‘Post!’ shouted Terry the delivery boy. I scooped my three letters out of the in-tray, and felt my heart sink. Oh God, not that creep again, I thought as I ripped into a carmine envelope, strewn with silver hearts. My stalker. We’ve all got them. Every single person who goes on air has their pet pest. Imogen who does the weather reports has an elderly man called Mike. He even turns up to see her at the station sometimes, but Tom never lets him in. Barry the announcer is stalked by a middle-aged woman called Fran. She knits him these hideous, neckless jumpers and interminable scarves. My pest is called Ron, and every few weeks he sends me a letter in which he mixes fanatical admiration with excoriating scorn – an unnerving combination. ‘
My dearest Minty
,’ he began, as usual:
Just breaking off from my rocket science here to say how wondrous it was to hearken unto your dulcet tones again on the wireless last week. I could hardly drag my ears away from the set. I’d missed you, my darling. Where have you been? I was worried that you might have been ‘doing it’ with some other radio station and that I’d have to twiddle my dial to find you. Imagine my relief when I heard your phantasmagorical voice floating through the ether once more. You were talking about marriage, I believe, and may I say that my offer still stands. Your report was stupendous, Mint. Scrumptious. Your usual brilliant standard, in fact. But will you PLEASE LEARN HOW TO PRONOUNCE ‘CONTROVERSY’, YOU STUPID COW!!!! If you say ‘CON-TROVERSY’ one more time, I’m afraid I’ll have to come round to London FM and SPANK YOU!!!
Your devoted and ever-loving Ron
Eeuuuugghhh. Into the bin it went. At least he doesn’t send me things to eat, like some stalkers do. That’s Rule Number One when it comes to Mad People Who Listen to the Radio and then Write to You: Never
ever
eat what they send – God knows what it might contain.
‘What was that, Minty?’ asked Melinda, suspiciously.
‘Just another letter from my stalker,’ I replied. ‘Or perhaps I should call it a “sick note”.’
Her face collapsed. ‘Why haven’t
I
got a stalker?’ she whined.
‘Why do you
want
one?’ I said. ‘They’re sick and sad.’
‘Because I’m the star pwesenter.
I
ought to have one too.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ I said wearily. ‘You’re more than welcome to mine.’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I want my
own.
Evewyone else has got one. Why shouldn’t
I
?’ This was unfathomable. ‘Min-teee …?’ She’d gone into wheedling mode. ‘Would you give me a hand with my cues?’
‘OK,’ I said, wearily, as I went over to her desk. ‘But then I’ve got to do my own work.’
‘Now: Saddam Hussein,’ she began, furrowing her brow,
‘is it Iwan he’s associated with, or Iwaq? I can never quite wemember.’
‘It’s Iwaq,’ I said.
‘This is going to be fun!’ Amber called from the sitting room a few days later. She was ‘busy’ straightening the cushions in preparation for the first meeting of the BBBC, due to start in half an hour.
‘It’s going to be a real brain-fest,’ she added enthusiastically, as I prepared supper in the kitchen. ‘We should have a really stimulating literary debate, with so many brilliant women here.’
Amber had deliberately invited her four most intelligent friends: Joan, the astrophysicist, Frances the brilliant divorce lawyer, Jackie the geneticist and Cathy, the nuclear engineer. Amber loves the company of clever women. I’m happy in the company of nice ones, so I’d invited Helen, who I hadn’t laid eyes on since our honeymoon. I’d rung her from work a couple of times, but she’d been uncharacteristically elusive. But finally I’d managed to get through to her, and she’d agreed to come.
Rather than spend the evening discussing just one book, we’d decided that for the first meeting, each of us would chat about a novel we admired. I was praying that Amber wouldn’t be foolish or vain enough to –
‘Let’s do
A Public Convenience
!’ she’d said. I had tried, as tactfully as I could, to talk her out of this. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t bear to have to read it again.
‘Well …’ I began.
‘Why not, Minty?’
‘Er …’
‘I hope your hesitation is not in any way connected with what that cow Polly Snodgrass said in the
Daily Post
,’ she snarled. However, Polly Snodgrass’s views, with which I was entirely in sympathy, were quite unconnected with my reluctance. The fact is,
A Public Convenience
is crap. The prose is not so much deathless, as lifeless, the characters so flat they might have been cut from the back of a cornflakes box.
