Longshot (3 page)

Words temporarily failed him, and I thought that everyone’s life was interesting to themselves, tragedies and all. Everyone had a story to tell: the trouble lay in the few who wanted to read it, the fewer still who were ready to pay for the privilege.

Ronnie soothingly refilled the glasses and gave us a regretful summary of the state of the book trade, which was in one of its periodical downswings on account of current high interest rates and their adverse effects on mortgage payments.

“It’s the people with mortgages who usually buy books,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. For every mortgage there are five people saving into the building societies, and when interest rates are high
their
incomes go up. They’ve more money to spend, but they just don’t seem to buy books with it.”

Tremayne and I looked blank over this piece of sociology, and Ronnie further told us, without noticeably cheering us up, that for a publisher in the modern world turnover was all very well but losses weren’t, and that it was getting more and more difficult to get a marginal book accepted.

I felt more grateful than ever that he’d got one particular marginal book accepted, and remembered what the lady from the publisher’s had said when she’d taken me for the getting-acquainted lunch.

“Ronnie could sweet-talk the devil. He says we need to catch new authors like you in their early thirties, otherwise we won’t have any big names ten years from now. No one knows yet how you’ll turn out in ten years. Ronnie says that all salmon are small fry to begin with. So we’re not promising you the world, but an opportunity, yes.”

An opportunity was all one could ask, I thought. Daisy at length appeared in the doorway to say the food had arrived, and we all went along to the big room where the central table had been cleared of books and relaid with plates, knives, napkins and two large platters of healthy-looking sandwiches decorated with a drizzle of cress.

Ronnie’s associates emerged from their rooms to join us, which made seven altogether, including Daisy and her sister, and I managed to eat a lot without, I hoped, it being noticeable. Fillings of beef, ham, cheese, bacon: once-ordinary things that had become luxuries lately. Free lunch, breakfast and dinner. I wished Ronnie would write summoning notes oftener.

Tremayne harangued me again over the generic shortcomings of racing writers, holding his glass in one hand and waving a sandwich in the other as he made his indignant points, while I nodded in sympathetic silence and munched away as if listening carefully.

Tremayne made a great outward show of forceful self-confidence, but there was something in his insistence which curiously belied it. It was almost as if he needed the book to be written to prove he had lived; as if photographs and records weren’t enough.

“How old are you?” he said abruptly, breaking off in midflow.

I said with my mouth full, “Thirty-two.”

“You look younger.”

I didn’t know whether “good” or “sorry” was appropriate, so I merely smiled and went on eating.

“Could you write a biography?” Again the abruptness.

“I don’t know. Never tried.”

“I’d do it myself,” he said belligerently, “but I haven’t got time.”

I nodded understandingly. If there was one biography I didn’t want to cut my teeth on, I thought, it was his. Much too difficult.

Ronnie fetched up beside him and wheeled him away, and in between finishing the beef-and-chutney and listening to Daisy’s problems with scrambled software I watched Ronnie across the room, nodding his head placatingly under Tremayne’s barrage of complaints. Eventually, when all that was left on the plates were a few pallidly wilting threads of cress, Ronnie said a firm farewell to Tremayne, who still didn’t want to go.

“There’s nothing I can usefully offer at the moment,” Ronnie was saying, shaking an unresponsive hand and practically pushing Tremayne doorward with a friendly clasp on his shoulder. “But leave it to me. I’ll see what I can do. Keep in touch.”

With ill grace Tremayne finally left, and without any hint of relief Ronnie said to me, “Come along then, John. Sorry to have kept you all this time,” and led the way back to his room.

“Tremayne asked if I’d ever written a biography,” I said, taking my former place on the visitors’ side of his desk.

Ronnie gave me a swift glance, settling himself into his own padded dark-green leather chair and swiveling gently from side to side as if in indecision. Finally he came to a stop and asked, “Did he offer you the job?”

“Not exactly.”

