Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (30 page)

'I don't want to find out, if he's dead . . .' Janice shivered.

'Can't stop now,' said Erica. 'Otherwise you'll spend all your life wondering. Think of the parable of the loaves and fishes. He raised those from the dead, didn't he?'

There was a short period of understandable silence after t
his, and Erica's small congregati
on appeared to be lost in thought. It
sounded
sort of right.

'And if
I've
survived, then I don't see any reason for thinking
he
hasn't. . .' she added positively.

Janice looked at her admiringly. 'There is a fourteenth-century French poem by Jean de Meun called
Roman de la Rose.'
She wrinkled her forehead attempting to remember it. Rohanne Bulbecker nearly groaned out loud with despair; her new-found author looked even less appetizing when she was pondering.

Janice brightened. 'I can remember it in a sort of hotch-potch of Old French,' she said. 'Of course, it is not my idea of the grand literary ideal - it's rather deprecating about our sex -' 'Shame,' said Erica.

‘
But it is not as cruel as
blastanges de Femmes,
and so we should allow its qualities. Now, how does it go?' Janice opened her
mouth to speak, and then raised
a didactic finger. 'Of course, the entire
Roman
is allegorical - I'm thinking of Jean de Meun's duenna,
le Viell
e,
one of his characters, you know. He gives us a whole series of them before the Lover finally obtains the rose. In fact, the whole debate and symposium on love, which it is, of course, supposed to be. . .' - she looked over her glasses at nobody in particular - 'is interspersed and brought to life by their long, explanatory monologues.'

Rohanne thought Janice was not doing too badly herself in this department.

'The point is,' said Janice firmly, 'the point is that sometimes subsidiary characters are stronger and say more than the main protagonists.' She smiled at Erica. 'Which is something I am just beginning to find out.
..
So' — she screwed up her forehead again so that Rohanne spontaneously buried her head in her hands -'something like this:

'N'onc ne fui d'Amours a escole

Ou l'en leiist la theorique,

Mais je sai tout par la pratique: Esperiment m'en ont fait sage,

Que j'ai hantez tout mon aage.'

'Ah, Ovid,' breathed Janice to herself. I had forgotten that -' 'What's it about?' Erica asked.

'Approximately it says this: "I never went to the school of love where they taught theory; all I know is through practice. The experiences I've had all my life have made me wise."'

'Streetwise?' asked Erica.

'Everywise,' said Janice. 'Like you.'

'Me?' said Erica von Hyatt. 'I don't know about that. But I bet I could find Dermot Poll for you if you wanted me to.'

'Look,' said Rohanne wearily, 'here's a deal. You write one more book for me and Morgan Pfeiffer. You get paid a fortune for it. You use the fortune you get paid to hunt down this
..
.
whatever he's called . . .'

'Dermot,' said Janice.

'Poll,' added Erica.

They smiled at each other.

Rohanne tried to smile, too. 'And then everybody is happy,' she added. 'How about it? One more book?'

'Go on,' nudged Erica. 'One for the road.' And she smiled a beautiful, golden smile.

'I don't suppose you
would
let me substitute a photograph of her
...'
Rohanne gazed wistfully at the pink, the silver, the gold. And then she shook her head and sighed. That would be taking deceit too far. In Rohanne Bulbecker's opinion, whatever life was, it was not a farce, and she was not going to begin to turn it into one now.
Why oh why
had she been so impulsive and told them all about the beauty of her quarry?
Why oh why
did she think it mattered at
all?
She couldn't possibly ring up now and say, 'Oh, by the way — small detail, Mr Pfeiffer — I got the description the teeniest little bit wrong. Mistook the identity. She's actually a
little
more like a sumo wrestler than I first suggested . . .' She just
couldn't.
It would be zero credibility and out after that.

She checked her nails. Pretty little baby growths beginning to herald the new dawn. And now two of those had gone already. She put the third in her mouth. Through clamped teeth she began to think wildly. Invent something, an illness perhaps, unidentifiable, debilitating, contagious - something to prevent her from holding court with the media. And which eventually made you swell up like a balloon.

'AH right,' said Janice. 'If it truly means for the very last time, then I will write just one more.' She looked at Erica and smiled. 'My
magnum opus.
Free of Sylvia Perth.'

The telephone rang. Everybody jumped. Everybody listened. Nobody got up. The answerphone played. 'I'm sorry,' said Sylvia Perth's voice sweetly, 'that I am not able to take your call right now. . .'

Janice swung out of the couch and switched the machine off. She smiled. 'Free, for ever, of Sylvia Perth.' She rubbed her plump, sticky hands together.

Rohanne Bulbecker gazed at her forlornly. She was beginning to feel a certain amount of sympathy with Sylvia Perth.

'And if,' Janice swallowed, 'and if I have to show myself to the world, then I will -'

'Over my dead body,' muttered Rohanne Bulbecker, and then immediately apologized to God, crossed herself and took the words back. This was no time to be taking risks. 'That might not be absolutely necessary,' she said calmly. 'Perhaps just writing the book would do. You just get on with that and leave Rohanne to deal with all the rest.'

Janice thought that she had heard something very similar to that before.

