Lilith
By Ewan
- 429 reads
Two boys went out on the lake. One came back. The other one was my son. I didn’t know my son’s friend. I knew his name, but he never came to the house. A few times I saw them kicking a football on the common. I know, you’re making judgements about our village already. And perhaps you’re right. There’s a church I don’t go to and a pub where Toby’s father used to drink cider after cricket in the summer. It has a beer garden and a menu that serves seven fat cut chips with a tiny fillet steak that no-one dares complain about. There isn’ t much else; a farm shop, a hobby-business that sells an antique a week and a camp-site towards the lake which doesn’t fill its dozen pitches even in the summer.
Toby was three when we moved here. His father and I decided that we could afford to leave London. He had been laid off from the bank and I had worked at Excelsior less and less since the book, and having Toby. In any case, Hermione offered me the brand new post of Editor-at-large.
‘Jane, it’s ideal, really. You can work from home, finally write another book in between times. Everyone has broadband nowadays, think of the freedom. I’m jealous, really I am.’
But of course, she wasn’t. Being an Editor-at-large meant I would be a consultant and as such self-employed, doing work that Excelsior contracted out to me. It also meant I’d be cheaper, and publishing books had become still more expensive, since the internet had arrived. Besides, she probably thought to herself, I was rich enough to retire. But I doubted I could write that book.
Lots of things had changed in publishing since I had started. Some things for the better. UEA’s course hadn’t prepared me for making tea for middle-aged men. Trireme Press’s time had passed before I’d begun as an ‘assistant’. It must have been one of the last independents where nothing was done after lunch, since everyone retreated to offices for confidential meetings. The snores and the smell of alcohol breached the locked doors with ease.
I made progress, spotted two next-big-things in my first eighteen months on the slush pile. Of course, one of the partners at Trireme took on the projects. I never met either author. There was a promotion at Trireme, but by that time I had already networked a position at… well… it’s named after a river in a University town. Be careful what you wish for,they say. There were many meetings with authors and I learned that although meeting your heroes may be a disappointment, meeting your hero who happens to be a writer is devastating. There were some highlights. It’s fascinating to find out who can’t spell and who thinks a dangling participle is some kind of Carry On Writing joke. It fascinates for a while, anyway.
So when my old friend from University offered me a job at Excelsior I jumped at the chance. I was only 30, single and could still laugh at Bridget Jones without feeling too uncomfortable. The film had come out and done as little justice to the book as the novel had to the newspaper column. The company was new-ish and yes, I admit it, run by women although not for women, you understand. I’d been with Excelsior about a year when I got a call from a small agency in Brighton (Brighton!). They had someone, they thought, that maybe, with a good editor and a sympathetic publisher, might possibly… I was about to hang up, when the woman said,
‘It is good. Very good. Maybe too good. Perhaps we’ve made a mistake...’
‘No, I’m interested. We’ll take a look. Can you get the author to e-mail -’
‘I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘Well, you put something together yourselves and I’ll get back to -’
‘No, it’s… there’s only one copy of the manuscript. The author wants to deliver it in person.
‘You want us to read a whole manuscript? It’s a novella, is it?’
‘Umm...’
‘How many words? 150,000?’
‘250,000.’
‘Ah. Well, I think perhaps it won’t be for us.’
‘You should meet the author. Explain, you know.’
‘Do they have a gun to your head now?’
‘Hahaha, no of course not. Look I’m going to phone a couple of people I know over at...’
It was utterly mad. I had no idea what kind of loon I was going to end up meeting, but I would not be meeting them at Excelsior. Nevertheless, I did give in and arranged a meeting for the following Wednesday at a pub in the West End, a tourist trap where I’d never been before and I’d never have to visit again.
On the day, I arrived late. I took the tube, because I’d have felt guilty putting a taxi on expenses. The pub was full of tourists, open-mouthed at the prices and at the fact that they hadn’t thought to check them first. I had been sure ‘the Client’ would be easy to spot. Maybe a man in an off the peg suit and highly polished cheap shoes or someone with their manuscript in a Tesco’s bag who looked like they’d been living rough. I had considered that it might be a stalwart of a provincial W.I., someone rather like my mother in fact. I confess I’d hoped not. So when an unaccompanied woman of about my age approached carrying a briefcase much like one I would have brought to any other meeting, I was more than a little surprised. She wore an antique Biba like one I had seen and almost bought on a day out with friends at Covent Garden the week before. I presumed she had arrived by taxi, since I never walked anywhere in a pair of Jimmy Choo’s. She held out a hand,
‘Excelsior?’
