Conversations With Mr. Prain Read online

  When I returned to the counter, Mr. Prain was holding the draft of the poem. Something fizzy welled up in my abdomen.

  “Can I read more of your work sometime? That novel, for example?” His manner was courteous and, now, calculating.

  I looked at him saying this as if I were lip-reading from a distance.

  “What?” I said.

  “A selection of your work,” he repeated. “May I read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be back in two weeks, if you could have something ready.”

  “All right.”

  “Good. Well. Bye then.”

  I don’t remember him leaving. I stood as motionless as a statue, as the cliché goes. I moved only when someone asked to buy a book, and broke the spell.

  A selection. I spent thirteen days reading and sorting to find a truly representative sample of my best material. I printed out stories again so everything looked tidy, with no pages curled or torn, as if it were a competition in which you scored points for neatness. I bought pink ribbon to tie around different categories: poems, short stories, the novel. I covered an A4-sized box with black paper to make it look solid and impressive, and stuck labels with my name at a corner of the top and on two sides, so it would not get lost.

  The designated day began with fine weather, but by lunch-time there were intermittent squally showers and a north wind. Some stallkeepers closed up. Some were fighting not to have their wares blown away and soaked. Nevertheless, crowds of people animated by the power of positive thinking had decided to stay on in Camden in case it ceased raining and turned back into a bright, shiny day. This was not to be, and they sought comfort inside the proper buildings and covered areas of the Market, watching things fly past, waiting for the worst of it to pass. I counted twenty-three people in my stall. Their dripping clothing and bags were speckling the books with water. They had despondent, guilty faces as they looked over the shelves, knowing that they were only inside to keep dry. They were even buying cheap books from the bargain bin in a hope of convincing me that their intentions were genuine. The rain lashed in and seeped through on to the stock, while I anxiously covered it with sheets of plastic. Then I sat guarding my black box amid the kerfuffle, telling the paper cup of tepid tea upon my counter, “he won’t come.” But he did, at 4.30 p.m., when the people had gone and I was thinking of shutting up my lot and going home.

  “Hello,” he said, rather brightly. “Sorry I’m a bit on the late side. Ghastly weather, isn’t it?”

  “Awful,” I agreed.

  He was wearing a tailored raincoat and a brown hat and somehow managed to appear unnaturally dry and glossy, as if he had just stepped out of a magazine feature on businessmen of the year.

  I was nervous. No longer was he the gentleman whose hankering for different conversation forced him into the chaos of Camden Market; he was a publisher. My reactions had now been transformed into awe. He was God’s mercy incarnate, which had dropped—as the ungentle rain from heaven—into my humble bookstall. He had descended from his modern, multistorey West End offices to offer hope. He, who was Coymans Publishing Company, had asked to read my work. He had perceived a spark of talent in that one poem. He was giving me a chance to prove that I was worthy, that I really could write, that my novel could be published to widespread critical acclaim. All those years of writing in the night could suddenly come to something. I felt speechless. I, who ordinarily chattered freely, had nothing to say. I smiled that false smile one offers to cameras.

  “Is this your selection?” he asked, in good spirits.

  “Yes.”

  “My word, you have been industrious. I thought I would get a Manilla folder.” He spoke as if I were a child who had done a very large school project. I felt a little like a child who had done a very large school project. I busied myself finding a plastic bag in which the box of typescripts could be protected from the elements. He said he had managed to park his car very nearby, and so a bag was unnecessary. I deemed that it was. I felt him looking down upon me as I rummaged through packing materials and paper bags under the counter in an effort to find something suitable. Someone came to stand beside him: a punctured Punk with a pound coin in one hand and a book in the other. Distractedly, I took the money and let him go away without checking the price inside, and put the coin in my pocket to ring up later. I was flustered and determined not to show it. Mr. Prain seemed buoyant and in a mood completely at odds with the weather.

