He answers without looking at the number. ‘Rufus Orton,’ he says, in the voice he uses on the telephone. It’s very English. Very ‘Young Conservative’. Very Chipping Norton.
‘Rufus, hi. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? Hi.’
He doesn’t let himself sigh, though he feels it swell inside his chest. The multiple greetings are a dead giveaway – it’s Harriet, his current book editor. She’s only ten years older than his youngest daughter, but she is tasked with making his manuscripts fit for market. She’s energetic, fizzy and full of mollifying synonyms, all designed to make an author feel better about the fact that their manuscripts have started becoming a little on the ‘shit’ side.
‘Harriet,’ he says, pulling himself out of the chair and feeling the earth sway a little beneath his feet. He looks around for some trousers, aware that he is about to have an important meeting. Spots a pair of soft cords dangling over the edge of the big Belfast sink. He recalls a vague incident with spilled wine and some attempt to sponge the crotch with the hem of the floral curtains, but doesn’t want to follow the thought any further.
‘Is it as awful up there as it is down here?’ she asks, in her usual way. She always gives him a little weather report before launching into the actual purpose of the call. ‘One of those horribly grey days in London. You could actually see the mist rising off the river when I jogged in this morning. Like an army of ghosts, I thought, and then I realized I’d probably cut that sentence if I spotted it in a submission.’
Rufus gives a dutiful laugh. ‘I haven’t seen much of the day. The windows in the kitchen make everything look dark – even on a gorgeous June day. But judging from the muddy footprints on the flagstones, it’s been raining. Welcome to Yorkshire, eh?’
‘I do miss it,’ says Harriet, a note of whimsy in her voice. ‘I hope to get home for the bank holiday, see the folks, maybe take a boat on the river at Knaresborough. If you’re around, as always, it would be lovely to buy you lunch, meet the family. I haven’t seen Shonagh since the launch before last …’
Rufus feels his heart clench. He doesn’t need Harriet to see his life. These last couple of years he has managed to tell her just enough about his domestic set-up to stop her asking any more questions, but if she were to walk into the kitchen of his tumbledown house on the North Yorkshire moors, she would lose any lingering respect for a novelist once named as a rising star, and described by the Telegraph as ‘the most exciting new literary voice for a generation’. He’s been using that line on the covers of his books since 1998.
‘I’m hoping there’ll be some good news to share,’ says Rufus, looking around the catastrophe of his kitchen and wondering if he should be looking for bin liners and rubber gloves, or just pulling the pin from a grenade and lobbing it into the fruit bowl. ‘Can’t say I’m feeling massively positive at the moment. I know RedGreen was a bit ambitious but that was the point, surely. I mean, readers are the clever ones, aren’t they? The thinkers? Surely people buy books to think new thoughts, or at least to hold up a mirror …’
‘Yes, I saw the blog piece you wrote,’ says Harriet, reproachfully. ‘Harsh.’
He winces, remembering the vitriol he had spewed at two a.m., his fingers hitting the keys on his laptop as if each letter drove a nail further into the forehead of the reviewers who had eviscerated his latest work. ‘There were some good responses,’ he mutters. ‘My readers all liked it.’
She doesn’t disguise the sigh. ‘Rufus, your readers would buy your work if you just wrote your name over and over again on a blank manuscript. Your readers love you. What we need is new readers. I know this isn’t news to you and we’ve had this conversation ad nauseum but unless we can get the supermarkets on board or reposition you as a name for the mass market, we should really be grateful for getting reviews at all. That’s rather the reason for the call, actually. The marketing department think you’ll be better positioned for the spring brochure rather than the autumn, so we’ll push back the release date of the new one by six months, which will buy you some time on the deadline and obviously give us more time to think of a way to get the buzz out there …’
Rufus’s head spins. Six more months to wait before the new book sees the light of day. Six more months until he receives another quarter share of his meagre advance. His money worries are all consuming. Not many bailiffs are able to find his house, but plenty do. He’s behind on the rent, has maxed out every credit card and has to decide each week whether to put fuel in the car or food in himself. He usually finds a compromise by ignoring both concerns and just drinking wine until he finds the right frequency for optimism. He doesn’t think it can go on like this much longer. Shonagh looks at him with true disgust. The children are rarely home. His book launches pass without so much as a ‘congratulations’ card from the publisher and the long-mooted screen adaptation of his first book remains trapped in ‘development hell’, which strikes Rufus as a synonym for ‘the bin’.
‘Whatever you think best,’ says Rufus, trying to sound breezy. ‘You know me, Harriet. Team player. Will it still be a five thousand print run on the RedGreen paperback, or do you think we should think big and go for ten?’
Harriet makes a noise he doesn’t like. ‘Oh no,’ she says, as if this were truly absurd. ‘No, I think it was a thousand, wasn’t it? You know the situation – the independents
