at a party at ten; all I had to do was get him there, and then she and Suzy and the rest of the cavalry would take over. If there were any problems I was to call. Belinda hoped we would hit it off in a purely professional way, that I would be an option to take over the editing of his books if, despite our assurances, Cockburn’s mysterious fall proved fatal to their working relationship. There was a lot riding on it: his last novel had sold nearly half a million copies.
I understood why they trusted me: I was polite, I was unpretentious (unpretentious for publishing, very pretentious for elsewhere) and I got on with people. They couldn’t have known about the damage I successfully concealed. When Craig Bennett is written about in the press, his name is usually prefaced by phrases such as ‘combustible’, ‘iconoclastic’, ‘self-destructive’, even ‘Bacchanalian’, which tells you more about journalists than about Bennett. (I once heard a literary editor describe James Cockburn as a real-life ‘Dionysius’, by which they meant he wore his shirt unbuttoned and took cocaine at parties.) Such tags were relative. Most novelists don’t make good copy for the news pages. If Bennett wanted to turn up on stage in the middle of a seventy-two-hour bender and abuse crowd members for their ‘intellectual cowardice’ then I was all for it. If he wanted to grip Julian Barnes in a tight bear-hug whenever he saw him in a green room and repeatedly lick his face until prised away, then what of it? (Bennett was ‘not welcome again’ at the Hay, Edinburgh and Cheltenham festivals.) He was a little old for such behaviour, but so are many people who behave this way. I am not in the first generation of men who refused to grow up. That evening I was expecting to meet someone completely normal. I wasn’t at all worried about Bennett’s reputation.
I arrived twenty minutes late at the glass-fronted French restaurant in Notting Hill. Or rather, I was on time, watching him through the window as he poured himself three consecutive glasses of wine. Sarah had finally answered her phone and was telling me it was over and to stop calling her so much. I pleaded with her to see sense and she objected to my definition of sense. Over the last twenty-four hours I had maintained a firm faith in the power of reason to defeat chaos. If I could just keep talking, if I could talk all day and all night, she would have to realise what I had done was not so bad, that it was not in fact me who had done it. I would have gone on for ever, listening to my voice grow more impassioned and articulate, wavering on the edge of real tears, if she had not begun to cry herself, something she hardly ever did, and in doing so remind me that she was something more than an obstacle to my will, an exercise in persuasion. She was Sarah and she was miserable. I would never have the right or the power to convince her otherwise.
I looked at my reflection in the restaurant window and listened to her cry. She was not a crier; I’d made her take on a role that wasn’t hers. We criers are the moral infants of the world, the sensualists. We like the way it feels; though we don’t admit it, we’re yearning to be miserable. We want a fix. Behind my reflection Craig Bennett was looking at me curiously. I waved at him and something in the friendly childishness of my gesture stabbed me: how far away I was from that pleasant boy I’d taken for granted and forgotten to stay in touch with. I wheeled around and after two minutes of desperate, abruptly terminated pleas to Sarah, I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt and entered the restaurant.
‘You look fucking awful,’ he said, after I introduced myself and sat down. Some people may have thought the same of him. You will have seen the photos: the rich craggy drinker’s face; its pink tributaries crawling through reddish stubble, sunken blue eyes, bleached of emotion by hot weather and late nights. A surly face. Well, that was the photos, or the photos the papers took, or the photos the papers used. He might have been trying to look surly but it didn’t convince me, and I was glad to take his comment as friendly. I have a lot of friends who, if they don’t have faces like his already, are working on getting them.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, nodding.
‘And you’re twenty minutes late,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I continued to nod gratefully, ‘yes I am.’ I reached out and poured myself the last glass of wine in the bottle, immediately raising it towards the waitress. ‘Another of these, please.’ I took a swig. ‘This is nice,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for being so late –’
And then I turned my face and just about swallowed another sob that threatened to spill over the table.
Craig Bennett continued to gaze at me curiously.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, pouring the rest of the glass down my throat. ‘I’m not normally so incontinent.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Oh, I’ve just been dumped. Last night. She’s not going to have me back.’
‘I’m glad about that.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Don’t get me wrong. We’ll get into that. At least we can talk about that – if you’re not too boring about it. You may even be wrong. I mean, I thought for an awful moment that they’d sent someone whose mother had just died or something.’
‘We wouldn’t put that on you,’ I said, speaking as the company. ‘That’d be awful manners.’
‘A spurned boyfriend is far better than a grief-stricken son.’
‘Yes? You’re probably right. They wouldn’t have sent me if they’d known how miserable I was.’
The waitress came over and showed me the bottle of wine. ‘Just pour it please,’ I said.
‘You’re doing all right,’ said Bennett, like a command.
‘Yes,’ I beamed, as the waitress filled our glasses. ‘A shaky start but I feel much better.’
‘Good man.’
‘My girlfriend would dispute that.’
‘Your ex-girlfriend.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ My irony wasn’t robust enough to joke about that yet.
‘How old are you anyway?’
‘I’m thirty.’
‘You lucky bastard. So then you better tell me what happened. Be warned: I don’t have infinite sympathy for young lucky bastards.’
I didn’t spend long telling him. It was mundane and predictable. I lied. I made out I was better than I was. And when it was obvious that I was worse than I’d pretended – to myself as well as her, with the poems, surprise gifts, underwear and holidays – I lied harder and was caught out in increments until I was worse than what I had concealed. When I finally told the truth, it was unrealistic.
‘What shall we eat?’ I asked.
‘I’m not really hungry. Why do you people always insist on meeting in restaurants? What’s wrong with pubs?’
‘We’d have to pay for our own meals then. But I’d have been very happy with a pub. I think I’ve given up food. I’ve thrown up everything I’ve tried to eat since Saturday.’
He looked at me steadily. ‘Ah, mate,’ he said, and he reached out and patted me on the arm. ‘So it is serious? You love her? It’s mundane but I know it fucking hurts. I’ve been there too.’
He was talking, I found out later, about Amy Casares, the half-Argentine novelist I had published. It was no coincidence that she would appeal to
