A Certain Chemistry (15 page)

Hugh took a sip from his glass and sloshed the wine around in his mouth while he gazed down at the floor again and slowly shook his head.

“Well,” said Mary, “I think I’m going to grab something from that buffet—it all looks delicious.”

“Mmmm . . . yes,” I said, leading her away towards the table. “Dive in. Everything needs to be eaten.”

“What’s in the sandwiches?”

“We have salmon, cheese, and jam,” I said, then leaned closer to her and whispered, “
I
made them, so don’t worry—that is three
separate
types of sandwich.”

Sara’s uncle Tam and his wife, Lizzy, were the last people to leave, at around eleven o’clock. Lizzy apologized, again, for Tam and thanked us for the bag of leftover cakes. Tam stood behind her, wriggling with surprising fluidity for a man his age, and singing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” We told Lizzy it was fine and thanked her for coming—and for the Ikea token—and said we really must make an effort to see each other more often this year. She steered Tam down the drive towards their car, hissing, “You do this
every
time.”

“Quick,” he hissed back, grinning. “Get us home—I’ve a yen for some lovin’.”

We waved them off, closed the door, and silently set about tidying the house. I gathered up the rubbish from the table, and Sara stood next to me, putting all the leftovers onto as few plates as possible. There was more silence than could comfortably fit into the room. Then, without glancing away from the trifle, Sara finally spoke.

“I’m sorry.”

I stopped my tidying and looked at her. She spooned the remainder of the trifle into a smaller bowl, each scoop coming up with a sound like a wellington boot being pulled out of deep mud. When she’d finished, she too stopped and looked back at me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she repeated, smiling sadly. “It is good that you ordered the magazine for me. I know I’ll enjoy it. It’s just . . . you know, I was
expecting
something really . . .
unexpected
. I must have seemed very ungrateful, but I’d dropped you all those hints and I’d worked myself up to the point where I was certain you’d got something
unbelievable
planned. I convinced myself so much that I even started to sense you were being secretive and . . .”

“Secretive? How?”

“Well, that’s the point, I can’t even say precisely how. I just had the feeling you were up to something, that there was something going on that you weren’t telling me about, and that confirmed to me you’d got a big surprise in the offing. I must have been imagining it simply because I wanted it so much. I got angry because I was disappointed . . . but I disappointed myself, really.”

“No . . . it’s my fault.” I felt awful. And why hadn’t I apologized first? What a twat I am. “I’m just shit, Sara. You know what I’m like, I can’t bring myself to do the big set pieces, I simply
can’t
. I can’t do the carriage and the ballet—”

“The
what
?”

“Oh, just for example, you know—the fairy-tale stuff. And, yes, I do think they’re stupid, and I do think the men who do them are self-serving egomaniacs, but I should have tried anyway. I knew how much you wanted something like that. I’ll make it up to you, somehow. I just messed up this time because, well . . . you know . . . I’m shit.”

She moved the couple of steps needed to cross the huge distance that had been dividing us all day and put her arms around me, laying her head on my shoulder. I pulled her to me even tighter and combed my fingers through her hair. She smelled of home.

“Oh, well,” she said. “Maybe one day.”

“Ewww . . . don’t. Can’t we just agree I’m completely shit and draw the line there?”

She laughed. “Okay, okay—you’re shit. At the end of the day, I’m very happy with what I’ve got . . . and it’s you, Tom . . . and you’re shit.”

“Utter shit.”

“You shitter.”

I kissed her head.

“Do you love me beyond the edges of reason and beyond the walls of time?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Sure.”

By the time the McAllister & Campbell thing that I’d promised George I’d attend in her place came round I’d delivered the manuscript of the book to Hugh. In truth, I could have delivered it a little earlier. I’d gone back and rewritten parts of it what was, for me, an extraordinary number of times. Normally, I raced through the process of slapping the words down and then reread the completed manuscript once to check for unbearable uglinesses (sometimes I didn’t even do this—that’s what editors are for) and clumsy typos or embarrassing factual idiocies (sometimes I didn’t even do this—that’s what copy editors are for). I’d then plonk it on Hugh’s desk, whoop with joy, and never think about the damn thing again. For some reason, it was different with this book. It was now officially titled
Georgina Nye: Growing,
by the way. As she was still only thirty, it seemed fittingly apologetic as a title for an autobiography, and it also gave the sense that the book covered the period of her growing up. Moreover, it hinted that she modestly felt she was still growing, um, “spiritually” or something, and finally, our all-purpose subtitle was actually a reference to a Burns song, “Green Grow the Rashes,” which jammed in not just the Scottish angle but also George’s perky, chat-show-friendly feminism: a quote from the song began the book.

Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears
Her noblest work she classes, O;
Her prentice han’ she tried on man,
An’ then she made the lasses, O!

I’d simply been unable to leave the text of the book alone. I recast bits. I threw out whole sections, disgusted with myself because of their crassness. I did research—
proper
research. I fretted over single words. Often I’d even get up out of bed and start writing, unable to sleep because a flawed passage was reading itself over and over in my mind. In the end I practically had to
force
myself to deliver the manuscript: it was never going to be good enough to satisfy me, but the deadline had arrived.

When he got to read it, Hugh was “a bit concerned.” A ghostwriter is usually required to sound like the person whose book he’s writing. Not completely, of course—you don’t want the footballer you’re being on the page to be the mumbling, drunken twat that’s on your Dictaphone. But enough so that the people reading it can comfortably match the image of Wayne Center-Forward with the voice of the simple, unpretentious geezer in the prose.

And that was why Hugh was concerned.

He felt that
Growing
read rather more like Susan Sontag than Georgina Nye. It was a mismatch. I countered by saying that I quite fancied Susan Sontag—going so far, in fact, as to ask if he knew of anywhere I could find nude photos of Susan Sontag on the Web. He remained concerned. (Actually, he looked somewhat more concerned.) Eventually, he called in support from Fiona, who—with typically unattractive snottiness—informed me that viewers of
The Firth
and big fans of
Against Interpretation
were two “largely distinct demographics.” So, in the end, I took out nearly all of the section about how one could use the collapse of Weimar as a metaphor for personal conscience being ever open to the atavistic demons of the id, lost the chapter on Tiresias, and added lots of photos of George at showbiz parties.

George’s agent had approved everything—“Terrif choice of photos! Cracking!!!”—and so the manuscript went off to the copy editor (copy editors, like, say, computer programmers or proctologists, are the kind of people you’re hugely thankful exist but whom you can’t help worrying about at some very deep level), and I got a hotel room booked for me so I could attend the McAllister & Campbell in-house party in London.

I wasn’t looking forward to the party at all, and the day before it I got some news that made me even less keen to go. I was in the bedroom packing my overnight bag, and Sara came in from the shower.

“Don’t forget to bring back the hotel shampoo,” she said.

Sara had pale skin. In fact, with her see-through-you eyes, pale skin, and red hair, you could easily think that one of those tragic, fey heroines from a Waterhouse painting had attempted to evade her fate by sneaking off the canvas and hiding out as the supervisor of an Edinburgh frozen-food store—perhaps a Danaid placed there by some Olympian witness-protection program after grassing up her murderous sisters. However, after a hot shower, Sara went bright pink (or, if she took a bath, pink everywhere below the waterline—just a white head and knees): fresh from the shower, she looked like the kind of exotic dancer you’d find in a bar in
Star Wars
.

“Sure . . . shampoo, soap, maybe if we’re lucky, I’ll get some chocolate and a sheet of notepaper too.”

“Newspaper?”

“Nah. The place to collect newspapers is on the train. Wait long enough and you can get one of everything.”

Sara laughed and scrubbed her hair with the towel. “Good thinking. You can get a few tabloids that way—you’ll be able to see what else Georgina Nye has been up to in America while you’re here doing her book-promotion work.”

“Yeah.” I laughed back, then paused my packing and asked, “What do you mean, ‘what
else
’? What has she got up to already?”

“Och.” Sara shrugged. “She’s shagging Darren Boyle, isn’t she?”

Darren Boyle was a comedian turned game-show host turned actor. (He could, as far as I was concerned, keep turning.)

“What?”