  “It’s very good of you to have a look at this,” I said, trying not to sound as meekly crawling and overcome by modesty as I felt.

  “Not at all. It’s my job.”

  “I hope you won’t be … too bored or … disappointed.” I trailed off into a shy woolliness, completely unlike me.

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  After putting the box in a decent enough plastic bag, I handed it to him as if it were a parcel of crystal. Robustly, he flung it under his arm.

  “I wondered,” he said, halting. This time it was he who seemed tentative. “Why don’t you come to tea one day next month? We can talk better.”

  I gathered he meant we could talk about my work better, undisturbed by customers and other visitors. This certainly seemed a good idea. I could not imagine him going through it in these circumstances, with all sorts of people peering at the pages.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “That would be good. But Monday’s my only real day off.”

  “Come on a Monday then, a Monday afternoon.”

  This was very kind of him, I thought, to be so accommodating. And it was very respectable too. He might have offered dinner, but then I may have become suspicious that he was out to wine and dine me for other purposes. No, he was clearly doing all this in order that we could discuss what I had given him in a civilised fashion.

  We decided on the date and time, and he gave me instructions on how to catch a certain train to Banbury.

  “Banbury?” I asked. “Isn’t that miles away, near Oxford?”

  “Yes. That’s where I have my house—well, near there, in the countryside really. An hour and a bit by train. Get the one-fifty from Marylebone Station and I’ll meet you.” He smiled. His eyes were as determined as an athlete’s.

  “Right,” I said. “So I’ll see you then.”

  And so I took the train from Marylebone Station on that Monday in late August, a day full of promise, sun and warmth. I went to meet Mr. Edward Prain, to talk about my work, over tea.

  chapter one | the study

  “There are too many writers in the world. There are too many stories. There’s a glut.”

  This response was not a promising development in our conversation. I had a feeling that I would be held in the web of a monologue about recent British economic forces, all because I had asked if he had missed the opportunity of publishing a writer who subsequently became a success. I appeared to have touched a nerve.

  I placed my teacup carefully into the round central depression of the saucer, avoiding the silver teaspoon and a biscuit crumb. The fine bone china chinked lightly. I removed my tense finger and thumb from the ornate cup handle and breathed an inaudible sigh of relief that I had succeeded in drinking half a cup of tea and eating a piece of angel cake without cracking anything, catapulting items of crockery across the table, or showering sugar over the embroidered table-cloth.

  Mr. Prain continued, “Furthermore, there are too many good writers in the world. There are too many good stories. There are too many well-written novels. There are celebrated foreign writers whose works should be translated into English. There are excellent writers from unusual social backgrounds or minority ethnic groups that deserve publication for their perspectives. There are superb and neglected writers from times past whose works should be republished. There are new writers whose fresh visions and marvellous plots should guarantee an interested audience. One should publish them all.”

  He paused. I recognised it was a cue.

  “And why is it that so few are printed?”


  “As I said,” he replied, as if it were perfectly obvious, “There’s an oversupply of well-written prose. We live in a free market.” He did not say “consumer society.” I would like to record that he said that, but he did not. “It’s a question of supply and demand. Writers create a product, and we process it, advertise it, and then rely on book distributers to get it to the book-sellers, who also advertise and try to tempt the public. Ultimately, it all comes down to the question: will it sell? Publishing is a business like any other. Coymans is, first and foremost, a financial entity with responsibility to our shareholders. We can entice the buyers—invest thousands in PR and advertising, artistic covers and so on, or hope to God that the authors will, faint chance, be newsworthy in themselves—but the fact is that in today’s society people are not as interested in reading quality fiction as the talented authors of the world would wish. So of course my company has passed over a number of writers who have gone on to be successful. It’s inevitable. One cannot publish everything that makes the grade. One has to make guesses about marketability, and sometimes one can be wrong.”

