Ithaca (8 page)

Within six months of moving in with him, however, she discovered that the intensity that she had found so attractive when they were dating could get oppressive when she had to deal with it constantly; if she didn’t align herself with his obsessions, she ran the risk of being run over or shut out. Fortunately, during the first years of their marriage, physical passion, their shared love of many of the great voices in contemporary fiction, and the stimulating literary circles they moved in kept their relationship alive and fresh. However, by the time the second book in the
Angels
quartet was published she had begun to have misgivings about the marriage and her husband. By now it wasn’t so much his rather controlling nature that bothered her – she had figured out how to handle it – but something that she found rather more distressing: his obsession with literature (and, to be honest, with her) had been replaced by a desire to succeed in the most boring sense possible. Just like any other businessman he had begun to worry about getting ahead, about hitting sales and profit targets; he fretted about the competition, yearned for a showier lifestyle. They moved from their tiny Russell Square flat into a larger one overlooking a park in Kensington, long before they could afford it. He got rid of his rumpled English
editorial look and, at considerable expense, invested in three Italian designer suits (Savile Row, he explained, was “so British,” shorthand for dowdy, she had come to realize), and was only kept from acquiring a flash car and a house in the country because it would have stretched their finances too far.

She left him a year and a half after he was promoted to publisher; he was hardly around anyway, preoccupied as he was with the publication of the fourth
Angels
book. Besides the fact that they no longer seemed able to have even a conversation without quarrelling, she suspected he was having an affair with one of his writers – he denied it but that just set the seal on her misery.

Julia looks at the blinking red light on her phone – seven messages, and she is pretty sure that the majority (if not all) are from Zach. He is back from his trip and she thinks with dismay that the barrage of calls means that it hasn’t calmed him in the way she had hoped it would. And Mandy is obviously not helping any. She decides not to listen to the messages tonight, she has an important submission to send out tomorrow by a promising young graduate of the University of East Anglia writing program, and getting the tone of the letter right is a lot more important than listening to Zach’s latest tale of woe.

The phone rings. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she mutters, glancing at her clock radio, which says it’s two in the morning,
considers letting the call go to voice mail, then picks up the phone.

“Yes, Zach,” she says, accentuating the weariness in her voice, “you do know its two o’clock in the morning.”

“Sorry, jet lag, and I know you go to sleep late.”

“Perhaps the fact that you phoned seven times and I didn’t get back to you might mean something to someone less monomaniacal than you. In any case why call me instead of your drama queen?”

Her less than complimentary reference to Zach’s current lover irritates her because of what it signifies. On the only occasion they had met she had taken a dislike to Mandy, and as she was not the sort of person who was reflexively unpleasant about others, it was clear that this was yet another indication that she still cared about Zach. She doesn’t have to look far for further evidence – almost two years after walking out on him, why hasn’t she filed the divorce papers, why does she take his calls, why is she so intimately involved with his life?

“I don’t know why you are so nasty to her.”

“When England passes a law that I am to be nice to the lovely Mandy perhaps I’ll change my mind but until then –”

“Come on, if you got to know her –”

“Thank you very much but I’d rather not – in any case, with your constant whining about her I feel I know her better than my own sister.”

“Julia, maybe we should just get off the subject of Mandy?”

“Nothing would please me more, but you’re the one who keeps bringing her up –”

“Not this time I didn’t but fine, I won’t discuss her with you again, all right.”

“You know I think it was Einstein who said if an experiment ends disastrously it’s pure insanity to keep trying it in the hope of getting a different result.”

“Well, I married you, didn’t I?”

“And we both know how that turned out!”

“Listen, I didn’t call you to fight, I just wanted to talk about Bhutan.”

“All right then, but let’s talk tomorrow, I’ve got to go now. I have to finish tidying up this submission before I send it out.”

“I hope we’re seeing it.”

“But of course, my love,” she says sweetly before hanging up.

God, that Zach, she thinks, how irritating he is. What on earth has he found in Bhutan? Religion? A new love? She remembers their holiday there when everything was great between them. There must have been arguments, sulks, and that sort of thing but she remembers none of that, just the perfection of long walks through mist-shrouded hills, monks blooming like roses from the windows of fat-bellied dzongs, the exquisite detail of the thangka they couldn’t afford but bought anyway. It hangs on her bedroom wall, and she walks over to it, examines its delicate blue and gold tracery. She must get back to the manuscript she has been working on, but she can’t seem to stop thinking about the man she once loved, and still appears to be involved with. This is ridiculous, she thinks, it’s as though she has never left. They talk every
other day, see each other at least once a week, and her desultory efforts at dating have met with no success, because it is clear that she isn’t interested. She goes to the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror. At thirty-nine (five years older than Mandy, she thinks sourly, but better looking, definitely better looking) she knows she still looks good – the burnished fall of brown hair with just the occasional furtive strand of grey, the eyes that Zach had once compared to wild honey, the face unlined except for a faint latticework of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes – and could find a man without any trouble, she has no doubt about that. But until she can excise Zach from her life she knows there is no point in thinking about that option. She laughs when she remembers she quoted Einstein at him (where did that come from?); perhaps she should direct the quote at herself. She brushes and flosses, creeps into bed, switches off the light, and composes herself for sleep.

