The Ingredients of Love (7 page)

I expected an answer—to my letter and my questions—and the prospect of getting to know the author who had ended his story in Le Temps des Cerises was exciting. But by no means as exciting as what then actually happened.

 

Four

The earth seemed to have swallowed Adam Goldberg. He didn't answer, and I became more nervous with every hour that passed. Since the previous evening I had tried to reach him again and again. The fact that someone could theoretically be called on four different numbers and was still, when it came down to it, unreachable, filled me with hatred for the digital age.

In his office in London the answering machine—whose announcement I by now knew by heart—just kept picking up. No one answered his business cell phone either—I could leave a message and the subscriber would also be informed of my call by text: how comforting! The telephone at his home number rang for several minutes before the answering machine cut in—with the babbling voice of Tom, Adam's six-year-old son.

“Hi, the Goldbergs are not at home. But don't you worry—we'll be back soon and then we can taaaaalk…” Then came some giggles and crackles and then the additional information that the head of the Goldberg family could be reached on his private cell phone if the matter was really urgent.

“In urgent cases you can reach Adam Goldberg on his mobile…” More crackling, then a whisper. “What's your mobile number, Daddy?” And then the child's voice recited another telephone number at full volume—one I didn't know. If you dialed this number, another friendly robotic voice informed you, “This number is temporarily unavailable, please try again later,” and this time there wasn't even the chance to leave a message—just the instruction to “try again later.” I ground my teeth.

Back in the office, I wrote to the literary agency first thing in the morning in the hope that, wherever Adam was, he would at least pick up his e-mail.

Dear Adam, I'm trying everything to reach you. Where on earth are you?! All hell's been let loose here!!! Please ring me back URGENTLY, preferably on my cell phone. It's about our author, Robert Miller, who's got to come to Paris. Yours, André.

A minute later the reply came, and I sighed with relief, until I opened the message:

Sorry, I'm out of the office. In an emergency you can reach me on my mobile number.

What can I say? The number was the one that, when you called it, was temporarily unavailable. And so the circle was completed.

I tried to work. I looked through manuscripts, answered e-mail, wrote some jacket copy, drank what felt like my hundred-and-fiftieth espresso, and watched my phone. It rang many times that morning, but my friend and business colleague Adam Goldberg was never at the other end of the line.

The first to ring was Hélène Bonvin, a French author who was very nice—and very time-consuming. She was always either writing away like mad, in which case she'd tell me about every minuscule idea she'd put down on paper—and if it had been up to her, she'd probably have liked to read me the whole manuscript over the phone. Or she would be suffering from writer's block, and then I had to do my utmost to convince her that she really was a superb writer.

This time it was the writer's block.

“I'm totally empty. I have no ideas whatsoever,” she lamented.

“Oh, Hélène, that's what you say every time, and you always end up producing a fine novel.”

“Not this time,” she said in a gloomy voice. “The whole thing's a mess from start to finish. Do you know what, André? Yesterday I spent the whole day in front of this stupid machine, and in the evening I deleted everything I'd written because it was simply atrocious. Platitudinous, no ideas, and full of clichés. No one will want to read something like that.”

“But, Hélène, it's not like that at all. You write so wonderfully—just read the enthusiastic reviews by our readers on Amazon. And anyway it's perfectly normal to feel a bit off from time to time. Perhaps you should just take a day off and write nothing. Then your ideas will start to flow again. You'll see.”

“No. I've got a really funny feeling. It's not going to work. We'd better just forget about this novel … and I…”

“What nonsense you're talking!” I interrupted her. “You want to throw in the towel just as you've reached the home stretch? The book is already as good as finished.”

“Maybe. But it's no
good,
” she replied stubbornly. “I'd have to rewrite the whole thing. Basically, I might as well delete it all.”

