The Murdstone Trilogy (2 page)

‘Table for two,’ she’d said, breezing in. ‘Name of Cinch. Thanks.’

Philip had ordered the Mexican Platter and been given an enormous square plate upon which, apparently, a cat had been sick in neat heaps around a folded pancake. The heaps were necklaced together by what looked like thin red jam. One of the things the cat had eaten was green.

Minerva used an opaline fingernail to remove a pomegranate seed from her teeth. She dabbed it onto the tablecloth. In its tiny smear of red flesh it resembled something left over from the dissection of a small mammal.

She said, ‘I think the problem is, darling, that you’ve lost your appetite.’

‘No,’ he said robustly. ‘This is delicious, honestly. You can’t get this sort of thing in Devon.’

Minerva held her hand up. ‘I’m not talking about the food, Philip. I’m talking about your
work
. And not just your work, OK, but about your
motive
.’

‘Ah,’ Philip said. He poured more Moldovan Pinot
Grigio into his glass, pretending to be thoughtful. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

She sighed like a teacher. ‘This isn’t easy for me, OK? But let’s get down to basics. Philip, why do you write novels for kids, sorry, young adults?’

‘Well, God, what a question. I mean. You’re my agent.’

‘Yes, for my sins. So. You write for kids because you have a unique insight into the pain of childhood. No one, and I mean
no one
, has ever written so sensitively, so poetically, about a child with learning difficulties as you did in
First Past the Post
. A wonderful, wonderful book. It deserved all those prizes. It broke new ground. It made Asperger’s cool.’

‘
Last
,’ Philip said.

‘Pardon?’

‘It’s
Last Past the Post
. You said
First
.’

‘Sorry. Anyway, you’ve made that whole area, you know, boys who’re inadequate, your own. Which may be why no one is writing that kind of thing any more. In your five lovely sensitive novels you’ve said all there is to say.’

‘Well, gosh, I don’t know about that. I mean, in the new book I think I’ve gone into a whole new, er, dimension.’

‘You mean football?’

‘Well, not just the football …’

‘The football is cool,’ Minerva said. ‘Definitely a selling point right now.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not really
about
football, obviously.’

‘Right, OK, and that’s Problem One. Have you ever actually played football, darling?’

‘Well, no, not really, but—’

‘I didn’t think so. But that doesn’t matter, you were about to say, because
Sent Off
isn’t really about football. It’s about a sensitive adopted boy of mixed race with learning difficulties who’s good at football and believes his real father might be a Premiership footballer and so he sets out to make contact with him and gets rejected and then realizes that he doesn’t need a paternal role model because he has his own inner strengths. Basically.’

‘Well, yes, and—’

‘And I can’t sell it,’ Minerva said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I’ve walked the length and breadth of this city on my knees and begged and wept and no one wants to publish another book about sensitive retarded boys. Even with football in it.’

‘Ah,’ Philip said. He gulped wine.

Minerva studied him. He was still good-looking, in a crumply vicar sort of way. He was still recognizably the seriously smiling young man whose photograph appeared on the jackets of his books. The hair was untouched by grey, and it was rather sweet that even at his age he still didn’t know where to get a decent cut. The skin tone was starting to go, though; his face had the texture of an apple that had been left just a teeny bit too long in the fruit bowl. She wondered, briefly and more or less professionally, whether he’d had any sex recently. Since
Tony Blair was Prime Minister, say. She dabbed the edges of her lipstick with the paper napkin, sighed, and put the boot in.

‘And, darling, I’ve just seen the sales figures for
Waldo Chicken.’

Bravely, he looked at her.

‘Three hundred and thirteen,’ she said.

‘Christ. No. But – but it got great reviews, Minerva!’

‘
One
great review. In
Merry-go-Round
. By Toby Chervil. Who owes me a favour. About whom I know a thing or two. To be fair, there’s also been a couple of so-so blogs, but you won’t have seen those, of course.’

Philip had the stricken, disbelieving face of a man who returns home to find a dead cow in his living room.

After several attempts to say something angry or dignified he blurted ‘What are we going to
do
?’

Minerva reached across and laid a gentle hand on his wrist. ‘Move on,’ she said. ‘Surprise everybody. Get hungry again.’ She removed the hand and wiggled it at the waiter who had been leaning on the bar, ogling her. He came over to the table as though it were only one of several entertaining options available to him.

