Not Another Happy Ending

by David Solomons

  They returned to the cottage. The weather closed in shortly before they reached shelter and they were both soaked through. When she entered the room, towelling her hair dry, she found him occupying his usual place in the armchair by the fire.

  ‘We need to talk about the sex,’ he announced.

  The sex. Le Sex. Finally, she thought.

  There were, however, cultural proprieties to be observed. A nice girl simply didn't acquiesce to such an indecent proposal. ‘I don't think we do,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I am not talking about “the sex” with you. You've got some cheek, you know that? Just because I asked you up here doesn't mean I'm ready to jump into bed.’

  ‘The sex,’ he said evenly, ‘in chapter seventeen.’ He opened her novel to the relevant page.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, unfolding her arms. ‘Yes. That sex.’

  Tom stabbed a finger at a section halfway down the page. ‘I'm confused. What is going on here?’

  ‘What are you talking about? It's …’ She circled behind him, craning her neck for a sight of the offending paragraph. ‘Perfectly clear.’

  ‘Are they having sex? Because if they are, you should know that it's improbable.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ she wagged a finger, ‘that's because I'm writing it from the woman's perspective—something you clearly don't understand.’

  ‘Right.’ He held the page at arm's length, rotating it first one way and then the other, as if looking at it from another angle would make the scene clearer. ‘So where exactly is her leg meant to be?’

  Oh, the man was maddening! Jane swatted him with her towel and made a grab for the manuscript. ‘Give that back!’

  He was too fast for her. He led her around the room, dangling the novel at arm's length, just out of her grasp. At first she requested him curtly but politely to desist in his childish behaviour, but when he ignored her she resorted to a tirade of foul language. He doubled up with laughter at hearing her swear. Which meant that he failed to notice the trailing cord of the standard lamp as he swept around the room once more.

  ‘Ow!’ He slammed into the floor, his knee taking the brunt. ‘I hate this place!’

  She stood over him to gloat. ‘Serves you right. It's a good scene. It's full-blooded, lusty—’

  Tom rubbed his knee mournfully. ‘—physically impossible.’

  With one final cry of irritation she lunged for the manuscript. He teased it out of reach and with his other hand swept her legs from under her. She crumpled, sinking down beside him. So near to him now she saw that he had kept his promise—no lover had ever looked at her this way.

  ‘It's not impossible,’ she said, swallowing. ‘You just have to be … bendy.’

  That raised an eyebrow. ‘This is drawn from personal experience?’

  They were close enough to breathe each other's air.

  ‘Well, that's not something you're ever going to find out.’ She let the words hang there. Just the two of them in the overwhelming silence of the cottage. Not a milk frother to disturb the stillness.

  A small part of her couldn't help but observe the situation from a distance: an unfairly attractive Frenchman, a hearthrug in front of a crackling log fire, a Highland cottage. If she'd written it, he would have struck it out. Infuriating, exasperating man.

  She waited. In all the romances she'd read people kissed adverbially. Hungrily, madly, passionately. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him. Wondered about the hardness of his bristles and the softness of his lips. Wondered if she should make the first move.

  And then she didn't have to wonder any longer.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’, Travis, 1999, Independiente

  ‘YOU STILL UP?’ Bleary-eyed, Roddy surveyed the wreckage of the evening: a card table strewn with the last hand, a drained bottle of something in equal parts cheap and noxious, and Tom. He sat in the quiet darkness of his office with a supermarket brand cognac, swirling the dregs around the fat-bottomed glass. The pale liquid caught the light of a streetlamp.

  ‘I'm off to bed. Got Jane Austen with my Fifth Years first thing tomorrow,’ Roddy said wearily. ‘Or, as I prefer to call it, Pride and Extreme Prejudice. Are you crying?’

  ‘No.’ There was a snuffle from the darkness.

  ‘You are. You're crying like a little girl.’ He took a step into the room. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Tom attempted to hide the manuscript propped open on his lap, but it was too late. ‘It's a non-fiction proposal,’ he said, ‘about the endangered Chinese Crested Tern.’ He wiped his cheek. ‘Very moving.’

