Longshot

‘A writer’s a writer. Anyone can do it. You tell me I’ve been wrong looking for a big name. Very well then, find me a smaller name. You said your friend here is brilliant. So how about him?’

‘Ah,’ Ronnie said cautiously. ‘Brilliant is just... ah... a figure of speech. He’s inquisitive, capable and impulsive.’

I smiled at my agent with amusement.

‘So he’s not brilliant?’ Tremayne asked ironically, and to me he said, ‘What have you written, then?’

I answered obligingly, ‘Six travel guides and a novel.’

‘Travel guides? What sort of travel guides?’

‘How to live in the jungle. Or in the Arctic. Or in deserts. That sort of thing.’

‘For people who like difficult holidays,’ Ronnie said, with all the indulgent irony of those devoted to comfort. ‘John used to work for a travel agency which specialises in sending the intrepid out to be stretched.’

‘Oh.’ Tremayne looked at his wine without enthusiasm and after a while said testily, ‘There must be someone who’d leap at the job.’

I said, more to make conversation than out of urgent curiosity, ‘What is it that you want written?’

Ronnie made a gesture that seemed to say ‘Don’t ask’, but Tremayne answered straightforwardly.

‘An account of my life.’

I blinked. Ronnie’s eyebrows rose and fell.

Tremayne said, ‘You’d think those race-writing johnnies would be falling over themselves for the honour, but they’ve all turned me down.’ He sounded aggrieved. ‘Four of them.’

He recited their names, and such was their eminence that even I, who seldom paid much attention to racing, had heard of them all. I glanced at Ronnie, who showed resignation.

‘There must be others,’ I said mildly.

‘There’s some I wouldn’t let set foot through my door.’ The truculence in Tremayne’s voice was one of the reasons, I reflected, why he was having trouble. I lost interest in him, and Ronnie, seeing it, cheered up several notches and suggested sandwiches for lunch.

‘I hoped you’d be lunching me at your club,’ Tremayne said grouchily, and Ronnie said vaguely ‘Work’ with a flap of the hand to indicate the papers on his desk. ‘I mostly have lunch on the run, these days.’

He went over to the door and put the same section of himself through it as before.

‘Daisy?’ He called to her along the passage. ‘Phone down to the shop for sandwiches, would you? Usual selection. Everyone welcome. Count heads, would you? Three of us here.’

He brought himself in again without more discussion. Tremayne went on looking disgruntled and I drank my wine with gratitude.

It was warm in Ronnie’s office. That, too, was a bonus. I took off the jacket of the ski-suit, hung it over a chair back and sat down contentedly in the scarlet sweater I wore underneath. Ronnie winced as usual over the brightness of my clothes but in fact I felt warmer in red, and I never discounted the psychology of colours. Those of my travel-agency friends who dressed in army olive-browns were colonels at heart.

Tremayne went on niggling away at his frustration, not seeming to mind if I learned his business.

‘I offered to have them stay,’ he complained. ‘Can’t do fairer than that. They all said the sales wouldn’t be worth the work, not at the rate I was offering. Arrogant lot of bastards.’ He gloomily drank and made a face over the taste. ‘My name alone would sell the book, I told them, and they had the gall to disagree. Ronnie says it’s a small market.’ He glowered at my agent. ‘Ronnie says that he can’t get the book commissioned by a publisher without a top-rank writer, and maybe not even then, and that no top-rank writer will touch it without a commission. See where that gets me?’

He seemed to expect an answer, so I shook my head.

‘It gets me into what they call vanity publishing. Vanity! Bloody insult. Ronnie says there are companies that will print and bind any book you give them, but you have to pay them. Then I’d also have to pay someone to write the book. Then I’d also have to sell the book myself, as I would be my own publisher, and Ronnie says there’s no way I’d sell enough to cover the costs, let alone make a profit. He says that’s why no regular publisher will take the book. Not enough sales. And I ask you, why not? Why not, eh?’

I shook my head again. He seemed to think I should know who he was, that everyone should. I hardly liked to say I’d never heard of him.

He partially enlightened me. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I’ve trained getting on for a thousand winners. The Grand National, two Champion Hurdles, a Gold Cup, the Whitbread, you name it. I’ve seen half a century of racing. There’s stories in all of it. Childhood... growing up... success... My life has been interesting, dammit.’

Words temporarily failed him, and I thought that everyone’s life was interesting to themselves, tragedies and all. Everyone had a story to tell: the trouble lay in the few who wanted to read it, the fewer still who were ready to pay for the privilege.