‘Of course,’ I looked over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t the client coming, then?’
‘Oh! Ah, that would be me. Julia at Fitch & Associates is feeling a little off-colour. She said I should just come on my own.’
To be honest, I hadn’t expected Julia to turn up. But I didn’t expect the client to look like someone my friend should have sent with her. The woman waved over to a corner of the pub,
‘I’ve got a cheap-tasting Chardonnay and some bottled water from some Polish spa over there, shall we sit?’
I followed and because I couldn’t think of anything to say, I didn’t say anything.
We both looked at the Chardonnay and she lifted the water bottle and poured us each a glass.
‘I expect you feel this is a little peculiar. Julia did explain that this isn’t how things are done, of course.’
‘No, well. As I’m here, can you tell me a little about yourself and your...’
‘My name is Lilith, Lilith Satanne,’ she rolled her eyes. ‘Of course, that’s not the name we’ll put on the cover of the book, too much like a porn star, don’t you think? I could use my maiden name, but I’d rather not. I want initials. W.R. Sickert would look good on the shelves at Waterstone’s, wouldn't it? I’m a housewife and mother living near the Lakes. A tiny village, you wouldn’t have heard of it...’
I was trying to concentrate on what she was saying, but I kept thinking, where did she get those clothes?’
‘- and no publicity. No festivals, no book-signings, no radio, no TV. Nothing.’
I thought she didn’t look mad.
‘Well, we can talk about that when… If we take your work on.’
She smiled. ‘Take the manuscript. I’ll call you in a week. You have a card don’t you?’
I gave her my card. She put the briefcase on the table. Then she stood up, shook my hand and I watched her take the only coat off the hooks by the Ladies. Balenciaga. I’d have kept it on all the while I was in the pub. She gave a wave and it was a long time before I saw her again.
I managed not to look at the manuscript for at least two days. In the end I took it out at home: my future husband had phoned to claim yet another essential need for his expertise whilst the Dow opened to trade pork bellies or some other commodity, so I took the remains of a bottle of a half-decent Medoc from the the sideboard and opened the briefcase. The manuscript was not in green ink. It wasn’t even hand-written. It was typed. On an old-fashioned mechanical type-writer. It was double spaced and there was no liquid eraser on any of the paper. Not one mistake in a quarter of a million words? Giles didn’t come home all night but phoned at about half seven. He might have been a bit taken aback when I answered so quickly, but I couldn’t really tell. I phoned in sick and finished reading the woman’s novel.
It was good. No, it was better than that, it was … Finished: polished, edited, honed. It was bloody-fucking-perfect. I suppose if all you know of books is what you’ve read, you might believe that a manuscript turns up at a publisher and needs a bit of spelling checked and maybe an over-repeated word replaced. Perhaps there might be what’s called a continuity error, someone’s name changes half-way through. Little things. What do they of publishing know, who only read some books? Nothing, that’s what. Everything that gets accepted as a manuscript from a new author, and that’s a one in ten thousand chance, is treated like a first draft. It’s best if the book is “on trend”. You know, if it can be pigeon-holed into some category that readers will recognise, then that’s what we’re looking for. If not, we make a few suggestions so that we can do that. The one-in-a-million book is the one that you read that is perfect and original.
The woman’s book was one in a million. You’ve probably got in on your shelves, even if you haven’t read it. The book has been optioned for years, but I hope they never make the film, because it won’t be a film, it’ll be a movie – and it’ll be dreadful.
I was quite beside myself by the time the writer eventually rang.
‘It’s … Lilith.’
As if I cared what she called herself.
‘We’ll take the book. It will need a good editing, but we’ll put our best-’
She laughed, ‘We both know it doesn’t.’
‘Ah, well, you know, we can’t offer...’
‘I don’t want a deal, you couldn’t pay me enough money.’
‘What do you want then?’
‘Oh, I’ll collect, one day.’
