by Mavis Cheek
One-word titles, she muses, and runs through a string of them in her head. As the lift ascends, they seem to drop from her like dead flies falling down the lift shaft, useless and out of sight, none of them owning a barb with which to hook itself securely in her brain. 'Phoenix Rising,' she repeats to herself as she lets herself in, 'Phoenix Rising.' It will have to be that. But will Sylvia Perth let her?
She closes the door, feeling weary and annoyed, and takes the foodstuffs to the kitchen. Does she really, she asks herself, need to go through this performance every time there is a new book to begin? The tube journey, the people all jostling, the contact with that horrible world outside her door? Why doesn't she just invent her people? Other writers probably do, so why not her? She butters some bread and cuts a wedge or two of cheese and waits for the kettle to boil. She licks her buttery fingers. Why put herself through this ghastliness? She makes tea and while it brews she pours off the top of the milk into her cup. She enjoys that first drink which is creamy and rich and rolls smoothly over her tongue like a coat of silk. After the first mouthful she feels cheered. That is just the way it is. She undertook to abide by the rule and - she carries her cup and plate back into the living-room - that is what she must do. It is her integrity which is at stake. Integrity . . .
Well, she could call it that, she supposes. But she really doesn't want to. And why should she have to? Why, come to that, should she have to write any more books at all? And if she does, couldn't she at least have the right to choose what she calls them without needing permission? Not that Sylvia Perth would see it as that. She would see it merely as giving advice, sound advice. Well, a small, rebel flame comes leaping up again, has her advice been so sound? Janice Gentle dwells on this momentarily, decides it is a question best not put, but feels bothered by it, all the same.
And then she stops, sets down the cup, sets down the plate, puts a piece of cheese in her mouth and smiles as she chews.
Perhaps if she were a bit less amenable with Sylvia, if she were to ring her now and be a bit offish, then she might get her way about the tide. She has never done such a thing before but . . . hmm ... it might be worth a try. The irritation rises again. Anyway, why not? It's her book, after all. Even if Sylvia does do all the donkey-work and pay all the bills. Surely she has some rights in the choice? After all, she's the one who has got to get her head down until it aches. Sylvia Perth will be very nice and visit her, and telephone from time to time, and say that she is available whenever Janice might need her. But the plain fact of the matter - Janice takes an enormous and really quite savage bite from her bread - is Here We Go Again. Another book, another chunk of time out of her life. And always she has believed that each one would be the last. Would this new one be any different? It certainly should be. Time is rolling on for Janice. She has a Quest to pursue, a Pilgrimage to make, and the only thing that stands in her way is the need to have a substantial supply of money in her coffers. Every book she has written so far has been supposed to fill these to the brim. They have not. Always a good reason, of course, and Sylvia does her best, but her reassurances that perhaps after the next Janice need never write again are wearing a little thin. Indeed, at the very beginning that is what Sylvia Perth told her. She remembers it distinctly. And it has still not come about.
Sylvia said, Janice remembers it clearly, that she need never write anything again after her second book, if she would only finish it.
Writing being a hard, labouring agony, and her being as virginal as a nun, she began to call the products of her craft her children by way of a little, maidenly joke. Sylvia took it up and henceforth Janice Gentle's books were always known as her babies. And there seemed to be more and more of them as the years went by - quite a teeming womb, in fact. Looking back, she is still not quite sure what happened to all those promises of Sylvia's, but their failure to hold was no one's fault but the public and the publishers. Both Janice and Sylvia had nothing to be ashamed of. It was, really, out of her friend and agent's hands.
Nevertheless it became, 'We need a third.' What else could she do but comply? 'We need a third.' And, smiling, Sylvia, dipping her hands into her Gucci bucket bag, brought forth temptations.
'Look,' she said, 'I remembered how you like them.' From its depths she took a gold box adorned with ribbons bearing a crest and the legend 'Chocolat Dufours'.
'Oh,' said Janice, enraptured, 'how kind of you.'
'And what is more,' Sylvia Perth smiled conspiratorially, 'they are all for you. Now, grit your teeth and write on, my dear. A third book is essential.'
