The Right Man (2 page)

I kept
walking.

Things
like this don’t happen to me. Its meaning was surely clear and yet so clichéd
as to be unbelievable. I ran it past myself several times to see if I could get
the joke. Had Sara Henderson been hired by someone? Was she a sort of ‘affair-o-gram’?
It was half past four and the sound of the traffic was getting to me. Back in
the office, the girls were already a tad pissed. As I hurriedly got my things
together to leave, a not-joining-in-ness from Naomi told me that the females
had probably been talking about me while I had been out walking.

I have
discussed infidelity often with Naomi — in theory, of course — and once or
twice with Joan and Tilda. You get to do that kind of thing if you work in an
all-female environment. They don’t like those close to them to hold differing
opinions, I’ve discovered, there has to be a sort of common ground. They want
everyone to feel the same way about things, and about men in particular. One
year they even managed somehow to synchronize their periods. That was tough on
me, as you can imagine. One thing agreed by all the women in the office was
that the secret to a good relationship is finding the right man. The moment he
shows signs of being typically like other men, non-attentive or unable to
commit, or just plain wrong, then the consensus was he should be dropped or
avoided and the search must continue.

The
irony of this wisdom as far as Naomi Ketts was concerned was that she was an
absolutely hopeless judge of character, falling again and again for charismatic
men with power, money and, inevitably, wives and children. She would announce
these disasters regularly at work and in wine bars, well, to anyone willing to
listen actually. The last one was with quite a big-shot BBC producer, whose
name I withhold, who got dropped in the franchise reshuffle and moved to
Nottingham with his wife and kids. We always knew when old Ketts had found one.
She would become indignant, self-pitying and shirty for a few months. Angry
with her lot in life. A tough and brassy woman at work, but in her lonely flat
in Highgate a hopeless co-dependent looking for big daddy. When I asked her if
the man’s wife knew, she said, ‘She must have known, everybody knew.’ It was
true that everybody did most likely know. Naomi is never the most discreet of
women when it comes to sexual matters. But in this case I suspected ‘everybody’
included everybody except the man’s wife. I felt sorry for them all, and for
Naomi’s shrink, who must have had even more of an earful of it than all of us
at Muffin and Ketts. I wondered if I was the only person in the whole of
glorious show-business who didn’t know about Bob Henderson and my Liz.

The
female orgasm, that’s the rub. That’s the blinking bafflement. With men, the
word orgasm refers to a specific moment in time: the moment of ejaculation —
or, as the Australians would have it, ‘slime’, as in ‘Have you slimed yet?’
However, with women it seems to be more of a generic term, and is something on
which surprisingly few of the women of my acquaintance seem to agree. In my
years of working in an all female environment, I have heard the female orgasm
defined in so many different ways as to warrant a sub-section in the
dictionary, like the Innuit and their supposed hundred and fifty words for
snow. Some women say they have never had an orgasm, some only when
masturbating, some are exclusively clitoral, some come all over, others from nipple
stimulation, one maintaining that only breast-feeding was truly orgasmic. Some
go multiple, others once a year. Some can only achieve fulfilment within
intimacy, others only with illicit lovers, casual sex or strangers. If the ads
are to be believed, high-calorie ice— cream has something to do with it, as do
motorcycles, chocolate, caring conversation and model boys covered in car
grease. Tania in the office flies in the face of current accepted wisdom,
claiming she can come only from repeated vaginal penetration with her boyfriend
in the missionary position. Highly unfashionable. Despite this multiplicity of
opinion, ‘You never made me come’ is still one of the worst put-downs available
to a woman when trying to humiliate an irritating mate. There is also the
faking option — unavailable to men — although my Liz would not have bothered
with that one. I sometimes wish she had; it might at least have shown willing.

