Oedipus Snark also looked irritated. He had no objection to the waiter’s taking his order first—indeed he rather expected it, being an MP and being in the public eye. What he objected to was Barbara’s choosing exactly the same courses as he had. Had she no imagination? Or was she trying to be like him? That really annoyed him. He could understand, of course, why somebody should wish to imitate him, but he did not like it to be so obvious. I shall have to get rid of her, he thought; she’s going to have to go.
“I read something interesting about scallops the other day,” Barbara remarked. “Did you know that the best scallops are those that are hand-picked by divers? Apparently the other ones are sucked up by great vacuum cleaners and that bruises the scallop—ruins it, they say.”
Oedipus nodded. He was thinking of a new research assistant he had met in the House of Commons library. She had certainly been hand-picked, he thought, as opposed to being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. She was currently working for another MP but that little difficulty could be dealt with easily enough. And if she came to work for him, then he could get rid of Jenny and Barbara at one stroke, neatly inserting this new girl into the roles occupied by both of them. It would be a perfect solution—not only more convenient and entertaining, but cheaper too.
“I think perhaps we should ask them where they get their scallops from,” Barbara said.
Oedipus waved a hand in the air. “The fishmonger, I expect.” He looked at her. “You’re not turning into one of these people who bang on about food miles, are you?”
Barbara frowned. “I don’t bang on about anything, Oedipus. But there is some point to the food miles argument. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the fresh beans in our local supermarket should come from East Africa?”
“Not really,” he said. “Farmers there have to sell their produce. And if we didn’t buy it, then we’d be taking the food out of their mouths rather than putting it into ours. If you see what I mean.”
“I’m all for free trade,” said Barbara. “But think of the fuel it takes to airlift a sack of beans from Kenya to London.”
Oedipus shrugged. “Everything’s wrong,” he said. “The whole way we order our affairs is wrong.”
Barbara reached for a piece of bread. “At least you can do something about it,” she said. “You’re in Parliament.”
Oedipus erupted into sudden laughter. “Parliament? What’s Parliament got to do with it?”
“Everything, I would have thought.”
“Oh, Barbara, my dear,” said Oedipus Snark. “Parliament decides nothing. I have no illusions about that. We’re voting fodder—a sort of press conference audience for the Prime Minister at Question Time. We’re more or less instructed to boo or shout. Parliament controls nobody. We’re thrown a few scraps of symbolic power from time to time, but the Government, in the shape of the Prime Minister and his close allies, decides everything. Look at the way our constitution has been changed. Just like that—no real consultation. Nothing.”
“I thought—” began Barbara.
“And then there’s Brussels,” Oedipus went on. “Brussels decides our fate to a very large extent. But do we actually vote for the people who make the decisions over there? Answer: no. And are they accountable to us? Again the answer is no.”
Barbara absorbed all this. “So why are you in politics if you can’t do anything?”
Oedipus fingered his tie. “It’s an agreeable career,” he said. “And it gives most of the people in it a sense of belonging, and purpose too, I suppose. But let’s not delude ourselves as to what one person can do. Even somebody like me.”
Barbara decided to change the subject. “I’ve had a very trying week,” she said. “A lot of stress.”
Oedipus smiled blandly. He did not really care very much what sort of week Barbara had had; in fact, he did not care at all. But if she wanted to talk, then he supposed that he could at least provide an ear for her to pour her troubles into. Silly woman.
“Do tell me,” he said. “Difficult colleagues again? Un-reasonable publishers refusing to publish your pet authors?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. Rather the opposite, in fact. You see, I’ve had somebody come to see me with a sure-fire, copper-bottomed best seller. Fabulous story. Great pace. A tour de force if ever there was one.”
She saw a flicker of interest cross Oedipus’s face. At least he sees me now, she thought.
“And?” he asked.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” said Barbara. “The author is difficult—but then so are all authors, without exception. He has his notions and he only wants to place it with the publisher of his choice. Our author is determined to try to get this particular publisher—he seems to care nothing for the suggestions I’ve made. He wants to go for this completely unsuitable high-end literary publisher.”
