DAVID SOLOMONS was born in Glasgow and now lives in Dorset with his wife, Natasha, and son, Luke. He also writes screenplays.

Not Another
Happy Ending
David Solomons

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Natasha and Luke, with love.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

They say that a writer ploughs a lonely furrow. So, with that in mind, I'd like to thank my enormous support team.

My editor Donna Condon and the team at Harlequin. From the first drop of Sancerre it was meant to be.

Copy editor Robin Seavill for straightening out my Brontës and my Beethoven.

Lit agent Stan who has unwittingly unleashed another member of the Solomons family on to the reading public. A mere pawn in our plans for global domination. Bwahahaha.

Film agents Elinor Burns and Anthony Mestriner for their friendship and advice and for sticking by this one (and all the rest) through thick, thin and meh.

Producers Claire Mundell and Wendy Griffin, and director John McKay. This might be the first novel to have been produced and directed before it was written.

Karen Gillan and Stanley Weber for saving me from the inevitable question about who I'd like to play Jane and Tom in a film of the book.

My son, Luke. For not only giving me the opportunity to name him after a Star Wars character but also reminding me that everything's OK even when it feels like it isn't. Luke, I am your father. Never gets old.

And my wife, Natasha, a brilliant writer, all round Renaissance woman (though her specialty is the eighteenth century) and the love of my life.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

‘Here Comes the Rain Again’, Eurythmics, 1984, RCA

Dear Jane,

Thank you for submitting your novel, The Endless Anguish of My Father.

Ten years ago it would probably have received a warm reception, but there is quite enough misery to be found on the non-fiction shelves just now, so, in fiction, we're currently very much into happy stories with happy endings.

At the moment we are enjoying wonderful success with a novel entitled Come to Me, an exotic and erotic tale of revenge and redemption, with a fabulously feisty female lead and a Hollywood ending. If you were willing to make some adjustments to the novel's dénouement you might also be happy to entertain some other minor reshapings: set it in LA or Bangkok rather than Glasgow, say; make your main protagonist a jet-set-y interior designer, for instance, rather than a shelf-stacker; and tweak the key relationship so that, rather than one between father and daughter, it's between our cosmopolitan interior designer—who is actually, despite her success and fabulous wardrobe, just a little girl at heart—and a father figure, who happens to be a domineering (but gorgeous!) film producer. If you were to reposition the novel in that kind of way, then I'd be very happy to reread.

You can certainly write, but these days it's so difficult to launch a new writer—however talented—who's writing about the wrong things.

I have recycled your manuscript.

Yours sincerely,

Cressida Galsworthy

Assistant Editor

Well, thought Jane, at least Cressida gets points for sustainability.

She made space on the notice-board—in a moment of dejection she'd referred to it as her Board of Pain, and the name had stuck—and pinned up this latest rejection, then sat back to admire the varied collection of publishers’ and agents’ rebuffs.

Until she began submitting her novel she hadn't appreciated that there were so many polite ways to say no. Forty-seven examples, to date. The rejection didn't hurt so much; the opinion of some woman in W1 she'd never met was of no consequence to Jane. She had survived far worse in her twenty-five years than anything Cressida—or Olivia or Sophie (so many Sophies)—could throw at her. But early on in the process she realised that the letters could be useful. There were writers who stuck inspirational messages over their desks to spur them on: you can do it … believe in yourself … open that window of opportunity! But encouraging slogans didn't work for Jane; she shrank from their brimming optimism. She was far more likely to want to jump head first out of that window of opportunity. Instead, she bought the board at her favourite vintage store off Great Western Road, nailed it to the wall by the large bay window of her airy, white flat and artfully arranged the naysaying letters. She could hear their honking dismissals as she penned each new query letter and packaged up the latest hopeful submission. I didn't love it. I didn't love it enough. I hated it. Their lack of enthusiasm was grist to her dark Satanic mill.

The printer spewed out another copy of the manuscript, and as she waited for the four hundred pages of her thus far ill-starred debut to stack up she hoisted the sash window, leaned on the sill and took a deep breath.

The air smelled of trees after the rain. Half a dozen slender poplars lined the quiet West End street, in full leaf now that what passed for the Scottish summer had arrived. Beyond them stood a blond sandstone terrace, a mirror to the building Jane's flat occupied. From the top floor someone practised the cello. The doleful strings drifted over the treetops, and suddenly the flats were miserable dolls’ houses with naked windows through which Jane glimpsed desperate lives: a raging argument between husband and wife, the tired old lady with no visitors, the self-harming teenage girl crying in her bedroom. On the street below a wan-faced young mother slouched behind a squeaking pushchair, cigarette jammed between chapped lips, flicking ash over a wailing infant.

The cellist took a break from his practice and reality was instantly restored. The windows revealed no more heartache than a tired executive mourning a slice of burnt toast, and in a patch of sunlight beneath the trimmed poplars it was a smart young mother wheeling a silver-framed pram, talking to her child in a voice as groomed as her suit.

Jane roused herself from her melancholy flight of fancy. This was the West End of Glasgow, a dear green place of well-kempt gardens, specialist delicatessens, and more convertibles per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.

She still couldn't quite believe she lived here. She had grown up in the East End of the city. It was four and a half miles away, but may as well have been a million, her life until the age of sixteen spent in one of the brutalist tower blocks more readily associated with the mean city of legend.

Residents never referred to them as tower blocks; they were always the ‘high flats’. Plain language hid a litany of flaws as deep as their rotten foundations: walls thin as cigarette paper, alien mould choking every corner, a stagnant pool of water in the basement referred to with typical humour as ‘the spa’, and stairwells daubed with crude graffiti that always bothered Jane less for its vulgarity than for its incorrect use of the apostrophe (in retrospect, a clear sign of bookish leanings to come). She laughed when she heard people reminisce about growing up on the schemes: ‘Aye, we might have been poor, but we were happy.’ What a load of crap. It was a miserable place to exist.

She'd only got out thanks to her mum. She remembered the letter arriving on her twenty-first birthday. It was from her mum, which came as something of a surprise since she'd died fourteen years earlier. They'd had so little time together that now when Jane tried to picture her face it was like reaching through water. Turned out mum had squirrelled away most of the wages she made at the Co-op in some kind of get rich quick scheme invested in Jane's name soon after she was born. The letter duly arrived with a valuation and a note on how to claim her inheritance—god, it sounded like something out of Dickens.

She remembered sitting on the floor by the front door reading the contents with growing disbelief. The money was enough for a healthy deposit on her new flat; her new life. It was surprising enough that the dodgy investment had reaped a profit, but the bigger surprise was that her mum had contrived to keep the money out of her dad's thieving hands.

A breeze at the open window ruffled the rejection letters on the board. Set amongst them was a faded Polaroid of an older man, face scored with deep lines, eyes surprisingly soft, one pile driver arm wrapped around a ten year-old girl. In the photograph the late afternoon sun has caught her hair, turning the hated ‘ginger’ a deep, sunset red. Father and daughter are both smiling. But then, that was the summer before it happened.

Mum had taken the snap on a day out to the beach at Prestwick. Unusually, the sun had shone all day, just like it should in a memory. She remembered on the way home afterwards stopping in Kilmarnock at Varani's for ice cream. Best in the world, her dad used to say. Not that to her knowledge her father had ever been outside Scotland. Of course she couldn't be sure of his travel itinerary since then, not after he walked out on them later that year. He left a few months after the photograph was taken, on her birthday. She laughed. How much more of a cliché could you get? Her hand brushed the faded photograph. That was the last time she'd had ice cream from Varani's.

Her eye fell on a flourishing umbrella plant on her desk, its soft, green leaves trailing across the top of her laptop screen. It had been a present from him a few years ago; the only evidence in a decade that he was still alive. When it arrived she prepared herself for the inevitable follow-up: the drunken, apologetic phone call in the middle of the night; the knock at the door with a bunch of petrol station flowers. Neither of them came; only more silence.

The leaves were dry to her touch. She gave the plant a quick spray from a water bottle she kept close by. They didn't have a garden in the high flats, but her dad had installed a window box and she remembered planting it with him. It was a shady spot, he explained, so they filled it with Busy Lizzies in summer and hardy cyclamen in winter. The water-spray hissed. Thinking about it, she wasn't even sure why she kept his plant.

With a whine the printer finished its work. She packaged up the latest submission into a large buff envelope and wrote out the address of the next publisher on her hit list. Tristesse Books were based in Glasgow. Tristesse was French for something she couldn't quite remember. She'd taken Higher French at school, but only just passed the exam. Je m'appelle Jane. J'habite à Glasgow. That was about the extent of her conversation. That and, at a push, she reckoned she could order a saucisson.

Outside, the sky darkened, dampening the earlier promise of sunshine. The wind swirled around the trees, sending a flurry of rain against the open window. Hurriedly, she slid it shut and stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the rain-soaked pane. Her hair was still long and straight and red, its neat fringe framing a pair of bright green eyes held open in what seemed to be a state of permanent surprise at the vagaries of the big, bad world. When the kids at school had taunted her for being a ‘ginger’, her dad had pulled her onto his knee and together they'd watched his (pirated) copy of Disney's The Little Mermaid. The first few times she didn't understand the message that however tough the journey, even redheads are allowed a happy ever after. Instead, through a terrible misreading, Ariel and her singing friends gave her a horror of losing her voice, and for years the slightest hint of hoarseness convinced her that the end of her little life was imminent.

The superstitions and playground taunts of childhood were long gone, but now she attracted a different kind of unwelcome attention, from the Armani-skinned lizards with large cufflinks who frequented the bars on Byres Road. And these days there was no dad to tell her it would all turn out happily in the end.

He was the one who'd inadvertently introduced her to the world of books, dropping her off in the public library to wait while he took care of a little business at the bookies across the street and then nipping in for a swift pint—or nine—at the pub next door. As he gambled and drank away their benefit money she immersed herself in books.

Even after he walked out of her life she continued to visit the library, just in case he came back. She hated him for leaving, but more than anything else she wanted him to come back. And as she waited for him to swing through the door with his big grin and too-loud voice, she read. The library was her playground, her university. Here she was surrounded by familiar faces. Hello, Cinderella. Cheer up, Tess. Good day, Mr Darcy. As the years passed, The Brothers Grimm became The Brothers Karamazov until one day she picked up a pen and began to write her own stories.

Raindrops streamed down the cheeks of her reflection in the window. She remembered what ‘tristesse’ meant.

After almost a decade in Scotland, Thomas Duval still dreamt in French. Four years of university in Glasgow, followed by a brief internship with Edinburgh publisher Klinsch & McLeish (ending in a spectacular bust-up with the notoriously spiky Dr Klinsch) and then five years building up Tristesse had left him a fluent English speaker trailing a wisp of a French accent along with the added charm of a stray Scottish vowel. But at night, in his dreams, he was once more the golden boy from the Côte d'Azur, raised under hot blue skies, bestride his old Benelli motorbike racing the rich kids in their Ferraris and Lambos along the twisting coast road between Saint-Tropez and Cannes. And always with a different girl riding pillion. Mais, bien sûr.

But somehow despite the sun-soaked childhood, when he'd first arrived in Glasgow something stirred in his soul. He'd always loved Walter Scott, James Hogg, the gloomy heart of the Scottish canon. The first time it rained he walked around the city without an umbrella until he was wet to the skin. He'd never felt so alive, which was ironic, since he came down with a bout of flu and missed the rest of Freshers’ Week. But his affair with Scotland had begun. His family thought he was mad. He ignored them and bought an umbrella. Soon, the tanned limbs of Brigittes and Hélènes gave way to the pale, freckled legs of Karens and Morags.

