Zelda’s Cut

‘You would sell my book in supermarkets? Like cans of beans?’

Troy’s eyes snapped a warning at her. ‘Miss Vere, Justin and Freeman Press would undertake to place this book where it would sell the most copies. That’s what we all want.’

‘Of course we’d try for the bookshops,’ Charles said feebly. ‘But the great strength of this book, as we see it, is the common touch.’ He turned back to Zelda Vere. ‘You really know how the ordinary woman thinks. It struck a chord with all of us at Justin and Freeman. I gave the manuscript to my secretary and to my wife, and I can tell you, I knew, when those two ordinary women came back to me and said that they saw themselves in this wonderful story, that we had a winner on our hands.’

‘Both very normal and at the same time very bizarre,’ Susan confirmed. ‘That was what attracted me: the bizarre quality of the story. And, more than anything else, fresh; but absolutely central to the genre.’

‘And which genre is that?’ Troy asked.

Susan looked at him as if there could be no doubt. ‘Survivor fiction,’ she said bluntly. ‘This is a survivor fiction novel. We couldn’t make it work any other way. This is Zelda’s own story, fictionalised and told in third person – though we may need to see an editorial amendment there – but this is the real-life story of a woman horrifically abused who survives and revenges herself.’

Isobel felt her hand tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. ‘But if it were real life, if it were true, then Charity would face dozens of criminal charges.’ She stopped herself, realising her snap of irritation was quite unlike Zelda Vere’s slow drawl. ‘I’m sorry. What I meant to say was – it can’t be offered as a true story. Not possibly. Can it? Because Charity kidnaps two children and burns down a house, and bankrupts a business and blackmails a politician, and scars a woman.’

‘I assumed there was a fictional element,’ Susan said briskly. ‘And we’d make that clear. But this is a survivor fiction, isn’t it? There is a core of truth, and that a terrible truth.’

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘No,’ said Isobel.

Troy crossed the room and took her hand and kissed it. Under the warm touch of his lips she felt the warning pinch of his fingers. ‘She’s such an artist she does not know the truth she has told,’ he said firmly. ‘She’s still in denial.’

Five (#ulink_7be66a16-3763-5e8a-9efd-ef8d094f6dc1)

There was no time for Troy and Isobel to speak before the next pair of editors arrived, and then the next. All morning they trooped in, drank a glass of champagne, praised the novel to the skies, promised astounding sales, and all of them, every single one, tried to persuade Isobel to confess that the novel was autobiographical. When Troy closed the front door on the last editor he found Isobel in her bedroom, wig on the stand, precious pink suit discarded on the unmade bed, frantically scrubbing at her red face with tissues.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked tightly.

She turned to him, her eyes blackly encircled with wet mascara. ‘This is impossible,’ she said. ‘We invented her, Zelda Vere, and now they’re all at it. They want her to be a Satanic cult survivor and it’s nonsense. I can’t stand it. I can’t begin to pretend these things are true. And I can’t begin to pretend to be in denial about it either, so don’t try that way out. We’ll have to call it off.’

He was about to snap at her but he held himself back. ‘How much is the swimming pool?’

She paused and turned towards him. ‘Fifty thousand pounds … I don’t know.’

‘And it would help Philip’s condition?’

‘He thinks so.’

Troy nodded. ‘That last editor, from Rootsman, said they would be starting the bidding for the world rights at £200,000. That’s starting the bidding. You could go to half a million.’

Isobel dropped a grubby ball of cotton wool on the dressing-table top and looked at him in silence.

‘I’ll go and buy some sandwiches,’ Troy said. ‘I think we could both of us do with some lunch.’

Isobel appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing her country skirt with the baggy waistband, a cotton shirt, and a sweater draped over her shoulders. Her brown hair was tied back in her usual bun, her face was clean and shiny without even a dab of lipstick. She could have wilfully designed her appearance to remind Troy that she was a middle-aged academic, up from the country for a visit and already longing to be home again.

He put the plate of sandwiches before her and poured her a strong black coffee.

‘The money is fantastic,’ he said after she had eaten.

She nodded.

‘And all the work has been done. All they want is a few editorial changes. I’ll do them if you don’t want to. I can set up the bank account tomorrow, they all understand that the money’s to be paid into a numbered account overseas. They think it’s a tax issue, so that’s all right. Then you collect the money and you’re free to write whatever you want to write.’

Still Isobel said nothing.

‘The rest of your life, you can write exactly what you like. Or take a break,’ he said persuasively. ‘Go for a cruise. Go somewhere warm with Philip. Take a holiday. It’d do you both good. You can invest this and have an income, or you can buy the things you need. And if it goes to a TV mini series, which is very likely, then you’ll be provided for all the rest of your life. You can replace his shares and his savings so he’ll never know you raided them. You can take out insurance so that you know that he’s safe whatever happens to you. You need never work again, unless you want to.’

‘They’ll want a sequel,’ she said flatly.

He shrugged. ‘It’s a one-book contract. They can want all they like. You can decide to write another, or we could hire a ghost writer and I could brief her. Or they can do without. It’s up to you. You’re the star.’

Troy saw the brief gleam of ambition in her eyes before she looked down.

‘You’re an author who has been immensely influential in the literary world,’ he continued. ‘But you will never earn the money you need to keep yourself, let alone to support Philip. This one book can redress that injustice and nobody will ever know. This gives you the money you deserve. And if they do alter the book – why should you care? This was a book to make money, why should you mind what they call it: fantasy, gothic, survivor fiction, who cares? As long as it sells?’

