Summer at Shell Cottage (25 page)

Beside her, she felt him freeze.
‘I—’ he began, but then her temper snapped.

‘Don’t bother telling me any more lies,’ she said, getting up and away from him.
She was positively crackling with rage.
‘I’ve had it with lies.
Do you or do you
not have a publishing deal?
Do you or do you not have a literary agent, an editor, an American publisher, Uncle bloody Tom Cobley and all the rest of them?’
Her voice had risen to a shout but
she no longer cared.
Let the Tarrants all hear.
Let them know what a snake their precious Robert was!
‘You don’t, do you?’
she said contemptuously.
‘The whole thing’s
been a bloody fantasy from start to finish.
For fuck’s sake, Robert!’

He still wasn’t looking at her, guilt written all over him.
Not even bothering to think up an excuse this time
, she thought angrily.
Well, that was a first.
Not so creative
now, eh, Robert?
Not so proud of yourself now!

‘No,’ he mumbled eventually.
He actually looked as if he might puke right there on the faded oatmeal carpet.
‘I don’t have those things.
But – Harriet!
Wait!’

Oh, no.
Was he for real?
Harriet was not about to wait and listen to any more bullshit.
He clearly thought she was the dumbest halfwit alive for believing him in the first place.
‘I’m not interested,’ she snarled, voice shaking.
‘I don’t want to hear another word.
I can’t even look at you right now.’

Rigid with anger, she marched out of the room and straight through the house, crashing the front door behind her.
Fuck you, Robert
, she thought furiously.
Fuck you and your big fat
lies.
He’d spun this whole web of deceit, and he’d let her believe it for weeks, for months.
When all along, there was no glittering fairy tale of success, there was no contract or
glory.
Shit, Robert.
What were you playing at?
Why did you do this?
And how the hell did you ever think it would work?
There she’d been a few weeks ago, toying with the idea of
giving up her job, becoming a lady of leisure supported by him!
Thank God she hadn’t!

She jumped into the car and began speeding away from Shell Cottage, the first sobs gulping out.
First Simon and his lies, then Robert and his.
Was there something about her that attracted these
lying bastard husbands?
Did she have the word ‘Mug’ tattooed on her forehead or something?
How could she have fallen for it all over again?

Everyone had seemed so delighted when Robert announced that he was quitting the courier job in order to write his first novel.
It was almost as if they’d been waiting
this whole time for him to come to his senses and jolly well get on with it already.

Alec had clapped him on the back, Olivia’s eyes had become soft with pride and even Freya had grinned and said, ‘Watch out, Dad, you’ve got competition.’
Yeah, right.

For someone who’d always been his number one cheerleader, Harriet hadn’t been
quite
so enthusiastic when Robert told her what he was planning, instead fretting about their
finances and how they would manage without his regular salary.
‘I know you’ll write an amazing book, but I just don’t earn enough money for all three of us,’ she’d
said anxiously.
‘Maybe you could go part-time with the courier firm for now, so that you’re still bringing something in?’

Unbeknown to his wife, though, Robert had already handed in his notice following a row with his bell-end boss, Keith.
There was no way he was going grovelling back there, asking for a part-time
job.
He’d been cut up in the bus lanes by enough aggressive London drivers to last a lifetime; in the last week alone, two of his mates had been knocked down on deliveries.
One had a broken
collarbone, the other a broken wrist and concussion.
It was a dangerous job unless you had the recklessness and quick wits of youth, and Robert felt he’d been living on borrowed time for the
last year or so.
He was an accident waiting to happen and he and Fate both knew it.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told Harriet, assuring her he would cash in a trust fund that should keep them afloat for the year.
‘And if I don’t sell the book, I’ll get
some other kind of work,’ he promised.
‘But I have to try, Harriet.
I have to give it a go.’

So off he went, flexing his fingers like a boxer before a fight, and typed
Chapter One
on the blank page.
Characters bloomed in his mind.
Plot twists and turns came to him when he least
expected it.
He introduced a clever science-fiction element, and a heart-stopping heist scene.
His word count grew steadily, day after day after day.
Thanks to his double-line spacing and a
judicious choice of large font, he’d reached one hundred pages within the first month.