Janice munched and Sylvia departed. Ever since then it seemed a foregone conclusion that Janice still had a long way to go before the Seeking could begin.
'Money,' said Janice a year or two later. 'Have I made enough yet?'
'Not yet, I'm afraid, dear. Is there anything, apart from the Thing' - Sylvia bared her teeth - 'that you need?' And, as was customary, Janice merely shook her head.
Janice Gentle appeared to have no tastes or desires beyond the most basic kind, and Sylvia Perth was intrigued to know what this odd, reclusive pudding of a woman could ever possibly want to buy. It had taken all Sylvia's persuasion to get Janice to sell her mother's house and to begin negotiations on a flat somewhere further into town. And even then Janice had insisted it should be in Battersea. They had taken a taxi to look at properties around Harrods and Kensington Town Hall, and the fool of a driver had gone along on the wrong side of the river. Janice, looking out, suddenly said, 'This is the place,' and that had been that. No amount of persuasion made any difference. So if Battersea was the kind of place she wanted to live in, and if she was as happy with that dreadful hutch-like place as she seemed to be, it was hardly surprising, mused Sylvia Perth, that Janice asked for nothing beyond her keep. But, oh dear, it was such a waste . . .
'Dermot Poll,' said Janice Gentle dreamily.
Sylvia raised her eyebrows. Lord, she was off again.
'I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line that night I missed something he said. I thought he was going to come to me, but . . . well ... I must have got it all muddled. He probably arranged a meeting somewhere else. He probably waited there all night, just as I waited all night for him . . .'
Her voice rose, her eyes filled with tears, the pain was quite real to her, and Sylvia was embarrassed. She wiped the wetness beneath Janice's eyes with her Venetian lace handkerchief.
'There, there,' she said, 'we'll find him for you. Don't you worry.'
'Did you use those private detectives?'
Sylvia Perth replaced her hanky in her Anastasie pochette, snapped it shut, and said smoothly, 'Of course. I told you that they had no luck. And that, I am afraid, is why we need another book. As I told you, dear, they cost so much, so very much nowadays . . .'
'Skibbereen was a clue. He came from Skibbereen . . .'
'Yes, dear, and Charlie Chaplin came from London. But he didn't end up there. Do you see?'
'He mentioned Australia, America, China . . .'
Sylvia nodded. 'I know, dear. So we need lots and lots more in the kitty before we can do anything about it. So buck up and let's get started. Shall we?'
Janice ceased the tears. What good would they do? What was needed was action, creativity, to provide. After all, did those queens of Spain and France flinch from raising the finance to fight their crusades? They did not. And neither, therefore, must she.
'You don't think he will have forgotten me?'
Sylvia looked at Janice. Above her considerable bulk the only relief from beige and buff was the pink rosette of her nose and the misty red rims of her eyes through the steamed-up glass of her spectacles. ‘I don't see how he could, my dear,' said Sylvia Perth with feeling. 'I really don't see how he could.'
It was at this point that Sylvia Perth felt the first tightening in her chest. She sat very still for a moment, and soon it passed. She stood up. 'Good luck, my dear,' she said, straightening her little
Dior skirt. And she went out
into the air to breathe slow and deep and remind herself to stay calm. Janice Gentle wrote on.
Sylvia Perth kindly took over the management of all Janice's affairs, for which Janice was deeply grateful. She no longer had to deal with accountants, publishers, taxmen, bill-paying, the general public, bank managers (particularly bank managers), the media - not anybody. Sylvia was even able to sign things for Janice, which saved a great deal of what Sylvia called fuss.
Fuss was something, in any case, that Sylvia Perth wished to avoid for her own good, too. Fuss made her breathing difficult, fuss made her chest tighten, fuss brought the occasional pounding in her ears as if the ocean itself were closing in. Fuss, as the years drew on, seemed ever lurking and a most debilitating nuisance.
