Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (2 page)

It was such touches of reality which made her books so popular even among the graduate classes. If Janice
Gentle
wrote about romance, she wrote about it pragmatically; readers could say 'I know what you mean' to the page they were reading, identifying with the inner experience even if the outward experience were remote. If Janice built
castle
s in the air with her books, she also offered a credible means to climb up to them — for those who were interested. Those who were not interested could bypass the occasionally esoteric word, forget about the quotations, and go straight to the heart of the story.

For essentially Janice Gentle wrote stories. Men and women stories reflecting desire and reward. She could combine the unreal (a Newmarket stud and a heartbruised millionairess) with the real (what are we in the dark of the night when we sit alone but sisters and brothers under the skin?) without losing touch with reality. So, the Little Blonde piece of perfection will be stuck paralysed for all eternity as punishment for her insensitivity - unless Janice decides to be kind and let her die in the end. Everybody likes to see wrongdoing suffer as they like to see virtue rewarded. The
Little
Blonde will suffer for her sins. The way Janice is feeling this morning that seems justice. She really does hate going out in the world, avoids it wherever possible, has given herself up to be organized and controlled by Sylvia Perth and likes nothing better than to scuttle back to her retreat as soon as possible. Janice has given up on society. These tube journeys and the resulting books are the price she pays for conventual seclusion; it is unlikely that the dainty creature opposite will receive a more kindly end. Janice is not disposed to be kind.

Unaware of her fate, and only uncomfortably cons
cious of Janice's gaze, the Littl
e Blonde Secretary Bird looks up. She shifts her tight
little
bottom in its sketchy lace knickers and pulls down the hem of her neat black skirt. People of more than a size twelve should not be allowed on the Underground in t
he rush hour. So thinks the Littl
e Blonde Secretary Bird, giving the ample form of Janice one more fleeting glance of shudder before she quickly dives back into the pages of her book. She loves a good read and is one of those Janice
Gentle
fans who ignores the rope ladder and goes straight for the
castle
every time. She also skips the longish words, passes over the quotations from poets long dead and takes comfort that all will be well in the end. She feels that this is just as life
should
be; others who read it feel that this is the way life never will be, but it would be
oh so nice
if it were. Janice
Gentle
, with some mysterious and unerring skill, manages to make her work appeal to the credulous and the sceptical alike. An anomaly in the world of books, one that many have tried to emulate, one that none, it seems, can.

It is a tiring business, this research. On the train by eight-thirty, not off again until ten. And sometimes the whole upsetting procedure has to be repeated the next day if the spark of inspiration fizzles out or if it is successful only in part. This happens. Sometimes she can see the most perfect character and yet not find its twin or its foil. The process cannot be forced. Janice knows this. It is depressing, but unavoidable. Sometimes she has to go out several times.

She removes a sandwich from her plastic bag and chews on it meditatively. The hero could either be that tall, thin chap further down the car or this square-jawed mid-thirties strap-hanger opposite. He, focusing momentarily and in some horror at what he sees - Janice biting into the sandwich has not quite negotiated the ham successfully and a piece lolls out of her mouth like a dead snake's tongue - turns away, bumps the knees of the Little Blonde Secretary, apologizes
(a rare moment of intercompart
mental intercourse), and they smile at each other. Fleetingly, it is true, and perhaps not with their eyes, but a smile, a connection. For a picosecond they are human together. Janice notices, feels this is somehow fortuitous, and decides. The thin man down the line is too thin, too peppery-looking. Square Jaw will do very well. Heroes — she bites again - are much more difficult than heroines. Somehow men do not seem to give out their personalities as freely as even the most static of women.

She settles back and spreads a bit now that the seat to her left is vacant. The rush hour is thinning and it may be that she will have to start all over again tomorrow, for she has yet to find a heroine. She checks the height of the square-jawed chosen one. Good, she thinks, he is quite tall so there should not be too much of a problem matching him up. Ever since she became fixated on a very short but remarkably beautiful olive-skinned chap (just right for the Eastern Diplomat she needed at the time) she has been wary. Finding a match for him at under five foot four was not at all easy, for she was wise enough to know that all women, if only in their fantasies, like their partners to be bigger and stronger than they. Of course, it was possible that men
also
- if only in their fantasies - liked their female lovers to be ditto, but this did not concern her. It was women she wrote for and -happily - it was women who bought and read her books.

Sylvia Perth had told her. 'Janice,' she said, 'almost all fiction is read by women. Chaps read other stuff, so don't you worry about them. You carry on writing just the way you do and that will be absolutely fine.'

So, there could be no heroine towering over her olive-skinned hero - and that had been hard. This was the crux of the problem of her creative shibboleth; it could never be broken. If it were -even once - then everything else would tumble to the ground. The Eastern Diplomat had taken three dreadful journeys before she found the right match and she felt miserable at the prospect of similar difficulties now. She unwraps a Mars bar. Two more mornings of torture like this, especially if the wet, warm weather continued, would be —

'Excuse me.'

A well-bred, firm-toned female voice. Janice looks up.

Tight lips, a strong, fine-boned face framed in a red-gold fringe, below which there are flower-blue eyes that say nothing. Remainder of hair held close in an uncompromising chignon. No lipstick, no rouge, refined bearing with the smell of lemons and honey about her. Graceless clothes; pleated skirt, plain white blouse, indeterminate brown coat and unadorned black pumps. Janice remarks to herself that the coat is not summerweight and yet its owner does not even glow. She also sees that the ankles are small, the wrists delicate, the curve of the neck graceful. This is not raw-boned gracelessness but imposed, surface only. Early forties perhaps, but not difficult to picture her younger. Janice blinks and half smiles, she nods, moves her bulk and the crackling plastic bag, and goes on chewing her chocolate bar. She continues to look sideways as she does so. Good, very good, she thinks.

