‘Oh I adore Alice! She is simply amazing. And what’s your name? Sorry, you did tell me.’
‘James. James Crawley. Alice and I went out together for a couple of years.’
‘Gosh – really? Sex and everything? Lucky you! What fun that must have been. But that must have been a while ago?’
‘Yes, I suppose. We were at university together. I suppose it was a long time ago,’ said James. ‘But she hasn’t changed much.’
He went to refill their cups with another 175 ml of red wine. Now why, he wondered, would she say something like that? Why would it have been so long ago? It was, of course, but why would she think so? Another, related question was why it should bother him. After all, it wasn’t as if trying to go back out with Alice was ever part of his plan. All that wine may have had something to do with it. By way of a remedy, he swallowed another mouthful and cultivated some destructive thoughts as he looked around the room again. It occurred to him that he would probably enjoy it more if Rachel was there.
Felix took him away, and steered him to the other side of the room.
‘A useful tip at things like this is to avoid the journalists and writers, and instead go for the boys and girls who work in PR. They have particular expertise in being agreeable, and the good ones tend to be highly attractive.’
Sure enough, things were much better over here. In no time at all, James was welcomed into a pool of lightness and warmth. As Felix had said, the public relations women were genuinely skilled, with an uncanny gift for discovering a point of common interest, and then building an entertaining conversation around it. There was no nervous tension in the laughter, no debilitating intellectual chasms and none of the acute anxiety of being with someone who was his own age, but who had a much more prestigious job.
If James did have a gripe, it was that the PR women were terribly flighty, and wouldn’t stay still. It might have been a strategy, as with herds of gazelles, for the constant movement made it very difficult to pick any one of them off. James would have liked to talk some more with Kate, who had a very pretty upturned nose and lived in a part of Southwark that James had particular knowledge of, but instead he found himself engrossed with Isabelle, who wore a turquoise ribbon in her hair and whose sister had been at the London School of Economics at the same time as him, but in fact he ended up drinking wine with Miranda who had bright pink lipstick and an old boyfriend who lived in Leicester.
But then, quite suddenly, Miranda disappeared, and he was back talking with Kate for a minute, before she abruptly left to do something critical to the functioning of the event, and he found himself alone with Felix. At that moment a grey-haired, small-faced man in a navy-blue suit strode into the middle of the room and people clapped their hands. He was the Managing Director of the publishing company and the host of the evening, though he seemed to be of little consequence and probably wasn’t even that rich.
It appeared that two novels were getting launched that night, in order to maximise publicity and reduce costs. James tried to concentrate, but the gin and the red wine were now mingling unhappily in his blood, and he felt light-headed and hot-faced. There weren’t even any crisps. Instead, Isabelle handed him a sheet of paper with biographical details of the writers, both of whom were now standing alongside the Managing Director, beaming out indiscriminate smiles and displaying approximately the right quantities of exuberance, humility and ironic detachment.
The first to be introduced was Amelia Zhang-Montel. James nodded in silent appreciation: she was an ethnic masterpiece, a perfect synthesis of the most physically attractive, culturally revered and economically dynamic nations in the world. She had a Chinese mother and Franco-Jewish father, and had been raised in New York and educated in Cambridge, Paris and Berkeley. Even at a distance, James could immediately see all of that. She was small and preposterously pretty, with honey skin, shiny dark hair, an impish nose and unnerving green eyes.
Lucian Woodward was more conventionally attractive – a large, dramatic young man with diabolical black hair and thick, tilted eyebrows. He was wearing crude jeans and an open-necked, white linen shirt. His father was a professor of philosophy with a logical paradox named after him, and his mother was the vice-president of an investment bank that had recently destabilised Indonesia’s economy.
Standing at the back of the room, James felt himself becoming small-minded. As ever, the major problem was not so much where they had come from, their patronage, the cost of their education, or even their talents, but their age. Both of the writers were comfortably under thirty. What the fuck, thought James with a surprising amount of bitterness, could they possibly be writing about? Weren’t novelists meant to possess a treasury of insights in matters relating to the needs and failings of human beings? Surely, for all their accomplishments, they hadn’t had the time to accumulate this wisdom, to have experienced the necessary defeats and disappointments?