It’s Halloween.

We don't usually dress up, but Ms Rights said she had been looking for her tiara that morning.

I thought she wore it every day. 

‘Only mentally, Marion, only mentally,’ she said.  ‘And what about your broomstick?  Is that why you always look so cheerful?’

For the record, I never look cheerful. But I was more concerned with the ‘underneath the venom, there’s a happy person’ implication.

The other day she arrived at work clutching a latte and announced that she needed some advice.

‘My husband came back from the States and gave me a pair of suspenders.  Red suspenders.  What do you think this means?’

‘To much information,’ I thought but tried to appear unperturbed.  ‘I think it probably means he would like you to wear them dear,’ I said, trying to rapidly banish the resulting picture from my head.

‘Yes, but you don’t understand, they’re Gordon Gekko suspenders, you know – the sort you wear to hold up your pants…’

Ah, American suspenders…  Braces.  Trousers not knickers.  Got you.  I should know this stuff since I’ve spent the last month inserting these very words and their siblings into my book to make it more, well, American for the publisher on the other side of the pond.

But now I was even more perturbed.  ‘Why is he buying you braces?’

'I don't know, that's what I'm wondering...'

‘Does he like you to wear men’s clothes?’ asked another, whose meek voice belayed the fact that she won the ‘unfortunate things I did in my youth’ contest in the office the other week, up against a lot of fierce, very fierce competition.

‘Have his mother, sister, female friend, cousin, whatever,  take him aside and tell him what constitutes an appropriate present for a woman,’ I counselled.

Banish from the list: braces, gladioli, carnations, a Magimix, cosmetic sets bought on planes (we generally wear one shade of lipstick and don’t need three others in crap colours) more than two airport perfumes in which we’ve expressed an interest, and a tea-tray with four cups and saucers.  The final item was the gift I received on the last birthday my husband spent at home.

I should have known then something was afoot.

Cold calling

This morning, on the way to work the phone rang...  It was someone who used to commission me and who kept me off the breadline at various points in my life but it has been a while since he has returned any of my calls. Today however, he was on the line.

Chatting.

About his cold.

He didn't mention the book proof which I know my publishing company sent him, and about which I had thought, in my giddy, excited naivety, he would be pleased - in the way a friend would.  I waited for him to say something - anything - until it's the elephant in the room, but apparently only I can see it.  Oh dear Lord, how awful it is when you send someone your book and the response is deafening silence.  I feel it at work when we parcel up our own proof copies and dispatch them to people we hope will say something nice to put on the cover, and it's like they've fallen off the end of the world without even a splash.  However, it's worse when it's your own.  I mean, even 'thanks' would be nice.  I'm not expecting a three ring circus or a plot analysis.

Instead he spoke for a good five minutes about his self-confessed 'man-flu', and about being laid low, and how he was 'zapping' it with Echinacea and Beechams Cold and Flu relief.  Ah yes, the art of sparkling conversation is not yet dead.  This is one of the advantages of not living with a man - that you don't have to sympathise while hearing lurid descriptions of their snot.

Eventually after he'd talked about his steam treatment, I crumbled and asked him if the book arrived.  He muttered an off hand yes.   The way I do when a sales representative asks me if I'm the person who deals with our environmental waste management.

 'You won't read it will you?'  I said in wearily defeatist mode.

'No...' he agreed, before insisting that it was lying around somewhere.

(Sound of indeterminate scrabbling)

I sigh.  I got six copies and have only two left and he has one 'lying around somewhere...'

'Well will you pass it on to someone else for me?'

He mumbled something discouraging about the book pages of his paper, intimating that it wouldn't really be quite their thing being all paperbacky but offered to give it to his 'kid' who is 33 because 'she likes girlie books'.

'It's not that girlie,' I protested, 'it's quite dark.'

I couldn't help myself from exaggerating hugely about how pleased the Waddling Duck Overseas sales' departments were (believe me, to hear me tell it - they know my name in India where, as you can imagine, the Delhi housewife is going to be enthralled by the domestic life of a West London psychopathic housekeeper), but he remained unimpressed by my blatant lying.

