'How old are you?' he said abruptly, breaking off in mid flow.

I said with my mouth full, 'Thirty-two.'

'You look younger.'

I didn't know whether 'good' or 'sorry' was appropriate, so I merely smiled and went on eating.

'Could you write a biography?' Again the abruptness.

'I don't know. Never tried.'

'I'd do it myself,' he said belligerently, 'but I haven't got time.'

I nodded understandingly. If there was one biography I didn't want to cut my teeth on, I thought, it was his. Much too difficult.

Ronnie fetched up beside him and wheeled him away, and in between finishing the beef-and-chutney and listening to Daisy's problems with scrambled software I watched Ronnie across the room nodding his head placatingly under Tremayne's barrage of complaints. Eventually, when all that was left on the plates were a few pallidly wilting threads of cress, Ronnie said a firm farewell to Tremayne, who still didn't want to go.

'There's nothing I can usefully offer at the moment,' Ronnie was saying, shaking an unresponsive hand and practically pushing Tremayne doorwards with a friendly clasp on his shoulder. 'But leave it to me. I'll see what I can do. Keep in touch.'

With ill grace Tremayne finally left, and without any hint of relief Ronnie said to me, 'Come along then, John. Sorry to have kept you all this time,' and led the way back to his room.

'Tremayne asked if I'd ever written a biography,' I said, taking my former place on the visitors' side of the desk.

Ronnie gave me a swift glance, settling himself into his own padded dark green leather chair and swivelling gently from side to side as if in indecision. Finally he came to a stop and asked, 'Did he offer you the job?'

'Not exactly.'

'My advice to you would be not to think of it.' He gave me no time to a.s.sure him that I wouldn't, and went straight on, 'It's fair to say he's a good racehorse trainer, well known in his own field. It's fair to say he's a better man than you would have guessed today. It's even fair to agree he's had an interesting life. But that isn't enough. It all depends on the writing.' He paused and sighed. 'Tremayne doesn't really believe that. He wants a big name because of the prestige, but you heard him, he thinks anyone can write. He doesn't really know the difference.'

'Will you find him someone?' I asked.

'Not on the terms he's looking for.' Ronnie considered things. 'I suppose I can tell you,' he said, 'as he made an approach to you. He's asking for a writer to stay in his house for at least a month, to go through all his cuttings and records and interview him in depth. None of the top names will do that, they've all got other lives to lead. Then he wants seventy per cent of royalty income which isn't going to amount to much in any case. No top writer is going to work for thirty per cent.'

'Thirty per cent- including the advance?'

'Right. An advance no bigger than yours, if I could get one at all.'

'That's starvation.'

Ronnie smiled. 'Comparatively few people live by writing alone. I thought you knew that. Anyway,' he leaned forward, dismissing Tremayne and saying more briskly, 'about these American rights-'

It seemed that a New York literary agent, an occasional a.s.sociate of Ronnie's, had asked my publishers routinely whether they had anything of interest in the pipeline. They had steered him back to Ronnie. Would I, Ronnie asked, care to have him send a copy of my ma.n.u.script to the American agent, who would then, if he thought the book saleable in the American market, try to find it an American publisher.

I managed to keep my mouth shut but was gaping and gasping inside.

'Well?' Ronnie said.

'I- er- I'd be delighted,' I said.

'Thought you would. Not promising anything, you realise. He's just taking a look.'

'Yes.'

'If you remember we gave your publisher here only British and Commonwealth rights. That leaves us elbowroom to manoeuvre.' He went on for a while discussing technicalities and possibilities his pendulum way. I was left with a feeling that things might be going to happen but on the other hand probably not. The market was down, everything was difficult, but the publishing machine needed constant fodder and my book might be regarded as a bundle of hay. He would let me know, he said, as soon as he got an opinion back from the New York agent.

'How's the new book coming along?' he asked.

'Slowly.'

He nodded. 'The second one's always difficult. But just keep going.'

'Yes.'

He rose to his feet, looking apologetically at his waiting paperwork, shaking my hand warmly in farewell. I thanked him for the lunch. Any time, he said automatically, his mind already on his next task, and I left him and walked along the pa.s.sage, stopping at Daisy's desk on the way out.

'You're sending my ma.n.u.script to America,' I said, zipping up my jacket and bursting to tell someone, anyone, the good news.

'Yes,' she beamed. 'I posted it last Friday.'

'Did you indeed!'

I went on out to the lift not sure whether to laugh or be vaguely annoyed at Ronnie's asking permission for something he had already done. I wouldn't have minded at all if he'd simply told me he'd sent the book off. It was his job to do the best for me that he could; I would have thought it well within his rights.

I went down two floors and out into the bitter afternoon air thinking of the steps that had led to his door.

Finishing the book had been one thing, finding a publisher another. The six small books I'd previously written, though published and on sale to the public, had all been part of my work for the travel firm who had paid me pretty well for writing them besides sending me to far-flung places to gather the knowledge. The travel firm owned the guides and published them themselves, and they weren't in the market for novels.

I'd taken my precious typescript personally to a small but well-known publisher (looking up the address in the phone book) and had handed it to a pretty girl there who said she would put it in the slush pile and get round to it in due course.

The slush pile, she explained, showing dimples, was what they called the heap of unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts that dropped through their letter-box day by day. She would read my book while she commuted. I could return for her opinion in three weeks.

Three weeks later, the dimples still in place, she told me my book wasn't really 'their sort of thing', which was mainly 'serious literature', it seemed. She suggested I should take it to an agent, who would know where to place it. She gave me a list of names and addresses.

'Try one of those,' she said. 'I enjoyed the book very much. Good luck with it.'

I tried Ronnie Curzon for no better reason than I'd known where to find his office, as Kensington High Street lay on my direct walk home. Impulse had led to good and bad all my life, but when I felt it strongly, I usually followed it. Ronnie had been good. Opting for poverty had been so-so. Accepting Tremayne's offer was the pits.

CHAPTER 2.

As I walked back to Chiswick from Ronnie's office, I hadn't the slightest intention of ever meeting Tremayne Vickers again. I forgot him. I thought of the present book I was writing: especially of how to get one character down from a runaway, experimental helium-filled balloon with its air pumps out of order. I had doubts about the balloon. Maybe I'd rethink the whole thing. Maybe I'd sc.r.a.p what I'd done and start again. The character in the balloon was s.h.i.tting himself with fear. I thought I knew how he felt. The chief unexpected thing I'd learned from writing fiction was fear of getting it wrong.

The book that had been accepted, which was called Long Way Home, was about survival in general and in particular about the survival, physical and mental, of a bunch of people isolated by a disaster. Hardly an original theme, but I'd followed the basic advice to write about something I knew, and survival was what I knew best.

In the interest of continuing to survive for another week or ten days, I stopped at the supermarket nearest to the friend's aunt's house and spent my food allotment on enough provisions for the purpose: bunch of packet soups, loaf of bread, box of spaghetti, box of porridge oats, pint of milk, a cauliflower and some carrots. I would eat the vegetables raw whenever I felt like it, and otherwise enjoy soup with bread in it, soup on spaghetti and porridge with milk. Items like tea, Marmite and salt cropped up occasionally. Crumpets and b.u.t.ter came at scarce intervals when I could no longer resist them. Apart from all that I bought once a month a bottle of vitamin pills to stuff me full of any oddments I might be missing and, dull though it might seem and in spite of frequent hunger, I had stayed in resounding good health all along.

I opened the front door with my latchkey and met the friend's aunt in the hall.