'Just leave everything up to Sylvia,' she said the last time they met. She placed an Alfredo-gloved hand upon Janice's pale head and patted it. 'You must not worry any more. Just keep on writing. It's the only way. And don't forget, it really would be helpful if this time you could give it a one-word tide. That's what they like nowadays.' She lit one of her Turkish cigarettes so that Janice was wreathed in the blue-grey smoke like an unblinking houri. 'Who knows if this next one won't do the trick. And then' - she gave Janice a wicked little smile - 'it will be Dermot here I come . . .'
She breathed the smoke out generously and it eased the remnants of the tense, odd feeling in her chest. 'How I envy you your isolation, Janice,' she said. 'Sometimes I wish I could lock my door and throw away the key. I love this calm solitude, this undemanding colour scheme, this lack of busyness and ornament. How I should like to live somewhere like this and make myself a home — but then, I can't. One of us has got to be out there on the road, hasn't she?'
Janice nodded, immediately feeling guilty.
Sylvia gave a martyred grimace. 'It must be wonderful to be incommunicado and have everything done for you . . And leaving Janice with that thought, Sylvia Perth buttoned her little Ungaro jacket and departed.
Janice knew Sylvia was right. She always was. It was wonderful to be here, protected, alone. And it was the next best thing to rearing to a convent, which, had she lived long ago, she would have preferred. But still, with Sylvia Perth in the role of Mother Superior and her Battersea apartment more or less enclosed, it was the nearest she could get, and it would do very well. Besides, she couldn't really be a nun, or they might not let her out again to find Dermot Poll. She picked up her calendar and selected, with a pin, the day of her first tube-train outing. There was no point in delaying the beginning of the process any longer.
The pin had selected today - and with the law of Sod continually in mind, it was the first day of rain for six weeks. But it was over. Concluded successfully. And that - she eyed the scones happily - was something.
*
Before telephoning Sylvia she crosses to the word processor and removes its cover.
The only thing that comforts her is that somewhere, wherever he is, Dermot Poll is growing older, too. She has kept that roundness that he so admired (not at all hard to do). So he will certainly be able to recognize her when the time comes. And as for her, why, she would be able to pick him out on Brighton Beach in a heatwave. Of that she is absolutely sure. Dear God, she thinks, has not this waiting gone on long enough?
Impatience and crossness flare again. She cannot help it. There is a limit, she thinks, to the amount of time you can keep a love alive without its object before you. She switches the machine on aggressively. She makes notes - notes about the characters, a plot sketch — and then she goes back to the beginning of the file and tides it. 'Phoenix Rising,' she types in bold. That makes it real. It's in the machine now. Sylvia Perth must simply accept it. If Christine de Pisan was allowed to choose her titles six hundred years ago, surely, by the laws of emancipation, Janice Gentle should be allowed to choose hers today?
She dials the familiar number, keeping her eye very firmly on the screen. Just for once Janice intends to assert herself.
*
In her office near Claridge's Sylvia Perth has been giving an idealistic young author a pep-talk. And while the idealistic young author has been upturning her pretty flower-like face to the desk, perching Sylvia has been attempting, with moderate success, to look down the neck of the idealistic young author's blouse.
Sylvia is fifty-four. She has spent most of her working life persuading publishers to publish books enthusiastically, and authors to write them in the same spirit. Sometimes she wondered whether the two kinds even occupied the same planet. But now she represents only one author, Janice Gentle, from whom the pickings have been gratifyingly good. Sylvia Perth feels that she has given up quite enough of the joys of ordinary mortalhood to be compensated in this way. She has given up the possibility of marriage, children, friendships, in pursuit of her career, and she has absolutely no qualms about either her business methods with her author or her attempts to look down the blouse of the young woman opposite. 'I might be a smutty old dyke,' she says with wry amusement to herself, 'but at least my author is pure and honest and squeaky clean.' She rather likes the oppositional comparison and the dot, dot, dottiness of the activity left unsaid. Janice's books have a purity about them which makes Sylvia — who, in many ways, and despite objectively knowing otherwise, views herself as rather soiled - feel better. By this one act of honour in representing Janice she feels she has bought herself many pardons. In other words, though she would never admit it to a living soul, the only thing Sylvia Perth is involved with that feels clean and wholesome and good is Janice Gentle's books. And when she is approached, as she has been recently, to take them from their shell of honesty and inject them with a vein or two of gratuitous smut, she takes a warm, righteous pleasure in refusing. Not that sex in literature offends Sylvia Perth, for literature reflects all manner of life, but she is wise enough in the world of books to know that the best of such writing is organic and that you had as well try to attach a dried flower to the glass over a Chardin painting as to put a hot-bed scene in one of Janice's books. Since Janice constantly refers to them as her children, it would be like offering them up for paedophiliac rape. The goose was laying golden eggs. Why on earth risk a change that could seriously lead to dross?
