Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The principal duty of an editorial assistant was to stick books into brown Jiffy Bags and mail them to a list, provided by Goodman, of journalists he knew. Once, Andy made the mistake of sending a copy of How To Make A Million By The Time You're 30 to a literary editor he had met at a party who had been vaguely encouraging of his ambitions. Goodman had intercepted the package with a streak of alacrity that Andy had not previously suspected in him. 'Utter waste of time. No one reviews our books. He'll take it straight down to Obelisk's.' Obelisk's - Andy learned from Angela, Carpe Diem's only other employee - was a bookshop in Vauxhall where critics traded in their review copies for cash. 'And next time,' Goodman said, carefully peeling off a stamp, 'be sure to send it second class.'

  After he had worked five months at Carpe Diem, Andy was promoted. Goodman was able to manipulate his face in such a way as to communicate the news that to be appointed a junior editor on the Guru List - Goodman would remain senior editor - was to have arrived at a significant rung on the ladder of Andy's ambition to run a general list: to settle the point, he was prepared to raise Andy's salary to PS18,000.

  'Let me tell you something in confidence about gurus, Andrew. One day you may apply the same rule to novelists, poets, biographers, maybe even to fishermen. Their most remarkable characteristic is that they benefit least from their own wisdom.'

  Goodman sketched out for Andy one of the lists that he was prone to making. It made for sober reflection:

  --Khalil Gibran ( The Prophet ), died of cirrhosis. 'A sponging and randy bore who couldn't open his mouth without telling a lie. He lied even about whether he liked to eat lobster.' Lobster, so Andy had gathered over his one and only lunch with Goodman at Wheeler's, being one of Goodman's favourite dishes.

  --Jim Fixx ( The Complete Book of Running ), died while jogging, of massive heart attack.

  --Dr Robert Atkins ( The Atkins Diet ), 258 lbs at time of death, clinically obese.

  --Morgan Scott Peck ( The Road Less Travelled ), womanising, alcoholic chain-smoker, unable to relate to his wives or children.

  'You are looking,' Goodman said in conclusion, 'at the most reliable bunch of losers that I have encountered in twenty-five years in publishing. And if you come across another, please tell me. As you'll discover in your new incarnation,' he said expansively, 'all human problems have a family resemblance.'

  Goodman's problems too, it turned out.

  Success in the self-help world, in which he was regarded as primus inter pares, had failed to bring Goodman the corresponding personal contentment that Andy had fully imagined himself to be on course to enjoy with Sophie. Goodman's unfulfilled desire, according to Angela, was to have a child. 'You want to know what makes him tick? Well, that's it.' But fatherhood had eluded him, despite a brace of marriages - to two loud, talkative women, both of whom had ended up in Vancouver - 'like every other lost soul I know'. His failure had had the effect of sapping his confidence with the opposite sex. These days when women pressed themselves on him, he talked in an increasingly exaggerated South African accent about his bad back and lack of money and watched the trails of dust as they drove away. But Goodman's childlessness was not a topic to be discussed, this after reaching a melancholy acceptance that the cause lay with him. Whatever illusions he peddled to others, he lacked none about himself. 'I abide by this rule,' he disclosed to Andy during their lunch at Wheeler's. 'If there's more than one thing wrong with you, it's in your head.'

  What went on in Goodman's head was sometimes a great deal less easy to read than his books.

  After five minutes, Goodman lifted his red face and said: 'How was your afternoon off? A funeral, wasn't it? No one close, I hope.' His eyes darkened as he narrowed them and Andy wondered if Goodman feared the sinister competition of Christianity.

  'An old teacher of mine.' But what he was thinking was that his life was over, too, and nothing remained but cold and rain as on every other February morning in London, always.

  Goodman rubbed his nose. 'One's teachers can be closer to us than our parents,' with the seriousness of someone contemplating whether there might not be the germ of a self-help book there.

  He picked up the A4 sheet that Angela had laid on his desk and scratched his cheek. 'As for your other request,' he went on, 'nobody likes to reward success more than I do. But let's look at the figures, shall we?'

