I was still thinking about him when I got back to the office. It was 3.15, absurdly late by my standards (on most days I buy a sandwich from round the corner and eat it at my desk), but we’d put the pages to bed the day before: the annual stunt whereby celebrity names (including the odd author) recommend their favourite titles had kept us there till after ten at night. Now the pressure was off, and with Leonie also out for lunch I’d not needed to rush from mine. Indeed, she still wasn’t back when I sat down at my screen and logged on. There were no interesting emails, just the usual stuff – an editor wondering why a ‘glitteringly authentic’ first novel she’d published in August hadn’t yet been reviewed by us (or anyone else, probably); a poet submitting three new odes (his word) from his Cornish Megalith sequence; a twitcher from Chipping Norton objecting to a passing reference to Manx shearwaters in a book review the previous week (‘everyone knows they migrate to the South Atlantic in winter’). It was too early to start laying out next week’s pages – none of the copy had come in. I spent an hour in the book cupboard instead.
It’s more a glass cubicle than a cupboard, but the floor-to-ceiling shelves close it off from the rest of the office and if you shut the door, which has frosted glass, you’re invisible from outside. The rest of the office is open-plan, which makes the cupboard an object of envy and nudge-nudge comment. To my knowledge, no sexual activity has ever occurred in there, but colleagues have sometimes slipped in clutching a handkerchief or asked to borrow it for clandestine phone calls. We’ve taken to locking the door when we leave, but during the day it stays open, and there are always journalists who drift in, ‘for a browse’, which Leonie finds annoying (‘we’re not a fucking bookshop’), all the more so when, as invariably happens, the browser emerges with a review copy and offers to write a piece, an offer she’ll politely decline (‘ah, sorry, we’ve already commissioned someone’), then ridicule when they’ve departed (‘why the fuck does the fucking environment correspondent think he’s qualified to review the new Rushdie?’), unless the book is chick lit or military history, in which case she’ll say no thank, but they’re welcome to keep it. I’m easier-going than Leonie, but I didn’t want to be intruded on that afternoon and made a point of closing the door behind me.
I love it in the book cupboard – the half-light, the monkish silence, the smell of freshly printed pages – but it’s hard not to feel chastened. You pick up a novel, say, and think of where it began, with a man or woman sitting alone in a room, and of the work that’s gone into it since (the agenting, copy-editing, proofreading, designing and printing), and of the work still to come putting the word out and getting copies into bookshops, and of how any review you run, however brief, will matter hugely to the author, regardless of sales, which ought to weigh heavily on you, except that several dozen other novels are also coming out the same week, all of them in front of you in the cupboard, and if a glance at the dust jacket, or rapid sampling of the first page, suggests it’s not a book worth bothering with, you put it in the reject pile without even a twinge of conscience. Does that sound cynical? Maybe. But we’ve space to cover only a tiny fraction of the books published each year. And those we do cover have to be worthwhile journalistically, with either the author or the subject matter sparking an interesting review.
That afternoon, in the space of ten minutes, I put forty-three books in the reject crate, seasonal tosh mostly, or books that shouldn’t have been sent to us in the first place, since anyone familiar with our pages knows that we don’t review books on DIY, pet care, yoga, self-help and how to make your first million. That left only five books worth commissioning reviews on, all due out in January, one by a contemporary of mine at Bristol, Ed McKeane, whose last novel had been longlisted for the Booker and whom Leonie rated highly, as I might have too and indeed briefly did, since he seemed a good guy despite his public-school patina, someone who might become a friend, I thought, until he humiliated me in a first-year seminar for my pronunciation of the word ‘rhetoric’ – I knew what it meant, but I’d never heard it said aloud and put the stress on the second syllable, an error which Ed highlighted by leaping into the class discussion straight after me and repeating the word, with a stress on the first syllable and a smirk across the table. Now he was smirking at me again, from a dust jacket, twenty-odd years older but with his sheen and cleverness undimmed. I’d have loved to dump him in the reject crate, but Leonie had already set up a reviewer and I’d a duty to send it out.
