Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

Oedipus nodded. He was thinking of a new research assistant he had met in the House of Commons library. She had certainly been hand-picked, he thought, as opposed to being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. She was currently working for another MP but that little difficulty could be dealt with easily enough. And if she came to work for him, then he could get rid of Jenny and Barbara at one stroke, neatly inserting this new girl into the roles occupied by both of them. It would be a perfect solution - not only more convenient and entertaining, but cheaper too.

‘I think perhaps we should ask them where they get their scallops from,’ Barbara said.

Oedipus waved a hand in the air. ‘The fishmonger, I expect.’ He looked at her. ‘You’re not turning into one of these people who bang on about food miles, are you?’

Barbara frowned. ‘I don’t bang on about anything, Oedipus. But there is some point to the food miles argument. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the fresh beans in our local supermarket should come from East Africa?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Farmers there have to sell their produce. And if we didn’t buy it, then we’d be taking the food out of their mouths rather than putting it into ours. If you see what I mean.’

‘I’m all for free trade,’ said Barbara. ‘But think of the fuel it takes to airlift a sack of beans from Kenya to London.’

Oedipus shrugged. ‘Everything’s wrong,’ he said. ‘The whole way we order our affairs is wrong.’

Barbara reached for a piece of bread. ‘At least you can do something about it,’ she said. ‘You’re in Parliament.’

Oedipus erupted into sudden laughter. ‘Parliament? What’s Parliament got to do with it?’

‘Everything, I would have thought.’

‘Oh, Barbara, my dear,’ said Oedipus Snark. ‘Parliament decides nothing. I have no illusions about that. We’re voting fodder - a sort of press conference audience for the Prime Minister at Question Time. We’re more or less instructed to boo or shout. Parliament controls nobody. We’re thrown a few scraps of symbolic power from time to time, but the Government, in the shape of the Prime Minister and his close allies, decides everything. Look at the way our constitution has been changed. Just like that - no real consultation. Nothing.’

‘I thought—’ began Barbara.

‘And then there’s Brussels,’ Oedipus went on. ‘Brussels decides our fate to a very large extent. But do we actually vote for the people who make the decisions over there? Answer: no. And are they accountable to us? Again the answer is no.’

Barbara absorbed all this. ‘So why are you in politics if you can’t do anything?’

Oedipus fingered his tie. ‘It’s an agreeable career,’ he said. ‘And it gives most of the people in it a sense of belonging, and purpose too, I suppose. But let’s not delude ourselves as to what one person can do. Even somebody like me.’

Barbara decided to change the subject. ‘I’ve had a very trying week,’ she said. ‘A lot of stress.’

Oedipus smiled blandly. He did not really care very much what sort of week Barbara had had; in fact, he did not care at all. But if she wanted to talk, then he supposed that he could at least provide an ear for her to pour her troubles into. Silly woman.

‘Do tell me,’ he said. ‘Difficult colleagues again? Unreasonable publishers refusing to publish your pet authors?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing like that. Rather the opposite, in fact. You see, I’ve had somebody come to see me with a sure-fire, copper-bottomed bestseller. Fabulous story. Great pace. A tour de force if ever there was one.’

She saw a flicker of interest cross Oedipus’s face. At least he sees me now, she thought.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ said Barbara. ‘The author is difficult - but then so are all authors, without exception. He has his notions and he only wants to place it with the publisher of his choice. Our author is determined to try to get this particular publisher - he seems to care nothing for the suggestions I’ve made. He wants to go for this completely unsuitable high-end literary publisher.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Oedipus.

‘I’m going to have to sit tight for six months,’ said Barbara. ‘The author is off on retreat somewhere and doesn’t want me to do anything until he comes back. So I sit on this fabulous idea and watch it gather dust.’

Oedipus watched her; he was thinking. ‘Tell me about this idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know whether it’ll run the way you say it will.’

‘Well, it’s what you might call a biographical thriller,’ said Barbara Ragg. ‘It’s a new category. But it’s going to be big. As big as The Da Vinci Code was. Ever since The Da Vinci Code was so successful, publishers have been looking out for something that will do the same thing. Code books. The uncovering of secrets. Masons. Rosicrucians. And so on.’

‘No accounting for taste,’ said Oedipus Snark.

‘You read The Da Vinci Code ?’

He shook his head. ‘Far too busy,’ he said, and then added, ‘constituency business, you see.’

Barbara Ragg broke off a piece of her bread roll and buttered it carefully. ‘I’m not saying that it was great literature. But it kept enough people riveted. And from our point of view as agents - not that we were the agents in question - it did the trick. It made millions of pounds. Millions. Even for the agents.’

‘I can understand why you’re looking for the next thing,’ said Oedipus Snark. Millions of pounds: what would I do with millions of pounds? he wondered. Well, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here in the Mermaid Inn in Rye talking to poor old Barbara Ragg. Paris perhaps. An agreeable little pied-à-terre on the Île de la Cité, perhaps, or near the Parc Monceau. Or an apartment in Manhattan, upper seventies, perhaps, East Side. Friends to match. Live in London, of course, but hop over to New York once a month for a few days. See what’s on at the Met. Take a few friends. Perfect.

‘Of course,’ said Barbara, ‘you can’t repeat things. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. So all those “me too” manuscripts that followed the Code ended up doing pretty miserably.’

She was warming to her theme. ‘And the same goes for authors. Some of them have one book in them - just one - and they’re never going to be able to write anything else.’

‘Like God,’ said Oedipus.

She looked at him quizzically.

‘He wrote the Bible, didn’t he? But he never really followed up with anything quite so successful.’

‘I was being serious.’

He smiled. ‘So was I. But tell me about this author of yours. I’m intrigued.’

Barbara buttered the rest of her bread roll. ‘He’s a first-time author,’ she said. ‘He came to us out of the blue. We get all sorts of manuscripts sent to us. The vast majority are impossible, of course, but every so often you get something really good. It’s like mining diamonds. You go through thousands of tons of kimberlite for one little diamond. And every so often, among millions of tons of the stuff, along comes a great big stone that gets De Beers jumping up and down with excitement. Well, that’s what it’s like with manuscripts. One beautiful idea among the tons of dross.’

Oedipus Snark had left his roll untouched. Although he was trying not to show it, he was fascinated by what Barbara was saying. This was the sort of thing that he liked: better - surer - than looking for the next high performers on the alternative stock markets. You could waste months of your time doing that and at the end of the day find that you simply could not compete with the young men in the City, with their access to whispers and rumours.