  His eyes absorbed the list in his hand. He might have been a foreman of the jury charged with reading out a unanimous verdict of guilt.

  'Your last title was the Gladys Peak?'

  Andy nodded.

  'Here we are. 1001 Ways To Reach Nirvana ,' Goodman said sepulchrally. 'Only 284 sales through the till.'

  Before Andy could protest that it had not been his idea to commission Gladys Peak, an auctioneer's widow who lived near Goodman's weekend retreat in Fordingbridge, Goodman allowed himself a sharp intake of breath and looked up. 'Not to labour a point, Andrew, could you explain why I should pay you a penny extra at a time when I am losing a substantial sum because of you?'

  Leaning back: 'Now had you published a bestseller like How To Make A Million By The Time You're 30 . . . But 284 sales . . .' He put down the list and folded it along with Andy's dashed hopes into his in-tray. 'No, Andrew, not good. As I explained at the outset, what you are gaining here at Carpe Diem is experience - and what is better than that? Let's pluck a leaf from what we tell our readers. "Life isn't about getting, it's about learning to let go," eh?'

  That was Goodman all over: when you asked him for a salary increase, he asked you to think of the readers.

  In maintaining his flexible policy of despising his readers in the flesh, but also, when it suited him, of appealing to them in the abstract as grains of God, Goodman admitted no contradiction. Nor was anyone at Carpe Diem likely to contradict him. His readers had been there longer than Angela, who had less time for them even than Goodman. Andy could not forget the low throaty hiss that issued from Angela's lips when he asked if she could recommend to his sister the book he was stuffing into a Jiffy Bag. Angela had the disenchanted look in her eye of a black woman from Benin who was wondering why, if voodoo was so powerful, her family had been slaves for 400 years. 'Pah! If self-help books really worked, there wouldn't be so many miserable people.'

  But the door was opening and Goodman's arm was on his shoulder and he was giving Andy his pet smile again. 'Perhaps if your next book makes a splash we can return to the subject. What are you working on, by the way?'

  Andy stared at him vacantly. How would he feel when he got home and no one came up the stairs?

  'Ruth Challis,' he mumbled.

  'Ah, yes. I need corrected proofs by the end of today. Is that feasible?'

  'Yes . . . I think so.'

  'Good. That's all I want to know. You've got a lot on your plate. To which I regret I have added more. I've asked Angela to give you Enid Tansley's new manuscript. Oh, and another thing.'

  Andy waited.

  'You might get to work earlier in future . . .'

  And then Andy was out of the door, leaving Goodman pulling down the tie from the hook on the other side of it and grabbing his jacket and overcoat from the sofa, an infallible sign that he would shortly be on his way to a long lunch at Wheeler's.

  Andy's father, a pilot, would say that when an object or a situation is staring you in the face you do not always see it straight away. 'It's to do with the optic nerve being right at the back. You have to keep scanning the sky. If anything's dead ahead, you'll lose it for a sec - until it hits you.' When it came to Sophie and also to Rian Goodman, Andy had not had any peripheral vision.

  He returned to his office, tripped on a drawer that stuck out, and knocked over the mug that Angela had placed on his desk. He hunted about for something to soak up the coffee that was seeping into Ruth Challis's proofs. But the weight in his chest made it difficult to focus.

  The coffee was dripping onto the floor. He saw his future. Everything that from now on went wrong, he would blame on the fact that
Sophie was no longer in his life.

  He grabbed a spare roll from the toilet and began mopping.

  The damp pages were the work of Carpe Diem's leading manic depression guru. Goodman, untroubled by the necessity of having to read it, regarded her prose as 'highly enriched uranium'. The job of making the word of Ruth Challis flesh, of checking her spelling, facts and grammar, was Andy's, like so much else at Carpe Diem. The editorial, foreign rights and contract department - Angela looked at it every time she remembered to bring Andy a cup of her tongue-burning latte, a powdered liquid that bore no relation, either through the father's side or the mother's, to a coffee bean. Another example of Goodman's miserliness.

