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Troy looked across the worktop at her with compassion. ‘But it means that you’re only fifty, and married to a man who won’t ever take you dancing.’
‘Dancing’s the least of it,’ she said quietly.
There was a brief silence and then Isobel found a smile from somewhere. ‘There’s no point grieving over it,’ she said briskly. ‘I made my mind up to it years ago. I was sure he was going to die when he first had it. I promised myself then that if he was spared, if we were spared, that I would be happy. I would make him happy. This is so much better than it might have been.’
‘Oh yes,’ Troy assented emphatically, privately thinking that it was not.
At eight thirty in the morning Troy called Isobel; but she had been awake for an hour, listening to the unaccustomed noise of the London street, nursing a hangover, and wishing she felt free to go to the kitchen and make herself a cup of tea.
He opened the bedroom door and presented her with a cup of pale green liquid smelling of straw. ‘Herbal tea,’ he said. ‘To get you in the mood.’
‘I’m terrified,’ Isobel said.
‘You’ll be wonderful. You were wonderful yesterday and that was only a practice.’
‘And there’ll be no-one who has ever met me? No-one from Penshurst Press?’
‘Penshurst!’ He waved them away. ‘They don’t have the kind of money we’re looking for here. They’re a small-time literary house. We’re playing with the major league here.’
Isobel nodded and leaned back against the pillows.
‘You’re pale,’ he said with sudden concern. ‘Feeling all right?’
‘I have a hangover,’ she confessed. Philip would have been shocked and disapproving.
‘Oh yes,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll get you something. We did go it a bit.’
He disappeared from the bedroom and came back with a small effervescing drink. ‘Here you are. And I’ve run you a hot bath. As soon as you’ve had it we’ll have breakfast and then start to get Zelda ready. She needs to be beautiful by ten o’clock. The first editors are here at ten thirty.’
‘Isn’t that awfully early?’ asked Isobel, who had learned over the years that it was impossible to reach the editors at her publishing house much before eleven in the morning.
Troy grinned. ‘They’re hungry. They’ll be here.’
‘You make me sound like a picnic,’ Isobel remarked.
‘Zelda is,’ he said, lingering on her name. ‘Zelda is a picnic and a dinner and a drink all rolled into one. Zelda is cordon bleu, and everybody wants her.’
Isobel, perfumed, blonde-headed, perfectly made up and dressed in the pink suit with the pink mules, was draped over the sofa at ten fifteen, and at ten thirty the first editors came in. She did not get up from her seat but merely lifted a languid hand to them. The woman shook hands, but the man was so overcome that he kissed the well-manicured fingertips and then sat down opposite her and gazed.
‘How much of this is based on real life?’ Susan Jarvis, the senior editor, asked.
Zelda Vere smiled. ‘It’s fiction, of course.’
‘But I would guess that you have had some kind of experience with a Satanic cult?’ Susan pressed.
Zelda’s gesture indicated an invisible wall before her. ‘I based the novel on my research and my own intuitive sense,’ she said. ‘And on my experiences, of course.’
In this country?’ Susan hinted.
‘In this country, and abroad.’
‘Of course Zelda’s great talent is telling a great story,’ Troy intervened, speaking to Charles, the junior editor.
‘It is a great story,’ he concurred. ‘May I say, Miss Vere, what a great story it is? And what a great all-round package – if I can use the word – you are? I think we can do great things with you.’
‘What sort of things?’ Troy asked encouragingly.
‘Oh, we’d be looking at a major advertising campaign in all the media including television. We’d be looking at a major author tour in five, maybe six or seven, cities. We’d be submitting this book for the appropriate prizes, extracts in suitable magazines, a big publicity campaign and a big push in the non-book outlets in particular.’
‘Non-book outlets?’ Isobel asked, confused.
‘Supermakets,’ Troy said briefly. ‘More than bookshops.’
‘You would sell my book in supermarkets? Like cans of beans?’
Troy’s eyes snapped a warning at her. ‘Miss Vere, Justin and Freeman Press would undertake to place this book where it would sell the most copies. That’s what we all want.’
