The Planner (7 page)

‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m just observing.’

‘If you want a little confidence boost, then remember this: people in publishing earn fuck all. Believe it or not, a lot of the people here probably earn less than you.’

James nodded. He knew that in Islington, with its complex class ecology, that didn’t necessarily count for much, but it was helpful to know this all the same. He went over to a table, refilled his beaker of wine and, not wanting Felix to have to introduce him to anyone, decided to take the initiative himself. Selecting the least attractive woman standing on her own, he strode over and began a conversation.

‘Hello,’ said James. ‘Are you a writer as well?’

‘Well, yes – that is how I earn my living, but I don’t think I’ve got the patience to ever write a book.’

That seemed a reasonable reply, and allowed James to follow up with a series of supplementary questions. She in turn asked him things, quickly establishing that he had no connection with the cultural sector. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that Felix was thriving on the noise, drink and conversation of strangers. But James already needed assistance. It was clear that he had made a mistake. True, the woman he was talking to might have been unattractive if she worked in a pharmacy in Leicester, but she was actually a newspaper columnist, and arguably the most important person in the room. Her round cheeks weren’t quite a camouflage, for doubtless she would prefer to be prettier, but they were an irrelevance and in any case, the key feature was her deep ferrous voice, with its connotations of private education and great sexual experience. For James, the grammar school boy with a geography degree, erotic excitement and social advancement went closely together, but in such circumstances there was always the danger of paralysis.

‘Ah good,’ said Felix, coming over to join them. ‘I see you’ve met one another. Now Felicity happens to be an enormous admirer of your friend Alice Baum.’

‘Oh, really? How do you know Alice?’ said James.

‘Oh I adore Alice! She is simply amazing. And what’s your name? Sorry, you did tell me.’

‘James. James Crawley. Alice and I went out together for a couple of years.’

‘Gosh – really? Sex and everything? Lucky you! What fun that must have been. But that must have been a while ago?’

‘Yes, I suppose. We were at university together. I suppose it was a long time ago,’ said James. ‘But she hasn’t changed much.’

He went to refill their cups with another 175 ml of red wine. Now why, he wondered, would she say something like that? Why would it have been so long ago? It was, of course, but why would she think so? Another, related question was why it should bother him. After all, it wasn’t as if trying to go back out with Alice was ever part of his plan. All that wine may have had something to do with it. By way of a remedy, he swallowed another mouthful and cultivated some destructive thoughts as he looked around the room again. It occurred to him that he would probably enjoy it more if Rachel was there.

Felix took him away, and steered him to the other side of the room.

‘A useful tip at things like this is to avoid the journalists and writers, and instead go for the boys and girls who work in PR. They have particular expertise in being agreeable, and the good ones tend to be highly attractive.’

Sure enough, things were much better over here. In no time at all, James was welcomed into a pool of lightness and warmth. As Felix had said, the public relations women were genuinely skilled, with an uncanny gift for discovering a point of common interest, and then building an entertaining conversation around it. There was no nervous tension in the laughter, no debilitating intellectual chasms and none of the acute anxiety of being with someone who was his own age, but who had a much more prestigious job.

If James did have a gripe, it was that the PR women were terribly flighty, and wouldn’t stay still. It might have been a strategy, as with herds of gazelles, for the constant movement made it very difficult to pick any one of them off. James would have liked to talk some more with Kate, who had a very pretty upturned nose and lived in a part of Southwark that James had particular knowledge of, but instead he found himself engrossed with Isabelle, who wore a turquoise ribbon in her hair and whose sister had been at the London School of Economics at the same time as him, but in fact he ended up drinking wine with Miranda who had bright pink lipstick and an old boyfriend who lived in Leicester.

But then, quite suddenly, Miranda disappeared, and he was back talking with Kate for a minute, before she abruptly left to do something critical to the functioning of the event, and he found himself alone with Felix. At that moment a grey-haired, small-faced man in a navy-blue suit strode into the middle of the room and people clapped their hands. He was the Managing Director of the publishing company and the host of the evening, though he seemed to be of little consequence and probably wasn’t even that rich.

It appeared that two novels were getting launched that night, in order to maximise publicity and reduce costs. James tried to concentrate, but the gin and the red wine were now mingling unhappily in his blood, and he felt light-headed and hot-faced. There weren’t even any crisps. Instead, Isabelle handed him a sheet of paper with biographical details of the writers, both of whom were now standing alongside the Managing Director, beaming out indiscriminate smiles and displaying approximately the right quantities of exuberance, humility and ironic detachment.

The first to be introduced was Amelia Zhang-Montel. James nodded in silent appreciation: she was an ethnic masterpiece, a perfect synthesis of the most physically attractive, culturally revered and economically dynamic nations in the world. She had a Chinese mother and Franco-Jewish father, and had been raised in New York and educated in Cambridge, Paris and Berkeley. Even at a distance, James could immediately see all of that. She was small and preposterously pretty, with honey skin, shiny dark hair, an impish nose and unnerving green eyes.

Lucian Woodward was more conventionally attractive – a large, dramatic young man with diabolical black hair and thick, tilted eyebrows. He was wearing crude jeans and an open-necked, white linen shirt. His father was a professor of philosophy with a logical paradox named after him, and his mother was the vice-president of an investment bank that had recently destabilised Indonesia’s economy.

Standing at the back of the room, James felt himself becoming small-minded. As ever, the major problem was not so much where they had come from, their patronage, the cost of their education, or even their talents, but their
age
. Both of the writers were comfortably under thirty. What the fuck, thought James with a surprising amount of bitterness, could they possibly be writing about? Weren’t novelists meant to possess a treasury of insights in matters relating to the needs and failings of human beings? Surely, for all their accomplishments, they hadn’t had the time to accumulate this wisdom, to have experienced the necessary defeats and disappointments?

