Executive decisions taken so far this morning:
Whether or not to go down to Mr Patel for milk for Mr T’s morning coffee or hope someone else will do it.
It was a tough one. Took me a good ten minutes to ponder, but I decided, after judicious consideration, and weighing up all the different variables, including the fact that I had only 20p in my pocket, just to wait.
Em… that’s it.
Later, I made two rounds of coffee with milk fetched by AN Other (was thanked by an affectionate touch on the arm by one of the recipients – lovely man, is he looking for a wife – really I’m that easy…), poured several glasses of water, and sent out some books to very grand authors. Then I fielded a couple of phone calls from very important agents, one who spit into my ear like a shot from a close range rifle when I told him Mr T was ‘in a meeting’ – and the other who sounded like Brian Sewell pretending to be a female impersonator with a pug under each arm who said he would ring him on his direct line before I could tell him this was pointless, and the call diverted back to my extension.
'As I said, he's in a meeting,' I repeated, dryly.
Otherwise I waited outside Mr T’s office ready to spring on him between appointments, with little success – it’s just as well I’m not a lioness waiting to bring down an impala at a watering hole, because slapping post-it notes on desks and waving paper in front of fleeting eyes does not attest to my stalking skills.
I also walked round to One Alfred Place where Mr T had breakfast and picked up the credit card that he had left there after his breakfast meeting. I mean, when I say I work in publishing, you get an idea of the range of expertise this demands. So don’t bother asking me if I can get your little Pandora of Crispin work experience when they’ve finished their degree in Sanscrit and Psycho-geography at Bristol because they will need a first and/or a couple of living languages before they would even be considered.
You don’t get to run this caliber of errand on six GCSEs and a certificate in life-saving unless you’re me.
And then the phone rings:
Imagine mincing Kenneth Williams type drawl: Yes, good morning, I would like to speak to someone about a book I’ve written.
Imagine bored Scottish sigh: Yes…. (oh bugger off implied but not voiced)
Which is all I get out before he launches into long monologue: Blah blah blah, my book, similar to Robert Kagan’s Return of History blah blah blah manuscript 300 pages (I’m waiting for the word count) I don’t have an agent blah blah… (although in fact it was more of a mya mya mya sound.
Me leaping in with icy diction straight from Miss Jean Brodie: Let me stop you there because I’m afraid we don’t accept any unsolicited manuscripts…
Kenneth Keegan crosses the field and tackles: But as I explained it’s in the same spirit as Robert Kagan’s
Marion, sweeps in, grabs the ball: Yes, but as I’m explaining we don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts and the fact that we’ve already published the Kagan would probably mean that we wouldn’t publish anything too similar.
Foul, I’m over clutching my ankle as he continues to insist: I didn’t say it was exactly the same, it’s about mya mya mya.
Still, you’ll need to get an agent first, I say, absently clicking on my email where I see an email from my own agent. I know it can’t be anything good or she would have called me. I’m guessing it’s more or less what I’ve been expecting – bad news or no news from the American publisher.
But I don’t have an agent, persists Mr Train Spotter, look – is there anyone else I can speak to?
OH MY GOD! I screamed.
This silenced him for oooooooooh all of one second.
I beg your pardon? he coughs, all affronted.
But I couldn’t answer him, my eyes were fixated on the email:
Then my mouth starts moving, saying ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ and ‘list of agents’ and ‘all unsolicited manuscripts come to me and are returned’ as I read the words on the screen over and over again.
That lovey, wonderful, amazingly precient woman from Harpy in New York has typed with her very own fingers: ‘...and so believe it or not I would like to offer…’
Bloody hell – I’ve got an American publisher.