‘Some sing else?’ he said.

‘
Fantasy
?’ Philip repeated the word in a whisper, as if it were something shockingly filthy that might have been overheard at the neighbouring tables.

‘Or, to be more precise,’ Minerva said, ‘
High
Fantasy. Sometimes spelled
Phantasy
, with a pee-aitch.’

‘And what is that when it’s at home in its pyjamas?’

‘Tolkien with knobs on,’ Minerva said. ‘Necromancers. Dark Forces. Quests. For Mystical Objects that have got lost, usually. Goblins, gnomes, faeries, often also spelled with a pee-aitch. Dwarves. Beards. Time and dimension shifts. Books with a deep serious message that no one understands. You know.’

‘Oh, God. Minerva, you can’t be serious. You know I can’t write that stuff! I
hate
Tolkien. I mean. Bloody pretentious escapist nonsense, isn’t it? And you know, come on, it’s not my
genre
.’

‘Philip, darling. You are actually in no position to get all mimsy about your genre. Your genre, which you more or less invented, OK, the Sensitive Dippy Boy genre, lovely as it is, isn’t
selling
. Fantasy, on the other hand, is flying off the shelves. It’s selling by bucketloads, contain-erloads, downloads. You know why? Because it’s what kids want to read. Especially sensitive dippy boys.’

Philip managed a reasonably good impersonation of a British POW ignoring a serious flesh wound. ‘You can be harsh, Minerva. Did you know that? This pudding is disgusting, by the way.’

‘I told you not to order it. Now listen, OK? I’m going to tell you something. Three months ago, a manuscript landed on my desk. A huge great wodge of paper, typed. Years since I’d seen such a thing. I nearly put my back out trying to lift it. It was called
The Talisman of Sooth
.’

Philip groaned.

‘The author is a Baptist minister and part-time masseur
from Huddersfield. He wrote it, he said, in a three-month phrenzy of inspiration. I skimmed the first couple of chapters, then gave it to Evelyn to read.’

‘Evelyn?’

‘Evelyn Dent, my PA. She likes that sort of thing. She came in late the next day, all hollow-eyed, and said it was triff. So I gritted my loins and had another go at it. It had no structure, no character development, just one mad thing after another at breakneck pace. Dead religious, of course. The White Necromancer turns out to be a thinly disguised Jesus in a pointy hat.’

‘Well, of course,’ Philip said, ‘they usually—’

Minerva raised a shapely hand to silence him. ‘Three weeks later – just
three
, darling, OK? – I sold
The Talisman of Sooth
to Pegasus Books for an advance of … well, let’s just say not far short of a bent banker’s bonus. Plus, there are so many American publishers climbing all over each other to get it that I’m going to have to hold an auction. And last week I agreed a fee of a half of a mill for the computer game rights. I’m flying out to LA on Tuesday to close the deal.’

Philip shook his head slowly. ‘The world’s gone mad,’ he said, as if he were alone.

‘The dogs bark but the caravan goes by,’ Minerva said.

He squinted at her suspiciously. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means, darling, that you’ve got to decide whether you are a tethered dog barking in the night or part of
the caravan. Or the bandwagon, if you prefer. Do you know the last thing Wayne Dimbleby at Pegasus said to me, after we’d shaken hands on the
Talisman
deal? He said, “Minerva, dear heart, you don’t happen to have any more where this came from, do you?” He was practically
begging
. “I might have,” says I.’ She leaned back in her chair and fixed her client with a firedrake eye.

‘Minerva, I told you. I can’t write that dreadful hobbity stuff. I just simply …
can’t
.’

‘Of course you can,’ Minerva said quite sharply. ‘You’re a professional, Philip. You could turn your hand to anything, if you put your mind to it.’

Philip clasped his hands together until the knuckles whitened. ‘Minerva, please. Listen to me. I—’

‘No, darling. You listen to me for just another tiny minute. Your total income for last year, from all five books, OK, was twelve grand and some change. My share of that was a measly eighteen hundred quid plus VAT. Now, you may be perfectly content in your badgery little cottage living on poached mice and hedge fruit, but my tastes run a little richer. Eighteen hundred hardly pays for lunch for a week. Unless you eat here, of course. People are starting to wonder why I keep you on. And to be frank, darling, in my stronger moments so am I.’

