Ithaca Page 6

  She left him a year and a half after he was promoted to publisher; he was hardly around anyway, preoccupied as he was with the publication of the fourth Angels book. Besides the fact that they no longer seemed able to have even a conversation without quarrelling, she suspected he was having an affair with one of his writers – he denied it but that just set the seal on her misery.

  Julia looks at the blinking red light on her phone – seven messages, and she is pretty sure that the majority (if not all) are from Zach. He is back from his trip and she thinks with dismay that the barrage of calls means that it hasn’t calmed him in the way she had hoped it would. And Mandy is obviously not helping any. She decides not to listen to the messages tonight, she has an important submission to send out tomorrow by a promising young graduate of the University of East Anglia writing program, and getting the tone of the letter right is a lot more important than listening to Zach’s latest tale of woe.

  The phone rings. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she mutters, glancing at her clock radio, which says it’s two in the morning, considers letting the call go to voice mail, then picks up the phone.

  “Yes, Zach,” she says, accentuating the weariness in her voice, “you do know its two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Sorry, jet lag, and I know you go to sleep late.”

  “Perhaps the fact that you phoned seven times and I didn’t get back to you might mean something to someone less monomaniacal than you. In any case why call me instead of your drama queen?”

  Her less than complimentary reference to Zach’s current lover irritates her because of what it signifies. On the only occasion they had met she had taken a dislike to Mandy, and as she was not the sort of person who was reflexively unpleasant about others, it was clear that this was yet another indication that she still cared about Zach. She doesn’t have to look far for further evidence – almost two years after walking out on him, why hasn’t she filed the divorce papers, why does she take his calls, why is she so intimately involved with his life?

  “I don’t know why you are so nasty to her.”

  “When England passes a law that I am to be nice to the lovely Mandy perhaps I’ll change my mind but until then –”

  “Come on, if you got to know her –”

  “Thank you very much but I’d rather not – in any case, with your constant whining about her I feel I know her better than my own sister.”

  “Julia, maybe we should just get off the subject of Mandy?”

  “Nothing would please me more, but you’re the one who keeps bringing her up –”

  “Not this time I didn’t but fine, I won’t discuss her with you again, all right.”

  “You know I think it was Einstein who said if an experiment ends disastrously it’s pure insanity to keep trying it in the hope of getting a different result.”

  “Well, I married you, didn’t I?”

  “And we both know how that turned out!”

  “Listen, I didn’t call you to fight, I just wanted to talk about Bhutan.”

  “All right then, but let’s talk tomorrow, I’ve got to go now. I have to finish tidying up this submission before I send it out.”

  “I hope we’re seeing it.”

  “But of course, my love,” she says sweetly before hanging up.

  God, that Zach, she thinks, how irritating he is. What on earth has he found in Bhutan? Religion? A new love? She remembers their holiday there when everything was great between them. There must have been arguments, sulks, and that sort of thing but she remembers none of that, just the perfection of long walks through mist-shrouded hills, monks blooming like roses from the windows of fat-bellied dzongs, the exquisite detail of the thangka they couldn’t afford but bought anyway. It hangs on her bedroom wall, and she walks over to it, examines its delicate blue and gold tracery. She must get back to the manuscript she has been working on, but she can’t seem to stop thinking about the man she once loved, and still appears to be involved with. This is ridiculous, she thinks, it’s as though she has never left. They talk every other day, see each other at least once a week, and her desultory efforts at dating have met with no success, because it is clear that she isn’t interested. She goes to the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror. At thirty-nine (five years older than Mandy, she thinks sourly, but better looking, definitely better looking) she knows she still looks good – the burnished fall of brown hair with just the occasional furtive strand of grey, the eyes that Zach had once compared to wild honey, the face unlined except for a faint latticework of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes – and could find a man without any trouble, she has no doubt about that. But until she can excise Zach from her life she knows there is no point in thinking about that option. She laughs when she remembers she quoted Einstein at him (where did that come from?); perhaps she should direct the quote at herself. She brushes and flosses, creeps into bed, switches off the light, and composes herself for sleep.

  When the money started to pour in with the third Angels book, Gabrijela bought a Georgian townhouse on a leafy square in Soho for slightly less than four million pounds and moved the thirty-two people who worked out of the London office there. Litmus’s employees loved their new offices, all five floors of it; the best space in the whole building was the top floor, with its oak panelling and tall windows through which the light streamed in to illuminate the gigantic boardroom table made of Canadian maple, which could comfortably seat twenty. This was where the drama of Litmus’s working day was at its most intense – it was here that all the important decisions whether at the board level or at a production meeting were taken.

  The hot, life-giving star at the centre of the frenetic universe of publishing is the editorial meeting. This is where it all starts, and in whichever part of the world it takes place its format is essentially the same, and the business it transacts is the same: it is in this forum that the books that the company is thinking of buying are first revealed, appraised, discussed, fought over, and bought or turned down.

