Not Another Happy Ending. David Solomons

Taking the manuscript in the tips of his fingers, he gave a shudder of disgust.

      ‘Ms. Lockhart … au revoir.’ And with that he tossed it into the cavernous wastepaper basket by the side of his desk.

       CHAPTER 2

       ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’, The Blue Nile, 1984, Linn Records

      THE BOWLER WAS a great idea. She rocked that hat. It was her lucky hat, always had been. Not that Jane could recall specific examples of its effect on her good fortune at this precise moment, but she was sure there must have been some in the past.

      It was an awesome hat. It had been a last-second decision to take it to the meeting and she'd plucked it from its hook above the umbrella stand along with her favourite red umbrella. Not that the umbrella was lucky. Who has a lucky umbrella? In fact, weren't they notoriously unlucky objects? Yes, it was bad luck to walk under them. No, that couldn't be right. That was ladders, of course. Open them! You weren't supposed to open them indoors in case … what? Non-specific, umbrella-related doom, she supposed.

      Oh god, she was losing it.

      It was nerves. The email from Thomas Duval of Tristesse Books inviting her—correction, summoning her—to a Monday morning meeting had arrived last thing on Friday, leaving her all weekend to obsess. It had to be bad news; nothing good ever happened on a Monday morning. But if that were the case then why demand a meeting? If he wasn't interested in publishing her novel, surely he would have rejected her in the customary pro forma fashion, and he hadn't Dear Jane-d her, not yet.

      She felt a spike of anticipation, which was instantly brought down by a hypodermic shot of self-doubt. Perhaps he was some sort of sadist who got his kicks torturing writers in person. But that seemed so unlikely. She'd been propping herself up with this line of thinking throughout most of the weekend, extracting every last drop of hope from it, until halfway through the longueur of her Sunday afternoon she decided to Google him and discovered that Thomas Duval was indeed just such a sadist. The Hannibal Lecter of publishing, blogged one aspirant author who'd evidently suffered at his hands. Attila the Hun with a red Biro, recorded another.

      She dismissed the opinions of a few affronted authors—all right, fourteen—as a case of sour grapes and sought out a more cool-headed assessment of his reputation. There was scant information available on the Bookseller’s site, the industry's go-to journal, but she dug up half a dozen snippets of news. The names changed, but on each occasion the substance remained the same: breaking news—Thomas Duval falls out acrimoniously with another of his writers, who storms out in high dudgeon, swearing never to write one more word for that arrogant, temperamental sonofabitch.

      Well, at least he was consistent.

      She jumped on the subway at Kelvinbridge and rode the train to Buchanan Street in the centre of town. By the time she reached the surface, the early rain had given way to patchy sunshine and she enjoyed a pleasant stroll through George Square to the Merchant City. European-style café culture had come late to Glasgow—until 1988 if you said barista to a Glaswegian you risked a punch on the nose. But when it did arrive it came in a tsunami of foaming milk. An area of the city once referred to as the ‘toun’ these days sported sleek cafés on every corner, where, at the first warming ray, outside tables sprouted like sunflowers, and were just as swiftly populated by chattering, sunglasses-wearing crowds who always seemed to be waiting just off screen for their cue.

      Jane headed along cobbled Candleriggs past the old Fruit Market, before stopping outside a set of electric gates. One of the residents was leaving and as the gates whirred open she slipped inside, finding herself in a large, sunlit courtyard bordered by a Victorian terrace on one side and a glassy office block on the other.

      She made her way over to the far corner and at the door, she inspected the nameplate. This was the place all right. She hadn't really paid attention to the Tristesse Books logo before, but a large version of it was stencilled on the wall: a white letter ‘T’ suspended in a fat blue drop of rain. As she pushed the buzzer it struck her that it wasn't rain at all, but a teardrop.

      Jane had been kicking her heels for half an hour, waiting in the hot, cramped Reception room for her meeting with Thomas Duval. She could hear him through the wall, shouting in rapid-fire French. He may not have been ordering a saucisson, but it wasn't difficult to catch the gist—someone was getting it in le neck.

      Though his fury wasn't directed at her, with each fresh salvo Jane shrank deeper into the waiting-room chair. After fifteen minutes of listening to him rant she'd contemplated making her excuses and slinking out, but the possibility that he had read and liked The Endless Anguish of My Father was enough to encourage her to stay put and suffer.

      Across the room she could see Duval's secretary trying to ignore the furious noises coming from his boss's office. At least, Jane assumed the man sitting at the desk was his secretary. For some reason she'd pictured Thomas Duval's secretary as one of those pencil-skirt wearing, bespectacled ah-Miss-Jones-you're-beautiful types, whereas the figure valiantly shielding the phone receiver from the angry French volcano on the other side of the wall was a twentysomething man in a brown corduroy suit and red bow tie. Now that she studied him carefully, he looked less like a secretary and more as if he was channelling a fifty-year-old schoolteacher.

      ‘Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh yeah, he's a wonderful writer. So unremittingly bleak.’ The secretary paused as the caller on the other end of the phone asked a question. ‘No, Tristesse doesn't publish him any more,’ he said haltingly. ‘A little disagreement with …’ He glanced towards Duval's office door, cupping the receiver against the rising din. ‘She's one of my favourites!’ he said, responding to a fresh enquiry. ‘Yes, long-listed for the Booker, you know.’ His left eye twitched. ‘Right after she was sectioned.’ He listened again, one corner of his mouth sinking mournfully. ‘No. She left too.’

      This was becoming ridiculous. How long would Duval make her wait in this tiny, airless cellar of a room? For all he knew she had taken time off her actual, proper job to show up at his beck and call. Not that she had a proper job any more. She'd quit the supermarket at the beginning of the year, when they offered her a place on the management trainee programme. She'd started off stacking shelves and here they were offering her a suit and a key to the executive WC. It was a sign; she knew, that if she took it then her life would go into the toilet metaphorically as well, taking her far away from her writing.

      In the end it didn't even feel like her decision. She had to write; it was as simple as that. So she jumped, a great, giddy, don't-look-down leap of faith. And here she was. Forty-seven rejection letters later. Savings countable on the fingers of one hand … Was it stuffy in here, or was it her?

      She yawned and stretched her legs, knocking the low table in front of her on which perched a stack of teetering manuscripts. They wobbled alarmingly and she dived to steady them, noticing as she did that the top novel was entitled A Comedy in Long Shot. Not a bad title. She immediately compared it with her own, placing each in an imaginary ranking system. Hers scored higher, she felt sure. The Endless Anguish of My Father had been tougher to come up with than the rest of the novel. But the day it popped into her head she knew it was the one. It had the ring of authenticity, rooted in truth, in life; six words that spoke to the eternal verities. And it looked good when she typed it across the cover page.

      Something glinted behind the paper stack. A single golden page coiled into a scroll and set on a plinth. It was an award. An inscription ran along its base. She picked it up to read: ‘Thomas Duval. Young European Publisher of the Year, 2010.’ She turned the award another notch. ‘Runner-up.’

      ‘Miss Lockhart?’

      Duval's secretary had crept up on her. Startled, she dropped the award. It landed against the wooden floor with a resounding clang and rolled under a sofa. Apologising profusely, Jane fell to her knees and scrabbled to retrieve it, a part of her brain belatedly registering that the shouting from the office had ceased.

      ‘What the hell are you