He wrote more.
He changed his mind about the science-fiction element.
He added a comedy romance sub-plot.
He killed some of the characters when he couldn’t decide what to do with them.
He
made the beginning funnier.
Then he made it darker.
Then he deleted the entire first chapter and decided the comedy romance wasn’t quite so comic after all.
Maybe black humour and sarcasm
were more his style?

In the meantime, he began sending out sample chapters and a letter of introduction to various agents and publishers.
He deliberated whether or not to mention his father but eventually vetoed the
idea.
He didn’t want to ride on anyone else’s coat-tails.
He wanted his talent to shine out from the submissions pile, for him to be admired for his writing, rather than for the
branches on his family tree.
Unfortunately, as the replies began trickling back, he wondered if his lofty principles had been such a good idea after all.

We found the writing muddled
, one editor said.
The plot seemed far-fetched to the point of farce
, said another.
The characters need development.
The style is overblown and,
at times, a little pretentious.
Some editors didn’t even offer a word of feedback, instead sending a proforma thanks-but-no-thanks.

Each brush-off was a kick in the gut, bringing the terror of failure ever closer.
He cursed himself for boasting of his writing plans in the first place.
Why hadn’t he attempted this in
secret, so that nobody else need know of his endless rejections?
Now he had to put up with a steady flow of innocuous, hopeful questions and each time he replied in the negative, he felt himself
dying a little more inside.

So, how’s the great novel progressing?
Pretty well, thanks.
Really enjoying it.
(He wasn’t enjoying it.
He hated it.
Why was he putting himself through this stupid charade
at all?
He was starting to relate to the Jack Nicholson character in
The Shining.
Any day now he’d be taking to the door with a pickaxe, bellowing ‘Heeeeere’s
Robbie!’)

Can I read some of it?
Sure, when it’s finished.
(No way.
Not until he had a cast-iron guarantee of publication, anyway.
He had been forced to let Harriet read a few scenes when
she wore him down with eager requests but there was no chance of his father or anyone else getting a look-in.
Dad would recognize his inadequacy within two sentences even if Harriet
didn’t.)

What’s this masterpiece called, then?
What’s it about?
Oh .
.
.
er .
.
.
I don’t actually have a title just yet.
I guess you’d call it literary fiction with a
twist.
(The twist being that it was shit.)

‘Any dirty bits in this novel, then?’
Harriet purred in his ear one night in bed, and then, when he confessed no, not really, it wasn’t that kind of book, she’d clambered
on top of him and growled that perhaps they could make one up now, together.
No bloke in his right mind could turn down an offer like that.
Of course, he’d duly conjured up a particularly
filthy scenario there and then.
(
See?
You can be creative when you put your mind to it!
he assured himself afterwards when they rolled apart, panting.) It didn’t half make him feel a
bastard, though.

One Sunday back in the spring, Robert, Harriet and Molly were at the Tarrant home in Hampstead for the usual roast chicken and trimmings when Alec cleared his throat and said, ‘I told my
editor, Eleanor, that you were writing a novel, Robert.
She said she’d be very interested in taking a look when you’re ready.’

If anybody noticed Robert’s silent gulp of panic, they didn’t show it.
He fully expected lightning to strike him down when he politely replied, ‘Thanks Dad, that’s great.
I’ll definitely send it to her, when it’s ready to submit.’
What he didn’t mention was that he’d already had his sample material rejected by Eleanor with the damning
line ‘It just didn’t convince me, I’m afraid’.
Thank goodness Robert had had the foresight to send in the chapters under a pen name.
The last thing he wanted was for Eleanor
to mention it to Alec during one of their working lunches.
Oh dear, I’m afraid I had to reject your son’s work.
Really not up to scratch, sorry.
Looks like the writing gene skipped
a generation!

Whenever he considered the horror of such a scenario, Robert’s skin crawled.
Bad as he felt about lying to his old man, it was preferable to that, at least.
But then he upped the ante when
Harriet came back from work one night a few days later and asked in that still hopeful, bright voice, ‘Any news on the book, then?
How’s it going?’

He was just sick of mumbling that there was no news, not yet, and seeing the light die in her eyes.
Sick to the back teeth and tonsils of it.
And so this time he heard himself say, ‘Well.
Actually, there is a bit of a news.
A publisher rang me up today, wants to meet me to have a chat.’

