“Thank you very much.”
“Fifty? Fifty-five? It’s just that my publisher tells me I particularly appeal to the older reader.”
“Really?” she asked.
“So I was told.”
“I’m surprised.”
“I will fax my publisher immediately and have my image corrected,” he said. “Conductor? Conductor? I want to send a fax. Where is the conductor? They’re never around when you need one. So, how old are you? It’s not that I would ask on my own account, but if I am to prove my point with the publisher...”
“Twenty,” she said.
“Twenty,” he repeated. “And lovely with it. And did your parents give you a name, or do they just call you what mine used to call me. ‘Oy, you. Come here. Clean this mess. No, I don’t believe your brother did it.’ I was fifteen before I realised that my name wasn’t ‘Oy, you.’ ”
“Really?” she asked.
“All those years thinking I was Japanese. Sounds Japanese, doesn’t it? ‘Oy, you.’ People teasing me because I lost the war. I never understood.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” she said.
“Let’s just say that I lead a rich fantasy life. But of course I have to, don’t I?”
“Where do your ideas come from, then?”
“From the very air we breathe. They’re all around us.”
“No, really.”
“Really? Well, as you’re a prize-winning reader, I’ll tell you. They come from paying attention to what I see and what I read and what happens to me. And then I try to think of different ways it might have happened.”
“Different ways?”
“If I do it the same way everybody else does it, then there’s no point, is there? If I write the three little pigs, who cares? But if I write a story called the three little wolves, then I’m on my way. See?”
“I think so,” she said.
“So,” Kessler said. “Do you have a name?”
“Catherine. But people call me Cat.”
“So, Cat, are you married? Do you have children?”
“Give us a chance!” she said.
“I keep forgetting. You’re not one of my typical readers. You’re my one millionth reader.”
“Am I? Really?”
“I hereby pronounce you Clive Kessler’s official one millionth reader. If you accept this official position, you must shake my hand again.”
They shook hands again but this time the man did not release the woman immediately. “You have nice hands,” he said quietly. “But I expect everybody tells you that.” He released her.
She said, “No, they don’t.”
“Well, they should. Because you do. And that’s official, too. But to make your hands official we must shake books on it.” He picked up her book. Instinctively she grabbed it, too. He shook the book up and down. “There,” he said, “we’ve shaken books on it, so it’s settled.”
“You’re weird,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me,” she said.
“I was just a bit lonely. I saw you reading the book. And, well, the rest is history.”
“Lonely?” she said.
“A writer’s life is a lonely one,” he said. “You have to do it by yourself.”
“Oh, I see.”
“And you never meet any of the people you do it for,” he said. “They may buy the book, and eventually the publisher tells you how many you’ve sold. But normally you never meet anybody who ever reads them. The people who, after all, are the people you wrote the book for.”
“I never thought of that,” she said.
“Did you ever meet a writer before?”
“Only in school. They had a poet come in. It was in primary school and most of the kids thought her jokes were pretty naff. I kind of liked her, though.”
“And so you continue to read. And here you are, on the train today, reading one of mine. So, where are you going?”
“To Reading. I’m visiting my dad’s mum.”
“Do you like her?”
“Not much.”
“So, it’s a duty visit?”
“Yeah. I go about every couple of months.”
“You’re a very good granddaughter, Cat.”
She laughed. “Dad gives me a tenner and pays the train fare.”
“And you make an old woman happy.”
“She doesn’t usually know who I am, to tell the truth. But it’s a day out.”
“I’m going to Reading, too,” the man said.
“What for?”
“Research.”
“Oh.”
“For my next book. I’m going to have a look at Reading Gaol.”
“The gaol. What for?”
“Because famous people have been incarcerated there. Oscar Wilde, for instance.”
“Yeah?”
“And Stacy Reach. He’s an American actor. Played Mike Hammer on the tele.”
“What was he in gaol for?”
“Drugs.”
“Oh.”
“He’s out now, though.”
“Who’s Mike Hammer?”
“Mickey Spillane’s psychotic, misogynistic private eye.”
“Oh.”
“Not your thing, private eyes?”
“They’re okay, but I like books with more romance in them better.”
“And sex?”
She smiled. “Don’t mind.”
“Like my books?”
She hesitated.
“You haven’t got to the sexy bits then?” He nodded at the open book on the table between them.
“What sexy bits?” she asked.
“I don’t want to spoil them by telling you,” he said easily. “Surprise, unexpectedness... They make sex so much more exciting, don’t you think?”
She frowned at him across the table.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you by referring to sex,” he said gently. “You said you didn’t mind. I didn’t mean to offend you. All I mean to do is chat.” He raised one of his hands and counted off on his fingers. “One, chat. Two, see Reading Gaol. Three, invite you for a meal after you see your gran. Four, walk around the park. Then, if we get to the thumb, then maybe we can talk about sex before the last train home. Something like that.”
The man spoke lightly, playfully. But the woman’s mood had become hard. He saw it, recognised it, and said, “What’s wrong, Cat?”
She picked the book up. “I’ve read this book before.”
“A real fan. That’s great. Do you want me to sign it?”
She pulled the book to her chest. “There are no sexy bits in it.”
“There aren’t?”
“None.”
“It’s hard to believe that someone can write a book, can spend all the time and energy it takes to convert blank sheets of paper into something interesting, and then not remember what he’s written.”
“Yes. It is hard to believe.”
“It happens, though.”
“So tell me the story of the book.”
“The story?”
“What is it about?”
“You can write a book,” the man said, “and then once you start on another you can’t remember a single thing about the first. Not a single thing.”
The woman was not impressed with this insight about writers. She and the man looked at one another for a number of seconds.
Then the man said, “I am a writer.”
“Congratulations.”
“My name is John Leith. I’m twenty-seven years old. I’ve written three novels, and finally one of them got published last summer. Actually published. That’s quite a big deal these days. It was called Winter Rain. It came out in June. It went back in again in July. I’ve written another novel since then, but the publishers don’t even want to read it. I have always wanted to be a writer, since I was about twelve. I have always wanted to be on a train or a plane and see a beautiful woman reading one of my books. I’ve wanted to know what it would be like to introduce myself and to see what she felt about what she was reading. Because when I write, the way I do it is by writing as if it’s a letter to a woman I love, by writing as if I am making love to her.”