I was just going to post it to Betsy, anonymously (I’m tempted to deprive Gunn of credit for this bit of graft; I’m tempted – oh I know I’m silly – to keep this as something I’ve done for me, you know?) but then it occurred to me (it’s becoming annoying, this business of things occurring to me, this habit I’ve developed in Gunn’s skin of not knowing everything ahead of time) that there was a good chance it would end up on a slush pile, or in the secretary’s Deal With it Later file, or worse, ignominiously in the bin. So I went to see her. Gunn generally rings and makes an appointment. I didn’t.
This weather . . . Humans, how do you avoid spending all your time just experiencing the weather? I walked from Clerkenwell to Covent Garden in very mild, very slightly moving air that touched the exposed bits of me like the petals of cool roses. The sky (even I’ve got to take my hat off to Himself when it comes to summer skies) was high and beaten thin, the low sun softly exploding pale oranges and watery greens into the upper margins of lilac and blue. The whole thing had a distant, bleached quality to it that made me in Gunn’s body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the way he himself used to feel as a child, when his mother would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn, nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote, would begin to feel dizzy and afraid. (I’ve resigned myself, as you can see, to bits of Gunn’s life intruding. Manifestly, the longer I’m here the more susceptible I am. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?)
The good old world smelled good and old and worldly: fruity drains, diesel, caramelized nuts, fried onions, heatrotted litter, tyres, minty and decidedly unminty breath. A suddenly opened pub door let a scent-bubble of beerflavoured carpet and fagsmoke out into the fresh air. I inhaled (burped booze and bar snacks in there, too) as I passed through, smiling. Women had touched themselves up – cosmetically, thank you – and their features glowed and gleamed: mouths like scimitars in claret, plum, sienna, mimosa, pearl, burgundy and puce, smokily shadowed eyes with diamond hints and sapphire glints, flecks of emerald and fragments of jade. Easy there, Luce, easy. This is what they see every day. Doesn’t mean anything to them. I know. I can’t help it. Like your man Rumi, I find myself ‘drenched in being here, rambling drunk . . .’ You don’t know what it is to me, this leisure (no priest in the taxi, no rabbi on the stairs), Gunn’s sensory quintet working overtime. One after another: the wind’s sudden swerve; someone’s cinnamonish aftershave; the flooded gutter’s ribbon of sky; teen bodyheat on a rammed Tube; marmalade breath and perfumed wrists. Wears man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell, as dear old Hopkins lamented. You don’t find me lamenting it, do you? Eh? I say, Missus, you don’t find me lamenting it.
It used to give Gunn tremendous pleasure to visit Betsy, in her Covent Garden office. It was the sort of office he’d always imagined a literary agent would have: gargantuan oak desk, wafer-thin Persian rug in sky-blue and gold, fat oxblood leather couch, books everywhere – simply everywhere – and, of course, manuscripts. Betsy, who, at fifty-six has a well-lined face and sunken cheeks, chain-smoked Dunhills and had shorthand or private language conversations on the phone that always made Gunn feel like part of the select world of Literature, even though he hadn’t a clue what she was on about. (It was of course the select world of Publishing, but Gunn was a hopeless romantic.) Over the years our Betsy’s perfected a very slightly sexually flirtatious persona for her young male writers, one that’s based on her knowing that she’s not physically attractive but that she is socially and professionally powerful. Her eyes are a pellucid blue, and are occasionally to be observed lingering a fraction longer than necessary on the lineaments of her ‘boys’. (She doesn’t have young women writers because she doesn’t like young women.) She’s had three long lunches with Gunn at the end of which he’s had the feeling – the odd double entendre, nothing disgusting – she might be about to offer him money to fuck her – and he can’t say the thought doesn’t stimulate him. He imagines broad, deflated breasts with wine gum nipples, old-woman flesh in the armpits, an arsehole with a history . . . Since becoming ‘a writer’ Gunn believes such warped or distended liaisons are within his scope (he’s going to love Harriet), are part of his duty, in fact, along with bowling around the West End drunk at four in the morning and wearing overcoats that reek of Oxfam.
Then, God help him, A Grace of Storms.
‘I think you’re making it awfully hard for yourself with a book this long,’ she said to him, at their last protracted but emphatically unerotic lunch after she’d read the monstrous tome.
‘Yeah,’ Gunn said, ‘but when a book’s good you want it to go on forever, don’t you?’
This left Betsy in such an appalling position that she surreptitiously dug her belt buckle’s prong into her palm to distract herself. She knew exactly the sort of reviews Gunn thought the book would get. She knew exactly (light another Dunhill) the sort of reviews the book would get.
‘Have you spoken to Sylvia?’ Gunn asked. Sylvia Brawne, the editor of Gunn’s last novel. ‘Have you told her anything about it?’
Weary Betsy blew a Gandalfian smoke-ring. How much she wanted to say: ‘Declan, you’re a good writer who does what he does well – but you’re not Anthony Burgess or Lawrence Durrell. You’ve got a nice line in understated poetic observation but virtually no intellectual rigour. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew and as a result this manuscript is a titanic failure.’
Instead, she said: ‘We’ll go to Sylvia first and then see.’
They did see. A Grace of Storms was turned down. By everyone.
The inner sanctum of Betsy’s office is antechambered by a smaller room with a varnished wooden floor, dark blue walls and one very new-looking Ikea desk, behind which sits Betsy’s small and moody assistant, Elspeth.
‘She’s with somebody,’ Elspeth said to me. ‘Did you have an appointment?’
I ignored her and strode across to the door. Unheard of, to breach the adytum unmediated or unannounced. Elspeth’s bottom jaw went rapidly through a sequence of little adjustments. Then she pushed the wheelie chair away from her desk and swivelled on it to face me. ‘She’s with someone, Declan,’ she repeated.