Once I
timed her. I know that’s unromantic, but twenty-four minutes! Eighteen minutes
of stimulation with no sign of life from her, then a few brief minutes of
arousal — still with her eyes closed — followed by her orgasm: twenty seconds
of groaning and a slight tremble followed by silence. Maybe I should have tried
harder, been sexier, but my arm was tired. I was worried I might develop
Repetitive Strain Injury. I ran out of dirty talk after four minutes, which may
make me sound like a wimp, but four minutes is one minute longer than a pop
record and eight times longer than the average commercial.

Ever
onwards. In the half-hour I’d been out dealing with Mrs Henderson and her
theatrics there were nine call-back messages for me, three scripts to skim and
the problem of the undelivered manuscript of Neil James’s first novel to deal
with. Neil was turning into a problem client in general. A blunder kid. Too
much mopping up to do, not enough creative play.

Naomi Ketts
and I worked ridiculously hard to get this agency off the ground and keep it
flapping about in the sparkly blue. It’s taken us ten years of near obsessive
dedication. We’ve been through a lot together and now have developed a working
relationship which is completely symbiotic. Often, we don’t even need to speak,
we know what the other is thinking before it has been thought. But unlike me,
she still gets a thrill out of the whole shebang. She still flies off the
handle, shouts at the girls, gets rip-roaringly drunk to celebrate a deal
clinched. Still goes to see all the new shows. Studies the business press like
a circling vulture. Still vibrates to the electric charge of it all. She still
needs that entertainment-biz petrol.

I can’t
really call it a mid-life crisis — I’m too young for that, I hope — but in the
last couple of years I’ve definitely gone through some sort of sci-fi dooweeoo
time shuffle. Much of what goes on at work just seems, well, adolescent to me
now, and it’s definitely to do with Grace. April the fifth 1994, 2.30 a.m., 8lb
3oz. When they bunged her, covered in white stuff, her fanny all blue, into my
arms at Queen Charlotte’s that night, I had a profound feeling of something.
Not that everything else became meaningless, not that. But priorities suddenly
seemed to shift into a different focus. A new sense of proportion prevailed.

What I’ve
been trying to do since Grace was born is to narrow down my field of hands-on
operation to just seven clients, my ‘heavy seven’. Maybe a couple more: Jenny
Thompson perhaps, Simon Eggleston — Barbara Stenner of course — but basically,
keep my personal client list small enough to be able to take a more active role
in child-rearing. Ideally, I would like to work only three days a week, maybe
doing the rest from home. Obviously I could never stop seeking out new talent —
that would be unsafe — but I am very happy nowadays to delegate work on my
forty or so other clients, to Naomi or Tilda in the office. Both of whom are
more than competent.

To
succeed, to get anywhere as an agent, you have to burn with it. You have to
wake in the morning with last night’s prime-time TV ratings figures beckoning
you into consciousness. You have to put down the office phone, look at your
watch and realize that it’s half past eight at night already and that you haven’t
eaten for the last seven hours. You have to be able to keep a cast list of
names, faces and phone numbers at the forefront of your mind for fourteen hours
on the trot. For it to be fun, which it can be, requires that you engage your
third gear after breakfast, if you believe in breakfast, and keep it engaged
until bedtime. Coast along in fourth or pause to admire the view and some other
nippier vehicle will overtake you, probably picking up your passengers on the
way. I suppose it’s the same in any field of entrepreneurial work, which covers
almost everything these days since the privatizations of the late eighties. It
seems as if, traditionally, mothers and midwives knew what they were doing
keeping men away from childbirth. It’s not so much that men weren’t interested
in babies but that the women couldn’t afford to risk having their husbands lose
the plot, going all philosophical and sentimental on them, taking their hands
off the steering wheel of commerce when, as new mothers, they were most in need
of security and support, and money of course.

