Chapter Four
Alex
‘You can’t be serious about this,’ Alex says, the moment Jess is out of the door, her fading footsteps communicating that she is also out of earshot.
The only plausible explanation is that this is a threat.
A bluff. Either Alex gets his act together, finds the humour that can supposedly be extracted from this serious plotline, or Nathan imposes an ‘editorial consultant’, whatever that is.
And not just any ‘editorial consultant’, but a distractingly pretty one with mesmerising eyes and a worrying penchant for fluffier books – he won’t dignify those books with the word literature.
‘As serious as a plane crash,’ Nathan says, the shadow of a smile playing at his lips.
‘Very funny.’
‘It’s not meant to be funny,’ Nathan says. ‘And to be clear, neither is your book. I’m not expecting you to transform it into a laugh-a-minute romp. Just to raise the odd smile, that’s all. So the reader isn’t relentlessly attacked by grimness.’
‘Relentlessly attacked? You really hated it, didn’t you?’
‘Sorry.’ Nathan offers up a tight-lipped smile. ‘I didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded. The book isn’t grim. At all. It’s got the makings of something great, maybe better than all your other books so far. But it is … well, fairly cheerless.’
Alex refuses to do the undignified thing of going round in circles – a plane crash!
It is cheerless! – like a pampered toddler throwing a tantrum.
If anyone is pampered here, it’s – what’s her name again – Jess.
Who else gets a leg-up in the publishing industry handed to them on a plate like that?
She probably doesn’t know what it’s like to have to battle with anxiety.
To be ready at any moment to be interrupted because one of the many members of your unwieldily large family needs something from you.
Alex has had to navigate all of that. He has had to work hard.
He had to read craft books, study for an MFA, write two novels that went nowhere before he finally got a book deal.
Jess takes a few photos, posts them online, and hey presto, she is now – in, what, her mid-twenties – deemed to be the saviour of his below-par prose?
‘She had a pencil in her hair, Nathan. She was putting her nose in books and smelling them.’ What had seemed charming and whimsical at the bookshop feels like something else now – evidence that she is not serious enough for this kind of project.
‘She’ll probably want everyone on the plane to survive.
Land on a tropical island flowing with milk and honey and live there happily ever after. ’
‘I doubt that.’
Nathan turns away from Alex, then stands and moves towards his bookshelf. He runs his fingers along the spines of a row of books – twenty-nine of them. Pulls out a worryingly orange book, and another with a bright green cover.
‘I want you to go away and read these.’
‘Romance novels?’
‘Yes. Very good ones. They’re warm and witty.’
It’s not an accident that Nathan has used this phrase.
Warm and witty was one of his favourite compliments for Alex’s second novel from a notoriously hard-to-please reviewer at The Times.
He and Nathan had read the review together.
Alex is not the type to dance around a room in glee, but if he had been, that would have been the moment.
Warm and witty, he had repeated, in awe of this victory, this welcome into the literary firmament by one of its staunchest and most intimidating gatekeepers.
He’s deployed an alliteration, Nathan had pointed out. That’s how you know he really means it.
‘Nathan,’ Alex says now – the pain, he hopes, evident in his voice. ‘Please.’
‘These romance novels are surprisingly humorous. They’ve also got emotional depth and they don’t ignore the realities of life. So yes, they’re stories with happy endings. But that’s not all they are.’
Nathan holds out the books in Alex’s direction, nodding at them, a clear instruction for him to take them.
‘Haven’t I suffered enough?’
‘If you have suffered, then some people might say that maybe that’s precisely why you need romance novels.’
‘Some people, like Jess?’
‘Maybe some people like me, too. It would do you good to read something fun. And I don’t just mean that it would do your writing good. I mean you.’
Alex chooses not to interrogate this odd assertion in this particular moment.
He’ll return to it later, in his mind; he knows this already.
But there are more pressing issues at hand right now, in this conversation, than whether or not he should read romance novels to ‘heal his soul’ or ‘open himself up to the possibility of love’ or whatever the claim is that people make – that even sensible, reliable, serious Nathan seems to be making.
He sighs heavily, deliberately, as he takes the books.
‘Look, Alex.’ Nathan twists his wedding ring, clockwise and then anticlockwise.
In other men – men like Alex – a gesture like this might reveal suppressed anxiety or marital trouble.
But Nathan is one of the most confident people Alex knows, and one of the most happily married.
I pray every day for you to have what I have, Nathan had said to him after too many glasses of prosecco at his second book launch, nodding in the direction of his wife, Priya.
For Nathan, playing with a wedding ring is just playing with a wedding ring.
That simplicity, that innocence – they are things Alex deeply admires.
Maybe even envies, if he’s entirely honest.
‘I know it’s hard,’ Nathan says now. ‘You’ve written these brilliant books, and you’ve spoken out about not believing in writer’s block, and now here you are, having taken four years to finish a book because you’ve struggled with writer’s block.
I know you hate asking for help. I know you hate accepting it when it’s being offered to you.
But I also know you wouldn’t want to put anything out into the world that isn’t your best work – isn’t as good as you can possibly make it.
And here I am, offering you a solution. Offering you, potentially, a lucrative book deal for the next novel, if you can get the nuances of this one right. ’
What Nathan is not saying is abundantly clear: their continued partnership is also at stake.
This stings Alex perhaps more than anything else – the idea that he could be dropped not only by his publisher, but by one of his oldest friends.
Partnering with Nathan in his writing career has had nothing but upsides for both of them until now – aside, that is, from the creeping, niggling fear that Alex has, at best, jumped the queue by knowing the right people, that he’s a nepo-writer of sorts.
Now he is seeing other issues: the fear of letting Nathan down, of disappointing him and even, perhaps, being exposed as a fraud to him.
Anyone can write three great books. That’s just dumb luck.
But if you can’t sustain it for the long term, did you ever really know what you were doing? Was Nathan right to take a risk on him?
Besides which, more prosaically, royalties from his last three books can’t keep him fed and watered forever.
There have been translation deals in Italy, Germany, even in the difficult-to-crack literary market that is France; this past year, he received the maximum amount allowed from the British library system on the basis of how many people have borrowed his books.
But all of that, he knows, will eventually slow to a trickle.
He might have to give up skiing trips. He might have to eat out less often, forgo the black daal from Dishoom which he likes to consume no less than monthly.
He might even have to move away from Hampstead, and that can’t be countenanced.
So he sighs, and he says, ‘Fine.’ And then he says, ‘But I can’t be held responsible for my actions.’
There’s that smile again, at the corner of Nathan’s lips. ‘Deal,’ he says, holding out his hand for Alex to shake.
‘Deal,’ he replies, against his better judgment.