The Five Bells and Bladebone (4 page)

Joanna rustled through the mess of papers on top of her desk, found an apple core in the pencil-holder and a satsuma peel doing duty as a bookmark, but couldn’t find her Requirements List. She yanked out the desk drawer, stuffed like a turkey with balled-up, coffee-stained papers, several cigarette butts, a fruit scone hairy with mold, a vial of Valium, and a small screw of jelly babies. Finally, she found the list of publishers’ guidelines she had compiled. Number one was Bennick and Company. She read: 5
hot lips scns, min; 150 pp. TOPS; nude allwed—brsts expsd hfy
. Hfy? What had she meant?
Halfway
, that was it. Breast exposure. Number two on the list was Sabers. The Big Bang scene midway, three-quarters, and last chapter but one. Nudity, to waist. Two hundred pages.

There were five other publishers singing subtle variations of those requirements. She decided to write this one for Bennick because it would save her fifty pages of mind-numbing boredom and because she had a stockpile of love scenes, any of them ripe for transplantation into
London Love
, thereby saving her another possible thirty or forty pages of work.

As she pecked away at the ancient typewriter, she wondered how these people could have the gall to tell you to read at least thirty of their romances before you even put pen to paper. To read even one or two was a torment beyond imagining; she had got halfway through one. That, plus the last chapter, had given her a complete education in writing romances. Simply looking at the cover of the book would have sufficed.

Joanna sighed and typed. Like Trollope, she kept a watch on her desk — in her case, a stopwatch. Her goal was the same as Trollope’s, two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes. If she was short, the slack would have to be taken up in the next quarter-hour and so on. Thus the end of her writing day was often a race to the death. In these sprints she sometimes forgot the names of her hero
and heroine, which didn’t bother her at all, since her characters, except for considerations of age and sex, were interchangeable. If there was one thing Joanna didn’t believe in, it was artistic integrity. Artistic integrity was a luxury for paupers. All she wanted was money.

Occasionally, she stopped. Not to think, but to light a cigarette, which she inhaled and then lay, coal-end out, on the edge of the desk. The edge was notched with a row of cigarette burns, like notches on a rifle for each dead body. Valerie and Matt were wrestling on the bed, Valerie with breasts halfway exposed. She wondered if she dared drag the neckline down just a wee bit farther. No, this was no time to deviate from Bennick’s requirements for the sake of sex. She still had three thousand words to go before the end of the day.

One rule she always hewed to was that revision must be kept to an absolute minimum, generally an exercise in proofreading just to make sure Valerie and Matt kept to their Christian names throughout the book. As for polishing, forget it. Why dress a dog in diamonds?

For the next two hours she tapped away, coming up with the requisite two thousand words and feeling quite pleased with herself. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure what she’d written, having put the plot on automatic pilot while her mind dealt with more pressing concerns.

One of which was that self-appointed guardian of literary taste, Theo Wrenn Browne. She had not set foot inside his shop ever since he had refused to carry her books; that was nasty enough without his also discouraging his customers from reading them. Joanna had been enjoying a considerable reputation in the area. To be one of the first to have “the new Lewes” was a feather in one’s cap. After all, how many villages could boast a top-selling author, never mind the quality of what she wrote. Oh,
she
knew her books were mindless, and probably a number of people to whom she gave presentation copies found them a bit
thin (to say the least), but when money talks, readers keep their mouths shut. Except for Theo Wrenn Browne.

The trouble was that when you owned a bookshop, especially one that dealt not just in new, but in falling-apart, fox-paged first editions, customers tended to believe that you must have taste and discrimination. Joanna knew the reason for all of his carping criticism: when they had still been on speaking terms, he had asked her, casually, to “have a look at” his own novel. Naturally, he hadn’t asked outright that she send it along to her publisher, but that was clearly his intention.