I could practically hear him yawning.

'And our author Aravind's White Tiger won The Man Booker,' I added, bringing out the big guns for good measure, refraining to mention it was the only ruddy thing that anyone wanted to talk about at last night's Meet The Press night at Waddling Duck at which I was supposed to be plugging myself.

'Yeah, is it any good?' he drawled.

'Of course it's good.  It's fantastic.  It won.'

But his only response was to reprise his minute by minute pharmaceutical treatment of his bad cold (aka man-flu).

Bless him.

Getting your book published is only the first hurdle in a long, long battle.  Next you have to get bookshops to sell it and then you have to pray someone will read it.  What hope is there when you can't even persuade some of your friends and acquaintances to flick through further than the acknowledgments?    The woman (very, very nice woman) from Radio Four said that she gave each book 50 pages.

Maybe I should have slipped in fivers?

You may remember the self-published book I was sent recently on the slush pile with a quote that the author had added on the back from 'my friend Dave'.  I'm now worried that I may not even be able to muster up that:

'I read a good book today.  Yours.'  My eldest daughter (who lives with me, food, rent-free and with all utilities paid).

'I read a bit and then I put it down.'  My youngest daughter (as above).

'It really stayed with me.'  Fran in Pedantic Press Publicity Department (sits behind me, within easy reach of hot liquids and scissors, recently moved to New York Office).

'It's good.  Everything you do is good.'  Husband.  Before leaving.

'I might not like it.'  My best friend Nel.

'Can you change the ending?'  American publisher.

Feel free to jump in anytime.

Anyone?

Okay then, tenners?

A bottle of champagne for the best one?

First born son?  (Actually he's unemployed, lives at home etc, but has great hair and is very cute...)

Meet the Press at Waddling Duck

The publicity machine trundles along, or in my case creaks, much like my aching joints as I hobble in heels along The Strand to Waddling Duck for a Meet The Press session with my fellow spring authors. 

I’m a little nervous as readers of this blog will have by now ascertained that 'meeting' is not my strong point.  I can sometimes enjoy a party, despite all claims to the contrary, but like marriage, monogamy and motherhood, it’s more the idea that appeals to me.  I like the anticipation, the fantasy, the notion.  By the time it's a reality it's too late - you're there, stuck in a corner, doing it, with only alcohol to dull the pain.  

So what do you wear to meet the press?  Once upon a time I was the press and I don't remember anyone dressing up for me.  The other problem is lighting in as much as, at home, in the 4pm gloom of my bedroom, I don't have any.  Naturally, this means that when I'm getting ready by 40 watt bulb, I look simply wonderful - but not so much when standing on the 10th Floor of Waddling House Corporate Headquarters under spotlights that do the same for the face as holding a torch under it, but in reverse.  My eldest daughter had helpfully rubbed in a bit of unblended concealer before I left the house (breeding does, apparently, have its advantages) but after that I was on my own with a glass of cava in a room the size of Terminal 5 with a lot of people wearing sticky badges, most of which seemed to herald that they were not, in fact, Press, but employees.  

Young employees.

It appears that the press were somewhat under-represented though those who did drag themselves across  London for a free drink were quite senior literary editors lured, no doubt, by names like Alain de Botton - whose Waddling Duck minder stuck to his side like glue in a sweater - rather than that of, say, Marion McUnpronounceable.  I was recently invited to one of his School of Life singles evenings by a friend.  Even the thought made me want to curl up like a cold canape and throw myself into the nearest swing bin.  Not least because I imagine they are full of women.  Clever women.  Everything is full of women.  (Please God, women who read!) There are times, this being yet another in the long conveyor belt of such moments since the husband became unhinged and unhitched, when I realise that not only have I woken up to a brand new world full of women, but that I have also woken up to a brand new world full of young women.  

At work the other day during a heated discussion over whether or not Russell Brandt should resign (American election, what American election?) I mentioned that the Beeb could always hire him back later: 'Remember, like they did with Kenny Everet?'

