Neve ordered a pot of tea from a passing waiter, then decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘Jacob? Sorry, but I’ve got another meeting after this.’ It sounded better than saying that she was going to see a rom-com with her father.
‘Oh, sorry. I think I spend more time on Twitter than I do working,’ Jacob said, still transfixed by his BlackBerry and not sounding the least bit annoyed that Neve had decided to speak before she was spoken to. ‘How are you? You look well.’
‘I’m fine,’ Neve said carefully, because she wasn’t sure if it was a trick question and that Jacob was just about to hit her with a ‘How can you possibly be fine when the chapters you sent me were badly written, poorly constructed and lacking in any discernible content?’
But he didn’t. He turned off his BlackBerry then looked up and smiled at her, and Neve couldn’t help but state the obvious. ‘I didn’t know you wore glasses.’
He was wearing a pair of thick black nerdy glasses that made him look a hundred times less intimidating than when there was nothing coming between him and his glare. Jacob touched the frames with a nervous gesture and seemed a little nonplussed. ‘Well, I put in my contact lenses whenever I come to the Archive, even though they irritate my eyes,’ he revealed. At least it explained why he frowned so much.
Neve took the bait. ‘Why can’t you wear your glasses at the Archive?’
Jacob Morrison, literary super-agent, actually squirmed in his chair. If you took away the designer suit and the expensive haircut and the chiselled jawline, he looked like a little boy who’d been caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. ‘I used to work at the Archive when I first came down from Cambridge,’ he said finally. ‘George, Mr Freemont, sat at the next desk and spent a large part of every day mocking me for the thickness of my lenses – when, that is, he wasn’t mocking me for my poor cataloguing skills and my general failure as a human being.’
‘So he was like that, even then?’ Neve asked.
‘Worse. I think he’s actually mellowed with age,’ Jacob said with a smile. ‘But Rose used to stick up for me. And there was the time when I did something absolutely unconscionable when I was making him a cup of tea, so it wasn’t all bad.’
‘What did you do to his tea?’
Jacob shook his head solemnly. ‘That’s a secret I’ll take to the grave or until you get me horribly drunk.’
Neve giggled, and though she’d imagined spending the entire meeting monosyllabic, she spent the next ten minutes firing questions at Jacob so she could get all the dirt on Mr Freemont and report back to Chloe and Philip because Rose had obviously been holding out on them all this time.
Eventually Jacob held up his hands in protest. ‘Enough! That wasn’t why I asked you to tea. I want to talk about Lucy Keener.’
Every instinct Neve possessed shrieked at her to tense and panic, but she tried to ignore them, because she was here for Lucy first and foremost. Anything else was just gravy, though if Jacob absolutely hated what she’d written, she hoped he’d make it quick and relatively painless.
‘You said you liked Dancing on the Edge of the World,’ she prompted nervously.
‘I didn’t like it,’ Jacob said, as Neve frowned because he’d sent her that email, ‘I loved it. And so did my assistant and my reader and my girlfriend who read it in one sitting and was in tears for the last fifty pages. I think you’ve discovered one of the great British novels, Neve.’
‘I have?’ Neve allowed herself to relax a little. ‘And the poems and short stories? Did you like them too?’
Jacob nodded. ‘I did, very much. Though poems and short stories are a harder sell than novels, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
Neve decided that the fact that Jacob had said ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ didn’t mean anything deeply significant. ‘So you’ll submit Dancing on the Edge of the World to publishers then?’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I know it’s out of my hands, but I feel very protective towards Lucy.’
He was frowning at her from behind his glasses and Neve clenched up again. ‘Shall we cut to the chase, Neve?’
She nodded despondently.
‘The first two chapters you sent were very stilted. They were all tell, no show. I really wanted to get a sense of Lucy’s background, where she went to school, who ran the corner shop, what her bedroom looked like – the reader needs to get a sense of who Lucy is so they can start to care about her.’