‘Of course we’d try for the bookshops,’ Charles said feebly. ‘But the great strength of this book, as we see it, is the common touch.’ He turned back to Zelda Vere. ‘You really know how the ordinary woman thinks. It struck a chord with all of us at Justin and Freeman. I gave the manuscript to my secretary and to my wife, and I can tell you, I knew, when those two ordinary women came back to me and said that they saw themselves in this wonderful story, that we had a winner on our hands.’
‘Both very normal and at the same time very bizarre,’ Susan confirmed. ‘That was what attracted me: the bizarre quality of the story. And, more than anything else, fresh; but absolutely central to the genre.’
‘And which genre is that?’ Troy asked.
Susan looked at him as if there could be no doubt. ‘Survivor fiction,’ she said bluntly. ‘This is a survivor fiction novel. We couldn’t make it work any other way. This is Zelda’s own story, fictionalised and told in third person – though we may need to see an editorial amendment there – but this is the real-life story of a woman horrifically abused who survives and revenges herself.’
Isobel felt her hand tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. ‘But if it were real life, if it were true, then Charity would face dozens of criminal charges.’ She stopped herself, realising her snap of irritation was quite unlike Zelda Vere’s slow drawl. ‘I’m sorry. What I meant to say was – it can’t be offered as a true story. Not possibly. Can it? Because Charity kidnaps two children and burns down a house, and bankrupts a business and blackmails a politician, and scars a woman.’
‘I assumed there was a fictional element,’ Susan said briskly. ‘And we’d make that clear. But this is a survivor fiction, isn’t it? There is a core of truth, and that a terrible truth.’
‘Yes,’ said Troy.
‘No,’ said Isobel.
Troy crossed the room and took her hand and kissed it. Under the warm touch of his lips she felt the warning pinch of his fingers. ‘She’s such an artist she does not know the truth she has told,’ he said firmly. ‘She’s still in denial.’
Five
There was no time for Troy and Isobel to speak before the next pair of editors arrived, and then the next. All morning they trooped in, drank a glass of champagne, praised the novel to the skies, promised astounding sales, and all of them, every single one, tried to persuade Isobel to confess that the novel was autobiographical. When Troy closed the front door on the last editor he found Isobel in her bedroom, wig on the stand, precious pink suit discarded on the unmade bed, frantically scrubbing at her red face with tissues.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked tightly.
She turned to him, her eyes blackly encircled with wet mascara. ‘This is impossible,’ she said. ‘We invented her, Zelda Vere, and now they’re all at it. They want her to be a Satanic cult survivor and it’s nonsense. I can’t stand it. I can’t begin to pretend these things are true. And I can’t begin to pretend to be in denial about it either, so don’t try that way out. We’ll have to call it off.’
He was about to snap at her but he held himself back. ‘How much is the swimming pool?’
She paused and turned towards him. ‘Fifty thousand pounds … I don’t know.’
‘And it would help Philip’s condition?’
‘He thinks so.’
Troy nodded. ‘That last editor, from Rootsman, said they would be starting the bidding for the world rights at £200,000. That’s starting the bidding. You could go to half a million.’
Isobel dropped a grubby ball of cotton wool on the dressing-table top and looked at him in silence.
‘I’ll go and buy some sandwiches,’ Troy said. ‘I think we could both of us do with some lunch.’
Isobel appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing her country skirt with the baggy waistband, a cotton shirt, and a sweater draped over her shoulders. Her brown hair was tied back in her usual bun, her face was clean and shiny without even a dab of lipstick. She could have wilfully designed her appearance to remind Troy that she was a middle-aged academic, up from the country for a visit and already longing to be home again.
He put the plate of sandwiches before her and poured her a strong black coffee.
‘The money is fantastic,’ he said after she had eaten.
She nodded.
‘And all the work has been done. All they want is a few editorial changes. I’ll do them if you don’t want to. I can set up the bank account tomorrow, they all understand that the money’s to be paid into a numbered account overseas. They think it’s a tax issue, so that’s all right. Then you collect the money and you’re free to write whatever you want to write.’
Still Isobel said nothing.