'Kenny who?'  said one of my co-workers.

'You, know - Kenny..?'  and then my voice trailed off.  That's the problem.  They don't.

'Leonard Cohen?'

'Is he one of the Burn after Reading brothers?' 

And they are everywhere: sitting at the desks surrounding me in the office, standing in the huddle into which I insinuated myself the other night at the book launch, hanging around my house eating my food claiming to be blood kin, and now here, swarming at Waddling Duck.  My lovely editor looks like she's stepped out of the pages of  Tatler.  My publicist, doe-eyed, winsome and slim as a bread-stick stands next to me and immediately supersizes me to a Happy Meal with extra fries, and then I see a tall, leggy girl with blonde curly hair tumbling down her back talking to Andrew Holgate from The Sunday Times and think she is the journalist from Vogue.  It's not until the Publicity Director at Waddling Duck (also impossibly young) tells me her name that I realise she's actually my Publisher who, on the basis of one short meeting, I seem to have embossed in my memory on a pedestal of glossy, corporate seniority in a Chanel Suit and Anna Wintour shades.  There are even boys, boys, with managerial titles, and less facial hair than some of my women friends...

So where are all the birds my age, I wonder (apart from hurriedly having electrolysis?)  Have I stumbled into the publishing equivalent of Logan's Run?


(Logan's what?)

But no.  They exist.  They're out there writing books judging by the other female authors.  All three of my fellow novelists must be at least in my ball park (okay I'm downscaling, on the grounds of tact).   One of them, another mother of four, can surely remember Kenny.  She has a daughter older than mine.  Not a ruddy line on her face though, and no body fat.  I know.  I checked.  That intent look when I'm talking to you is not me being absolutely riveted by what you say (though that too) - it's me desperately trying to identify a wrinkle so I can feel less like the Cryptkeeper surrounded by nubile nymphs.

None of the authors I wanted to meet appeared.  How to meet a man after 40?  Not a sign of her.  (Get a wedding ring, I would say.  It always seemed to have a magical effect for me, albeit with the wrong sort of sleazy man who touchingly imagines being married makes you 'safe').  Or Split: 'I want a divorce.'  Surely we two would have a great deal in common?  Even The Idle Parent would have been nice to know, since its a philosophy I have long held and practiced.  

'I thought you must be the stalker woman,' said a male author.  

'No' I said, offended.  

'I meant the woman who had been stalked,' he added.

'Still no.  Though I did have a stalker once,'  I replied to his back.

'Yes, me too,' he said airily, lest I think I was special.

I asked Andrew Holgate if he was married.  'Yes, 29 years,' he replied defensively, stepping back just a tad (perhaps worried that I was about to apply my own criteria for sleaziness).

'Good,' I said.  'Please get your wife to read my book.  It's about a woman who runs away,' I add, quickly, wondering if Will Skidelsky is also married and I can lean on him for his wife before he goes.

Target audience, darling, target audience.

White out

...and then I'd just fallen asleep when the sixteen year old clumped into the bedroom and woke me up.

'Can I show you something?' she asked.

'Sure...' I replied blearily trying to give the impression of a mother who has been up all night worrying instead of comatose, couldn't care less, thought she was in bed hours ago.

'Well you could sound a bit more enthusiastic,' she scolded.

(It's the middle of the night, or it could be, and I've been sleeping, and it was lovely and I'm not ruddy enthusiastic.)

I jumped up brightly - or as bright as you can be when you're pissed off and bleary eyed, prepared to be attentive to whatever wondrous thing had happened - Britney in Rehab, Gossip Girl second series out on DVD. etc.

'You need to get up.'

(No, no, no.) I  tripped over my jeans, my shoes, stood on a stiletto heel, kicked over a glass of water and swore

She pulled back the curtains.

'It's snowing.'

Ah - so yes.  Apparently hell does freeze over.