She turned on him then. ‘Because if it’s commercial fiction then it doesn’t matter that it is nonsense,’ she said fiercely. ‘They put a jacket on it which says it is nonsense. It’s read as entertaining nonsense. Once we start saying it is based on fact we are telling lies about the nature of the world itself. We are misleading people. We’re not producing fiction, we’re telling lies. We are doing something morally wrong.’

He nodded, thinking fast. ‘People pretend all the time,’ he argued. ‘In their own lives. They say they are a certain sort of person because it keeps them where they are. You say that you love your husband and that you are a highly moral woman because that keeps you at home when someone with less motivation would have cut and run.’ He heard her gasp but he would not be interrupted. ‘People’s lives are fiction. All autobiographies are fiction. When some supermodel says that what she really wanted to do was to work for charity, when some rich man’s wife writes that she married him for love: it’s fiction. Sportsmen’s autobiographies, ballerinas’ own stories: they tell the truth of their lives as they want it to appear, not what it was really like. We all know it. That’s what we’re selling. Whether the manuscript says “Charity thinks, Charity does” or “I thought, I did” makes no difference.’

Isobel was on to it like a flash. ‘It makes a difference to me! I have to stand by this nonsense and pretend that it is real. I have to say that it was me!’

‘Zelda says: “it was me”, not you. And you were happy to pretend to be her, brought up in France, worked as a secretary, married once, unhappily, parents dead in car crash. Now we pretend as well that she had a sister, that she was entrapped by a cult of Satanists. What difference does it make?’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said slowly. ‘It does make a difference. There is a difference between fiction and telling lies.’

‘It’s fantasy whichever way you look at it,’ he said. He took a breath, forcing himself to stay calm. From this one morning’s work he stood to earn £20,000. The prestige from being known as Zelda Vere’s agent had already had an impact in the way he was treated by publishers. No-one had ever before returned Troy’s calls within the same day. Overnight he had become a major figure in the publishing scene.

‘Please, Isobel, think,’ he said quietly. ‘The auction is tomorrow. I can’t be seen to let people down. I can’t conduct an auction and then withdraw the book. The auction is a binding agreement. If we’re going to cancel then it has to be by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. And then you’ll have lost everything. You’ll be back where you were when we started. You’ll never again earn enough to live on from your writing, Penshurst simply won’t pay more. And worse than that: you’ve just wasted four months on a novel that you won’t publish. I’ll have wasted a small fortune on Zelda’s clothes. You’ve destroyed my confidence in your work.’

She looked quickly at him and he saw her lower lip quiver. ‘You?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lost you?’

Troy was relentless. ‘I asked you in the cab before we went to Harrods if you were sure. I told you then that it was my reputation as Zelda’s agent that was on the line. I bank rolled you. I said we were in it together. If you pull out now it doesn’t just hurt you and Philip, it’s bad for me too.’

She shook her head as if it were too much for her. He thought for a guilty moment that he was bullying her as persistently as her husband must bully her. Philip must do something like this: intellectual argument and then emotional blackmail. This must be his technique to make her responsible for everything. She was so endearingly vulnerable. She could struggle forever with that sharp, trained intelligence, but she could not tolerate the thought of being abandoned, of losing someone’s love.

He saw her shoulders hunch under the burden he had laid on her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry to appear indecisive. I’ll ring you tonight. I’ll think about it as I go home on the train. I’ll decide by six o’clock.’

He nodded. ‘I hope you decide to take the plunge,’ he said. ‘For the swimming pool, for Zelda, for Philip. I hope you decide to take good money for good work. I’d be really disappointed if you failed at this stage.’

Isobel nodded. He noticed that she did not meet his eyes. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

There was an odd atmosphere between them as she came from the spare bedroom with her little overnight bag. They were like lovers parting after some mutually unsatisfactory experience. The cramped hall was filled with the atmosphere of mild blame, of dissatisfaction. At the door, on a sudden impulse, Troy put his hand on her waist and at once she turned her face up to his. He leaned forward and kissed her. Extraordinarily, her mouth was warm and inviting under his. She dropped her bag, her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders and then one cool palm pulled his head down to her lips. He kissed her hard, passionately, his irritation dissolving into a surprised desire. She kissed him back and for a moment he did not see her as the tired middle-aged woman, but with his eyes closed in her kiss he imagined that he was touching the golden, languid, arrogant beauty who had sprawled all the morning on his sofa with a high-heeled pink mule swinging, showing the curve of her instep.

Isobel stepped back and they looked at each other, a little breathless. She would have said something but awkwardly, shyly, he opened the front door, and in that moment’s dislocation she slipped away. The door closed behind her and Troy froze, listening to her sensible shoes clumping down the stone steps to the street but hearing in his mind the light feminine skitter of high heels.

On the other side of the door, Isobel stepped into the road and raised a hand for a taxi. ‘Waterloo,’ she said to the driver, her face blank.

She had her hand clamped over her mouth as if to hold the kiss and the power of the kiss inside her. Unprecedentedly, for a woman who was mostly intellect, and often worry, she thought of nothing, nothing at all. She sat back in the seat and stared unseeingly, as the taxi turned in the street and headed south through the early-afternoon traffic. Still she kept her hand over her mouth, still she felt, under the unconscious grip of her fingers, the heat and the power of his kiss.