‘But that will still be stressful for her.’
‘But –’
‘The hard part is not sitting upright, it’s being creative.’
‘But –’
‘You can publish sometime later next year.’
‘But we’ll have missed the big summer sales. We were hoping for a huge increase –’
‘Tania,’Jojo said, warningly.
‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Sorry, sorry.’
TO:
[email protected] HAIGH.co
FROM:
[email protected] HAIGH.co
SUBJECT: I’ve been thinking…
Maybe we should wait until after the partnership appointment in November before we become official. I don’t want ‘us’ to damage your trajectory.
M XXX
Jojo stared at her screen in dismay. Was Mark bailing on her? November was a long, long way away; so long that it might never happen. Was he getting cold feet?
The possibility scared her so much, she was actually surprised.
She went to his office and walked in. ‘What’s going on?’
‘With what?’
‘We agreed on August, now you want to change it to November. If you’re trying to bail on me, forget it. I’ll just laugh in your face.’
Mark raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry. ‘Some of the partners – Jocelyn Forsyth, Nicholas in Scodand – are family men.’ He was calm, cold even, but Jojo knew him well enough to realize he was angry. When he was incensed he kind of looked too big for his suit. ‘They won’t be impressed by our home-wrecking. In fact, I don’t think any of the partners will appreciate it. I don’t want to run the risk of you losing any votes.’
She had to admit that this was something which had flitted across her own mind.
‘I made the decision – suggestion – with your career and only that in mind.’
She nodded, a little intimidated by his clipped tones. ‘But Jim already knows,’ she said. ‘Olga has probably guessed. And I bet Richie Gant has told all of them he saw us together.’
‘Maybe, but an affair is different from my having left my wife and set up shop with you.’
She thought about it: he was right. It would be better to wait. And November was only a short while after August. It was just that…
‘I’m usually the one who keeps deferring our big day,’ she admitted.
‘I had noticed,’ he said, drily.
‘You’ve been very patient.’
‘I would wait for you for ever.’ Then he added, ‘Although obviously I would prefer not to have to.’
‘November it is. When? The day of the decision?’
‘Why not wait until it’s official and published in Book News? No point spoiling the ship and all that.’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What?’
‘Scaring me.’
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Except fear itself.’
‘And wardrobe monsters.’
‘And giant rocks that fall out of the sky and land on your head.’
‘Exactly.’
Tuesday morning
The first piece of post she opened was a letter from Paul Whitington, turning down Gemma’s book. That only left Knoxton House and after that it would be time to move on to the independents. At this late stage in the game, she acknowledged there was a good chance she wasn’t going to sell it, and if she did, only for a tiny advance – maybe a thousand quid.
‘Choose your next editor carefully, Ms Harvey,’ Manoj said. ‘It may be your last.’
She decided on Nadine Steidl and forced herself to sound enthusiastic. ‘I’ve got a wee gem for you.’ She was using Cassie’s phrase, she liked it.
But Cassie’s phrase wasn’t enough to convince Nadine and on Thursday morning, she came back to Jojo with a no.
Thursday afternoon
‘Tania Teal on line one for you. Accept or reject?’
‘I’d rather stick a rusty compass in my eye.’
‘I didn’t ask you that. Accept or reject?’
‘OK. Accept’
Click, then Tania’s anxiety was pouring down the phone line. ‘Jojo, because of Miranda, next summer’s schedule is in bad shape.’
Again with the pregnant author!
‘We need a popular women’s fiction book to fill Miranda’s May slot and we have nothing.’
‘But you’ve got so many authors.’
‘I’ve looked at what we have and every book coming out next year is tied in to time-specific promotions or won’t be ready for May.’
So what do you want me to do, Jojo wondered. Write the fucking thing myself?
‘I was thinking of that Irish thing you sent me,’ Tania said. ‘That would do. Have you managed to sell it?’
She meant Gemma Hogan’s book: the one Jojo couldn’t even give away.
