Читать книгу Not Another Happy Ending - David Solomons - Страница 7

‘Here Comes the Rain Again’, Eurythmics, 1984, RCA

Dear Jane,

Thank you for submitting your novel, The Endless Anguish of My Father.

Ten years ago it would probably have received a warm reception, but there is quite enough misery to be found on the non-fiction shelves just now, so, in fiction, we're currently very much into happy stories with happy endings.

At the moment we are enjoying wonderful success with a novel entitled Come to Me, an exotic and erotic tale of revenge and redemption, with a fabulously feisty female lead and a Hollywood ending. If you were willing to make some adjustments to the novel's dénouement you might also be happy to entertain some other minor reshapings: set it in LA or Bangkok rather than Glasgow, say; make your main protagonist a jet-set-y interior designer, for instance, rather than a shelf-stacker; and tweak the key relationship so that, rather than one between father and daughter, it's between our cosmopolitan interior designer—who is actually, despite her success and fabulous wardrobe, just a little girl at heart—and a father figure, who happens to be a domineering (but gorgeous!) film producer. If you were to reposition the novel in that kind of way, then I'd be very happy to reread.

You can certainly write, but these days it's so difficult to launch a new writer—however talented—who's writing about the wrong things.

I have recycled your manuscript.

Yours sincerely,

Cressida Galsworthy

Assistant Editor

Well, thought Jane, at least Cressida gets points for sustainability.

She made space on the notice-board—in a moment of dejection she'd referred to it as her Board of Pain, and the name had stuck—and pinned up this latest rejection, then sat back to admire the varied collection of publishers’ and agents’ rebuffs.

Until she began submitting her novel she hadn't appreciated that there were so many polite ways to say no. Forty-seven examples, to date. The rejection didn't hurt so much; the opinion of some woman in W1 she'd never met was of no consequence to Jane. She had survived far worse in her twenty-five years than anything Cressida—or Olivia or Sophie (so many Sophies)—could throw at her. But early on in the process she realised that the letters could be useful. There were writers who stuck inspirational messages over their desks to spur them on: you can do it … believe in yourself … open that window of opportunity! But encouraging slogans didn't work for Jane; she shrank from their brimming optimism. She was far more likely to want to jump head first out of that window of opportunity. Instead, she bought the board at her favourite vintage store off Great Western Road, nailed it to the wall by the large bay window of her airy, white flat and artfully arranged the naysaying letters. She could hear their honking dismissals as she penned each new query letter and packaged up the latest hopeful submission. I didn't love it. I didn't love it enough. I hated it. Their lack of enthusiasm was grist to her dark Satanic mill.

The printer spewed out another copy of the manuscript, and as she waited for the four hundred pages of her thus far ill-starred debut to stack up she hoisted the sash window, leaned on the sill and took a deep breath.

The air smelled of trees after the rain. Half a dozen slender poplars lined the quiet West End street, in full leaf now that what passed for the Scottish summer had arrived. Beyond them stood a blond sandstone terrace, a mirror to the building Jane's flat occupied. From the top floor someone practised the cello. The doleful strings drifted over the treetops, and suddenly the flats were miserable dolls’ houses with naked windows through which Jane glimpsed desperate lives: a raging argument between husband and wife, the tired old lady with no visitors, the self-harming teenage girl crying in her bedroom. On the street below a wan-faced young mother slouched behind a squeaking pushchair, cigarette jammed between chapped lips, flicking ash over a wailing infant.

The cellist took a break from his practice and reality was instantly restored. The windows revealed no more heartache than a tired executive mourning a slice of burnt toast, and in a patch of sunlight beneath the trimmed poplars it was a smart young mother wheeling a silver-framed pram, talking to her child in a voice as groomed as her suit.

Jane roused herself from her melancholy flight of fancy. This was the West End of Glasgow, a dear green place of well-kempt gardens, specialist delicatessens, and more convertibles per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.

She still couldn't quite believe she lived here. She had grown up in the East End of the city. It was four and a half miles away, but may as well have been a million, her life until the age of sixteen spent in one of the brutalist tower blocks more readily associated with the mean city of legend.

Residents never referred to them as tower blocks; they were always the ‘high flats’. Plain language hid a litany of flaws as deep as their rotten foundations: walls thin as cigarette paper, alien mould choking every corner, a stagnant pool of water in the basement referred to with typical humour as ‘the spa’, and stairwells daubed with crude graffiti that always bothered Jane less for its vulgarity than for its incorrect use of the apostrophe (in retrospect, a clear sign of bookish leanings to come). She laughed when she heard people reminisce about growing up on the schemes: ‘Aye, we might have been poor, but we were happy.’ What a load of crap. It was a miserable place to exist.