Justin Marozzi’s Book Launch, W11

It’s slightly worrying and just a bit Woody Allen on his Bergman kick in that the house, a grand stucco edifice on one of those curling crescents on the way up the Notting Hill Gate, is slap bang next to my shrink.  I only realized the coincidence, and yes, shut up Freud, such things do exist, when I was standing outside earlier in the day ringing the bell.

As I left at the end of my session I told her that I was invited to a party later that night in the house next door.  ‘And I’m definitely going.’ I added, just incase she had also been invited and was planning on attending.   This is my social life at stake here so if there’s any risk of us running into each other outside the professional space I want it made clear from the outset that I’m not going to be the one staying home watching Coronation Street.

So lines drawn in the psychoanalytical sand,  I’m upstairs in the drawing room, drinking Prosecco, hoovering up peanuts and any canapé that is unwary enough to come within a three foot radius, mingling.  I hate mingling.  I sort of swim through the crowd looking for someone I know well enough to monopolise and then cling on to their social lifebelt like a shipwrecked sailor, and if I happen to hail a familiar face across the room, believe me I’m definitely drowning, not waving.

Luckily, literary friend is already in situ, next to an ashtray and a bowl of chocolate truffles, although no luck is involved in any part of this sentence as all has been carefully arranged including the relocation of the small bowl of confectionery, previously on a low table at the other end of the room.  Literary friend is swathed in smoke and provides a great, if odoriferous, place to hide.  She has colleagues with her, enough to look like there are a bunch of us, all terribly interested in what each other has to say which, given that they work together every day, is highly unlikely.  I have my eldest daughter with me which, given that we live together every day means the same conclusion may be drawn.

I don’t really know the author but have the good fortune to remember who he is as he strides across the room looking older and even more handsome than he did ten years ago when we last met at something FTish.  However, we share an agent, and his wife used to be my editor, and his launch party is being held in the house next door to my shrink and my friend Kate is an editor at his publishing house.  That makes me an utterly legitimate guest who is not attending under false pretences. 

I repeat this between handfuls of peanuts:  ‘Marion, you are a legitimate guest.  You are not freeloading.’ Though in my head of course (all that money spent next door, absolutely not in vain.  And then I notice the hole in the ceiling.

One of the few things that makes it bearable that other people live in houses like these is that they too probably have mice.  You are reassured that you are not the only person to have cracks big enough to push wishes into like the Wailing Wall under your windows or huge, water-stained chasms in your ceilings which small children could drop through.  The daughter who was with me followed my gaze upwards and, knowing the small fissure on our kitchen through which water drips every time someone has a shower, smiled at me in solidarity.  She remembers sitting in the Bodleian in Oxford working on her thesis when there was a scuttling sound overhead and a squirrel fell out of the ceiling and scampered off across the reading room table and disappeared behind the stack.  When she mentioned it to one of the librarians they looked at her disapprovingly and informed her that nobody else had complained.

No squirrels here.  So far.  But it is a ruddy big hole.

And that’s where the Woody Allen kicks in.  1988 Another Woman.  (The power of Google, lest you imagine I'm a film buff.  I can’t remember anything before last Tuesday unless it involves humiliation or emotional trauma when it becomes encyclopedic.)  Mia Farrow sitting spilling her soul in her shrink’s office and Gina Rowlands (coincidentally, again, forget the Freudian stuff) eavesdropping through the air conditioning vent.

Oh God.

I scanned the room for the attractive older woman who seemed to be the hostess and the dark, dapper man who was, possibly, her husband.  Their son, a friend of the author (I believe) was wandering round with a bottle in each hand.  It suddenly occurred to me that while I’m upstairs spilling in the shrink’s front room that any of these poor, unsuspecting people could be resting in their bedroom next door, listening.

Imagine.  It’s like this blog only never, ever funny.  The hairdresser without holidays.  The confession without the sin.  The city without the sex.  Is there anything worse than blabbing about your petty neuroses than the possibility of being overheard?

