Chestnut Street (40 page)

“Come on, what’s he doing, what mammoth task has he agreed to do that he needs you to hold his hand?” Clare had been a friend and colleague long enough to speak in that tone. But only just.

“You couldn’t be more wrong. Harry didn’t ask me not to go; he doesn’t even know it’s on.”

They looked at one another, shocked. What kind of relationship could he have with someone in publishing and not know about sales conferences?

“You’ll be passed over, Ella. The boys upstairs will never stand for this. No matter what lies you tell them.”

“I won’t tell them any lies. I’ll just say that it doesn’t suit me.”

“Not only are you completely cracked, but you’re letting us all down. They’ll say women can’t cope, that you’re premenstrual or having the vapors or that you’re pregnant. Lord, you’re not, are you?” Clare was aghast.

“No, certainly not.” Ella spoke in a voice too calm, too normal for the crisis she was bringing down on all of them.

Clare waved the others away majestically. “Let’s have a glass of the emergency tequila,” she suggested. The emergency tequila was a ludicrous bottle stashed away at the back of an office drawer for an occasion just like this.

“No, honestly, it’s too early, I couldn’t swallow it,” Ella protested.

“You
are
pregnant,” Clare said.

Ella looked at her friend with a great but almost distant affection. Clare was married to an owl, a wise old owl peering over his spectacles with an indulgent look at Clare. In a million years she wouldn’t know what it took to hold a man like Harry.

“I can’t tell you—you’d feel honor-bound to try to talk me out of it,” Ella said.

Clare looked relieved. At least there was a hint of a smile on
Ella’s face again; they hadn’t seen that for a long time, only a look of grim concentration.

“It’s his parents. They’re coming up for this
Fidelio;
he’s got tickets for all of us.”

“Ella,
Fidelio
will come back again—it’s not some new, experimental work that might sink without trace.”

“No, but it’s …”

“Even his parents will come back again. They’re not like Halley’s Comet, coming round once every seventy-four years. You
can’t
miss the conference. What about your authors? You can’t let them down.”

“Someone else can present their books. Come on, we spend our time telling each other not to believe that we are indispensable.…”

Clare looked at her in exasperation. It was one thing to realize that you could be replaced; it was another to walk out on your authors. They
expected
you to be at the sales conference, to talk up their books to the reps, who then had to go out and sell them into bookshops. Apart altogether from what the boys upstairs would say.

“I’m sick of the boys upstairs,” Ella said; and all on her own, Clare opened the emergency tequila and drank most of it out of a coffee mug.

Back in the office, Ella faced the silent reproach of Kathy, her assistant.

“I wish you’d change your mind,” Kathy said eventually.

“No, you don’t.” Ella was cheerful and brisk. “This is your big break. It’s like the understudy hoping that the decrepit old bat of a leading lady won’t be able to go on. Suddenly, a star will be born.”

“It’s not remotely like that.” Kathy was cross. “For one thing, you are not a decrepit old bat, no matter how oddly you are behaving. You are only three years older than me, if I remember
correctly. And anyway, this is not becoming a star, it’s taking over all your work as well as my own.”

“You’re well able for it,” Ella encouraged her.

“It’s not fair, Ella, even if there was a good reason. And how am I going to deal with that madman from Australia?”

“Oh, God,” said Ella. “I’d forgotten the Jackaroo.”

“Well, he hasn’t forgotten you.” Kathy was triumphant. “He has an appointment to see you at five o’clock.”

“Not
this
evening. I can’t meet him this evening!”

Kathy lost her temper. “I think you should play fair with everyone, hand in your resignation, sit at home and plan your hope chest and let the rest of us get on with trying to publish books.”

When Ella was very young, her father had always told her that it was a great virtue to be able to see the other point of view. She used to be able to do that; in fact, it was one of her great strengths. She could imagine what it was like to be an author, or a bookseller, a rival editor or an office junior. Perhaps of late she had been very preoccupied. She had been seeing another point of view, certainly, but only Harry’s. She had been trying to out-guess him, solve the problem before it occurred, wipe away the frown before it started to pucker on his forehead. She looked Kathy straight in the eye.

“You are absolutely right,” she said. And for the first time since she had met Harry, she picked up the phone to tell him that she wouldn’t be meeting him.

Harry was astonished. “Who do you have to meet?” he asked in disbelief.

“This Australian—he’s an author. I won’t be going to the sales conference, you see, so I have to talk to him about his book and what plans we have for it.”

“But he’s an
author
,” Harry said. “I mean, you’re his editor; he should be pretty bloody grateful that you take any interest in it at all!”

“He is.” Ella’s voice was firm.

Harry sounded aggrieved. “I’d have made other plans, if I’d known. Now I’ll be hanging about.”

“Come and join us, then. You and I weren’t going to meet until six anyway. Come to the bar beside my office; that’s where we’ll be, at the back.”

He grumbled a bit. But he said he’d be there.

Ella took her notes on the Jackaroo’s book. It was a zany first novel—it was very different from anything else. It was quirky, not in the mainstream. She did regret that she wouldn’t be there to explain at the conference how it should be approached. But she had made up her mind. She had not spent all this time taming her beautiful, strutting peacock—making him adapt to a domestic lifestyle and like the idea of her being permanent in his life—just to throw it away. There would be other Jackaroos, other zany first novels, there were sales conferences every six months; but there might never be another shot like this at Harry.