Neve hung her head. ‘Oh, OK. Well …’
‘But then you got into a rhythm about halfway through chapter three, when her sister Dorothy left home to get married, and I really liked the way you began to build up the relationship Lucy had with her father,’ Jacob said, smiling at her. ‘I think you’re off to a good start.’
‘I am?’ Neve couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.
‘You are, but don’t let it go to your head,’ Jacob said sharply, but with another smile to take the sting out of his words. ‘Now, I want to submit a package to prospective publishers of Dancing on the Edge of the World, along with a completed manuscript of the biography and a collection of her best poems and short stories. I’d like us to work on that together because you have a better understanding of the material.’
‘I thought you could maybe divide the poems and stories into decades, so it works almost as an autobiography,’ Neve said eagerly. ‘Her writing changed so much if you compare her short stories written during the war to the poems she wrote three years after it had ended and Charles Holden had got married. Though I suppose there’d be a chronological gap where—’
‘Neve, did you hear what I said?’ Jacob asked, with another frown, though she was starting to get used to them. ‘I’d like you to finish writing Lucy’s biography so I can submit it to publishers.’
‘Are you sure? Because I’m not a proper writer. I mean, I had a few things published in Isis when I was at Oxford, but that doesn’t really count. What if I get stuck? What if I get writer’s block?’ Neve was just about to run her fingers through her hair in agitation when she remembered that she had a foam wedge resting in there. She settled for wringing her hands instead. ‘A whole book – how long is it meant to be, anyway?’
‘OK, you need to take some deep breaths,’ Jacob advised, summoning a waiter. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water so you don’t start hyperventilating.’
He waited until Neve was clutching on to a glass of mineral water for dear life, before he continued: ‘Just think of writing this book as if it were your MA dissertation, but with a lot less literary theory.’
Neve had rolled up at Jacob’s club fearing the worst, and now that the worst appeared to be that she had literary representation and the green light to finish Lucy’s biography, she wasn’t sure how to react. She took shallow breaths and tried to open her mouth to say something. Anything.
‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you. I can’t tell you what this means to me.’
‘Well, what it means is that I’ve asked you to write a book in your spare time and unpaid. And once it’s done, if I can’t get you a deal, then you’ll never earn any money from it.’
‘I don’t care about the money,’ Neve breathed and it was the absolute truth. Jacob Morrison having faith in her and her writing was more than enough. It was also more than she’d ever expected. ‘Oh my goodness, I can casually refer to “my agent” when I talk to people.’ She paused as Jacob stared at her as if she was mad. She did feel rather unhinged. ‘Not that I would, because people would think I was an utter fool.’
‘They really would,’ Jacob said. ‘I’ll get my office to draw up a contract, but shall we shake on it, before we start talking about logistics?’
They spent a happy hour discussing the huge amount of work that Neve had committed to. Not just the actual writing but contacting the Alumni Association at Oxford so she could get in touch with Lucy’s contemporaries, and sweet-talking the woman in charge of the Holden family’s personal archive into letting her have access to their private
papers. Even contacting the Cultural Attaché at the Russian Embassy to shed some light on the two years that Lucy had spent in Russia. It was daunting but it was also very, very exciting.
Even better, Jacob was going to use his influence to wangle her a four-day week at the Archive without a cut in her salary, because any publication of Lucy Keener’s work would benefit the LLA and, ‘You’re practically on minimum wage as it is.’
Just as they were both getting misty-eyed at the wish-for-the-moon possibility of a Lucy Keener biopic with Kate Winslet in the title role, Neve happened to glance down at her watch. She couldn’t believe that she’d been there for two hours.
‘On dear, I had no idea it was so late,’ she said apologetically. ‘I have to be in Camden by five.’
Jacob nodded, but he was already pulling out his BlackBerry. ‘I’ll get my assistant to email you,’ he said, as Neve scraped her chair back. ‘And I’ll take great pleasure in phoning George Freemont tomorrow to tell him that he’ll have to manage without you one day a week.’