“So what are you going to do?” asked Oedipus.
“I’m going to have to sit tight for six months,” said Barbara. “The author is off on retreat somewhere and doesn’t want me to do anything until he comes back. So I sit on this fabulous idea and watch it gather dust.”
Oedipus watched her; he was thinking. “Tell me about this idea,” he said. “I’ll let you know whether it’ll run the way you say it will.”
32. The Yeti Writes
“WELL, it’s what you might call a biographical thriller,” said Barbara Ragg. “It’s a new category. But it’s going to be big. As big as The Da Vinci Code was. Ever since The Da Vinci Code was so successful, publishers have been looking out for something that will do the same thing. Code books. The uncovering of secrets. Masons. Rosicrucians. And so on.”
“No accounting for taste,” said Oedipus Snark.
“You read The Da Vinci Code?”
He shook his head. “Far too busy,” he said, and then added, “constituency business, you see.”
Barbara Ragg broke off a piece of her bread roll and buttered it carefully. “I’m not saying that it was great literature. But it kept enough people riveted. And from our point of view as agents—not that we were the agents in question—it did the trick. It made millions of pounds. Millions. Even for the agents.”
“I can understand why you’re looking for the next thing,” said Oedipus Snark. Millions of pounds: What would I do with millions of pounds? he wondered. Well, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here in the Mermaid Inn in Rye talking to poor old Barbara Ragg. Paris perhaps. An agreeable little pied-à-terre on the Île de la Cité, perhaps, or near the Parc Monceau. Or an apartment in Manhattan, upper seventies, perhaps, East Side. Friends to match. Live in London, of course, but hop over to New York once a month for a few days. See what’s on at the Met. Take a few friends. Perfect.
“Of course,” said Barbara, “you can’t repeat things. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. So all those ‘me too’ manuscripts that followed the Code ended up doing pretty miserably.”
She was warming to her theme. “And the same goes for authors. Some of them have one book in them—just one—and they’re never going to be able to write anything else.”
“Like God,” said Oedipus.
She looked at him quizzically.
“He wrote the Bible, didn’t he? But he never really followed up with anything quite so successful.”
“I was being serious.”
He smiled. “So was I. But tell me about this author of yours. I’m intrigued.”
Barbara buttered the rest of her bread roll. “He’s a first-time author,” she said. “He came to us out of the blue. We get all sorts of manuscripts sent to us. The vast majority are impossible, of course, but every so often you get something really good. It’s like mining diamonds. You go through thousands of tons of kimberlite for one little diamond. And every so often, among millions of tons of the stuff, along comes a great big stone that gets De Beers jumping up and down with excitement. Well, that’s what it’s like with manuscripts. One beautiful idea among the tons of dross.”
Oedipus Snark had left his roll untouched. Although he was trying not to show it, he was fascinated by what Barbara was saying. This was the sort of thing that he liked: better—surer—than looking for the next high performers on the alternative stock markets. You could waste months of your time doing that and at the end of the day find that you simply could not compete with the young men in the City, with their access to whispers and rumours.
“Go on,” he said evenly. “This person from out of the blue.”
“It landed on my desk,” said Barbara. “We have somebody who gives things a preliminary read. She sends most of the stuff right back, or at least sends it back after we’ve let it sit in the office for three weeks or so. One wouldn’t want the authors to think that we’d rejected them out of hand.”
Oedipus raised an eyebrow. “So she said it had the makings?”
“She did. In fact, she said that this was the one. I remember her precise words. ‘We must write to him and say thank you.’ That’s what she said. Do you realise how rarely that happens in publishing? The last author who got anything like that was Wilbur Smith—you know, the man who writes about deeds of derring-do in Africa. Elephants and ancient treasure. Very exciting stuff. People love reading him. Sells millions. When he sent his first manuscript off to the publishers he was a complete unknown. He parcelled it up and sent it off—this was still the days of typewriters, of course, and it was maybe the only copy. Back came a telegram in no time at all: ‘Thank you for this wonderful book. Letter follows.’”