She'd only got out thanks to her mum. She remembered the letter arriving on her twenty-first birthday. It was from her mum, which came as something of a surprise since she'd died fourteen years earlier. They'd had so little time together that now when Jane tried to picture her face it was like reaching through water. Turned out mum had squirrelled away most of the wages she made at the Co-op in some kind of get rich quick scheme invested in Jane's name soon after she was born. The letter duly arrived with a valuation and a note on how to claim her inheritance—god, it sounded like something out of Dickens.

She remembered sitting on the floor by the front door reading the contents with growing disbelief. The money was enough for a healthy deposit on her new flat; her new life. It was surprising enough that the dodgy investment had reaped a profit, but the bigger surprise was that her mum had contrived to keep the money out of her dad's thieving hands.

A breeze at the open window ruffled the rejection letters on the board. Set amongst them was a faded Polaroid of an older man, face scored with deep lines, eyes surprisingly soft, one pile driver arm wrapped around a ten year-old girl. In the photograph the late afternoon sun has caught her hair, turning the hated ‘ginger’ a deep, sunset red. Father and daughter are both smiling. But then, that was the summer before it happened.

Mum had taken the snap on a day out to the beach at Prestwick. Unusually, the sun had shone all day, just like it should in a memory. She remembered on the way home afterwards stopping in Kilmarnock at Varani's for ice cream. Best in the world, her dad used to say. Not that to her knowledge her father had ever been outside Scotland. Of course she couldn't be sure of his travel itinerary since then, not after he walked out on them later that year. He left a few months after the photograph was taken, on her birthday. She laughed. How much more of a cliché could you get? Her hand brushed the faded photograph. That was the last time she'd had ice cream from Varani's.

Her eye fell on a flourishing umbrella plant on her desk, its soft, green leaves trailing across the top of her laptop screen. It had been a present from him a few years ago; the only evidence in a decade that he was still alive. When it arrived she prepared herself for the inevitable follow-up: the drunken, apologetic phone call in the middle of the night; the knock at the door with a bunch of petrol station flowers. Neither of them came; only more silence.

The leaves were dry to her touch. She gave the plant a quick spray from a water bottle she kept close by. They didn't have a garden in the high flats, but her dad had installed a window box and she remembered planting it with him. It was a shady spot, he explained, so they filled it with Busy Lizzies in summer and hardy cyclamen in winter. The water-spray hissed. Thinking about it, she wasn't even sure why she kept his plant.

With a whine the printer finished its work. She packaged up the latest submission into a large buff envelope and wrote out the address of the next publisher on her hit list. Tristesse Books were based in Glasgow. Tristesse was French for something she couldn't quite remember. She'd taken Higher French at school, but only just passed the exam. Je m'appelle Jane. J'habite à Glasgow. That was about the extent of her conversation. That and, at a push, she reckoned she could order a saucisson.

Outside, the sky darkened, dampening the earlier promise of sunshine. The wind swirled around the trees, sending a flurry of rain against the open window. Hurriedly, she slid it shut and stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the rain-soaked pane. Her hair was still long and straight and red, its neat fringe framing a pair of bright green eyes held open in what seemed to be a state of permanent surprise at the vagaries of the big, bad world. When the kids at school had taunted her for being a ‘ginger’, her dad had pulled her onto his knee and together they'd watched his (pirated) copy of Disney's The Little Mermaid. The first few times she didn't understand the message that however tough the journey, even redheads are allowed a happy ever after. Instead, through a terrible misreading, Ariel and her singing friends gave her a horror of losing her voice, and for years the slightest hint of hoarseness convinced her that the end of her little life was imminent.

The superstitions and playground taunts of childhood were long gone, but now she attracted a different kind of unwelcome attention, from the Armani-skinned lizards with large cufflinks who frequented the bars on Byres Road. And these days there was no dad to tell her it would all turn out happily in the end.

He was the one who'd inadvertently introduced her to the world of books, dropping her off in the public library to wait while he took care of a little business at the bookies across the street and then nipping in for a swift pint—or nine—at the pub next door. As he gambled and drank away their benefit money she immersed herself in books.