‘There you are,’ Leonie said, pushing the door open as I stapled the Jiffy bag with Ed’s novel in it. With her black hair and dark brown eyes, she can look eerily pallid, but for once her cheeks were pink. ‘Good lunch?’ she asked before I could.
‘Yes. Not long back. I was seeing Robert Pope.’
‘God, Robert Pope. I’d forgotten about him. You should get him to do something for us. He’s not a bad writer, for a poet.’
‘He’s rather picky,’ I said. ‘And less keen on us since we trashed his last collection.’
‘We?’
‘Marcus Downe.’
‘Remind me.’
‘Long piece back in the spring. Even by Marcus’s standards it was harsh.’
‘What’s he expect, veneration?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘He’ll get over it. We should bung him something and offer lots of space. What’s in the Jiffy bag?’ she said, narrowing her eyes.
‘The new Ed McKeane. For Daphne.’
‘Sorry. Change of plan. Daphne read the proof and hated it. I’ve asked Bridget instead.’
‘I thought Bridget did his last one.’ I knew Bridget had done his last one. She’d called Ed the new Graham Greene. We try to avoid reviewers covering the same author twice, especially if they’ve been fulsome the first time. Bridget was like a Labrador pup: whoever the author, she jumped up and licked them all over.
‘Everyone else is too busy or already reviewing it,’ Leonie said. ‘What else has come in?’
‘Rubbish time of year. But I’ve found a few things. There’s the new –’
‘Actually, I’ve a couple of calls to make. Can we leave it till later?’
‘Sure.’
‘Or tomorrow, definitely.’
Leonie’s not a procrastinator, but she likes to do things on her terms. By tomorrow, she’d have looked at the books I’d saved from the reject crate and decided who should review them – she wouldn’t send them out before consulting me, but any discussion would be token. I’m not complaining. She’s the one responsible for the books pages. And they’re good pages, sharper and livelier than our rivals’. But if I were ambitious, I’d feel frustrated by how little commissioning I get to do. And if I were thinner-skinned, I’d feel slighted by her lack of regard for any suggestions I make.
The upside is that she has children and – unlike the other (mostly male) department heads – doesn’t believe in us working after six unless we have to. It’s a mixed blessing to be home before the children go to bed. But I usually manage it.
‘What a narcissist,’ Marie said.
We’d finally got Jack and Noah off, though with Noah you couldn’t be sure about the finally: he was two now and capable of sleeping through, but as often as not he’d wake about an hour after we’d put him down and demand that one of us sit with him till he went off again, so dinner tended to be a quick affair, timed so that we’d just about digested whatever it was (tonight, tortellini with pesto and parmesan, plus green salad), before whoever’s turn it was to deal with him disappeared upstairs, often never to return, since there’s nothing like lying in bed with your infant son after a meal and glass of wine to send you to sleep, even if it’s not yet ten o’clock and even if, since Marie became pregnant again, we’d given up the wine, she for health reasons and me out of solidarity.
‘I took it as a compliment,’ I said.
‘I’m sure you did. But it’s some creepy power thing. He wants to keep a hold over you when he’s gone.’
‘He trust
s me to look after his interests.’
‘Which are what? He’ll be dead.’
‘He’s his reputation to think of.’
‘It’s all he ever does think of. Himself and all things pertaining to. Never Jill.’
Marie had met Jill only once, at a small dinner for the launch of Rob’s fourth collection. She wasn’t much more acquainted with Rob – my relationship with her goes back only a decade, by which point I was seeing less of him. But that dinner was enough to convince her that she’d got the dynamic of their marriage sussed. And that Rob was even more vain, pretentious and misogynistic than she’d feared. She might have forgiven him for that, up to a point, since several other male writers she’d come across were no better. But she couldn’t forgive him for neglecting Jill, who, as Marie saw it, he’d left on her own that evening, at the far end of the table from him, and who looked lost, miserable and bored until Marie swapped places with someone and came to her rescue. It wasn’t that she especially warmed to Jill. Their lives and careers had little in common. Marie works with children who have speech problems and she spent the evening struggling to coax words out of Jill. None of which she held against her. It was all Rob’s fault, for being a selfish bastard.