  Ruth Challis's soggy proofs brought to mind the wet newspapers that Andy's mother liked to plant her bulbs in. The coffee had stained the near-transparent paper, and print showed through from the pages beneath. Lines composed of words the wrong way round competed to be read with the lines that they obscured. The effect, heightened by granular streaks and brown bubbles, was of something in torment.

  Andy peeled off a page and it tore. He stacked the first half of the manuscript on the radiator to dry and began at Chapter Five, 'Giving Up Your Personal History'.

  The first line was vintage Challis: 'Refuse to allow any thoughts based on your past to defile you.'

  Glumly, he checked the paragraph against the original typescript. Then he took a sharp pencil and crossed out the l in 'defile' and made it 'define'.

  Perhaps his mother and sister had been right. There never had been a future with Sophie. Perhaps he had only fallen for her because she reminded him of someone else.

  On his return from his summer holiday in Canada when he was ten, Andy told his sister that he had seen their father embracing a strange woman at the airport.

  'What was her name?'

  'Lynn.'

  'What does she do?'

  'She works as a pilot in Moose Jaw.'

  His sister looked at him. 'You're making this up.'

  He could see that the woman's laugh made his father happy.

  'What did she look like?' pressed his sister a year later, by which time their father was living in Canada.

  'I've told you.'

  'Again.'

  Andy had not formed a proper impression. Only from the back. Her amber hair gathered in a tight ponytail. Oval face. And that laugh.

  'She wasn't in uniform. She had a blue turtleneck and a black shawl over her arm.'

  But he remembered where he stood, just as he remembered the position of certain sentences on a page. Near the conveyor belt, watching the mauve knapsack that his mother had bought in Salisbury shudder towards him. While opposite, in dislocated words that he would not be able to relate to himself or make sense of until years later, in the Polish Club, they talked.

  'There's my bag,' unlocking their eyes.

  'I'd better go,' muttered his father.

  She touched the edge of his mouth, moved away.

  When Andy asked him who she was, this woman whose wrists had encircled his neck, who caused him to look back at her so yearningly, his father took him by the arm and hugged him close, crushing the present from his wife, some pressed snowdrops from their garden wrapped in blue tissue paper in Andy's shirt pocket, and said, the first time he had spoken to him as a grown-up, 'Someone I used to fly with.' He wore a dark green polo shirt and striped socks and was quite out of breath.

  Someone he used to fly with!

  He grabbed Andy's knapsack and they went out to the car. A tube of cream on the front seat and a packet of dried pears, which he offered to Andy as he rubbed something into the corners of his mouth. His face had a grey boiled look. But his eyes were abnormally clear.

  Shortly after five o'clock, Andy stretched two thick rubber bands around Learn To Make Your Black Dog Your Guide-Dog and carried it down the corridor to Goodman's office.

  In the slumber produced by his reorientating lunch at Wheeler's, the owner of Carpe Diem lay across one of his sofas, snoring.

  'Anything urgent?' asked Angela, appearing at the door and impeding Andy's view of a lobster-fattened waistline.

  'He wanted this as soon as possible.'

  Angela, irritated and yet partly calmed by Goodman's snoring, took the manuscript. 'I'll see he gets it.' Then looked at Andy in a curious way. 'What?'

  Only now did it hit him. How would he get through the next couple of months? He had needed the extra income to settle a sheaf of bills, not to mention the rent outstanding on his flat.

  'I don't know how to say this -'

  In a shredding voice: 'You need to borrow more money.'

  4

  A NDY DID NOT RECALL much about the rest of that week. Goodman's refusal to raise his salary was of a part with the mess that his life had become since missing Furnivall's funeral.

  He did not eat. He could not sleep. Pimples sprouted on his chin.

  Everything was unbearable: the office; the instant coffee that Angela brought him out of a sense of pity; the lock on the front door that did not work - he pictured his landlord's response: 'I call it: I'm keeping the lock buggered like that until you've paid me'; and once he did manage to gain entrance, his flat strewn with envelopes - each stuffed with another rejection from a publisher or crimson reminder from London Electricity or refusal from the bank to extend his overdraft; the fridge that needed repairing; the sound of Marilyn Manson thudding down from the floor above; his bedroom with the chunks of plaster missing from the ceiling.