“My advice to you would be not to think of it.” He gave me no time to assure him that I wouldn’t, and went straight on, “It’s fair to say he’s a good racehorse trainer, well known in his own field. It’s fair to say he’s a better man than you would have guessed today. It’s even fair to agree he’s had an interesting life. But that isn’t enough. It all depends on the writing.” He paused and sighed. “Tremayne doesn’t really believe that. He wants a big name because of the prestige, but you heard him, he thinks anyone can write. He doesn’t really know the difference.”

“Will you find him someone?” I asked.

“Not on the terms he’s looking for.” Ronnie considered things. “I suppose I can tell you,” he said, “as he made an approach to you. He’s asking for a writer to stay in his house for at least a month, to go through all his cuttings and records and interview him in depth. None of the top names will do that, they’ve all got other lives to lead. Then he wants seventy percent of royalty income, which isn’t going to amount to much in any case. No top writer is going to work for thirty percent.”

“Thirty percent . . . including the advance?”

“Right. An advance no bigger than yours, if I could get one at all.”

“That’s starvation.”

Ronnie smiled. “Comparatively few people live by writing alone. I thought you knew that. Anyway”—he leaned forward, dismissing Tremayne and saying more briskly—“about these American rights... ”

It seemed that a New York literary agent, an occasional associate of Ronnie’s, had asked my publishers routinely whether they had anything of interest in the pipeline. They had steered him back to Ronnie. Would I, Ronnie asked, care to have him send a copy of my manuscript to the American agent, who would then, if he thought the book salable in the American market, try to find it an American publisher.

I managed to keep my mouth shut but was gaping and gasping inside.

“Well?” Ronnie said.

“I . . . er ... I’d be delighted,” I said.

“Thought you would. Not promising anything, you realize. He’s just taking a look.”

“Yes.”

“If you remember, we gave your publisher here only British and Commonwealth rights. That leaves us elbow room to maneuver.” He went on for a while discussing technicalities and possibilities that I only half understood, raising hopes and damping them in his pendulum way. I was left with a feeling that things might be going to happen but on the other hand probably not. The market was down, everything was difficult, but the publishing machine needed constant fodder and my book might be regarded as a bundle of hay.... He would let me know, he said, as soon as he got an opinion back from the New York agent.

“How’s the new book coming along?” he asked.

“Slowly.”

He nodded. “The second one’s always difficult. But just keep going.”

“Yes.”

He rose to his feet, looking apologetically at his waiting paperwork, shaking my hand warmly in farewell. I thanked him for the lunch. Any time, he said automatically, his mind already on his next task, and I left him and walked along the passage, stopping at Daisy’s desk on the way out.

“You’re sending my manuscript to America,” I said, zipping up my jacket and bursting to tell someone, anyone, the good news.

“Yes.” She beamed. “I posted it last Friday.”

“Did you indeed!”

I went on out to the elevator not sure whether to laugh or be vaguely annoyed at Ronnie’s asking permission for something he had already done. I wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d simply told me he’d sent the book off. It was his job to do the best for me that he could; I would have thought it well within his rights.

I rode down two floors and went out into the bitter afternoon air thinking of the steps that had led to his door.

Finishing the book had been one thing, finding a publisher another. The six small books I’d previously written, though published and on sale to the public, had all been part of my work for the travel firm, who had paid me pretty well for writing them besides sending me to far-flung places to gather the knowledge. The travel firm owned the guides and published them themselves, and they weren’t in the market for novels.

I’d taken my precious typescript personally to a small but well-known publisher (looking up the address in the phone book) and had handed it to a pretty girl there who said she would put it in the slush pile and get around to it in due course.

The slush pile, she explained, showing dimples, was what they called the heap of unsolicited manuscripts that dropped through their letterbox day by day. She would read my book while she commuted. I could return for her opinion in three weeks.

Three weeks later, the dimples still in place, she told me my book wasn’t really “their sort of thing,” which was mainly “serious literature,” it seemed. She suggested I should take it to an agent, who would know where to place it. She gave me a list of names and addresses.

