A Murder of Magpies (5 page)

It's hard to believe I even know about this. My interest in clothes is so minimal I have two work skirts for everyday, two suits I think of as my “posh” suits for author meetings, parties, and other formalities. Shirts are tiresome, as they don't wear as well as the skirts, which I expect to have to replace only every three years or so. But if you keep the suits and skirts to two neutral colors (very neutral: black and dark gray), then the shirts can all be more or less anything, and it's less of a bother. My theory is, I'm clean, I'm tidy. Everything else is too boring to think about.

Kit claims that I am the only woman on the planet who doesn't look in shop windows as she walks down the street. I think it's more to do with the kind of women he knows. We once had lunch in the Armani shop in Knightsbridge. (Surprisingly good pasta. I'd expected three lettuce leaves, hold the dressing, and air kisses.) He stopped in the shop on the way out and waved a white suit in my direction.

“This is
fab
ulous.”

It was. I appreciate fashion in the abstract. It just has nothing to do with me.

“Try it on.”

“Me? Why?”

“What do you mean, why? To buy it. You'd look great.”

“I wouldn't wear white.”

Now it was his turn to be confused. “Why not?”

“Too bright.”

This was gibberish to Kit. “Too bright? How can white be too bright?”

“Kit. People will look at me.”

Still gibberish. “But I
love
people looking at me.” Kit is tall and extremely dark, with an elegant lion's mane of hair artfully coiffed to give him even more height. If you didn't register his intense Englishness, superficially you'd think he was French. He was at his most French then, in a charcoal-gray, exquisitely cut suit, waving his hands in the air lavishly. But I remained immune to his projection. I don't want people to look at me. They don't, and they probably wouldn't even if I wore white, but basically I like being invisible.

It's something that comes with age. When you're in your teens everyone looks at you because who knows what troublesome teenagers will do. When you're in your twenties, you're potential partner material, and so even someone as ordinary looking as me gets a certain amount of attention. Once you're in your early forties, that's it, you've vanished. You're not old enough to warrant courtesy, you're much too old to fit into the interesting category. So no one sees you anymore. At first it's a bit startling, but after a while it's very relaxing. You can do whatever you want, because no one cares. The negative part might be “because no one cares,” but the positive is the “you can do whatever you want” part.

But Kit wasn't buying into this, and he didn't give up. “They do it in gray, too.”

I barely glanced in the direction he was semaphoring. “Too bright.”

“Gray? How can gray be too bright?”

I began to laugh helplessly. I'm not unaware of my limitations, I even know they're ludicrous. I just don't see why I should change them. “Kit, it's too bright. It's a
bright
gray. An incredibly loud, cheerful, bright gray. Practically scarlet. Now let's just go. I'm not going to buy a suit. I'm not even going to try on a suit. I
have
a suit.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky once came up with a sentence to demonstrate how you could say something completely grammatical that still had no meaning at all. His was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Kit obviously thought “I have a suit” was on the same level.
A
suit? One? And what did that one old suit have to do with this lovely new suit?

I distracted him with a discussion of his upcoming travels—I didn't know where he was going, but he was always going somewhere, so it was a safe bet—and I managed to maneuver us out of the shop. As well as the two months of the year he spends at fashion shows—or, as he so elegantly puts it, “wasting my time looking at fucking frocks”—Kit also gives a lot of lectures and acts as a consultant to a bunch of companies. He's good, and he can't say no, a lethal combination. This was why Sandra and I were having lunch with him now, nearly nine months before publication. Pinning him down for publicity was always tricky.

We went to the Groucho Club, which I loathe but Kit likes. Kit was late, of course, but I wasn't going to hang around outside for him, and one of the Groucho's less attractive aspects—one of its many unattractive aspects—is having nowhere for waiting guests to sit. The theory, I've always assumed, is that if you're not worthy of being a member, you're not worthy, full stop. Why should they make an effort—and, worse, use up space where they might otherwise be making money—for people that they'd probably rejected?

