Days 186 and 187

Writing exercise – about something other than the book I’m writing –

…

I had worked very hard to improve my position from fact checker to my ultimate role, editor. It took years of dedication and application, doing everything that was asked of me, and more.

And now, after seven years, I believed my time had come, an email from the chief editor to discuss my role moving forward.

It had been the same every year but those were reviews of my work, and I knew it took time before the review became an interview for promotion.  It was my turn.

10 AM:  Montgomery Montague’s office, 45^th floor, the executive level, one above editorial, the department I aspired to work for.

Chester, my recalcitrant cat, raised his head as I came into the kitchen, and gave me his usual look of disdain.  This morning, he was not going to get off as easily.

“This is my day,” I said.  “You can rejoice in my success, or you can mope.”

A meow told me he did not give one jot what was happening in my world, just get the food in the bowl now.  Yes, that look was almost one of malice.

“Not today mister.”  I selected a tin of some sort of fish, removed the lid and scooped it into the bowl. 

Before I could move the bowl to the floor he had jumped up onto the counter, sniffed it, and looked at me.  Yes, that was the ‘you gave me that yesterday’ look, and that momentary thrill of tricking him, passed.

Of course, I hadn’t.  He looked at me and meowed twice.  The rebuke.

“No,” I said.  “You eat it, or you starve.  I’m going to work now.”

I stared him down.  “You cannot rain on my parade.” Another few seconds, he turned back to the bowl and took a tentative bite.  “I’ll be back with the good news.”

Good things happened in threes, my mother used to say.  That was number one.

The train was late, a holdup over a signal failure, or that’s what I thought I heard, but to Montgomery Montague, that was not an excuse.

Despite the minor setback, I forgoed my usual early morning coffee and went straight to the office, and weas only five minutes late.

When I reached his outer office where his personal assistant sat I saw her coming out of his office, and she gave me the ‘look’.  Everyone knew it, it was not a good day.

Had an event I had no control over ruined my chance.  She sat and I took a seat.

She was going to make me wait.

And panic.

Then she looked up and smiled.  “You are very lucky I was detained in his office.  I’ll tell him you’re here.”

She called, then nodded, assent to enter the inner sanctum.  It would be the third time I had bene in his office, the first my interview for the job, the second a discussion over some facts that were in dispute. And this time. Hopefully, my promotion.

I knocked on the door, waited for the terse ‘enter’ then went in, softly closing the door behind me.

Then it was past the meeting table. The coffee table the lounge chairs, the open space, the stop at the desk.

There was always the right number of chairs for those invited.  The uncomfortable chairs so you didn’t linger longer than necessary.

“Have a seat.”

The question was, which one?  Someone said once there was a right choice and a wrong choice, and I just realised there were two seats.  Was there another person about to join the interview?

I sat in the left seat.

There was just a hint of a smile on his face.  “The pilot’s seat.  Good choice, Ben.”

He gave me the serious look, the one that rattled everyone who sat opposite his desk, from new employees to the seasoned editors, those who had been here for years.

“Do you write?”

It was an unexpected question, and perhaps a little superfluous.  Why work at a publisher if you didn’t write?  I was going to say that, but was it a trick question?

“Yes, I do.”

“And read?”

“Avidly.  Writers must read.”  It was almost a mantra in this place.

“Of course, they do.  What type of stories do you write?”

“Thrillers, espionage, but at the moment historical fiction.”

“Busy then?”

“I keep myself amused in my spare time, and Chester more so.”

“Chester?”

“My cat, and harshest critic.  I read him parts of the story, and if he complains, it’s a rewrite.”

He made a face; one I didn’t decipher.  Someone once said, don’t embellish.  “What makes you think you can edit?”

“I’ve read a great many books to learn style and composition.  Ui can see errors in manuscripts that I’ve been given to fact check and often check later what I found with the end product, and I’ve had successes.”

“Editing is more than just grammar and spelling.  It’s continuity, missing links, slight changes in titles, descriptions, and other errors that authors routinely make.  We do not want to be checking your work.  You are the final word.  But…”

And here it comes, all my hopes and dreams were about to be shattered.

“I need you to do a test case for me before I make the final decision.”

He leaned forward and opened a drawer in front of him and pulled out a folder, looked at it then put it on the desk.  It was quite thick, but old, and quite discoloured.  The front had several coffee cup stains.

“This novel has been here for at least thirty years, and so far, no one has been able to turn it into something worth reading.  We call it Pandora’s Box.  You never know what’s inside.  A word to the wise, the last 25 recipients of this manuscript failed and didn’t get to become an editor here.  I have high hopes that you will not join them.  You have three weeks.”

