Текст книги "What a cave up!"

Автор книги: Джонатан Коу

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

SOLUTION: Embryotomy. It was discovered that living piglets could be cut from the womb of their dead mother in aseptic conditions in order to establish what was to become known as a ‘minimal disease herd’.

4. TAIL-BITING AND BOAR-TAINT: Weaned piglets moved into densely stocked pens soon develop aggressive behaviour, of which tail-biting is the most obvious example. ‘Boar-taint’ is the strong, unpalatable taste which is alleged by some butchers (notably the supermarket chains) to be found in meat from male pigs.

SOLUTIONS: Tail-docking and castration. Preferably to be done with a blunt instrument, as the crushing action helps to reduce bleeding.

5. DEFORMITY: Dorothy once conducted a survey of 2,000 of her pigs kept on concrete floors, and found that 86 per cent suffered from lameness or serious damage to their hoof horns.

SOLUTION: None. As she once drily remarked to a journalist from Farmers’ Weekly, ‘I don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture.’

∗

One evening when I was about thirty-seven, I came home to my flat carrying a small plastic bag, half filled with provisions from the local supermarket. I had a pint of milk, some cans of soft drinks, a packet of chocolate biscuits, four Mars bars, a loaf of bread, and one serving of the Brunwin Group’s ‘Heat’n’Eat’ Bangers and Mash, which I put in the oven at once, before transferring my other purchases to the fridge or the food cupboards.

Twenty-five minutes later, when it was time to turn the oven off, I fished the packet out of the waste bin to check that I had followed the instructions correctly: and that was when it happened. It was, I suppose, a sort of epiphany. You have to remember that at this stage I hadn’t spoken to anyone for more than a year: I may have been going mad, but I don’t think so. I didn’t start laughing hysterically, or anything like that. None the less, I experienced what you might call a rare moment of lucidity: a flash of insight, very subtle and fleeting, but enough to produce a lasting change, if not in my life, then at least in my diet from that time onward.

It wasn’t so much the picture on the front, although that in itself might have given me pause for thought. A family of four were shown gathered around the dinner table: the healthy, white-teethed paterfamilias, two ruddy-cheeked children beaming with anticipation, and their young, pretty mother, her face lit by an almost beatific glow as she laid the last helping of Bangers and Mash before her husband, as if this meal, the final, crowning triumph to a day of honest toil and wifely achievement, offered the ultimate confirmation of her own self-worth. Such fantasies are thrust upon us every day, and I’ve become immune to them. But on the back of the packet was a photograph I was not prepared for. It was captioned ‘serving suggestion’. It showed a portion of Bangers and Mash on a plate. The Bangers took up one half of the plate, and the Mash took up the other. The plate was on a table, and there was a knife and a fork on either side. And that was it.

I stared at this photograph for some time, while a nasty suspicion began to creep over me. All at once I had the feeling that someone, somewhere, was enjoying a monstrous joke at my expense. And not just at my expense, but at all our expenses. I suddenly took this photograph to be an insult aimed both at myself and at the world in general. I pulled the plastic tray out of the oven and threw it into the bin. It was the last Brunwin meal I ever bought.

I remember being hungry that night.

∗

On his way back from the Lake District, only ten miles or so from the farm, George stopped his car by the side of the road and stood for a while at a gate, looking out over the moors. He was reasonably sober, and had no hangover (he never got hangovers these days), but still managed to feel weighed down by a curious heaviness, a sense of foreboding. As usual, he was nervous about seeing his wife again; and to make matters worse, they would be entertaining her insufferable cousins Thomas and Henry the next evening, along with a couple of senior managers from Nutrilite, the Brunwin animal-feed supplier. He was supposed to have discussed a provisional menu with the cook, but had forgotten all about it. Dorothy would probably be furious.

He had been away for three days: three wasted days, because he had come to no important decision regarding his marriage, even though – now he came to think of it – that had been the purpose of the trip, originally. He knew, at least, that he would never be able to leave Dorothy and live with the knowledge that she retained control of the farm; and in that case, it seemed there was nothing for it but to carry on as before. There were always the animals, of course. Pathetic though it might seem, he did not feel that he was completely wasting his life as long as he was able to bring some kind of comfort to the creatures who had suffered the worst of his wife’s abuses. He was already looking forward to seeing them again, to revisiting the cowshed and drinking their health from the whisky bottle he kept hidden behind the loose bricks in the wall.