  ‘Bollocks. It's Jane's novel, isn't it?’

  Tom shot him a look. ‘You can never tell her. Never. Promise me, Roddy.’

  ‘OK, OK. But I don't know what you're so worried about—if you hadn't noticed, Glasgow city centre on a non-football Saturday is chock-a with reconstructed males in floods when they discover Boots has run out of their Hydra Energetic Anti-Fatigue Moisturiser.’ He yawned. ‘How many times have you read that book anyway?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I'll leave you two alone then. There's a box of man-sized tissues by the sofa.’

  ‘Roddy!’

  ‘For the crying, sicko.’

  ‘Ah, right. Thanks.’

  Roddy shook his head and, smiling at his friend's mood, set off upstairs.

  ‘She's more real than any writer I've ever known,’ Tom whispered. ‘She stands there, a red flame in a downpour. I think she's the one.’

  Roddy froze, then quickly trotted back to the doorway. ‘Oh my god. So it's finally happened. The lothario—what's French for lothario?—doesn't matter—anyway, the great lover from Saint-Tropez meets the girl of his dreams and—twist ending—turns out she's a redhead from the Gallowgate. It's love across the borders. Jeux Sans Frontières. Or is that It's a Knockout?’

  Tom scowled. ‘She's the one Tristesse has been waiting for.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Roddy. ‘No bridesmaid dress for me then.’

  ‘I don't care if her novel sells a single copy, it is a great piece of work.’ He reflected on that with a tilt of his head. ‘Naturally, I wouldn't object if it does sell a few copies.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Shitloads would be good, actually.’

  Tom drained his glass and thumped it down on the table. ‘But she can write, Roddy. The darkness, the terrible beauty of her prose. She does not mistake sentiment for emotion, she plays with language, sometimes it almost destroys her. She leaves a piece of herself on every page. She is unafraid to use her life, her self—whatever the cost. It's very brave.’ He took a deep breath. ‘In her soul she is a poet.’

  ‘That's nice.’ Roddy studied his friend in the gloom. ‘Have you told her?’

  ‘Don't be ridiculous.’

  ‘Why not? People like to be told they're doing a good job.’

  ‘Such petty considerations do not concern an artist such as Jane.’

  ‘An artist …?’ Roddy's face lit up. ‘Oh wait a minute, you do fancy her, don't you?’

  Tom pursed his lips and blew out dismissively.

  Roddy pointed excitedly. ‘Did you just pah? You did. You just pah'd.’

  ‘I did not. And that is such a cliché. I thought you were going to bed.’

  Roddy narrowed his eyes. ‘Have you two … done it yet?’

  Tom threw up his hands. ‘Typical Anglo-Saxon prurience. Next you'll be asking me if I first requested her father's permission.’

  ‘You did! You two did it.’ Roddy's voice dropped to an appalled whisper. ‘But what about the golden rule—don't shag your own novelists?’

  ‘I never said it was a golden rule.’ Tom shrugged. ‘It's just a rule.’

  ‘It's the bloody Prime Directive, mate!’

  ‘This is not the time to be quoting Star Wars.’

  ‘Trek, you philistine.’

  ‘Well then, say it why don't you?’ Tom invited the expected d
isapproval with a brusque wave. ‘No good will come of this. You cannot work together and sleep together. Come on, where is your petty bourgeois censure?’

  ‘Au contraire—as we Anglo-Saxons like to say—I think it's a great idea. You two make a lovely couple.’

  Tom shook a finger at Roddy. ‘Hey, hey, hey—who's talking about a couple?’

  ‘Well, I just thought—’

  ‘Do I fancy her? Yes. Did sleeping with her make the edit more enjoyable? Naturally. But for fuck's sake, Roddy, why does every hook-up have to be Happy Ever After?’

  Sunday morning tiptoed into Jane's bedroom on a gentle breeze and the muffled blare of a radio from the flat upstairs. Through a gap in the curtains a bar of daylight striped the wooden floors and the bed where the two of them had spent most of the night. The rest of it they'd spent in the bath. And on the kitchen counter. And then on her desk in the bay window.

