Chapter 2
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.
Douglas Adams
I’m watching the logo on my laptop go slowly round and round when the wall of heat hits me. Given that a horrible sleeting rain that really should be snow is hammering against the window, and that the temporary heater in my office has been cranked up to max for the past few hours with little discernible effect, I know the warmth is coming from within. I reach for the box on my desk and take out a tissue, mopping my now sodden brow, then my neck and finally (with an anxious glance out of the patio doors to be sure nobody is outside, although they shouldn’t be, the mews is absolutely private) underneath my arms.
I throw the damp tissue in the waste-paper bin and lean back in my chair, furious with my body for doing its own thing yet again. Why do women have to put up with so much? First it’s periods, which started for me on my thirteenth birthday and continued relentlessly, regular as clockwork, until my forty-fifth last summer. And now it’s the menopause, a descent into the hell of unexpected sweating, brain fog and irritation levels that are off the chart. At least I hope it’s the menopause that makes me feel one step away from exploding with rage at any given moment. Otherwise I’ll really start worrying. Is there ever a time in a woman’s life when she can just get on with it without having to think of how her body might ambush her? Honestly, it’s a bloody minefield (pun not entirely unintended).
I have an appointment with my local doctor next week and I won’t listen to any faff about natural remedies or lifestyle changes from him. I’ll demand the best possible HRT immediately. I don’t have time to be menopausal.
I catch sight of my reflection in the glass of the patio door and get up from my desk to inspect it more closely. My face is flushed, but despite my rosy cheeks and perspiring brow, I actually look reasonably good. Not just ‘for my age’, even if forty-five is the new thirty-five or whatever. I look good because I take care of myself. I’ve always done a good cleanse, tone and moisturise regime. I exfoliate regularly. I have facials every month. I do a thirty-minute yoga session before work every morning, I eat healthy foods whenever I can, though obviously there has to be a bit of leeway from time to time, and I try hard to only drink alcohol at the weekends, or if absolutely necessary for work. I know people will say there’s no absolutely necessary time, but there is, I assure you.
Anyway, I don’t look my age, and when I’m not doing my impression of someone battling Niagara Falls, I appear perfectly normal and well balanced. I pull my hair up from the nape of my neck, twist it and stick a pencil through it to hold it in a precarious bun. I was once a natural coppery brunette, but the greys started to appear long before the hot flushes, and now the colour is out of a bottle and needs regular touching up.
The hot flush ends as abruptly as it began, and I shiver. With impeccable timing, the boiler packed up this morning, which is why I’m using the hopelessly inefficient heater. The plumber I rang in a panic could barely contain his laughter when I asked if he could come out before the afternoon – he told me it’d be three days at the earliest. I tried alternative plumbers from the Local Heroes app, but there’s nobody available to don a superhero outfit and come out any sooner. It seems that Dublin is a cesspit of broken boilers. If this weather keeps up, I’ll be found, a block of ice, sitting frozen in front of my laptop while the intertwined ABA – Ariel Barrett Agency – logo still turns.
I rub my hands together and pull the heater closer to my desk. Then I look at my watch and subtract four hours. Charles will be having lunch now, stickler for routine that he is. I imagine him sitting on his balcony overlooking the sea, drinking a glass of wine – or maybe even a cocktail – his laptop open in front of him as he eats his chicken sandwich. (He’s a stickler for his food routine too. Although the hotel is famed for the quality of its cuisine, I’m betting he’s asking for chicken sandwiches for lunch and steak for dinner.)
I take out my phone.
Hope it’s going OK
It’s a few minutes before it pings in reply.
Wonderfully well
I’m glad to hear that. Do you want to send anything to me?
No
Because the deadline is close
I know when the ****ing deadline is
I’m trying to help, that’s all
Telling me about the deadline isn’t helping
Sorry. I only meant
I stop as I see that he’s continuing to type. I wait for the rest of his message.
It’s pressure I don’t need. You know I don’t work well under pressure
I’m not pressuring you
You damn well are
I hesitate for a while, then send a message that says I’ll leave him to it. But it’s taken me all my willpower not to actually phone him and tell him that he needs to get his arse into gear, and that his ‘writing retreat’ is hardly a retreat if he hasn’t actually put any words on the page.
