Longshot (2 page)

Give it two years, I’d thought, kissing farewell to the security of a salary: if I can’t get published in two years I’ll admit that the compulsion to write fiction is fool’s gold and settle for common sense. Tossing away the paychecks had been a fairly desperate step, but I’d tried writing before work and after, in trains and at weekends, and had produced only dust. A stretch of no-excuse solitude, I’d thought, would settle things one way or another. Incipient hypothermia wasn’t in any way diminishing the intense happiness of having put my toe into the first crack of the rockface.

I did as it happened know quite a lot about survival in adverse circumstances, and the prospect of lean times hadn’t worried me. I’d rather looked forward to them as a test of ingenuity. I just hadn’t realized that sitting and thinking in itself made one cold. I hadn’t known that a busy brain sneakily stole warmth from inactive hands and feet. In every freezing configuration I’d lived through before, I’d been moving.

The letter from Ronnie Curzon came on a particularly cold morning when there was ice like a half-descended curtain over the inside of my friend’s aunt’s attic window. The window, with its high view over the Thames at Chiswick, over the ebb-tide mud and the wind-sailing sea gulls, that window, my delight, had done most, I reckoned, to release invention into words. I’d rigged a chair onto a platform so that I could sit there to write with a long view to the tree-chopped horizon over Kew Gardens. I’d never yet managed an even passable sentence when faced with a blank wall.

The letter said:

AMERICAN RIGHTS! INCREDIBLE words.

The day warmed up miraculously. American rights were things that happened to successful authors, not to people struggling in an unfamiliar landscape, afflicted by self-doubts and insecurities, with a need to be told over and over that the book is OK, it’s OK, don’t worry so much.

“Don’t worry,” Ronnie had said heartily, summoning me to his presence after reading the manuscript I’d dumped unheralded on his desk a couple of weeks earlier. “Don’t worry, I’m sure we can find you a publisher. Leave it to me. Let me see what I can do.”

Ronnie Curzon, authors’ agent, with his salesman’s subtle tongue, had indeed found me a publisher, a house more prestigious than I would have aimed for.

“They have a large list,” Ronnie explained kindly. “They can afford to take a risk on a few first-timers, though it’s all much harder than it used to be.” He sighed. “The tyrannical bottom line and so on. Still,” he beamed, “they’ve asked you to lunch to get acquainted. Look on the bright side.”

I’d grown used to Ronnie’s fast swings to pessimism and back. He’d told me in the same breath that I’d sell two thousand copies if I was very lucky indeed, and that a certain lady novelist counted her paperbacks in millions.

“Everything’s possible,” he said encouragingly.

“Including falling flat on one’s face?” I asked.

“Don’t worry so much.”

On the day of the American rights letter I walked as usual from the friend’s aunt’s house to Ronnie’s office four miles away in Kensington High Street and, as I’d learned a thing or two by that time, I went not precipitously as soon as possible but later in the morning, so as to arrive at noon. Shortly after that hour, I’d discovered, Ronnie tended to offer wine to his visitors and to send out for sandwiches. I hadn’t told him much about my reduced domestic arrangements; he was naturally and spontaneously generous.

I misjudged things to the extent that the door of his own room was firmly shut, where normally it stood open.

“He’s with another client,” Daisy said.

Daisy smiled easily, an unusual virtue in a receptionist. Big white teeth in a black face. Wild hair. A neat Oxford accent. Going to night school for Italian classes.

“I’ll let him know you’re here,” she said, lifting her telephone, pressing a button and consulting with her boss.

“He wants you to wait,” she reported, and I nodded and passed some time with patience on one of the two semi-comfortable chairs arranged for the purpose.

Ronnie’s suite of offices consisted of a large outer room, partly furnished by the desks of Daisy and of her sister Alice, who kept the firm’s complicated accounts, and partly by a wall of box-files on shelves and a large central table scattered with published books. Down a passage from the big room lay on one side the doors to three private offices (two housing Ronnie’s associates) and on the other the entrance into a windowless store like a library, where from floor to ceiling were ranked copies of all the books that Ronnie and his father before him had nursed to birth.

I spent the time in the outer room looking at a framed corkboard on which were pinned the dust jackets of the crop still in the shops, wondering yet again what my own baby would look like. First-time authors, it seemed, were allowed little input in the design department.

“Trust the professionals,” Ronnie had said comfortingly. “After all, they know what will sell books.”

I’d thought cynically that sometimes you’d never guess. All I could do, though, was hope.

Ronnie’s door opened and out came his head, his neck and a section of shoulder.

“John? Come along in.”

I went down to his room which contained his desk, his swiveling armchair, two guest chairs, a cupboard and roughly a thousand books.

“Sorry to keep you,” he said.

He was as expansively apologetic as if I’d had a definite appointment and waved me into his office with every appearance of being delighted by my presence. He showed the same manner to everyone. A very successful agent, Ronnie.

He was rounded and enthusiastic. Cuddly was almost the word. Short, with smooth dark hair and soft dry hands, wearing always a business suit over a white shirt and a striped tie. Authors, his presentation seemed to say, could turn up if they pleased in pale-blue and red ski-suits and snow-defeating moon boots, but serious business took place in sober worsted.

“A cold day,” he said, eyeing my clothes forgivingly.

“The slush in the gutters has frozen solid.”

He nodded, only half listening, his eyes on his other client, who had remained settled in his chair as if there for the day. It seemed to me that Ronnie was stifling exasperation under a façade of aplomb, a surprising configuration when what he usually showed was unflagging effortless bonhomie.

“Tremayne,” he was saying jovially to his guest, “this is John Kendall, a brilliant young author.”