After she was twenty-five pages into it, she wouldn’t have sent it to her publisher on a bet. It was one of those terribly avant-garde antinovels, just the thing Theo Wrenn Browne would be expected to write, with no dialogue and no characters save for the narrator, a paranoid South African guerrilla whose life scrolled before him as he was watching the last race at Doncaster. That was the name of it:
The Last Race
. The title was the only intelligible thing about the book. The story had something to do with apartheid, but what it had to do with it was a mystery. Nor was it ever explained how the South African guerrilla had got to Doncaster. Add to that that the Afrikaner could not speak the Queen’s English and the reader was left to wallow in strange syntactical circles. The theme was the death of Africa and the death of the novel. Joanna had told him his book was abundant proof of at least one of those. Her own publisher, known for its intellectual clout despite its concupiscent sideline (romances with half-bare-breasted heroines published on the sly under another logo), would have dropped
The Last Race
in the dustbin like a dead mouse.

There had been a distinct chill in the air when she had handed Theo Wrenn Browne’s manuscript back to him, saying that she doubted her publisher would be interested in a book about horse-racing. That of course had torn it.
Theo Wrenn Browne had come down from the rarefied air of his intellectual mountain peak for as long as it took to tell her
she
was merely a hack. He had then made the mistake of submitting it himself. According to Mrs. Oilings, who charred for Joanna when she wasn’t leaning on her mop drinking tea, the manuscript had got shot back to Theo Wrenn Browne so fast she wondered who’d had time to lick the flap. So Theo Wrenn Browne had taken to establishing another persona when the Dedicated Artist one had fallen through. He wore seedy tweeds, smoked small black cigarettes, and made Miss Ada Crisp’s life hell. Miss Crisp was the unfortunate who owned a secondhand furniture shop next to his cutely christened bookshop, the Wrenn’s Nest. He was over at Miss Crisp’s whenever business was slack, trying to bully her into selling up so that he could have the premises to expand his own. So far she had withstood this onslaught, but she had become more palsied than ever, twitching down the High Street as if she were plugged into an electrical outlet.

When he wasn’t deviling Miss Crisp, Theo Wrenn Browne was across the High Street, being quite open (especially when there were customers in Trueblood’s shop) in his criticism of the jacked-up prices and the so-called authenticity of a silversmith’s stamp. As if Marshall Trueblood had gone about stamping all of his silver himself. According to Mrs. Oilings, Theo Wrenn Browne had even taken to dipping into books about antiques. Trueblood, however, was made of sterner stuff than Ada Crisp; he’d have to be bludgeoned with one of his own antique coshers before he’d rise to the bait.

When it came down to it, there wasn’t a person in Long Piddleton who had altogether escaped the waspish tongue of Theo Wrenn Browne . . . .

Joanna slammed the door on this counterproductive line of thought; it was only leading to the real reason for her dilemma. She was painfully aware, as she tapped the keys,
that her characters’ wrestling on the bed was small potatoes compared to her own inner writhing.

 • • • 

Theo Wrenn Browne watched the single-knife guillotine descend, make a cut, and then return. He held his handkerchief to his head like a compress, soaking up beads of perspiration. At his bench press in the rear room of the Wrenn’s Nest, Theo Wrenn Browne, with a certain reverence, pulled over his latest acquisition, a volume that he was in the process of rebinding. He had glued up the sections. Now he was pasting the folds of an endpaper. Finishing that, he placed the endpapered book between boards and weighted it down.

The work kept his mind off the previous night, at least for moments at a time. But still he could feel the cold sweat prickle as it ran between his shoulder blades, and he immediately turned to another book and started applying some edge-coloring.

No one would suspect, not even Marshall Trueblood.

Marshall Trueblood was a man he detested. He brushed aside the uncomfortable feeling that his dislike might arise from a hidden spring of totally different emotions. There was no doubt that Trueblood could easily stand him on his ear when it came to knowledge of antiques, but that the man would humiliate him in front of —

Put it straight out of your mind, old boy
, he told himself.

He thought instead of Diane Demorney, who served wonderfully as friend, and as smokescreen, to boot. And adviser. “The trouble with you is, you try to learn too much,” Diane had told him. They’d been having drinks in her living room. “What you ought to do is simply stick with one period, no, not even a whole period, just part of it. Better still, part of the part. Say Victorian salt cellars or something easy. You’d make Marshall look a bit of a fool, wouldn’t you? He has to
sell
the damned stuff — all he knows he’s learned through being in the trade, and you
can’t stop and read great gobs of books if you’re working at the same time.”