It was late in the afternoon when he arrived home. Dorothy’s car was parked in the yard but he was able to sneak round to the kitchens without being seen. The cook was sitting at a table with her feet up, reading a magazine. She did not give a guilty start and resume working when George appeared: it had long been the case (although he never noticed it) that he had absolutely no authority over his staff.

He asked if everything was in order for the dinner tomorrow night, and she told him that it was all under control, that they would be having veal, and that Dorothy herself had chosen the calf and carried out the slaughter less than an hour ago.

George felt suddenly sick. He ran to the cowshed and kicked open the door.

Herbert was not yet dead. He was hanging by his legs from a beam, and blood was dripping from the thinnest of cuts in his neck into a bucket on the floor, now three quarters full. His eyes were milky, pale and sightless. Otherwise, the cowshed was empty.

Beginning to whimper, George ran back to the farmhouse and found Dorothy in her office, tapping away at a computer keyboard.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Home already?’

When George didn’t answer, she said: ‘I’m sorry about your little friend, darling, but he was really the leanest and best-looking of the bunch. It had to be him.’

She swung around in her chair, looked at him, sighed, and left the room. A minute or two later she came back, carrying a shotgun.

‘For God’s sake,’ she said, handing him the gun. ‘Finish him off if you want to. He won’t taste as good, but who cares? Anything to spare your feelings.’

George took the gun and left. Dorothy went back to her keyboard, and listened out for the shot. In fact there were two, a few seconds apart.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered. ‘He can’t even hit a calf from three feet away.’

She was never able to establish, with absolute certainty, which of her farmworkers fed the story to the News of the World. She ended up sacking a troublesome middle-aged labourer called Harold, but that was very much by way of killing two birds with one stone, because his lungs were giving out from inhaling too much crop spray and he wasn’t much use to her any more. It was unlikely to have been him, on the whole. In any case it was only a small story, tucked away on page nine: a few lurid, joky paragraphs under the headline KINKY FARMER IN CALF-LOVE SUICIDE PACT. Her PR people assured her that no one would take it very seriously, and indeed the whole incident was all but forgotten after a few months.

This would have been in June, 1982.

June 1982

1

The word existed, I knew. I just couldn’t think of it.

… panache … polish … style …

My aim was to catch the 3.35 train, but this review had taken longer than expected, and now I was running late. Clumsily I stuffed five days’ worth of clothes into a holdall, along with a couple of books and my writing pad. I’d been hoping to phone the copy through to the newspaper before I left, but there wasn’t time now. It would have to be done when I got to Sheffield. It was always the same: always those last couple of sentences, the even-handed summation, the ironic parting shot, which took such a disproportionate toll on one’s time and effort.

I scribbled a note to my flatmate, locked all the doors, and then, bag in hand, climbed the wrought-iron stairs which led up to street level. It was a hot, windless summer day, but because I hadn’t stepped out of the flat for more than forty-eight hours – the time it had taken to read the book and formulate my responses to it – the sunlight and the fresh air seemed immediately invigorating. Our basement flat was in a side street not far from the Earl’s Court Road, just a few minutes’ walk from the tube station. It was a lively area, a little overcrowded, a little seedy; its restless bustle and activity could sometimes be overwhelming, but this afternoon it really lifted my spirits. Suddenly I began to feel, for the very first time, that I might be setting out on a great adventure.

Getting from Earl’s Court to St Pancras required a tedious journey of twenty minutes on the Piccadilly Line. As usual I had a book open in my hands, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. Currents of anxiety and anticipation shivered through me. It would be strange to see Joan again: at least, not just to see her (I did that nearly every Christmas, when we both went home to visit our parents) but to spend time with her, to become reacquainted. On the telephone she had sounded friendly, confident, authoritative. The invitation to come and visit had been thrown off easily, almost as an afterthought, and it occurred to me now that she probably saw nothing very significant in it – just another house guest to be fleetingly accommodated within what sounded like a busy working schedule – whereas for me it was a development of enormous import and promise: a chance to rediscover the youthful and optimistic self which I had somehow mislaid during that absurd marriage, and to which Joan was now, in effect, the only surviving witness.