I sighed. It was always the same with Hélène Bonvin. While most authors that I worked with circled anxiously around the first pages of their work and took unbelievably long to wind themselves up to get started, this woman always had her panic attacks when three-quarters of the manuscript was already written. Then suddenly nothing pleased her anymore, everything was total garbage, the worst thing she'd ever written.

“Now, Hélène, just listen to me. You're not deleting anything! Send me what you've written so far, and I'll look at it right away. Then we'll talk about it, okay? I bet it'll be fantastic as always.”

I talked to Hélène Bonvin for another ten minutes before hanging up, exhausted. Then I stood up and went into the secretary's office, where Madame Petit was just having a gossip with Mademoiselle Mirabeau.

“Has Adam Goldberg called?” I asked, and Madame Petit, who had this morning swathed her baroque form in a brightly colored dress with large flowers, smiled at me over her coffee cup.

“No, Monsieur Chabanais,” was her friendly reply. “I would have told you at once. Just one of the translators, Monsieur Favre, who had a couple more questions, but he'll call back later. And … oh yes, your mother called and wants you to ring back urgently.”

“For heaven's sake!” I raised my hands in self-defense. Whenever my mother asked me to ring back urgently, it cost me at least an hour. But it was never urgent.

Unlike me, the old dear had plenty of time, and she loved to call me at work because there was always someone there to pick up the phone. If I wasn't available, she would chat to Madame Petit, whom she found “totally charming.” I had once given Maman my number at work—for emergencies. Unfortunately, her idea of what constituted an emergency differed sharply from mine, and she had the uncanny knack of calling precisely when I was on the hop, when I had to rush to a meeting or was under severe pressure reading a manuscript that should if possible go to the typesetter by the afternoon.

“Just imagine, old Orban has fallen from his ladder while he was picking cherries, and now he's lying in the hospital … a fractured hip! What do you say to that? I mean … does he have to climb around in trees at his age?”

“Maman, please! I haven't got time right now!”

“
Mon Dieu,
André, you're always in such a state,” she would then say, and you couldn't mistake the reproachful tone in her voice. “I thought you'd be interested; after all, you spent so much time at the Orbans' as a child…”

As a rule these conversations ended unhappily. Either I was actually sitting at my desk and let the conversation flow over me and then said “Aha!” or “Oh dear!” so often at the wrong time that my mother would eventually cry out indignantly, “André, are you actually listening to me?” or I would interrupt her immediately, snapping “I can't talk to you now!” and then have to listen to her saying I was extremely uptight and probably wasn't eating properly.

Then to prevent Maman being upset with me for a century or so I would have to promise to call her from home in the evening “at leisure.”

And so it was better for all concerned if she didn't get through to me at work. “If my mother calls, just tell her I'm in a meeting and I'll get back to her in the evening,” I had constantly impressed on Madame Petit—but our secretary always took Maman's side.

“But, Monsieur Chabanais—she is your
mother,
after all!” she would say when she had disregarded my orders yet again. And when she really wanted to annoy me, she would add: “I also find you're sometimes a bit highly strung.”

“Listen, Madame Petit,” I now said with a threatening look. “I'm under a bit of pressure and under no … under no circumstances are you to put my mother through. And no one else who's going to waste my time—unless it's Adam Goldberg or someone from his agency. I hope I have made myself clear!”

Pretty little Mademoiselle Mirabeau looked at me wide-eyed. When I'd taken her under my wing in her first week and patiently explained to her the way things worked in the editorial department, she had smiled at me admiringly and finally said that I was just like that nice English publisher in the film of John le Carré's thriller
The Russia House
—the one with the brown eyes and the beard—but younger, of course.

I'd found that rather flattering. Well, I mean, what man would not like to be Sean Connery as a British gentleman publisher (but younger, of course): not only well read, but also intelligent enough to pull the wool over the eyes of all the world's secret services. Now I saw her dismayed look and ran a hand roughly over my short-trimmed beard. She probably thought I was an ogre.