I grit my teeth, put the phone to one side and tap the computer keyboard. I have other clients and other things to do rather than run around after Charles Miller. But I’ve always run around after Charles. Ever since the first day we met over fifteen years ago.
I was an ambitious young agent at Saxby-Brown, one of the UK’s most prestigious literary agencies. Saxby-Brown has always had lots of big-name authors on its books, and it’s a badge of honour for the agency that quite a number of them have won the Booker, or the Impac, or any one of the many literary prizes that are up for grabs throughout the year.
None of my authors at the time were prizewinners, because I generally looked after non-celebrity writers who sold enough to be profitable but not enough to get their books into the big promotions, the TV book clubs or the radio shows. Nevertheless, they were all wonderful, hard-working people and I was privileged to represent them. I truly hoped one day they’d be top-ten bestsellers and prizewinners too.
When Charles Miller’s manuscript arrived on my desk (well, arrived by email as per our submission instructions, which was a positive start in itself; you wouldn’t believe the number of hopefuls that ignore them), I began to skim through the covering letter, but it was so elegantly written that I started again and read it more slowly.
It was brief and concise, giving relevant information about his book while clearly conveying how much it meant to him. He said that he hoped he’d managed to write something that people would want to read, and added that he’d been writing for years but this was the first time he’d ever reached the end, and that in itself was so exciting he had to send it off to someone. And he’d picked me because he’d done some research and seen that I was looking for new voices and unique books and he hoped he fitted the bill on both counts.
I clicked on the attachment, hoping his novel would flow as fluently as his email. It did. I read all 90,000 words of it that evening.
I wanted to sign him right away.
Apart from the undoubted exquisiteness of his writing, the characters were real and alive. The story tugged at the heartstrings. I was absolutely convinced it would be a hit if it was handled in the right way by the right team. And I knew I was the right agent and Saxby-Brown definitely had the best team to find a publisher who’d support Charles and nurture his career.
Of course, the other part of potential success is the author themselves. If Charles had an engaging personal story, if he was attractive, if he got on well with people and could do a good interview, that would make it easier. The key was to sell him as well as his book. And that it was a poignant romance, skilfully portrayed by a man (fingers crossed, reasonably good-looking, articulate and not psychopathic), made it an excellent selling proposition. As I sat and planned, I realised I was getting too far ahead of myself. Right now, it was only about convincing a publisher that they’d have a bestseller on their hands.
I replied to Charles the next day asking if he could come and meet me at the office. His response was that he could, but not until the following week, as he’d have to take time off from his job as an accounts manager to come to London from Dublin, where he lived. I was surprised at hearing he was in accounts. He had the soul of a poet, not a number-cruncher.
In the days before virtual meetings were a thing, I told him I’d meet him wherever and whenever it suited him, and that if he preferred, I could come to Dublin.
I think I’d like to see your offices, he wrote. Also, I haven’t been to London for ages and I love the idea that I have to visit in order to meet my potential agent.
I told him I was looking forward to meeting him.
When he turned up at the office, I knew I’d made the right call.
Despite my hopes for an interesting backstory (you know, like he’d recovered from a life-threatening illness, or a heart-rending divorce, always good for some column inches), Charles said his life was as dull as his accounting career. But it didn’t matter. Because the only thing that did matter was Charles himself.
The man was a Greek god. The handsomest male author who’d ever walked into the Saxby-Brown office – and we’ve had our fair share. We’ve sold boy-band memoirs and biographies of actors and celebrities who’ve been filtered to within an inch of their lives. But Charles Miller, aged thirty-three and a half, wasn’t a boy. He was a man. And the kind of man to make a woman go weak at the knees.
He had a lion’s mane of thick golden hair, piercing blue eyes, and a jawline that was so square and strong it really did look as though it had been chiselled from granite. He was tall and broad-shouldered and he seemed to fill my small office both physically and with the strength of his character.
