Like all the best film scripts, it wasn’t quite over at the moment when the hero arrived to save me. But Richard did have a heroic mien: he was tall and craggy, an Olympic fencer still, in his fifties, with a baritone voice and a head of curls. He introduced me to Christine Casley, the wonderful editor who would go on to edit my next three books (my next three books. That casual phrase that for two years I’d been unable to take for granted.) I liked everyone in that small firm with their offices off Soho Square. It felt like old-fashioned publishing. They got on with each other, they believed in all the books. It was a happiness to go in and see them, to use, again, with infinitely more pleasure, the innocent phrase ‘my publisher’, to descend from the square to that bright, bookish basement.
But financially, the wolves were slinking round the door, clattering the lids of the dustbins outside. Richard had sunk his inheritance into the firm, but he was an editor, not an accountant. I had grown more steely through those three hard years, and I remember one day how I went down the steps to see this tall man who had done so much for me, determined to get the second half of my advance, payable on delivery, now I had given him the edited text. He had great charm, and we liked each other. He did not refuse, but said something like, ‘We don’t have to do it now, do we? I could put it in the post.’ All the conventions of politeness said, ‘Oh, put it in the post, Richard.’ But the steel in me said, ‘Now would be great.’ I left the office, his cheque hot in my hand, and paid it in to the bank with indecent haste.
Publication was scheduled for some time in autumn. The cover proof shimmered, a cave of blue ice. Christine Casley’s editing had cured me for ever of my overuse of ellipses and italics. We had a summer holiday in Cornwall with Rosa and her friend Aline, camping near a surfing beach. It was a brilliant holiday, a treat for the body, walking on rolling cliffs and long sands, lying on our backs to watch shooting stars. I was very happy that things had got better, infinitely grateful for ordinariness. The girls were twelve and fourteen: a lovely age. They stayed in bed in their tent in the morning while Nick and I had time on our own. I was supposed to ring Richard from a callbox—this was before the days of mobiles—to check the last few corrections to the text and get a definite publication date. I remember I left the girls and Nick on the beach at St Ives, below the new Tate. I had to walk through some cavernous, hellish entertainment place to find the callbox. Going back into the underworld.
Richard was sounding slightly evasive. Various things were going on, he said. He had a few ‘troubles’. He was wondering … perhaps it would be better to publish in the spring? Then he could really make a good job of it. There would be more money, he’d be on a firmer footing. I was caught off guard, and did not disagree.
I went back to the beach. The girls were playing, the sand was white, it was the same as before, but a terrible dread began to crystallise as I relayed this apparently anodyne message.
Nick’s reaction was instinctive and immediate. He went through his pockets to find more coins. ‘You go back and tell him he’s got to publish. It has to be now, Mags, you’ve got to get it out. And if he’s short of money, we’ll find it somehow. I’ll find it. I will. Go and tell him that.’ I trusted Nick’s instincts. I was impressed. I went back through hell to talk to Richard.
He did find the money. They made a lovely book, with expensive paper and a cover of austere cobalt beauty, an ice-cave leading away into light, something silver, mysterious, just around the corner. Twelve copies arrived: I held the first in my hands, electric with joy. I was alive again. I have never loved a book so much as The Ice People, that cool blue drink after three years of drought. Now at last I realised how precious books were, how hard and risky it was to write them, how chancy the business of jumping through the hoops.
But I had made it in the nick of time. On the day the book was published, the publisher went bust. The launch party for my book was a wake. Half the literary world had turned up, not just for me but out of sympathy for Richard. We must have sold sixty or seventy books that evening, because I caught a muttered conversation between two of the staff as they totted up the takings: ‘Over £600. That’ll pay X’s wages.’ The reviews of this book that the tall, superior agent had said ‘did not demand to be published’ were almost uniformly ecstatic. Jeremy Paxman invited me on ‘Start the Week’ and was intelligent and enthusiastic, saying I was ‘up there with Orwell and Huxley’; Eric Korn praised me highly in the TLS; George Melly raved in the Telegraph; Fay Weldon applauded in the Literary Review: as in a happy dream, everybody loved it. The Times, Time Out, all fell into line.