Still asleep, Tom reached an arm around the shape beside him in the wide bed. He began to mutter in French, a low, rhythmical sound, languid and masculine, capable of snapping knicker elastic at twenty paces, then slid one hand beneath the rumpled sheets—and froze. His smile slipped, replaced with a glower of cheated surprise.

He sat up and flung the covers from the bed. Beside him lay a chunky six-hundred pager. He'd just tried to make sweet love to a manuscript, and not even one worthy of his moves. A glance at the title—The Unbearable Sadness of Daal—brought back last night's bedtime reading: mediocre writing, derivative plot and two hundred pages too long.

He huffed and turned a bleary eye to the small bedroom. Manuscripts littered every surface. Uneven stacks of them sprang from the floor like heroes turned to stone by a Gorgon's stare. He was behind in his reading, as usual. He had put his romantic life on the back burner in favour of pursuing a different prize—glittering success as a publisher. So far he was frustrated on both fronts, not helped by his strict adherence to one of his few rules: never shag a writer—especially not one of your own. He was still looking for The One. Just one critically acclaimed—and more crucially—best-selling book would take his struggling company to another level.

Once showered and dressed he stood over the espresso machine as it gurgled and hissed in protest before grudgingly offering up a shot of treacle-black coffee. Tom drained the cup and immediately poured another. His broad frame filled the narrow galley kitchen like a Rodin bronze in an elevator. The living quarters were crammed into a mezzanine above Tristesse's offices and consisted of two small bedrooms and a holiday camp for bacteria masquerading as a kitchen, littered with plates growing more life than the average Petri dish. Less cordon bleu, more cordoned off.

He juggled a new manuscript and a piece of toast. Concentration fixed on the page he failed to notice that the marmalade he spread thickly over the toast was in fact mayonnaise. He took a bite. Disgusted, he toed open the pedal-bin at the end of the counter—and discarded the manuscript. Swiping a finger across his phone he checked the time.

‘Roddy!’ He barked towards the second bedroom. ‘School!’ There was a thud from inside like a cadaver being dropped by a slippery-fingered mortician, the distinctive chink of many empty beer bottles being inexpertly stepped over and then the door swung open. Out shambled a figure in a state of confusion and a brown corduroy suit.

‘Have you seen my tie?’

‘You mean the brown one,’ mocked Tom, ‘to match the chic suit?’

Roddy stuck out his chin defensively. He was a slightly built man with the sort of boyish face always ID'd when buying a six-pack. He tugged at one of the large lapels. ‘It's not brown,’ he insisted. It flapped like a Basset hound's ear. ‘I'll have you know this is fine Italian tailoring and the young lady who sold it to me called it marrone.’

‘You do know that's just Italian for “brown”, right?’

Roddy ignored him, moving aside manuscripts to continue his search. ‘So have you seen my tie or not?’

‘Hey, careful with those,’ said Tom, waving his toast at the unread scripts. ‘I have a system.’

‘Ah-ha!’ Roddy produced a red bow tie from behind one of the stacks and slipped it around his neck.

‘You're seriously going to wear that to school?’

‘It's a valid choice.’

‘For Yogi Bear, maybe.’

Roddy frowned. ‘That makes no sense. Yogi Bear never wore a bow tie. It was a necktie—and it wasn't even red, it was green. Wait, are you thinking of the Cat in the Hat?’

‘If I pretend I just arrived from France and don't understand anything you're saying will you stop talking?’

‘Just for that I'm having your muesli.’

Roddy swiped a bowl off the draining board, wiped a spoon on his trousers and dived in.

‘Hmm?’ Tom looked up from his reading. ‘We're out of muesli. Haven't bought any in weeks.’

Roddy gagged as he spat out the ancient slurry. ‘Aw, you're kiddin’. That's criminal. That's unsanitary, that is. We live in squalor, you know that?’ He threw down the bowl. ‘I'll get something in the staff room.’ He turned to go and paused in the doorway. ‘Oh, don't forget, you've got Nicola coming in this afternoon.’

Tom grunted. A couple of years ago he'd discovered Nicola Ball, a writer of novels set in the unpromising world of public transport (one notable sex scene in her debut had brought whole new meaning to the phrase ‘double-decker’). Recently, she'd featured on some influential lit. crit. blog, hovering near the middle of a list of ‘Scottish novelists to watch under the age of 30’, and the annoying girl wouldn't stop reminding him about it at every opportunity. However, her sales didn't match her bumptiousness.

A buzzer sounded from downstairs.

‘Get that, will you?’ Tom strolled off, head buried in the latest novel plucked from the slush-pile.

‘No can do,’ spluttered Roddy. ‘I've got Wuthering Heights with my Third Years …’ He checked his watch. ‘In fifteen minutes. Bollocks.’

The buzzer went again and Tom padded resentfully downstairs. Roddy's question trailed after him: ‘When are you going to hire an actual secretary?’ The answer was simple: when he could afford one. Which right now felt a long way off.

The postman might as well have been holding a ticking bomb. He brandished what Tom recognised through long acquaintance as unwelcome correspondence from the bank and credit card company.

‘Lovely morning,’ the postman said cheerily, ‘though there's a bit of rain forecast for later.’

Reluctantly, Tom took the mail, which included half a dozen fat A4 envelopes—more manuscripts—and closed the door. With a dissatisfied grunt, he shuffled the official letters to the bottom of the pile and made his way along the narrow passage to his office, deftly navigating around towers of cardboard boxes filled with expensively produced books fresh from the printer. He shuddered at the financial risk; each title was a long shot of vomit-inducing odds, a fragile paper boat set sail on the roughest publishing market since William Caxton thought ‘Hey, what if I put the ink in here?’

Tom threw the mail onto his desk and sat down heavily. Napoleon glowered up at him. It was a bust of the great Emperor, a gift from Roddy on the launch of Tristesse Books, which Tom was in no doubt also conveyed a pointed comment on his high-handed manner. He looked round his tiny office with its clutter of contracts, press releases and inescapable manuscripts; a battered velour sofa with the stuffing knocked out of it (appropriately) and a couple of low, uncomfortable chairs, perfect to intimidate writers. It wasn't exactly the Palace of Fontainebleau.

He turned his frustration to the morning mail, tearing open the top envelope and removing the bulging manuscript from within. He scanned the cover and blew out his cheeks in disbelief. Then held it out in front of him, squinting at the title to make sure he'd read it correctly. Which he had. There it was, in black and white, Cambria twenty-four point. Quelle horreur.

‘The Endless Anguish of My Father,’ he read aloud, allowing each word its full weight and bombast. ‘By Jane Lockhart.’

Worst title this year? Certainly it was the worst this month. Briefly he pondered summoning the author for a meeting, purely for the satisfaction of telling her just what a brainless title she had concocted and, he felt confident asserting this without condemning himself to the unpleasant task of reading one more word, that she was a hopeless case with no chance of making a career as a novelist. But he was busy. Taking the manuscript in the tips of his fingers, he gave a shudder of disgust.

‘Ms. Lockhart … au revoir.’ And with that he tossed it into the cavernous wastepaper basket by the side of his desk.

CHAPTER 2

‘Tinseltown in the Rain’, The Blue Nile, 1984, Linn Records

THE BOWLER WAS a great idea. She rocked that hat. It was her lucky hat, always had been. Not that Jane could recall specific examples of its effect on her good fortune at this precise moment, but she was sure there must have been some in the past.

It was an awesome hat. It had been a last-second decision to take it to the meeting and she'd plucked it from its hook above the umbrella stand along with her favourite red umbrella. Not that the umbrella was lucky. Who has a lucky umbrella? In fact, weren't they notoriously unlucky objects? Yes, it was bad luck to walk under them. No, that couldn't be right. That was ladders, of course. Open them! You weren't supposed to open them indoors in case … what? Non-specific, umbrella-related doom, she supposed.

Oh god, she was losing it.

It was nerves. The email from Thomas Duval of Tristesse Books inviting her—correction, summoning her—to a Monday morning meeting had arrived last thing on Friday, leaving her all weekend to obsess. It had to be bad news; nothing good ever happened on a Monday morning. But if that were the case then why demand a meeting? If he wasn't interested in publishing her novel, surely he would have rejected her in the customary pro forma fashion, and he hadn't Dear Jane-d her, not yet.

She felt a spike of anticipation, which was instantly brought down by a hypodermic shot of self-doubt. Perhaps he was some sort of sadist who got his kicks torturing writers in person. But that seemed so unlikely. She'd been propping herself up with this line of thinking throughout most of the weekend, extracting every last drop of hope from it, until halfway through the longueur of her Sunday afternoon she decided to Google him and discovered that Thomas Duval was indeed just such a sadist. The Hannibal Lecter of publishing, blogged one aspirant author who'd evidently suffered at his hands. Attila the Hun with a red Biro, recorded another.

She dismissed the opinions of a few affronted authors—all right, fourteen—as a case of sour grapes and sought out a more cool-headed assessment of his reputation. There was scant information available on the Bookseller’s site, the industry's go-to journal, but she dug up half a dozen snippets of news. The names changed, but on each occasion the substance remained the same: breaking news—Thomas Duval falls out acrimoniously with another of his writers, who storms out in high dudgeon, swearing never to write one more word for that arrogant, temperamental sonofabitch.

Well, at least he was consistent.

She jumped on the subway at Kelvinbridge and rode the train to Buchanan Street in the centre of town. By the time she reached the surface, the early rain had given way to patchy sunshine and she enjoyed a pleasant stroll through George Square to the Merchant City. European-style café culture had come late to Glasgow—until 1988 if you said barista to a Glaswegian you risked a punch on the nose. But when it did arrive it came in a tsunami of foaming milk. An area of the city once referred to as the ‘toun’ these days sported sleek cafés on every corner, where, at the first warming ray, outside tables sprouted like sunflowers, and were just as swiftly populated by chattering, sunglasses-wearing crowds who always seemed to be waiting just off screen for their cue.

Jane headed along cobbled Candleriggs past the old Fruit Market, before stopping outside a set of electric gates. One of the residents was leaving and as the gates whirred open she slipped inside, finding herself in a large, sunlit courtyard bordered by a Victorian terrace on one side and a glassy office block on the other.

She made her way over to the far corner and at the door, she inspected the nameplate. This was the place all right. She hadn't really paid attention to the Tristesse Books logo before, but a large version of it was stencilled on the wall: a white letter ‘T’ suspended in a fat blue drop of rain. As she pushed the buzzer it struck her that it wasn't rain at all, but a teardrop.

Jane had been kicking her heels for half an hour, waiting in the hot, cramped Reception room for her meeting with Thomas Duval. She could hear him through the wall, shouting in rapid-fire French. He may not have been ordering a saucisson, but it wasn't difficult to catch the gist—someone was getting it in le neck.

Though his fury wasn't directed at her, with each fresh salvo Jane shrank deeper into the waiting-room chair. After fifteen minutes of listening to him rant she'd contemplated making her excuses and slinking out, but the possibility that he had read and liked The Endless Anguish of My Father was enough to encourage her to stay put and suffer.

Across the room she could see Duval's secretary trying to ignore the furious noises coming from his boss's office. At least, Jane assumed the man sitting at the desk was his secretary. For some reason she'd pictured Thomas Duval's secretary as one of those pencil-skirt wearing, bespectacled ah-Miss-Jones-you're-beautiful types, whereas the figure valiantly shielding the phone receiver from the angry French volcano on the other side of the wall was a twentysomething man in a brown corduroy suit and red bow tie. Now that she studied him carefully, he looked less like a secretary and more as if he was channelling a fifty-year-old schoolteacher.

‘Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh yeah, he's a wonderful writer. So unremittingly bleak.’ The secretary paused as the caller on the other end of the phone asked a question. ‘No, Tristesse doesn't publish him any more,’ he said haltingly. ‘A little disagreement with …’ He glanced towards Duval's office door, cupping the receiver against the rising din. ‘She's one of my favourites!’ he said, responding to a fresh enquiry. ‘Yes, long-listed for the Booker, you know.’ His left eye twitched. ‘Right after she was sectioned.’ He listened again, one corner of his mouth sinking mournfully. ‘No. She left too.’