She had never met the man she called the Jackaroo. His manuscript had been very neat, and she had imagined him as a small, fussy sort of person—like a penguin, possibly. He had assured her, on the telephone, that he was hopelessly disorganized, but that he happened to be in love with his word processor. He said it had tidied up his mind. Now he wished he could find a machine that would tidy up his house.

“What about a wife?” she had asked him.

“Oh, I have one of those,” he had said.

Or maybe he had said that he
had
had one of those—she couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, anyway; all that mattered was that she explain to him that even though
she
wouldn’t be there, Kathy would do everything to ensure that the book was appreciated before it set out on its journey with all the other books.

She looked around the bar. Nobody looked remotely like a penguin.

A huge, shaggy man with long hair and a long, droopy coat stood by the bar, sipping white wine.

“I’m looking for a middle-aged trout called Ella,” he said to the barman.

“One middle-aged trout reporting,” she said with a laugh.

“God, you’re different to what I thought!”

“You too.” She wanted to be brisk, get as much of it over as possible, perhaps even all of it, before Harry came in. He looked a reasonable kind of fellow. About as far from a penguin as she could imagine. They sat down together.

“Is it worth my getting a bottle of wine?” he asked. “I’m timid with publishers—I don’t want to assume or presume.”

“You’re not timid with publishers—you call them ‘old trouts.’ ”

“Ah, but I was wrong. Is the bottle going too far?”

“No, but I’m the editor, I’ll get it. Anyway, I’ve a friend joining us later.”

“You get the second one, then.” He had a wonderful laugh, short, sudden and unexpected but very infectious. She found herself laughing too.

They talked a little about the book. He said it was like a dream, to have made it all the way from the outback to a really smart bar in London and to find that the old trout he had thought was patting him on the head like a good little colonial was a gorgeous bird.

“You’re like a lorikeet, in those lovely blues and oranges,” he said.

“A lorikeet?”

“You’ve never seen a rainbow lorikeet?” He wondered at the strangeness of it. He told her about the rosellas and the fig parrots and the noisy pittas.

“You’re making them up!” she pleaded.

Somehow, they hadn’t got round to talking about the book by the time that Harry arrived.

Harry, in his soft sweater that was exactly the color of his eyes. But
exactly
. It had taken a lot of choosing and selecting and bringing it out of the shop to the daylight.

Harry said that the bar was a collector’s item; he couldn’t imagine how they had found somewhere so scruffy.

“I thought it was a smart bar,” said Greg. She had stopped thinking of him as the Jackaroo.

“Oh, well,” Harry said. It didn’t mean anything. It could have meant that if you didn’t know better, it was a smart bar; or it might have meant that if you came all the way from Australia, it could possibly look like a smart place. It might have meant, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter—the main thing is that we’re all here having a drink.”

Ella realized that Harry rarely explained himself. Beautiful people didn’t have to explain themselves or tell stories. A peacock didn’t have to explain itself or tell stories. A peacock didn’t have to do anything except be a peacock: everyone else did things around it.

She realized what bird Greg reminded her of: an emu, a big, scrappy emu …

“Tell me what emus are like?” she said, and he told her that they were big, flightless things always looking as if they needed to be put through a car wash—or indeed as if they
were
a car wash. They were innocent and interested in everything, he said. You only had to sit and wave a handkerchief out of the car and a great big mob of them would come meandering through the scrub to investigate.

Ella found that both endearing and funny. She threw her head back and laughed. They sat opposite her, Greg and Harry, both looking at her with admiration. But Ella realized that Harry was looking just past her. There was an old mirror behind her. He could see himself nicely.

“Tell me about this sales conference,” Greg asked.

Ella looked straight at him.

“It’s next week,” she said. “I’ll be there to hold your hand.”

If you’re telling fortunes for a charity, you have to do your homework just like everywhere else.

Melly, who lived in Number 26, was very popular in the street, which was unexpected since she was a real old-fashioned hippie with a long floral skirt, long hair and long amber beads.

She even had a lovely smile, which meant that even the difficult and fussy Mr. O’Brien, next door, liked her. She was kind to her fellow men and women, which meant that the very religious Kennys, who lived in Number 4, approved of her, whereas normally they might have had words to say about hippie culture.

Her neighbors, the dull Nessa and Barry, had become less dull since they knew her. Melly would always feed a cat or dog if anyone was away and had even been known to take a pair of someone’s canaries for a walk in their cage in case they felt it was too dark for them indoors.

Melly had held the ladder for Bucket Maguire, window cleaner from Number 11, when he looked as if he would fall down in the next gust of wind. She went regularly to read for Miss Mack, the blind woman in Number 3. It was wonderful that Miss Mack liked all the stuff about the court of King Arthur.

So when the neighbors decided to have a fete in the central piece of grass that made Chestnut Street into a kind of a horseshoe, they asked Melly to be the fortune-teller. They knew she would say yes because it was in aid of a Kosovan orphanage and she was so good-natured and she would look the part too, with a scarf around her head with little coins attached to it. Melly would see something good ahead for everyone, and money would be raised for children without much hope ahead of them.