‘You can’t mean that,’ Philip cried, aghast. ‘Don’t say that. I mean, good lord, it’s true that I’m having a bit of a dip at the moment, but—’

‘It’s not a dip, Philip. It’s a ditch. It’s a rather deep
trench. One might almost say a canyon filled with darkest night.’

‘Well, I think that’s—’

‘Write me a phantasy, Philip. Let’s make lots of money. Then if you don’t like being rich you can go back to writing about loopy boys. That’s fair, isn’t it?’

‘But Minerva,
Minerva
,’ he wailed. ‘I don’t know how to do it!’ He seized her hand in both of his.

‘Oh, come on, Philip. It’s not quantum physics. There’s a
formula
.’

‘Is there?’

‘Of course. I’ll show you. Would you like a brandy first?’

‘Oh God, yes please.’

Minerva spoke rapidly, simultaneously scrawling key words and sentences on the back of a sheet of scrap paper taken from her bag. She wrote in purple-ink felt-tip. The scrap paper was the tragic final page of Philip Murdstone’s manuscript of
Sent Off.

‘So. The world – “Realm” is the proper term – of High Fantasy is sort of medieval. Well, pre-industrial, anyway. Something like Devon, I imagine. Vaguely socialist, in an idyllic, farmerish – is that a word? – sort of a way. But the Realm has fallen under the power of a Dark Lord who wants to change everything. He was probably a decent sort of a guy originally, but went mental when he got a sniff of power or got snubbed or something. You know. Anyway, the Dark Lord is served by minions. That’s a
word you
must
use, OK? The top minions are the Dark Sorcerers. Some of them conspire against the Dark Lord, but he is much cleverer than they are and always finds out what they are up to and does terrible things to them. Below the Dark Sorcerers there are hordes of brutish warriors. They’re usually something like warthogs wearing leather armour and are called Dorcs. The oppressed subjects of the Realm are of three sorts. There are dwarves, who live under the ground in old mines, burrows, that sort of thing. Then there are elves. They live in, up, or under trees. Finally, there are sort of humans. Some of them live in walled cities, some live in funny little hamlets a bit like whatsitsname, the one you live in. All three types can do magic, but it’s pretty feeble stuff compared to the heavy magic the Sorcerers can do.’

She underlined ‘feeble magic’ and ‘heavy magic’.

‘I could murder a cigarette,’ Philip said.

‘In a minute. The young hero lives in a remote village in the furthest Shire – that’s another must,
Shire
, OK – of the Realm. He thinks he’s an orphan, but he’s a prince, of course. He’s being brought up by nice doddery old sort of humans. They probably get slaughtered by Dorcs and he has to flee. Somehow or other he becomes the apprentice of a Greybeard who is a Good Sorcerer, the last of the Twelve High Magi or somesuch. He knows the true parentage of the hero, but doesn’t tell him. He does instruct the hero in the rules and uses of Magick – that’s magic with a
kay
– but otherwise keeps him in the dark about what the hell is going on. The hero passes various tests
and ordeals, sort of like Mystical GCSEs, then he gets a magick sword. The sword has to have a name. That’s important, OK?’

Minerva underlined
sword has name
three times.

‘What sort of a name?’ Philip asked, dazed.

‘Something a bit Welsh-sounding is usually OK. Something you can’t pronounce if you’ve got a normal set of teeth, you know? Oh, and on the subject of names generally, it’s a good idea to stick an apostrophe in where you wouldn’t normally expect one. So. Where was I? Ah yes. Then the Greybeard disappears, or dies. Towards the end of the story the hero acquires an even more powerful and more mysterious mentor. He’ll be a Whitebeard, not a Greybeard. But before that the hero has to go on a Quest. This is terribly important, Philip, OK? You’ve simply got to have a Quest.’

She wrote QUEST in purple capitals.

‘Really?’ Philip tried to sound arch. ‘Surprising as it may seem, I am
dimly
aware of the importance of the quest in children’s fiction. All great children’s books are quest narratives. I think it’s fair to say that my own novels might be seen as contemporary versions of—’

‘Yes, darling, of course. But in the kind of quest I’m talking about, the hero has to overcome
real
dragons, not gropey games masters or embittered ladies from Social Services.’

When Philip had recovered from this stabbing he said, rather meekly, ‘Dragons are compulsory, are they?’