But she wasn’t telling Tania that! ‘You might just have got lucky,’ she said. ‘It’s still available but only just. I’ve got two houses about to bite –’
‘How much?’ Tania interrupted. ‘Ten grand?’
‘Er –’
‘Twenty? Thirty, then.’
Jojo said nothing. Why should she? Tania was doing the bidding for her.
‘Thirty-five?’
Jojo made her pitch. ‘A hundred for two.’
Tania whispered, ‘Christ.’ Then in a proper voice asked, ‘Is there a second book?’
‘Sure.’ She didn’t know for certain, but there probably was.
‘Sixty for one,’ Tania said. ‘And that’s it, Jojo. I don’t want another author, I’ve too many as it is. I just need a stop-gap.’
It wasn’t perfect. A two-book deal was always better because it meant the house was commited to the long-term future of the author.
But still a deal was better than no deal. Sixty grand was better than a thousand. And who knows, if the book did well, she could get Gemma a second deal for a lot more.
‘OK. Runaway Dad is yours.’
She could actually feel Tania wince. ‘That name will have to go.’
Then Jojo rang Gemma, who was thrilled she’d been sold to Lily Wright’s editor.
‘Thank you for trying again for me. I knew you could convince her.’
Authors, Jojo thought. Buncha know-nothings. Then Jojo told Gemma about the money.
‘Sixty grand. Sixty grand. Oh, my good Christ. Great. Fabulous. Fantastico!’
Fantastico indeed. No need to tell Gemma she was the literary equivalent of a band-aid, because this might work out very nicely.
LILY
24
Book News, 5 August
RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Tania Teal from Dalkin Emery has bought Chasing Rainbows, the debut novel from Irish writer Gemma Hogan. Agented by Jojo Harvey from Lipman Haigh, the book sold for a reported £60,000. Described as a cross between Miranda England and Bridie O’Connor, it will be published next May as a paperback original.
I was skimming through Book News, looking for any excuse not to write, when the words ‘Gemma’ and ‘Hogan’ leapt off the page, waited until they had my full attention, then punched me in the stomach. Gripping the page too hard, I read the piece properly, then reread it while little waves of shock broke over my head. Gemma. Book. My agent. My editor. Lots of money.
Fear in my heart, I stared at the black letters until my eyes went blurry. There could be many Irish Gemma Hogans, it was not such an unusual name, but already I knew: this was my Gemma. She had often talked about writing a book and her having my agent and my editor was too much of a coincidence. But how on earth had she swung it? It was difficult enough to get a book published, never mind to bag the agent and publisher of one’s choice. She must have become a practitioner of the black arts. I sank my face into my hands; this was a message, like the horse’s head in the bed in The Godfather.
I am gifted at intuition, at premonitions even, and I knew the game was up. Although I had feared some form of retribution, so much time
had passed that I had begun to hope that Gemma had moved on with her life and perhaps even quietly forgiven me. But I had been mistaken: all this time she had been planning revenge. I was not sure exactly how she was going to ruin my life, I could not have given precise details there and then, but I knew this was the start of an unravelling.
In an instant I saw my entire life falling away from me. Gemma hated me. She would tell the whole world what I had done to her and would turn everyone against me.
And the money! Sixty thousand! As compared to the paltry little four thousand advance I had got. Her book must be stunningly good. My career was finished, she would blow me out of the water with her sixty-grand masterpiece.
I picked up the phone, blew the dust off it through trembling lips and rang Anton.
‘Gemma’s written a book.’
‘Gemma Hogan?’
‘It gets worse. Guess who her agent is? Jojo. And guess who her editor is? Tania.’
‘No, that can’t be right.’
‘It is, I promise. It’s in Book News.’
Silence. Then, ‘Christ, she’s sending us a warning shot across the bows. It’s like the horse’s head in The Godfather.
‘That’s just what I thought.’
‘Ring Jojo, find out what it’s about. But it’s got to be about us, right?’
