‘It’s okay. Not finished, or anywhere near it, but I’m managing to do some most days.’
The voice went public again: ‘She works even on holiday, this lady!’, and then returned to me. ‘That’s great. Only Sonny is a great admirer of your work, he really loves your writing, and he is in town hunting for a traditional English saga. Something with heart and integrity. Real emotions, real feelings, real people – a sense of history, you know?’
I knew, but was by no means sure what it had to do with me.
‘I think,’ said Lew, ‘that Down Our Street may be just what he’s looking for.’
I digested this. ‘You do?’
Another nervous laugh intended to display cavalier confidence to Lew’s unseen audience. ‘I know it!’
It was a while since I’d had an American success. A Time to Reap had not even found an American publisher, due (Lew said) to its degree of sophistication and brilliance. The word turncoat might have been invented for my agent, who was capable of hijacking the moral high ground no matter how shifting the sands, and who could snatch credit from the jaws of the most crushing condemnation.
‘Harriet?’
‘Yes?’
‘I keep losing you.’ There was a tapping sound. ‘Must be the line. I take it we are interested?’
‘All things being equal.’ I was playing it cool, but actually I could feel a distinct prickle of excitement at the thought of Sonny Beidermeyer and his customised cheque book.
‘She says all things being equal!’ laughed Lew. This time there was no answering rumble, and he went on. ‘Now the point at issue here, Harriet, is that I’ve been able to give Sonny a fair idea of the novel from your excellent synopsis, and incidentally I’ve let him have a copy, but he is dying to see a few chapters …’
Lew left this hanging in the air for me to grab. I didn’t somehow think that Beidermeyer was the sort of chap who ‘died’ to do anything. That was pure Lew Mervin. On the other hand, I must be as shadowy a presence to him as he was to me. I would play hard to get. It was tough on Lew, but I was sure his small store of business acumen would come to his assistance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘there isn’t a lot I can do about that. We’re here for another ten days, and I’ve got the whole thing with me. I’m writing in longhand at the moment. It’s really not a good time.’
‘I understand that perfectly, Harriet,’ said Lew solemnly. He loved his clients to behave like serious writers. ‘The book must come first, and I know Sonny would be the first to appreciate that …’ His voice faded again as he glanced round for endorsement of this view. ‘I’m wondering how we can get round this.’
‘I’m pleased with the way it’s developing,’ I added.
‘She’s pleased with the way it’s developing,’ relayed Lew.
There was an answering rumble, which drew closer and suddenly and alarmingly became a voice in my ear.
‘… exactly how we can get round it. Mrs Blair, this is Sonny Beidermeyer of Aurora, New York.’ He introduced himself as though nothing Lew had said till now had done the job adequately.
‘How do you do?’ I gave cool detachment my best shot.
‘Mrs Blair, are you interested in being published by Aurora?’
He was alarmingly direct. His use of my married handle recalled the Great Man of Era Books, whose best girl I had been for so many years until the unfortunate Fartenwald incident. His voice was deep, thick and gravelly, the sort of voice used to promote American beers and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
‘Yes,’ I said tamely.
‘Good. In that case I want to see this manuscript your agent has been telling me so much about.’
‘The trouble is I’m on holiday in France.’
‘And I’m in London on business,’ countered Beidermeyer abrasively. ‘But I see no reason why young Lew here shouldn’t fly down and pick up the book.’
I could hear Lew no-no-noing and sure-sure-sureing in the background.
‘At my expense,’ added Beidermeyer.
‘Isn’t that a bit drastic?’ I asked. ‘I could post it.’
‘You could post it, Mrs Blair, but I have only a few days in your lovely capital, and very little faith in the postal system. If your novel is as commercial as it is said to be then I want to read it while I’m still in the UK.’
‘Right,’ I said.
I’d had to make some pretty swift decisions. This would undoubtedly have been my opportunity to make use of Royston’s much-proffered fax machine, but I could not bring myself to give him the satisfaction. Besides which I rather liked the idea of Sonny Beidermeyer, the big man, sending an envoy scurrying to France to collect the precious manuscript.
