The Black Tide

Jordans, the publishers to whom I had sent my book, were a small firm specializing in wildlife and natural history. It was just after three when I reached their office in Queen’s Gate, one of those white porticoed buildings almost opposite the Natural History Museum. A pretty little girl with a streaming cold took me up to Ken Jordan’s office on the first floor, which was little bigger than a partitioned cubicle, the ceiling showing part of the ornate plaster design of a larger room. There was a window looking across to the Museum and the walls were lined with bookshelves that overflowed into stacked heaps on the floor.

Jordan proved to be a rather intense individual

with sandy hair and eyes too close together, his face long and the lips turned up at the corners in what appeared to be a perpetual smile. He had my typescript on the desk in front of him, on top of an untidy litter of books, letters and galleys, and as soon as I was seated, instead of talking about my book he went into a long monologue about the one I ought to write. ‘You owe it to your wife.’ He said that several times. He wanted me to start again, writing the whole story of Balkaer from Karen’s point of view…

‘Write it in the first person. Imagine you’re really your wife, everything from her angle, right?’ His pale, rather protuberant eyes stared at me urgently. ‘I’m sure you can do it. Her feelings as she’s cleaning up those half-dead birds, what she thinks about the government, the oil companies, the men who run the tankers, how the idea gradually forms in her mind — immolation, a spectacular, suicidal gesture—’

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ I said quickly.

‘No, no, of course not.’ He gave a high little laugh, almost a giggle. ‘But that’s how the public see it now. And it’s the public that buy books. So you give them what they want, use your imagination. A little invention. Dramatize it. Build it up.’ And then he had the nerve to ask me whether she had tried it before.

‘How do you mean?’ I could hear the hostility in my voice, feel anger building up inside me.

‘Just that. Had she tried it before—’ He stopped there and opened the folder, leafing through the pages Karen had typed so carefully. ‘That oil slick you described. Not the first one.’ He found the page he

was looking for. It was near the end. ‘The one in November. Now, if she tried to set fire to it and failed … you see what I’m getting at? It would make it so much more dramatic — her feelings when it didn’t work, the sense of anti-climax.’ He paused, staring at me. ‘A nice build-up, you see, to the end of the book — very exciting, very moving … the reader having been through it all before when it didn’t work, and then, the next time, knowing it’s for real, that she’s going to kill herself.’

‘She didn’t mean to,’ I said again. ‘She wasn’t thinking of suicide, only of setting light—’

‘No, but you see what I’m getting at. So dramatic, eh? And that’s what you want, isn’t it, to make the point she was trying to make? The news story, that’s over, finished now. What we want is something much more personal, something deeply moving.’ He was leaning forward, his voice quiet and persuasive. ‘I’m sure you can do it, Mr Rodin. It’s just a question of putting yourself in your wife’s — er, sea boots—’ he smiled, trying to lighten his words — ‘seeing it as she might have seen it, and building the whole thing up, dramatizing it, making it exciting, sensational even — it needs fictionalizing, you see.’

‘You aren’t interested then in what I’ve already written?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, not really.’ And he added quickly as I began to get to my feet, ‘It’s nicely written. Don’t misunderstand me. You can write. But these are difficult times. I don’t think we could sell it, not now. But the book I’ve just outlined … I’m sure

we could sell that. It has excitement, emotional involvement, action — it could be a very moving book. We could try one of the Sundays too. It could make a good two or three-part serial.’

‘But not if I wrote it the way I saw it, the way it really happened?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ He banged the typescript shut. ‘What we’re talking about is a first book. Trevor Rodin. Nobody’s heard of you, you see. You’re new, unknown. So we’ve got to give it depth, excite people, give the reader something to get his teeth into — husband writes the full intimate story of his wife’s final, terrible decision. See what I mean? It’s moving. It would tear at their hearts—’

‘No.’ I was on my feet now, staring down at him, hating him for his callous rejection of all those months of work, for the way he was trying to get me to twist the truth to fit his own idea of what was marketable.