As Ronnie regularly described all his authors as brilliant, even with plentiful evidence to the contrary, I remained unembarrassed.

Tremayne was equally unimpressed. Tremayne, sixtyish, gray-haired, big and self-assured, was clearly not pleased at the interruption.

“We haven’t finished our business,” he said ungraciously.

“Time for a glass of wine,” Ronnie suggested, ignoring the complaint. “For you, Tremayne?”

“Gin and tonic.”

“Ah . . . I meant, white wine or red?”

After a pause Tremayne said with a show of annoyed resignation, “Red, then.”

“Tremayne Vickers,” Ronnie said to me noncommittally, completing the introduction. “Red do you, John?”

“Great.”

Ronnie bustled about, moving heaps of books and papers, clearing spaces, producing glasses, bottle and corkscrew and presently pouring with concentration.

“To trade,” he said with a smile, handing me a glass. “To success,” he said to Vickers.

“Success! What success? All these writers are too big for their boots.”

Ronnie glanced involuntarily at my own boots, which were big enough for anyone.

“It’s no use you telling me I’m not offering a decent fee,” Tremayne told him. “They ought to be glad of the work.” He eyed me briefly and asked me without tact, “What do you earn in a year?”

I smiled as blandly as Ronnie and didn’t answer.

“How much do you know about racing?” he demanded.

“Horse racing?” I asked.

“Of course horse racing.”

“Well,” I said. “Not a lot.”

“Tremayne,” Ronnie protested, “John isn’t your sort of writer.”

“A writer’s a writer. Anyone can do it. You tell me I’ve been wrong looking for a big name. Very well then, find me a smaller name. You said your friend here is brilliant. So how about
him
?”

“Ah,” Ronnie said cautiously. “Brilliant is just . . . ah ... a figure of speech. He’s inquisitive, capable and impulsive.”

I smiled at my agent with amusement.

“So he’s
not
brilliant?” Tremayne asked ironically, and to me he said, “What have you written, then?”

I answered obligingly, “Six travel guides and a novel.”

“Travel guides? What sort of travel guides?”

“How to live in the jungle. Or in the Arctic. Or in deserts. That sort of thing.”

“For people who like difficult holidays,” Ronnie said, with all the indulgent irony of those devoted to comfort. “John used to work for a travel agency which specializes in sending the intrepid out to be stretched.”

“Oh.” Tremayne looked at his wine without enthusiasm and after a while said testily, “There must be someone who’d leap at the job.”

I said, more to make conversation than out of urgent curiosity, “What is it that you want written?”

Ronnie made a gesture that seemed to say “Don’t ask,” but Tremayne answered straightforwardly.

“An account of my life.”

I blinked. Ronnie’s eyebrows rose and fell.

Tremayne said, “You’d think those race-writing johnnies would be falling over themselves for the honor, but they’ve all turned me down.” He sounded aggrieved. “Four of them.”

He recited their names, and such was their eminence that even I, who seldom paid much attention to racing, had heard of them all. I glanced at Ronnie, who showed resignation.

“There must be others,” I said mildly.

“There’s some I wouldn’t let set foot through my door.” The truculence in Tremayne’s voice was one of the reasons, I reflected, why he was having trouble. I lost interest in him, and Ronnie, seeing it, cheered up several notches and suggested sandwiches for lunch.

“I hoped you’d be lunching me at your club,” Tremayne said grouchily, and Ronnie said vaguely “Work” with a flap of the hand to indicate the papers on his desk. “I mostly have lunch on the run these days.”

He went over to the door and put the same section of himself through it as before.

“Daisy?” He called to her along the passage. “Phone down to the shop for sandwiches, would you? Usual selection. Everyone welcome. Count heads, would you? Three of us here.”

He brought himself in again without more discussion. Tremayne went on looking disgruntled and I drank my wine with gratitude.

It was warm in Ronnie’s office. That, too, was a bonus. I took off the jacket of the ski suit, hung it over a chair back and sat down contentedly in the scarlet sweater I wore underneath. Ronnie winced as usual over the brightness of my clothes but in fact I felt warmer in red, and I never discounted the psychology of colors. Those of my travel-agency friends who dressed in army olive-browns were colonels at heart.

Tremayne went on niggling away at his frustration, not seeming to mind if I learned his business.

“I offered to have them to stay,” he complained. “Can’t do fairer than that. They all said the sales wouldn’t be worth the work, not at the rate I was offering. Arrogant lot of bastards.” He gloomily drank and made a face over the taste. “My name alone would sell the book, I told them, and they had the gall to disagree. Ronnie says it’s a small market.” He glowered at my agent. “Ronnie says that he can’t get the book commissioned by a publisher without a top-rank writer, and maybe not even then, and that no top-rank writer will touch it without a commission. See where that gets me?”

He seemed to expect an answer, so I shook my head.

“It gets me into what they call vanity publishing. Vanity! Bloody insult. Ronnie says there are companies that will print and bind any book you give them, but
you
have to pay
them.
Then I’d also have to pay someone to write the book. Then I’d also have to sell the book myself, as I would be my own publisher, and Ronnie says there’s no way I’d sell enough to cover the costs, let alone make a profit. He says that’s why no regular publisher will take the book. Not enough sales. And I ask you, why not? Why not, eh?”

I shook my head again. He seemed to think I should know who he was, that everyone should. I hardly liked to say I’d never heard of him.

He partially enlightened me. “After all,” he said, “I’ve trained getting on for a thousand winners. The Grand National, two Champion Hurdles, a Gold Cup, the Whitbread, you name it. I’ve seen half a century of racing. There’s stories in all of it. Childhood... growing up ... success... My life has been
interesting,
dammit.”