“Nice,” said Oedipus Snark.
Barbara agreed. “Most of the time, when an author writes to an agent or a publisher to find out about the fate of a manuscript, he gets a reply saying, ‘Your manuscript is under active consideration.’ You know what that means, Oedipus? It means: We’re actively looking for it.”
Oedipus said nothing. It was a useful phrase, and he would have to use it himself in his own letters. “The point you raised with me is under active consideration.” It was very nice.
Barbara continued her story. “Well, I took this manuscript home with me. I didn’t look forward to reading it, I’m afraid—I hate reading manuscripts but I had to do it. So I made myself a stiff gin and tonic and sat down with this great pile of paper. I hadn’t even read the title at that stage. All I had seen was the name of the author. Errol Greatorex. Not a good start. Names are important in the book business, you know. You can have one author called Stan Jones, or whatever, who writes exactly the same sort of book as, shall we say, somebody called Jodi de Balzac. Whose book makes its mark? Not Stan Jones’s, I’m afraid. So we had a bit of a problem with Errol Greatorex. It was the Errol, of course—the Greatorex bit was fine. Full of literary possibilities.
“I sat down with my gin and Mr. Greatorex’s manuscript and looked at the title. The Autobiography of a Yeti.”
Oedipus Snark’s eyes widened. “The Abominable Snowman?”
“The very same. The yeti who lives up in the high forests of the Himalayas. On the edge of the treeline. That yeti.”
It was at this point that the waiter returned with the scallops. But neither of the diners paid much attention to the plate of elegantly served seafood that was placed before them. Barbara’s eyes were bright with the memory of the moment when she first began to read the manuscript. And Oedipus, for his part, was thinking: What if I took over this amazing story? What if I was the one to reveal this to the world? Me. Oedipus Snark. And something else crossed his mind too. Money.
33. “An hairy man” (sic)
OEDIPUS WAS NOT one to show an overt interest in anything very much but Barbara Ragg could tell that he was acutely interested in Errol Greatorex’s manuscript. This pleased her; indeed, she basked in his attention, a rare experience for her. At least now he’s taking me seriously, she said to herself as she tackled the last scraps of scallop.
“The scallops were just perfect,” she commented, dabbing at her mouth with her table napkin. “They must have been hand-picked rather than sucked up, don’t you think?”
“Very possibly,” said Oedipus. “Perhaps some brave Scottish diver went down into the waters off Mull or somewhere like that. Tremendously cold, no doubt. But tell me, this Errol Greatorex …”
Barbara was enjoying herself. “I wonder if they dive with air tanks?” she mused. “Or do they just hold their breath and swim down? There’s something called free-diving, you know. I read about it.”
“Maybe. But tell me, this manuscript …”
Barbara ignored the incipient question. “They go down to an amazing depth, you know, these free-divers. Two hundred feet and more in some cases. All with one lungful of air.”
“Yes, yes. But I don’t think that these scallop divers …”
“There’s something called the mammalian diving reflex,” Barbara continued. She had listened to him for so long; now he could listen to her for a change. “It makes it easier for your system to work on very little oxygen. You can get better and better at it if you train yourself. It’s quite amazing.”
Oedipus pushed his plate aside. “I’m not really all that interested in free-diving, Barbara,” he said. “This novel of yours: that’s what I want to discuss.”
“But there’s not much to discuss,” said Barbara calmly. “It’s just the story of a yeti’s life.” She paused. “And it’s not fiction, you know.”
She watched Oedipus’s expression. He looked mocking. “You mean he claims to be a yeti?”
