Dick Francis
Longshot
With love to
Jocelyn
Matthew
Bianca
Timothy
William
Our grandchildren
and acknowledgments to
The SAS Survival Handbook
by John Wiseman
and
No Need To Die
by Eddie McGee
Chapter 1
I accepted a commission that had been turned down by four other writers, but I was hungry at the time.
Although starving in a garret had seemed a feasible enough plan a year earlier, the present realities of existence under the frozen eaves of a friend’s aunt’s house in a snowy January were such that without enough income to keep well fed and warm I was a knockover for a risky decision.
My state, of course, was my own fault. I could easily have gone out looking for paid muscular employment. I didn’t have to sit shivering in a ski-suit biting the end of a pencil, hunched over a notebook, unsure of myself, of my ability and of the illuminations crashing about my head.
The spartan discomfort was not, either, a self-pitying morass of abject failure, but more the arctic doldrums between the high elation of the recent acceptance of my first novel for publication and the distant date of its launch into literary orbit. This was the downside after the heady receipt of the first advance payment and its division into past debts, present expenses and six months’ future rent.
Give it two years, I’d thought, kissing farewell to the security of a salary: if I can’t get published in two years I’ll admit that the compulsion to write fiction is fools’ gold and settle for common sense. Tossing away the pay-cheques had been a fairly desperate step, but I’d tried writing before work and after, in trains and at weekends, and had produced only dust. A stretch of no-excuse solitude, I’d thought, would settle things one way or another. Incipient hypothermia wasn’t in any way diminishing the intense happiness of having put my toe into the first crack of the rock face.
I did as it happened know quite a lot about survival in adverse circumstances and the prospect of lean times hadn’t worried me. I’d rather looked forward to them as a test of ingenuity. I just hadn’t realised that sitting and thinking in itself made one cold. I hadn’t known that a busy brain sneakily stole warmth from inactive hands and feet. In every freezing configuration I’d lived through before, I’d been moving.
The letter from Ronnie Curzon came on a particularly cold morning when there was ice like a half-descended curtain over the inside of my friend’s aunt’s attic window. The window, with its high view over the Thames at Chiswick, over the ebb-tide mud and the wind-sailing seagulls, that window, my delight, had done most, I reckoned, to release invention into words. I’d rigged a chair onto a platform so that I could sit there to write with a long view to the tree-chopped horizon over Kew Gardens. I’d never yet managed an even passable sentence when faced with a blank wall.
‘Dear John,’ the letter said.
‘Care to drop into the office? There’s been a suggestion about American rights in your book. You might be interested. I think we might discuss it, anyway.
Yours ever, Ronnie.
Why can’t you have a telephone like everyone else?’
American rights! Incredible words.
The day warmed up miraculously. American rights were things that happened to successful authors, not to people struggling in an unfamiliar landscape, afflicted by self-doubts and insecurities, with a need to be told over and over that the book is OK, it’s OK, don’t worry so much.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ronnie had said heartily, summoning me to his presence after reading the manuscript I’d dumped unheralded on his desk a couple of weeks earlier. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure we can find you a publisher. Leave it to me. Let me see what I can do.’
Ronnie Curzon, authors’ agent, with his salesman’s subtle tongue, had indeed found me a publisher, a house more prestigious than I would have aimed for.
‘They have a large list,’ Ronnie explained kindly. ‘They can afford to take a risk on a few first-timers, though it’s all much harder than it used to be.’ He sighed. ‘The tyrannical bottom line and so on. Still,’ he beamed, ‘they’ve asked you to lunch to get acquainted. Look on the bright side.’
I’d grown used to Ronnie’s fast swings to pessimism and back. He’d told me in the same breath that I’d sell two thousand copies if I was very lucky indeed, and that a certain lady novelist counted her paperbacks in millions.
‘Everything’s possible,’ he said, encouragingly.
‘Including falling flat on one’s face?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry so much.’
On the day of the American rights letter I walked as usual from the friend’s aunt’s house to Ronnie’s office four miles away in Kensington High Street and, as I’d learned a thing or two by that time, I went not precipitously as soon as possible but later in the morning, so as to arrive at noon. Shortly after that hour, I’d discovered, Ronnie tended to offer wine to his visitors and to send out for sandwiches. I hadn’t told him much about my reduced domestic arrangements; he was naturally and spontaneously generous.
I misjudged things to the extent that the door of his own room was firmly shut, where normally it stood open.
‘He’s with another client,’ Daisy said.
Daisy smiled easily, an unusual virtue in a receptionist. Big white teeth in a black face. Wild hair. A neat Oxford accent. Going to night school for Italian classes.
‘I’ll let him know you’re here,’ she said, lifting her telephone, pressing a button and consulting with her boss.
‘He wants you to wait,’ she reported, and I nodded and passed some time with patience on one of the two semi-comfortable chairs arranged for the purpose.
Ronnie’s suite of offices consisted of a large outer room, partly furnished by the desks of Daisy and her sister Alice, who kept the firm’s complicated accounts, and partly by a wall of box-files on shelves and a large central table scattered with published books. Down a passage from the big room lay on one side the doors to three private offices (two housing Ronnie’s associates) and on the other the entrance into a window less store like a library, where from floor to ceiling were ranked copies of all the books that Ronnie and his father before him had nursed to birth.
I spent the time in the outer room looking at a framed corkboard on which were pinned the dust jackets of the crop still in the shops, wondering yet again what my own baby would look like. First-time authors, it seemed, were allowed little input in the design department.
‘Trust the professionals,’ Ronnie had said comfortingly. ‘After all, they know what will sell books.’
I’d thought cynically that sometimes you’d never guess. All I could do, though, was hope.
Ronnie’s door opened and out came his head, his neck and a section of shoulder.
‘John? Come along in.’
I went down to his room which contained his desk, his swivelling armchair, two guest chairs, a cupboard and roughly a thousand books.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ he said.
He was as expansively apologetic as if I’d had a definite appointment and waved me into his office with every appearance of being delighted by my presence. He showed the same manner to everyone. A very successful agent, Ronnie.
He was rounded and enthusiastic. Cuddly was almost the word. Short, with smooth dark hair and soft dry hands, wearing always a business suit over a white shirt and a striped tie. Authors, his presentation seemed to say, could turn up if they pleased in pale blue and red ski-suits and snow-defeating moon-boots, but serious business took place in sober worsted.