When the money started to pour in with the third
Angels
book, Gabrijela bought a Georgian townhouse on a leafy square in Soho for slightly less than four million pounds and moved the thirty-two people who worked out of the London office there. Litmus’s employees loved their new offices, all five floors of it; the best space in the whole building was the top floor, with its oak panelling and tall windows through which the light streamed in to illuminate the gigantic boardroom table made of Canadian maple, which could
comfortably seat twenty. This was where the drama of Litmus’s working day was at its most intense – it was here that all the important decisions whether at the board level or at a production meeting were taken.

The hot, life-giving star at the centre of the frenetic universe of publishing is the editorial meeting. This is where it all starts, and in whichever part of the world it takes place its format is essentially the same, and the business it transacts is the same: it is in this forum that the books that the company is thinking of buying are first revealed, appraised, discussed, fought over, and bought or turned down.

Through a process of deduction, experience, and whimsy Zach has decided that Thursday is the best day of the week to hold his editorial meeting. Monday and Tuesday are necessary to get the motor up and running at full rev after the slacking off over the weekend; Wednesday, like the middle son, is just dull and without promise, a pit stop before the highperformance day, Thursday, after which the slow tapering off to the weekend begins. The meeting begins at nine. He is a morning person and is half asleep by three in the afternoon, especially if he has had a glass of wine or two with lunch (an all too rare occurrence these days compared with when he started his career), which is why he schedules all his inessential meetings – with colleagues wishing to whine about this or that, bloviated agents who have sold him nothing of consequence for years, and so on – for the late afternoon.

Of late, as the company’s fortunes have sunk, and the threat of layoffs and salary freezes looms, the editorial meetings that were the highlight of his week have become filled with tension as his colleagues, terrified of losing their jobs, battle each other grimly, trying to boost themselves at each other’s expense.

This is his first editorial meeting after his holiday, and he makes it a point to get to the meeting room early, the better to compose his thoughts. He wanders over to a window and looks down on the square. It is a grey London day, a thin drizzle, which has temporarily dispelled the heat of the summer, knitting earth and sky together. It is the sort of weather that would have normally filled him with energy (this astonishes his sun-worshipping native English colleagues but Zach has always loved rain in whatever form, a throwback to his years growing up in one of the rainiest places in India), but this morning the sight leaves no impression on him. Today’s meeting, which is going to have a module on future editorial strategy bolted onto the regular business of the week, is not going to be easy, for either his staff or himself, as at the end of it he will need to have a slate of big books for next year (and, hopefully, a couple they could drop into the current year to turn it around, something they haven’t had to do in all the years that Seppi was their mainstay) to present to Gabrijela and the directors at the quarterly board meeting next week. He has nothing that makes the cut as of now. He will know whether there is anything big out there when he has done his rounds of the agents, but it is the leanest time of the year and he isn’t
getting his hopes up. He hopes his editors’ ideas for books that they can commission or authors they can shake loose from the competition are truly brilliant, although he fears that he might be expecting too much of them – they will not be able to conjure up world-beating books at a moment’s notice. Further souring his mood is the fact that he will have to let go of Fiona, the managing editor, soon after the meeting.

He still finds firing people the most difficult task he has to perform as a senior executive. To make things more difficult, he shuns the most efficient way to get rid of employees in which all he is required to do is make a short, noncommittal speech to the person concerned, following which Naomi, Litmus’s terrific head of HR, takes over and leads the poor devil through the various stages that Kübler-Ross and other gurus have identified – shock, denial, anger, panic, bargaining, depression, acceptance and then the fade into oblivion. He finds this abhorrent and patronizing. Colleagues, especially long-term colleagues, are not units of inventory or items on the balance sheet to be managed by the impersonal tricks the human resources department has up its sleeve. He has always taken the time and the trouble to do the firing himself – erring on the side of generosity and refusing to come up with negative reasons, usually exaggerated, to diminish the employee, and make it easier to let her go. Naomi certainly, and even Gabrijela, who is renowned for her loyalty to her employees, have found his method difficult to take on occasion. He understands their point of view – that he is needlessly prolonging the process, and there is no evidence that slow, compassionate strangling is better for the employee
than the swift bite of the guillotine – but he is not going to change. These people did their bit for him and the company; he will not disrespect them, which appears to be the default position of management. He will do everything he can for them, even if it means he is on edge for days beforehand, and filled with despondency for weeks and months afterwards. To make matters worse, Fiona is his best friend in the office; she was the managing editor when he joined the department as an assistant, and she has applauded and stood by him through every twist and turn of his career at Litmus. She is to be the first victim of the planned cost cuts; Gabrijela and he did everything they could to save her but in the end there was no way out. And if they aren’t able to come up with projects that generate positive cash flow quickly there will be more jobs lost. Litmus is the last of the significant London publishers to start laying off people, but without a Seppi it is not immune to the recession. He has been back in London for just three days and already the calm and certainty of his Bhutanese holiday have been swept into the far recesses of his mind.