I looked again, right into the eyes of the young man serving the wine.  He smiled cheerfully – either a waiter, hired for the evening, or totally unperturbed by any leaking angst.  Neither one of the older couple seemed to be catatonic with boredom.  The sound of my voice didn’t send them screaming to the window ready to jump.  Very thick walls then?  Hole in ceiling not directly connected to shrink’s consulting room?  Apparently not.

I moved away from the comfort of familiar faces anyway, just to be on the safe side as an old friend, another author, rent-a-bod at London Literary Parties, and sharer of agent appeared in the doorway.  He was with a poet (it’s West London folks, what else would he be?) all self-effacing, stooped shouldered, floppy haired, Hugh Grant, cashmere jumpered and bohemian (there was probably a hole in it somewhere inconspicuous).

I waved (drowning).

Frantically.

He obliged by approaching and after several heavy hints introduced me to the poet. 

‘You’re adults, you can introduce yourselves,’ he said crossly on the third raised eyebrow and elbow dig. 

I tried to see if the poet was wearing a wedding ring or a big sign saying ‘I am gay,’ but couldn’t verify either and am smiling winningly, or grimacing wildly depending on how many glasses of wine you’ve had when the old friend announced that he had seem my husband earlier that morning at Chatham House.

‘Did he tell you he left me five months ago?’ I asked, sighing, turning to the poet adding an ex to every subsequent sentence with a husband in it.  He backed off a little in a manner suspiciously similar to that of the person (aged approximately 35) I had spoken to earlier when I introduced him to my twenty four year old daughter.

‘That’s too bad,’ said old friend.  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.  If I had known I wouldn’t have mentioned seeing him.’

Oh shut up about the husband please, I’m thinking.

‘You know I’ve been through all this myself.’  He added.  ‘We could always have a drink?’

At which point my mobile rang with a call from my sixteen year old daughter asking to be picked up. 

Woman with baggage.  See me weep.

What’s worse was that after I’d excused myself another message from my daughter arrived to say that she was getting a taxi home and didn’t want me after all.

By that time I was home.  Had missed Corrie, but still managed to catch House. 

Welcome to the club darling, welcome to the club.

I'm running a little late this morning

PS I may be some time...

Graham Rawle's launch party for The Wizard of Oz

I feel like that woman in Manet's Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, except in a studio in Shoreditch, and with messier hair.

Nevertheless, I am standing behind a bar (aka a kitchen worktop) with several rows of wine glasses in front of me and the choice of white, red or water in a loft the size of a five-a-side football pitch.

Every now and again there's a sort of grandfather clock chime (I may be making this up, but either way it's a noise) which heralds another guest, several storeys down at street level. Some minutes later, a body or two appears in the doorway and, as if genetically programmed, makes its way towards me. I hand them a glass and they go off into the throng which divides unequally into two: friends of the artist Graham Rawle and People from Atlantic (though the categories are not mutually exclusive).

The space is amazing - both cosily and quirkily domestic and the sort of place that makes your teeth ache with envy, especially if you spent any time in an Art School and ever had dreams of having your own studio. It makes my cupboard with a window in it and the garden shed with the table top press that is now buried underneath the lawn mower, pale into insignificance in the way that The Sahara is a desert and a sand box is where kids play with buckets and spades. I'm still in the sandbox, making pies. He's at the far end of the Saharan room with an enormous record collection, a brace of drawing boards, display cases of the sort you used to find in old draper's shops full of dolls and old toys set out in a little shrine to a 1950s childhood, and a jumble of disembodied dummies.

I mean, apart, that is, from the people from Atlantic.

These dummies are blank faced and fixed-eyed.

No, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic. (They're the ones with glasses in their hands.)

I'm referring to the torsos with gaping sockets, separated heads and loose arms and legs that are strung up from the ceiling like laundry hung out to dry. It's a magician's workship. A bizarre magician's workshop. Little Dorothy from Graham's Wizard of Oz illustrations poses in one of the shop cabinets next to the threadbare lion frozen in an open mouthed roar that still manages to look more pained than punitive. When I was a kid we had a doll that went on top of the Christmas Tree every year called John (so, who says angels have to be girls - ever heard of Gabriel?). John had plastic moulded hair onto which someone (me) had once stuck cotton wool, was cross eyed with one eyelid that was forever winking, and his limbs were attached to his body with elastic bands that perished annually and had to be replaced. I always wondered what happened to him. Now I know. Graham's studio is where the old, broken and bald go to live again...

