I nodded, waiting to see what he was driving at.
‘I wrote you two or three letters subsequently. You never replied.’
‘Well, you know how it is, when you’re … wrapped up in something.’
‘I could have pushed it. I could have chivvied you along. I could have come down on you like a ton of bricks. But I chose not to. I decided to wait in the background, and see what developed. It’s one of the most important parts of my job, you see, being prepared to just wait in the background, and see what develops. There are times when you can tell you need to do something like that, simply by instinct. Especially when you’re dealing with a writer you’ve taken a personal interest in. One that you feel close to.’
He fell silent and gave me what can only have been intended as a meaningful look. Not knowing what it meant, I ignored it and shifted slightly in my chair.
‘I felt very close to you, back then, Michael. I discovered you. I pulled you out of the slush pile. In fact – and correct me if I’m being fanciful here – you would have had grounds, in those days, for looking on me not just as your editor, but as your friend.’
I felt no inclination to correct him on that point, but couldn’t make up my mind whether to nod or shake my head, and so did neither.
‘Michael,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘allow me one favour.’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘Allow me, for one moment, to speak as your friend, and not as your editor.’
I shrugged. ‘Feel free.’
‘OK, then. Speaking as your friend, and not as your editor – and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way – may I just say – in a spirit of constructive criticism, and personal interest – that you look fucking terrible.’
I stared back at him.
‘Michael, you look as though you’ve aged about twenty years.’
I struggled for words. ‘What … Are you saying that I look old?’
‘The thing is that you always used to look so young. Back then, you always looked ten years younger than you really were, and now you look ten years older than you really are.’
I thought about this for a moment, and wondered whether to point out that in that case, allowing for the eight years which had gone by in the meantime, I should really have been looking as though I’d aged about thirty years. But instead I just sat there, my mouth opening and shutting like a land-locked fish.
‘So what happened?’ said Patrick. ‘What’s been going on?’
‘Well, I don’t know … I don’t really know where to begin.’ Patrick got up at this point, but I carried on talking. ‘The 1980s weren’t a good time for me, on the whole. I suppose they weren’t for a lot of people.’ He had opened a cupboard, and seemed to be staring at the inside of the door. ‘My father died a few years ago, and that hit me quite hard, and then – well, as you probably know, ever since I split up with Verity, I haven’t had much –’
‘Do I look older?’ Patrick asked suddenly. I realized that he was peering into a mirror.
‘What? No, not really.’
‘I feel it.’ He sat down again, with an exaggerated flop. ‘It suddenly seems all such a long time ago, you showing up in my office, full of youthful promise.’
‘Well, as I was saying, so much has happened since then: first there was my father dying, which was all a bit of a blow, and then –’
‘I hate this job, you know. I really hate what it’s become.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I waited for him to elaborate, but there was just a heavy pause. ‘Anyway, and then, as you know, since Verity and I broke up, I haven’t been all that successful when it comes to –’
‘I mean, it’s just not the same job any more. The whole business has changed out of all recognition. We get all our instructions from America and nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to anything I say at editorial meetings. Nobody gives a tinker’s fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.’ He poured himself another beakerful and took a deep swig, as if it was neat whisky. ‘Now, here – here’ssomething that’ll make you laugh. This’ll really crease you up, this will. I read a new novel the other day, in typescript. Do you want to guess who it was by?’
‘All right, tell me.’
‘A friend of yours. Someone you know a lot about.’
‘I give up.’
‘Hilary Winshaw.’
Once again I found myself at a loss for words.
‘Oh yes, they’re all at it now, you know. It’s not enough to be stinking rich, land yourself one of the most powerful jobs in television and have two million readers paying good money every week to find out about the dry rot in your skirting-board: these people want fucking immortality! They want their names in the British Library catalogue, they want their six presentation copies, they want to be able to slot that handsome hardback volume between the Shakespeare and the Tolstoy on their living-room bookshelf. And they’re going to get it. They’re going to get it because people like me know only too well that even if we decide we’ve found the new Dostoevsky, we’re still not going to sell half as many copies as we would of any old crap written by some bloke who reads the weather on the fucking television!’
His voice rose almost to a shout on the last word. Then he sat back and ran his hands through his hair.
‘So what’s it like then, her book?’ I asked, after he had had time to calm down a bit.
‘Oh, it’s the usual sort of rubbish. Lots of media people being dynamic and ruthless. Sex every forty pages. Cheap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written by a computer. Probably was written by a computer. Empty, hollow, materialistic, meretricious. Enough to make any civilized person heave, really.’ He stared ruefully into space. ‘And the worst of it is they didn’t even accept my bid. Somebody tipped me by ten grand. Bastards. I just know it’s going to be the hit of the spring season.’
There appeared to be no easy way of breaking the ensuing silence. Patrick’s eyes were popped out like a frog’s as he looked straight past me, and he seemed to have completely forgotten that I was in the room.
‘Look,’ I said at last, making a big show of glancing at my watch. ‘I really have to go and keep another appointment quite soon. If you could just give me a few pointers about the stuff I sent you …’
Patrick’s eyes slowly turned in my direction and came into focus. A dreamy, rueful grin spread over his face. I don’t think he had heard me.
‘Then again, maybe none of this matters,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are more important things going on in the world and my little problems don’t count for much at all. Perhaps we’ll be at war soon, anyway.’
‘At war?’
‘Well, it’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it? Britain and France sending more troops to Saudi Arabia. On Sunday we expel all those people from the Iraqi Embassy. And now the Ayatollah’s joining in and calling for a holy war against the United States.’ He shuddered. ‘I’m telling you, the implications of this situation look pretty grim from where I’m sitting.’
‘You mean that as soon as the fighting starts, Israel is going to get involved and before we know it relationships in the Middle East will be even worse. And then if the United Nations breaks up under the strain, the whole Cold War situation is wide open again and we could be looking at the possibility of a limited nuclear war?’
Patrick’s glance expressed pity at my naivety.
‘That’s hardly my point,’ he said. ‘The thing is that if we don’t get a biography of Saddam Hussein into the shops in the next three or four months, we’re going to get crapped on by every publisher in town.’ He looked up at me with a sudden desperate gleam in his eye. ‘Maybe you could do one for us. What do you say? Six weeks’ research, six weeks’ writing. Twenty thousand upfront if we keep all the overseas and serial rights.’
‘Patrick, I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’ I got up, paced the room a couple of times and then looked him square in the face. ‘I can’t believe you’re the same person I had all those discussions with eight years ago. All that stuff about the – permanence of great literature; the need to look beyond the horizons of the merely contemporary. I mean, what’s the business doing to you these days?’