I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

to go on forever, don’t you?’

This left Betsy in such an appalling position that she surreptitiously dug her belt buckle’s prong into her palm to distract herself. She knew exactly the sort of reviews Gunn thought the book would get. She knew exactly (light another Dunhill) the sort of reviews the book would get.

‘Have you spoken to Sylvia?’ Gunn asked. Sylvia Brawne, the editor of Gunn’s last novel. ‘Have you told her anything about it?’

Weary Betsy blew a Gandalfian smoke-ring. How much she wanted to say: ‘Declan, you’re a good writer who does what he does well – but you’re not Anthony Burgess or Lawrence Durrell. You’ve got a nice line in understated poetic observation but virtually no intellectual rigour. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew and as a result this manuscript is a titanic failure.’

Instead, she said: ‘We’ll go to Sylvia first and then see.’

They did see. A Grace of Storms was turned down. By everyone.

The inner sanctum of Betsy’s office is antechambered by a smaller room with a varnished wooden floor, dark blue walls and one very new-looking Ikea desk, behind which sits Betsy’s small and moody assistant, Elspeth.

‘She’s with somebody,’ Elspeth said to me. ‘Did you have an appointment?’

I ignored her and strode across to the door. Unheard of, to breach the adytum unmediated or unannounced. Elspeth’s bottom jaw went rapidly through a sequence of little adjustments. Then she pushed the wheelie chair away from her desk and swivelled on it to face me. ‘She’s with someone, Declan,’ she repeated.

One of the downsides of being me is that I’m occasionally rendered mute by the sheer number of acerbic ripostes teeming on my tongue. I glared at Elspeth and opened the door.

‘. . . developing a much more . . . muscular language,’ was the tail end of Betsy’s compliment to the young man seated with a confrontational expansiveness of body in the middle of the oxblood couch. Tony Lamb. Gunn hates this person. Secondarily for his chubby face, buzz-cut and habit of dressing all in black, but primarily for his ubiquity and the success of his novels. Betsy despises Tony Lamb, too, certainly for his commitment to black clothes, but mostly for the blandness and flippancy of his language, the absence of ideas, the absence of reading, and the presence of a raging desire to get into Hollywood (which he will, within the year) and snort coke and fuck aspiring starlets and throw-up in the bathrooms of very exclusive places. The very life ‘Declan’ (bless) is living right now. She knows that for Tony Lamb writing is a tool which, if used cannily, will mean he’ll never have to write again.

Neither will Declan after the script I’m going to deliver.

I myself have no feelings about this Lamb cocksucker, one way or another. I approve of him, obviously, since he’s (a) perpetually distracting himself from God, and (b) heading for Hollywood, where his dedication to making money and inflating his own ego will see him contributing productively to an industry that distracts whole populations from God. Other than that he’s of no interest to me. There’s no murder in him, and only a very predictable dribble of lust. His soul, and billions like it, provide the cosmos with its muzak.

Betsy and Tony looked up as Elspeth crashed into my heels then squeezed past me into the office.

‘Declan,’ Betsy said.

‘I told him you were with someone, Betsy.’

‘Declan, I’m . . . ah . . .’ Betsy said – but I was already bored. Besides, this wasn’t something Gunn wouldn’t have done himself, on a good day. So I moved fast. Over to the couch, where I smiled, brightly, at Tony Lamb before grabbing him by his black lapels and yanking him to his feet.

‘What the fuck –’

I looked at him. I looked at him, through Gunn. (Which is just as well, since Gunn’s frightening look wouldn’t frighten a callipered octogenarian.) I thought, briefly, about lifting him off his feet, but Gunn’s equipment – the work-shy radials and biceps, the dole-hardened triceps and scrounging quads – really wasn’t up to it. Amazing what I can put into a look, even through human eyes. Amazing how I can make you see all the time I’ve lived and you haven’t.