I had, however, been there enough to know that a confident exterior goes a long way. I marched up to the signing-in book and scribbled something important looking and illegible, adding Sandra as my guest. After all, what were they going to do if they caught on, force me to join?

We sat down to wait in the bar and went through the plans Sandra was going to present. It was always fun to work on things with Sandra. Publicity is a relentless business. By thirty most people are howling to get out, which means that publicists tend to be young and therefore, by definition, inexperienced. Inexperienced at best. At worst inept. Sandra was neither. She was a veteran of hundreds of campaigns, and had kept her sanity and her perspective. She had also kept her sense of humor, and it was one of the reasons she and Kit worked so well together: She was scabrously funny. For the moment, though, we were mapping out the detail, which was dull but had to be done.

“I thought you'd said there was a complete embargo,” Sandra said.

“There is. I told you. Even in-house. I hope you haven't given the manuscript to anyone.”

“Of course not, but if that's the case I don't understand why you said that
Vogue
could have an advance look.”

“
Vogue
? I didn't. What are you talking about? Why would they want to see it anyway, apart from vulgar curiosity, that is?”

“I had a call just before we left, from a guy named Philippe Anjou, at French
Vogue,
saying you had told him to get in touch. A smoothy with a gorgeous voice.”

“Me? I've never had any contacts with
Vogue,
much less French
Vogue
and their smoothies, and I wouldn't have told them to ring you—why would I? Serial is being handled by Susie. It always is.”

“I wondered about that. I thought maybe you'd met him with Kit and you were playing footsie with him—or Kit was.” She looked hopeful.

I hated to stamp on a perfectly good smutty rumor, but it couldn't be helped. “It's probably one of the tabloids, trying to get their hands on an advance copy.”

Sandra was silent. She would have preferred me to be having a fling with a French smoothy, but had to acknowledge that a tabloid foray was more likely. A bit depressing, when I thought about it.

“Did you print out the manuscript?” I asked.

“Yes, I always do—it's easier. Why?”

“Can you lock it away? Kit had a break-in.” I told her about it, but let her assume that it was the tabloid hacks. I didn't want to be overdramatic, and in the cold light of day—well, the gloomy light of the Groucho—it did seem silly.

Sandra looked bemused. “I'll try and think what to do, but I'm not sure there's anything that locks in my office.”

Come to that, neither was I. My office door didn't lock. Publishers are an honest bunch—or at least we're all aware that none of us has anything worth stealing. Whatever the case, petty pilfering has never been a problem and since manuscripts are not intrinsically valuable, and we have so many, and so many copies of each one, nothing is ever locked up, or even put away. The usual filing system with manuscripts is much like David's with everything: pile them up until they topple over. They're not exactly gold bullion. Sandra's office is particularly loaded. As well as copies of each manuscript that was being published, she had proofs, presenters, or sales folders, and finished books. And, being Sandra, all of this went back for the entire time she'd been with the company. My office is much emptier, as about every six months or so the clutter and dust irritate me into getting a bin liner and throwing out everything that has already been published.

Much emptier. Much easier to find things.

I was edgy, and I was also now cross. It was one thirty, and Kit was half an hour late, which was excessive, even for him. I wanted to sort out the publicity and get back to the office for a three-thirty meeting. I tried calling him at home, but there was no answer. There was no point in trying his mobile, as although he carried it he usually forgot to turn it on, and he doesn't know how to access his voice mail. He'd asked me to answer it a couple of weeks ago when he was driving, and I discovered he had messages going back six months, none of which he even knew were there.

The waiter came over to ask what name the bill should be in. He looked at Sandra, which was understandable. She was standard publicity issue, which meant blonde, pretty, and black-lycraed. I intervened. Sandra was used to paying for all her authors. “Lovell,” I said, smiling brilliantly at him, “Kit Lovell.” If Kit was going to be late, he could at least pay for it.

