David Solomons - Not Another Happy Ending

‘We should celebrate,’ she said. ‘How about tomorrow I take you out for lunch?’

Tom climbed out of bed and started to pull on his clothes, retrieving them from the corners of the room where they had been flung the night before. ‘Can't. Off to Frankfurt first thing.’

She was puzzled. ‘On holiday?’

‘For the Book Fair.’ He fastened his jeans. ‘I need to find the new Jane Lockhart.’

She knew he was kidding, that this was meant to flatter her. But if that was the case then what was this sick feeling in her stomach?

‘A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall’, Bob Dylan, 1962, Columbia Records

THE DAY AFTER Tom announced that the edit was finished, Jane got all the way to the Underground platform before she remembered. She huffed, irritated at wasting her time until it struck her that she could waste as much time as she wanted now. She had absolutely nothing to do.

She trudged home and proceeded to mooch about her flat, rearranging furniture, desultorily flicking through magazines she had been forbidden from reading during the last few months. When they'd started to revise her manuscript Tom had banned all other reading material. No magazines. No newspapers. Definitely no novels. To avoid the possibility of leakage, he had said. He didn't want her influenced by external factors. What about him, she'd teased, wasn't he external? No, he'd said sternly, from this moment on I am inside you. Yeah, he really didn't hear himself.

When he returned from Frankfurt they met up for dinner, but without the scattered manuscript pages and the low-level squabbling that invariably accompanied the edit, something was missing. She even missed his red pen. Which, she had to admit, did sound somewhat phallic. And yes, they did sleep together that night, but then around midnight his phone pulsed with a message.

‘Who is it?’ she asked sleepily.

‘Nicola,’ he said, the blue glow from the screen illuminating his face. He read her text and smiled. ‘Clever. Very clever.’

She felt a stab of jealousy. ‘What does she want?

‘She's had a thought about how to crack chapter twenty-two and wants to talk it through.’ He climbed out of bed.

Stung, Jane sat up. ‘You're going?’ she said. ‘Now?’

Hurriedly he began to dress. ‘If I don't go to her now then by morning she will have convinced herself that the idea is worthless. She's not like you. She doesn't have your confidence.’

She tried to accept the compliment and to remind herself that Nicola and Tom really was just business, but as she heard the front door click shut behind him the unease she'd felt through dinner swelled into emotional indigestion.

The next date went better. They'd planned to see a triple bill of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs at the GFT, but over drinks Tom asked her if she had any thoughts about her next novel and as she talked to him she realised that she did. They missed Blue as they brainstormed and by the time they made it to the film theatre, they'd lost three and a half hours of Polish miserablism to their conversation and decided to skip the rest of the bill in favour of continuing their discussion over a curry at Balbir's.

As they ate, it occurred to her that as soon as she gave him the next novel it would be followed by another close edit and they'd be back in the place where things between them had flowed easily. She decided to start work on the new novel the very next morning.

When she awoke he had already left. Instead of feeling upset she took advantage of his absence and the peace of the empty flat, leapt out of bed, showered, grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down at her desk. File. New Document. Save As Untitled. That would do for now. She was ready to begin. She loved this moment. The anticipation of what happens next. It didn't matter that the ideas which had seemed so sharp the night before now appeared fuzzy. She was fearless before the blank page. She rested her hands on the wrist pad and, taking a deep breath, hurled herself into the white void of the first draft.

She quickly lost herself in the new book. Her protagonist, Darsie Baird, began to dominate every waking and most of her sleeping hours. Suddenly, she didn't have time to see Tom and when after a few weeks of writing in her pyjamas she decided it would be nice to shave her legs and drop in on him she discovered that he had gone home to France for a month to see his family. She tried not to be irritated that he hadn't told her, and Roddy mumbled something about him not wanting to interrupt her Muse.

Somehow the weeks had drifted past and now it was the best part of two months since they'd seen each other. A couple of days ago he'd texted her to say he was back in Glasgow and the finished copies of her book were due to arrive that week. She waited as long as she could to call in to the office, unsure which she was more eager to see: her debut novel or Tom.

‘Hello?’ It was Roddy's voice on the intercom.

She stood outside Tristesse, bouncing with anticipation, mouth tilted up to the speaker, one hand supporting a tray of fairy cakes. ‘I was just passing.’ Lie.

There was a buzz and a click and she threw herself through the front door. Balancing the tray she skipped down the corridor towards Reception. The fairy cakes were a bluff. She'd been making batches of them all morning, studding alphabet sweets in the icing to spell out highly amusing and piercingly appropriate lines from classic literature.

At least, that had been her plan. Turns out the surface area of your average fairy cake is not nearly expansive enough to accommodate your classic literary quip. And anyway, even had the cakes been bigger, there weren't enough e's in her bag of alphabet sweets to manage more than a couple of zingers from Shakespeare and the opening line of Moby Dick . In the end she gave up any attempt at cake intertextuality and settled on dropping random letters onto the icing. She was adamant that if you squinted at the last batch you could see a couple of lines from Emily Brontë.

But the fairy cakes were a decoy. A subterfuge. ATrojan horse in sponge form.

She eyed the stacked boxes that lined the narrow passageway, paying more attention to them than usual. One of them could contain her book . She'd been waiting for this moment since Tom announced that the edit was finished. He was happy. Or, as happy as the scowling Frenchman ever got. The manuscript had been scoured for solecisms, corrected for commas; it was ready to go to the printer, he announced. And what about the cover?

‘That is up to the publisher,’ he'd said. ‘Trust me.’

And she had.

Tom had insisted that the delivery date was a rough one, that the books could arrive any day that week. She wasn't taking any chances. But she didn't want to seem too keen. Hence the deceptive fairy cakes.