“No, of course not. Greatorex is not a yeti name. I would have thought that you would know that.” She paused. I have just said something extremely witty, she said to herself. But Oedipus Snark just stared at her. “He’s called it an autobiography,” she continued, “because the yeti told him his story. It’s an ‘as told to’ book. You know, the sort that pop singers and footballers write. They’re just like yetis, in their way. Everybody knows that they can’t do it themselves and use ghost writers. Hence the ‘as told to’ books.”
Oedipus shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. The yeti doesn’t exist.”
Barbara leaned forward slightly. “How do you know, Oedipus? How do you know the yeti doesn’t exist?”
“For the same reason I know that Father Christmas doesn’t exist,” he said. “Or the Tooth Fairy.”
“Or Higgs’s boson?”
Oedipus Snark’s eyes flashed. If Barbara imagines she can pull particle physics on me, he thought, she’s in for a surprise.
“Higgs boson?” he snapped. “There’s mathematics for that. Where is the mathematics for the Tooth Fairy? And anyway, what about the W and Z bosons?”
Barbara wondered whether she could ask for more scallops. “The W and Z bosons?” she repeated.
Oedipus held her gaze. “Yes.”
“I haven’t got the first clue,” she said. “I’m not a physicist, Oedipus. You tell me about them. What are they, these bosons?”
Oedipus waved a hand in the air. “Some other time,” he said. “But where’s the evidence for the existence of yetis?”
Barbara looked at her empty plate. She would buy some scallops when she got back to London and eat them privately in her kitchen, with a glass of white wine and Mozart playing in the background. It would be nice to be married, but could married people do that sort of thing? “There’s some evidence,” she said. “Sightings. Big footprints in the snow. Quite a bit of this comes from perfectly levelheaded people.”
Oedipus laughed. “Listen, light can play tricks. People see all sorts of things—ghosts, UFOs, the face of Elvis in their pizzas and so on. If you believed half of what people claim to have seen, you’d be very badly informed.” He paused. “And as for footprints in the snow, an ordinary footprint gets much bigger as the snow melts around the edges. See?”
Barbara shrugged. “Well, you can believe what you will. I shall remain agnostic on the subject. All I know is that Errol’s book is absolutely riveting. And it will sell. In fact, I’m prepared to bet that it will be pretty much number on
e on the lists. It’s absolutely compelling.”
Oedipus became placatory. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to rubbish your book. It’s just I doubt if it can be true. I’m sure that it’s a great read—as fiction. Look, why don’t you tell me a bit about it? How did he meet the yeti?”
Barbara sat back while the waiter served the second course. “Errol Greatorex is an American travel writer. He mostly writes for magazines but was working on a coffee-table book on the Himalayas when all this happened.”
“What happened?” asked Oedipus.
“His encounter,” said Barbara. “He had an encounter.”
Oedipus rolled his eyes upwards. “The effect of thin air,” he said. “The oxygen-starved brain hallucinates.”
“Not when you’re acclimatised,” snapped Barbara. “Errol had been there for several weeks. He would be unlikely to be hallucinating at that stage.”
“All right,” said Oedipus grudgingly. “So he had an encounter. What exactly happened?”
Barbara sat back in her chair. “He was staying in a Buddhist monastery up in Nepal. It was a very remote place. Can you picture it? Prayer flags fluttering in the wind. Bare green pastures ringed by mountains. Grey rocky outcrops. The chant of monks hanging in the air.”
She waited for him to respond. He nodded.
“One of the monks came to him one morning and said that he wanted to show him something very unusual. Most of the monks spoke no English, but this one had a few words and was able to make himself understood. He said that it was not something that he would show to anybody; Errol Greatorex had been kind to him, he explained, and he trusted him.
“This monk led him off to the back of the monastery. They had a whole lot of buildings—it was all rather higgledy-piggledy. One of these buildings was a sort of classroom; he had walked past it once or twice and had seen a class of boys being instructed in religious texts. There were no schoolboys there at the time, but Greatorex saw the teacher sitting at a desk apparently marking a pile of little school notebooks. For a while the teacher did not appear to notice his visitors, but then he looked up from his task and Greatorex saw his face for the first time.”
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