By the time I put the phone down three minutes later I’d arranged to pick up Lew in Bordeaux the following afternoon. We had been out-hustled by an expert. Beidermeyer had seized control and exercised it with the assurance of a master. I was torn between wondering how I had allowed this to happen, and excitement over the possibility of a fat American sale.
‘Everything okay?’ asked Priscilla, floating by with a tray of beers.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘Only it can be the very devil getting a decent line from here.’
‘No problem.’
I sat down outside and ordered myself a demi-pichet. No problem? I could see little else.
‘Where exactly are you staying?’ asked Priscilla when she brought my drink.
‘The Villa Almont. Do you know it?’
‘God, yes, how funny, it’s one of Annie and Chris’s places.’
‘Annie and Chris?’
‘My sister and brother-in-law, the Rutherford-Pounces. I dare say you’ll have corresponded with them before coming.’
‘What a coincidence.’
‘It’s a new acquisition, that house. They wanted something in this area to keep an eye on me, really,’ explained Priscilla. She seemed to accept her role as prodigal with equanimity. ‘Have you met them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you make of them?’
‘They were very nice.’
Priscilla guffawed. ‘They’re perfectly okay, actually. Underneath all that.’
I remembered very clearly our visit chez the RPs. Annabel wore an upstanding collar, a Guernsey, pearl earrings and the sort of jeans that only well-bred women wear. Crispin had sleek hair with a high parting, and chukka boots. Their house was freezing cold.
‘So you’re Annabel’s sister?’
‘That’s right.’ Priscilla sat down at the table and lit herself a Marlboro with quivering, orange-stained fingers. ‘Hard to credit, isn’t it? She did all the right things and I did all the wrong ones, but we are absolutely devoted.’ She recovered from a coughing fit and added: ‘As a matter of fact one of Chris’s envoys is over at the moment so you’ll probably get a visit. But you mustn’t worry. He’s an absolute honey.’
Royston was swimming with the girls. Or at least he was bobbing about on our giant inflatable turtle, sitting astride and urging it forward with his heels as though in some aquatic Rotten Row.
‘We invited him in!’ called Clara gaily. ‘It must be so awful to be next door and not be able to use the pool!’
Royston dismounted and pulled himself up on to the edge. He was very thin and white with immensely pointed shoulders and knobbly knees like the ten-stone weakling in the Charles Atlas ads.
‘I’ll be off now your mother’s back,’ he said, as though I were a termagant in crimplene and he some kindly guardian standing in loco parentis.
‘There’s no need to rush,’ I muttered.
‘Where did you go, anyway?’ asked Clara. ‘You never said.’
‘I went to town to make a telephone call.’
‘Whatever did you do that for?’ asked Royston. ‘You should have come round to me.’
‘I had one or two other things to do,’ I said. ‘And I had my card with me.’
They were not sufficiently interested to ask what my agent ha
d wanted to speak to me so urgently about, and I was too pigheaded to tell them.
‘Hey,’ said Naomi from the lilo, ‘Royston, show Harriet your eye.’
‘She doesn’t want to see it,’ said Royston, in the tone of a man who takes his harp to parties and is invariably asked to play.
‘Oh yes, go on,’ added Clara. I sat stolidly on the grass. Royston turned round, made an ‘O’ with his finger and thumb round his right eye, somehow popped the eye through it, caught it in his other hand, treated me to a quick flash of the empty socket and replaced it. The whole grisly trick was over in a few seconds. The girls shrieked and clapped.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ they chorused.
‘Amazing,’ I agreed.
Royston spread his arms as though acknowledging the applause of a vast audience. ‘It was nothing. I got it when I was but a lad. I came off my bicycle on to a neighbour’s chickenwire fence. Stood me in good stead with the girls ever since.’
I tried hard to see Royston as some kind of spoiled romantic hero, fatally attractive to women. But it was no good.
‘He’s got a spare one,’ said Naomi from the lilo.
‘And there’s not many guys can say that!’ shrieked Clara.