“Try one of those,” she said. “I enjoyed the book very much. Good luck with it.”

I tried Ronnie Curzon for no better reason than I’d known where to find his office, as Kensington High Street lay on my direct walk home. Impulse had led to good and bad all my life, but when I felt it strongly, I usually followed it. Ronnie had been good. Opting for poverty had been so-so. Accepting Tremayne’s offer was the pits.

A
s I walked back to Chiswick from Ronnie’s office, I hadn’t the slightest intention of ever meeting Tremayne Vickers again. I forgot him. I thought of the present book I was writing: especially of how to get one character down from a runaway experimental helium-filled balloon with its air pumps out of order. I had doubts about the balloon. Maybe I’d rethink the whole thing. Maybe I’d scrap what I’d done and start again. The character in the balloon was shitting himself with fear. I thought I knew how he felt. The chief unexpected thing I’d learned from writing fiction was fear of getting it wrong.

The book that had been accepted, which was called
Long Way Home,
was about survival in general and in particular about the survival, physical and mental, of a bunch of people isolated by a disaster. Hardly an original theme, but I’d followed the basic advice to write about something I knew, and survival was what I knew best.

In the interest of continuing to survive for another week or ten days, I stopped at the supermarket nearest to the friend’s aunt’s house and spent my food allotment on enough provisions for the purpose: bunch of packet soups, loaf of bread, box of spaghetti, box of porridge oats, pint of milk, a cauliflower and some carrots. I would eat the vegetables raw whenever I felt like it, and otherwise enjoy soup with bread in it, soup on spaghetti and porridge with milk. Items like tea, Marmite and salt cropped up occasionally. Crumpets and butter came at scarce intervals when I could no longer resist them. Apart from all that I bought once a month a bottle of vitamin pills to stuff me full of any oddments I might be missing and, dull though it might seem and in spite of frequent hunger, I had stayed in resounding good health all along.

I opened the front door with my latchkey and met the friend’s aunt in the hall.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “Everything all right?”

I told her about Ronnie sending my book to America, and her thin face filled with genuine pleasure. She was roughly fifty, divorced, a grandmother, sweet, fair-haired, undemanding and boring. I understood that she regarded the rent I paid her (a fifth of what I had had to fork out for my former flat) as more a bribe to get her to let a stranger into her house than as an essential part of her income. In addition, though, she had agreed I could put milk in her fridge, wash my dishes in her sink, shower in her bathroom and use her washer-drier once a week. I wasn’t to make a noise or ask anyone in. We had settled these details amicably. She had installed a coin-in-the-slot electric meter for me, and approved a toaster, a kettle, a tiny tabletop cooker and new plugs for a television and a razor.

She’d been introduced to me as “Aunty” and that’s what I called her, and she seemed to regard me as a sort of extension nephew. We had lived for ten months in harmony, our lives adjacent but uninvolved.

“It’s very cold... are you warm enough up there?” she asked kindly.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. The electric heater ate money. I almost never switched it on.

“These old houses... very cold under the roofs.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She said, “Good, dear,” amiably, and we nodded to each other, and I went upstairs thinking that I’d lived in the Arctic Circle and if I hadn’t been able to deal with a cold London attic I would have been ashamed of myself. I wore silk jersey, long-sleeved undershirts and long johns under sweaters and jeans under the ski suit, and I slept warmly in a sleeping bag designed for the North Pole. It was writing that made me cold.

Up in my eyrie I struggled for a couple of hours to resolve the plight of the helium balloon but ended with only a speculation on nerve pathways. Why didn’t terror make one
deaf,
for instance? How did it always beeline to the bowel? My man in the balloon didn’t know and was too miserable to care. I thought I’d have to invent a range of mountains dead ahead for him to come to grief on. Then he would merely have the problem of descending from an Everest-approximation with only fingers, toes and resolution. Much easier. I knew a tip or two about that, the first being to look for the longest way down because it would be the least steep. Sharp-faced mountains often had sloping backs.