Chapter Twenty-Five
“Don’t get a big head,” Ross teased when she relayed Alistair’s conversation to him that evening.
“If anyone’s going to get a big head . . .” she shot back pointedly. “Although, I suppose this is all same old, same old for
you?”
“Ah, but no,” he reminded her. “You’ve clearly not read the ballad of Ross McCloud,” he told her. “First off, it was a tiny
deal—a sink or swim number, far from a lead title. Although, yeah, it was from a respectable publisher. Then—somehow—it went
viral on TikTok. We hit the literary festivals too—God, that was exhausting—I was turning up to bookshops lucky if I sold
and signed one book at first . . .”
“And then you got short-listed for the Booker,” Petra took up the tale, “and everyone said you wouldn’t win.”
“Exactly,” said Ross. “And quite right too, there were some fantastic authors on that list, I was—well—I was amazed it was
me, actually.”
“Yours was the best book, end of story.”
“Ah, so you do know the ballad of Ross McCloud,” he told her, ruffling her hair, as the two of them slumped on the sofa in front of the
fire, draped across each other and basking in the heat. Earlier they had been outside in his tiny garden with its view of
the hill with their bench on it, but sunset had driven them inside, shivering in their summer clothes.
The bleak January day when they had first met seemed a world away now, Petra remembered. Not the most edifying of occasions.
“Remember when I thought you were a tramp.” She smiled.
He chuckled. “And the day you blew up the internet,” he reminded her.
Petra struggled to smile in reply. She certainly did. And soon she would be pitching herself right back into that world.
“Imagine if we could just stay like this forever,” she ventured, “with people not knowing who you are, and not remembering
who I am—what I did . . .”
“You didn’t murder anyone,” he pointed out, giving her a comforting squeeze. “And no one can pause time. Imagine how bored
we’d get . . . the same few months over and over?”
“Not me,” Petra said fiercely. “I would never get bored of this. Never . . .”
“So let’s just keep doing this,” Ross said gently, “forever and ever . . .”
“Hmm, not feasible, sadly,” Petra admitted. “Money, for one thing. I quite like eating.”
“Yeah, me too,” he agreed. “I do need to publish something else one day soon,” he admitted. “Either that or get a proper job.”
“I’ve got a proper job,” said Petra. “I could keep us.” But even as she said it, she knew, of course. She was only borrowing this job. It wasn’t hers. And it didn’t pay that much either. “I could get another job around here,” she said with a hint of desperation.
“We can’t just stop,” Ross said gently. “We’re like sharks, we humans. We need to keep swimming forward or die.”
They both stared into the flames for the longest time. Then into the silence Ross’s phone bleeped with a notification.
He didn’t move.
“Who’s that?” asked Petra sleepily.
“No one,” said Ross. “Now let’s go to bed. You need to get some rest.”
Petra wasn’t great with uncertainty. The future was a mystery, but one thing Petra was sure about was that the encompassing and comforting bookish arms of Capelthorne’s had wrapped themselves around her and restored her love of literature.
She was excited to come into work in the morning; excited to speak to the customers, to divine which books they would love; to unpack the boxes of new stock arriving twice a week, feeling like Christmas every time; to listen to the visiting sales agents as to what was hot and what was not.
At first, she had known full well which books they would tell her about, knowing from upstream the titles that were going to be traveling down the line with publisher support.
But just recently, the books she was encouraged by the agents to get behind were titles she didn’t recognize, and that had ignited a wistful longing to be back in the London publishing world—to be preparing, even now in July, for the Frankfurt Book Fair in the autumn, where the big deals would be done, and the behemoth publishing companies, alongside the smaller independents, would go to preen and hustle and show off their acquisitions.
And this autumn, one of those acquisitions would be Ross’s new book. She, of all the literary agent mess-ups, was to be entrusted
with the stewardship of that sale.
What if she screwed it up?
What then for this precious relationship? Their love was blossoming here in Portneath, in the liminal space between their
respective worlds, but would it be crushed by the disappointments she routinely brought to her writer clients?
How could it not?
Wise, kind Alistair had foretold it of course, on that hideous day—her last day in London that January. He had known that
Petra needed this sabbatical—a chance to fall back in love with books—but how was he to know that she would fall in love even
more profoundly than that?