This was becoming ridiculous. How long would Duval make her wait in this tiny, airless cellar of a room? For all he knew she had taken time off her actual, proper job to show up at his beck and call. Not that she had a proper job any more. She'd quit the supermarket at the beginning of the year, when they offered her a place on the management trainee programme. She'd started off stacking shelves and here they were offering her a suit and a key to the executive WC. It was a sign; she knew, that if she took it then her life would go into the toilet metaphorically as well, taking her far away from her writing.

In the end it didn't even feel like her decision. She had to write; it was as simple as that. So she jumped, a great, giddy, don't-look-down leap of faith. And here she was. Forty-seven rejection letters later. Savings countable on the fingers of one hand … Was it stuffy in here, or was it her?

She yawned and stretched her legs, knocking the low table in front of her on which perched a stack of teetering manuscripts. They wobbled alarmingly and she dived to steady them, noticing as she did that the top novel was entitled A Comedy in Long Shot. Not a bad title. She immediately compared it with her own, placing each in an imaginary ranking system. Hers scored higher, she felt sure. The Endless Anguish of My Father had been tougher to come up with than the rest of the novel. But the day it popped into her head she knew it was the one. It had the ring of authenticity, rooted in truth, in life; six words that spoke to the eternal verities. And it looked good when she typed it across the cover page.

Something glinted behind the paper stack. A single golden page coiled into a scroll and set on a plinth. It was an award. An inscription ran along its base. She picked it up to read: ‘Thomas Duval. Young European Publisher of the Year, 2010.’ She turned the award another notch. ‘Runner-up.’

‘Miss Lockhart?’

Duval's secretary had crept up on her. Startled, she dropped the award. It landed against the wooden floor with a resounding clang and rolled under a sofa. Apologising profusely, Jane fell to her knees and scrabbled to retrieve it, a part of her brain belatedly registering that the shouting from the office had ceased.

‘What the hell are you doing?

She looked up into the face of Thomas Duval and felt her own flush. He was handsome in a way that would make Greek gods sit around and bitch. It wasn't the rangy stubble, or the thick wave of hair that demanded you run your fingers through its luxuriant tangle, or the intense stare from behind his Clark Kent spectacles. OK, it might have been some of those things. His distracting features were currently arranged to display a mixture of anger and puzzlement, but, she noted with a sinking feeling, they definitely tipped towards anger. She was also vaguely aware of a draught located around her backside and knew then that in her pursuit of the runaway award her skirt had ridden up and currently resided somewhere around her waist. As she covered her modesty (oh, way too late for that) she made a show of polishing the golden award with one corner of her sleeve.

‘I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to—I was just, y'know, touching it. I mean not touching—that sounds like molesting, like I'm some kind of pervert …’ she drew breath, ‘which I'm not.’ She ventured a smile. ‘Young European Publisher of the Year … Runner-up? That's really impressive.’ Don't make a joke. Don't make a joke. ‘I have a swimming certificate.’

Across the room the secretary chuckled, for which she was immensely grateful. Duval silenced him with a scowl. Certain that her submissive kneeling position wasn't helping her case, Jane picked herself up off the floor, laying a hand on the vertiginous stack of manuscripts for leverage. She leaned on the unsteady pile and the scripts toppled over, crashing to the floor. Random pages flew up around her ears.

Duval narrowed his eyes. ‘Who are you?’

She stuck out a hand in greeting. ‘Jane Lockhart …?’ Duval ignored the proffered hand. She withdrew it awkwardly, turning the action into a waving gesture she hoped came across as insouciant. ‘I wrote The Endless Anguish of My Father?’

‘Ah,’ he grunted. ‘Yes.’ He turned his back on her and began to walk away.

So that was it, she thought—another rejection. And I've shown him my pants.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he snapped over his shoulder.

She threw a questioning glance at the secretary, who motioned her to follow the disappearing Duval. Hurriedly gathering up her hat and umbrella she stumbled after him.

She was not sure what compelled her to do so—blame it on the confusion of believing she was about to be unceremoniously ejected onto the street—but by the time he had led her into his office she was again wearing the bowler hat. She was confronted with his broad back as he gestured her curtly into a low seat, then slid behind his desk and looked up. He leaned in with a quizzical expression, mouth half open.

‘It's my lucky hat,’ she pre-empted his question.

‘No one has a lucky hat.’

Something about this man made her want to argue. ‘What about leprechauns?’

He screwed up his face. ‘What?’

‘They're lucky. They wear hats.’ Oh god, she was doing it again. Stop talking. Stop talking right now. ‘Y'know, with the green and the buckle and … Ah … Ah!’ She sat up, raising one finger triumphantly. ‘You can have a thinking-cap.’

He sneered. ‘It's not the same thing at all.’

‘No. No it isn't.’ Sheepishly, she removed the offending bowler. ‘I only wore it to offset the umbrella,’ she confessed, then asked brightly, ‘Have you ever wondered why it's bad luck to open an umbrella indoors?’

Duval gazed at her steadily. ‘The superstition arose during the late 18th century when umbrellas were larger, with heavy, spring-loaded mechanisms and hard metal spokes. Open one in the confines of a drawing room and the consequences could be destructive.’

‘Oh.’

He drew a tired breath and fished a manuscript from under a pile. She recognised it immediately as her own, although the pages appeared crumpled at the corners and was that the brown crescent of a coffee stain on the cover? This must be a good sign. Clearly, the turned-down corners were evidence of the hours Duval had spent reading and then rereading; the stain conjured a long, espresso-fuelled night, his head bent over her novel mesmerised by the spare, elegant prose, those sharp, intelligent eyes tearing up at the emotive tale.

‘I'll be honest with you,’ he said, tossing the well-worn manuscript down on the desk, ‘I put this in the bin without reading a single word.’

Or, there was that.

She looked down and played nervously with her ring. It was made from an old typewriter key, the word ‘backspace’ in black letters on a silver background. She'd bought it with her last pay packet, a fitting gift to launch her on her new career as a novelist. She felt a lump in her throat and swallowed hard. She swore she wouldn't cry in front of him.

‘That title …’ He made a long, sucking sound through his teeth.

She had a feeling it wasn't the only thing that sucked. She glimpsed a straw and clutched at it. ‘But you took it out again.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Of the bin. Something must have made you take it back out.’

‘Yes.’ He fiddled with the small bust of Napoleon. ‘A fly.’

Had he just admitted to using the novel she'd slaved over for the last year and a half as a fly swatter?

‘It was a highly persistent fly,’ he added in a conciliatory tone. He pushed a bored hand through his hair. ‘I'm busy, so I'll keep this brief. I read your novel. I'm afraid it needs work. A lot of work.’

Hot tears pricked her eyes. She blinked furiously, trying to hold back the waterworks. She hadn't cried in years, not since her dad left, and now here was this man making her feel like that little girl again. It wasn't the rejection—she'd shrugged off dozens without resorting to tears. It must be him. The bastard. To actually reject her face to face.

‘But it has potential, so I'm going to publish it.’

What a complete and utter shit. Making her come all the way here just to wait in his stupid little office, only to be told—

Wait. What?

‘Ms. Lockhart?’ He peered into her stunned face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Publish? Me?’ She just had to check. ‘In a book?’

He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘I'm offering you a two-book deal. It will mean a lot of rewriting—definitely a new title—and neither of us will get rich. But I think you have it in you to be a writer and, unfashionable as it may seem, that is what I came here to find.’

She waited for the punchline, searching his face for the appearance of a grin that would say, ‘only joking’, but it didn't come. He was serious. This man wanted to publish her novel. This kind, wonderful man. There was only one rational response to the news.

She dissolved into tears.

She'd always wondered how she'd feel if—she corrected herself—when the moment finally came and the flood of ‘no's’ was stemmed by one small, clear ‘yes’. In the end it wasn't even a ‘yes’ so much as a ‘oui’. Vive la France! Vive le Candleriggs! But this was more than an air-punching victory, it was … happiness. That's what it felt like. Through great hiccupping sobs she could see him watching her, confused. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to …’she blubbed. ‘It's been so … so long … so many rejections … I have a board.’

‘You have a board?’

‘Of rejection letters. I call it my Board of Pain.’

‘Well,’ he said with a straight face, ‘that's completely normal.’

‘It is?’ Oh good, that was a relief.

‘So, how many publishers turned you down exactly?’

‘All of them,’ she said, palming away tears. ‘Well, obviously not all of them. All of the big ones, I mean.’ She caught his eye. ‘Not that I'm saying you're not big. I'm sure you're very … important. I mean, really, I should have sent you my novel ages ago, given that it's set in Glasgow and so are you.’

‘So why didn't you?’

‘Umm.’ This was awkward. ‘Because I'd never heard of you?’

He grunted.

‘But then I read The Final Stop by Nicola Ball and I loved it and she is really talented and really young and I saw your logo on the spine and, well, here I am.’

She lapsed into a renewed bout of weeping.

The office door swung open and the secretary in the brown suit entered, flourishing a paper tissue from a man-sized box. He'd come prepared. ‘I'm sorry about him. He was like this at uni. Everywhere he went—crying women.’

She took the tissue and blew her nose loudly.

‘Roddy—’said Duval, trying to explain that, as unlikely as it appeared, this time he was not the cause of the great lamentation.

Roddy wagged a finger. ‘Uh-uh. You lot are supposed to be charming. Charmant, n'est-ce pas?’

Jane shook her head, struggling to form words through the wracking sobs.

‘I've told you,’ snapped Duval, ‘never try to talk French to me, you—’

‘Happy!’ Jane's outburst silenced both men. ‘No, really.’ She bounced out of the low seat. ‘I've … I've never been so happy in all my life.’

She hugged a surprised Roddy and then circled round his desk to embrace Duval. Gosh, up close he was very tall. In her exuberance she knocked over her umbrella. It sprang open, an inauspicious red blot in the centre of the room.

But it was probably nothing to worry about.

CHAPTER 3

‘Nine Million Rainy Days’, The Jesus and Mary Chain, 1987, Bianco y Negro

‘THIS IS THE marketing department … And this is sales … And this is publicity.’

‘Hi, I'm Sophie,’ said a shiny young woman with a sleek bob and perfectly applied make-up.

‘Sophie Hamilton Findlay,’ said Tom, ‘three names, three departments. You blame Sophie if no one reviews your book, or if you can't find it in all good bookshops. Don't blame her for not marketing it … I don't give her any money for that.’

They turned a hundred and eighty on the spot.

‘And this is George. He's production.’

A pinched face looked up from a wizened baked potato overflowing with egg mayonnaise.

‘I'm on lunch.’

‘You blame George if the print falls off the page, or if the pages themselves fall out. So, you've met the rest of the team. Any questions?’

‘Well …’ Jane began.

‘Good.’ Duval clapped his hands. ‘Time to get to work.’

When he suggested heading out of the office for their first editorial meeting Jane pictured them moving to a quiet corner of Café Gandolfi sipping espressos and arguing about leitmotifs. He had different ideas. One thinks at walking pace, he pronounced, and took off along Candleriggs at a clip, brandishing her manuscript and a red pen. Andante!

She scurried after him, his loping stride forcing her to trot to keep up. The man thought fast. He did not approve of the modern fashion of editing at a distance, he explained, with notes issued coldly via email; adding with a grin that he preferred to see the whites of his writers’ eyes.

‘Readers are only impressed by two things,’ he said. ‘Either that a novel took just three weeks to write, or that the author laboured three decades.’ He sucked his teeth in disgust. ‘And then dropped dead, preferably before it was published. No one cares about the ordinary writer. The grafter. Like you.’