The answer became apparent once Amelia began reading from her novel, for the protagonists weren’t actually humans. Instead, they were nymphs – magical woodland beings who lived in a mystical kingdom. Driven out of their forest by timber cutters, a group of them sought shelter in the nearest town where they were immediately hailed by some as angels to be worshipped, while others branded them as demons and demanded they be destroyed. The crux of the problem was that the qualities for which they were most revered – their beauty, outlandish clothing, the affection they inspired in children and their warnings about the weather – were exactly the ones for which they were also reviled. Amelia read some extracts from the opening chapters, and wouldn’t say what happened, though James suspected it ended very badly for the nymphs.

Amelia explained that it was based on a traditional Catalan fairy tale, but obviously it wasn’t meant to be a children’s story. Nor, as far as James could tell, did it seem particularly allegorical, which was as far as his powers of literary analysis and hard-won Grade B in A level English could stretch. Her book wasn’t about the destruction of the environment or the banality of Western monotheism – it really did just seem to be about some nymphs.

Lucian’s book,
Sexheads
, sounded more straightforward. It was about conjoined triplet brothers, who all survive a pioneering operation to separate them performed by a religious mystic, only for their minds to have miraculously fused, cursing them with a permanent psychic connection. As a result, all psycho-sexual experiences and ordeals were shared, however far apart they were. Their father, just before committing suicide, placed them across the world’s continents, so they only knew one another through their respective sexual encounters, with the additional complication that one of the brothers was an unhappily married heterosexual, the second a promiscuous homosexual and the third a sado-masochist and convicted murderer.

James bought a copy of each book from Kate and Miranda, who were now managing a makeshift sales counter with very little efficiency but high spirits. It cost him thirty pounds, but if nothing else, he now had some books on his shelves other than
The Lord of the Rings
and the sixth edition of
Principles and Practice of Town Planning
. Felix called Lucian over, and at once he crossed the room to join them, his shirt cuffs flapping and his thick arms outstretched. He was tall, almost the same height as James, but with the volume and force of personality to go with it.

‘James, this is Lucian. We used to work together, until he persuaded himself that his talents would be better applied elsewhere, and that what he really needed to do was reduce his annual income by three-quarters.’

Lucian smiled, a handsome, generous, smile. He was aggressively unshaven, with dark hair that seemed to be ripening across his jaw even as he spoke, craftily counter-balanced by long eyelashes and a chunky silver earring.

‘And what do you do?’ he said, turning to James. His voice was deep and stupendously upper class – he had not yet learnt to smudge his consonants or shorten his vowels.

‘I’m a planner,’ said James.

‘Ah, like Felix. That’s great,’ said Lucian. ‘Some of the most brilliant people I know are planners. Are you at the same agency?’

‘No, sorry, I’m a different kind of planner. I’m a town planner.’

‘Really? That’s great,’ said Lucian.

But Lucian’s attention was now being taken by a woman who had approached them without any need for stealth or courtesy. She had small round glasses on the end of her nose and a tidy bob of dark hair, but was otherwise dressed like a prostitute, with a scarlet blouse, tiny lime-green skirt and spectacular red leather boots. She was called Louise, she was a literary critic for a national newspaper and, at this stage in Lucian’s career, it was more significant if she liked him than if he liked her. They embraced without artifice, and with only a moment’s hesitation. It was almost inconceivable that they hadn’t slept together.

‘Louise, I’m so pleased you came,’ said Lucian. ‘I was worried you wouldn’t make it.’

‘Of course! I wasn’t going to miss this one. Sorry I got here so late. I had to show my face at some tedious awards thing.’

‘Better leave him to it,’ said Felix to James. ‘He’s made his career choice, and is now undertaking his professional responsibilities.’

Amelia joined them. Close up, her charms and talents were even greater than James had guessed. She looked, and she probably got this a lot, like one of her nymphs – a slender, precious being not of the material world. She had beautiful transnational manners, and made a point of introducing herself to each of them in turn, as if she really wanted to speak to everyone as much as she did to Louise. And so, by way of retaliation, James made a point of
not
talking to her or asking her to sign his book. It was a personal victory over her precocious success and beauty. Maybe, in years to come, after she had won the Booker Prize and become famous, he might be able to construct a memory in which he had snubbed her.

James turned to Felix. ‘I can see that there is a literary scene,’ he said, ‘and that it works with its own structure and hierarchies. And I can also see that people might get into it. But I don’t think it’s really for me. And another thing: how does anyone make a living from it?’

‘I agree, that is something of a mystery,’ said Felix. ‘People used to write books in order to make money. But now I think it is almost completely the other way round.’

Sensing that those with the highest status and net worth were coalescing into a single group, Felicity and the Managing Director came over. James, making the same observation, crossed to the other side of the room. But by now the public relations team had scattered for good. Their work was done, their objectives secured and the event would have to be considered a success, even James could see that. But without them, with nothing other than writers and journalists to speak to, it seemed a bit forlorn. Two South Asian women appeared and started to clear away the tables.

‘Well,’ said Felix, who also seemed to have given up. ‘Mission accomplished. You have now spent an evening in the company of the metropolitan liberal elite. And what’s interesting is how little you took to them.’

‘Or them to me,’ said James.

‘Oh I wouldn’t say that – the PR girls adored you,’ said Felix. ‘But at times like this, we should always remember the Dalai Lama: when you lose, don’t lose the lesson.’