he was confronted by another group of Sterling books the spectacle seemed to have less to do with him, as if the books were products of a phase of his life which he'd left behind. He mustn't lose his enthusiasm now, when he needed it for the press interview. The thought sent him striding back to Firebrand Books.
Among the books displayed in a rack opposite the easy chairs in the reception area he found a copy of The Boy Who Caught The Snowflalxs. While he was waiting for Mark Matthews he speed-read the book, and was on the last page when a voice remarked 'If even the author's reading it, it must be good.'
This was Mark Matthews, a tall man in his thirties, already balding. His long face appeared to be trying to smile with as many features as possible. 'We can hustle now if you like,' he said, 'if you feel like getting a drink in before Howard Bellamy wants to talk.'
'You think that will loosen my tongue, do you?'
'We have ways of making you talk,' the publicist said, and relinquishing his fake German accent, 'but the way I hear it, you don't need any.'
Ben hoped there wouldn't be much of this. When Matthews said 'Italian all right for you?' Ben though momentarily that he was proposing to don another accent. 'Whatever pleases Bellamy,' Ben said.
It proved to be the restaurant where Kerys Thorn had lunched the Sterlings, and the interviewer was already waiting, perched on a bar stool just inside the window and feeding himself olives with one pudgy hand between sips of the cocktail in the other. He continued to survey the faces of the passers-by until Mark Matthews cleared his throat, and then he swung round on the groaning stool and raised his handlebar eyebrows. 'Howard Bellamy, Ben Sterling,' the publicist said.
Bellamy gave Ben's hand a loose shake and retrieved his cocktail from the bar. 'Wife following?'
'Someone had to stay home with the children.'
'Thought I'd rather have the pretty half, did you?' Bellamy said to the publicist, and to Ben: 'Shame, though. She could have made me a sketch to send out with my pieces. Let's put something in our tummies while you're being grilled.'
'It sounds as if you're going to make a meal of me.'
'Do you know, I think I'm going to like this man,' Bellamy said, descending gracefully as a seal from the stool and tugging his velvet waistcoat over his paunch. 'You'll be easy,' he told Ben. 'We'll have fun.'
The interview was certainly fluent and slick. Once Bellamy had posed his tape-recorder beside the bowl of parmesan, Ben forgot it and discoursed on all the subjects which Bellamy raised or which his own responses led to: childhood as a visionary state, the stifling of imagination by pressures to conform, imagination as the soul of man, the undying essences of myths and fairy tales, the need to let them tell themselves, the possibility that only children could hear them clearly and rediscover the meaning they must have had when they were told round the fire under an unknown sky in the midst of an unknown dark which perhaps had been the real storyteller, borrowing a human voice to tell its tales… Bellamy nodded and smiled and managed to look eager for more while he swallowed an extravagant amount of spaghetti. He didn't switch off the recorder until coffee had followed several bottles of wine. 'That'll more than do,' he said. 'Unless you've anything else in your head that you particularly want to let loose on the world.'
The termination of the interview took Ben off guard; he'd reached a stage where he was scarcely aware of talking. 'I was just thinking how many people I've known who sound like adjectives or adverbs. Dainty, Quick, and now you. Not overweight, just comfortably bellamy.'
Bellamy took his time about smiling at that, but once he did his smile looked set for a while. 'I predict we'll be seeing you up high before long. I'll be bending my efforts towards it,' he said, and wrote his address inside one of the restaurant's match-books. 'Drop me a line if you think of anything you forgot to say.'
As Ben and Mark Matthews walked back to Ember the publicist said 'I'll want to use you a lot more next year. We mustn't let all that charm and eloquence go to waste.'
'Maybe I should save some for my new editor.'
'Maybe.'
Without warning Ben felt as if the part of him which talked about writing and which had carried him through the interview had deserted him, exposing him to his impatience with the delay of the next two days. He was afraid he might be rude to Alice Carroll, and then so angry with being afraid that he felt like being yet ruder. But when he saw that she looked even smaller behind Kerys' desk than Kerys had, his anger didn't seem worth sustaining. 'He was perfect for Bellamy,' the publicist told her. 'I've been there when Howard took against someone he was interviewing. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you.'
Ben had to admit to himself that Alice Carroll was: the dabs of pink on her marbly cheeks emphasised her delicate bones, her blonde hair cascaded to her waist out of a hairband shaped like a snake. She gave his hand two shakes and said 'Anything you can do to maximise sales.'
Ben assumed she was talking to Mark Matthews as well, which made him feel only half acknowledged. 'I'd like to have our photographer take you before you leave, Ben,' the publicist said.
'What about Ellen?'
'Send us one.'
'We can take him now,' Alice Carroll said, and glanced at Ben. 'If you don't mind, of course.'
'I'll live.'
She acknowledged his response with a terse smile and raised her faint eyebrows at the publicist until he retreated. 'Coffee,' she said to Ben as if she was advising him to sober up.
While they awaited the coffee she talked to him about the book she referred to as Snowflakes. She was pleased with the sales of Snowflakes, and sounded surprised as well. There was talk of submitting Snowflakes for a children's book award. Perhaps it was because her phone kept interrupting that he didn't find her comments as heartening as she presumably meant him to. Soon the photographer let himself into her glass and plywood booth. 'Hold my calls,' Alice Carroll told her secretary who brought the coffee, and nodded to the photographer to start whenever he was ready. To Ben she said 'You're waiting to hear what I thought of your latest submission.'
'Of course,' he said graciously.
'I thought you were trying too hard.'
The electronic shutter of the camera emitted a sound like a stifled exclamation. The photographer was shooting. Let him, Ben thought furiously; he wouldn't catch Ben unawares, as Alice Carroll had. He was so anxious not to betray she had that his tongue stumbled. 'To do, to do what?'
'To produce what you think the market wants.'
'Wasn't that what you asked for?'
'True, but my authors don't normally take me so literally. I have to see the finished product before I can judge it, obviously, and in this case I'd say it shows you aren't as good at carrying out instructions as you think you are.'
Repeated swiftly several times, the noise of the camera shutter sounded like imperfectly suppressed mirth. 'So what are you saying?' Ben said in a tone intended to seem receptive but aloof.
'What I just said.' She sat forwards on her high revolving chair, and Ben imagined spinning it until she vanished beneath the desk-top. 'If you're asking me what you should do,' she said, 'I'd say you ought to wag a few less fingers at your readers. Address their concerns but let your story make your points for you. People don't like to be preached at, children least of all.'
'Nor do I,' Ben retorted – not out loud, but he wondered if the snicker of the shutter meant that the camera had caught him thinking it.
'And you might try injecting more imagination into the rewrite,' Alice Carroll said, 'since that's what you're good at and it seems to sell. Enough?'
Her last word was meant for the photographer, but Ben was tempted to respond. As the photographer went out she said to Ben, 'I hope you didn't mind him taking you while we were talking. I think it makes for a livelier image. We've enough shots of you trying to look like an author.'
'So to return to what you were saying…'
'I meant everything I said, of course.'
Had Ben thought or hoped otherwise? 'Simple as that,' he said, and stood up.
'I'll walk you to the lifts.' She held the door of her booth open while he struggled into his coat, which felt like his anger made heavy and hotter and even more frustrating, then she led him along the aisle between the unpartitioned desks. Someone held open a lift for Ben, but she waved it away. 'Have your children read this book?'