  Through a process of deduction, experience, and whimsy Zach has decided that Thursday is the best day of the week to hold his editorial meeting. Monday and Tuesday are necessary to get the motor up and running at full rev after the slacking off over the weekend; Wednesday, like the middle son, is just dull and without promise, a pit stop before the highperformance day, Thursday, after which the slow tapering off to the weekend begins. The meeting begins at nine. He is a morning person and is half asleep by three in the afternoon, especially if he has had a glass of wine or two with lunch (an all too rare occurrence these days compared with when he started his career), which is why he schedules all his inessential meetings – with colleagues wishing to whine about this or that, bloviated agents who have sold him nothing of consequence for years, and so on – for the late afternoon.

  Of late, as the company’s fortunes have sunk, and the threat of layoffs and salary freezes looms, the editorial meetings that were the highlight of his week have become filled with tension as his colleagues, terrified of losing their jobs, battle each other grimly, trying to boost themselves at each other’s expense.

  This is his first editorial meeting after his holiday, and he makes it a point to get to the meeting room early, the better to compose his thoughts. He wanders over to a window and looks down on the square. It is a grey London day, a thin drizzle, which has temporarily dispelled the heat of the summer, knitting earth and sky together. It is the sort of weather that would have normally filled him with energy (this astonishes his sun-worshipping native English colleagues but Zach has always loved rain in whatever form, a throwback to his years growing up in one of the rainiest places in India), but this morning the sight leaves no impression on him. Today’s meeting, which is going to have a module on future editorial strategy bolted onto the regular business of the week, is not going to be easy, for either his staff or himself, as at the end of it he will need to have a slate of big books for next year (and, hopefully, a couple they could drop into the current
year to turn it around, something they haven’t had to do in all the years that Seppi was their mainstay) to present to Gabrijela and the directors at the quarterly board meeting next week. He has nothing that makes the cut as of now. He will know whether there is anything big out there when he has done his rounds of the agents, but it is the leanest time of the year and he isn’t getting his hopes up. He hopes his editors’ ideas for books that they can commission or authors they can shake loose from the competition are truly brilliant, although he fears that he might be expecting too much of them – they will not be able to conjure up world-beating books at a moment’s notice. Further souring his mood is the fact that he will have to let go of Fiona, the managing editor, soon after the meeting.

  He still finds firing people the most difficult task he has to perform as a senior executive. To make things more difficult, he shuns the most efficient way to get rid of employees in which all he is required to do is make a short, noncommittal speech to the person concerned, following which Naomi, Litmus’s terrific head of HR, takes over and leads the poor devil through the various stages that Kübler-Ross and other gurus have identified – shock, denial, anger, panic, bargaining, depression, acceptance and then the fade into oblivion. He finds this abhorrent and patronizing. Colleagues, especially long-term colleagues, are not units of inventory or items on the balance sheet to be managed by the impersonal tricks the human resources department has up its sleeve. He has always taken the time and the trouble to do the firing himself – erring on the side of generosity and refusing to come up with negative reasons, usually exaggerated, to diminish the employee, and make it easier to let her go. Naomi certainly, and even Gabrijela, who is renowned for her loyalty to her employees, have found his method difficult to take on occasion. He understands their point of view – that he is needlessly prolonging the process, and there is no evidence that slow, compassionate strangling is better for the employee than the swift bite of the guillotine – but he is not going to change. These people did their bit for him and the company; he will not disrespect them, which appears to be the default position of management. He will do everything he can for them, even if it means he is on edge for days beforehand, and filled with despondency for weeks and months afterwards. To make matters worse, Fiona is his best friend in the office; she was the managing editor when he joined the department as an assistant, and she has applauded and stood by him through every twist and turn of his career at Litmus. She is to be the first victim of the planned cost cuts; Gabrijela and he did everything they could to save her but in the end there was no way out. And if they aren’t able to come up with projects that generate positive cash flow quickly there will be more jobs lost. Litmus is the last of the significant London publishers to start laying off people, but without a Seppi it is not immune to the recession. He has been back in London for just three days and already the calm and certainty of his Bhutanese holiday have been swept into the far recesses of his mind.

  His colleagues know that he likes to start his meetings on time, and just before nine the room fills with a rush. First in is Yanara. He greets her, liking to speak her name out loud, the consonants and vowels rolling off the tongue like castanets. Of Cuban descent she is exquisite – a tall, willowy woman with an exuberant mane of auburn hair. A non-fiction editor of genius, Yanara does repeatedly what none but the best are capable of; she finds books or authors that anticipate a trend or shift in consumer taste, unlike the majority of non-fiction editors who follow trends and are then surprised to find their books have failed. She is able to see a complete book in her mind’s eye soon after she has finished watching a television program, or reading a blog – all the author has to do is connect the dots – so she often gets to books or authors long before they are lassoed by agents. Plus, she does her homework, is good with facts and figures, and can position her books exceptionally well. Her latest success, a deeply insightful study on the significance of the little black dress, which she commissioned after attending a fashion show, swept every major non-fiction award last year, and sold 200,000 copies. A fanatical gamer, Yanara is leading Litmus’s digital publishing efforts, but that is only a small part of what she does at the moment, for she has charge of every major non-fiction area: history, politics, science, popular culture, lifestyle, and everything else in between. Zach does not have the luxury of having an editor for every area of specialization like the biggest houses do, so his six editors are expected to forage far and wide for their books. He is hoping she will come up with something good today.

