You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (54 page)

‘Hardly,’ Neve said, but she allowed herself a few seconds to try to imagine what it would be like if Philip’s words came to pass. It seemed so implausible that she gave up. ‘And I would always take your calls. Or I’d get my PA to take your calls.’

‘You never know, Neevy. People do get agents and they do get book deals. It’s not completely unheard of.’

‘All I really want is for him to tell me that he’s going to submit
Dancing on the Edge of the World
to publishers. Then he’ll tell me that while he enjoyed reading my pitiful attempt at writing a biography, I should stick to transcribing. God, I never asked him to read it,’ Neve said crossly. ‘And I will tell him that. Well, I won’t, but I’ll be thinking it very loudly.’

‘You’re being very ornery today, Neve. What on earth has got into you?’

This time the enigmatic smile was more of a smirk. ‘A lady never kisses and tells.’ She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘I suppose I’d better get this over and done with. And will you at least think about what I said? You deserve to be with someone who makes you happy.’

Neve thought that it would take more than one stirring pep talk to convince Philip to break free of decades spent being a doormat. It was hard to change, but it wasn’t impossible, and if she kept gently pushing him in the right direction, then maybe he’d break free from Clive’s evil clutches and kick his evil ex-wife to the kerb too while he was at it.

She was still grinning at her mental picture of a single, self-assured Philip dancing on the podium in a gay nightclub surrounded by admiring, muscle-bound men as she walked through the dining room of Jacob Morrison’s club to what appeared to be his usual table, tucked away in an alcove. He probably preferred that table so there weren’t many witnesses when he reduced hapless wannabe writers to tears.

Jacob didn’t look up from his BlackBerry as Neve approached, but as he never willingly acknowledged her existence, she was expecting that. She’d also forgotten to change out of her Converses, she noticed as she pulled out the chair, but it wasn’t as if he’d asked her there to discuss her choice of footwear.

Neve ordered a pot of tea from a passing waiter, then decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘Jacob? Sorry, but I’ve got another meeting after this.’ It sounded better than saying that she was going to see a rom-com with her father.

‘Oh, sorry. I think I spend more time on Twitter than I do working,’ Jacob said, still transfixed by his BlackBerry and not sounding the least bit annoyed that Neve had decided to speak before she was spoken to. ‘How are you? You look well.’

‘I’m fine,’ Neve said carefully, because she wasn’t sure if it was a trick question and that Jacob was just about to hit her with a ‘How can you possibly be fine when the chapters you sent me were badly written, poorly constructed and lacking in any discernible content?’

But he didn’t. He turned off his BlackBerry then looked up and smiled at her, and Neve couldn’t help but state the obvious. ‘I didn’t know you wore glasses.’

He was wearing a pair of thick black nerdy glasses that made him look a hundred times less intimidating than when there was nothing coming between him and his glare. Jacob touched the frames with a nervous gesture and seemed a little nonplussed. ‘Well, I put in my contact lenses whenever I come to the Archive, even though they irritate my eyes,’ he revealed. At least it explained why he frowned so much.

Neve took the bait. ‘Why can’t you wear your glasses at the Archive?’

Jacob Morrison, literary super-agent, actually squirmed in his chair. If you took away the designer suit and the expensive haircut and the chiselled jawline, he looked like a little boy who’d been caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. ‘I used to work at the Archive when I first came down from Cambridge,’ he said finally. ‘George, Mr Freemont, sat at the next desk and spent a large part of every day mocking me for the thickness of my lenses – when, that is, he wasn’t mocking me for my poor cataloguing skills and my general failure as a human being.’

‘So he was like that, even then?’ Neve asked.

‘Worse. I think he’s actually mellowed with age,’ Jacob said with a smile. ‘But Rose used to stick up for me. And there was the time when I did something absolutely unconscionable when I was making him a cup of tea, so it wasn’t all bad.’

‘What did you do to his tea?’