It made, he supposed, some sort of Demorney sense. Although Trueblood’s “being in the trade” was precisely the problem: Marshall Trueblood had gone from rags to riches by selling the stuff. It’s impossible (she had said, pouring another of her ten-to-one martini cocktails) to think of Marshall ever wearing rags. The way she’d laughed had unnerved him; one would think the exquisite Diane Demorney saw Marshall Trueblood as another world to conquer.

Holding the cotton wool over the edge of the book, he stared into space and carried on with his mental dismemberment of Marshall Trueblood. He did not see how anyone in Long Piddleton could take the man, and consequently the man’s wares, seriously. Melrose Plant, for example, actually seemed to
like
him. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to intimate that Plant’s sexual persuasion was anything but normal. He clutched at the book, his knuckles whitening.

 • • • 

He unpacked the box and then tore open another. These were current best-sellers, five of each, ten of the one that had won the Booker Prize. There were also two that he’d ordered, not to sell, but for himself to read. Theo pulled out the latest Lewes:
Lisbon Lust
. Odious titles these romances had, and he’d never lower himself to sell Joanna the Mad, an equally odious woman. But he enjoyed reading her; settling down in bed with a cup of tea and a box of chocolates was sheer heaven. Too bad they were warring, or he’d ask her to autograph it. Might be valuable some day, that. As he thought about her refusal to send his own novel to her editor, along with some sort of billet-doux recommending it strongly, he could feel the blood rise to his face. A perfectly wretched person. It was only decent to let your friends have a crack at your editor. His
head started to throb; he rubbed his temples. It was mortifying, having sent the book out himself and having it returned with nothing but a printed rejection slip. They weren’t interested in
art
, these publishers; they only wanted Lewes-trash. He enjoyed reading trash, everyone needed a bit of trash in his life, but that didn’t excuse them for failing to recognize the Real Thing.
The Last Race
would walk away with the Booker if only he could land it on an intelligent editor’s desk. It was experimental, grand. One thing he could say for himself (amongst other things) was that he took chances. Not like so many other writers, who wrote to the same prescription — Joanna the Mad, for one; or that mystery-writing hack Polly Praed, whose books Melrose Plant was always snatching up. No, that wasn’t his way. He didn’t give a pile of beans for money.

On the other hand, he wasn’t averse to making it. He’d been trying to run the Crisp woman out of her distressed-furniture business next door, again, to no avail. But he knew if he kept up this war of nerves, he could break her. Crisp didn’t have the pseudosoigné, laissez-faire attitude Trueblood affected. Tremors would shudder through Crisp’s wiry frame; her hands shook whenever he walked in the door of that dusty, Dickensian shop. But when he walked into Trueblood’s Antiques, the man merely raised one of those painted eyebrows and stuck another of those rainbow-colored cigarettes in his holder. What affectation! Rich affectation, to boot.

He plugged a black cigarillo into an elegant ebony holder and continued musing. Diane Demorney might be on to something. Although her little bits of knowledge reminded him of a shabbily cut quilt, still, what she knew she appeared to know all of. It was quite damned clever, he thought; instead of attempting the Herculean task of boning up on history, one just chose a snippet of it and then cut it to even tinier bits. He’d heard her talk Richard the Third to smithereens and the other person would simply
have to give up, especially when it came to that murder in the Tower. And Diane hadn’t even bothered cracking a history book. She’d simply read
The Daughter of Time
twice over, and it was certainly easier reading a mystery novel than dry-as-dust history. If only someone would write a mystery novel set in a bookshop! No, a bookshop
and
an antiques business, Theo thought. Trueblood, of course, had a speciality — all those floggers of old furniture did, or pretended they did. Trueblood probably really
did
know, he’d have to credit the man with that. He might be whirling through life with all his bright scarves flying like Millamant, but when it came to his business he was serious. Theo thought again, raising his eyes to the mouse-colored ceiling and stroking his throat. Millamant. Now, that was an idea. He could kill two birds with one stone — antiques and the theater — by reading up on William Congreve. No, reading
The Way of the World
several times over, the way Diane had read
The Daughter of Time
. God!
The Way of the World
he had tried to read and couldn’t: the dialogue was so brittle with wit, every line snapped like an icicle, every riposte cut the quick like a knife —