‘Your books are dogshit, Tony,’ I said, very quietly, then waited just a moment before spinning and shoving him (I’m thinking: don’t fuck it up, Luce; don’t trip) violently towards the door. Elspeth, arms folded, hooked her midriff to one side as he went stumbling past to collide with the wheelie chair. Protracted clattering. He didn’t utter a sound. I walked over to Elspeth, put my hand around the base of her neck and steered her to the door.

‘Betsy I –’

‘Shshsh,’ I said. ‘Go and help Tony pick himself up, there’s a good girl. Do as you’re told now, darling, or I’ll break your moody little spine.’

She opened and closed her mouth a few times, staring straight ahead, but I got her through the door and closed it softly behind her. ‘There,’ I said to Betsy Galvez. ‘That’s better. Now we can talk.’

You’ve got to hand it to Betsy: grace under pressure. She sat back in her chair (already mentally composing the stunned and apologetic call to Tony Lamb: He’s been under a lot of stress . . . Truth is, I think the medication . . .) and crossed her blue stockinged legs in a whisper of electrified nylon. The mannish hands (liver spots coming soon; already a phthisic look) came to rest together on the plump yam of her belly, and her head rested back so that she could regard me as if from a position of unruffled superiority. She’s very good at pretending to be unruffled, is Betsy. She lets her mouth, that wry old orifice so charmingly radialled with its hundred fine lines, perform little smirky manoeuvres to show you she’s well aware that this is all tremendously meaningless fun and that she’s going along with it like an indulgent auntie. For all that, I knew she wasn’t quite unruffled. A part of her saw this whole spectacle as confirmation that the business with A Grace of Storms had, as she’d suspected it might, sent Gunn completely off his rocker.

I rushed across the room, knelt before her and put my hands on her knees. The knees were the size of babies’ skulls.

‘You need to get one hand up to my chin, darling, if this is a Classically inspired entreaty,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’

I pushed my face into her lap and held it there for a moment. Delicious aroma: laundered wool, Opium, the noon tuna-salad, Laphroaig single malt, fagsmoke and ah, yes, surely a trace of Betsy’s sly and seasoned vadge. I leaped to my feet, crossed the Persian rug and threw myself into the leather couch so lately and ingloriously vacated by Tony Lamb. Betsy – with more amdram suppression of girlish collusion – took a Dunhills from her silver case and lit up from a hideous malachite and gold desk lighter. I followed suit with a Silk Cut and a Swan Vesta.

‘It’s very simple, Betsy,’ I said. ‘It’s really unbelievably simple. I wanted to see you, so here I am.’

Dunhill smoke exhaled nasally in twin plumes. Slowblinking heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Ah,’ she said – gravelly monosyllable – ‘A newly discovered allergy to the telephone?’

‘A newly discovered knack for spontaneity.’

‘And violence, apparently.’

I gave her a lickerish grin. ‘A talentless cunt with a head like a dead lightbulb, and you know it.’

‘Of course I know it, Declan. That doesn’t give you the right to assault the poor chap. Besides, Villiers are going to cough up a quarter of a million for his next book if I’ve got anything to do with it.’

‘Who said anything about rights,’ I said. ‘I want to come back over there and put my hand up your skirt.’

‘Oh I shouldn’t if I were you.’ Deeply blushing throat despite the aplomb. ‘Why don’t you tell me what all this is in aid of, umm?’

I smoked for a couple of drags in silence. It felt remarkably pleasant to be sprawled in Betsy’s couch, one leg hooked over the back, one arm trailing on the floor. The late afternoon light was fading and I knew that any moment Betsy would turn her desk lamp on (a charming art nouveau doodle in pewter with a green glass shade) creating a weird grotto of light around her heavy face. Our cigarette smoke hung in skeins above us. A Covent Garden audience stuttered into applause outside. Children cheered, tinnily. Betsy’s dark wall clock clucked, softly, and I thought: I’ll be sorry to leave all this behind.

‘Betsy,’ I said, then blew a succession of fat and shivering smoke rings. ‘Betsy, I’ve got a book for you. It’s not finished yet, but it very nearly is. I have absolutely no idea whether you’ll like it, nor do I care. All I want you to do is get the fucking thing published.’