‘You know
why
Snotgrass did that, don’t you?’ Amber went on, as she opened a bottle of red wine. ‘You know
why
she gave me such a beastly review?’
‘Er …was it because you gave
her
book a very bad review last year?’
‘No! That’s not the reason!’ she spat, as she sank into a chair. ‘It’s because the woman’s
consumed
with jealousy.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. Of course. I’d forgotten. It seemed to be Amber’s answer to everything. ‘Er, why is she jealous?’ I asked. Amber rolled her eyes at the cosmic stupidity of my question.
‘Because. My. Books. Are.
Good
,’ she enunciated, as though giving directions to a cretinous foreigner. ‘And. Her. Books. Are.
Crap
!’
I knew this to be untrue. Polly Snodgrass writes very well. She wrote a brilliant sequel to
Wuthering Heights
, as dark and as visceral as the Brontë.
‘But to be, you know, quite impartial here for a second,’ I ventured, ‘I don’t see why you would expect Polly Snodgrass to be nice about your novel when you had completely trashed hers.’
‘Minty,’ said Amber, with this slightly perplexed expression on her face, ‘you don’t normally argue with me about literary issues.’
This was true. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t argue with Amber about
any
issues. Normally. But then I didn’t feel quite so ‘normal’ any more.
‘Well, why
should
she be nice about your book?’ I persisted, disguising my new-found boldness with a nervous giggle.
‘Because, Minty,’ Amber began with the weary patience of an adult explaining something tricky to a slow-witted child, ‘critics should be
objective.
They should put their personal jealousies to one side, otherwise they are palpably failing to serve the reader.’
‘But in the
Evening Mail
you described her novel as having – correct me if I’m wrong – “all the appeal of an unflushed lavatory”.’
‘Yes,’ she said, laughing snortily, ‘I did! Thought it was
rather good, actually. But then you must bear in mind what she’d said the previous year about
The Hideaway.
She wrote, and I quote: “If this Dane were a dog, you’d put it down. As it was I struggled to pick it up.”’ Amber had an ability – of which she was perversely proud – to recite every bad review she’d ever received with word-for-word perfection.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘yes, that was a bit mean.’
‘Mean?’ Amber snorted. ‘It was outrageous – and totally untrue! The literary world really is
beastly
, though,’ she added as I whipped up eight egg whites for the chocolate mousse. ‘It’s full of talentless hacks who just use their reviews either to seek favours, or to settle scores. I’m going to bloody well
write
about it,’ she announced, as she snapped a piece off the menier chocolate and bit into it. ‘When I’ve finished
Animal Passion
I’ll satirise all those bastards who’ve tried to belittle my books.’
‘The literary world’s already been done,’ I pointed out.
‘Has it?’
‘Yes, in
Bestseller.
’
Amber ignored this. ‘Can’t we do my book?’ she persisted. ‘Go on, Mint. Please, please,
pleeease.
’
‘Well, it’s, er, not the done thing really,’ I said carefully. ‘To, er, discuss your own book. No reflection on
A Public Convenience
, of course, Amber – absolutely not. Splendid book. And I know you’ve sold, er, hundreds of copies.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Well, er, it’s a bit like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf choosing eight of her own recordings on
Desert Island Discs
,’ I replied. ‘It just wouldn’t go down very well.’ I changed the subject by reeling off my short-list of suggested titles.
‘
Captain Corelli
!’ she said with a snort. ‘You don’t think that’s any
good
, do you?’
‘Well, yes – I do, actually. I’m not mad on the ending, but it’s very vividly written.’
‘And as for
The God of Small Things
– useless bloody book!’
‘Well, she’s sold 140,000 copies in hardback,’ I pointed out. And over a million in paperback.’
‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t won the Booker, would she?’ Amber spat triumphantly.
‘Er, probably not, no,’ I conceded.
‘
Charlotte Gray
?’ she groaned. ‘Oh God. I can’t
bear
Sebastian Faulks. It’s just Mills and Boon with guns! I’ll do
Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan,’ she said. ‘He’s really quite good, you know. Shout if you need a hand,’ she added, sinking into a chair.
‘Oh no, no, no, don’t worry, no,’ I said as I frantically washed the salad.
‘Why don’t you make that really nice French dressing you do?’ Amber suggested. ‘But make sure you use Balsamic.’ She sighed with frustration as she picked up her novel again. ‘I just don’t know why it isn’t selling better,’ she whined as I set the table. ‘I blame the marketing people – they just didn’t pull their finger out. I said I wanted a cinema campaign, and they wouldn’t do it. Bloody ridiculous.’