‘We’ll need you to promote the book, I know what you said but-’
‘Salinger, Pynchon, O'Donnell ...’ she laughed again.
‘It doesn’t work like that nowadays...’
‘Try. Sickert was a joke by the way. Use any name you like. Yours, even.’
So I did.
Hermione wasn’t surprised, and nor should she have been. Do you know how many people in the industry have an unpublished novel in a drawer? Anyway, you know the tale about the publishing phenomenon with my name on the cover. Well, two initials and my surname. I did lots of interviews and publicity. Somebody had to and so I was the face that saved print books. I worked all through the pregnancy and married Giles after Toby was born. It wasn’t a great problem keeping the plates spinning, Toby was well-looked after by a girl from Spain and, inevitably, so was Giles. We changed the au-pair for a Mr Doubtfire, a compromise that saved me playing tit-for-tat on Giles. Toby did have a lot of accidents; bumps, bruises and minor burns. I’d been the same as a child. If there was a step to trip on, I would do so and Toby seemed the same. So when Giles lost his job at the bank, I had been out-earning him for the past three years and… well, I thought it would be a fresh start.
The village was small. Giles laughed when I joined the W.I. and I roared when he joined the Cricket Club. He’d told me he’d been the 2nd XI’s scorer at school. Toby, like Topsy, grew. I shed a tear as he started school. I didn’t mention his little accidents. Even in the country, they know words like dyspraxia. I didn’t want a label on my little boy, who does? As for the freelancing, it had never been a success. There was no broadband, no 4G no 3G and precious little mobile phone signal. I didn’t miss them. Giles went about once a week to a cyber café about twenty miles away. I thought how my little boy’s innocence might endure a little longer and was glad.
All through reception year, he didn’t “mix well”, as Ms Hepplewhite put it, while we both squatted at Toby’s level to include him in the conversation at the end of the year. I wore trousers as I did the same with Ms Jaeger at the end of year 2. So you’ll understand that I was delighted that Toby made a friend in year 3. I stopped asking Toby if his friend wanted to come for tea and managed to get the words ‘play date’ between my gritted teeth, but Toby’s friend never did come.
By the time they were eight they were inseparable, as long as Toby wasn’t at home.
Of course, I watched for Toby’s friend’s mother at the school gates. Somehow I never managed to catch her. I saw a well-dressed woman from the back from time to time. Sometimes her boy would turn to wave at Toby, but he was so far away I could not see his face. Toby waved back. He never waved at other children.
‘About your friend...’ I asked him one day as we walked down the lane towards the cottage.
‘He’s my friend.’ I wondered why he never smiled like that for me.
‘Why do you like him so much?’
Toby looked at me, ‘you won’t believe me.’
‘Of course, I will,’ I laughed.
‘He can disappear.’
‘Don’t be silly, Toby.’ I pulled him onto the grass verge as a tractor went past. I ignored the farmer’s wave.
‘I’m not silly, and – and – and,’
I bent down to Toby’s level, it sometimes helped with the stammer.
‘And he’s going to show me how!’
I was determined to meet with the other boy’s mother. Eventually I managed to persuade Giles to accompany me to pick Toby up from school.
‘You can take him home. I’ll wait.’
‘You’re being ridiculous, Jane.’
‘So I’m ridiculous because I want to know more about this boy?’
‘They’re eight years old, in two years they’ll barely remember each other.’
But he agreed to come.
Giles took Toby’s hand and turned to go. I saw the woman and her boy in the distance, already a long way from the school gates and about to turn out of sight by the pub on the corner.
I ran. Giles swore, but took Toby home, as promised. It was a cool day and I recognised the Balenciaga coat. When I turned the corner, both of them had vanished.
That was the day before the boys went out on the lake.
I told them. I told the police. I told them again after the lake had been searched by frogmen. I told them after they had tried to find the mysterious woman and my son’s only friend. I told them I had seen the boy more than once since it happened. I told them this,
“Two boys went out on the lake, one came back. His name was Walter.”
- Log in to post comments
Comments
Oooh - beware the Balenciaga
Oooh - beware the Balenciaga coat. Some lovely touches (great list of reclusive authors), just the right hint of bitterness towards publishers. It all seems entirely plausible to me.
- Log in to post comments