Mr Toppit (26 page)

As for me, I made myself scarce. I had enough problems with it at school, and it was too much to cope with dashed expectations on the faces of strangers. It wasn’t my fault that I had grown up. I couldn’t stay a seven-year-old forever, trapped on the pages of the books. I was still just about recognizable as the
boy in Lila’s drawings and the comparison was not a favorable one. I came to learn the national characteristics of disappointment: the resentfulness of the English, the downright hostility of the French, who looked as if they might ask for their money back, the touching sadness on the gentle faces of the Japanese—such pain that I both was and wasn’t the boy in the books. I was Dorian Gray in reverse: my attic was in every bookshop in the world.

Of the European countries, it was Germany where the sales were largest. Lila herself had supervised the German translation, had worn down Martha, Graham, and the German publishers and nearly driven the hapless translator over the brink into madness. It gave her one more notch of ownership in the books—an unselfconscious
droit de seigneuse
that enabled her to ring the doorbell at almost any time with friends or relations in tow, having given them a tour of the Darkwood during which, she told us, she had cleared up litter, waved her stick, and told anyone she had encountered that they were trespassing. Sometimes she threatened to call the police, and sometimes she actually did call the police, who would wearily turn up at the house only to be harangued by her for their failure to protect us properly.

Once inside the house she waited for someone to make tea for her and her guests while she handed out the
Lebkuchen
she had brought with her. By now, Martha would have excused herself to go and have a rest, Rachel, who had said she was going to put on the kettle, would have just vanished but might or might not reappear later in a state of rambling disarray, and I would be left as the sacrificial lamb. “This is Luke,” Lila would say, as she gave her tinkling laugh and patted her beaded hairnet. “In due course he will show us round the house. He knows all of its secrets.”

• • •

When Laurie had phoned from California some months after Arthur’s death, she had mentioned, in passing, to Rachel that she had had an idea: she thought it might be fun maybe to feature a little bit from the books on her KCIF show. Rachel was never the most reliable reporter, but she recollected with some certainty that Laurie had not mentioned that she had already started to read the books on her hospital show, something we only discovered later.

That summer Martha was not to be relied on for anything rational. We dated it, Rachel and I, to after the bonfire. Walking back from town one day, we could see a great cloud of smoke rising from the garden and in a panic we broke into a run, Rachel faster, more urgent, more prescient than I. Before I came round the side of the house, I could hear Rachel screaming, “What are you doing?
What are you doing?”
and when I got there Rachel was violently trying to stop Martha throwing things on the fire. Fights in real life aren’t choreographed like they are in films. They’re sloppy and fumbling; they’re graceless and unfocused. The people in them look sad and undignified. Rachel and Martha certainly did. Later, but not often, Rachel and I referred glancingly to the incident, but not to the awful details of it or the pained, silent aftermath that lasted for days. Martha never referred to it at all.

Late into that evening, Rachel sat by the smoldering fire, so close to the house that you could still feel its dying heat as you opened the side door, such a mad, dangerous thing for Martha to have done on her own, but maybe that was the point. Her clothes filthy, her face blackened with soot and wet from the water she had put on the fire, Rachel picked over the things
she had retrieved from it, the few things of Arthur’s life, all of which Martha had wanted to destroy. Upstairs we could hear her moving around, her soft footfall on the creaking floorboards. Martha wouldn’t come down again that night.

Later, Rachel showed me some stuff she had rescued, bits and pieces of
Hayseed
stuff, and one thing that didn’t appear to have any
Hayseed
connection: a charred couple of pages that seemed to be the beginning of a short story called “A Trip To Le Touquet” about a woman who wins a ticket in a competition and goes there to meet someone.

Anyway, the point of this is simply that, in other circumstances, we might have discussed Laurie’s request with Martha, but Rachel, without thinking too much about it, had said, “Fine, of course, why not?” We would have mentioned it at some point to Martha, I suppose, but more importantly, one of us must have mentioned it to Lila. What is certain, anyway, is that Lila phoned Graham Carter.