  She lay there watching him sleep. They hadn't really discussed what this was, what they were: was this just part of his editing process, along with square sausage rolls and coffee from Café Gandolfi? Was he her boyfriend? Somehow she couldn't bring herself to ask, didn't want to seem needy. She was trying very hard to be cool and aloof—for a change. And anyway she saw him every day and it didn't seem to matter. The edit was intense and intimate, but in all this time he hadn't said those four magic little words she so wanted to hear: I love your novel.

  She was wearing one of his shirts, though couldn't remember putting it on. She did remember being naked and the ensuing tussle that had visited every room in the flat and lasted half the night. In their passionate frenzy they'd broken a vase filled with fresh flowers and now the memory of last night's lovemaking was suffused with the scent of peonies. Beside her, he stirred. He rubbed his eyes, kissed her good morning and then reached past her for the manuscript on the bedside table. Slipping on his spectacles he began to read.

  They had started the final chapter of the edit last week and now all that remained to review was the ending. She studied him, absorbed in her novel, aware of nothing but her words. He must have read the ending countless times—perhaps more than she had, certainly more than any other section of the novel. Finish strongly, he'd said to her often. It was a rule of writing, like ‘cut adverbs’, ‘show, don't tell’, and ‘never sleep with your editor’.

  ‘So, the ending,’ he said at last.

  She propped herself up on her elbows. ‘You think it's too sad.’

  ‘I love sad. I'm French.’ He propped his spectacles on his forehead. ‘The way you describe her mum's death …’

  Perhaps it was more memoir than fiction, she thought. Certainly it was only the most delicate skein that separated the events in the novel and her real life. But she hadn't acknowledged it—not to him—until now.

  ‘I was seven when she died.’

  ‘You must miss her very much.’

  ‘There were aunties. A lot of aunties.’

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘My dad left us. Me.’

  ‘Do you hate him?’

  ‘It'd be easier if I did, right? What kind of man walks out on his family like that?’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe I do hate him, but the fact is I don't know him. Is it wrong, but I wish I knew where he was?’

  She flung off the covers and swung her legs onto the floor. ‘I'm going to jump in the shower.’ She stood up. The shirt hung down over her hips, brushing the tops of her bare legs. ‘Coming?’ She waggled her eyebrows.

  ‘Wait. I have something I need to say.’ He sat up and laid the manuscript on his lap. ‘Jane, I believe we're finished.’

  The room went quiet and she took a breath. In her head she started to give herself a talking-to. Get it together. We were never really a couple.

  Then he patted the manuscript and said, ‘We're finished the edit. I want to publish.’

  She exhaled. It took her a moment to register what he'd actually said and then all she could muster was a disbelieving, ‘Really, are you sure?’

  He shrugged. ‘We could go through it one more time if you prefer—?’

  ‘No!’ She squealed. ‘Oh, Tom.’ She leapt onto the bed and flung her arms around him. Finally, it was done. Finished. Over! But even as she thrilled to the prospect of being published she was aware of a small voice in her head ringing like an alarm. ‘Oh-oh. Oh-oh.’ Done. Finished. Over. The edit, not the two of them. So what did it mean for them?

  She tried to dismiss the nagging voice. What they had was much more than an edit. Wasn't it? He had shared his deepest feelings. About her novel. He'd demonstrated an acute sensitivity to her emotions. On the page. She realised with a jolt that everything they'd done together to this point was on the page. Apart from the stuff they'd done under the duvet. Under this duvet. Tomorrow there would be no discussion of metaphor, no disagreement over the importance of chapter fourteen. Tomorrow there would be no reason for them to see each other.

  ‘We should celebrate,’ she said. ‘How about tomorrow I take you out for lunch?’

  Tom climbed out of bed and started to pull on his clothes, retrieving them from the corners of the room where they had been flung the night before. ‘Can't. Off to Frankfurt first thing.’

  She was puzzled. ‘On holiday?’

  ‘For the Book Fair.’ He fastened his jeans. ‘I need to find the new Jane Lockhart.’