‘Does it ever just – drop out?’ I asked.
‘Never fear. Once it’s in, it’s kind of sucked in place like a sea anemone.’
‘What’s the spare for then?’
‘Security,’ replied Royston. He got to his feet. He was wearing those strange long bathing shorts, printed with orange, black and purple psychedelia. In my view they were only just acceptable on youths of Gareth’s age, and on someone of Royston’s feather not at all.
He misread my expression. ‘I see you like my shorts.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘I thought I’d branch out.’
‘Good for you,’ put in Clara. ‘They’re really up to date.’
There was clearly no point in being rude, especially as he was going.
‘We’ll see you the day after tomorrow then,’ I said pointedly.
‘Yes, indeed. I’m looking forward to it.’
I wished I could say the same.
Later that evening I saw Rindin paddling about in the dewpond and sure enough, at about eleven, the drainage pump started up. I decided not to go to bed until I was ready to fall asleep.
It was a sultry night. At half past twelve I was still out on the terrace when Obelix came down for a swim. She swayed heavily down the steps till her front feet were in the water and drank noisily. Thirst slaked she looked about her for a moment with water dripping from her muzzle before taking a great leap, ears flying, and belly-flopping on to the surface of the pool. She then did several stately lengths in a determined manner, like an old lady in a leisure centre.
This time I didn’t resent the intrusion. But it brought home to me the fact that my struggle to regain the status quo, which only a week ago had seemed moderately successful, was beginning to lose ground.
George, whose exhaustively presented views on the virtue of family holidays had led to this trip, had buggered off to the office at the first opportunity. Agents and publishers were determined to winkle me out and involve me in deals. Lew was coming. Royston was lurking, one-eyed and insinuating, on the sidelines. Rindin and the Count were conducting their war of attrition across the no-man’s land of the Villa Almont. Priscilla Shaw was RP’s sister-in-law. The roving scout was about to descend.
And somewhere out there in the hot, scented, buzzing night was Kostaki.
I rose from my seat, charged the pool and did a racing dive into the water in my shorts and T-shirt, narrowly missing Obelix, and sending her floundering and yelping for the steps.
Chapter Eleven
I went to Lalutte early next day to shop for the dinner party. My plan was to acquire the ingredients, do whatever cooking I could in advance and stow it in the fridge, and give over the afternoon to the collection and settling-in of Lew.
The town had a brittle, biscuity quality as if, were one to rap the yellow walls with one’s fist, it would disintegrate into a pile of crumbs. Pru’s Bar was empty, and the dogs not in sight. I did my shopping without a pause for refreshment, and set off for home. On the way back I glanced through the gateway of the Château Forêt Noir and saw Isabelle and Véronique working on the front border with long-handled hoes. They looked like a couple of gawky wading birds as they dibbled about among the weeds. Of the Count and his house guest there was no sign. Indoors, perhaps, putting a final polish on their Valse Valeta. Back at the Villa Almont the girls were still in bed asleep and Royston was not at his work centre. Through the window I could see the fax machine sporadically dribbling documents into an empty room.
As I put my purchases away and got on with the fairly simple cooking to which I was committed, I tried to look on the dinner party as an opportunity to claw back some self-esteem.
At the airport, Lew was last through, in spite of having travelled first class courtesy of Aurora, NY. He was an experienced traveller – every year saw him breaking new ground in places like Nepal and Alaska – but he appeared flustered.
‘You’re never going to believe this, Harriet,’ he said, sublimely unaware that as far as he was concerned I was ready to believe anything. ‘But I picked up the wrong bag.’
‘It’s easily done,’ I conceded, remembering the Scotsman in Perth.
‘Happily the other guy found out right away. He went to get a present he’d bought for his mother.’
I pictured the poor man opening the case to be confronted with piles of Lew’s designer mistakes. Mind you, Lew was wearing a few of them. Enormous white-rimmed sunglasses bestrode his nose, and a lemon seersucker jacket topped a white T-shirt and white peg-top trousers which made Lew, a small man, look as if he were entering for a sack race. His feet were shod in painfully new white HiTecs picked out in silver like the hooves of a circus pony.
