He saw the thought and cut in before I had figured out what to say, his hands raised pacifically: ‘The file went upstairs yesterday; there was an email with the decision when I woke up this morning.’

Some of the tension left my body. ‘Lucky for you.’

He carefully didn’t smile. ‘So it would seem.’

I’d expected another quiet day at work. Fridays were generally subdued in publishing no matter what time of year. Lots of people worked four-day weeks, and Friday was the favoured at-home day. In the summer, even more people took long weekends, and then there were the ones who were formally or informally on holiday. I’d got lots of reading done the day before, and dealt with a backlog of contract quibbles I’d been sitting on for weeks. Truthfully, contracts I’d been sitting on for months. But no more than a couple of months. Three maybe. All right, they were contracts I’d been sitting on since before the dawn of time, but now I’d finally dealt with them, I felt I should get points for it, and even more points for all those months when I’d been genuinely pained at not having done them. Although neither the agents involved, nor even our own contracts department, seemed to agree.

At any rate, they were done now, and I was free to get
on with the kind of work I liked. Submissions are great. There is always a sense of adventure when you pull the next manuscript off the pile. I still thought of it as a pile, even though most of our submissions were now sent by email, and I read them on an e-reader. It’s far more practical – the agents can send them over to us faster, the assistants don’t spend their lives photocopying them, or unjamming the photocopier. But I still don’t like these cyber-manuscripts. There are rational reasons for my dislike. I think it’s important to know physically where I am in a book, how much further to halfway, to the end, things that matter in terms of pacing and structure. And there are irrational reasons: the feel, the smell, the heft. An e-reader is less physically strenuous – carrying just three or four manuscripts home to read was hell on the back – but also somehow less of an adventure. And Bim has made his displeasure known too. He was used to having lots of paper from me to colour on, or cut into shapes and paste. E-readers were damaging his creative output.

That morning, however, it was a printed manuscript, from a Luddite agent who always sent her submissions by post. We rolled our eyes when we mentioned her name, but secretly I loved her. Miranda obviously felt differently when she came in and found me with my feet up, manuscript in my lap, cup in hand. She looked at me as if I’d asked her to go and pluck another quill from the goose and sharpen its nib. A few weeks ago I’d walked past when she was discussing manuscripts with another assistant. ‘How did they get submissions before?’ they were exclaiming in wonder. I didn’t break stride. ‘Papyrus,’ I said. Now she stared down at me as though she finally believed me.

I waited for her to remember what it was she’d come in for. She had plenty to be getting on with, and if she’d just needed advice or input, she usually emailed. She stayed leaning against the door jamb, but if that was supposed to make me think that she’d just come in for a casual gossip, she’d failed, because she’d closed the door.

‘Have you heard?’ she asked.

‘Heard?’ If it was minor office rumours, who was sleeping with whom, she wouldn’t have closed the door.

‘Olive. She’s been having breakfast meetings all this week. And she hasn’t told Evie who they’re with, just to book her out till ten.’ Olive is Olive Robinson, the publishing director. In a larger company she’d have a fancier title, like chief executive. Evie is her secretary, which is another way you know how senior Olive is, because the rest of the senior staff have assistants. Whatever you call them, the administrative staff can, and do, forecast the major upheavals, because they book the meetings.

I took my feet out of the drawer they rest on when I read. Miranda’s bulletin might as well have a caption: Important Enough to Sit Up For. ‘Wow,’ I said.

We stared at each other meaningfully. I drank the last of my coffee and kept hold of my cup. The kitchen would be where there was news, if it was anywhere.

A cluster of anxious-looking people stood by the kettle. I poured out some coffee, but didn’t bother to look at the treat-table. It was Friday, and no one came back to work from holiday on a Friday. I wasn’t thinking about that consciously, it was just a Pavlov’s-dog reflex response to office circadian rhythms.

I leant against the counter and took stock: a couple
of people from contracts, one from marketing, one from design. If there was anything to know, there was a chance someone would have heard.

Timmins & Ross is owned privately, by the descendants of the Mr Timmins and Mr Ross who had founded the company in the 1930s, diluted by a few others who had bought in in the late eighties when the company had needed a cash infusion. Happily, it was just before the period when venture capitalists had decided that investing in publishing would make them rich. Those companies had been swallowed up by conglomerates soon after, because there was no other way to make a speedy financial return. Publishing made an OK return if you didn’t want riches beyond the dreams of avarice, but if an OK return was what venture capitalists were looking for, I’d missed the memo. Anyway, that was then. Now publishing barely makes any money, and an OK return would have us all conga-ing around Bedford Square wearing party hats made out of discarded publicity folders. Because in the last decade, book sales have declined overall, and even where numbers have held up, or even increased, the sales are made in supermarkets and online, places where publishers receive a declining share of the sale price. We are just like the farmers getting screwed over by the supermarkets: they buy from us at ever-lower prices, so even if they sell more and more, the money magically never increases. Same story for Amazon. Same story for e-books.

I know, not the world’s biggest tragedy in the great scheme of things. But this wasn’t the great scheme of things,
this was our lives. And our livelihoods. But like everyone else working in a disaster zone, we had pushed the truth aside until it became background noise. We did what we could to make the new reality work. We offered our authors less money. That hurt every time we had to do it, but we did it. We spent less on marketing and promotion, which was self-defeating, but we did that too. Staffing levels had been cut, thankfully so far through natural wastage rather than redundancies at T&R, but we were always expecting worse. And still profits dropped.

So if Olive was having long meetings with someone, or several someones, whose names couldn’t be written in her diary, we automatically assumed the worst. A positive result would be a new investor. A negative one, that the current owners wanted to sell. Then it would be to one of the big corporate publishers, and most of us would lose our jobs. The big companies already had the back-office apparatus they needed, so finance, contracts, all those departments would go; even editorial and design weren’t safe. T&R published a hundred books a year. If you were a giant corporation that already employed a few dozen editors and a few dozen designers, our whole list could be scattered among them. And since those editors and designers were just as scared of losing their jobs, they would quietly take on the extra work, no matter how burdensome.

I listened to the back and forth, but there was nothing concrete. It was all surmise, and a lot of fear.

Just before one, Sandra Stanworth, the head of publicity and one of my closer friends at work, put her head round my door and asked if I had lunch plans. I didn’t, so we headed to a square behind the British Museum. It was part
of the University of London, and would be packed with students, but the bigger squares nearby – Bedford Square on one side, Russell Square on the other – would have more tourists shuffling through from the British Museum and the stations. Malet Square was hidden, and there was less through-traffic. There was also a deli en route, where we could pick up lunch. A pastoral haven it wasn’t, but it was the best central London could come up with on a weekday.

We stayed off the topic of Olive and her mystery meetings. We’d both been through it before – everyone in publishing over thirty has been through it before – and we knew that whatever would happen would happen. Instead we caught each other up. Sandra has a very small car, two large boys, and one vast dog, and they’d just driven back from a wedding in Ireland. As a mathematical equation, 2(big) boys + 1(huge) dog x 1(tiny) car / (11-hour) drive = opening scene in comic novel. Then I filled her in on the Jake scenario – not Frank’s death, which I couldn’t bear to mention, just the dinner-with-Aidan-door-kicking story, which for her benefit I also turned into comedy. She was disappointed I hadn’t thrown stuff. In another lifetime, I told her. I understand the attractions of throwing. But unless you organise your life better than I’ve managed to organise mine, if you throw stuff, eventually you have to pick it up again. Which is a terrible anticlimax, and would make me want to throw the stuff all over again. Which I’d have to pick up again. Which.