He pushed the file across the desk towards me.  The interview, such as it was, was over.

Good things come in threes. Let’s call the outcome of this meeting a possible second.

Clutching the folder close, I took the elevator back down to my floor.  I assumed I was not yet a fully-fledged editor, so I could not move to the editorial floor five above, where I currently worked with nine other fact-checkers.

We worked in pairs, and my pair was Josie, a graduate with more degrees than I had, and I often wondered why she was not a rocket scientist.  She certainly knew enough about them, and space.

I had been considering asking her on a date, but after hearing about her last one, I decided she was not going to be interested in someone like me.

She saw me come out of the elevator and then went back to her work until I sat down.  In the fact-checking department, a year longer than me, and having no desire to become an editor, she had this dream of the cottage, the country garden, the picket fence, the husband who came home the same time every day, and the 2.4 children.  I was not sure the last part was possible; it had to be either 2 or 3.

“How did the interview go?”

I had told her I was going to see Montague and High Hopes.  She didn’t try to dash them, having seen her fair share of hopefuls’ crash and burn, but I could see the lack of confidence in her eyes when I told her of my ambition.  All she told me was to not fly too close to the sun.

“I have a task, a test.”

“Pandora’s Box?”

“You know?”

“Everyone knows.  No one speaks of it.”

“It’s not the first time he’s brought it out?”

“No.”

“And no one has made it work?”

“They couldn’t.  It’s gibberish.  He’s reputed to have written it himself as a means to squash budding hopefuls.”

“No one?”

“None that I’ve heard of over the last 10 years.  They come, they get the call to his office, he gives them Pandora’s Box, they fail, and then they leave.”

“Why?”

“Because they know he will never promote them to editor.”

I shrugged.  “There’s always a first time.”

“Have you read any of it?”

“No.”

“Then take it home and read it to Chester.  If he turns up his nose, then you have a problem.  If not, well, there may be hope.”

That said, she returned to the pile of manuscripts, each about some aspect of space.

I put the file in my backpack along with my laptop computer and, at precisely 6:05 pm, left the office.

I thought of asking Josie if she wanted to drop into a bar that was on both our ways home.  Sometimes when she wanted a sounding board, we would drop into a quaint bar and have a drink or two and sometimes a snack.  They were not dates, even though in my imagination they were.

She had come from a small town in the Midwest, and I came from upstate, New York.  Her family were ranchers, mine bankers, so we had little in common.

This time we parted at the door, with a promise I’d tell her what my reaction was to the story.  She had only heard about it, and nothing good.

Chester was waiting, curled up on the lounge where he was not supposed to be, but then, he never listened to me.

I glared at him as I closed the door, crossed to the kitchen bench where I put dinner from the Deli up the road, and the backpack.  I thought about taking the file out, but left it.  Dinner for Chester, then dinner for me, first.

An hour later and after cleaning up. I dragged the folder out and extracted the manuscript.  It was about three hundred pages of double-spaced type, done on an old-world manual typewriter with a cloth ribbon that had seen a lot of use.  The unevenness of the typeface told me some keys were stiffer to push than others, typed by a hunter and pecker, not an accomplished typist.

Errors we xxed out, and there were handwritten notes in red ink, whether put there by the author or a hapless would-be editor.

The title:  A Continental Mystery.

No author, the sheets were yellowing and darkening around the paper edges.  All of the pages had the look and feel of being thumbed through many times.  There were dog-eared pages scattered throughout the manuscript.  I looked, but there was no reason behind any of them, and one had a coffee cup stain.

It was hardly the sort of manuscript the company would accept.  I knew their requested requirements for submissions, and they were very high.  This would never have made the cut.

So…

I had to ask myself what Montague’s game was here?

Perhaps if I read the first page…

I made myself comfortable on the lounge chair, put my feet up on the ottoman and after a few minutes, Chester came and sat next to me.

“Would you like me to read you this story?” I said, looking at him.

His expression said ‘No’.

Good.  I was not in the mood to spare him.

It was a dark early morning; the moon had disappeared behind clouds that suggested an imminent downpour.  James quickened his pace to get to King’s Cross station before the skies above him opened.

It was not the only reason he was in a hurry; he had promised Matilda, the girl he was intending to ask to marry him, that he would be at the station a half hour before the train was to depart, and she did not like tardiness.

They were taking the train to Edinburgh, where they would be collected and taken to Matilda’s family home, Barkworth Manor.  For him, it was an opportunity to travel on the latest night Scotsman service, just upgraded to rival any luxury train in the world.