Her call had one purpose: to stop Laurie. She dressed it up in a variety of ways, the principal one being that the integrity of the books would be destroyed if they were read on the radio by an American voice. The complex rhythm of the language would be altered, the purity, the essential Englishness of the books fatally compromised—an objection, of course, that Lila did not have when it came to translating the books into German. Graham, as an editor and publisher, as an English Scholar, would surely understand, she said. “Lila, it’s not
The Canterbury Tales,”
Graham said.

Lila pleaded with him, told him that the family were paralyzed with grief and could not make the right decision, reminded him that this was in his control. She was technically correct: under the original contract that Arthur had signed
with the Carter Press, they essentially acted as his agent and managed all subsidiary rights: film, television, stage, translation, merchandising, and—the rights in question—single voice readings. Without permission, without a fee being negotiated, KCIF would be in breach of copyright. Not that that was really the point: the contract might just have well been written in Urdu, given that the books had sold in negligible numbers in Britain and there was no money to argue over. It was only later that it became relevant, when Martha took the Carter Press to court to dispute the validity of the original contract.

What happened in America might have happened anyway, but Lila’s call to Graham put him into play—but in a different way from how she had intended. In fact, by trying to stop it happening she actually set the ball in motion. Almost as soon as they finished the conversation, Graham phoned Laurie to explain the copyright situation, but in a positive way. He thought it was a great idea to read the books and that there might be some money in it. He discovered that Laurie, in fact, had started her KCIF broadcasts some days before she had spoken to Rachel, and when he talked to Rick Whitcomb, Rick had no option other than to agree to pay a fee. The timing was lucky: if Rick had realized before Laurie began the readings that he would have to pay, he would almost certainly have canned the idea.

Most importantly, Lila’s call alerted Graham to possibilities he had not even considered. As chance would have it, he had planned a trip to the States later that month, partly to see his father, Wally Carter, in Los Angeles, and persuade him to invest further in the business to prevent the Carter Press’s chronic cash-flow problems becoming terminal, and partly for
meetings with publishers in New York to try to sell US rights in his books. His list included some fiction, a series of guides to the great philosophers, a little sociology and psychology, a bit of travel writing, and the five
Hayseed Chronicles
. Under normal circumstances, and indeed on any of his earlier sales trips to New York, it would not have occurred to him to try to sell the US rights in Arthur’s books—not mainstream enough, too English, too niche, without even the attraction of any significant sales in their home territory.

Now, away from Meard Street and the grind of keeping his company on the rails, emboldened by Wally’s agreement to stump up more cash, and enthused by the heat and buzz of New York, he talked about Arthur’s books to the publishers he saw, dropping in the names Lewis and Tolkien, using the word “franchise,” and talking about the Darkwood as the new Middle Earth. It was not a bad pitch, but he had no takers. The “phenomenon”—as Graham ambitiously described it—of Laurie’s readings in Modesto did not carry as much weight as he had hoped.

However, Laurie’s subterranean trickle began to break through the earth. The editor-in-chief at Segal-Klein, the largest and most prestigious of the publishers Graham saw, was called David Sloane, and after Graham’s visit something was left lodged in his brain, nothing to be acted on then and there but a cell that would slowly multiply. He had more connection with Modesto than anyone else Graham saw: his aunt, Bea Brooks, was in a retirement home there. Six months later, when she died, he happened to be in San Francisco on business and drove to Modesto for the funeral. Afterwards, as he always did in any town he passed through, he paid a visit to the local bookstore. There, he noticed the display of Arthur’s
books imported from England and the photograph of Laurie beside it. He had seen her picture before: he remembered reading an article about her success in daytime television. She had been plucked from a local TV station in San Francisco and had moved to Los Angeles to front a chat show that was one of the hits of the season.

We got to know David Sloane well. Whenever he was in England he always took us and Graham out to dinner at this fancy hotel called the Connaught and he would often retell his story, which made Graham squirm: the implication was that David was the real magician in the
Hayseed
saga, the one who knew with unerring certainty which card was the Queen of Hearts.

When David returned from his trip west, he read the books and found, to his surprise, that he was intrigued by them. They resonated in his head, particularly the larger-than-life figure of Mr. Toppit. He assigned a junior editor the task of doing some research on them and it was she who turned up
Hayseed Reflections
.

