The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (12 page)

Debbie is a gluttonous reader, consuming one novel after another, but she never notices the names of the authors. She reads what we at the literature festival would have called clog-and-shawl sagas. Debbie doesn't call them anything. To her they are simply books, the only kind she is aware of.

Lisa prefers magazines, though she dips into the occasional celebrity biography, and has recently finished Victoria Beckham's. Until she did, she often told Debbie and me that the last book she had read ‘all the way through' was
The
Twits
by Roald Dahl. I can't tell her, because it would sound patronising, that it amuses me no end to have a close friend who would describe a book in these terms: ‘the last book I read all the way through'.

In my old life, I had friends who read Ben Okri and Adam Thorpe and Don DeLillo, but they all lost interest in me after I was sacked.

I needn't have moved to Loughborough. I'm sure I could have got a job in the housekeeping department of the hotel I used to telephone almost daily to arrange accommodation for guests of the festival, but I didn't want to be perceived as clinging on in an undignified way to the life I had lost. I couldn't stand to be seen by anyone who knew what had happened to me. I felt miserable, rejected and ruined, and I wanted to move to a place where, I assumed, many people felt that way. I knew nothing about Loughborough, but it sounded uninspiring and characterless so I chose it, and I haven't been disappointed. It's a horrible town. On some level, I wonder if I am trying to pacify the fates by
volunteering
to live here. ‘You see,' I am saying to them, ‘I have no pride left. I have nothing. Look where I live. Look what
I do. I cannot sink any lower, so you'd be wasting your time arranging for me to do so.'

When I tried to discuss with Debbie some possible
interpretations
of the cryptic part of M8's note (I wasn't interested in the second bit – everyone knows what ‘Hope you die a slow and painful death' means), I was reminded once again of the differences between us. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘It makes no sense.' She was content to leave it at that. Had I endorsed her plan to destroy the letter and forget about it, Debbie would have resigned herself, happily, to permanent ignorance. She would have got on with her day-to-day existence and I don't think she would ever have given a thought to M8, let alone driven herself crazy wondering who he or she was, or about the precise nature of his or her relationship to Ian Prudhoe. Debbie had no burning need to know what the line ‘All good criketers cum over each other' meant; she had no inclination to speculate, in the absence of knowledge.

I knew Lisa would be equally indifferent, unless I could prove to her that either Ian Prudhoe or M8 had slept with one of the Beckhams or showed off his (or her) new
conservatory
in the pages of
Hello!
magazine, so I speculated alone. My best guess was that Ian Prudhoe played cricket and had had some kind of dalliance with another cricketer. M8 was bound to be the wife or girlfriend of this character, the second cricketer, or, if it was an entirely homosexual scenario rather than a bisexual one, his jealous male lover.

I was desperate to have my suspicions confirmed, to discuss with Ian Prudhoe the pros and cons of having an affair with a fellow team member, an attached one at that. I looked forward to demonstrating that I did not belong to the moral majority. I already knew that I would advise Ian to follow his heart rather than submit to the tyranny of M8's emotional blackmail. Marriage is only a piece of paper, I would say. M8 cannot expect to own the second cricketer, and it is
impossible
to steal someone from somebody else unless that person
wishes to be stolen. Ian would, of course, be impressed by my sophisticated approach to matters of the heart.

I turn back to my introduction, intending to carry on with the story, but am immediately distracted again by the memory of another feature of the situation that appealed to me, at this early stage of my involvement in Ian Prudhoe's life. My downfall, at the literature festival, in the town where I used to live, was brought about by excessive self-absorption. I don't think anybody would deny that. The festival board, the sponsors, the audience who turned up that night to see Ian McEwan – they would all agree that I was obsessed, in those days, with my own selfish concerns. Not so now, in my new Loughborough life. By focusing so avidly on Ian Prudhoe's predicament, by really immersing myself in it, I believed I would demonstrate to whatever authority was watching (I hesitate to say God, but I suppose I had in mind someone along those lines) that I had learned my lesson and now took a whole-hearted interest in other people's problems.