These were my thoughts as I travelled towards King’s Cross; or some of them, anyway. Much of the journey, to be honest, was spent looking at the women in my carriage. Not only had I been divorced for eight years, but I hadn’t made love to a woman for more than nine, and I had in the meantime become an inveterate starer, appraiser, sizer-up of possibilities, my every glance heavy with that furtive intensity which is the hallmark of the truly desperate (and dangerous) male. It quickly became obvious that there were only two serious objects of interest on this occasion. There was one sitting further down my row of seats, next to the doors – small, composed, expensively dressed: the classic, Grace Kelly-style icy blonde. She’d got on at Knightsbridge. And then down at the other end of the carriage was a taller and more ascetic-looking brunette: I’d noticed her on the platform at Earl’s Court, but then, as now, it was hard to make out her features behind the curtain of fine dark hair and the newspaper in which she was clearly absorbed. I looked at the blonde again, a risky, sidelong gaze which – unless I was imagining it – she caught and held for a fragile moment, her eyes responding without encouragement but also without rebuke. At once I launched into a fantasy, my favourite fantasy: the one in which it turned out, miraculously, that she was getting out at the same stop, continuing on to the same station, catching the same train, travelling to the same town – a series of coincidences which would bring us together while usefully absolving me from the need to take events into my own hands. And so the closer we came to King’s Cross, the more I willed her to stay on the train. At every stop I felt the onset of a hollow, tightening dread, and the prospect of falling into conversation with her started to seem more and more desirable, just as her face and figure appeared to take on an extra degree of almost-perfection. Leicester Square. Covent Garden. Holborn. I was sure she was going to get out at Holborn, but no, if anything she seemed to be settling even more comfortably into her seat, her very posture now assuming an air of seductive languor (we were the only passengers left in our half of the carriage and I was getting thoroughly carried away by this stage). Just two more stops. If only … If only … And then we were pulling into King’s Cross, and as I looked at her, unashamedly now, it was suddenly obvious that she had no intention of getting out even here: I was the one who was about to shatter the fantasy, and to make matters worse I stole a final glance, just before the doors opened, and she looked back with a light of lazy inquiry in her eye, unmistakable and transfixing. As I stepped down on to the platform my limbs were leaden; cords of feeling bound me to the train, prohibiting, elastic. It pulled away; I turned, failed to glimpse her; and for the next few minutes, as I made my way to St Pancras, bought my ticket and killed time at the newsagent’s kiosk, there was a deadness in my stomach, the bruised sense of having somehow survived yet another in a sequence of tiny tragedies which threatened endless, daily repetition.

Sitting in a carriage of the Sheffield train, waiting for it to shift into motion, I brooded on this humiliating incident and cursed the ill-luck – if that’s what it was – which had stamped me for ever as a man of imagination rather than action: condemned, like Orpheus, to roam an underworld of fantasies, when my hero Yuri would not have hesitated to plunge boldly towards the stars. A few well-chosen words, that was all it need have taken, and yet I couldn’t even think of them: me, a published writer, for God’s sake. Instead I was stuck here dreaming up scenarios of ever-spiralling ridiculousness: the latest of which involved the object of my attraction suddenly realizing that she had missed her stop, leaping out at Caledonian Road, hailing a taxi and arriving just in time to jump on my train as it pulled away from the platform. Pathetic. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. Something useful, for once. The word: that was what I should be concentrating on, the elusive word … It was vital that I should have that final sentence sorted out before arriving in Sheffield.

… the necessary grace … necessary zest… esprit …

This stratagem proved surprisingly successful. I became so preoccupied that I never heard the guard’s whistle blow; barely noticed the train starting to move; was only dimly aware of the door to my carriage sliding open to admit a breathless, flustered figure who collapsed into a seat just a few rows away from me. It wasn’t until we were speeding through the outskirts of London that I registered her presence, looked up, and recognized her as the dark-haired woman from my tube journey. The inevitable thrill of excitement lasted only a fraction of an instant. It was superseded by something much more powerful: a fantastic emotional shockwave, compounded of delight, confusion and, at first, stubborn disbelief. For how could it possibly be true that she appeared to be reading – no, not her newspaper, but a slim, hardback novel with my photograph on the cover?