'You can't even see the ship properly and there are no people in it whatsoever,' said Gretchen O'Dowd suddenly.

This received a similar response to Erica's loaves and fishes until Rohanne made the connection. 'Well, at least she gave you
something?
she said, 'even if you don't like the picture. Janice here has lost everything.'

'Not quite everything.'

'No?'

'Oh no. I have my Quest and I have my integrity. Twin guides to steer me as I write my last book.'

'Not
too
much integrity?' said Rohanne nervously.

'Enough,' said Janice mysteriously. And she gave Erica a long and contemplative smile. 'And I know exactly how to do it.' She squeezed the hand of the golden girl affectionately. 'With a bit of help from my little pinchbeck here.'

Erica was beginning to feel rather important, which was very nice.

'And
I
get seasick,' muttered Gretchen. But nobody heard.

Fleetingly Janice thought of her characters from the tube train and wondered what would happen now she had no use for them. Despite the whole superstition seeming irrelevant and the travel-

lers cardboard and unreal, she nevertheless felt regret. She had intended to order and fulfil their lives - the good to profit by their goodness, the bad to suffer for their sins. And now they must roam unchecked to stumble where they would. It didn't seem fair, for their stories would have no proper ending. She sighed. Nevertheless, she would have to release them soon to let them find their way.

Erica returned the squeeze of her hand. Misinterpreting the sigh, she said stoutly, 'You'll find your Dermot. I'm sure of it.'

'That,' said Janice, 'would be the very best ending of all. And the only justification for everything.'

Rohanne was not at all sure about finding Dermot Poll. Nor about anything being a justification for anything. But it was not, fortunately, her problem. At least she was going back to New York with the real Janice Gentle's book agreed. What she was going to tell them about the lack of the real (not to say substantial) Janice
Gentle
in person, she did not yet know. Something. Something strong. Strong fiction, she told herself wryly. And smiled.

There was, of course, one last hurdle to overcome. She cleared her throat, put on what she hoped was a breezy smile, and prepared to introduce the subject with delicacy.

Chapter Eighteen

‘Er
Janice?'

'Yes, Rohanne?'

'One small little thing.' Janice blinked. 'What?'

'Sex.'

'Sex?'

'Mr Pfeiffer wants sex. I mean, Mr Pfeiffer wants sex in the book.'

'Ah,' said Janice, and up went the finger of admonishment again. 'As with the Court of Gloriana - Virgin Queen, indeed - it has come to this
..
.

'All
you
that
love,
or
loved
before

The
fairy
queen
Proserpina

Bids
you
increase
that
loving
humour
more:

They
that
yet
have
not
fed

On
delight
amorous

She
vows
that
they
shall
lead

Apes
in
Avernus
.
..'

'It's those amoral Elizabethans all over again,' she said, 'tampering with the purer beauties and the high ideals, replacing it with tabloid salaciousness, bringing
sex and conceits and disgruntle
ment into everything.' She looked meaningfully at Erica. 'Avernus, of course, being another name for hell.'

'Of course,' said Erica promptly.

'And the hell in this case would be the hell of unrequited love, "to lead apes in Hell" being an Elizabethan term for sexual frustration. They should have stayed with the courtly ideal rather than reduce it to the lowest common denominator . . .'

'Urn,' said Rohanne Bulbecker, who had become quite lost, 'I think he means something a little more up to date than that. A bit more, shall we say,
direct?

'You mean of an illustrative nature?' said Janice. 'Not the prose of the understood but the prose of the explicit?'

Rohanne latched on to the last word. She nodded. 'Uh-huh,' she said.

'I am afraid not,' said Janice.

'Why?'

'Integrity,' said Janice firmly. 'And because I don't know anything about that side of things.'

Rohanne, contemplating the figure before her, was not at all surprised. Nevertheless, that was the whole point of creativity -the ability to get inside and imagine and inform convincingly. Look at Frankenstein.

'You must know something,' she said cajolingly. 'Look, basically we want you to write the same kind of book you have always written. Only with one or two . . . er . . . updates, expansions, a slight changing of emphasis . . .' She shrugged. There was no other word for it. 'Sex. He wants some of that going on, as well as all the other lovely things you write about so well . . . After all, it is part of life .
..'
Rohanne felt her voice growing fainter as she spoke. 'People expect it. And it means that when he markets you, he has a hook. You'll sell a lot more books.'

Rohanne felt strangely uncomfortable as she said this. In Morgan Pfeiffer's office it had been a straightforward enough brief.

'What do you mean, sex?'

'Well,' Rohanne shrugged, 'you know.'

'No,' said Janice, 'I don't.'

'Do you mean that you .
..
um
..
. don't know whether you
can
write about it, or . . . um . . . that you . . . er
..
. well . . .
haven't?

'Yes,' said Janice. 'Both.'

'But surely,' she said, as evenly as possible though she was quite sure that if she looke
d down she would see the breast
pocket of her leathers going pump, pump, pump, 'you don't have to experience everything before you write about it. What about your Eastern Diplomat? What about all those heroines of yours? You've never dealt in pictures or run an hotel, yet all those women were very real.'