‘The rest of your life, you can write exactly what you like. Or take a break,’ he said persuasively. ‘Go for a cruise. Go somewhere warm with Philip. Take a holiday. It’d do you both good. You can invest this and have an income, or you can buy the things you need. And if it goes to a TV mini series, which is very likely, then you’ll be provided for all the rest of your life. You can replace his shares and his savings so he’ll never know you raided them. You can take out insurance so that you know that he’s safe whatever happens to you. You need never work again, unless you want to.’
‘They’ll want a sequel,’ she said flatly.
He shrugged. ‘It’s a one-book contract. They can want all they like. You can decide to write another, or we could hire a ghost writer and I could brief her. Or they can do without. It’s up to you. You’re the star.’
Troy saw the brief gleam of ambition in her eyes before she looked down.
‘You’re an author who has been immensely influential in the literary world,’ he continued. ‘But you will never earn the money you need to keep yourself, let alone to support Philip. This one book can redress that injustice and nobody will ever know. This gives you the money you deserve. And if they do alter the book – why should you care? This was a book to make money, why should you mind what they call it: fantasy, gothic, survivor fiction, who cares? As long as it sells?’
She turned on him then. ‘Because if it’s commercial fiction then it doesn’t matter that it is nonsense,’ she said fiercely. ‘They put a jacket on it which says it is nonsense. It’s read as entertaining nonsense. Once we start saying it is based on fact we are telling lies about the nature of the world itself. We are misleading people. We’re not producing fiction, we’re telling lies. We are doing something morally wrong.’
He nodded, thinking fast. ‘People pretend all the time,’ he argued. ‘In their own lives. They say they are a certain sort of person because it keeps them where they are. You say that you love your husband and that you are a highly moral woman because that keeps you at home when someone with less motivation would have cut and run.’ He heard her gasp but he would not be interrupted. ‘People’s lives are fiction. All autobiographies are fiction. When some supermodel says that what she really wanted to do was to work for charity, when some rich man’s wife writes that she married him for love: it’s fiction. Sportsmen’s autobiographies, ballerinas’ own stories: they tell the truth of their lives as they want it to appear, not what it was really like. We all know it. That’s what we’re selling. Whether the manuscript says “Charity thinks, Charity does” or “I thought, I did” makes no difference.’
Isobel was on to it like a flash. ‘It makes a difference to me! I have to stand by this nonsense and pretend that it is real. I have to say that it was me!’
‘Zelda says: “it was me”, not you. And you were happy to pretend to be her, brought up in France, worked as a secretary, married once, unhappily, parents dead in car crash. Now we pretend as well that she had a sister, that she was entrapped by a cult of Satanists. What difference does it make?’
She hesitated. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said slowly. ‘It does make a difference. There is a difference between fiction and telling lies.’
‘It’s fantasy whichever way you look at it,’ he said. He took a breath, forcing himself to stay calm. From this one morning’s work he stood to earn £20,000. The prestige from being known as Zelda Vere’s agent had already had an impact in the way he was treated by publishers. No-one had ever before returned Troy’s calls within the same day. Overnight he had become a major figure in the publishing scene.
‘Please, Isobel, think,’ he said quietly. ‘The auction is tomorrow. I can’t be seen to let people down. I can’t conduct an auction and then withdraw the book. The auction is a binding agreement. If we’re going to cancel then it has to be by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. And then you’ll have lost everything. You’ll be back where you were when we started. You’ll never again earn enough to live on from your writing, Penshurst simply won’t pay more. And worse than that: you’ve just wasted four months on a novel that you won’t publish. I’ll have wasted a small fortune on Zelda’s clothes. You’ve destroyed my confidence in your work.’
She looked quickly at him and he saw her lower lip quiver. ‘You?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lost you?’
Troy was relentless. ‘I asked you in the cab before we went to Harrods if you were sure. I told you then that it was my reputation as Zelda’s agent that was on the line. I bank rolled you. I said we were in it together. If you pull out now it doesn’t just hurt you and Philip, it’s bad for me too.’
She shook her head as if it were too much for her. He thought for a guilty moment that he was bullying her as persistently as her husband must bully her. Philip must do something like this: intellectual argument and then emotional blackmail. This must be his technique to make her responsible for everything. She was so endearingly vulnerable. She could struggle forever with that sharp, trained intelligence, but she could not tolerate the thought of being abandoned, of losing someone’s love.