  Throughout this address my attention was seized by one of his small collection of misericords. There was a grotesque head leering in my direction, with two anthropomorphic hares on either side. The effect was curiously pagan and unsettling. I believe it was at this moment that I began to feel a self-consciousness that had nothing to do with the ordinary, explicable timidity a writer might feel in my predicament. This other self-consciousness was of a more personal nature, and seemed to be provoked by stares: by Mr. Prain’s steady gaze reflected, as though through a distorting mirror, in that of the misericord ogre. The piece itself was constructed out of dark, polished oak and was so well-rubbed it seemed to glow. There was hardly a speck of dust on any of the omnifarious artefacts in this room. Despite its cluttered concentration in one area of the house, he kept the collection as immaculate as himself. His chin was closely shaven, and his dark brown hair was swept back off his high forehead. He did not smoke or fiddle with his clothes. He sat back, without slouching, in a black leather armchair, with his opposite fingertips touching, so that he looked, almost, as if he were at prayer.

  Although I can trace the first tinge of disquiet to this instant, I would be exaggerating if I implied by this that it was more than the barest inkling. Perhaps, then, even subconsciously, I knew he had invited me to his grand house on that close Monday afternoon of the late summer not to discuss my work, or literature in general, but for something else entirely, and perhaps I did not want to believe this. Whatever the case, consciously at least I put it to one side. Our conversation proceeded uninterrupted by this particular anxiety for a little time. I had enough to deal with restraining my natural spirits sufficiently to be civilised at the tea table, to bend my accent into something closer to BBC newscaster pronunciation, to say the right things, to impress him. I did want to impress him. I knew I was smart, but I wanted him to think so too.

  “And poetry!” he exclaimed, with exasperation, “The would-be poets greatly outnumber those who actually read verse in this day and age.”

  He eyed me, this would-be poet he had before him. He brought his fingertips closer to his mouth, as if he were about to kiss them, but he arrested the motion before contact. I saw on his lips an amusement at knowing his words would unsettle me. He wanted me to become flustered and drop my teaspoon on the floor.

  Out of the corner of my eye I sensed that the ogre’s face under the wooden bracket leered wider, and I had to close my eyes. It is too easy for a writer to be kidnapped by imagination at times of stress. The mind seeks an escape. For example, then, when the ogre grinned, I was snared by Grimm. There was a flash of some folk tale, of a woodland creature half human, half demon. I sensed the glint of swords, the smell of dragons, the shuffle of feet through leaves. It was as if the archaic components of the fable lying around in some collective subconscious were waiting to be summoned and joined together in my head, like the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision, with a word, words. I had written some 25 new folk-tales and, of course, there is no market for them today at all. If Mr. Prain only knew! I wrenched myself away from the chaos of myth; those images had no right to intrude at such a time. I closed my eyes for a moment, turning out the light on fancy, and snapped back to the task at hand.

  “People do read, though,” I said, “Even poetry. In any society, there will always be a need for storytellers. Before there was the written word there was the voice of the people in the tribe or the village who told stories. Poems may tell a tiny story and novels a large one, but they are both responding to human instinct.”

  “And so in our society there will always be a market for new books. But the books that really sell are seldom the best-written. If publishers today were interested only in the business of making money from books we would publish very little quality fiction at all. Lightweight information books sell: travel books, diets, how-to’s, popular medicine and psychology, self-improvement, biographies of the rich and famous, or sports heroes. For fiction the public chooses chillers or thrillers, mystery, adventures, and there is always that genre my colleagues call ‘chick lit,’ amusing romances designed for office girls and frustrated housewives. Then there’s all the cross-over adults reading as children business. Harry Potter and that dog book. I suppose no one saw that coming. Authors tend to forget that we may be looking for a blockbuster, but in the back of our minds we’re hoping to siphon the resulting funds into printing literary works of merit, even if they only sell 200 copies. We’re not simply money-grubbers. We have a sense of cultural responsibility.”