“What?” asked Ross that evening as they waited in the chip shop, a heavy, mouthwatering aroma of fried food filling the air.
She loved stealing glances at him, unwatched: the way the heavy lock of hair fell over his forehead as he stood, the way he
pulled her against his lean body, steadying her. This time, amused, he met her analytical gaze.
“What happened?” she said, her heart pounding in response to her daring, to the danger of hearing something she didn’t want
to hear. Something he couldn’t take back.
“Care to narrow it down a bit?” he replied lightly. “What happened when? With what? Or who? Are we talking big bang, or something
more recent?”
“You’ve never really told me what happened before?
” she went on, in too deep to stop now, even if she wanted to.
“What made you so sure you couldn’t be romantically involved with anyone you were working with?
Was it your agent? It was Veronica Bampton, wasn’t it?
Were you in a relationship, you and her . . . did you . . .”
Stop talking, stop talking, thought Petra, seeing Ross’s face go blank, as if she had wiped it clean like a blackboard. She
managed to make herself shut up by physically putting her finger on her lips, like her primary school teacher Mrs. Grafton
used to make the whole class do when they got too noisy.
She wished she was back there now. Back in her childhood where life was simple, and the grown-ups were in charge, and she
didn’t feel like she was going to blow her life to smithereens by opening her big mouth. Again.
With a sigh, Ross turned to face her now, placing his hands heavily on her shoulders. His expression was bleak.
“I told you,” he said gently, but with studied patience. “I detached myself from my agent when it was clear she was going
to have nothing of mine to go out with—that there wasn’t going to be another book. That was a long time after . . .”
He hung his head, shaking it, as if trying to shake away the memories.
Petra stayed silent. Motionless, hearing the chatter and clatter of the chip shop fade as they became enclosed in their own
intense little bubble.
“I was having an affair with my editor,” he said at last. His voice was a monotone, like he was the most bored newsreader in the world, reading from a teleprompter.
“Her name is Henrietta. We began an intense relationship when we were communicating about edits. I felt she really got me,” he admitted.
“She got my story . . . and it was intoxicating.
I was flattered that she was taking so much care and excited
that she was so committed to making the book a success, knowing it was a tiny deal as far as this publisher was concerned.
I felt lucky. I felt seen.”
Petra stayed very still, looking up at him, giving him space to talk. A clumsy intervention at this stage would be a disaster.
For once she managed to keep her mouth shut, and Ross continued:
“Genuinely, she helped me make it a better book but—at the same time—she was prescriptive. Overly prescriptive. Gradually,
I realized that I had let her take control to the point where I was being told precisely what to write, down to individual words and phrases. And then we started having creative differences, but she was
making it very clear it was her way or the highway. If I insisted on my own perspective, then I was told I was sacrificing
the success of the book. So I went along with it. I didn’t know how not to. Of course, the book was published, it did well . . .” He shrugged. “But, by that time, rightly or wrongly, I felt like
it wasn’t my book, so—obviously—it wasn’t even my success. Not entirely.
“Next thing I knew, she withdrew emotionally. I asked what was wrong. She told me I was being paranoid. Again and again, she
lied. She gaslit me. It eventually turned out she was in a relationship with another young writer.
He was just like me, starting out, a bit younger than her, talented but inexperienced, na?ve .
. . He was me, basically. Anyhow, when I learned she had been lying to me for months, there was a huge row, and we went our separate ways,” he explained wearily.
“And I think it was only then it slowly dawned on me how Faustian the whole affair had been. I loathed her. I was glad I was free. But—when I sat down to write, I discovered . . . I had nothing. It was as if she had wormed her way inside my creative mind and trained it to think she was the creator, not me. I was second-guessing and shooting down every idea before it even crystalized. I was self-sabotaging. I couldn’t stop.
“Anyhow,” he shrugged, staring unseeing at the plastic chip shop menu on the wall, “I realized that without her, I was nothing. I could write nothing,” he declared, giving Petra a sad little smile. “I thought she was my muse.” He gave a hollow laugh. “The things—it turns
out—we are prepared to do for what we think we want . . . There’s a cost,” he declared, straightening and squaring his shoulders.
“And it’s not a cost I am prepared to pay again.”
How desperate! thought Petra. No wonder he had been so broken when she met him.