Pedro squawked, then emitted a shrill peal of Granny’s laughter.
‘But that would cost millions,’ I pointed out, as I passed a clean cloth over the wine glasses.
‘I’m worth it, Minty,’ she said. ‘They should have pulled out all the stops.’
Amber was renowned throughout the publishing world for a number of things. She was notorious for comparing herself, in articles, to Dickens, Zola, and Tolstoy. She was famous for making dreadful scenes in bookshops if her novels were not prominently displayed. She was fabled for writing livid letters to critics who had rubbished her books; but she was best known for the inflated demands she made on her publishers, Hedder Hodline. ‘How do they expect me to sell a
single
copy,’ she added, ‘when they didn’t even give me posters in the Tube? I’ll have to get them to put up the marketing budgets. Fifty grand at least.’
‘But books sell largely by personal recommendation, don’t they?’ I pointed out as I chopped mushrooms for the homemade sauce. ‘I mean, look at
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin:
that had very little publicity, it just spread by word of mouth.’
‘Clearly, Minty,’ said Amber, shooting me a poisonous look, ‘you haven’t the
faintest
idea about publishing.’
‘Well, I think your marketing people are rather good,’ I said, thinking of the quotes they had managed to come up with on the back cover. For this they had doctored reviews of her previous books with the skill and nerve of a plastic surgeon, turning the scruffiest pigs’ ears into the most lustrous of pearls. For example, Anthony Welch, writing in
The Times
, had famously described
Fat Chance
as ‘quite stupendously awful – a stinker!’ The Hedder Hodline publicity department had miraculously transformed this into ‘Quite stupendous!’ And Hedder Hodline had shown remarkable restraint too when it came to allowing Amber to include in her list of Acknowledgements a constellation of famous people, none of whom she had actually met.
‘I am indebted to Tony Blair
,’ she had written in the three pages of gushing gratitude which prefaced
A Public Convenience. ‘And I am profoundly grateful too, to my friend, Princess Michael of Kent. I would also like to express heartfelt thanks to Fay Weldon, for her tremendous encouragement and support.
’ Now, Amber
had
met Fay Weldon, once. On a train. Fay Weldon had asked her if she’d mind awfully closing the window. In a paroxysm of appreciation. Amber went on to express her ‘
unending thankfulness to Gordon Brown, Twiggy, and, of course, my dear mentor, Sir Isaiah Berlin.
’ I’d tried pointing out that Sir Isaiah Berlin had died a whole year before she’d actually put pen to paper. She’d assured me that no one would notice, let alone care.
‘Publishers expect writers to name drop,’ she’d said gaily. ‘Just chuck in a few celebs – dead or alive!’
Amber picked up the book again and it fell open at the dedication page.
‘If I’d known Charlie was going to dump me I would
never
have dedicated the book to him,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it changed if there’s a reprint. I’ll dedicate it to Pedro instead. He loves me, don’t you, darling? Now, Pedro, what do you think of this?’ Amber picked up a page of her manuscript, and Pedro’s golden eyes glazed over as she began to read aloud:
Cathy gazed lustfully at Tom over the mounds of gleaming viscera. Her gut instinct was to spill out her heart. To inform him how she felt. She watched his sweaty, shiny biceps flex as he stripped the hide from the steaming carcases. Brain was over-rated, she thought. What she really wanted was brawn.
‘Tom’ – she addressed his ripplingly muscled back. ‘Tom, you know what, Tom, I’ve been thinking …’
‘Woof woof!’ Amber put down her manuscript and flew to open the door. Everyone had arrived at once. We sat down to supper, during which Amber held forth, yet again, about Charlie and about what a ‘total shit’ he was and how unceremoniously he had dumped her, and what a ‘complete cad’ he was. And everyone nodded sympathetically, though I was squirming and I noticed Helen blush and shift uncomfortably on her chair. Helen would never say so, but I don’t think she likes Amber much. I think she finds her hard to take – a lot of people do. And I do too, sometimes, I don’t mind telling you. But it’s different for me, because she’s family.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t called you,’ Helen said quietly, as I made the coffee. ‘I’ve been really …’ she struggled to find the right word, ‘rather overwhelmed lately. So many orders,’ she added quickly. ‘And I’m finding the early start for the flower market a bit hard going at the moment.’