Harriet had screamed.
She’d actually
screamed
, her hands clasped either side of her face like a joyful version of the Munch painting.
‘No way!’
she cried, eyes
sparkling.
‘Rob!
Oh my God, that’s
amazing
!
So they must really like it, then, this publisher?
They must be interested, surely?’

He could have stopped it right there if he’d had his wits about him, reined himself in so that he’d have room to manoeuvre further down the line.
But he’d had such a depressing
week with all those rejections that he simply couldn’t resist the temptation of indulging himself with fantasy, trying it on for size.
‘Yeah.
He said he loved it,’ he replied
recklessly.
‘Said he’s never read a debut so good.’

Oh man.
Why did he have to over-egg the pudding with lie upon lie?
Because for a few minutes while Harriet kissed him and squealed and told him how proud she was, he almost believed it himself.
That was why.
Because it allowed him to daydream, to imagine what it would feel like if this was actually true.
It felt damn good already, in that suspended moment of pretence.
It felt amazing.

Afterwards there was no going back, though.
He had dug himself a hole and was firmly entrenched.
In recent weeks, he had invented an editor – Richard DuLac (fiercely clever and cutting
edge) – and given himself an agent to boot (the butt-kicking and brilliant yet sadly fictitious Jake Greenaway).
He had conjured up meetings and contracts from thin air, boasted of likely
bestseller status and foreign deals.
At night he lay in bed, agonizing over his deceit and worrying about how on earth he could extricate himself, but each day the lies just kept on flowing,
particularly since his father had died, the one person who might have blown his cover (‘I’ve never heard of Richard DuLac,’ he would have said, terrifyingly.
‘What publisher
did you say he was with?’).

Grief-stricken as Robert was by Alec’s death, there was still a tiny cynical corner of him that had breathed a very small sigh of relief at his father’s untimely demise.
Yes –
relief.
It was a blessing that his dad had never discovered the unpleasant truth: that his son was a liar.
(Did that make him the worst son ever?
Probably.
Just like he was the worst husband
too.)

Like father, like son – liars and deceivers both, he thought grimly in the ringing silence that followed Harriet’s departure.
Bad blood passing down the line from one to the other.
And now look what had happened.
The facade had collapsed.
The deceit beneath was revealed.
He felt like the Wizard of Oz after his unmasking: a fraud, disappointing everyone.

What an idiot he had been.
He’d clung to blind faith this whole time that someone somewhere would still publish his novel and that he could get away with his lies.
But as email after email
came in, all rejecting the novel and him in the same old brief, polite, screw-you format, he had become increasingly desperate.
Time was ticking by, everyone expected to see an actual book with his
name on it within a matter of months.
How was he going to get out of this mess?
He toyed with stories about the publisher going bust, Richard DuLac falling under the number 73 bus, the manuscript
becoming destroyed somehow – anything to put the brakes on the runaway train of his so-called literary success and clamber down from it without losing too much face.

Then he’d learned about self-publishing and thought he’d found his rescue plan: he’d pay for a load of books to be printed so that he could show them to Harriet and his family,
maybe even have some made up in foreign languages in order to continue the pretence of going international .
.
.

But now that Harriet knew the truth, the game was up and she despised him.
The runaway train had crashed straight through their marriage and plunged off a cliff.
It was surely only a matter of
time before everyone else knew, too: Molly Mum, Freya, Victor .
.
.
The thought of their incredulous looks as they learned what a waste of space he really was .
.
.
It was excruciating.
They
wouldn’t understand.
They would stare at him as if he wasn’t right in the head.
What, so there is no book deal?
So it was all a load of bollocks?
You actually made the whole thing
up?

Harriet’s words kept flashing into his mind.
The whole thing’s been a bloody fantasy from start to finish.
For fuck’s sake, Robert!

He pushed his hands through his hair and wondered if he’d ever be able to make this up to her, if there would ever come a day when she could smile at him with love in her eyes again rather
than undiluted contempt.
Right now, it was hard to imagine.
Right now, he felt as if he was at the bottom of a hole, unsure whether he’d ever be able to scramble out of it.
And for what?
Stupid male pride.
The sinking feeling that he hadn’t been quite enough for his wife, his parents; that he hadn’t measured up in the eyes of the watching world.
It was pretty pathetic,
really.