  Then there were the holes in his vocabulary. He fell asleep counting the words Sophie had ruined for him, that he would never be able to use. Sophie , model , chicken milanesa , Cintra , love , marriage , America , Richard , forever . . . all words from now on that he would not be able to read or hear without a stab.

  On the Wednesday after Furnivall's funeral, the telephone rang in his office and he seized it.

  She used to ring about now, to brief him on her plans for the day. He saw her sitting on the arm of her outsized Conran sofa, her shoulder strap down and the blonde puff of hair between her legs . . . His hands never again to touch her.

  It was Miss Lightfoot, wanting to know why he was not at Furnivall's funeral. 'Everyone was there.'

  He felt an enormous sense of isolation. 'Something came up at work,' he mumbled.

  Patricia Lightfoot commiserated: Stuart would have understood. She had visited him in the hospice in Barnes where he spent his final weeks. He had spoken warmly of Andy, his interesting work. 'He was waiting to hear back from you. He had great faith in your judgment. He was too modest to say so, but I think he hoped you would publish his book.' She described their last outing together, to a one-day cricket match at Lords. It was as much as she could do to walk Furnivall arm in arm from the ground to the taxi. 'I have to confess I cried when I heard that he had died.'

  After she rang off, Andy sat staring at his desk. He had no idea what to do. His eyes fell in a blurred gaze to a pile of pages that he had thrust to the back.

  Another moment before he realised that the letters he had been staring at spelled MISSING MONTAIGNE.

  The manuscript, bound with a ginger rubber band, had arrived at Carpe Diem a week before Christmas, along with the covering letter that Andy now slipped out and unfolded. He felt a tightening, a sudden rawness in his gut as he began to reread the even-spaced handwriting.

  Dear Andy,

  I won't beat about the bush. I've been suffering these past three years from a terminal illness and I learned long ago that the best resource against pain is diversion.

  Don't groan. I have - enfin! - completed the project that I embarked on in my twenties. This book (really an autobiographical essay) is my excuse to get in touch. It's a dreadful intrusion even to ask this, but might you possibly consider taking a look at it for me? I'm just so baffled as to what to do, and an impartial, clear, not to say distinguished set of eyes would be invaluable. But I'm sorry even to ask, both when it may be that the book is dreadful and unreadable, and
when I know that you are deep in your own work as I write this. So please don't for a minute hesitate to tell me this is not the time. I'll totally understand.

  There followed a few paragraphs in which Furnivall outlined his project. Andy skipped to the end.

  If, as I suspect, the result doesn't suit today's prurient climate, don't wrinkle your forehead over it - as the Great Man said: 'the worst writings of my time have won the greatest applause.' I've been through enough hedges. I fully expect to hear from you that Missing Montaigne may be of some interest to Montaigne scholars, but other than a brief reference to penis size (small) it will be of little interest to anyone else.

  With fond regards,

  Stuart

  PS Cornwall is not so far from London - five hours by car.

  It had taken the briefest glance to realise that Missing Montaigne was 'low box office', in Goodman's phrase, and unsuitable for Carpe Diem. Andy had not progressed much farther than the first page, which was riddled with quotes and schoolmasterly in a way that Furnivall never had been. Andy had put the manuscript aside to read later. But it was like accepting an invitation ahead: he hoped in some miraculous way it would go away. He had still not replied when Miss Lightfoot wrote with news of Furnivall's death. At least Furnivall never knew that his book was unpublishable. He died with it still a possibility.

  Down the corridor a door opened and a paper lifted on his desk.

  Andy was reaching the end of the first chapter when Goodman came in.

  'My commiserations about your girlfriend.'

  'Angela told you?'

  'Don't worry,' Goodman said. 'As Thomas Moore put it better than I: "You have the opportunity to be close to another in a more profound way." How's the Enid Tansley, by the way?'

  'Sorry?'

  Goodman gave him a reproachful look. 'The Tansley, the Tansley,' clicking his fingers. 'Didn't Angela give it to you?'

  'Oh, yes . . .'