And yes, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic.

We're out in force. Everybody wanted to come to this party. A large number of us are wearing silver shoes (in the book Dorothy's slippers were silver not ruby, however in the, then, exciting new world of Technicolor film, silver would have shown up on the screen as grey) although we managed to persuade MD that motorcycle boots were perhaps, in his case, more appropriate.

Beside the dummies (yep, okay, fair enough, this time I do mean two or three of us from Atlantic) twinkles the fantastic Emerald City itself. It's exquisite. Forget having a studio. If you ever wanted a model railway, or a toy farm, or a doll's house, or you ever watched Blue Peter and made a Sindy bedroom out of a cardboard box and a washing-up bottle (I confess, that sad girl was me) you can't help falling in love with the Emerald City. I want to live there. Okay, well as a consolation prize, if you insist, I'll take the studio...

In the meantime, I go back to the bar and keep pouring drinks.

More and more of Graham's friends arrive. I see a cool blonde with whom I think I may once have gone to Dorset for a weekend. She's a friend of a friend, who isn't any longer. I say hello in that awful way you do at parties when you have to first remind the person who you are, and they still look at you blankly. (To me this is called introducing yourself.) So you're stammering, clutching at any topic of conversation you can grab out of the air ('nice space' - 'mmmm very nice') and saying something stupid like: 'and how's Louise?' (the person who organised the Dorset weekend) when I saw her myself two weeks ago and I know she's fine.

I'm fine.

Lost weekend in Dorset woman's fine.

Louise is fine, her husband is fine and her kids are fine.

We're all really, really fine.

Groan.

I hate parties.

Why am I cursed with this memory that never forgets a face and the urge to go and speak to that face, just because I recognise it? It's an affliction. A mental bloody illness. In this way I once bounded up to Anna Chancellor in the actor in Portobello Road and asked her how she was because I thought I knew her. I did. From Four Weddings and a Funeral. In this way I strike up conversations with women on the bus who I am sure I know really, really well. And I do. They work on the tills at Sainsbury's. If I was once introduced to someone at a lecture at St Antony's College in Oxford in 1985 and they turn up in the offices at Atlantic Books, believe me, I will remember them.

Them, me? Not so much.

I seem to be one of those bland people that your memory erases like bleach does a stain.

So back behind the bar.

Red or white?

And, damn it, there's another face I recognise.

Don't do it Marion.

Just say no.

But I'm sure...

No, walk away from the lightbulb moment. Do not introduce yourself. You do not know this person - it is a mere quirk of memory. Walk away...

But I'm off asking Graham: 'Is that your brother?' while referring to a man who looks exactly like Graham but a little older, darker and more fashionably stubbled.

Graham sighs long sufferingly, used to this, and agrees.

'I wondered why you looked so familiar, and now I know, it's because of your brother.' (And your genius and boyish good looks, charm, modesty and talent.) But just to be on the safe side, I investigate further: 'Didn't he used to be on Drop the Dead Donkey?'

Graham nods, thinking, ah yes, another star * er.

And I'm off, across the floor in seconds, not to Graham's brother but to his wife who is wearing her mother's vintage frock - a Biba original. Sigh. If I wore my mother's vintage clothing I'd be in a pre-war wrap around pinnie with a turban and a fag in the corner of my mouth.

'Didn't you used to live in Highlever Road?' I gush.

'Yes,' she agrees, smiling (smiling - take note lost weekend in Dorset person) and within seconds we have established that we were neighbours, and that my best friend just bought their house, and, two more handshakes later, I meet Robin and her husband (okay faces I get but names? Don't even know my own after two glasses of wine) who live round the corner from me and whose kids and mine have shared a primary school.

Mwa, mwa. I'm connected.

and I love parties.