Even after he walked out of her life she continued to visit the library, just in case he came back. She hated him for leaving, but more than anything else she wanted him to come back. And as she waited for him to swing through the door with his big grin and too-loud voice, she read. The library was her playground, her university. Here she was surrounded by familiar faces. Hello, Cinderella. Cheer up, Tess. Good day, Mr Darcy. As the years passed, The Brothers Grimm became The Brothers Karamazov until one day she picked up a pen and began to write her own stories.

Raindrops streamed down the cheeks of her reflection in the window. She remembered what ‘tristesse’ meant.

After almost a decade in Scotland, Thomas Duval still dreamt in French. Four years of university in Glasgow, followed by a brief internship with Edinburgh publisher Klinsch & McLeish (ending in a spectacular bust-up with the notoriously spiky Dr Klinsch) and then five years building up Tristesse had left him a fluent English speaker trailing a wisp of a French accent along with the added charm of a stray Scottish vowel. But at night, in his dreams, he was once more the golden boy from the Côte d'Azur, raised under hot blue skies, bestride his old Benelli motorbike racing the rich kids in their Ferraris and Lambos along the twisting coast road between Saint-Tropez and Cannes. And always with a different girl riding pillion. Mais, bien sûr.

But somehow despite the sun-soaked childhood, when he'd first arrived in Glasgow something stirred in his soul. He'd always loved Walter Scott, James Hogg, the gloomy heart of the Scottish canon. The first time it rained he walked around the city without an umbrella until he was wet to the skin. He'd never felt so alive, which was ironic, since he came down with a bout of flu and missed the rest of Freshers’ Week. But his affair with Scotland had begun. His family thought he was mad. He ignored them and bought an umbrella. Soon, the tanned limbs of Brigittes and Hélènes gave way to the pale, freckled legs of Karens and Morags.

Still asleep, Tom reached an arm around the shape beside him in the wide bed. He began to mutter in French, a low, rhythmical sound, languid and masculine, capable of snapping knicker elastic at twenty paces, then slid one hand beneath the rumpled sheets—and froze. His smile slipped, replaced with a glower of cheated surprise.

He sat up and flung the covers from the bed. Beside him lay a chunky six-hundred pager. He'd just tried to make sweet love to a manuscript, and not even one worthy of his moves. A glance at the title—The Unbearable Sadness of Daal—brought back last night's bedtime reading: mediocre writing, derivative plot and two hundred pages too long.

He huffed and turned a bleary eye to the small bedroom. Manuscripts littered every surface. Uneven stacks of them sprang from the floor like heroes turned to stone by a Gorgon's stare. He was behind in his reading, as usual. He had put his romantic life on the back burner in favour of pursuing a different prize—glittering success as a publisher. So far he was frustrated on both fronts, not helped by his strict adherence to one of his few rules: never shag a writer—especially not one of your own. He was still looking for The One. Just one critically acclaimed—and more crucially—best-selling book would take his struggling company to another level.

Once showered and dressed he stood over the espresso machine as it gurgled and hissed in protest before grudgingly offering up a shot of treacle-black coffee. Tom drained the cup and immediately poured another. His broad frame filled the narrow galley kitchen like a Rodin bronze in an elevator. The living quarters were crammed into a mezzanine above Tristesse's offices and consisted of two small bedrooms and a holiday camp for bacteria masquerading as a kitchen, littered with plates growing more life than the average Petri dish. Less cordon bleu, more cordoned off.

He juggled a new manuscript and a piece of toast. Concentration fixed on the page he failed to notice that the marmalade he spread thickly over the toast was in fact mayonnaise. He took a bite. Disgusted, he toed open the pedal-bin at the end of the counter—and discarded the manuscript. Swiping a finger across his phone he checked the time.

‘Roddy!’ He barked towards the second bedroom. ‘School!’ There was a thud from inside like a cadaver being dropped by a slippery-fingered mortician, the distinctive chink of many empty beer bottles being inexpertly stepped over and then the door swung open. Out shambled a figure in a state of confusion and a brown corduroy suit.

‘Have you seen my tie?’

‘You mean the brown one,’ mocked Tom, ‘to match the chic suit?’

Roddy stuck out his chin defensively. He was a slightly built man with the sort of boyish face always ID'd when buying a six-pack. He tugged at one of the large lapels. ‘It's not brown,’ he insisted. It flapped like a Basset hound's ear. ‘I'll have you know this is fine Italian tailoring and the young lady who sold it to me called it marrone.’

‘You do know that's just Italian for “brown”, right?’