It strikes me, as I sit in the dimly lit, windowless basement of the hotel, that I have failed to convey, in my book's title, my own enthusiasm for the project. Problems, secrets – whatever you want to call them – they amount to the same thing: other people's private business. My working title,
The Book of
Secrets
, does not communicate the allure, the enticement, that I need readers to feel if they are going to buy the book in their millions. I, as the editor, have to make contagious my desire to know those very facts and stories people most want to hide. I decide, impulsively, to change the title to
The Fantastic
Book of Everybody's Secrets
. I am aware that it is risky to make such an overblown claim, but I think I can get away with it. A few years ago, Tibor Fisher published a collection of short stories called
Don't Read This Book if You're
Stupid
and noone thought badly of him. On the contrary, we invited him to the festival.

But I must get on. 

Oh dear. I can't say that, can I? I cross it out, scribble on it until the words are no longer visible. It's a pity people are so sensitive, because I was going to go on to say that I felt drawn to Ian despite what many people would describe as his startling ugliness. My first thought, on seeing his face, was that it must have been reconstructed after an accident. Perhaps M8 had already struck. I wondered if it was acid, broken glass, fire. Ian's lips, nose and eyelids looked too large for his face, as if they were swollen. Or rather his face, because of its rough texture, looked like a weathered stone likeness of a swollen face.

I inspected him more closely and decided that perhaps the reconstructed effect was a result of bad acne scarring. Either way – and I know this would make no sense to a lot of readers, so I will leave it out because I want the book to be a commercial success – I was instantly drawn to Ian, far more than I would have been if he'd been conventionally handsome. His face told me that he had suffered horribly and
survived. I wanted to stroke his bumpy cheeks and tell him everything would be all right.

I pause to wipe away tears. It is impossible to convey how panicky I felt as he left and I realised there was nothing I could do. Never in my wildest dreams, in my vilest nightmares, had I envisaged that Ian might not want to confide in me. I felt like a total failure. I knew no more than I had before our meeting. I didn't even know Ian's sexual orientation. I told myself that he was sure to be straight, given how surly-verging-on-rude he was. I hoped so. I didn't like the thought of him in the arms of the second cricketer. And perhaps he never had been; perhaps the line about cricketers meant something quite different.

I am debating how much of my reaction to Ian's hasty departure to include in the introduction when my boss appears. June is in her late forties. She looks like a donkey. Her teeth are too long and her tights are always laddered.

‘What's that?' She nods at my notebook.

‘Nothing,' I say. I let it drop to the floor and quickly resume my work.

‘I think we need to talk, Tamsin. Don't you?'

‘No. About what?'

‘About your level of commitment to Hathersage hotels, and to your work here.'

‘I wouldn't have thought it was work that requires a level of commitment, is it?'

June frowns, puzzled. ‘A team is only as strong as its weakest member,' she says.

‘Yes, but my point is that, however weak and uncommitted I am, surely all that matters is that I do the work. And I do. By the end of the day, all the mess that has spilled into this room has been sorted into the appropriate piles and is ready to go. Well, isn't it?'

My theory is that June would not be so officious if she worked in a better hotel. Being housekeeping manager at the Hathersage, Loughborough, is hardly the most prestigious position. Rocco Forte needn't look to his laurels, put it that way. Hathersages are the same all over the country: flowery, three-star, unjustifiably content to serve watered-down soup. All too often their exteriors resemble multi-storey car parks, which doesn't matter because they cater for people who prize cheapness above all else. I try not to think about the Rembrandt, the literature festival's favoured hotel, with its beautiful Georgian façade, its sleek, modern décor.

‘Well, yes, you do seem to work quickly,' June concedes. ‘But your attitude isn't quite what I'd want it to be, Tamsin. And I think we both know that.'

‘Sometimes I miss my lunch hour,' I remind her. I do not add that this is usually when I want to plan or make notes about
The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets
. Lisa has been in York for two months now, and since Debbie left for Cambridge last week I haven't seen much point in having lunch in the canteen at work. I can manage without it
physically
, and I'd rather strive to fulfil my literary ambitions than eat cheesy leeks with Dennis and Jimmy the maintenance men. William Faulkner wrote
As I Lay Dying
in only eight weeks, while he was working night shifts at a petrol station.

‘It's not good for you to go without lunch,' says June, with her hands on her hips. ‘You'll make yourself ill. Everybody needs energy triggers.'

‘Do you mean food?' I ask.

‘I'm just saying that we have procedures and guidelines in place, Tamsin. Every team member must have an hour's break. Why don't you go now?'

I glare at her, but do as I'm told. I make sure to take my notebook with me.