It was more of a pamphlet than a book, staple-bound, some forty pages long. Although it was nominally published by a local Modesto press, who did maps and guidebooks to the area, Laurie and Borden Masters had essentially paid for it themselves. They’d had a thousand copies printed, most of which sat in a pile in Laurie’s garage. It had come out of the discussions they had had at their Tuesday-evening book group, when Borden, after too much wine, would become expansive and lecture them as if he was still a professor of English.

With no fuss, for almost no money, David secured the US rights to the five books from the Carter Press, then went to work on
Hayseed Reflections
. He flew to Los Angeles to see
Laurie. Although the little book had really been put together by Borden Masters, he needed Laurie on the cover and he needed her behind him—hers was now one of the fastest-growing shows in syndication. He retitled it
Hayseed Karma
by Dr. Borden Masters, PhD, Introduction by Laurie Clow, changed the format to make it pocket-sized, and edited Borden’s text into bite-sized pieces, while retaining the essential thesis, which was that almost everything that happened in
The Hayseed Chronicles
was capable of religious or philosophic interpretation. For example, the death of the crows in
Garden Growing
was the eleventh plague of Egypt, the tasks that Mr. Toppit set Luke were variations on the myth of Sisyphus, and so on. A lot of it, of course, centered round Mr. Toppit, who was taken to symbolize not only the unforgiving God in the Christian faith, the Jewish Yahweh, the Hindu Vishnu, the shaman in Native American culture, various deities in Chinese religion, but also Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, and assorted variations on the plain old Boogeyman.

David Sloane revamped the little book so that it worked on a number of levels. Borden Masters’s rich prose—“Our texts are ones of profound depth and almost infinitely extended meaning; texts that richly repay examination by the most varied and often the most contradictory techniques that modern criticism and theory can provide. These approaches, wide-ranging though they are, could still leave the Hayseed corpus open—quite wrongly—to the charge of ethnocentrism”—could be read as a kind of po-faced academic spoof, but it could also be taken seriously. Interspersed through the book were contributions that David Sloane had coerced from celebrities, who had written about incidents in their lives that appeared to mirror incidents in the books—Bob Woodward’s piece “And out
of the Whitehouse, Mr. President comes” became the best known.

Nearly eighteen months after his death, Segal-Klein published
Hayseed Karma
and Arthur’s first three books. In the week before publication, Laurie interviewed on her show people who had contributed to the book. Segal-Klein’s marketing thrust was towards
Hayseed Karma
, which, David Sloane guessed rightly, would lead people to the books themselves. They became word-of-mouth best sellers, and when the last two were published nine months later,
Hayseed
was already a publishing phenomenon.

And Lila: who knows what would have happened if she had not made that phone call to Graham, if Graham had not been suddenly propelled by an inchoate sense of possibility? Maybe those copies of
Hayseed Reflections
would have stayed in Laurie’s garage getting brown and faded with age in the dry California heat. Maybe Arthur’s books would never have been published in America and would have come to the end of their little life in Britain, the literary equivalent of the fruit fly’s abbreviated existence, to be found occasionally with scuffed covers in Oxfam shops and car-boot sales with “10p” written in pencil on the back.

There was no doubting David Sloane’s publishing savvy. He had a hunch that the books could “cross over” in America—that is, if marketed properly, they could appeal to adults as well as children—and in order to achieve this he made one crucial change to the books: he simply cut out the illustrations. The books, as they were published in America by Segal-Klein, were Lila-less.

Most people can find some way of hiding pain. For Lila it was impossible. She wore it, she breathed it, she reeked of it. And
yet she fought back in her own way. She ordered fifty copies of each of the five books—negotiating with Graham to get a trade discount—and had them delivered to her tiny flat where they sat in piles in the hallway. She already had string, Jiffy Bags, stamps, air-mail stickers, and return labels with her name and address printed, and she methodically sent one copy of the English edition of each book to everyone she knew, and didn’t know, in America: friends, relations, acquaintances, relations of friends, friends of acquaintances with a covering letter explaining that these were the authorized editions of the books and were not to be confused with any inferior versions.