‘I know you’ve reservations about Rob …’ I said.
‘Reservations!’
‘He’s an old friend. I couldn’t say no.’
‘It’s your funeral.’
‘All I’ll have to do is keep him in print. And see that any royalties go to Jill.’
‘Jill won’t have crossed his mind. He treats her as if she’s of no account.’
‘Of no account but an accountant – I like that.’
Rob used to joke about being the only poet in history married to an accountant (‘Other poets have muses or mistresses, I have a mathematician’). The word wasn’t quite accurate. At university Jill had read geography, and her job as CFO to an environmental charity was more about managing people than managing money. But she’d a talent for numbers: that much was true.
‘Whatever else,’ Marie said, helping herself to the last soggy parcel of tortellini, ‘I know you love me. Jill’s never had that reassurance from Rob.’
‘You don’t know what goes on in bed.’
‘Does anything go on in bed? They’ve not had kids.’
‘I don’t think they wanted kids.’
‘Jill did.’
‘Is that what she told you?’
‘She didn’t need to. I could tell.’
Marie sees the world in black and white, whereas I like to think I’m more nuanced, even if that doesn’t impress her (‘Nuance is for people too chicken to say what they think’). She’s quick to pass judgement and never fails to overstate the case. But she’s also rarely wrong. If her instincts tell her something, there’s no dislodging it, and invariably subsequent events will prove her right: that teenage boy whose inertia everyone attributed to adolescent torpor was addicted to skunk; the husband who she noticed playing with his wedding ring over dinner was having an affair; that babysitter she wouldn’t use despite all the friends who swore by her was stealing from them. Maybe that’s why I needed Marie, to give me a handle on life. She knew next to nothing about the world I moved in, but when something was bothering me (one of the subs being uppity, say, or the editor leaning on me, while Leonie was on holiday, to get a book by a friend of his reviewed), she’d help me see my way round it and encourage me to make a stand. Perhaps that’s what marriage is about, once kids come along and there’s no time for sex or not the kind of sex you had at the beginning (a languorous run of repeats rather than coitus interruptus). I was no less attracted to Marie than I’d ever been: if she’d lines on her forehead and shadows under her eyes, so what? She was still Marie. Her belief in me helped me to believe in myself. And made me tougher and more resolute. Well named, she used to say about me: Matt as in doormat. These days I was less of a pushover.
Still, as far as Rob’s request went – his ‘demand’, as Marie put it – she thought I’d given in too easily.
‘He’s always been brutal about looking after himself. And when he’s dead, he’ll expect you to be brutal on his behalf.’
‘That could be thirty years from now.’
‘But it’ll be hanging over you.’
‘It might be fun.’
‘If sorting through his stuff is how you want to spend what little spare time you have, then fine. My only point is: you don’t owe him a thing. He wouldn’t do it for you.’
‘Actually, he said he would.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Why not?’