∗

It’s every author’s dream, I suppose. And since it happens rarely enough even in the life of the literary celebrity, imagine how much more precious it would seem to the young, unknown writer like myself, hungry for any kind of evidence that his work has impinged on the consciousness of the public. The brief, respectful reviews I’d received in the papers and the literary journals – which I’d learned, in some cases, almost off by heart – paled into insignificance in the face of this sudden hint that the wider world might be hiding something else altogether, something unsuspected, alive and arbitrary: a readership. That was my first feeling. And then, of course, came the realization that I had finally been presented with the longed-for opportunity, the foolproof excuse, the perfect doorway into conversation: for it would surely be impolite not to introduce myself in these circumstances. The only question was how, and when, to make my move.

I was determined to be subtle about it. It wouldn’t do simply to blunder up, sit down opposite her and say something crass like ‘I see you’re reading one of my books’ – or, even worse, ‘I admire a woman with good taste in literature’. Far better to arrange it so that she made the discovery. Well, that shouldn’t be difficult. After a few minutes’ hesitation I got up and moved to a seat just across the central aisle from hers, taking my luggage with me. This in itself was enough to make her look up and watch me with surprise; perhaps even annoyance. I said, ‘Just trying to get out of the sunlight’ – a meaningless remark, given that my new seat was just as much in the sunlight as the old one. She said nothing; just smiled half-heartedly and returned to the book. I could see that she was on about page fifty, roughly a quarter of the way through: only a few pages from what was (or so I had thought when writing it) the most riotously funny scene in the whole novel. I sat back and kept a discreet watch on her from the corner of my eye; taking care, at the same time, to ensure that she had a good view – should she care to glance up – of my profile, seen from much the same angle as had been chosen by the studio photographer whose services I had myself engaged at considerable personal expense. Ten or twelve pages went by, in as many minutes, without producing anything in the way of visible amusement: not even the distant echo of a smile, let alone those helpless spasms of laughter I had fondly imagined the passage provoking in its readers. What on earth was the matter with her? In hardback, my novels sold a pitiful number of copies – five or six hundred, or something – so how had this one managed to fall into the hands of someone so obviously unattuned to its tone and methods? Looking closely at her face for the first time, I noticed the lack of humour in her eyes and the line of her mouth, and the traces of a solemn pucker which had creased her brow into a permanent frown. She read on. I waited another five minutes or more, with growing impatience. I shifted ostentatiously in my seat, even got up twice to take unnecessary items out of my holdall in the luggage rack above me; and finally I was reduced to the expedient of feigning a loud coughing fit, which went on until she looked across at me with wary expectancy, and said:

‘I’m sorry, are you trying to attract my attention?’

‘No, no, not at all,’ I said, conscious of a furious blush starting to inflame my cheek.

‘Would you like a cough sweet?’

‘No, I’m fine. Really.’

She returned to the book without another word, and I sank back into baffled silence, scarcely able to credit how difficult this was proving. The situation had gone beyond embarrassment into the realm of helpless stupidity. My only remaining option was to say: ‘Actually, I was trying to get your attention.’

She looked up and waited for me to explain.

‘It’s just … that book you’re reading.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, don’t you notice anything about the photograph on the back?’

She turned it over. ‘No, I don’t see …’ And then, looking from me to the photograph, from the photograph to me, she broke into an incredulous smile. ‘Well, I’ll be …’ It lit up her whole face, this smile; changed everything at once, so that she was suddenly welcoming and radiant. Then it turned to laughter. ‘And you just sitting there … I mean, this is incredible. I’m a huge fan of yours, you know. I’ve read all your books.’

‘Both of them,’ I corrected.

‘Both of them, absolutely. Well, I mean, I’ve read the first one, and now I’m reading this. And enjoying it hugely.’

‘Do you mind if …?’ I gestured at the seat opposite her.

‘Do I mind? How could I possibly … I mean, this is so extraordinary. It’s – well, it’s every reader’s dream, really, isn’t it?’

‘And every writer’s,’ I said, moving across to her table.

For a while we just smiled at each other, shyly, uncertain how to start.

‘I was watching you, just now,’ I said. ‘You were reading that big scene, weren’t you – at the wedding?’

‘The wedding, yes, absolutely. It’s such a marvellous chapter, too – so moving.’

‘Mm: do you think so? I was really hoping that it would be funny, you see.’