  She knew he was kidding, that this was meant to flatter her. But if that was the case then what was this sick feeling in her stomach?

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall’, Bob Dylan, 1962, Columbia Records

  THE DAY AFTER Tom announced that the edit was finished, Jane got all the way to the Underground platform before she remembered. She huffed, irritated at wasting her time until it struck her that she could waste as much time as she wanted now. She had absolutely nothing to do.

  She trudged home and proceeded to mooch about her flat, rearranging furniture, desultorily flicking through magazines she had been forbidden from reading during the last few months. When they'd started to revise her manuscript Tom had banned all other reading material. No magazines. No newspapers. Definitely no novels. To avoid the possibility of leakage, he had said. He didn't want her influenced by external factors. What about him, she'd teased, wasn't he external? No, he'd said sternly, from this moment on I am inside you. Yeah, he really didn't hear himself.

  When he returned from Frankfurt they met up for dinner, but without the scattered manuscript pages and the low-level squabbling that invariably accompanied the edit, something was missing. She even missed his red pen. Which, she had to admit, did sound somewhat phallic. And yes, they did sleep together that night, but then around midnight his phone pulsed with a message.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘Nicola,’ he said, the blue glow from the screen illuminating his face. He read her text and smiled. ‘Clever. Very clever.’

  She felt a stab of jealousy. ‘What does she want?

  ‘She's had a thought about how to crack chapter twenty-two and wants to talk it through.’ He climbed out of bed.

  Stung, Jane sat up. ‘You're going?’ she said. ‘Now?’

  Hurriedly he began to dress. ‘If I don't go to her now then by morning she will have convinced herself that the idea is worthless. She's not like you. She doesn't have your confidence.’

  She tried to accept the compliment and to remind herself that Nicola and Tom really was just business, but as she heard the front door click shut behind him the unease she'd felt through dinner swelled into emotional indigestion.

  The next date went better. They'd planned to see a triple bill of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs at the GFT, but over drinks Tom asked her if she had any thoughts about her next novel and as she talked to him she realised that she did. They missed Blue as they brainstormed and by the time they made it to the film theatre, they'd lost three and a half hours of Polish miserablism to their conversation and decided to skip the rest of the bill in favour of continui
ng their discussion over a curry at Balbir's.

  As they ate, it occurred to her that as soon as she gave him the next novel it would be followed by another close edit and they'd be back in the place where things between them had flowed easily. She decided to start work on the new novel the very next morning.

  When she awoke he had already left. Instead of feeling upset she took advantage of his absence and the peace of the empty flat, leapt out of bed, showered, grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down at her desk. File. New Document. Save As Untitled. That would do for now. She was ready to begin. She loved this moment. The anticipation of what happens next. It didn't matter that the ideas which had seemed so sharp the night before now appeared fuzzy. She was fearless before the blank page. She rested her hands on the wrist pad and, taking a deep breath, hurled herself into the white void of the first draft.

  She quickly lost herself in the new book. Her protagonist, Darsie Baird, began to dominate every waking and most of her sleeping hours. Suddenly, she didn't have time to see Tom and when after a few weeks of writing in her pyjamas she decided it would be nice to shave her legs and drop in on him she discovered that he had gone home to France for a month to see his family. She tried not to be irritated that he hadn't told her, and Roddy mumbled something about him not wanting to interrupt her Muse.

  Somehow the weeks had drifted past and now it was the best part of two months since they'd seen each other. A couple of days ago he'd texted her to say he was back in Glasgow and the finished copies of her book were due to arrive that week. She waited as long as she could to call in to the office, unsure which she was more eager to see: her debut novel or Tom.

  ‘Hello?’ It was Roddy's voice on the intercom.

  She stood outside Tristesse, bouncing with anticipation, mouth tilted up to the speaker, one hand supporting a tray of fairy cakes. ‘I was just passing.’ Lie.

  There was a buzz and a click and she threw herself through the front door. Balancing the tray she skipped down the corridor towards Reception. The fairy cakes were a bluff. She'd been making batches of them all morning, studding alphabet sweets in the icing to spell out highly amusing and piercingly appropriate lines from classic literature.