As I was a consummate professional, I didn’t allow my knees to weaken. I told him to have a seat and I poured us both some water from the pitcher on my desk. (I needed the water. He was as cool as the proverbial cucumber.) I asked him about his book, what had inspired it, if he’d written it from his own experience, if he’d written anything else. And I asked him why he’d become an accountant.
He frowned slightly and scratched the red-gold stubble on his chin.
‘Accounts manager,’ he said. ‘In a business. Not an actual accountant, though that’s my qualification. I needed a job and I’m good with numbers.’
Most writers are terrible with numbers. I guessed I could spin something about a transition from facts and figures to romantic literature. But it would be nice to have something deeply personal too. I asked again about his inspiration. Had he had his heart broken like the hero of his novel?
‘Not at all. I made it up,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘It came to me one afternoon when I was working on a spreadsheet.’
‘I didn’t realise spreadsheets could be so emotionally gripping.’
‘Neither did I.’ He smiled, and I was glad I was sitting down because my knees definitely would have buckled under his all-round hotness.
‘It’s a fabulous book, and if you allow me to represent you, I’ll do my best to get it the success it deserves.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘But it doesn’t always work,’ I warned. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many books are published every year, and each author wants theirs to be a bestseller. Some very deserving ones end up selling only a few dozen copies. It’s not fair, but it’s the industry.’
‘Life’s not fair.’ Charles shrugged. ‘If it fails, I won’t blame you.’
I couldn’t help thinking that the perfect client had walked into my office. Authors often do blame their agents when things don’t go to plan, so having one say upfront that he wouldn’t was refreshing. One way or another, I was going to try my hardest to make him a success.
Looking at him across the desk, the sunlight glinting off his magnificent hair, he reminded me of a young Hugh Grant without the stuttering awkward Englishness. Charles Miller was attractive, quietly confident and spoke in a smooth baritone that I knew would be ideal for radio. The whole package, of course, would be even better on TV.
But first I had to find him a publisher.
Which wasn’t as easy as I’d expected, given how brilliant I thought his book was. However, the trend at the time was for complicated financial thrillers, and the charts were filled with novels with black-and-red covers and silhouettes of tall office blocks at night. Charles’s was pure romance. If he’d been a female author, I would’ve brought it to a large publisher, suggested a floral cover with a breathlessly frothy blurb on the back, and marketed it as a chick-lit. But for Charles, I wanted to persuade publishers that it was a work of literature that would transcend genres.
Yet despite my relentless plugging, no one was biting. Eventually Graham Weston, the MD of Xerxes, a small independent publishing house, agreed to read it after I’d dropped him home, rather the worse for wear, from a launch party for one of Saxby-Brown’s big-name authors. An author Graham really admired and wanted to poach from his current publisher. Which he ultimately did.
Graham read the manuscript and loved it. The rest, to overuse a cliché, is history.
Winter’s Heartbreakwas published in time for the following Christmas, and it took off like Santa’s reindeer on steroids. Readers loved it. Book clubs loved it. And reviewers were very, very generous with their praise. Charles ended up on every possible book programme, talking about it and sharing his insights into men with broken hearts as he wooed his audiences with his husky, mellifluous voice, his cool blue eyes and that amazing lion’s mane of hair.
He knocked the financial thrillers off the charts, we sold the movie rights, he won the Booker, and Graham Weston bought me lunch at the Wolseley.
A couple of years later, no longer an accounts manager who wrote books, but a full-time author who was published in over forty languages, Charles was nominated for the Booker again, this time for My Frozen Heart, another heartbreakingly romantic novel. It didn’t win any prizes, but it topped the bestseller lists for weeks and is currently in production with Netflix.
His life had changed by the time the movie of Winter’s Heartbreak premiered, and so had mine. I’d become an agent that authors wanted to be represented by. My inbox was swamped with manuscripts and my confidence soared along with my career. I did my absolute best for every author I took on. None reached the dizzy heights of Charles Miller, but there were a lot of successes all the same. I celebrate every single publication day and every spot on the bestseller lists with all of them.
But Charles was, and always would be, my number one.
Not only because he was a brilliant writer.
Because he was also the man I was going to marry.