‘I guess I may have brought too much,’ he observed as we toiled across the concourse with his trolley, ‘but I’ve learned that to travel light can be a false economy.’
We emerged into the afternoon sun.
‘Wow,’ remarked Lew, ‘this is serious heat.’
‘Yes, it’s topped the hundred mark for the past few days.’
We climbed into the car and I rolled back the sunroof. Lew sighed and stretched his arms. His state-of-the-art plastic watch looked like a toy on his bony wrist.
‘You’re en famille, Harriet?’
‘Yes. Well, in theory. Though actually George had to go back to the UK yesterday.’
‘Surely not, when you’re on vacation! Why was that?’
I accelerated sharply out of the slip road. ‘Some business hitch or other.’
‘Gee, poor George,’ said Lew. ‘And I’m here.’
I glanced at Lew. Was he suggesting that he might in some way be able to fulfil George’s role in my life? It was unthinkable. In all the years I’d known him, and despite his devotion to me and unalloyed admiration for my work, there had never been in our relationship a hint of what my headmistress would have called ‘silliness’. At this moment Lew was polishing his outsize sunspecs on his handkerchief, leaving his exposed face looking even more thin and worried, and his large nose even more bulbous. No, it was guilt that had been the impulse for Lew’s remark. Guilt, at being here in sunny southern France with a bestselling author while poor old George grafted in the smoke. There wasn’t a trace of arrogance in Lew’s make-up. I was sure this was what had led to the breakdown of his marriage to the breathtaking Marisa, scion of a noble house and from a long line of mad, bad people. You only had to see Marisa’s photograph – flaring nostrils, curling lip and hooded eyes – to know that she needed three blazing rows a day and a beating before breakfast to keep her amused. The initial attraction was even harder to fathom. Perhaps in those far-off days Lew had come into Marisa’s life trailing clouds of glory, the rough diamond from Hoboken, New Jersey, the Sinatra of publishing
… Lew finished polishing his specs, replaced them on his conk and blew his nose on the handkerchief. No again. Marisa had wanted something to wipe her feet on.
‘How long can you stay?’ I asked gently.
‘A couple of nights. Will that be quite all right?’
‘Fine. I’ve got one or two people coming to dinner tomorrow night, so you’ll be able to play host.’
‘Sounds wonderful. I tell you what, though, Harriet. What I’m looking forward to most of all is reading Down Our Street.’
How little it takes, I thought, as we turned on to the autoroute and hurtled south, to make some people happy.
Lew was predictably bowled over. ‘Too much … it’s exquisite …’ he breathed, drinking in the house, the pool, the garden, the hammocks, the view over the parched sunflowers to the heat-smudged horizon. ‘How did you find this place?’
I decided against describing the Rutherford-Pounces. ‘Oh, friends of friends, you know the kind of thing.’
‘I should have such friends,’ said Lew wistfully.
He went for a swim. His trunks weren’t quite as funny as Royston’s, but only because they were more expensive. They were Black Watch boxer shorts, from which his thin legs protruded like a couple of lolly sticks. The girls lay motionless on their loungers by the sous-sol, faces greasy with sun oil, eyes shielded by Ray Bans, but I knew they were watching. Suddenly I felt rather protective of Lew. I should not be on my own tomorrow night.
He pleaded tiredness and went to bed early. But the knowledge that someone would soon be reading the work in progress for the first time had filled me with a fresh enthusiasm for it. The girls were sitting on the side of the pool enjoying a quiet fag in the moonlight, and Royston was safely behind his shutters, so I went up to the atelier to add a few telling paragraphs to Down Our Street.
I had left Mattie Piper alone on the moors, tear-stained and windswept and quivering in the wake of Oliver Challoner’s importunate embrace. So far, so star-crossed. But in the nature of the beast, things were going to have to get a lot worse before they got better. Mattie’s behaviour, for a start, had to bottom out, and this was next on the agenda.
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