“As you wish, Monsieur Chabanais,” replied Madame Petit sharply. And as I went out I heard her say to Mademoiselle Mirabeau: “Is he in a lousy mood today! And yet his mother is such a delightful old lady…”

I slammed my office door and fell into my seat. I stared morosely at my computer screen and studied the reflection of my face on the dark blue surface. No, I had nothing at all in common with good old Sean today. Except that I was still waiting to be called back by an agent, who admittedly didn't have any secret documents but did share a secret with me.

Adam Goldberg was Robert Miller's agent. For some years now this eloquent, clever Englishman had run his little literary agency in London with great success and we had got on with each other from the moment we first talked. Since then we had been through so many book fairs and at least as many enjoyable evenings in London clubs and Frankfurt bars that we had become good friends. It was also he who had offered me Robert Miller's manuscript and sold it to me for a relatively modest sum.

At least that was the official version.

“Well done, André!” Monsieur Monsignac had said when I told him that the contract was safely signed, and I had felt a little low.

“Now don't get your knickers in a twist,” Adam had said with a grin. “Opale wanted a Stephen Clarke, and now you've got one. You'll definitely bring in enough to cover the advance, and you'll save on the translation. Couldn't be better.”

And now everything had gone a bit too well, and the demands were increasing. Who would ever have imagined that Robert Miller's little Parisian novel would sell so well?

I flopped down in my chair and thought back to the time when I'd been at the Frankfurt Book Fair sitting in Jimmy's Bar with Adam and told him about the kind of book our publishing firm was looking for.

On the wings of several cold, alcoholic drinks I had sketched out the rough outlines of a possible plot and asked him to keep a lookout for a novel like that.

“Sorry, but I haven't got anything like that on offer at the moment,” Adam had answered. And then he had offhandedly said, “But I like the plot. My compliments. Why don't you actually write the book yourself? Then I can sell it to Éditions Opale.”

And that was how it all started.

At first I'd turned him down with a laugh. “What an idea! Never. I couldn't. I edit novels, I don't
write
them!”

“Bullshit,” Adam had said. “You've already worked with so many authors that you know how it works. You have original ideas, a good feeling for building up suspense, no one writes e-mails as funny as yours—and as for Stephen Clarke, you could beat him with one hand tied behind your back.”

Three hours and several mojitos later I was almost beginning to feel like I was Hemingway.

“But I can't write the book under my own name,” I objected. “I
work
for the company.”

“You don't have to, man! Who writes under their own name these days? That's really a bit old school. I actually represent some authors who have two or three names and write for different publishers under them. John le Carré is really called David Cornwell. We'll invent a nice pseudonym for you,” Adam said. “How about Andrew Ballantine?”

“Andrew Ballantine?” I pulled a face. “There's already a publisher called Ballantine, and as for Andrew—I'm André, and I'm buying the thing, people might feel…”

“Okay, okay, wait, I've got it: Robert Miller! What do you say? It's so normal that it sounds really genuine.”

“And if things go pear-shaped?”

“They won't. You write your little book, I offer it to your company—or rather to you. I'll deal with all the contracts. You'll make a tidy pile, things like that always sell. You'll get your royalties. Old man Monsignac will finally have his novel à la Stephen Clarke. And ultimately everyone will be happy. And Bob's your uncle.”

Adam clinked his mojito glass against mine. “To Robert Miller! And his novel? Or are you chicken? No risk, no fun. Come on, it'll be a great lark!” He laughed like a little boy.

I looked at Adam sitting cheerfully before me. Suddenly everything seemed so simple. And when I thought of my unspectacular salary and my permanent overdraft, the idea of an extra source of income was very tempting. No matter how good this profession was, as an editor, even as an editor in chief, you didn't exactly earn a massive amount—far from it. Many editors I knew worked as translators in their free time, or produced all kinds of Christmas or other anthologies to bump up their meager pay. The book trade was not the automobile trade. But at least the people had more interesting faces.