Roddy ignored him, moving aside manuscripts to continue his search. ‘So have you seen my tie or not?’

‘Hey, careful with those,’ said Tom, waving his toast at the unread scripts. ‘I have a system.’

‘Ah-ha!’ Roddy produced a red bow tie from behind one of the stacks and slipped it around his neck.

‘You're seriously going to wear that to school?’

‘It's a valid choice.’

‘For Yogi Bear, maybe.’

Roddy frowned. ‘That makes no sense. Yogi Bear never wore a bow tie. It was a necktie—and it wasn't even red, it was green. Wait, are you thinking of the Cat in the Hat?’

‘If I pretend I just arrived from France and don't understand anything you're saying will you stop talking?’

‘Just for that I'm having your muesli.’

Roddy swiped a bowl off the draining board, wiped a spoon on his trousers and dived in.

‘Hmm?’ Tom looked up from his reading. ‘We're out of muesli. Haven't bought any in weeks.’

Roddy gagged as he spat out the ancient slurry. ‘Aw, you're kiddin’. That's criminal. That's unsanitary, that is. We live in squalor, you know that?’ He threw down the bowl. ‘I'll get something in the staff room.’ He turned to go and paused in the doorway. ‘Oh, don't forget, you've got Nicola coming in this afternoon.’

Tom grunted. A couple of years ago he'd discovered Nicola Ball, a writer of novels set in the unpromising world of public transport (one notable sex scene in her debut had brought whole new meaning to the phrase ‘double-decker’). Recently, she'd featured on some influential lit. crit. blog, hovering near the middle of a list of ‘Scottish novelists to watch under the age of 30’, and the annoying girl wouldn't stop reminding him about it at every opportunity. However, her sales didn't match her bumptiousness.

A buzzer sounded from downstairs.

‘Get that, will you?’ Tom strolled off, head buried in the latest novel plucked from the slush-pile.

‘No can do,’ spluttered Roddy. ‘I've got Wuthering Heights with my Third Years …’ He checked his watch. ‘In fifteen minutes. Bollocks.’

The buzzer went again and Tom padded resentfully downstairs. Roddy's question trailed after him: ‘When are you going to hire an actual secretary?’ The answer was simple: when he could afford one. Which right now felt a long way off.

The postman might as well have been holding a ticking bomb. He brandished what Tom recognised through long acquaintance as unwelcome correspondence from the bank and credit card company.

‘Lovely morning,’ the postman said cheerily, ‘though there's a bit of rain forecast for later.’

Reluctantly, Tom took the mail, which included half a dozen fat A4 envelopes—more manuscripts—and closed the door. With a dissatisfied grunt, he shuffled the official letters to the bottom of the pile and made his way along the narrow passage to his office, deftly navigating around towers of cardboard boxes filled with expensively produced books fresh from the printer. He shuddered at the financial risk; each title was a long shot of vomit-inducing odds, a fragile paper boat set sail on the roughest publishing market since William Caxton thought ‘Hey, what if I put the ink in here?’

Tom threw the mail onto his desk and sat down heavily. Napoleon glowered up at him. It was a bust of the great Emperor, a gift from Roddy on the launch of Tristesse Books, which Tom was in no doubt also conveyed a pointed comment on his high-handed manner. He looked round his tiny office with its clutter of contracts, press releases and inescapable manuscripts; a battered velour sofa with the stuffing knocked out of it (appropriately) and a couple of low, uncomfortable chairs, perfect to intimidate writers. It wasn't exactly the Palace of Fontainebleau.

He turned his frustration to the morning mail, tearing open the top envelope and removing the bulging manuscript from within. He scanned the cover and blew out his cheeks in disbelief. Then held it out in front of him, squinting at the title to make sure he'd read it correctly. Which he had. There it was, in black and white, Cambria twenty-four point. Quelle horreur.

‘The Endless Anguish of My Father,’ he read aloud, allowing each word its full weight and bombast. ‘By Jane Lockhart.’

Worst title this year? Certainly it was the worst this month. Briefly he pondered summoning the author for a meeting, purely for the satisfaction of telling her just what a brainless title she had concocted and, he felt confident asserting this without condemning himself to the unpleasant task of reading one more word, that she was a hopeless case with no chance of making a career as a novelist. But he was busy. Taking the manuscript in the tips of his fingers, he gave a shudder of disgust.

‘Ms. Lockhart … au revoir.’ And with that he tossed it into the cavernous wastepaper basket by the side of his desk.