Ithaca (12 page)

He’s hoping to hear the up-and-coming trumpeter who is billed to play at Ronnie Scott’s, he is supposed to be a real talent, but Mandy has other ideas and they take off to a lingerie store that has advertised an opening day sale with extended hours. The store is packed with women of all ages and shapes and sizes. Any forlorn hope that he may have had that he will be mildly stimulated by the spectacle of his girlfriend shopping for lingerie along with scores of hot women is extinguished immediately by the sight of unattractive, wild-eyed shoppers pushing and shoving to get at frilly underwear. Three other male partners lurk sheepishly in the least populated parts of the store, hoping they will not
be mistaken for pervs. None of them makes eye contact. After a couple of hours, Mandy emerges triumphant with a set of lacy pink underwear and three boxes of tights. “Got them from under the nose of that rude bitch,” she says, holding up the pink undergarments, and pointing to a large woman in a yellow skirt that’s too tight for her. “Bet she doesn’t find anything tonight.”

“But you’re five sizes smaller than her, and you don’t like pink.”

“Oh, I don’t want the stuff. I’ll just return it at the cash; I just didn’t want her to have it.”

She makes sure she passes the woman on their way out of the store, and says loudly, “See you next time!”

Startled, the woman gives them an uncertain smile. Mandy looks triumphant and he is mystified by the comment until he twigs to the insult.

They walk along the cobbled streets of Soho to the Tube station, the evening’s shopping festooning his arms, and Mandy prattling away about some customer who wrote his phone number on his bill that afternoon – he wonders if she is trying to make him jealous. They stop at a Pret A Manger, buy wraps for dinner, and go to his place where they make arid, joyless love. If this is the best they can do after being apart for over a fortnight clearly this relationship is not going anywhere, surely Mandy can see that!

He manages to bundle her out of his flat at around eleven, and then calls Julia. She is not home, and he wonders unhappily where she might be. He leaves a message, asking her to call him back, then phones a few minutes later, asking her to dinner
next week. Pitiful, he thinks. Abruptly his thoughts about his less than satisfactory romantic life are displaced by thoughts of the disaster that threatens at work. Gabrijela has asked for a meeting in five days, and has told him to do everything he can to make a better showing than he did at the board meeting.

He goes to lunches and drinks and suppers with agents and publishing colleagues he has worked with for over a decade, men and women he likes and respects for the most part, all joined shoulder to shoulder in an endeavour that they have worked hard to perfect throughout their adult lives – the task of finding, valuing, and selling worthwhile writing, which despite all the algorithms and business models that attempt to convert it into something that can be weighed and measured like any other product is ultimately elusive and therefore all the more precious. All its disadvantages notwithstanding, to be part of this world is a privilege and he is proud to belong to this company of men and women, who for centuries have nurtured the mother of all creative arts, storytelling, with dedication and skill. But as he makes his rounds he finds out that they have nothing for him this time and he goes into his meeting with his boss insecure, with his excuses ready, knowing that will not be enough, because whether he likes it or not a solution will have to be found to the crisis that is already upon them.

Gabrijela is on the phone and he takes a seat in front of her kidney-shaped desk. Next to her computer is a little plaque that says, “Be humble because you are made of the earth, be
noble because you are made of the stars.” It describes her exactly, he thinks, this Serbian proverb that she keeps to remember her mother by. She is self-effacing to a fault, and fierce in her determination to live up to a higher standard than is the norm both in the way she conducts herself personally and in the way she leads her company. This sometimes makes her difficult to work for, but for all her prickliness he knows she will always be straight with him and will not let him down, traits that are worth much more than an insincere smile and assurances that mean nothing.

Gabrijela is on the phone for a long time. She doesn’t contribute much to the conversation. When she finally puts the phone down, she says, “That was William, he is off to New York tomorrow. Mortimer has asked for a meeting, he thinks Globish is going to sweeten their offer.”

“That’s not great, is it?”

“No it isn’t. I think we can continue to hold them off for a while but to be honest the mood among our shareholders at the moment is to take the money and run, unless we can come up with something really substantial. So, what do you have for me?”

“Not a lot I’m afraid,” he says. “Nothing that’s going to advance even 20K in hardcover.”

She says nothing, so he continues. He has decided to keep the incident involving Pam and Ron from her until Maggie and he can sort it out, so he only mentions the books they are having trouble with at the moment.

“There’s some bad news,” he says, “the Thames book is not up to scratch.”

“Fixable?”

“Probably. If we pad it with illustrations and call in a book doctor, we might squeak by.”

“We’re positioning it as a gift book, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do what you have to do, and let’s hope the reviewers won’t notice it’s a dog.”

“And Boris is being difficult.”

“What about?”

“A talking chicken – and I had a really tough meeting with his agent, who said if we didn’t play ball he would take the book elsewhere.”

“Christ! Sometimes I feel that I was happiest in the early days of Litmus when I did nothing but publish dead authors!” She says this without any heat and then adds, “Want to go out and get a coffee?”

“Sure.”

This is unusual and therefore alarming; Gabrijela is not known to rise from behind her desk except when there is a real emergency.