Ouch. A grafter? Really? She'd been harbouring hopes that she was an undiscovered genius.

‘And publishers are no better.’ He turned onto Trongate, carving a swathe through commuters and desultory schoolchildren, warming to his theme. ‘Do you recall that book about penguins?’

‘Which one?’ The previous year the book charts seemed to be awash with talking penguins, magically realistic penguins, melancholy penguins, there had even been an erotic penguin.

He slapped a hand against her manuscript. ‘My point exactly! One book about penguins sells half a million copies and suddenly you can't move for the waddling little bastards.’ He stopped, slumping against a doorway. His shoulders heaved like a longbow drawing and loosing. ‘The giants are gone,’ he said sadly.

Giants? Penguins? Was every day going to be like this? He set off again at a lick.

‘So many modern editors neglect the great legacy they have inherited. They are uninterested in language or, god forbid, art; and would prefer a mediocre novel they can compare to a hundred others than a great one that fits no easy category. They care only about publicity and book clubs and film tie-ins.’ He spat out the list as if it curdled his stomach. ‘Most editors are little more than cheerleaders, standing on the sidelines waving their pom-poms.’ He turned to her. ‘I have no pom-poms,’ he growled. Then thumped a palm against his chest. ‘I care. I care about the work. I care about your novel.’

He stopped again and she felt she ought to fill the silence that followed. ‘Thanks,’ she said brightly.

Duval cocked his head and looked thoughtful. ‘Of course, it is not a good novel.’

Sonofa—

‘But it could be.’ He pushed a hand through his hair. ‘So I say this to you now, without apology. From this moment, Jane, we will spend every waking hour together until I am satisfied. It will be hard. Lengthy. I will make you sweat.’

Uh, could he hear himself?

‘I will stretch you. Sometimes I will make you beg me to stop.’

Apparently not.

‘I do this not because I am a sadist—whatever you might have heard—I do this to give an ordinary writer a chance to be great.’

That was terrific, she was impressed—moved, even—but could he not give the ‘ordinary writer’ stuff a rest?

They came to a busy intersection. Pedestrians streamed past them. At the kerb the drivers of a bus and a black cab loudly swapped insults over a rear-ender; the aroma of frying bacon fat drifted from a van selling fast food. He ignored them all, shutting out the traffic and the smells and the noise, for her.

‘I promise that no one has ever looked at you the way I shall. Not even your lover.’

Jane swallowed. ‘I don't have a lover,’ she heard herself admit. ‘Right now I mean. I've had lovers, obviously. Not loads. I'm not, y'know, “sex” mad. I don't know why I brought up sex. Or why I put air quotes round it. I'm totally relaxed about … y'know … sex. And yet I just whispered it. Very relaxed. I think it's because you're French. You're all so lalala let's have a bonk and a Gauloise. Oh god. I'm so sorry about … well, me, Mr Duval. Should I call you Mr Duval? It sounds so formal. Maybe I could call you Robert.’

‘You could,’ he said, ‘but my name is Thomas.’

‘Thomas! Yes. I knew that. I was thinking of the other one. From The Godfather? Played the accountant.’

‘Tom.’

‘No, it was definitely Rob—oh, I see. Tom. Short for Thomas. I had a friend called Thomas. Well, when I say “friend” I—’

‘Stop talking.’

‘Yes. Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’ She dropped her head, stuck out a foot and screwed a toe into the pavement.

‘OK,’ he declared. ‘Now our work begins.’

And with those words the months spent at her desk writing for no one but herself were at an end. Now they would embark on a journey of discovery, together, to prepare her novel for … Publication. Suddenly, the sacrifices seemed worth it: losing touch with friends, turning on the central heating only when the ice was inside the windows, baked beans almost every day for three months straight, all to reach this pinnacle of a moment.

‘Do you want a roll and sausage?’ asked Duval.

‘Do I want a—?’

He marched off in the direction of the fast-food van.

‘Morning, Tommy,’ the owner greeted him. ‘The usual?’

‘Aye, Calum, give me some of that good stuff.’ Duval took the sandwich, then showed it excitedly to Jane as if he were a botanist and it a new species of orchid. ‘And not just any sausage, oh no. A square sausage. See how it fits so perfectly inside the thickly buttered soft white bap? Genius! But then, what else would one expect from the nation who gave the world the steam engine, the telephone and the television? This is why I love the Scots. Now, a soupçon of brown sauce.’ He squeezed a drop from the encrusted spout of a plastic bottle, patted down the top of the roll and sank his teeth into it. Paroxysms of delight ensued. ‘And to think that France calls itself the centre of world cuisine.’

She wasn't entirely sure he was joking. And then she realised. He'd gone native.

‘You must try one. I insist.’ He clicked his fingers as if he were ordering another bottle of the ’61 Lafite.

Moments later she stood peering at the sweating sandwich in her hands, and beyond it, Tom's grinning face.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now we begin.’

Ten minutes later they sat beside one another in the window of a café next door to his office. Between them lay the ziggurat of her manuscript.

‘Jane,’ he said softly, ‘there is no need to be nervous.’

‘Nervous? Me? No-o-o. Not nervous.’ A coffee machine gurgled and hissed, only partially masking the spin cycle taking place in her stomach. ‘OK, a little bit nervous.’

He smiled. ‘It's OK.’

It was then she realised what was making her nervous. He was being nice to her. The heat had gone out of his fire and brimstone, his voice, typically tense with anger, now soothed like warm ocean waves.

‘Usually I need a run-up before I start editing,’ she said. ‘Y'know: tea, a walk, regrouting the shower.’

‘Or we could just begin?’

‘What, no foreplay?’ Even as she spoke them she was chasing after the words to stop them coming out of her mouth. But it was too late. He gave a small laugh, the sort of laugh your older brother's handsome friend might give his mate's little sister. Jane's embarrassment turned to disappointment. ‘So, where d'you want to start?’

‘Call me crazy, but we could start at the beginning.’

‘OK.’ She nodded rapidly, appearing to give his suggestion serious consideration, hiding her mortification at asking such a dumb question. ‘OK yes.’ She clouted him matily on the arm. ‘You crazy Frenchman.’

He turned the top page of the manuscript. And they began.

He gave great notes. They were acute, considered, wise. Intimate.

As he had promised, the process of editing her novel forced them into a curious form of co-habitation. She would arrive at his office each morning and, following his customary breakfast of roll and sausage and black coffee, they would commence work. At first on opposite sides of his desk, then on the third day he came out and sat on the edge, balancing there comfortably, at ease in his body; a move, Jane did not fail to notice, which put her at eye level with his crotch.

Often she felt like the submissive in a highly specific S&M relationship, one with no physical contact but plenty of verbal discipline. I edit you. I. Edit. You. Ordinarily, she wouldn't have put up with any man who bossed her about as much as Tom did, but theirs was a professional relationship, she reminded herself. So she gave herself permission to be spanked. On the page.

Mostly they worked in his office, or the café next door, and whenever they reached a sticky point they would take to the streets and walk it out like a pulled muscle. Occasionally they decamped to her place. The first time he asked her—no, informed her—of the change of venue came early one morning while she was still half asleep, drowsy with last night's notes. He was on his way over, said the familiar accented voice on the other end of the phone.

When the doorbell rang she was in the shower. She stepped out, dripping, to shout down the corridor that there was a key on the lintel above the door and he should let himself in. It felt natural to give this man the run of her flat. After all, he was going to publish her. When she entered the sitting room she found him sprawled on the floor, propped on one elbow, pages scattered about him, red pen zipping through the manuscript. He looked right at home. And, watching him work steadily, intensely, she realised that he was the first man she'd properly trusted since her dad walked out.

They settled into their routine. Every day it was just the two of them, happily suspended in a bubble of literary discourse and fried egg sandwiches. One Wednesday morning, ten chapters into the edit, Jane breezed through the front door of Tristesse Books.

‘Morning, Roddy.’ She plunked a bulging paper bag on his desk. ‘I made brownies.’

There was an urgent rustle as Roddy tore open the bag. With an appreciative smile, she turned towards Tom's office. She liked Roddy; he was a good influence on Tom. If Tom had a fault—and he did—it was an impulsiveness that shaded into arrogance, and Roddy was the one who called him on it, every time. Although it was dubious how he balanced his job as a replacement English teacher with secretarial duties for Tristesse Books, he exuded an air of moral rectitude along with an insatiable appetite for her home baking. He was Jiminy Cricket to Tom's Pinocchio, she'd informed both men one cool summer night, as they sat outside at Bar 91 amidst the buzz of revellers welcoming the weekend. Tom had almost choked on his pint. Roddy just looked disappointed: couldn't he at least be Yoda to a hot-headed young Skywalker, he'd asked.

‘Uh, Jane. You can't go in there.’

She stopped at the door, one hand poised over the handle.

‘He's got someone with him. They've been in there all night.’

She could hear Tom on the other side, his voice in its by now familiar trajectory, the point and counterpoint of argument, the steady inflection and unwavering logic of his contention. And it hit her. He was giving notes.

To someone else.

She experienced a sudden light-headedness, like an aeroplane cabin depressurising at altitude, and was still reeling when the door opened and a winsomely pretty blonde girl stepped out of the office and collided with her.

‘Ooh, sorry.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, I should be the one who … sorry.’

They disentangled themselves and the girl introduced herself.

‘Nicola Ball.’

She was wearing a severe black pinafore dress on top of a white shirt buttoned to the neck. Pellucid blue eyes gazed unblinkingly from a perfectly oval face. There was a hint of redness around her eyelids, as if she'd been crying.

‘The Last Stop,’ said Jane delightedly. ‘I loved that book.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nicola, a tremulous smile appearing on pale lips. Then her expression hardened and she cast a dark look back through the doorway to Tom's office. ‘At least someone appreciates me,’ she snarled.

‘Why are you still here?’ Tom's voice boomed out. ‘Stop socialising and start rewriting. Go. Now!’

‘I hate that man,’ Nicola hissed.

As she said it Jane felt an unexpected sense of relief. Nicola hated Tom. Good.

‘Please tell me you're not one of his,’ said Nicola.

‘Uh, one of—? Oh, I see. Well yes, I am—as you say—one of his,’ said Jane, adding an apologetic shrug since Nicola's sombre expression seemed to demand one. ‘Tom's going to publish me.’

Nicola took her hand and patted it consolingly. ‘I'm so sorry.’ She pursed her lips in an expression of graveside condolence, bowed her head and departed.

Jane watched her slip out, the triangle of her pinafore dress swinging like a tolling church bell, and felt herself smile inwardly; whatever Nicola's experience of working with Tom had been, it bore little resemblance to her own.

‘Jane?’ he called from the office. ‘Is that you?’

She never tired of hearing him say her name. She floated inside on a cloud of happiness ready to embark on the next leg of their voyage of collaboration and constructive criticism, of intellectual discussion and high-minded debate.

‘Your notes,’ Jane spluttered. ‘Your notes are burning cigarettes stubbed out on the bare arm of my creativity.’ She stepped away from his desk only to return immediately. ‘Oh, and there is no such thing as constructive criticism. The phrase reeks of foul-tasting medicine forced down gagging throats “for your own good”. Constructive criticism is a fallacy; weasel words designed to lure innocent writers like me into an ambush. This chapter is too long. There's too much set-up. This plotline doesn't pay off. Uh, perhaps that's because you cut the set-up? This character is underwritten. Show, don't tell! This chapter is still too long. I like this scene, this is a great scene—it must be cut.’ She stood before him, her face flushed, her breath shallow and rapid.

‘Are you quite finished?’ Tom responded with irritating calm.

She brushed her fringe from her eyes and sniffed. ‘Yes.’

‘Good, then we shall continue.’

