Thieving Fear

'She has the idea, now she needs to make it work. As long as it's nearly the weekend, why don't I tell you more over a drink.'

Perhaps she was too close to the book or its author, and her inability to see how to improve it was why she'd begun to feel shut in. 'I'm free,' she said.

'I'll see you at the elevator in five. Here's a title for you in the meantime. Bad Old Things.'

The long-suffering residents of the Pantaloon Rest Home could hardly be described as villainous, even if maltreatment eventually provoked them to wish their infirmities on their tormentors so passionately that their shared imagination did the rest. Charlotte boxed the stack of pages in the file on which Ellen had painstakingly inked the title and her name, and then she stuffed another typescript into her shoulder bag before tidying her laden desk.

Glen was summoning a lift in the corridor narrowed by lockers. A threesome of their colleagues from the erotica imprint Ram followed him and Charlotte into the windowless grey cage and stood in a corner. 'Beats me,' Fiona was saying to Tasha and Niki, who appeared to share her position. As the doors lumbered shut Charlotte thought for an instant that someone else had slipped between them, but only a shadow could have been so thin. She could think a shadow had dimmed the indirect lighting, which was already meagre enough.

On the ground floor various Cheetah personnel – editors from Koala and Antelope and Little Deers – were spilling out of the other lift. Beyond the lobby New Oxford Street was crowded too. The side street along which Glen turned beneath a curved blue strip of August sky was deserted, but she'd had little chance to relish any spaciousness when he stopped short of Charing Cross Road. 'Here's my favourite,' he said.

Presumably he wasn't addressing the doorman outside Shelves, who inspected her bag and Glen's briefcase before Glen led the way to the cellar. The wine bar earned its name at once, constricting the steep staircase with bookshelves full of dilapidated volumes. At least the bar was relatively roomy, though it smelled of the musty volumes on the shelves that covered practically the whole of the walls up to the bare brick ceiling. Three businessmen with loosened ties were taking peanuts with their white wine at the bar. A balding man whose grey hair was as dishevelled as the rest of him was inspecting the books with such dissatisfaction that Charlotte guessed he was a bookseller. 'Shall we get a bottle of red?' Glen suggested.

'If you'll be drinking more than half.'

'However it works out,' he said and, once they were ensconced at a corner table, gently fended off the share of the price she tried to hand him.

'That's fine, Glen. That's even finer. You have some.' When he moved the bottle of Argentinean Malbec to his own glass Charlotte said 'Why is here your favourite?'

'I like dreaming how it used to be. You could publish anything that took your fancy and if it tanked, nobody would give you too much of a hard time. I think I'd do a better job than some of those guys, mind you. No wonder all their picks are buried down here, books you never heard of by writers nobody remembers, and I'll bet most of them weren't even known while they were alive.'

This seemed to intensify the smell of stale books, and Charlotte couldn't help reflecting that their authors must be even dustier – indeed, little more than the substance. She felt stifled enough to admit 'I've a confession to make.'

'Tell me anything you like.'

'It's just that Ellen Lomax – we're related.'

'I don't know any rule at Cheetah saying people can't be too close.' Glen waited for the unkempt bookseller to shuffle to a further bookshelf and said 'I'd say she's less exceptional than you, whatever she is to you.'

'Cousin,' Charlotte said and made her smile quick.

'It could work to our advantage,' Glen said, holding up his glass until she raised hers. 'You can say whatever she needs to hear.'

'Anything in particular?'

'Hey, no call to get protective. She wants to be published or she wouldn't have sent us the book.' He replenished the glasses, though Charlotte had by no means emptied hers, and said 'You won't be making her do anything we mightn't have to do ourselves.'

'I don't think I follow.'

'That's because officially you aren't hearing this till next week. Now we're part of the Frugo Corporation we need to look at books the way they do.'

'Which is . . .'

'Instead of buying books and then figuring out how to market them we have to turn it round. Unless you're sure how we can market it, don't make an offer.'

'Is that how they buy products for their supermarkets?'

'Same deal, or will be. They want Cheetah to produce books they can sell in every branch. They're going to be expanding into books there too.'

The room felt darkened and shrunken, but perhaps that was her state of mind. She found his comments so dispiriting that the only positive response she could offer was 'My cousin Hugh works for Frugo in Yorkshire.'

'Maybe soon the whole world will be working for them.' Glen added a laugh that seemed resigned to cynicism and said 'Your family for sure.'

'Not my cousin Rory. He'd starve first.' She took a mouthful of wine before asking 'So how do you think we can market Ellen's novel?'

'You tell me.'

'Well, I think it reads as if she knows her subject and cares about it too.'

'No, I mean sell the book to me. I'm a buyer. Thirty seconds or less.'

Charlotte felt boxed in by the dull dim faded volumes and his insistence. She didn't know how many seconds it took her to think of saying 'It's about people getting their own back.'

'That could sell. What kind of people?'

'Old folk who've been treated badly because there's nobody to look out for them, and so they have to discover their own power.'

'I'm just hearing old. I guess we're stuck with that, but why should I want to read about old guys in a home?'

'Because there are a lot of people in that situation?'

'No use going for my better nature. I'm shopping for product, not donating to charity. Don't hand me a collecting box.'

'Because your parents might be like that one day? Yours and everyone's.' His relentlessly expectant look had begun to peeve her. 'You might too,' she said.

'No point in giving me a hard time. We're talking fiction here. Guilt never sold that if it ever sold any kind of book.'

'It's about how you'd like to be when you're old,' Charlotte said in some desperation. 'Not as helpless as you'd be afraid to be. Able to fight back.'

'Me, I just want a quiet retirement on all the money I'll have made with books that sell. And by the way, your time ran out a while back.'

'You're supposed to be enthusiastic about her book,' Charlotte said and downed some wine to douse her anger. 'Your turn.'

'Hey, I'm only trying to show you how we'll have to think. I'm your friend, remember. Every book will need to have a concept we can package. Let's find one here.'

Charlotte was distracted by the bookseller, who had lifted a large book of English landscapes off a shelf only for the yellowed photographs of vanished views to sprawl out of the binding. As the man thrust the handful of images between the dilapidated covers and dumped the infirm volume on the shelf she said 'You start.'

'Try Sorcerous Seniors Strike Back. Magic's always going to sell, people need fantasy even if they know it's bullshit, and there's your revenge theme as well.'

'Don't you think it sounds like a comedy?'

'Sure. It should. That's what it needs to be.'

Charlotte had found Ellen's attempts at humour painfully facetious, by no means an unusual reaction to manuscripts she had to read but in this case uncomfortably personal. 'You think she could bring that off,' she said.