Not Another Happy Ending
Page 2
‘Ah-ha!’ Roddy produced a red bow tie from behind one of the stacks and slipped it around his neck.
‘You're seriously going to wear that to school?’
‘It's a valid choice.’
‘For Yogi Bear, maybe.’
Roddy frowned. ‘That makes no sense. Yogi Bear never wore a bow tie. It was a necktie—and it wasn't even red, it was green. Wait, are you thinking of the Cat in the Hat?’
‘If I pretend I just arrived from France and don't understand anything you're saying will you stop talking?’
‘Just for that I'm having your muesli.’
Roddy swiped a bowl off the draining board, wiped a spoon on his trousers and dived in.
‘Hmm?’ Tom looked up from his reading. ‘We're out of muesli. Haven't bought any in weeks.’
Roddy gagged as he spat out the ancient slurry. ‘Aw, you're kiddin’. That's criminal. That's unsanitary, that is. We live in squalor, you know that?’ He threw down the bowl. ‘I'll get something in the staff room.’ He turned to go and paused in the doorway. ‘Oh, don't forget, you've got Nicola coming in this afternoon.’
Tom grunted. A couple of years ago he'd discovered Nicola Ball, a writer of novels set in the unpromising world of public transport (one notable sex scene in her debut had brought whole new meaning to the phrase ‘double-decker’). Recently, she'd featured on some influential lit. crit. blog, hovering near the middle of a list of ‘Scottish novelists to watch under the age of 30’, and the annoying girl wouldn't stop reminding him about it at every opportunity. However, her sales didn't match her bumptiousness.
A buzzer sounded from downstairs.
‘Get that, will you?’ Tom strolled off, head buried in the latest novel plucked from the slush-pile.
‘No can do,’ spluttered Roddy. ‘I've got Wuthering Heights with my Third Years …’ He checked his watch. ‘In fifteen minutes. Bollocks.’
The buzzer went again and Tom padded resentfully downstairs. Roddy's question trailed after him: ‘When are you going to hire an actual secretary?’ The answer was simple: when he could afford one. Which right now felt a long way off.
The postman might as well have been holding a ticking bomb. He brandished what Tom recognised through long acquaintance as unwelcome correspondence from the bank and credit card company.
‘Lovely morning,’ the postman said cheerily, ‘though there's a bit of rain forecast for later.’
Reluctantly, Tom took the mail, which included half a dozen fat A4 envelopes—more manuscripts—and closed the door. With a dissatisfied grunt, he shuffled the official letters to the bottom of the pile and made his way along the narrow passage to his office, deftly navigating around towers of cardboard boxes filled with expensively produced books fresh from the printer. He shuddered at the financial risk; each title was a long shot of vomit-inducing odds, a fragile paper boat set sail on the roughest publishing market since William Caxton thought ‘Hey, what if I put the ink in here?’
Tom threw the mail onto his desk and sat down heavily. Napoleon glowered up at him. It was a bust of the great Emperor, a gift from Roddy on the launch of Tristesse Books, which Tom was in no doubt also conveyed a pointed comment on his high-handed manner. He looked round his tiny office with its clutter of contracts, press releases and inescapable manuscripts; a battered velour sofa with the stuffing knocked out of it (appropriately) and a couple of low, uncomfortable chairs, perfect to intimidate writers. It wasn't exactly the Palace of Fontainebleau.
He turned his frustration to the morning mail, tearing open the top envelope and removing the bulging manuscript from within. He scanned the cover and blew out his cheeks in disbelief. Then held it out in front of him, squinting at the title to make sure he'd read it correctly. Which he had. There it was, in black and white, Cambria twenty-four point. Quelle horreur.
‘The Endless Anguish of My Father,’ he read aloud, allowing each word its full weight and bombast. ‘By Jane Lockhart.’
Worst title this year? Certainly it was the worst this month. Briefly he pondered summoning the author for a meeting, purely for the satisfaction of telling her just what a brainless title she had concocted and, he felt confident asserting this without condemning himself to the unpleasant task of reading one more word, that she was a hopeless case with no chance of making a career as a novelist. But he was busy. Taking the manuscript in the tips of his fingers, he gave a shudder of disgust.