Sandra and I went and had lunch in the Groucho's restaurant at two, also on Kit's bill. Apart from leaving increasingly irritable messages, there really wasn't any choice. By three when he hadn't still hadn't shown up, we went back to the office.

I didn't know whether to be annoyed or worried. Kit sounds flighty, but I've always found him totally professional. He'd never have got as far as he has if he was as much a butterfly as he pretended. I figure it was a persona he had assumed when he was young, as a cover for insecurity, and now it was second nature. But he'd never stood me up before. If he is going to change his plans, which he does frequently, he always rings, or gets a message to me somehow. In fact, he usually claims that it's me who does the standing up, a charge I no longer bother to deny, because it gives him such pleasure.

So where was he? I'd called Miranda, in case he'd thought we were meeting at the office, but she'd said she'd worked at her desk on Breda's book throughout lunch, and he'd neither rung nor appeared. There wasn't much I could do. I could hardly start phoning hospitals and the police because someone's missed a meeting. Even I, with all my mothering instincts toward my authors, know that.

Mothering.
Hell, I hadn't called my mother back yesterday. My parents had divorced years ago, and my father has a second family in Canada, where we'd spent part of my childhood. He and I are civil, but not close. Helena, on the other hand, lives, in mothering terms, absolutely on my doorstep, or, as she calls it “just around the corner,” in St. John's Wood, and we are as close as two people who had lives that are totally incomprehensible to each other can possibly be.

I don't really understand how my mother lives her life, much less why. From time to time I consider the possibility that she is really two people, or perhaps a Martian. The Martian scenario usually wins out. My mother has been with the same City law firm forever. She made partner outrageously young, in her twenties. She had shown her fitness early: When she was twenty-two she took three days off work to have me, and has never really let me forget it, mostly by looking amazed whenever I am ill, as if to say,
You're staying home for
that
?
She is at the office by seven every morning, and she never leaves before seven in the evening. So what I can't work out is how she has also managed to see every play in town, go to concerts and opera regularly, have dinner with friends regularly—even worse, give her own dinner parties regularly—read all the latest novels, see all the latest films. She also walks three miles every morning before work, and has a large and close circle of friends. As I say, two people. Maybe three.

So when I say she left a message asking me to dinner, I don't want to give the impression she's some little old lady waiting only for a visit from her daughter to cast a ray of sunshine into her otherwise desolate existence.

One of her more irritating characteristics is that I always get her right away on the phone. Dammit, she's a lawyer. Why do my meetings spread over my days like ectoplasm, but not hers? “Never too busy, darling, to talk to you,” she trills. I'd like to ask why not, but I know the answer. Martian.

“Sorry not to get back to you yesterday. Nightmare day at the office.”

She doesn't have nightmare days, so she didn't bite. Instead, “I wanted to know, darling, if you'd like to come for dinner tomorrow. There's that nice judge I wanted you to meet, and possibly those two actors from Chichester.” Mother's friends are always incredibly glamorous. “That nice judge” is never a part-time magistrate in Slough. He'll probably turn out to be a Law Lord, or the American Attorney General. The actors from Chichester won't be two struggling kids just out of drama school, but some Hollywood stars beefing up their credentials by doing a short-run stint in Britain—or, if they are just out of drama school, by the time dessert arrives they'll have had Steven Spielberg on the phone, begging them to let him direct them in his newest production.

It's not that my mother is a starfucker. Everyone genuinely likes her, she genuinely likes them. I like her, too. She's interested, interesting, good company. I'd go to her dinner parties with pleasure if she'd met me somewhere and asked me. As her daughter, though, I just feel everyone sitting there comparing us all the time. No, not comparing us. I feel them sitting there awed into silent astonishment that we could be even distantly related.

She moved on. “Have you seen the new show at the Tate? It's marvelous—do go. But go early, once the reviews come out it will get crowded.”