‘Oh, but it is. I mean, it’s, er, moving … and funny. That’s what’s so terribly clever about it.’

‘You didn’t seem to be laughing much, that’s all.’

‘No, I was; I was laughing on the inside, really. I never laugh aloud at books. It’s just a thing with me.’

‘Well, you’ve made my day, anyway.’ That smile again; and a captivating lightness when she tossed back her hair. ‘I’d introduce myself, of course, except that you already know who I am.’

She took the hint. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have told you before. My name’s Alice. Alice Hastings.’

∗

The train was approaching Bedford. Alice and I had been talking for perhaps half an hour; I’d been up to the buffet car and treated her to a sandwich and a cup of coffee; we’d exchanged views on the Falklands War and the merits of various contemporary authors, finding ourselves in agreement in both instances. She had a lovely, rather equine face, a long, graceful neck and her voice was full, fruity, deep. It felt wonderful to be enjoying female company again. The last few years had been so desolate in that respect: that hopeless marriage to Verity, then the decision to go to university in the mid 1970s, where I found, despite my official designation as a ‘mature’ student, that my fellow undergraduates all seemed to have such a gift for slipping in and out of physical relationships that I, by comparison, ended up feeling like a gawky adolescent. Perhaps that’s why the writer’s life had always seemed so attractive: the refuge it offered for the socially backward, the gleaming legitimacy it conferred upon solitude. Patrick had hinted as much when he made that crack about there being no ‘sexual dimension’ to my work; but I pushed that recollection aside. I still burned from that conversation, couldn’t imagine when I would next feel equal to the task of facing him again.

‘So, where are you heading for, anyway?’ Alice asked; and when I told her, ‘Do you have family there?’

‘No, I’m going to see a friend. She’s been living there a few years now. She’s a social worker.’

‘I see. This is – this is a girlfriend, then, is it?’

‘No, no, not at all. Absolutely not. No, Joan and I go … way back. I mean –’ It suddenly occurred to me that there was a quick and easy way of filling her in on the situation. ‘Did you see that feature on me a couple of months ago, in one of the Sunday supplements: “The First Story I Ever Wrote”?’

‘Yes, I did. I adored it, too: that terribly funny spoof you wrote on detective stories when you were twelve or something. You must have been such a precocious little thing.’

‘I was eight,’ I said gravely. ‘And it was meant to be perfectly serious. Anyway, Joan was – well, I suppose my best friend in those days. She lived almost next door, and we used to go and play together on this farm: and that photograph which they used in the magazine, the one of me sitting at a desk and looking very serious and intellectual, that was taken in this cowshed where we had a sort of den. I knew it would be the perfect one for them to use – you know, they’d just have to cut it in half so she wasn’t actually in it – but I lost my copy years and years ago. I phoned up my parents and they had no idea where it was, either, so in the end I phoned Joan on the off chance that she might still have one. Which she did, much to my amazement: seems that she’s hung on to it all this time. And so she sent it down, and – well, it was sort of nice to have made contact again, because we hadn’t really had much to say to each other since … I don’t know, since my rather short-lived marriage, I suppose, and after that we had a few more phone calls and then she asked me if I wanted to come up and stay for a few days and I thought – well, why not? So here I am.’

Alice smiled. ‘Sounds like she’s a bit stuck on you.’

‘Who, Joan? No. We hardly know each other, really. We were just kids.’

‘I don’t know, though: keeping your photograph all those years. And now that you’ve had books published and everything you might seem very glamorous to her.’

‘No, I mean, all this is really just for … you know, old times’ sake.’

Despite all that I was doing to play things down, I could see that the subject of Joan was starting to make Alice uncomfortable. A twinge of incipient jealousy, perhaps? Already? That was how I chose to interpret it, at any rate, in my treacherous exhilaration, and my suspicion was merely confirmed when she glanced at her watch and changed the subject with shameless abruptness.

‘Do you make much money from writing, Michael?’

This might well have been an impertinent question; but if Alice had taken a risk, it was a well-judged one: I would have told her anything by now.

‘Not a lot, no. That’s not why you do it, really.’

‘No, of course not. I only asked because – well, I’m in the publishing business myself, and I know the kind of sums involved. I know it can’t be easy for you.’