“It was in the paper the other day.”

“Which paper?”

“I can’t remember. One of the girls at work was reading it. The
Star
. . . or the
Sun,
one of those kinds of papers. The
Daily Mail
.”

“What did it say?”

“Just that they were both in America at the moment and had been seen together. Having dinner, in clubs . . . you know. I think we had the usual quote from ‘a friend’ saying they couldn’t get enough of each other or something.”

“And what the
hell
does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Jesus, Tom, calm down.” She laughed again. “What does it matter? She’s not your girlfriend or anything. Who cares if she’s having a bit of a wriggle with Dazza?”

“It’s just . . . I mean, obviously, I don’t care who she sleeps with—the tart—it’s the book I’m thinking about.”

“Isn’t it good publicity for the book?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Well, yes, it is good publicity in that sense . . .”

“In the ‘publicity’ sense.”

“In the sense that she’s in the news. But Darren ‘Oh, I’m so fucking hilarious’ Boyle isn’t even mentioned in it. People will be disappointed not to find him
anywhere
if they buy the book because they’ve been swept up by the excitement of George’s whirlwind romance and marriage to the gurning little ponce.”

“I don’t think anyone’s mentioned marriage. They’ve just had dinner.”

“Well, that’s how it starts, believe me.”

Sara peered at me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.” I noticed I’d very nearly shouted this. “Yes,” I repeated more sanely, “I’m fine. It’s just all the work and having to go to this stupid party . . .”

“You didn’t
have
to go.”

“I did. I told you—Amy committed me to it as part of the contract.”

“You could have told her to go back to them, because she didn’t check with you first.”

“No, I couldn’t, because . . . well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m just a bit wound up, that’s all.”

“Perhaps you should call and cancel. Say you’re sick.”

“Mmmm . . .”

Sara pulled on her nightdress.

“No,” I replied, “I’ll go. I’ve said I would.”

“Well, please yourself,” she said, and headed off to take the wet towel back to the bathroom.

I began jamming the rest of the things into my overnight bag,
really
hard. “I’ll do the bloody party; you just hump your way round America, George,” I muttered venomously to myself. “I hope you feel massively fucking guilty about it, that’s all.”

In-house publishing parties work like this: drink. It’s an opportunity for all sections of the organization—management, editorial, marketing, sales, authors, et cetera—to come together for one evening and get savagely pissed on an equal footing. This one was being held at some venue in London that I knew must be very fashionable at the moment because in any other city in Great Britain no one would have stepped into the place. Aging metal handrails came out of dusty, gray concrete and ran alongside narrow steps gorged with people shuffling between levels in the desperate hope that above, or below, or above again was where the fun was actually happening. (It was probably designed to be “minimal” by people whose vocabulary tragically ended before the word “grim.”) London, because it’s where the media lives, truly is the only place where you can get away with this; in Leeds people would simply say, “Eh? They’ve just put some garden chairs out in an old fooking abattoir.” And it didn’t help that I really wasn’t in the mood for it anyway; after doing the minimum permissible amount of shouting how very big
Growing
was going to be at the sides of people’s heads, I spent most of my time simply trying to keep out of the way.

I was sitting alone in the corner of the bar, drinking a lager and watching a group of young women from M&C’s London offices—every single one of whom was called Emma—dance while holding bottles of Smirnoff Ice, when my mobile got a call. I whipped it from my side and slammed it against my ear. I didn’t even bother to glance at the caller display, as I knew it must be either Amy or Sara.

“Hello. Tom Cartwright can’t come to the phone right now, as he is currently in fucking hell. Please leave your message after the gnashing of teeth . . .”

“Erm . . . Tom?” It was George.

I rammed my finger into my other ear so that I could hear her better. “George! . . . Sorry. I was . . . expecting . . .”

“Oh, sorry. I won’t keep you, if you’re waiting for another call.”

“No . . . I—
no
. . . You’re, not . . . no . . . Hahaha,” I explained.

“I’ve still not quite got my head round the time difference—I think it’s five hours, or maybe six . . . or is it eight? Anyway, I just wanted to call you to say thanks again for filling in for me and ask how it was going.”