  Rachel, his main fiction editor, follows her colleague into the room. Petite and blonde, she couldn’t look more different from Yanara but she is just as brilliant. Their approach to publishing is a study in contrast. Where Yanara is passionate and instinctive Rachel is cool and granular. They have been at Litmus for around the same time, four years, and he was responsible for hiring one and promoting the other. They hate each other. Some of the dislike he attributes to their innate competitiveness, as they are both ambitious; but he is also aware that they compete for his attention and he is careful to divide his praise and time evenly between them. This doesn’t always work and verbal scuffles between the two hold up the meetings from time to time.

  Gareth, the sales director, ambles in. Gareth is his rival for Gabrijela’s job (she is still only fifty-four so no one expects her to quit anytime soon, but you never know) so they are wary around each other; this is not helped by the traditional standoff between editorial and sales. In a business as precarious and inexact as publishing, he will try to push for more optimistic sales numbers for any book they are trying to buy and Gareth will push back, attempt to be more conservative, because in the end it is Gareth who will be held responsible if sales do not measure up to projections. As publisher he has the right to veto Gareth’s sales numbers but he uses his power sparingly – too often, and he will run the risk of rendering Gareth ineffectual; too infrequently, and there will be missed opportunities.

  Hard on Gareth’s heels, Maggie makes her entrance. The two bicker like twins. As marketing manager, Maggie likes to weigh in on stuff that Gareth guards ferociously, basic things like how much the company can expect to sell of a new title (despite the fact that no one really knows, including the retail chains who tend to pretty much drive the bus, although everyone likes to pretend that that is not the case, and that publishers have the same clout they had back in the day). Not that it matters, for when it comes to actually acquiring a book other things count, such as how desperately they want it, in which case, no matter what Maggie, Gareth, he or the editor truly believe, all the rules will be flouted, P&Ls fiddled with, market studies ignored, and large sums of money and the Virgin Queen promised to the agent and the author in the hope that Litmus will land the book. If they succeed, there will be celebrations and drinks all around, gift baskets and expensive bottles of champagne will be sent to the author and agent thanking them for giving Litmus the opportunity to publish the best writer since Shakespeare or Marian Keyes or John Grisham or J.K. Rowling (or since the last budding Shakespeare/Keyes/Grisham/Rowling six months ago), depending on the sort of book it is, and all will be well. The trade journals will report the acquisition, the chains and perhaps even the supermarkets will buy a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, and the backslapping will continue. If the book turns out to be a monumental failure, with returns shipped back by the lorry load, it doesn’t really matter because that will be two or three years hence. Nobody will remember the original cost of the acquisition, the unearned advance will be written off, accountants who table postmortem P&Ls will be called party-poopers, the editor will have either been fired or have moved on. All that is left to do is to send the author, who is rubbish, packing: they absolutely will not publish his third book, his agent will stop returning the author’s calls, and life will go on. This cycle can go on forever, or at least until the cumulative weight of all the errors made in years past threatens to spoil the party.

  They are all here now: Patrick, tal
l, thin, with a heavily lined face and a neat goatee, who works with Yanara in the non-fiction area and is good with history; Jane, who assists Rachel with fiction, solid, dependable, as all backup fiction editors should be, their experience and years of careful reading an invaluable asset; Prudence, his kids’ editor, the weakest link in the chain (he could do with a Barry Cunningham) – she will probably be the next casualty in the editorial department should it come to that; and, finally, rounding out the complement of editors, Peter, the paperback editor, who will add the job of managing editor to his responsibilities next week. Thankfully, Fiona has a doctor’s appointment and will not be in until later in the day. Alice, his creative director, rushes in, looking as though she has rolled out of bed. Zoe, Rachel’s assistant, who records the minutes, closes the door, and the meeting gets underway.

  Zach makes a short speech outlining the challenges that lie ahead, and they’re off and running. Yanara, as usual, is the first to speak. She would like to commission a brilliant geek out of Santa Monica who is developing a theory on his blog that the iPhone app is changing the way the brain is wired. Hardly has she finished speaking than Rachel says vehemently that the book won’t work, nobody has any real idea about how long the iPhone and its cousins will maintain their hold on the imagination of the world, and evolutionary theory posits that anything that permanently changes the way we are needs to have been around for a while. Zach knows that Rachel, who is something of a Luddite, has probably never downloaded an app, and he is about to head off Yanara’s furious response when Gareth, who has been pecking away at his laptop, announces that Apple has sold over 1.5 million units of the iPhone in the first six months of 2009. Maggie, who looks hungover, unaccountably begins to tell a long, rambling story about how her collie, with the improbable name of Plasma, turned vegetarian a few weeks ago. He is mystified by her contribution just like everyone else at the meeting, and it temporarily suspends hostilities between Yanara and Rachel.