‘Ms. Lockhart … au revoir.’ And with that he tossed it into the cavernous wastepaper basket by the side of his desk.
CHAPTER 2
‘Tinseltown in the Rain’, The Blue Nile, 1984, Linn Records
THE BOWLER WAS a great idea. She rocked that hat. It was her lucky hat, always had been. Not that Jane could recall specific examples of its effect on her good fortune at this precise moment, but she was sure there must have been some in the past.
It was an awesome hat. It had been a last-second decision to take it to the meeting and she'd plucked it from its hook above the umbrella stand along with her favourite red umbrella. Not that the umbrella was lucky. Who has a lucky umbrella? In fact, weren't they notoriously unlucky objects? Yes, it was bad luck to walk under them. No, that couldn't be right. That was ladders, of course. Open them! You weren't supposed to open them indoors in case … what? Non-specific, umbrella-related doom, she supposed.
Oh god, she was losing it.
It was nerves. The email from Thomas Duval of Tristesse Books inviting her—correction, summoning her—to a Monday morning meeting had arrived last thing on Friday, leaving her all weekend to obsess. It had to be bad news; nothing good ever happened on a Monday morning. But if that were the case then why demand a meeting? If he wasn't interested in publishing her novel, surely he would have rejected her in the customary pro forma fashion, and he hadn't Dear Jane-d her, not yet.
She felt a spike of anticipation, which was instantly brought down by a hypodermic shot of self-doubt. Perhaps he was some sort of sadist who got his kicks torturing writers in person. But that seemed so unlikely. She'd been propping herself up with this line of thinking throughout most of the weekend, extracting every last drop of hope from it, until halfway through the longueur of her Sunday afternoon she decided to Google him and discovered that Thomas Duval was indeed just such a sadist. The Hannibal Lecter of publishing, blogged one aspirant author who'd evidently suffered at his hands. Attila the Hun with a red Biro, recorded another.
She dismissed the opinions of a few affronted authors—all right, fourteen—as a case of sour grapes and sought out a more cool-headed assessment of his reputation. There was scant information available on the Bookseller’s site, the industry's go-to journal, but she dug up half a dozen snippets of news. The names changed, but on each occasion the substance remained the same: breaking news—Thomas Duval falls out acrimoniously with another of his writers, who storms out in high dudgeon, swearing never to write one more word for that arrogant, temperamental sonofabitch.
Well, at least he was consistent.
She jumped on the subway at Kelvinbridge and rode the train to Buchanan Street in the centre of town. By the time she reached the surface, the early rain had given way to patchy sunshine and she enjoyed a pleasant stroll through George Square to the Merchant City. European-style café culture had come late to Glasgow—until 1988 if you said barista to a Glaswegian you risked a punch on the nose. But when it did arrive it came in a tsunami of foaming milk. An area of the city once referred to as the ‘toun’ these days sported sleek cafés on every corner, where, at the first warming ray, outside tables sprouted like sunflowers, and were just as swiftly populated by chattering, sunglasses-wearing crowds who always seemed to be waiting just off screen for their cue.
Jane headed along cobbled Candleriggs past the old Fruit Market, before stopping outside a set of electric gates. One of the residents was leaving and as the gates whirred open she slipped inside, finding herself in a large, sunlit courtyard bordered by a Victorian terrace on one side
and a glassy office block on the other.
She made her way over to the far corner and at the door, she inspected the nameplate. This was the place all right. She hadn't really paid attention to the Tristesse Books logo before, but a large version of it was stencilled on the wall: a white letter ‘T’ suspended in a fat blue drop of rain. As she pushed the buzzer it struck her that it wasn't rain at all, but a teardrop.
Jane had been kicking her heels for half an hour, waiting in the hot, cramped Reception room for her meeting with Thomas Duval. She could hear him through the wall, shouting in rapid-fire French. He may not have been ordering a saucisson, but it wasn't difficult to catch the gist—someone was getting it in le neck.