‘Thank you,’ Neve said fervently, because she’d been dreading that particular conversation.
‘Believe me, it will be a pleasure.’ When Jacob grinned and winked at her, Neve decided that it was a good thing that her heart was already taken, because having a crush on your agent would be very unprofessional. ‘You’d better run along, you don’t want to be late.’
Chapter Thirty-two
Neve had pencilled in the half-hour walk from Bloomsbury to Camden for worrying about the reunion with her father, but she spent all thirty minutes of it on the phone to Philip getting increasingly agitated as she visualised door after door slamming in her face, as the gatekeepers of private family papers and literary archives refused to admit her. In fact, she was so busy wailing at Philip as she turned into Parkway, that it took Neve a second to remember why she was there. Although she was ten minutes early because she was always ten minutes early, her father was already standing outside the cinema and giving a flinty-eyed look to the homeless man who was spinning him some sob story in the hope of earning fifty pence. Neve side-stepped the homeless man’s shopping trolley, which was full to the brim with bulging carrier bags, and came to a halt beside her father.
‘I won’t tell you again. Bugger off and get a job,’ Barry Slater was saying, when he caught sight of Neve. ‘There you are. Let’s go in. I don’t want to miss the trailers.’
There was a brief hug of bumped noses and banged elbows, before they walked inside. Of course, her dad had already bought the tickets and Neve was dispatched to the toilet (‘your mother always goes ten minutes in then spends the rest of the film asking me questions’). When she emerged, her father was standing there with two bottles of water and a small tub of popcorn.
‘It’s salted,’ he said, as they headed for Screen One. ‘Can you eat it? Is it all right for my cholesterol levels?’
‘I’ll have a little bit, but maybe you shouldn’t eat things that have a lot of sodium,’ Neve said, and she forced herself to look at him properly, without her eyes darting away at the last moment. He was looking good; tanned, without the lines etched into his face that she’d thought were permanent, and his stomach was a lot less paunchy than it had been. ‘Mum said you were looking after yourself – it seems to be working.’
Her father patted his gut. ‘I miss my beer,’ he muttered gruffly, so Neve guessed they were done talking about his cholesterol; she also knew that once they sat down, she’d be under pain of death not to open her mouth.
As she waited for the film to start, Neve wondered what she was doing there. Her father didn’t seem even a little racked with guilt over things that had been said and then things that hadn’t been said. Maybe he was thinking the same thing about her. It was hard to tell with Barry Slater.
Ninety minutes later, Neve was in much better spirits. Jennifer Aniston’s hair had been super-glossy, her co-star was handsome in a very rugged way, the obligatory best friend was kooky, the plot wasn’t too phallo-centric and it had all ended with a kiss in Central Park in springtime. Neve knew that she should probably spend more time catching up on Eastern European cinema but she really did love a good chick flick.
‘Did you enjoy it, Dad?’ she asked, as they made their way out of the cinema, her father’s hand on her elbow in case she couldn’t make it down the stairs on her own.
‘It were all right,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t know what that Brad Pitt was thinking of. Imagine leaving a woman like that.’
‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the real story,’ Neve mumbled because she didn’t want to encourage him.
‘Got the car parked round the corner. Thought we’d have dinner at Marco’s place,’ her father said, and Neve resigned herself to two more tension-filled hours.
They drove to Finsbury Park in a silence punctuated only by Barry Slater’s savage character assassinations of every other driver on the road. He also cast grave aspersions on their mothers, while Neve pressed her foot down on an imaginary brake pedal.
She could tell the exact moment that her father relaxed. It was when the restaurant door opened to let out the warm waft of garlic and fresh bread and Marco, the owner, rushed to welcome them inside.