‘Yes, and the worst bit of all.’ I could hardly utter the words, so great was my jealousy. ‘She got a huge advance.’
‘How much?’
‘You won’t believe –’
‘How much?’
‘Sixty thousand.’
Anton became quiet for a long, long time, then I heard a little whimper.
‘What?’ I almost shouted.
‘I picked the wrong girl!’
‘Oh, ha bloody ha,’ I said crossly.
I phoned Jojo. Though my head was racing with the need to know, I managed the polite ‘Howareyou?’ thing, then striving for casual but actually sounding half-strangled, I said, ‘Er, I read in Book News that you have a new author called Gemma Hogan. I was just wondering –’
‘Yeah, it’s the one you know,’ Jojo said.
Arse. Arse, arse, arse, arse, ARSE. ‘Are you sure? Living in Dublin, working in PR, Liza Minnelli hair?’
‘That’s the one.’
I wondered if I might weep.
‘Yeah,’ Jojo said. ‘She said to say hey to you. Ages ago. I’m sorry I forgot.’
‘She… she had a message for me?’
‘She just asked me to say hello.’
Dread swamped me. Any hope that this was a bizarre coincidence dissolved. Gemma had planned this. It was deliberate and targeted.
‘Jojo, can I ask… do you mind, is it breaking client confidentiality… what’s her book about?’
‘Her dad leaving her mom.’
‘And a best friend stealing someone’s boyfriend?’
‘No, just the dad leaving the mom. It’s fun! I’ll get a copy to you, soon as they’re proofed.’
‘Thanks,’ I whispered, and hung up.
Jojo was lying to me. Gemma must have already got to her and inducted her to the dark side.
Ema has run away with a marauding gang of chartered accountants, I thought. Anton has a touch of dry rot in his left leg and I lost my mother in a card game.
I forced myself to concentrate hard on the horridness of this scenario. I furrowed my brow and really tried. For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of how vile it would be to share a home with a man with dry rot. Then I did the mental equivalent of elbowing myself and saying, ‘Silly! None of those things are true!’
This exercise usually makes me grateful for my lot.
Not today, though.
25
Anton rang back, ‘Have they turned up yet?’
No need to ask who ‘they’ were: the builders. Our obsession, our fixation, the centre of our lives.
Despite the best efforts of most of the banks in Britain, we had bought our beautiful redbrick dream house and had moved in at the end of June. Spirits had been sky-high. I was so happy I thought I might die and for an entire week did nothing but look at cast-iron beds on the Internet.
Before we had even moved in, we had a building firm lined up to repair our dry rot as a prelude to ‘knocking things through’. We had not even fully unpacked when a small army of Irish labourers, all bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mad Paddy, descended upon us.
The Mad Paddys wielded their claw hammers and set to work with zeal, behaving as though they were on a demolition job – they ripped the plaster from the walls, then the bricks, then pretty much removed the entire front of the house; the only thing that kept it from toppling over into the front garden was a mesh of scaffolding.
For almost a week they slashed and destroyed and just at the point when they were meant to start reassembling our ruined house, they discovered the dry rot was a lot worse than originally thought. Those in the know, who have had a lot of construction done, tell me this is what usually happens. However, on account of Anton, Ema and I being the Crap Family, for whom nothing ever works, who are always led inexorably to the restaurant table with the wobbly leg, I took it personally.
And the cost of the job? In light of the new discoveries, the original quote doubled overnight. Again, this was text-book and again I took it personally.
Muttering something about needing new window lintels – whatever on earth they were – and not being able to do anything until they arrived, the boys – again, in time-honoured tradition, so I am told – disappeared. Once more, I took it personally.
For two full weeks we saw nothing of them. Gone, but not, however, forgotten. Anton, Ema, Zulema – I will get to Zulema – and I, were existing in squalor. Boot-shaped cement marks marched across the beautiful old wooden floors, I kept stumbling across tabloid newspapers in the oddest of places (beneath Ema’s pillow, anyone?) and sugar crunched underfoot; people complain about builders drinking too much tea – it was not the tea I objected to but the wretched accompanying sugar.
