‘And what would you say if I could get him to play at your daughter’s sixteenth birthday party? It would be a dream come true for her, yes?’
‘Get Richie Hawkins to Baruda and I’ll be forever in your debt,’ laughed the mayor, sipping his champagne.
‘In that case, I’ll sort out the rock star if you can cut Marshall Roberts down to size.’
Chapter Thirty
Jim settled back into his seat and accepted a glass of wine from the air stewardess. On other occasions he might have noticed how attractive she was, the curve of her hips under the dark pencil skirt or the brightness of her smile, but he was too busy checking his phone. He found a short message from Jennifer wishing him a safe flight home and smiled to himself. Many a time he’d teased his secretaries for obsessing about phone calls and messages from lovers and romantic prospects, and now here he was doing the same.
Without the luxury of Simon’s private jet, he was travelling back to New York via Miami. He had made a call to Elan Models on the short layover and had managed to be connected to Celine Wood.
‘You bastard, you never called me,’ she’d laughed, before telling him he had missed his opportunity. Jim had apologised, then asked her if she could arrange for her new lover Richie Hawkins to come and play on Baruda. A short acoustic set would be fine. In return they could stay at the new Santai resort, RedReef, whenever they fancied, and she would be given one of the best suites at the Casa D’Or launch party. Celine replied that Richie would do anything she asked of him, and that a romantic Caribbean holiday might even hasten a proposal. Jim felt this was a win-win position for everyone.
The flight from Miami was a little over two hours. As he put his phone back in his bag in the overhead locker, he noticed the manuscript that Saul had given him the previous day. He wondered whether now wouldn’t be the perfect time to read it.
Jim had always avoided his father’s seminal novel. Back in his teens and twenties, he had been an enthusiastic reader, he remembered, thinking back to that slightly pretentious youth who loved art house cinema and Milan Kundera novels. But he had given Bryn Johnson’s College a wide berth when it had hit the top of the best-seller chart, knowing that it would be folly to read it.
He did not particularly want to be reminded of the place where College had been written: Savannah, in the boathouse opposite Casa D’Or.
But there was another reason too.
Back when it was first published, Jim had had ambitions of his own to write the great British novel. Although he’d let his rock star dreams die after Savannah, writing, he appreciated, was something that could be fitted in around his corporate, money-making career. But it was tough living in the shadow of a literary lion, and the reviews and prizes and honorary doctorates that followed College only backed up Jim’s fear that if he read his father’s much-lauded and obviously brilliant novel and compared it with his own scribblings, he would never write another word.
These days there were more mundane reasons why he had never opened the book. He barely had time to read the FT, let alone get stuck into a four-hundred-page novel, but now, as he looked restlessly out of the window, he knew he had run out of excuses.
He sat back and put a pillow behind his head. The manuscript wasn’t particularly easy to read. It was a long book, and the pile of pages was at least three inches thick. There were no acknowledgements or dedications. The type had faded, and there were white stripes of Tippex where his father had made mistakes. It was quite alien-looking, and strange to think that this was how people had worked only twenty years ago – an era that didn’t seem so distant when he considered it was his university days, a time he could remember with nostalgic clarity.
He already knew the broad strokes of the story. Set in Cambridge, it followed the inappropriate relationship between a fifty-something don, Peter Col
t, who had just been passed over for a professorship, and a beautiful young student, Cecile. Even from the first few pages it was obvious that this was going to be a beautifully drawn character study. Jim was immediately gripped. It was a book about ego, about masculinity, about wrong choices. Colt was not a particularly sympathetic character; he was jealous of the friends who had successful careers in the City, vengeful against his university colleagues who he believed had gained unmerited promotion. But despite this, his father had made it easy to understand where the character’s anger and frustrations were coming from. They were an exaggerated and articulated form of many feelings experienced by men of a certain age.
It was easy to whip through the pages. It was the best type of literary novel – not weighed down by verbosity or pretension, yet smart and insightful with its observations about academic life.
It was literary legend that Bryn Johnson had written the book in less than three months, which made its quality even more impressive, and Jim grudgingly admitted that the inspiring surroundings of Savannah and the Lake House must have helped.
His father’s particular skill was his creation of characters; people who jumped off the page – whose charms you wanted to identify with, whose flaws made you look into your own dark corners. At the heart of the book was the theme of obsession and the transference of Colt’s volatile emotions to the beautiful Cecile, the daughter of one of his colleagues who had won undeserved promotion. Colt had started off wanting to impress the young woman, who was considered an intelligent scholar, attempting to point-score and show off, but their relationship had eventually become sexual.
Although he was tired, and could do with a nap after the drama of Baruda, Jim pushed on with one more chapter.
Peter and Cecile were spending their first night together. They had already kissed, and he had taken her to a cottage out of town, ostensibly to talk about Molière but really to consummate their relationship. Jim felt a twinge of embarrassment reading the powerful sexual imagery in his father’s words, and glanced around the aeroplane cabin to make sure he wasn’t being observed. The scene was certainly quite graphic for a mainstream novel, as the literary couple progressed from kissing over the French texts to soixante-neuf on the floor. Now they were lying post-coital in front of the fire.
Peter kissed her shoulder, noting the red blush where his teeth had grazed her, moving down into the small of her back, stopping only when he reached the diamond-shaped mole at the base of her spine. ‘This is mine,’ he murmured, his lips pressing into her pale skin. ‘This jewel is mine.’
Jim tried to swallow but couldn’t. He blinked, read the lines again, his heart dropping like an untethered lift. A diamond-shaped mole at the base of her spine. It couldn’t be, could it? It had to be a coincidence. Had to be.
An announcement came over the tannoy for passengers to fasten their seat belts in preparation for landing. Jim put the manuscript back into his bag and sat down, desperate to get back to New York.
He was up and moving the moment the seat-belt sign clicked off, running along the air bridge, straight through immigration. He stopped at the first bookshop in the arrivals hall and crossed to the ‘J’ section on the fiction stands. There it was: Bryn Johnson, College, a staff pick labelled ‘A classic of late-twentieth-century sexual politics, a must-read for any woman who wants to understand men, or any man who wants to understand himself.’ It had a fresh-looking red and black cover, presumably to attract a new audience.
Jim flipped to the chapter he wanted, his eyes wide as he scanned the text. Peter and Cecile go to the cottage, Peter turns on the charm, seducing the young Cecile. There was no mention of a diamond-shaped mole.
He reminded himself that the manuscript he had read on the plane was a first draft. Jim himself had never written a first draft of a novel, never got that far, but he could remember what it was like to write. He thought suddenly about his first girlfriend, Samantha Archer, a breakup that had affected him much more than it should have – almost derailed him from his English A level, in fact – when Samantha had delivered the fatal blow that she wanted to go out with one of his best mates at school, Peter Jackson.
Despite his laid-back nature, Jim was as vulnerable as the next person and had spent the entire summer listening to Smiths songs, writing poetry and letters to Samantha that had never been sent. It was a summer of wasted introspection, but the one thing he remembered about all those written words was their honesty. They were a transference of thoughts and feelings directly on to the page, unfiltered and raw.
But somewhere between the first draft of College and the finished product, the diamond-shaped mole had been taken out.
If it had stayed in the published novel, Jim might have been able to convince himself that it was pure fantasy or wish fulfilment, but now? Its wilful removal was like a confession. A confession of what his father had done with Jennifer.