‘Signor Slater, it’s been too long,’ he cried, and then he and her dad were clapping each other manfully on the back and as they made their way to a table by the window, they were greeted by Mr and Mrs Chatterjee who lived next door but one from her parents’ house.
Her father’s good mood showed no signs of abating, especially when Neve told him that his heart could handle a pizza as long as it wasn’t covered in too much cheese, and once her fingers were curled around a glass of red wine, Neve was sure that everything was going to be all right. They’d got off to a shaky start but that was only to be expected after three years of not saying very much to each other.
She smiled warmly at her father as he pulled a crumpled roll of paper from the back pocket of his trousers. ‘You brought something to read?’ he asked as he opened up Which? Computing.
It was then that Neve knew that nothing had changed. Sitting there reading like they’d used to do didn’t mean that everything was going to be all right. It meant that her father didn’t have a thing to say to her and Neve didn’t have a clue what to say to him. She rummaged in her bag and took out Gay from China at the Chalet School. If she couldn’t have comfort food, then she’d have comfort reading instead.
She hadn’t even finished the first paragraph when her father grunted. ‘You’re not still reading those bloody Chalet School books, are you?’
‘Well, rereading them, but—’
‘Do you remember when your Uncle George found the complete set of fifty hardbacks at a house clearance in Lytham St Annes …’
Neve had to stop him right there. ‘It was fifty-eight hardbacks, actually.’
‘I drove all through the night to pick them up, and when you opened up the box the next morning, you started crying loud enough to wake the dead,’ Barry Slater recalled, as if Neve’s reaction was still troubling him.
‘They were tears of happiness.’
‘There’s enough reason to cry without doing it when you’re happy too,’ he said, giving Neve an odd look.
‘I suppose,’ Neve murmured non-committally as she started reading again.
‘I remember Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School,’ her father announced proudly and Neve was forced to raise her head again.
‘How on earth do you remember that? You didn’t read them when I was in bed, did you?’
‘Give over,’ Barry Slater scoffed. ‘You told me all about it that time we went to Morecambe, when we had lunch together. Your ma still hasn’t forgiven me for that.’
‘Just so you know, neither have Seels and Dougie,’ Neve said, and she didn’t have to force the smile this time; her father was grinning too.
‘So, why are you reading those bloody books again when you’ve got a bloody degree from Oxford?’
So, Ne
ve told him that she’d started rereading them for solace when things had been so stressful at work. Then she told him about the AGM, and when Marco came to clear their dinner-plates, she was telling him about her new writing gig and her newly acquired agent.
‘I’m trying not to have a complete panic attack about it,’ she finished, as her father ordered a decaffeinated coffee and a peppermint tea.
‘You’ve always had a knack for telling a story. I remember when you helped Celia with her English homework by rewriting Romeo and Juliet and setting it on Coronation Street, not that it did her any good.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. She loves working in fashion.’
Her father sniffed because as far as he was concerned, working in fashion wasn’t a proper job and never would be. ‘Didn’t think we’d have an author in the family. Your nan would be so proud of you, Neevy.’
‘Really?’ she asked, treading carefully because their truce was so new, so fragile, and her father never talked about his mother.
‘She was a very bright woman but her father, that’d be your great-granddad, didn’t believe that girls needed an education. He wouldn’t let her go to the local grammar when she passed her eleven plus. Then she had to leave school when she was fifteen so she could start paying her way at home. She always regretted that.’
‘You must miss her a lot. I mean, she died when you were eighteen and, well, I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if anything happened to you or Mum.’
Her father raised his eyebrows. ‘You’d cope, pet.’
Neve took a deep breath. ‘Look, Dad, I’m sorry about what—’
‘I’m proud of you too. Might not always show it, but you’re the first Slater to go to university, let alone Oxford, and I can’t pretend I know exactly what you do at that library, but don’t you ever talk yourself out of opportunities that come your way. You can do anything if you set your mind to it, and I’m not just talking about the book-writing either.’