Nightly, I expected someone to shin up the scaffolding, slip in through one of the many holes in the wall and burgle us. Although they would have been bitterly disappointed as the only thing we had worth stealing was Ema.
Builders’ tools were strewn about the house and one of them, a foot-long wrench, had become the unlikely object of Ema’s affections. She had become so attached to it, she now insisted on sleeping with it. Other children become fixated with velveteen rabbits or small blankets; mine had fallen in love with a builder’s wrench as long as her soft, squeezy arm. (She had named it Jessie after my sister Jessie who had come home in June for a short visit from Argentina, where she was now permanently located with her boyfriend, Julian. Ema had been quite dazzled by her.)
But worse than all the other plagues put together was the omnipresent dust… Beneath our fingernails, between our bedsheets, behind our eyelids – it was not unlike living in a sandstorm. Every time I put on face-cream I exfoliated instead and I had given up cleaning the house because it was so staggeringly pointless.
It was wretchedness beyond description, especially for me because I ‘worked’ from ‘home’, but when I begged Anton to do something, he insisted the men would return when the lintels had arrived from wherever lintels come from.
I still had no idea what lintels were. It did not matter. They were still managing to break my heart.
One dusty morning, before Anton left for work, he was eating muesli. Suddenly he hurled down his spoon and exclaimed, ‘I keep thinking it’s dust!’
He foraged with his fingers in the bowl and retrieved something. ‘Look at that!’ He extended it to me. ‘It’s a piece of dust.’
‘It’s oatmeal.’
‘It’s fucking dust.’
I pretended to study it more closely. ‘You’re right, it’s dust.’ Perhaps now he would ring them.
He put a call in to Macko, the foreman, and the news was horrifying; the lintels had arrived from LintelLand but the
Mad Paddys had started another job. They would finish us off when they got the chance.
We blustered and stomped and complained in the strongest possible terms. They have to come. Look at the state of the place. We can’t live like this.
That was more than a week ago, and since then Anton and I had to take it in turns to be the grown-up, to ring them and insist in our firmest voices that they return to the job and finish it within the week, but they just laughed at us. This was not mere paranoia, I knew they laughed at us because I heard them.
Eventually Anton secured a promise. ‘They’ll be here next Monday. On their mothers’ lives, they’ll be here with the lintels on Monday.’
It was now Thursday. Three days later.
‘No, Anton, no sign of them yet.’
‘It’s your turn to ring them.’
‘Excuse me, I think not. I rang them first thing this morning.’ We rang them four or five times daily.
‘You didn’t, Zulema did.’
‘Because I bribed her to.’
‘What was it, this time?’
I hesitated. ‘My toner.’
‘The toner I bought you? The Jo Malone stuff?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, don’t be cross. I did love it, I do. But I loathe ringing them so much and she’s quite good at it. They don’t laugh at her.’
‘This has gone too far,’ Anton said, with sudden grim resolve. ‘I’m going to get us some legal advice.’
‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘Then they’ll never come back!’ One of the things I heard over and over was that if you even mention taking legal action against them, it was game over. ‘Please, Anton. That’s the last thing we should do. Let’s just keep grovelling.’
‘OK, I’ll ring them,’ he said.
Then I remembered we had agreed to grant him an exemption because he had got a filling in his tooth the day before.
Over the past week, regarding ringing the builders, Anton and I had developed a complicated system of obligations, exemptions and rewards. Because my job paid more than Anton’s he had to make two phone calls for every one of mine. But the chore could be sold, bartered or passed to another person if you could persuade them to do it; twice since Monday I had bribed Zulema with cosmetics. Anton had tried to get Ema to do it. Also illness could mean an exemption; Anton’s filling guaranteed him a free go. Likewise, I was looking forward very much to having my period.