‘You work in publishing? Who for?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of them. I’m afraid I work at the most disreputable end of the spectrum. Those two deadly words – I can hardly bring myself to utter them.’ She leaned forward, and her voice sank to a dramatic whisper: ‘Vanity publishing.’

I smiled indulgently. ‘Well, most publishing is vanity publishing, when you think about it. I certainly don’t earn a living wage, and my writing takes up a lot of time which I suppose I could be spending on other sorts of jobs, so you could say that I was paying for the privilege, in a way.’

‘Yes, but we publish the most dreadful kind of rubbish. Terrible novels and boring autobiographies … Stuff that’ll never get within five miles of a halfway decent bookshop.’

‘You’re an editor for these people, are you?’

‘Yes, I have to deal with all these mad authors on the telephone and reassure them that their books are worthwhile, which of course they aren’t. And sometimes I have to find writers, which is slightly more tricky: you know, somebody wants a book written – a history of their family, or something – and we have to find a writer who’ll take it on. That’s what I’m trying to do at the moment, as a matter of fact.’

‘The arrogance of these people, though: to assume their family histories are worth writing about.’

‘Well, they do happen to be quite famous, actually. You’ve heard of the Winshaws, have you?’

‘As in Henry Winshaw, you mean – that maniac who’s never off the television?’

She laughed. ‘That’s right. Well, Henry’s … aunt, I think it is, wants to have a book written about them all. Only she wants it to be done by – you know, a proper writer. Not just any old hack.’

‘God, you’d have to be a glutton for punishment to sign up for that, though, wouldn’t you?’

‘I suppose you would. All the same, they’re absolutely loaded, you know, the lot of them, and it seems she’s willing to pay the most absurd amount of money.’

I stroked my chin thoughtfully, beginning to pick up a hint of where this conversation was heading. ‘You know, it almost sounds … it almost sounds as if you’re trying to sell this idea to me.’

Alice laughed: she seemed truly shocked by this suggestion. ‘Toyou? Goodness, no. I mean, you’re a real writer, you’re famous,I’d never in my wildest dreams expect that –’

‘But you’d never in your wildest dreams have thought you’d meet me on a train, would you?’

‘No, but … Oh, I mean, this is ridiculous, it’s not even worth talking about. You must have so much to do, so many ideas for new novels …’

‘As it happens I don’t have any ideas for new novels at the moment. I was talking to my editor only a few weeks ago and we reached something of an impasse.’

‘But – look, you’re not telling me you’d be seriously interested in this, are you?’

‘Well, you haven’t told me what the deal is yet.’

When she did tell me, I tried to stop my eyes from widening and my jaw from dropping, but it wasn’t easy. I tried to look cool and confident in the few seconds it took to work some things out: how I could afford to move out of the flat in Earl’s Court, for instance, and buy my own place; how I would be able to live quite comfortably off the sort of sum she was talking about for several years. But there was something else I needed to know, something even more important, before I let myself be taken any further down this dangerous path.

‘And this book,’ I said: ‘this is your project, is it? Your baby.’

‘Oh yes, very much so. We’d … well, I imagine we’d be working together on it.’

The guard’s voice came over the speaker system, announcing that the train was about to arrive in Kettering. Alice stood up.

‘Well look, this is where I have to get off. It’s been really nice meeting you, and … Listen, you don’t have to be polite. You wouldn’t really be interested in taking this on, would you?’

‘It’s not out of the question, actually. Not by any means.’

She started laughing again. ‘I can’t believe this is really happening. Honestly, I can’t. Look, I’ve got a card in here somewhere …’ She fumbled inside her handbag. ‘Take this, and give me a call when you’ve had time to think about it a bit.’

I took the card and glanced at it. The name of the firm, ‘The Peacock Press’, stood out in red lettering, and beneath it came the legend, ‘Hortensia Tonks, Senior Editor’.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked, pointing at the name.

‘Oh, that’s … my boss, I suppose. They haven’t given me my own card, yet: I’m a relative newcomer. But who knows,’ and here – I can remember this clearly – she touched me lightly on the shoulder, ‘you could well turn out to be my passport to promotion. Just wait till I tell them that I’ve got Michael Owen interested in doing the Winshaw book. Just wait.’ She crossed out the unfamiliar name and wrote her own, in large, angular handwriting. Then she was taking my hand and pressing it in a formal farewell: ‘Well. Bye for now.’