  I presume his defensive tone was prompted by some expression upon my face, though I was not intending to put him on the spot. He spoke as if he was the official representative of all London publishers, but he was really speaking for himself alone. The royal “we.” Perhaps it was apt. He was like a prince on a throne, secure in his palace, while I was a visiting ambassador from a vastly inferior, and somewhat antagonistic, country in which he had deigned to take a paternal interest.

  I looked away, through the high leaded window to my left, removing my attention to the greenness of the expansive garden. Mr. Prain’s lawns were being shorn and striped by a large tractor mower. Now the machine snarled and petered out at the perimeter of the surrounding wood. The driver was a small, squat man whose body movements indicated that he did not feel it was his responsibility to mend the temperamental machine every time bits of it fell off or clogged up. I saw him remove his cap and flap away an invisible fly, bend over the engine, and thereafter walk angrily towards the outbuildings on the eastern side of the house.

  “You must remember, Stella, that Coymans is one of the very last independent British publishing houses of any size,” continued Mr. Prain. “These are perilous times. We may a seem a large concern to you, but the consortia are ever eager to absorb us. One has to be shrewd to maintain one’s autonomy. Eventually, I’m quite convinced, there will be a take-over bid too tempting to refuse, and then we will become an imprint.” He inhaled sharply and stopped himself. Although he was a man preoccupied with the realm of mergers and money, he had not invited me here to discuss these. He wanted now to wrap the subject up and put it away. “As I’ve said, publishing is a business,” he said, conclusively. “One cannot print a book without bothering to create a market, or satisfy one. Markets are not created by God. Coymans would not exist if we ignored consumer demands and thought only of talent.”

  “Right,” I said, not quite knowing what to say next. I wanted to ask him outright, “What about my talent?” but I did not dare.

  “Have a cream cake,” said Mr. Prain, leaning forward and picking up an eighteenth-century Delft plate spread with pastries that looked as if they would crumble into a flaky ruin on my napkin after one bite.

  “No, thank you,” I said, smiling gratefully and holding up my hand, nole-me-tangere. A fallen cream cake was precisely what I did not need to maintain poise and calm.

>   “Do,” he insisted. “Monique makes them. They’re awfully good.” The pastries were decked with sifted icing sugar and stuffed full of fresh clotted cream. The pastry looked crisp, light and beckoned to be demolished. “Have that round one in the middle.”

  His tone had become almost imperative. The consumption of Monique’s French pastries appeared to be a requirement of my visit to the house. I smiled again, acquiescent, and used the silver tongs to clasp hold of the specified item, transferring it carefully through the air to my side-plate, where it then remained, seductively waiting to embarrass, to devastate my studied composure in an explosion of sugar and cream. I watched as he took the tongs and, like a crayfish manoeuvring its pincer claw, clinched a long, rectangular pastry and brought it down upon his dish, his eyebrows raised in anticipation of delight.

  Meanwhile, I tried to seize the threads of our discussion. “Is that why you’re a publisher, Mr. Prain—because you have a sense of cultural responsibility?”

  Dexterously, he moved his plate close to his chin, picked up the cake and bit into it. Slops of cream squirted down on to the china and sat, like nodules of snow, until he scooped them up with his right middle finger and licked it clean. The icing sugar puffed delicately away from its source in a dusty spray, landing on his trousers and lining his upper lip with white down. He clearly enjoyed Monique’s pastries very much indeed, for he ate them with a relish and panache that signified that the cakes and he had had a long acquaintance. He wiped his upper lip clear and briskly brushed the powder from his legs, having completed the satisfactory operation. He then sat back and eyed the array again. Whilst engaged in this minor pursuit of pleasure, he managed to reply, haltingly, “Well, as you know, I’m a publisher because my father and grandfather were publishers and, partly, I was bound to continue the family business. I wasn’t the eldest son, but he was the less fitting one for the job really—sporty type—went to Argentina. I was the bookish one.”