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I’d taken my precious typescript personally to a small but well-known publisher (looking up the address in the phone book) and had handed it to a pretty girl there who said she would put it in the slush pile and get round to it in due course.

The slush pile, she explained, showing dimples, was what they called the heap of unsolicited manuscripts that dropped through their letter-box day by day. She would read my book while she commuted. I could return for her opinion in three weeks.

Three weeks later, the dimples still in place, she told me my book wasn’t really ‘their sort of thing’, which was mainly ‘serious literature’, it seemed. She suggested I should take it to an agent, who would know where to place it. She gave me a list of names and addresses.

‘Try one of those,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed the book very much. Good luck with it.’

I tried Ronnie Curzon for no better reason than I’d known where to find his office, as Kensington High Street lay on my direct walk home. Impulse had led to good and bad all my life, but when I felt it strongly, I usually followed it. Ronnie had been good. Opting for poverty had been so-so. Accepting Tremayne’s offer was the pits.

Chapter 2

As I walked back to Chiswick from Ronnie’s office, I hadn’t the slightest intention of ever meeting Tremayne Vickers again. I forgot him. I thought of the present book I was writing: especially of how to get one character down from a runaway, experimental helium-filled balloon with its air pumps out of order. I had doubts about the balloon. Maybe I’d rethink the whole thing. Maybe I’d scrap what I’d done and start again. The character in the balloon was shitting himself with fear. I thought I knew how he felt. The chief unexpected thing I’d learned from writing fiction was fear of getting it wrong.

The book that had been accepted, which was called Long Way Home, was about survival in general and in particular about the survival, physical and mental, of a bunch of people isolated by a disaster. Hardly an original theme, but I’d followed the basic advice to write about something I knew, and survival was what I knew best.

In the interest of continuing to survive for another week or ten days, I stopped at the supermarket nearest to the friend’s aunt’s house and spent my food allotment on enough provisions for the purpose: bunch of packet soups, loaf of bread, box of spaghetti, box of porridge oats, pint of milk, a cauliflower and some carrots. I would eat the vegetables raw whenever I felt like it, and otherwise enjoy soup with bread in it, soup on spaghetti and porridge with milk. Items like tea, Marmite and salt cropped up occasionally. Crumpets and butter came at scarce intervals when I could no longer resist them. Apart from all that I bought once a month a bottle of vitamin pills to stuff me full of any oddments I might be missing and, dull though it might seem and in spite of frequent hunger, I had stayed in resounding good health all along.

I opened the front door with my latchkey and met the friend’s aunt in the hall.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’

I told her about Ronnie sending my book to America and her thin face filled with genuine pleasure. She was roughly fifty, divorced, a grandmother, sweet, fair-haired, undemanding and boring. I understood that she regarded the rent I paid her (a fifth of what I had had to fork out for my former flat) as more a bribe to get her to let a stranger into her house than as an essential part of her income. In addition, though, she had agreed I could put milk in her fridge, wash my dishes in her sink, shower in her bathroom and use her washer-drier once a week. I wasn’t to make a noise or ask anyone in. We had settled these details amicably. She had installed a coin-in-the-slot electric meter for me, and approved a toaster, a kettle, a tiny table-top cooker and new plugs for a television and a razor.

I’d been introduced to her as ‘Aunty’ and that’s what I called her, and she seemed to regard me as a sort of extension nephew. We had lived for ten months in harmony, our lives adjacent but uninvolved.

‘It’s very cold... are you warm enough up there?’ she asked kindly.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. The electric heater ate money. I almost never switched it on.

‘These old houses... very cold under the roofs.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

She said, ‘Good, dear,’ amiably, and we nodded to each other, and I went upstairs thinking that I’d lived in the Arctic Circle and if I hadn’t been able to deal with a cold London attic I would have been ashamed of myself. I wore silk jersey long-sleeved vests and long Johns under sweaters and jeans under the ski-suit, and I slept warmly in a sleeping bag designed for the North Pole. It was writing that made me cold.

Up in my eyrie I struggled for a couple of hours to resolve the plight of the helium balloon but ended with only a speculation on nerve pathways. Why didn’t terror make one deaf, for instance? How did it always beeline to the bowel? My man in the balloon didn’t know and was too miserable to care. I thought I’d have to invent a range of mountains dead ahead for him to come to grief on. Then he would merely have the problem of descending from an Everest-approximation with only fingers, toes and resolution. Much easier. I knew a tip or two about that, the first being to look for the longest way down because it would be the least steep. Sharp-faced mountains often had sloping backs.

My attic, once the retreat of the youngest of Aunty’s daughters, had a worn pink carpet and cream wallpaper sprigged with pink roses. The resident furniture of bed, chest of drawers, tiny wardrobe, two chairs and a table was overwhelmed by a veritable army of crates, boxes and suitcases containing my collected worldly possessions: clothes, books, household goods and sports equipment, all top quality and in good shape, acquired in carefree bygone affluence. Two pairs of expensive skis stood in their covers in a corner. Wildly extravagant cameras and lenses rested in dark foam beds. I kept in working order a windproof, sandproof, bugproof tent which self-erected in seconds and weighed only three pounds. I checked also climbing gear and a camcorder from time to time. A word processor with a laser printer, which I still used, was wrapped most of the time in sheeting. My helicopter pilot’s licence lay in a drawer, automatically expired now since I hadn’t flown for a year. A life on hold, I thought. A life suspended.

I thought occasionally that I could eat better if I sold something, but I’d never get back what I’d paid for the skis, for instance, and it seemed stupid to cannibalise things that had given me pleasure. They were mostly the tools of my past trade, anyway, and I might need them again. They were my safety net. The travel firm had said they would take me back once I’d got this foolishness out of my system.

If I’d known I was going to do what I was doing I would have planned and saved a lot more in advance, perhaps: but between the final irresistible impulse and its execution there had been only about six weeks. The vague intention had been around a lot longer; for most of my life.

Helium balloon...

The second half of the advance on Long Way Home wasn’t due until publication day, a whole long year ahead. My small weekly allotted parcels of money wouldn’t last that long, and I didn’t see how I could live on much less. My rent-in-advance would run out at the end of June. If, I thought, if I could finish this balloon lark by then and if it were accepted and if they paid the same advance as before, then maybe I’d just manage the full two years. Then if the books fell with a dull thud, I’d give up and go back to the easier rigours of the wild.