Two months into the edit and Jane had lost all sense of perspective. Was he a brilliant editor or, despite his earlier disavowal, simply a sadist who enjoyed torturing novelists? Currently, she was leaning towards the latter. She half suspected that were she to pull at the antiquarian volume of Frankenstein squatting atop his bookcase a secret door would swing open to reveal a shadowy chamber and the gaunt, moaning figures of his other novelists, hanging from bloodstained bulldog clips, notes on their last drafts carved into their skin with his annoying and ubiquitous little red pen. It pained her to admit it, but Nicola Ball's expression of pity had been prophetic.

She occupied her usual spot, squirming in the low chair opposite his desk. They sat in silence as he went through her latest revisions, the only sounds the dismissive flick of manuscript pages and the scratch of that damn pen. She watched as he adjusted the bust of Napoleon, turning it precisely one inch clockwise, then two inches anti-clockwise. He did this with some regularity, but it was only latterly she'd realised that the tic inevitably preceded his delighted unearthing of a particularly egregious flaw in her manuscript.

‘This makes no sense at all,’ he muttered on cue, striking out a paragraph with a flurry of red slashes.

‘What are you cutting now?’ Sometime on Thursday she had given up any attempt to hide her irritation.

He looked up and she was sure that his smug, infuriating face evinced surprise at her presence. Why are you even here? it said. What could you possibly have to contribute to this process? You are merely the writer. Jane struggled out of her chair—she'd meant to leap up for added effect, but her prone position made it tricky.

‘I've changed my mind,’ she said, reaching across the desk for her manuscript. ‘I don't want to be published. By you. Thank you very much.’

She had no practical reason for retrieving the manuscript; if she'd really meant what she said she could simply have walked out of the door, gone home and printed out another—but she wanted to take something away from him. She had gathered an armful of pages when she felt his hand close gently but firmly around her wrist. She was startled; was it the first time he'd touched her?

Last week she'd been surprised that he hadn't kissed her in the French style—not that French style—when she'd finally signed her contract and left with a cheque that would pay for a fabulous trip to Moscow (the one in Ayrshire, natch). It had seemed to her that he started to lean in over the signature page for the customary embrace, but pulled back at the last moment. He'd been close enough for her to feel the leading edge of his well-groomed stubble and smell his skin. She'd half expected his natural scent to be Lorne sausage, but instead he was a heady mixture of sandalwood and new books. Then why his hesitation? She had swilled copious amounts of mouthwash that morning in preparation for the signing. Just on the off chance, you understand. So it wasn't her breath. Perhaps he simply didn't fancy the idea of kissing her. Well, his loss.

He was still holding her wrist. And, for a moment, she wondered what it would be like to do it right here on his desk.

‘You can't do that,’ he said firmly.

‘I know,’ she said, shocked at where her mind had taken her. ‘Knowing my luck I'd probably end up with Napoleon in my back.’

Jane saw that he was looking at her in utter bafflement. She had seen a similar expression on his face earlier that day over a complicated sandwich and a cappuccino at the café next door. Pushing his coffee to one side he had complained that until meeting her he'd imagined his English not only to be fluent, but idiomatic—and prided himself on being almost certainly the only living Frenchman who knew his bru from his broo. However, in conversation with her he often felt like a foreigner, he said. No. Correction. Like an alien. She hadn't said so, but secretly she enjoyed the thought that she unsettled him.

She shrugged off his hand, glowered at him to get it out of her system and then with a sigh lowered herself into the knee-height chair once more. She waved at him to continue. ‘You were cutting what was no doubt my favourite passage.’

‘Bon,’ he said, gratified, and scored viciously through another paragraph.

As she watched his scurrilous red pen she wondered when it had all gone wrong. A few weeks ago she had even made him her flourless chocolate cake. Though now she thought about it the baking interlude had arisen because one of his notes had sent her into a tailspin and she had been unable to write a single word for days. Yes, she realised, he was turning her into a crazy person.

As he droned on detailing the endless failings in her novel, she decided something had to be done. What was it about Tom that made her heed his every pronouncement? It wasn't just the sculpted stubbly chin, it was the self-confidence acquired from years at an exclusive French boys’ school followed by university degrees acquired in two languages. The closest she'd come to university was on the tills at the supermarket selling lager to boozed-up students on a Saturday night.

She found herself scanning the contents of the bookcase that filled the wall behind his desk, running her eye across the well-thumbed classics, vintage and modern, dozens of them seeded with slips of paper marking favourite passages. It was a display designed to impress. But then with a little rush she realised that she'd read most of them in the library in Dennistoun during those long afternoons. She sat a little straighter—she probably knew them as well as he did. Her gaze settled on a volume of Greek myths and an idea struck her.

The problem was territorial. Like the myth of the giant Antaeus, who drew his strength from his connection to the earth, all she had to do was separate him from the square mile of the Merchant City and she was sure their relationship would achieve new levels of equality and harmony. She needed to pluck him from his comfort zone and repot him. She smiled to herself—she knew just the place.

CHAPTER 4

‘Laughter in the Rain’, Neil Sedaka, 1974, Polydor Records

‘YOU SAID IT WAS a Highland cottage.’

‘Yes.’

‘I heard you distinctly. An old crofthouse nestling at the end of a glen, you said.’

‘Yes.’

‘But …’

‘Yes?’

‘You made it sound …’ he hunted for the right word ‘… picturesque.’

Ignoring his accusing tone, she motioned towards the small stone dwelling with a gesture of ‘ta-da!’

His eye roved suspiciously across the outside. A chimney stack balanced like a drunken man on the roof; weeds sprouted from slate tiles that had been discarded rather than laid; of the two windows cut roughly into the facing wall, one was bricked up and the other colonised by a family of squabbling, drab-feathered birds. The whole structure tilted at a twenty-degree angle, leaning into a relentless, biting wind that howled down the most desolate glen he had ever seen.

‘Does it leak?’

Her mouth gaped, offended. ‘Of course it doesn't leak.’ She turned away, fished out a great iron key from her weekend bag, slid it into the stiff lock and shouldered her way inside. ‘So long as it doesn't rain,’ she mumbled.

There was a sucking squelch from behind her.

‘Of course. What else should I expect? Just wonderful.’

He stood up to his ankles in a sloppy brown puddle. Jane wasn't sure which looked more soggy—his trousers or his face. When she had suggested the trip up north to work on the manuscript—to finish it once and for all—she told him to bring suitable outdoor wear. So, when he'd picked her up in his car that morning, she couldn't help but notice with some surprise that he was wearing orange trainers. She declined to comment at the time; he'd obviously picked them as a reminder that he didn't have to listen to her—he was the one who gave the notes in this relationship. Well, look where it got you, she thought smugly. I say potato, you say pomme de terre.

The muddied orange trainers steamed gently in front of the fireplace as Jane stoked the sputtering fire. Beside her, Tom shivered in a faded tweed armchair, hugging himself and grumbling.

‘What's wrong now? You haven't stopped moaning since we left Glasgow.’ She threw on a handful of kindling. ‘Don't you like it here? This was my granny's cottage.’

He snorted. ‘You're telling me your granny was a crofter?’

She noted that he didn't say ‘farmer’, but used the Scottish expression. He was amazing. His English. Was amazing. Not him. He was annoying. ‘She worked on the line at Templeton's Carpets,’ she explained.

‘So, she bought this place?’ He sounded incredulous at the idea anyone would put down hard-earned money for such a dump.

‘She won it. Back in the ‘80s. One of those dodgy timeshare offers came through the door.’ He gave her a blank expression. ‘Y'know the sort of thing: You have already won one of these great prizes: a wicker basket of dried flowers, a canoe, or a Highland hideaway. All you had to do to claim your prize—and it was always the dried flowers—was sit in a conference room in an Aviemore hotel and listen to some guy's sales pitch. But my granny hit the jackpot.’ She motioned, quiz-hostess style. ‘The Highland hideaway.’

‘And to think she could have walked away with a canoe.’ He cast a disgruntled eye around the dim room. ‘If you'd wanted a change of scene there are perfectly good cafés on Byres Road,’ he grumbled. ‘With Wi-Fi.’ He flicked the switch on a standard lamp sporting a fetching floral shade. The room remained dim. ‘And electricity!’ he barked. ‘This is not natural.’

‘What are you talking about? Outside that door is actual nature.’

‘Nature is for German hikers in yellow cagoules.’ He scraped the chair across the floor, closer to the fire. ‘Can't you turn this thing up?’

Jane tossed on another log and retreated to the kitchen to make coffee. It was a while since she'd been up to the cottage. When she'd begun the novel she imagined retreating to its splendid isolation. In her head it would go like this: during the day she would alternate writing by the window (that would be the one window with glass in the frame) with long walks in the countryside where she would be inspired by clouds and daffodils. At night she would curl up by the fire and continue scratching out her masterpiece. She had decamped to the cottage to live the dream, only to find the power out, as usual. Four hours later her laptop battery died and she lost half of the chapter she'd been working on. That was the end of the romance. She returned to Glasgow the following morning and hadn't been back since.

The cupboard contained a single jar of Nescafé, a tin of powdered milk and a suspicious trail of what she hoped were only mouse droppings. She warmed the drink on an old Primus stove. It pained her to admit it, but Tom was right; the place was little more than a ruin. But it was her ruin. Her gran had left it to her, not her mum. Gran hadn't approved of mum's choice of husband—she was an astute judge of character—and though there was no grand title or country estate to disinherit her from, there was the cottage.

Tom called from the other room, imploring her through chattering teeth to hurry up with the coffee. She put up with his hectoring, thankful he wasn't asking where to find the toilet. She was delaying the inevitable moment when she had to explain the purpose of the spade by the front door.

He had moved from the armchair onto the hearth, and as she approached she saw he was holding her manuscript. She sighed. It was straight to business then.

‘Sit down.’

‘You're incredibly bossy, anyone ever told you that?’ she complained, sitting nonetheless.

‘Yes. Now be quiet and listen. This is the chapter where Janet goes to her favourite sweetshop—’

‘Glickman's,’ she interrupted. It was on the London Road. A Glasgow institution, the oldest amongst dozens in that sweet tooth of a city. Her dad used to take her on a Saturday morning to spend her pocket money: a bag of Snowies for her—moreish drops of sweet white chocolate covered in rainbow-coloured sprinkles; and a quarter of tangy Soor Plooms for him that made her mouth tingle. He always let her pay for his—a warning sign of things to come.

Jane folded her arms, bracing herself for his critique. ‘OK, so what's wrong with it? Wait, don't tell me. It's the Soor Plooms—too specific—they won't understand the reference in Croydon.’

He said nothing and instead reached into his bag for a small, white paper bag. It rustled with unbearable familiarity.

‘Are those from Glickman's?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.

He chuted the contents into his hand. Out tumbled white chocolate Snowies.

She felt sick.

He held out a single sweet with the quiet unblinking confidence of a man who knows that when he wants to kiss a girl it is inevitable; at some point she will kiss him back. He offered the sweet to her, both of them understanding that she would succumb.

‘Your dad—’ He shrugged. ‘Forgive me, Janet's dad—was an alky and a total bamstick, but you took that pain and turned it into a novel which, for the most part, isn't awful.’

‘I'm not Janet.’

He made a face as if to say, oh really? ‘A less scrupulous publisher would insist on calling this a memoir,’ he said with a nod towards the manuscript. ‘He would conveniently skip over the few sections that are fiction and sell a hundred thousand more copies. Readers love pain, particularly if they know someone really suffered.’

‘I'm not Janet.’

‘Now, for the sake of editorial distance, you need to let her go.’

‘Editorial distance?’ She felt the sag of disappointment. So this was just about the edit.