'Thank you so much.' Superior politeness as if the one giving thanks is in fact saying,
Be grateful to me.
Cold. With fire lurking somewhere within.

Janice is intrigued.

An idea shapes in her head.

She chews faster, shifts her position to see better. Waits.

The idea grows in her as the woman arranges herself in the seat and adjusts her clothes to avoid encroaching on Janice's side. Janice spills everywhere, well into her companion's space, yet the woman manages to avoid any physical contact at all. There is something engaging about that isolation. She takes one more long, slow sideways look before daring to decide. But yes - yes, yes, yes - it is right. Easy to see her as she is now and as she was once. Fading red-gold beauty. Lines of experience, lines of regret, perhaps? And a hardness somewhere. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Janice wants to write a retrospective novel for which red-gold and her artificial, self-imposed dullness will be the very epitome of Phoenix rising. In fact, that might very well be the title of the book.

When the red-gold woman brings out a
Church Times
and begins reading it, Janice feels that her cup of invention is full. To create a romantic heroine from a vicar's wife — flaming hair, scorched hopes - is the beguilement that she seeks. Without such beguilement Janice Gentle could never complete a sentence let alone a whole book. Now she has what she needs.

Red Gold, who will be eternally happy.

Little Blonde, bird-like, bird-brain, who will be driven by boredom and disappointment towards a bitter, wretched end.

Square Jaw, whose even features resembled the Before in an Alka-Seltzer advertisement, will become a solid and desirable force — one who will be forgiven and loved.

The tale is set.

Janice can go home now, for her day's work is fairly done.

Genius, born out of such disparities.

Genius.

*

It is of course genius that Janice Gentle has. Her works have been likened to Jane Austen, they have been likened to Enid Blyton, they have been likened to Grimm. They have been discussed in sentences that breathed the names of both Richardson and Danielle Steele, they have been reviewed in
The Times,
they have sold by the yard in airport bookstalls. She is read by the wives of both Oxford dons and Oxford butchers, for she writes of that which touches the human condition most, that unfashionable, elusive item on which turns the world. She writes, at the core, about love. 'S
tone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage . . .' Janice may be recluse, she may have little experience of the commodity, but it does not stop her understanding it. After all, she has never been sat upon by an elephant, but she knows that if she were it would hurt. Life may pass her by, but she is not hampered in letting her own small experience fly free. Indeed, very possibly, it is the life passing her by that helps.

She herself had been touched by love once and it made a profound, if inconclusive, impression. Until she found Dermot Poll again writing about the condition was preferable to seeking more of its reality. And so she did. Calliope, beautiful-voiced Muse to a thousand epic poems, had blessed her sister with the gift of words (every woman has something if it is only smooth elbows), and Janice, alone and heart-bruised and severely into the pleasures of eating, used her gift well.

Sylvia Perth was right. Ninety-three per cent of her readership were women, princesses to pauperettes, taking the romance with as large or as small a dose of salt as they chose. They were loyal, enthusiastic and read her avidly.

Of the seven per cent remaining, this was almost entirely made up of men who, so far from having romance on their minds, were accused by their womenfolk of not having it anywhere within their vocabulary of understanding - not even so much as tucked away in an armpit. They read Janice Gentle as one might read a textbook, looking for a solution and a set of rules. And they came away, usually, as baffled as they had been before, the enchantment of the genre being beyond the ken of fact-finding man.

From Sydney to Stockholm, Dubai to Dundee, Janice Gentle's books were very much in demand. She had made a lot of money and spent
little
. She had spent little because her personal requirements were scant and also because she did not know that she had made a lot. Had she known how much she had made it is unlikely she would have been taking a tube-train journey this morning at all, it is far more likely that she would have been lying on a settee with her feet up, eating and waiting, waiting and eating, until the Quest she could at last set going produced results, and her Crusade could begin.

But only Sylvia Perth, agent and friend, confidante and publisher's go-between, loyal fan and devoted accountant, knew exactly how much money Janice Gentle had made from her books, and for reasons of her own, for the present, she did not feel it necessary to enlighten her.

*

Back now towards home, mission accomplished.

The Little Blonde Secretary has left the carriage already. Square Jaw and Red Gold remain. As the train pulls into the station and Janice steps out, she gives one last backward look at her intended characters. Yes, yes, they are both perfectly right, especially the colour of that hair. If she is skilful she can make much of that as it turns from its chignon into flowing silver-streaked fire. But she will have to be careful. Distinguishing sentimentality from romance is a thin line and the descent into bathos is never far away.

Sylvia once brought her a whole pile of books which, she said, were trying to replicate Janice's style. Janice read one or two and winced - it was as if the writers had stripped a tree bare of its

fruit instead of taking selectively, or had demanded that each tree carry all the fruits of the universe just to be sure . . . Square Jaw may well release that chignon of blazing hair - very possibly Red Gold will be young and beautiful again. But whether that beauty is in the eyes of the
world
or whether it is only in the eyes of her
lover
- that is the question which counts. As a mother looks upon her new babe which to the world resembles a potato and which to the mother resembles a cherub, so, Janice instinctually knows, do lovers look upon lovers. How else could the plain and the ugly be loved? And that is a thought which is dear to her. She believes it utterly.