Jacob shook his head solemnly. ‘That’s a secret I’ll take to the grave or until you get me horribly drunk.’

Neve giggled, and though she’d imagined spending the entire meeting monosyllabic, she spent the next ten minutes firing questions at Jacob so she could get all the dirt on Mr Freemont and report back to Chloe and Philip because Rose had obviously been holding out on them all this time.

Eventually Jacob held up his hands in protest. ‘Enough! That wasn’t why I asked you to tea. I want to talk about Lucy Keener.’

Every instinct Neve possessed shrieked at her to tense and panic, but she tried to ignore them, because she was here for Lucy first and foremost. Anything else was just gravy, though if Jacob absolutely
hated
what she’d written, she hoped he’d make it quick and relatively painless.

‘You said you liked
Dancing on the Edge of the World,’
she prompted nervously.

‘I didn’t like it,’ Jacob said, as Neve frowned because he’d sent her that email, ‘I
loved
it. And so did my assistant and my reader and my girlfriend who read it in one sitting and was in tears for the last fifty pages. I think you’ve discovered one of the great British novels, Neve.’

‘I have?’ Neve allowed herself to relax a little. ‘And the poems and short stories? Did you like them too?’

Jacob nodded. ‘I did, very much. Though poems and short stories are a harder sell than novels, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Neve decided that the fact that Jacob had said ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ didn’t mean anything deeply significant. ‘So you’ll submit
Dancing on the Edge of the World
to publishers then?’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I know it’s out of my hands, but I feel very protective towards Lucy.’

He was frowning at her from behind his glasses and Neve clenched up again. ‘Shall we cut to the chase, Neve?’

She nodded despondently.

‘The first two chapters you sent were very stilted. They were all tell, no show. I really wanted to get a sense of Lucy’s background, where she went to school, who ran the corner shop, what her bedroom looked like – the reader needs to get a sense of who Lucy is so they can start to care about her.’

Neve hung her head. ‘Oh, OK. Well …’

‘But then you got into a rhythm about halfway through chapter three, when her sister Dorothy left home to get married, and I really liked the way you began to build up the relationship Lucy had with her father,’ Jacob said, smiling at her. ‘I think you’re off to a good start.’

‘I am?’ Neve couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

‘You are, but don’t let it go to your head,’ Jacob said sharply, but with another smile to take the sting out of his words. ‘Now, I want to submit a package to prospective publishers of
Dancing on the Edge of the World
, along with a completed manuscript of the biography and a collection of her best poems and short stories. I’d like us to work on that together because you have a better understanding of the material.’

‘I thought you could maybe divide the poems and stories into decades, so it works almost as an autobiography,’ Neve said eagerly. ‘Her writing changed so much if you compare her short stories written during the war to the poems she wrote three years after it had ended and Charles Holden had got married. Though I suppose there’d be a chronological gap where—’

‘Neve, did you hear what I said?’ Jacob asked, with another frown, though she was starting to get used to them. ‘I’d like you to finish writing Lucy’s biography so I can submit it to publishers.’

‘Are you sure? Because I’m not a proper writer. I mean, I had a few things published in
Isis
when I was at Oxford, but that doesn’t really count. What if I get stuck? What if I get writer’s block?’ Neve was just about to run her fingers through her hair in agitation when she remembered that she had a foam wedge resting in there. She settled for wringing her hands instead. ‘A whole book – how long is it meant to be, anyway?’

‘OK, you need to take some deep breaths,’ Jacob advised, summoning a waiter. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water so you don’t start hyperventilating.’

He waited until Neve was clutching on to a glass of mineral water for dear life, before he continued: ‘Just think of writing this book as if it were your MA dissertation, but with a lot less literary theory.’

Neve had rolled up at Jacob’s club fearing the worst, and now that the worst appeared to be that she had literary representation and the green light to finish Lucy’s biography, she wasn’t sure how to react. She took shallow breaths and tried to open her mouth to say something.
Anything
.

‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you. I can’t tell you what this means to me.’

‘Well, what it means is that I’ve asked you to write a book in your spare time and unpaid. And once it’s done, if I can’t get you a deal, then you’ll never earn any money from it.’

‘I don’t care about the money,’ Neve breathed and it was the absolute truth. Jacob Morrison having faith in her and her writing was more than enough. It was also more than she’d ever expected. ‘Oh my goodness, I can casually refer to “my agent” when I talk to people.’ She paused as Jacob stared at her as if she was mad. She did feel rather unhinged. ‘Not that I would, because people would think I was an utter fool.’

‘They really would,’ Jacob said. ‘I’ll get my office to draw up a contract, but shall we shake on it, before we start talking about logistics?’

They spent a happy hour discussing the huge amount of work that Neve had committed to. Not just the actual writing but contacting the Alumni Association at Oxford so she could get in touch with Lucy’s contemporaries, and sweet-talking the woman in charge of the Holden family’s personal archive into letting her have access to their private papers. Even contacting the Cultural Attaché at the Russian Embassy to shed some light on the two years that Lucy had spent in Russia. It was daunting but it was also very, very exciting.

Even better, Jacob was going to use his influence to wangle her a four-day week at the Archive without a cut in her salary, because any publication of Lucy Keener’s work would benefit the LLA and, ‘You’re practically on minimum wage as it is.’

Just as they were both getting misty-eyed at the wish-for-the-moon possibility of a Lucy Keener biopic with Kate Winslet in the title role, Neve happened to glance down at her watch. She couldn’t believe that she’d been there for two hours.

‘On dear, I had no idea it was so late,’ she said apologetically. ‘I have to be in Camden by five.’

Jacob nodded, but he was already pulling out his BlackBerry. ‘I’ll get my assistant to email you,’ he said, as Neve scraped her chair back. ‘And I’ll take great pleasure in phoning George Freemont tomorrow to tell him that he’ll have to manage without you one day a week.’

‘Thank you,’ Neve said fervently, because she’d been dreading that particular conversation.

‘Believe me, it will be a pleasure.’ When Jacob grinned and winked at her, Neve decided that it was a good thing that her heart was already taken, because having a crush on your agent would be very unprofessional. ‘You’d better run along, you don’t want to be late.’

Neve had pencilled in the half-hour walk from Bloomsbury to Camden for worrying about the reunion with her father, but she spent all thirty minutes of it on the phone to Philip getting increasingly agitated as she visualised door after door slamming in her face, as the gatekeepers of private family papers and literary archives refused to admit her. In fact, she was so busy wailing at Philip as she turned into Parkway, that it took Neve a second to remember why she was there. Although she was ten minutes early because she was
always
ten minutes early, her father was already standing outside the cinema and giving a flinty-eyed look to the homeless man who was spinning him some sob story in the hope of earning fifty pence. Neve side-stepped the homeless man’s shopping trolley, which was full to the brim with bulging carrier bags, and came to a halt beside her father.

‘I won’t tell you again. Bugger off and get a job,’ Barry Slater was saying, when he caught sight of Neve. ‘There you are. Let’s go in. I don’t want to miss the trailers.’

There was a brief hug of bumped noses and banged elbows, before they walked inside. Of course, her dad had already bought the tickets and Neve was dispatched to the toilet (‘your mother always goes ten minutes in then spends the rest of the film asking me questions’). When she emerged, her father was standing there with two bottles of water and a small tub of popcorn.

‘It’s salted,’ he said, as they headed for Screen One. ‘Can you eat it? Is it all right for my cholesterol levels?’

‘I’ll have a little bit, but maybe you shouldn’t eat things that have a lot of sodium,’ Neve said, and she forced herself to look at him properly, without her eyes darting away at the last moment. He was looking good; tanned, without the lines etched into his face that she’d thought were permanent, and his stomach was a lot less paunchy than it had been. ‘Mum said you were looking after yourself – it seems to be working.’