He saw her shoulders hunch under the burden he had laid on her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry to appear indecisive. I’ll ring you tonight. I’ll think about it as I go home on the train. I’ll decide by six o’clock.’
He nodded. ‘I hope you decide to take the plunge,’ he said. ‘For the swimming pool, for Zelda, for Philip. I hope you decide to take good money for good work. I’d be really disappointed if you failed at this stage.’
Isobel nodded. He noticed that she did not meet his eyes. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.
There was an odd atmosphere between them as she came from the spare bedroom with her little overnight bag. They were like lovers parting after some mutually unsatisfactory experience. The cramped hall was filled with the atmosphere of mild blame, of dissatisfaction. At the door, on a sudden impulse, Troy put his hand on her waist and at once she turned her face up to his. He leaned forward and kissed her. Extraordinarily, her mouth was warm and inviting under his. She dropped her bag, her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders and then one cool palm pulled his head down to her lips. He kissed her hard, passionately, his irritation dissolving into a surprised desire. She kissed him back and for a moment he did not see her as the tired middle-aged woman, but with his eyes closed in her kiss he imagined that he was touching the golden, languid, arrogant beauty who had sprawled all the morning on his sofa with a high-heeled pink mule swinging, showing the curve of her instep.
Isobel stepped back and they looked at each other, a little breathless. She would have said something but awkwardly, shyly, he opened the front door, and in that moment’s dislocation she slipped away. The door closed behind her and Troy froze, listening to her sensible shoes clumping down the stone steps to the street but hearing in his mind the light feminine skitter of high heels.
On the other side of the door, Isobel stepped into the road and raised a hand for a taxi. ‘Waterloo,’ she said to the driver, her face blank.
She had her hand clamped over her mouth as if to hold the kiss and the power of the kiss inside her. Unprecedentedly, for a woman who was mostly intellect, and often worry, she thought of nothing, nothing at all. She sat back in the seat and stared unseeingly, as the taxi turned in the street and headed south through the early-afternoon traffic. Still she kept her hand over her mouth, still she felt, under the unconscious grip of her fingers, the heat and the power of his kiss.
‘Good talk?’ Philip asked her when she arrived home.
‘Fine,’ she said distractedly. The breakfast things had not been washed up, his soup bowl and bread plate from lunchtime were still on the table along with the litter of Philip’s morning: orange peel, a couple of pens, a rubber band from the post, some empty envelopes, some flyers which had been shed from the newspaper. Isobel looked at the room and the work that needed to be done without weariness, without irritation. She looked at it all with calm detachment, as if it were the kitchen of another woman. It was clearly not the kitchen of a woman who had, this very morning, been offered more than a quarter of a million pounds for a novel, lounged on a sofa like a beauty queen and been passionately kissed.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ Philip said, following her gaze. ‘Mrs M. thought she might go off early after staying overnight and I said: “Yes”. I didn’t quite realise …’
‘That’s all right,’ Isobel said. ‘Won’t take a minute.’
She started to clear the table, watching her hands collecting debris, throwing it in the bin, watching herself stacking plates in the dishwasher, adding dishwasher liquid, still feeling on her lips the scorch of Troy’s touch.
‘Did it go well?’ Philip asked again.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. She heard her voice assemble lies. ‘They were very bright, they asked some interesting questions. Then there was a buffet lunch. I saw Norman Villiers. He was doing the afternoon session. He was well, said some interesting things about Larkin. Then I came home.’
‘You should do that sort of thing more often,’ Philip said generously. ‘It’s certainly done you good. You look quite radiant.’
‘Do I?’ she asked, her interest suddenly sharpened.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Glowing.’
Isobel’s hand stole to her mouth, her fingers covered her lips as if their bruised pinkness would betray her. ‘Well, I did enjoy it,’ she said, her voice very level. ‘There was some talk of a series of lectures. Replacing someone on maternity leave. I didn’t say yes or no, but I would like to think about it.’
‘Surely you don’t want a regular commitment,’ he protested.