There were other reasons why Sylvia preferred to leave things unchanged — reasons not at all connected with literary integrity, reasons which Sylvia chose not to contemplate and which she kept tucked well away in the darker recesses of her most private mind.
Sylvia sighs. How pretty is the idealistic young author, and what indulgence it is to listen to her tinkling away about whatever it is she is tinkling away about. She might be able to do something for her, she supposes, put in a good word somewhere; there was always the possibility of future gratitude. Temptation creeps up Sylvia Perth's spine, but she suppresses it. She has already made one error of judgement at lunch today with a beautiful ash-haired American girl - a cardinal Perthly sin, that was. No, no, she had better stick to just looking on from a distance. She is lucky to have a preference for breasts, for in a male-oriented culture there is never any shortage of them.
The idealistic young author pauses for breath. To be in the presence of a real-life literary agent who seems interested in her work is wonderful. She does not normally smoke but accepts one of Sylvia's strange-looking cigarettes with a flourish of abandon and leans forward for it to be lit.
Sylvia momentarily loses mental equilibrium and asks, 'Are you married?' The idealistic young author looks surprised. Since she was at that point setting out her views on the meaning of meaning, it seemed a substantial non-sequitur. The cigarette gives her a kind of confidence; Sylvia Perth has screwed up her eyes against the smoke and is smiling encouragingly, sleekly.
The idealistic young author also screws up her eyes, though of necessity rather than design, and says, 'Married? I should think not. I'm only twenty-three and I want to express myself through my writing.'
Sylvia puts her hand on her chin and nods sagely. 'Well, quite,' she says.
'It is experience which counts. Every possible, conceivable, imaginable experience ... At the centre of the voyage of literary discovery is oneself. ..'
Sylvia has lost track completely of what is being said. After the words 'imaginable experience' she has given herself up to a wonderful fantasy in which hand-warmed massage oil makes an appearance.
'. . . break new ground, push out the boundaries.'
'Oh yes, yes,' says Sylvia, though in quite another connection.
Good heavens, thinks the idealistic young author, we are getting on well. 'May I come again?'
Sylvia, to whom this phrase has arrived a little early in her fantasy, returns to the real world. She faces a pair of round, dark, ingenue eyes and says the first thing that comes to mind. 'You have immense talents.' She looks at the girl's chest. 'Immense.'
'Really?' says the girl, leaning even further towards the pinkening dampness of Sylvia Perth's face.
Sylvia leans towards her and taps the delicious scrubbed rosiness of her cheek with her fingertip as if to say, 'Naughty, naughty . ..' They are practically nose to nose when the telephone rings.
It is Janice Gentle.
'Yes? What?' she snaps down the phone.
The irritation which subdued itself a little as Janice dialled surfaces again at the abrupt snappishness of Sylvia's answer. 'Sylvia, it is Janice.'
Sylvia immediately takes her eyes off the delights before her and concentrates, as much as she can, on her caller. 'Janice, my dear.'
'I wonder if you could come over for tea?'
'Certainly.' Sylvia looks at the pretty flower-like face upturned towards her, rosy and keen. 'When?' The agent flicks open her diary. The idea of dinner is still buzzing about in her head.
Janice's little irritation flares. 'Now. For tea? Sylvia understands the signal. Just for once she hesitates. 'Not tomorrow?'
