I approached the tallest, and said to be the toughest, agent with a literary reputation. His name had lustre because of his clients, yet the offices were small and uncomfortable and hard to get to, and I never felt at ease. Personally we were ill-assorted; he was too tall, too aristocratic, too dry, too shy, with an amused, conspiratorial manner that meant nothing; he had been very good at making money, and very good at picking clients. Yet he was also known for his love of good writing. From the little we talked, I think this was true; he loved Nabokov, as did I, and I was desperate to believe in him. I sent him my book to see if he liked it, and he said he thought it ‘remarkable’. He read it on some Greek island and left a praising message on my answerphone. What a fool I was; I kept the tape for weeks.
I went to see the first, and much more simpatico, agent who thought he had inherited me. He sat in his office with my book on his lap, and I saw he did like it, and was slightly hurt when I told him I was probably going to leave, though he had a wealth of clients, and of course soon got over it (why was I so stupid? I liked this first man, instinctively trusted him, could talk to him, yet I opted for the austere unknown because I thought he could magically lift me into the literary stratosphere, with his other clients. I thought I was making the right decision, yet lunch with this second man was empty and uncomfortable, and part of me wondered if his reputation came partly from his height, and his upper-class drawl, for literary agents are not usually so lofty. I should have listened to my animal instincts rather than the vaulting ambition of my brain.)
Thus bolstered by the good opinions of two agents who had to praise me to represent me—which does not mean they were insincere, but an agent’s job is to hook new names—and my husband’s enthusiasm (he read the book with the doors open on our green garden, as spring came on; he loved me, he loved it, but warm April possibly hazed his senses)—I dispatched the book to HarperCollins. I was mostly buoyant. Now everything would change.
Yet part of me was anxious. Such a very long novel. It was partly to do with the look of the manuscript. It’s part of the ‘frame’ that, according to psychologists, conditions the greater part of people’s response; what they know, or think they know, before they start reading. The Keeper of the Gate was the first book I had written straight on to computer (Where are the Snows and Lost Children were both drafted longhand). I used a huge font (why?), 14 pt, too many spaces, too many ellipses. In manuscript this novel ran to nearly 500 pages. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to say to the publishing world, ‘This is big, this is a substantial book.’ Probably it just looked long and shapeless.
My relationship with the new editor at HarperCollins Flamingo was non-existent, so the ground my work fell on was unprepared (always get on with your editor. Sometimes you really do need advice.) He had suggested we meet for a drink at intervals to discuss progress. But I never discussed my works-in-progress. Besides, at first there was no progress: not until the first four months of 1994 did the novel suddenly burst free of chaos. And this book was, to say the least of it, unusual. Not the manuscript to send to the new editor who, it’s cruel to say, but true, was best known for having commissioned a novel inspired by a TV coffee advert.
Why was my sixth novel unusual? Because it was about race. The germ of it was a racial killing. In April 1993, the black student Stephen Lawrence had been murdered at a bus-stop in south-east London by racist white youths. It was a horrible case, one of the sudden outbreaks of savagery that tells us London isn’t just a great city of endlessly mixing genes and peoples. We were not post-racist, then or now; we merely legislate against it, and rub along together, and marry each other, and hope for the best, which mostly happens—but every so often, so does the worst.
My personal experience of the crime sounds trivial. Rosa’s school was in Brent, which had, at the time, the highest proportion of black people in the UK. Naturally Rosa had black friends, naturally I was friends with their mothers, Rochelle’s mother Sandra, Shakira’s mother, a friendship built on shared love of our children. But British black people felt burning indignation over this murder. One of their best, a good student, a boy who should have become a lawyer, had been senselessly killed by white racists. The veil was lifted; their worst fears were true. For a while, all white people stood accused. And I found that my black friends, who I liked and valued, for a while were unable to meet my eyes. A veil had come down, though it didn’t last.
But I still felt accountable. What had I actually done to dissociate myself from the murderers? In 1982, when American Cruise missiles were about to be sent to Britain, I had written my anti-war novel The Burning Book; in 1988, the murder of eighty-four-year-old antinuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell had inspired my fourth novel, Grace. What was I going to do this time?