Not
that I’ve gone completely soft or anything. Wood and Walters no. But no one
ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’, did
they? Well, maybe my father, and that speaks for itself. To get where I am
required a finely tuned killer instinct and I don’t know whether I will be able
to stay here without it. Nowadays, for instance, when I put down the phone and
look at my watch, I’m aware of another timetable, running alongside my own: 12.30
p.m. nursery pickup — and, as of this September, 3.30 p.m. big school pick-up
—6.00 p.m. bathtime, 6.30 story and bed. The women in the office are pretty
good on the whole about me turning up later than I used to, and I leave early
now on three afternoons a week, whenever possible. Tilda’s got an
eight—year-old, so she’s the most sympathetic, but she has a live-in granny, so
it’s easier for her. Naomi got a bit stroppy at the beginning but that was fair
enough, I suppose; I was turning up zombified from lack of sleep and she had to
take the load, especially through Grace’s ear infection stage. She did badmouth
Liz a fair bit I know, but not to my face, to the others.

The
trouble is, my concentration’s gone somewhere without a paddle. These days I
seem to have a sort of twenty-four-hour undertow of concern that something bad
might happen to Grace. It’s my fault she was born after all, I got her her
first break as ‘twere, she didn’t ask for it. She didn’t write in with hopeful
ten-by-eights asking to be taken on. Well, mine and Liz’s fault, obviously.
When she stopped waking through the night I just couldn’t get myself back into
uninterrupted sleeping patterns, so I started having these recurrent nightmares
about her. Funny how the system plays tricks on one. They’d always involve some
danger she was in which I would have to get her out of by putting myself in it
instead. A kind of Abraham and Isaac in reverse. For instance, we’d be walking
along the cliffs in Cornwall or somewhere windy, the path would be steep and
rerouted due to some of the cliff having fallen away. There would even be a
danger sign and a rickety clanking fence. Grace was at the edge, not being
naughty, just there, almost as if I had put her there. The limestone began to
crumble and tufts of gorse pulled away from the path. A loud sea below
competing with the roar of the wind in our faces. The ground beneath her feet
didn’t crumble fast but slowly enough to present me with the main dilemma of
the dream, almost as if it were written on the wooden sign. I would have to
throw myself over the cliff in order to spare Grace. The cliff only needed to
claim one of us. Would I throw myself to the shingle below? I would. Indeed it
was almost as if I had brought us to this dangerous point for that very
purpose. Some kind of primordial deal with the devil.

And
that’s another thing, since the little bleeder was born I seem to have been in
touch with something elemental, something primeval. Some force which isn’t
about happy couples putting up wallpaper together like in the ads, or about
couples at all, something which is altogether unknowable, which is a matter of
life and death. My death, Grace’s life. As if now she’s here I no longer really
matter. As if there were some tide which has blown me to the edge of relevance
like an amateur wind-surfer on the horizon whose disappearance is a mere
holiday statistic. From now on my job is to be benign because what else is
left? A player no more, a carer from here on in. My career a mere shelter
providing domicile, my grandiose dreams redundant, my nightmares flabby
fiction. Suicide would now be merely an insult to those who needed me.
Everything must bend like the wind-blown branches of an ancient oak to the
whims of Grace’s survival.

I took
Neil James’s bloody unfinished manuscript out of its used brown envelope and
scanned through the first few pages, trying to see a point.
The Right Man
by
Neil James. Not another novel by a TV comedian. That had been my first, but of
course unexpressed reaction. A funny thing seems to happen as soon as somebody
gets successful in a certain field in this business. They immediately set about
seeing how grandly they can fail in other fields. Pop stars want to be actors
or charity workers, actors want to be pop stars or politicians, writers want to
be stand-up comics, and TV comedians, as we all know, have to write rip-roaring,
roller-coasting novels. I wonder what real novelists want.

Of
course this mass envy-pre-emption exercise can be very useful for someone in my
position. It can take me into new areas, where there is new talent to be found.
I hate putting it like this, but I have always been very talent-led. Talent
will lead you to other talent, and Neil had done that for me several times
before, unbeknownst to him, of course.

Despite
certain initial doubts, more to do with a somewhat saturated market area than
with my faith in Neil’s as yet untried ability as a novelist, I went along with
it. The publishers were keen, and seemed to have inspired Neil with confidence
after their initial meeting with him — at some rained-off charity cricket match
for Children in Need, I believe it was. Now the poor bod needed rescuing.
Sandra Subtlety would be required.