Though his fury wasn't directed at her, with each fresh salvo Jane shrank deeper into the waiting-room chair. After fifteen minutes of listening to him rant she'd contemplated making her excuses and slinking out, but the possibility that he had read and liked The Endless Anguish of My Father was enough to encourage her to stay put and suffer.
Across the room she could see Duval's secretary trying to ignore the furious noises coming from his boss's office. At least, Jane assumed the man sitting at the desk was his secretary. For some reason she'd pictured Thomas Duval's secretary as one of those pencil-skirt wearing, bespectacled ah-Miss-Jones-you're-beautiful types, whereas the figure valiantly shielding the phone receiver from the angry French volcano on the other side of the wall was a twentysomething man in a brown corduroy suit and red bow tie. Now that she studied him carefully, he looked less like a secretary and more as if he was channelling a fifty-year-old schoolteacher.
‘Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh yeah, he's a wonderful writer. So unremittingly bleak.’ The secretary paused as the caller on the other end of the phone asked a question. ‘No, Tristesse doesn't publish him any more,’ he said haltingly. ‘A little disagreement with …’ He glanced towards Duval's office door, cupping the receiver against the rising din. ‘She's one of my favourites!’ he said, responding to a fresh enquiry. ‘Yes, long-listed for the Booker, you know.’ His left eye twitched. ‘Right after she was sectioned.’ He listened again, one corner of his mouth sinking mournfully. ‘No. She left too.’
This was becoming ridiculous. How long would Duval make her wait in this tiny, airless cellar of a room? For all he knew she had taken time off her actual, proper job to show up at his beck and call. Not that she had a proper job any more. She'd quit the supermarket at the beginning of the year, when they offered her a place on the management trainee programme. She'd started off stacking shelves and here they were offering her a suit and a key to the executive WC. It was a sign; she knew, that if she took it then her life would go into the toilet metaphorically as well, taking her far away from her writing.
In the end it didn't even feel like her decision. She had to write; it was as simple as that. So she jumped, a great, giddy, don't-look-down leap of faith. And here she was. Forty-seven rejection letters later. Savings countable on the fingers of one hand … Was it stuffy in here, or was it her?
She yawned and stretched her legs, knocking the low table in front of her on which perched a stack of teetering manuscripts. They wobbled alarmingly and she dived to steady them, noticing as she did that the top novel was entitled A Comedy in Long Shot. Not a bad title. She immediately compared it with her own, placing each in an imaginary ranking system. Hers scored higher, she felt sure. The Endless Anguish of My Father had been tougher to come up with than the rest of the novel. But the day it popped into her head she knew it was the one. It had the ring of authenticity, rooted in truth, in life; six words that spoke to the eternal verities. And it looked good when she typed it across the cover page.
Something glinted behind the paper stack. A single golden page coiled into a scroll and set on a plinth. It was an award. An inscription ran along its base. She picked it up to read: ‘Thomas Duval. Young European Publisher of the Year, 2010.’ She turned the award another notch. ‘Runner-up.’
‘Miss Lockhart?’
Duval's secretary had crept up on her. Startled, she dropped the award. It landed against the wooden floor with a resounding clang and rolled under a sofa. Apologising profusely, Jane fell to her knees and scrabbled to retrieve it, a part of her brain belatedly registering that the shouting from the office had ceased.
‘What the hell are you doing?
She looked up into the face of Thomas Duval and felt her own flush. He was handsome in a way that would make Greek gods sit around and bitch. It wasn't the rangy stubble, or the thick wave of hair that demanded you run your fingers through its luxuriant tangle, or the intense stare from behind his Clark Kent spectacles. OK, it might have been some of those things. His distracting features were currently arranged to display a mixture of anger and puzzlement, but, she noted with a sinking feeling, they definitely tipped towards anger. She was also vaguely aware of a draught located around her backside and knew then that in her pursuit of the runaway award her skirt had ridden up and currently resided somewhere around her waist. As she covered her modesty (oh, way too late for that) she made a show of polishing the golden award with one corner of her sleeve.