When they are seated with their coffees at the Costa Coffee outlet near the office, a latte for him and an espresso for her, she says nothing for a while, just looks pensively at the ebb and flow of people and traffic on the street outside. Then she says softly, “I remember thinking when I hired you that the reason most of us get into this business is almost exactly the same – a love of books, a chance to spend our lives in their midst, the fate of all bookish misfits whether we are from Belgrade or Bombay.”

He isn’t sure what to say to this. As the Americans might say, Gabrijela does not do warm and fuzzy, and she does not do nostalgia. His lack of a response does not seem to matter, for she continues in the same quiet voice that seems to be directed mainly at herself.

“When we arrived in the UK, my parents like all refugees were determined that I acquire an education that would get me the best jobs – when I landed the scholarship to the LSE, they were overjoyed but they didn’t know their daughter had already contracted a fatal disease –”

My God, he thinks, is she dying, is that why she’s being so contemplative?

“Do you know the Czech writer Kundera?”

“Yes, I was just thinking about him the other day. I read
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
when I was in college and was blown away by it.” He wonders whether to mention that it informed his disastrous attempts to hook up with girls for more years than it should have and decides not to.

“Umm … I remember reading an interview with him where he said the reason he said he was so taken with the novel form was because it concerned itself with existence not reality. It didn’t examine what had already occurred – that was for historians and their like – what the novel was about was ‘the realm of human possibilities.’ He wanted, Kundera said, to delve into what a human being could become, he wanted to examine everything that a man was capable of. That is why he wrote novels, he wanted to be an explorer of existence, nothing less, and that was why I realized I wanted to read them. As I have never wanted to write,
I enjoy reading and thinking about what I have read too much, I realized that nothing would please me more than to spend the rest of my life working with books. Poor mama and papa, they were disappointed, not that they should have been because it was papa who turned me on to Ivo Andric, and all the other great writers of the region …”

She takes a sip of her espresso. “I loved Litmus when it was really small, and everything was a struggle. But I thrilled to the fact that I was publishing some of the world’s most extraordinary writers – though it was sad that I couldn’t do more with them. At the time people here would only read European writers in translation if they had won the Nobel or were ‘adopted’ by a big name English or American writer. That is why when I had the chance to pump more funds into Litmus I didn’t hesitate. My writers needed it, I needed it to be honest. William taught briefly at the LSE when I was a student, then went off and became a successful banker. When he retired and showed an interest in investing in Litmus, I grabbed the opportunity.

“He was patient as we built the company, then you found Seppi, and we made tons of money for him and the other investors, so all was well. But as I’ve told you, I can’t hold onto him much longer. If I was any younger, I might have said to hell with him, I’ll go and find the money elsewhere, but things are what they are. Morty is hell-bent on expanding his presence in the UK, and as there is very little left to buy he has turned his beady eye on us.”

“I’m sorry, you know, I’ve been racking my brain –”

“I have no doubt you have, and I’ve made a few calls
myself so I am aware that there is nothing out there. But, you know, when I worked for one of the big firms, my boss, a brilliant man, once said to me that even when it seems as if there is nothing you can do, you have to do something, you can’t just stand still, you have to make something happen.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“I was reading the other day about the standoff between the executors of Stieg Larsson’s estate and his partner, who claims to have an unpublished manuscript on a laptop. I know we talked about the Seppi estate at the board meeting but I was wondering if that was something you should follow up.”

“It was one of the first things I did. I e-mailed his translator. Nothing –”

“But if she and the family didn’t get on she might have something hidden away that she doesn’t want to talk about.”

“I don’t know. Also, we aren’t exactly her favourite publishers.”

She dismisses his objection with an elegant wave of her hand. “Look, it’s worth a shot. If we spread some money around, gain the confidence of the translator, there’s no telling what we might find. I don’t want this done on the phone, I want you to get on a plane to Toronto ASAP.”

“Are you sure?”

“Never been surer. We have to do something fast, and if Seppi doesn’t work out, I’ll have to go to my backup plan, which I don’t want to share with you just yet.”

They rise to go, he hasn’t finished his latte, but he has worked with Gabrijela long enough to know when a
meeting is over. As they head out the door she says, “Oh, and tell Lea to route your ticket through Delhi, I don’t want the people there to feel as though they are being neglected. Ten years from now, they will be Litmus’s fortune.”

The day before he is due to leave for India, he walks down to the river late in the evening. There are many things he loves about his city: its great cathedrals and parks; its cobblestoned streets lined by buildings perpetually cobwebbed in scaffolding; the hustle of the Portobello Road market; Notting Hill before the movie destroyed the particularity of one of his favourite neighbourhoods; scruffy pubs (now alarmingly smoke free, although he has never smoked) ironed into his memory by unforgettable evenings he has spent in them with friends or lovers. But in the years that he has lived here his likes and dislikes have moved around; the only thing that has remained constant is his fascination with the great waterway. It is one of the reasons he had been looking forward to publishing Zogoiby’s book, and partly why he is disappointed it hasn’t turned out well.