‘Yes. What else?’ Tom leant forward. ‘Janet is about to have a new life on the page. Soon, your character will belong to thousands of readers—’ he grimaced ‘—well, hundreds. You two need to go your separate ways.’ He paused. ‘So we are going to make a new memory. One that belongs to you, not her. Here, in this picturesque shit-hole.’

He pushed the Snowie towards her. ‘You are not Janet.’

‘I can't. I haven't had once since Dad …’

‘I know.’

Slowly, she parted her lips. He popped the sweetie on her tongue and her mouth filled with warm chocolate and the crunch of hundreds and thousands.

In the morning she found him asleep in the armchair, arms wrapped around her manuscript. Was it possible to feel jealous of your own novel? Nothing had happened after Snowie-gate; he had behaved like a gentleman, keeping the conversation professional, the mood workmanlike. Which was absolutely fine with her. A-OK. Hunky-flipping-dory. After all, it was perfectly natural for a modern young woman to invite an attractive man she barely knew to a cottage in the middle of nowhere. A cottage with one bedroom. There was no pretext; this weekend was all about the sex. Text. The fire had burned itself out overnight. No, that wasn't a metaphor. She gathered a handful of kindling from the basket next to the grate and built a new one.

At his suggestion after breakfast they spent the day walking the length of the glen. Around lunchtime it opened out to a dark, glassy loch. The sun was breaking through the thick layer of cloud when they came to a large flat rock by the edge of the water and Tom insisted on stopping. He reached into a chic leather messenger bag, and Jane was sure it was to retrieve the manuscript, but to her surprise he produced a couple of gourmet sandwiches from Berits & Brown and a portable espresso maker, from which he proceeded to make the most delicious cup of coffee she'd ever tasted.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked as they ate. The clouds had cleared and now the sun hung awkwardly overhead, lost in an empty sky like a walker who's realised he's been holding his Ordnance Survey map upside down for the last four and a half hours.

‘It's a nice day, I thought we should get out.’

‘No, I don't mean here. I mean here here. In Scotland. At the risk of sounding small-town, can I ask what a Frenchman from the Côte d'Azur is doing running a publishing company in Glasgow?’

He lowered his espresso cup. ‘You know, Saint-Tropez is a lot like Glasgow.’

‘It is?’

‘No. Not one little bit.’

‘So, you fancied a change of scene?’

‘I had to get out. I was living in a pop song. A French pop song. Do you know how many hours of sunshine the Côte d'Azur receives annually?’

‘How many?’

‘A fucking lot.’

‘Wait, you're saying you came to Scotland … for the rain?’

He shrugged and rooted around the ground before picking up a smooth, circular stone.

‘Why Glasgow?’ Jane continued. ‘You do know it's Edinburgh that has the book festival, right? And if you want to be a publisher isn't Paris a more obvious choice? Or London, or New York?’

Gripping the stone in the curve of his index finger and thumb he sent it skimming across the flat loch. It sank on the second bounce. ‘Merde!’ He turned to Jane. ‘The world has been overrun by ersatz writers, musicians and artists. All we have are writers who write about writing, singers who purposely break up with their lovers so that they may sing about heartache. I came because Glasgow is still somewhere real. And I came to find someone real.’

His eyes definitely did not bore into her soul. Real eyes didn't do that. So why did she feel so utterly naked?

‘Jane, I think I came to find y—’

‘Guten Tag!’

Above them on the edge of the loch stood a party of walkers with bare knees, ruddy cheeks—and yellow cagoules. Their round smiles deepened into Teutonic puzzlement when Jane and Tom's laughter shattered the stillness.

They returned to the cottage. The weather closed in shortly before they reached shelter and they were both soaked through. When she entered the room, towelling her hair dry, she found him occupying his usual place in the armchair by the fire.

‘We need to talk about the sex,’ he announced.

The sex. Le Sex. Finally, she thought.

There were, however, cultural proprieties to be observed. A nice girl simply didn't acquiesce to such an indecent proposal. ‘I don't think we do,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I am not talking about “the sex” with you. You've got some cheek, you know that? Just because I asked you up here doesn't mean I'm ready to jump into bed.’

‘The sex,’ he said evenly, ‘in chapter seventeen.’ He opened her novel to the relevant page.

‘Oh,’ she said, unfolding her arms. ‘Yes. That sex.’

Tom stabbed a finger at a section halfway down the page. ‘I'm confused. What is going on here?’

‘What are you talking about? It's …’ She circled behind him, craning her neck for a sight of the offending paragraph. ‘Perfectly clear.’

‘Are they having sex? Because if they are, you should know that it's improbable.’

‘Ah, well,’ she wagged a finger, ‘that's because I'm writing it from the woman's perspective—something you clearly don't understand.’

‘Right.’ He held the page at arm's length, rotating it first one way and then the other, as if looking at it from another angle would make the scene clearer. ‘So where exactly is her leg meant to be?’

Oh, the man was maddening! Jane swatted him with her towel and made a grab for the manuscript. ‘Give that back!’

He was too fast for her. He led her around the room, dangling the novel at arm's length, just out of her grasp. At first she requested him curtly but politely to desist in his childish behaviour, but when he ignored her she resorted to a tirade of foul language. He doubled up with laughter at hearing her swear. Which meant that he failed to notice the trailing cord of the standard lamp as he swept around the room once more.

‘Ow!’ He slammed into the floor, his knee taking the brunt. ‘I hate this place!’

She stood over him to gloat. ‘Serves you right. It's a good scene. It's full-blooded, lusty—’

Tom rubbed his knee mournfully. ‘—physically impossible.’

With one final cry of irritation she lunged for the manuscript. He teased it out of reach and with his other hand swept her legs from under her. She crumpled, sinking down beside him. So near to him now she saw that he had kept his promise—no lover had ever looked at her this way.

‘It's not impossible,’ she said, swallowing. ‘You just have to be … bendy.’

That raised an eyebrow. ‘This is drawn from personal experience?’

They were close enough to breathe each other's air.

‘Well, that's not something you're ever going to find out.’ She let the words hang there. Just the two of them in the overwhelming silence of the cottage. Not a milk frother to disturb the stillness.

A small part of her couldn't help but observe the situation from a distance: an unfairly attractive Frenchman, a hearthrug in front of a crackling log fire, a Highland cottage. If she'd written it, he would have struck it out. Infuriating, exasperating man.

She waited. In all the romances she'd read people kissed adverbially. Hungrily, madly, passionately. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him. Wondered about the hardness of his bristles and the softness of his lips. Wondered if she should make the first move.

And then she didn't have to wonder any longer.

CHAPTER 5

‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’, Travis, 1999, Independiente

‘YOU STILL UP?’ Bleary-eyed, Roddy surveyed the wreckage of the evening: a card table strewn with the last hand, a drained bottle of something in equal parts cheap and noxious, and Tom. He sat in the quiet darkness of his office with a supermarket brand cognac, swirling the dregs around the fat-bottomed glass. The pale liquid caught the light of a streetlamp.

‘I'm off to bed. Got Jane Austen with my Fifth Years first thing tomorrow,’ Roddy said wearily. ‘Or, as I prefer to call it, Pride and Extreme Prejudice. Are you crying?’

‘No.’ There was a snuffle from the darkness.

‘You are. You're crying like a little girl.’ He took a step into the room. ‘What are you reading?’

‘Nothing.’ Tom attempted to hide the manuscript propped open on his lap, but it was too late. ‘It's a non-fiction proposal,’ he said, ‘about the endangered Chinese Crested Tern.’ He wiped his cheek. ‘Very moving.’

‘Bollocks. It's Jane's novel, isn't it?’

Tom shot him a look. ‘You can never tell her. Never. Promise me, Roddy.’

‘OK, OK. But I don't know what you're so worried about—if you hadn't noticed, Glasgow city centre on a non-football Saturday is chock-a with reconstructed males in floods when they discover Boots has run out of their Hydra Energetic Anti-Fatigue Moisturiser.’ He yawned. ‘How many times have you read that book anyway?’

‘A few.’

‘Uh-huh. I'll leave you two alone then. There's a box of man-sized tissues by the sofa.’

‘Roddy!’

‘For the crying, sicko.’

‘Ah, right. Thanks.’

Roddy shook his head and, smiling at his friend's mood, set off upstairs.

‘She's more real than any writer I've ever known,’ Tom whispered. ‘She stands there, a red flame in a downpour. I think she's the one.’

Roddy froze, then quickly trotted back to the doorway. ‘Oh my god. So it's finally happened. The lothario—what's French for lothario?—doesn't matter—anyway, the great lover from Saint-Tropez meets the girl of his dreams and—twist ending—turns out she's a redhead from the Gallowgate. It's love across the borders. Jeux Sans Frontières. Or is that It's a Knockout?’

Tom scowled. ‘She's the one Tristesse has been waiting for.’

‘Oh,’ said Roddy. ‘No bridesmaid dress for me then.’

‘I don't care if her novel sells a single copy, it is a great piece of work.’ He reflected on that with a tilt of his head. ‘Naturally, I wouldn't object if it does sell a few copies.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Shitloads would be good, actually.’

Tom drained his glass and thumped it down on the table. ‘But she can write, Roddy. The darkness, the terrible beauty of her prose. She does not mistake sentiment for emotion, she plays with language, sometimes it almost destroys her. She leaves a piece of herself on every page. She is unafraid to use her life, her self—whatever the cost. It's very brave.’ He took a deep breath. ‘In her soul she is a poet.’

‘That's nice.’ Roddy studied his friend in the gloom. ‘Have you told her?’

‘Don't be ridiculous.’

‘Why not? People like to be told they're doing a good job.’

‘Such petty considerations do not concern an artist such as Jane.’

‘An artist …?’ Roddy's face lit up. ‘Oh wait a minute, you do fancy her, don't you?’

Tom pursed his lips and blew out dismissively.

Roddy pointed excitedly. ‘Did you just pah? You did. You just pah'd.’

‘I did not. And that is such a cliché. I thought you were going to bed.’

Roddy narrowed his eyes. ‘Have you two … done it yet?’

Tom threw up his hands. ‘Typical Anglo-Saxon prurience. Next you'll be asking me if I first requested her father's permission.’

‘You did! You two did it.’ Roddy's voice dropped to an appalled whisper. ‘But what about the golden rule—don't shag your own novelists?’

‘I never said it was a golden rule.’ Tom shrugged. ‘It's just a rule.’

‘It's the bloody Prime Directive, mate!’

‘This is not the time to be quoting Star Wars.’

‘Trek, you philistine.’

‘Well then, say it why don't you?’ Tom invited the expected disapproval with a brusque wave. ‘No good will come of this. You cannot work together and sleep together. Come on, where is your petty bourgeois censure?’

‘Au contraire—as we Anglo-Saxons like to say—I think it's a great idea. You two make a lovely couple.’

Tom shook a finger at Roddy. ‘Hey, hey, hey—who's talking about a couple?’

‘Well, I just thought—’

‘Do I fancy her? Yes. Did sleeping with her make the edit more enjoyable? Naturally. But for fuck's sake, Roddy, why does every hook-up have to be Happy Ever After?’

Sunday morning tiptoed into Jane's bedroom on a gentle breeze and the muffled blare of a radio from the flat upstairs. Through a gap in the curtains a bar of daylight striped the wooden floors and the bed where the two of them had spent most of the night. The rest of it they'd spent in the bath. And on the kitchen counter. And then on her desk in the bay window.

She lay there watching him sleep. They hadn't really discussed what this was, what they were: was this just part of his editing process, along with square sausage rolls and coffee from Café Gandolfi? Was he her boyfriend? Somehow she couldn't bring herself to ask, didn't want to seem needy. She was trying very hard to be cool and aloof—for a change. And anyway she saw him every day and it didn't seem to matter. The edit was intense and intimate, but in all this time he hadn't said those four magic little words she so wanted to hear: I love your novel.