‘I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to—I was just, y'know, touching it. I mean not touching—that sounds like molesting, like I'm some kind of pervert …’ she drew breath, ‘which I'm not.’ She ventured a smile. ‘Young European Publisher of the Year … Runner-up? That's really impressive.’ Don't make a joke. Don't make a joke. ‘I have a swimming certificate.’
Across the room the secretary chuckled, for which she was immensely grateful. Duval silenced him with a scowl. Certain that her submissive kneeling position wasn't helping her case, Jane picked herself up off the floor, laying a hand on the vertiginous stack of manuscripts for leverage. She leaned on the unsteady pile and the scripts toppled over, crashing to the floor. Random pages flew up around her ears.
Duval narrowed his eyes. ‘Who are you?’
She stuck out a hand in greeting. ‘Jane Lockhart …?’ Duval ignored the proffered hand. She withdrew it awkwardly, turning the action into a waving gesture she hoped came across as insouciant. ‘I wrote The Endless Anguish of My Father?’
‘Ah,’ he grunted. ‘Yes.’ He turned his back on her and began to walk away.
So that was it, she thought—another rejection. And I've shown him my pants.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he snapped over his shoulder.
She threw a questioning glance at the secretary, who motioned her to follow the disappearing Duval. Hurriedly gathering up her hat and umbrella she stumbled after him.
She was not sure what compelled her to do so—blame it on the confusion of believing she was about to be unceremoniously ejected onto the street—but by the time he had led her into his office she was again wearing the bowler hat. She was confronted with his broad back as he gestured her curtly into a low seat, then slid behind his desk and looked up. He leaned in with a quizzical expression, mouth half open.
‘It's my lucky hat,’ she pre-empted his question.
‘No one has a lucky hat.’
Something about this man made her want to argue. ‘What about leprechauns?’
He screwed up his face. ‘What?’
‘They're lucky. They wear hats.’ Oh god, she was doing it again. Stop talking. Stop talking right now. ‘Y'know, with the green and the buckle and … Ah … Ah!’ She sat up, raising one finger triumphantly. ‘You can have a thinking-cap.’
He sneered. ‘It's not the same thing at all.’
‘No. No it isn't.’ Sheepishly, she removed the offending bowler. ‘I only wore it to offset the umbrella,’ she confessed, then asked brightly, ‘Have you ever wondered why it's bad luck to open an umbrella indoors?’
Duval gazed at her steadily. ‘The superstition arose during the late 18th century when umbrellas were larger, with heavy, spring-loaded mechanisms and hard metal spokes. Open one in the confines of a drawing room and the consequences could be destructive.’
‘Oh.’
‘I'll be honest with you,’ he said, tossing the well-worn manuscript down on the desk, ‘I put this in the bin without reading a single word.’
Or, there was that.
She looked down and played nervously with her ring. It was made from an old typewriter key, the word ‘backspace’ in black letters on a silver background. She'd bought it with her last pay packet, a fitting gift to launch her on her new career as a novelist. She felt a lump in her throat and swallowed hard. She swore she wouldn't cry in front of him.
‘That title …’ He made a long, sucking sound through his teeth.
She had a feeling it wasn't the only thing that sucked. She glimpsed a straw and clutched at it. ‘But you took it out again.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Of the bin. Something must have made you take it back out.’
‘Yes.’ He fiddled with the small bust of Napoleon. ‘A fly.’
Had he just admitted to using the novel she'd slaved over for the last year and a half as a fly swatter?
‘It was a highly persistent fly,’ he added in a conciliatory tone. He pushed a bored hand through his hair. ‘I'm busy, so I'll keep this brief. I read your novel. I'm afraid it needs work. A lot of work.’
Hot tears pricked her eyes. She blinked furiously, trying to hold back the waterworks. She hadn't cried in years, not since her dad left, and now here was this man making her feel like that little girl again. It wasn't the rejection—she'd shrugged off dozens without resorting to tears. It must be him. The bastard. To actually reject her face to face.