Why not? Except that on the one occasion Rob had been asked to help me, when my first and only novel came out, he had let me down. Officially, it was my publishers who asked him, when they sent a proof copy which they hoped he’d ‘endorse’ with a quote for the dust jacket. But he must have known it was me who suggested him. Rob’s reply, which my editor passed on to me with an accompanying ‘!!!’, was a lesson in how not to decline an invitation. He would like to help, it went, since I was ‘in effect’ an old student of his and we were good friends, but he doubted that praise from him would cut much ice, since he was a poet not a novelist, besides which he had an urgent deadline to meet (do poets have deadlines?), and since the events of the previous year (9/11) he had lost faith in the power of literature, on top of which he’d begun a set of onerous dental appointments for root canal work, all of which meant he wouldn’t be able to read the novel before it came out, so with regret he must decline. As Marie says, if you’re going to decline an invitation, give one excuse, not a hatful. A sentence was all we were after, which – since he’d seen parts of the novel in draft – would have taken far less time than the paragraph he’d written explaining why he couldn’t write it. But for the fact that two novelists from the same publishing house (close friends of the editor) had come up with puffs as good or better than anything Rob would have written, I might have been seriously offended. But in my virginal euphoria at getting a book published, I let it go, and felt right to have done so when, after a couple of lukewarm reviews appeared, Rob wrote a long letter to say how much he liked the book, which he’d now read twice, and proceeded to give a breakdown of what was good about it – ending the letter with a PS that read ‘By the way, your publishers asked me to give a quote, but I was suffering from depression at the time: apologies, now I’m feeling better of course I wish I had.’ Had he been suffering from depression? Marie would have dismissed that as bullshit. But I’d never told Marie about the episode, because it predated her, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her now.
‘Any pud?’ I said, rearranging the dishwasher before sticking our plates in – Marie might be wise about most things, but when it comes to stacking crockery and glassware so there’s an outside chance of it getting clean or remaining intact, she hasn’t a clue.
‘Since when do we have pud during the week?’
‘It’s been known.’
‘You had lunch out.’
‘I still feel hungry.’
‘There’s cheese. And a few grapes.’
‘Want some?’
‘A peppermint tea will do me.’ A cry floated down: Noah, bang on time. ‘I’ll have it upstairs.’
‘You don’t want me to see to him?’
‘I’d rather you cleared up.’
She kissed me on the cheek as she passed, and I watched her kick a balloon aside in the doorway. It was Jack’s latest fetish, since his fifth-birthday party three weeks previously: five balloons were to remain inflated at all times; if one of them burst or began to sag, another must take its place. The balloons added to the general clutter in our basement kitchen, which had seemed so spacious when we moved in. Everything seemed spacious after the Hackney flat, and though buying a house meant moving further out, to Wood Green, because no property nearer in was affordable, we revelled in the freedom: four storeys, three bedrooms and a forty-foot rear garden was more than we’d dared to h
ope for when we started looking, London property prices being what they are or have become. Luckily, the flat sold for more than we’d expected (Hackney was cool), and Marie’s parents met the shortfall on the mortgage with a £30,000 loan, one they didn’t seriously expect us to repay. We felt to be living in Arcadia – 41 Arcadian Gardens to be precise – and, with Jack just a baby, the house was far bigger than we needed. When Noah came along he slept with us at first, then moved in with Jack, which left the spare bedroom free to double as an office. But with a third child it would become the nursery, and any work Marie or I brought home would have to be done at the kitchen table. We’d cope – of course we’d cope. We loved living where we did, in a street whose inhabitants were so proud, old-fashioned or impoverished as to do their cleaning, gardening, childcare and dog-walking themselves, rather than hiring others to do it for them. But any space in the house was shrinking, and the clutter in the basement kitchen, which doubled as a playroom, shrunk it even more. Pre-children, clearing up meant little more than a quick wipe of the table and worktops. Now, to take a small sample of the tasks I found myself performing while the tea brewed and Marie quieted Noah upstairs, it meant picking up stray pieces of jigsaw puzzle and finding the right box to put them in; stowing the Lego back in the red crate and the alphabet cards in a transparent plastic bag; detaching Play-Doh from chair legs, and swabbing juice stains from seats; herding Jack’s five coloured balloons into a corner, while resisting the temptation to burst them, since bursting them might wake him and even if it didn’t would require that I blew up five more; and – because I was feeling especially virtuous or malicious, I’m not sure which – wiping the blackboard clear of the chalky purple giant depicted there, with the twiggy arms that came out of his ears and the nine toes on each of his feet.
The Executor Page 2