She was wearing one of his shirts, though couldn't remember putting it on. She did remember being naked and the ensuing tussle that had visited every room in the flat and lasted half the night. In their passionate frenzy they'd broken a vase filled with fresh flowers and now the memory of last night's lovemaking was suffused with the scent of peonies. Beside her, he stirred. He rubbed his eyes, kissed her good morning and then reached past her for the manuscript on the bedside table. Slipping on his spectacles he began to read.

They had started the final chapter of the edit last week and now all that remained to review was the ending. She studied him, absorbed in her novel, aware of nothing but her words. He must have read the ending countless times—perhaps more than she had, certainly more than any other section of the novel. Finish strongly, he'd said to her often. It was a rule of writing, like ‘cut adverbs’, ‘show, don't tell’, and ‘never sleep with your editor’.

‘So, the ending,’ he said at last.

She propped herself up on her elbows. ‘You think it's too sad.’

‘I love sad. I'm French.’ He propped his spectacles on his forehead. ‘The way you describe her mum's death …’

Perhaps it was more memoir than fiction, she thought. Certainly it was only the most delicate skein that separated the events in the novel and her real life. But she hadn't acknowledged it—not to him—until now.

‘I was seven when she died.’

‘You must miss her very much.’

‘There were aunties. A lot of aunties.’

‘And your dad?’

‘My dad left us. Me.’

‘Do you hate him?’

‘It'd be easier if I did, right? What kind of man walks out on his family like that?’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe I do hate him, but the fact is I don't know him. Is it wrong, but I wish I knew where he was?’

She flung off the covers and swung her legs onto the floor. ‘I'm going to jump in the shower.’ She stood up. The shirt hung down over her hips, brushing the tops of her bare legs. ‘Coming?’ She waggled her eyebrows.

‘Wait. I have something I need to say.’ He sat up and laid the manuscript on his lap. ‘Jane, I believe we're finished.’

The room went quiet and she took a breath. In her head she started to give herself a talking-to. Get it together. We were never really a couple.

Then he patted the manuscript and said, ‘We're finished the edit. I want to publish.’

She exhaled. It took her a moment to register what he'd actually said and then all she could muster was a disbelieving, ‘Really, are you sure?’

He shrugged. ‘We could go through it one more time if you prefer—?’

‘No!’ She squealed. ‘Oh, Tom.’ She leapt onto the bed and flung her arms around him. Finally, it was done. Finished. Over! But even as she thrilled to the prospect of being published she was aware of a small voice in her head ringing like an alarm. ‘Oh-oh. Oh-oh.’ Done. Finished. Over. The edit, not the two of them. So what did it mean for them?

She tried to dismiss the nagging voice. What they had was much more than an edit. Wasn't it? He had shared his deepest feelings. About her novel. He'd demonstrated an acute sensitivity to her emotions. On the page. She realised with a jolt that everything they'd done together to this point was on the page. Apart from the stuff they'd done under the duvet. Under this duvet. Tomorrow there would be no discussion of metaphor, no disagreement over the importance of chapter fourteen. Tomorrow there would be no reason for them to see each other.

‘We should celebrate,’ she said. ‘How about tomorrow I take you out for lunch?’

Tom climbed out of bed and started to pull on his clothes, retrieving them from the corners of the room where they had been flung the night before. ‘Can't. Off to Frankfurt first thing.’

She was puzzled. ‘On holiday?’

‘For the Book Fair.’ He fastened his jeans. ‘I need to find the new Jane Lockhart.’

She knew he was kidding, that this was meant to flatter her. But if that was the case then what was this sick feeling in her stomach?

CHAPTER 6

‘A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall’, Bob Dylan, 1962, Columbia Records

THE DAY AFTER Tom announced that the edit was finished, Jane got all the way to the Underground platform before she remembered. She huffed, irritated at wasting her time until it struck her that she could waste as much time as she wanted now. She had absolutely nothing to do.

She trudged home and proceeded to mooch about her flat, rearranging furniture, desultorily flicking through magazines she had been forbidden from reading during the last few months. When they'd started to revise her manuscript Tom had banned all other reading material. No magazines. No newspapers. Definitely no novels. To avoid the possibility of leakage, he had said. He didn't want her influenced by external factors. What about him, she'd teased, wasn't he external? No, he'd said sternly, from this moment on I am inside you. Yeah, he really didn't hear himself.

When he returned from Frankfurt they met up for dinner, but without the scattered manuscript pages and the low-level squabbling that invariably accompanied the edit, something was missing. She even missed his red pen. Which, she had to admit, did sound somewhat phallic. And yes, they did sleep together that night, but then around midnight his phone pulsed with a message.

‘Who is it?’ she asked sleepily.

‘Nicola,’ he said, the blue glow from the screen illuminating his face. He read her text and smiled. ‘Clever. Very clever.’

She felt a stab of jealousy. ‘What does she want?

‘She's had a thought about how to crack chapter twenty-two and wants to talk it through.’ He climbed out of bed.

Stung, Jane sat up. ‘You're going?’ she said. ‘Now?’

Hurriedly he began to dress. ‘If I don't go to her now then by morning she will have convinced herself that the idea is worthless. She's not like you. She doesn't have your confidence.’

She tried to accept the compliment and to remind herself that Nicola and Tom really was just business, but as she heard the front door click shut behind him the unease she'd felt through dinner swelled into emotional indigestion.

The next date went better. They'd planned to see a triple bill of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs at the GFT, but over drinks Tom asked her if she had any thoughts about her next novel and as she talked to him she realised that she did. They missed Blue as they brainstormed and by the time they made it to the film theatre, they'd lost three and a half hours of Polish miserablism to their conversation and decided to skip the rest of the bill in favour of continuing their discussion over a curry at Balbir's.

As they ate, it occurred to her that as soon as she gave him the next novel it would be followed by another close edit and they'd be back in the place where things between them had flowed easily. She decided to start work on the new novel the very next morning.

When she awoke he had already left. Instead of feeling upset she took advantage of his absence and the peace of the empty flat, leapt out of bed, showered, grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down at her desk. File. New Document. Save As Untitled. That would do for now. She was ready to begin. She loved this moment. The anticipation of what happens next. It didn't matter that the ideas which had seemed so sharp the night before now appeared fuzzy. She was fearless before the blank page. She rested her hands on the wrist pad and, taking a deep breath, hurled herself into the white void of the first draft.

She quickly lost herself in the new book. Her protagonist, Darsie Baird, began to dominate every waking and most of her sleeping hours. Suddenly, she didn't have time to see Tom and when after a few weeks of writing in her pyjamas she decided it would be nice to shave her legs and drop in on him she discovered that he had gone home to France for a month to see his family. She tried not to be irritated that he hadn't told her, and Roddy mumbled something about him not wanting to interrupt her Muse.

Somehow the weeks had drifted past and now it was the best part of two months since they'd seen each other. A couple of days ago he'd texted her to say he was back in Glasgow and the finished copies of her book were due to arrive that week. She waited as long as she could to call in to the office, unsure which she was more eager to see: her debut novel or Tom.

‘Hello?’ It was Roddy's voice on the intercom.

She stood outside Tristesse, bouncing with anticipation, mouth tilted up to the speaker, one hand supporting a tray of fairy cakes. ‘I was just passing.’ Lie.

There was a buzz and a click and she threw herself through the front door. Balancing the tray she skipped down the corridor towards Reception. The fairy cakes were a bluff. She'd been making batches of them all morning, studding alphabet sweets in the icing to spell out highly amusing and piercingly appropriate lines from classic literature.

At least, that had been her plan. Turns out the surface area of your average fairy cake is not nearly expansive enough to accommodate your classic literary quip. And anyway, even had the cakes been bigger, there weren't enough e's in her bag of alphabet sweets to manage more than a couple of zingers from Shakespeare and the opening line of Moby Dick. In the end she gave up any attempt at cake intertextuality and settled on dropping random letters onto the icing. She was adamant that if you squinted at the last batch you could see a couple of lines from Emily Brontë.

But the fairy cakes were a decoy. A subterfuge. ATrojan horse in sponge form.

She eyed the stacked boxes that lined the narrow passageway, paying more attention to them than usual. One of them could contain her book. She'd been waiting for this moment since Tom announced that the edit was finished. He was happy. Or, as happy as the scowling Frenchman ever got. The manuscript had been scoured for solecisms, corrected for commas; it was ready to go to the printer, he announced. And what about the cover?

‘That is up to the publisher,’ he'd said. ‘Trust me.’

And she had.

Tom had insisted that the delivery date was a rough one, that the books could arrive any day that week. She wasn't taking any chances. But she didn't want to seem too keen. Hence the deceptive fairy cakes.

‘Hi, Jane,’ Roddy greeted her. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Yeah, I was just passing,’ she repeated, attempting to sound casual. ‘I was baking this morning and made too many of these.’ Lie.

‘Ooh, fairy cakes. With alphabet letters. Nice touch.’ He took a bite out of one, then snapped his fingers and said through a mouthful of sponge, ‘You know what would be brilliant—if you used the letters to spell out, y'know, famous lines from novels!’

‘Genius!’ she exclaimed with rather too much surprise. ‘I should do that.’ She waited impatiently while he polished off the cake.

‘Umm …’ she began.

‘He's in,’ Roddy nodded towards Tom's office door, ‘if that's what you're asking.’

‘Oh good. Good to know. That he's in.’ She scanned the small Reception room, trying to identify any new boxes. ‘Umm …’

‘Was there anything else, Jane?’

Her gaze fell on a stack propped in front of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Nicola Ball. They were unopened boxes, shrink-wrapped and pristine, lacking the telltale scuffmarks that indicated stock which had been left lying about the office for weeks. Jane snatched a pair of scissors from Roddy's desk and set about prising open the topmost box. The flaps sprang open and there before her lay four snugly fitting hardbacks.

Her heart sank: it wasn't her novel. The hot pink cover was dominated by a photograph of a grinning little girl under an umbrella, beneath the title, Happy Ending. Relief immediately replaced disappointment; it was an awful cover, and the title stank. What kind of a writer would come up with …? Jane's eye slipped down to the author's name.

Her name.

No. That made no sense. She hadn't written a novel called Happy Ending. She read it again and felt a sudden sensation of falling, as in a dream, and was aware of eyes watching her. She glanced up at the cut-out of Nicola Ball. The young novelist's knowing, cardboard expression said, ‘I told you so.’

‘Hey,’ said Roddy, studying the top row of fairy cakes with a quizzical expression. ‘I'm pretty sure that's the last line of Wuthering Heights. Jane?’

But she had gone.

‘I'll call you back.’ Tom replaced the receiver as Jane barrelled through the door, brandishing a copy of her novel, her face red with fury. With a grunt she launched the hardback in his direction. He ducked and it hurtled past his ear, slamming against the wall.

‘Now, Jane …’ He held up his hands defensively.

‘Happy Ending? Happy fucking Ending!? What happened to The Endless Anguish of My Father? You bastard, you changed my title! To that?!’

‘I told you. The first time we met, I said it must go.’

‘But we never discussed it.’

He shrugged. ‘I knew how you'd react.’

The supercilious, condescending … she quickly scanned the room for something else with which to assault him and immediately found just what she was looking for.

‘Careful,’ he cried, ‘that's my Young Publisher of the Year award.’

Jane weighed the gold-coloured trophy and drew back her hand. ‘Runner-up,’ she said, heaving it at his head.

It flashed past him.

‘Sonofa—’ cursed Jane, disgusted at her aim—two throws, two misses. What the hell was she doing?

She slumped and the fight went out of her. She studied the man before her, searching his face for a sign, for whatever it was she'd missed that revealed his true nature. Like some spotty teenage girl she'd been distracted by his outward charms. God, she felt such a fool. ‘Who are you?’