‘Just a short series. In a few months’ time,’ she said. ‘I might go up and stay overnight and then come back in the afternoon, like today, once a week.’
He rose from the table and stretched. ‘As you like,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference to me. There were a couple of phone calls. The ansaphone took them. I was outside in the barn. I’ve been measuring up. I marked it out with spray paint so you can see the size the pool would be on the ground. And I’ve got on with the drawings.’
‘You have been busy,’ she praised him as she moved towards the door, wondering if it was Troy who had called.
‘I told you it would be an interest for me,’ he said. ‘And I found a swimming pool company who will do it at a discount if we order within four months.’
‘Even so,’ she said, ‘£50,000 …’
‘I’ll show you the figures when you’ve finished work,’ he said, wanting to detain her. ‘But I think you’ll see that if we do it now we can get real value for money. We could always borrow the money, the house could be security for the loan.’
Isobel nodded and went into her study, closing the door behind her. The ansaphone showed two calls. One had left no message, the other was an invitation to judge a minor literary prize. She noted for a moment the disproportionate sense of disappointment that swept her at the realisation that neither call was from Troy.
She rested her head in her hands and looked at the telephone, willing it to ring. One part of her was fully conscious of the absurdity that she was a woman in her fifties, sitting by a telephone like a girl of thirteen waiting for a call from a boy. Another part of her mind revelled in the fact that she was treasuring a kiss, like a girl of thirteen, that the thought of him ringing her made her heart pound, that even Philip, who rarely noticed anything about her, had called her radiant.
She realised that she could ring him. There was no convention that said that she could not initiate a call. She picked up the telephone and dialled the number of Troy’s office. They put her through to him straight away.
‘Isobel,’ he said. She listened intently for an undercurrent of extra warmth in his voice, and found she could not be sure. The uncertainty was as thrilling as if he had told her he loved her. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call.’
‘I only just got in,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And then I had to talk to Philip.’
‘Sure. So. What do you think?’
‘Think?’
For a moment she believed he was asking her about the kiss.
‘About the auction, about the book, about letting them sell it as survivor fiction?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t seem to decide. What do you think?’
Troy felt the tense muscles of his shoulder blades suddenly blissfully uncurl. All afternoon he had been afraid that Isobel would stand on her principles, or stand on her pride and refuse to go ahead. Now, at the role of doubt in her voice, he warmed to her.
‘Oh, I think you would regret it all your life if you didn’t take this opportunity,’ he said. ‘It’s just a question of some minor editorial changes and a bit of extra acting. And we saw today how wonderful you are when you are Zelda Vere. It’s just all of that, only a little more.’
‘I don’t know that I can do it,’ she said.
‘I so want you to find the courage to do it,’ he said. ‘I feel like the whole idea is our creation, I feel so proud of you. Writing the book like that, and then creating Zelda Vere. And I do love the deception, it’s probably some terrible psychological flaw in me, but I just love it. I love that we have created her. I loved having her in my house. When you left today I felt quite …’
She waited. ‘What?’ she whispered.
‘Bereft.’
She drew in a sharp breath.
He could sense her concentration on his words, the bright spotlight of her undivided intelligent attention. ‘I would be so disappointed if we didn’t go ahead,’ he said, dropping his voice to a low, seductive whisper. ‘I’ve enjoyed it so much this far. The shopping, and the dressing, and the …’
‘The?’
‘Warmth.’
Her hand was at her mouth again, touching her lips. ‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll do it. But you must promise to be with me. I can’t do it on my own.’
‘I’ll be with you,’ he swore. ‘Every single step. I’ll be there. Every step of the way.’
Troy heard her whispered ‘goodbye’ and put the telephone down. He was conscious that in that one telephone call he had earned £20,000 and who knew how much more? But he knew himself well enough to recognise that he was feeling more than an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm for a good deal. There was something about Zelda Vere and about Isobel’s transformation into Zelda which was pulling at him: some deep, genuine attraction.
‘She is sexy,’ he said softly to himself, thinking of Isobel in the blonde wig and the pink mules. ‘Who would have believed it? Who would have dreamed she could have walked like that and sat like that?’ He looked over at the silent phone. ‘Who would have believed she could kiss like that?’