‘What?’

‘All that time we spent together working on the manuscript. No one's ever got me the way … You told me to trust you. I did.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘It was a lie. That man would never have done this.’ The words caught in her throat. ‘I don't know you.’

‘Look, it was a terrible title and I changed it,’ he said gently. ‘There's no point being upset about it. What's done is done. Let's move on.’

‘How can this be so easy for you?’ Her voice was low, restrained. ‘You bastard.’

He flinched and colour rose into his cheeks. Now he was angry. ‘Perhaps because I am not a talented writer whose dad left her with a pathological inability to stop worshipping her own pain.’

‘Worshipping my …’

He closed his eyes, trying to regain control of himself. ‘Please, sit down. Let's talk about the launch.’

‘You know what,’ she said quietly, ‘our deal is one more book and then what's done is done.’

She wanted to turn smartly on her heel, head held high and march from his office. From his life. She needed a good exit, something to show him what she was made of—a full stop at the end of their stupid little relationship, or whatever this was. But her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. And with each step she told herself don't look back. Don't look back at him. Finally, she was outside and she let the tears fall. She made her way quickly across the empty courtyard and back onto the street. With a whir and a click the gates swung closed behind her.

Au revoir, Tristesse.

CHAPTER 7

‘Only Happy When It Rains’, Garbage, 1995, Mushroom

IF IT HAD BEEN up to Jane she would have cut all ties with Tom and Tristesse, but there was the small matter of her debut novel to promote. As a result the next six weeks were punctuated with a stream of perky communications from Sophie Hamilton Findlay in her capacity as Tristesse Books’ publicity department.

‘I'm pitching you to Vogue/Harpers/Stylist,’ she would announce one day, and follow up two days later with news of a rejection delivered in the same upbeat fashion.

Sophie remained stalwart in the face of endless dismissal, but Jane couldn't help noticing that the scale of her ambition lowered with each round. The glossies gave way to the free sheets. ‘I'm pitching you to the Glasgow West Gazette/The Big Issue.’

As the weeks wore on, Jane began to worry. Now even worse than the prospect of bad reviews was the distinct possibility of no reviews. It was not so much the sinking of her expectations as their torpedoing.

‘We'll start with some events.’ Sophie's jaunty voice whizzed out of the phone. ‘Nothing glam, I'm afraid. Little bookstores. But we'll grow it.’

‘Does that usually work?’ Jane asked cautiously.

‘It can.’

‘Have you ever known it to work?’

Jane listened as Sophie circled the question like a bear trap. ‘Really, it's all about word of mouth. Nothing beats word of mouth.’

‘But people need to read the book in the first place before they can talk about it, right? You need … mouths.’

‘Yes.’

‘And how do you get to those mouths?’

‘Oh, lots of ways. We have our tricks of the trade. The key is to go where the conversation is happening.’

‘But it isn't happening.’

‘Not yet.’

‘So how do we make it happen?’

There was a pause and then Sophie announced breezily, ‘Word of mouth.’

Jane perched on a wobbly chair tucked away at the rear of the tiny bookshop in a space in the children's section that when she'd arrived earlier that evening was occupied by a playmat and assorted squeaky toys.

She'd pictured her first book signing a thousand times in her mind: a queue of eager readers snaking round the block, her sitting behind a desk bowing under the weight of books, happily accepting endless, unconditional praise, signing each fresh copy to the accompanying melody of the cash register. Reality was a letdown. Most of her makeshift audience had been lured in by the promise of a free glass of wine, some cheap plonk Tom had ordered for the occasion. She'd sunk two glasses in an attempt to bolster her courage before taking to the stage. Well, playmat.

No one applauded when she finished reading. She'd chosen the chapter in Happy Ending in which her protagonist is locked in her bedroom on the twelfth floor of the high flat and can only gaze down at the other children playing outside on the first day of sunshine after a month of rain.

She squinted into the audience. The bookshop owner had helpfully set up a reading lamp. It dazzled her as she looked out and she couldn't see their faces. ‘Audience’ was a bit grand; she wasn't sure there were enough people out there to fill a lift. Beyond the glare she could hear a cough and what sounded like the rustle of a crisp bag. This was her first public reading and judging from the silence she'd gone down like a slug in a salad.

Nervously she tucked a strand of hair behind an ear and closed the book. The awful title assaulted her from the cover and she flipped it face down on her lap so that she didn't have to look at it one second longer. Her cheeks burned. Tom had foisted the title on her, betrayed her trust and then insisted that she go out and pretend she was happy about what he'd done.

She hated her book. The thing—the object—made her feel sick. Such a shame. All she'd ever wished for was to be a published author, but when it happened it came in a pink cover with a title she loathed almost as much as the man standing at the back of the coughing crowd. She couldn't see him either, but had no doubt he'd be leaning handsomely up against the wall, arms folded, watching her make a fool of herself in front of five women and a dog.

This was humiliating. She had to get out of here. Another cough rattled out of the darkness. And another. Was there something going round? The bookshop owner, a severely thin woman with an orb of white hair, stood next to the lamp. They could have been twins.

‘Ms. Lockhart, that was lovely.’ There was a catch in her throat. God, there really was some epidemic sweeping the city. ‘So, so …’ her voice squeaked, ‘lovely.’

Jane thanked her quietly and got up to leave, knocking the lamp. It swung out over the audience, illuminating them with a sickly light. They weren't coughing.

They were crying.

At the next book signing the same thing happened. Sniffles became sobs, five people became ten. Then the first newspaper review came out. Inconsolably, wretchedly wonderful—Jane Lockhart knows desolation.

At the reading the following evening they had to borrow chairs from the café next door. Jane read, people wept. And a new sound joined the weeping, the ring of cash registers. Happy Ending is the new black, ran one style magazine. Young women jostled the middle-aged stalwarts in the queue.

And at the next event more than a few men lined up with a copy—or two—clutched in their hands. Just buying it for my wife, my girlfriend, my dear old ma, they stressed in loud voices, then sheepishly would ask for it to be signed ‘to Gary’. What was happening here? Sophie Hamilton Findlay had a ready answer.

Tears everywhere. Tears on the bus. Tears on the underground. Tears falling from the eyes of miserable office workers. Wracking sobs in the suburbs. Tom thought about approaching Kleenex to sponsor the rest of the book tour.

First was the Scottish leg and home advantage. Her people; the kind who didn't need a glossary for the slang. Then south, following in the wake of the book's sales success, until finally to London, the great nose-in-the-air of a city. Go on, impress me, said Chelsea and Islington and Shoreditch. A spot on Radio Four—Jane Lockhart unlocked—and a half page in the TLS. The literati swooned. Film producers sniffed.

The tour continued with a triumphal return home. The big Waterstones on Buchanan Street opened up specially; tickets had to be purchased in advance now, the wine drinkable.

Jane smiled as she signed each new hardback, her hand aching, her signature no more than a scribble after weeks of constant repetition. She'd sent out so many ‘best wishes’ into the universe that if there really was such a thing as karma she could expect something wonderful to rebound. She shook herself. What was she talking about? It had already happened. Her book was a hit. After three months on sale so wet with tears was the island of Great Britain it could have been rolled up and squeezed out like a rag.

Tom had wanted to tour with her but she'd roundly rejected the suggestion, informing him flatly that she didn't want him anywhere near her. Grumbling, he had insisted on sending Sophie to play chaperone. ‘To look after me?’ she'd snapped back. ‘Or your investment?’

He was here today, in Glasgow, watching the cash registers ring. Typical.

A reader, delighted to be face to tear-stained face with the author of her misery, offered up a copy for signature. She'd read it three times; this one was for her aunty Avril.

The book fell open at the dedication. ‘To my dad, wherever he is.’

It had been a suggestion of Tom's which he'd made one Sunday morning in bed, during the last stages of the edit, when things were still good between them. Who knows, he'd said with a boyish shrug, perhaps he'll read it and come looking for you. She'd smiled despite herself —she suspected that Tom was a romantic, even though he kept it extremely well hidden. He caught her eye across the room. Oh, and a complete bastard. Don't forget that part.

She swirled her signature across the page. ‘Thanks. Thanks so much,’ she said, handing over the book.

The funny thing was that no matter how often she said it, she meant it every time. People were connecting with her novel. It was amazing. There was so much noise out there, so many other books to choose from, it was nothing short of a miracle they'd found hers. Here she sat in a bookshop surrounded by thousands of titles. She could feel them bristling at being left dustily on the shelf; their characters resentful at hers being singled out for attention. She liked to think of her own characters out there in the world, making new acquaintances. Readers were complicit, referring to them by name, as if they were neighbours or friends of the family. Sometimes the sensation was so intense she forgot that they were just that: characters. The only downside to all this gratitude was the dry throat.

The water jug and glass laid out on the signing table were both empty. She turned to the bookseller at her side and asked for a refill, just as the next eager reader placed his copy down in front of her.

‘Who shall I make it out to?’ she asked on auto-pilot, turning to look up at the man who stood awkwardly before her.

His face was as heavily lined as she remembered, but the skin had lost its sallow complexion and his eyes were no longer dull and milky, but gazed down at her with surprising clarity. In the ageing Polaroid on her Board of Pain he had more hair and perhaps the jaw-line was set firmer, but other than that he appeared younger, more vital than the last time she'd seen him. And he smelt different—cleaner. She knew at once he'd given up the drink.

‘Dad,’ she whispered.

Benny Lockhart twisted his hands and looked away, unsure what to say. He offered a self-conscious smile.

‘Hullo, Jane.’

In the signing line the book group ladies, thirty-something mums and sprinkling of literate males, all highly attuned to drama, sensed a new scene developing before their eyes; a bonus DVD extra playing out right in front of them. Conversations ceased and a hush fell over the room.

Benny shuffled his feet. ‘So, how have you been?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Christ, what an eejit. How have you been? Like I just got back from a fortnight's holiday.’

Jane pushed back her chair, walked to the other side of the table and, with another low, whispered ‘Dad’, flung her arms about him. The embrace was as much of a surprise to her as it was to him.

She could see that he was uncomfortable with the public display of affection. Who was she kidding—he'd always been uncomfortable with any kind of affection. But then she felt him clasp her tightly, and knew that this time he would never let her go.

Two weeks later Jane was taking advantage of some late summer sun with a walk in Kelvingrove Park, ducking Frisbees hurled by pasty bare-chested Glaswegian boys, listening to happy chatter ripened by the sunshine. She imagined that somewhere in the park someone was reading her book. Her idle afternoon threatened to be ruined when Tom's name flashed up on her phone. She ignored him, but he kept calling, and after the sixth hang-up she answered.

‘What do you want?’

‘You've been shortlisted for the Austen Book Awards. Best New Writer.’

‘Oh my god!’

‘We did it.’

And for the briefest, blissful moment she forgot about their falling out. Hostilities were suspended in the late afternoon glow. There was a pause and in the silence she could hear the rush of the River Kelvin. She waited for him to say something else, perhaps invite her to lunch for a celebratory glass of champagne. Or maybe she should ask him.

‘The ceremony's in London. I'll have Sophie send you the details,’ he said, interrupting her pleasant reverie. ‘And, uh, there's not much left in the budget, so I'm not sure we can afford the train fare.’ He paused. ‘How would you feel about taking the bus?’

The auditorium was full. Five hundred publishers, authors and agents dolled up in cocktail dresses and dinner suits embraced their rivals with hearty greetings whilst silently wishing upon them ignominious failure.

Someone had described the Austen Book Awards as the Oscars of the book industry. Someone in marketing, of course. The comparison was spurious, but what the book award lacked in star-power it made up for in charm. The trophy—inevitably referred to as ‘The Jane’—was a golden statuette of a woman in an Empire line shift, inscribed with one of the eponymous author's less tolerant ideas: ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.’

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