“Well,” I said to Chester, who seemed to have an expression of interest.  “A girl who belongs to a wealthy family, living in such a salubrious residence to be named Barkworth Manor, in Scotland no less.”

Chester turned away and yawned.  Rich girls living in posh manor houses obviously didn’t impress him.  I shrugged.  It had my attention.  Was she an heiress?  And who was this James?

Read on…

James considered himself the luckiest man in London and had to believe he had been in the right place at the right time.  A chance meeting outside the Savoy Hotel, an awkward conversation that led to coffee and cake, which in turn led to dinner.

It seemed serendipitous; they were both down from Oxford, both studying Archaeology, and could have equally accidentally met in Oxford as in London.  It led to a semester of chance meetings, which led to study time in the Bodleian Library, which led to dinner, and then an invitation for him to spend the weekend in Scotland with her parents.

In normal circumstances, he visited his mother in Cornwall, or sometimes a weekend with his academic acquaintances.  That had all changed as his friendship with Matilda slowly became something more.

I dragged the notebook computer over and started a new document, and typed a note, ‘the start needs work’.  A better definition of the protagonists was needed.

But in my imagination, I could visualise London at night, dark clouds swirling, rain imminent, as it had rained every time I had visited England myself and then I tried to remember what Kings Cross looked like.

The year, if I was assuming correctly, was about 1928, and I remembered seeing a steam train documentary not long ago.  I would have been as excited as James, just seeing the train, let alone travelling on it.

The fact-checking part of me then went looking for information on the night trains to Edinburgh.  There was the Flying Scotsman, the overnight train from London to Edinburgh, selecting the date 1928.  There was, however, another train, the Night Scotsman, that had started in May of that year, left London at 10:35 pm and arrived in Edinburgh about eight and a half hours later.  Photos showed the locomotive, the carriages, and plans of the sleepers, first and third class.  It was between the wars, and a bustling time, but there might be a lead into the great depression, so there was going to be historical context.

Then I realised I was getting ahead of myself and needed to read more.  It wasn’t badly written, it just needed a few changes, making the characters more relatable, and whether they were on equal footing.

Or perhaps I wasn’t.

The reader always needs to know the basics.  Firstly, who was going to be the main protagonist? That was James.  Male, early twenties, perhaps the accepted age for a prospective graduate, and given the cost of his studies, perhaps reasonably wealthy parents were funding him.

Certainly, the girl, of similar age, was being funded by her parents, though at that time it might have been less acceptable for her to be studying rather than getting married.  Social mores were very different then, but times were changing, albeit slowly.  It wasn’t long after the suffragettes.

I scanned through the pages for more information on the boy.

James McArthur, the third son of Sir William McArthur, banker, the son being 24 years old.  His mother, Lady Allison McArthur, nee Benton, was a writer, not overly successful but enough to be in a circle of similar ladies, who cross all sections of the Arts.  James had been 14 at the end of the Great War, and had lost two of his brothers to it, leaving him, a younger brother and two older sisters.

Then, the girl. 

Matilda Carterville was one of four daughters and two sons of Lord and Lady Carterville, landowner and shipping magnate, whose personal Empire was as vast as the British Empire of the day.  Matilda’s mother had not been from the aristocracy, and had caught the eye of the Lord, before he became a Lord, when she was a Shakespearean actress.  For him, it had been love at first sight; for her, it had been an amusing interlude until she discovered who he was, and it ended up all over the society pages.

Several hours passed as I constructed a family tree from the first 100 pages.  I wondered if this was what other Editors did, trying to get a handle on the characters, their associations, and be ready for whatever the author threw at them. I felt, by the end of it, that I knew James and Matilda.

It was interesting to discover that James’s mother lived in a house that was described as a cottage, it also had a name, and to me sounded like it had a hundred rooms, a dozen servants who all lived in, and grounds the size of a municipal park.

That paled to insignificance when it came to the castle Matilda came from.  Yes, an actual castle, once described as sprawling, a place where one could get lost, that was described as cold and draughty, with towers, and everything made of stone.  It had a banquet hall, a dining hall, and countless other rooms and staff, a place that would cost a fortune to keep in good repair and run.

Oh, yes, it had grounds to go hunting and shooting, fox hunting, and a lake to go fishing.  Surrounding it was farmland with cattle, sheep, and various crops, and produce used in the castle kitchen.  It was hard to imagine such places still existed, especially the class divisions that I had read about, which were virtually swept away after the Second World War.  Still, I did see mention of butlers, maids, ground staff, chauffeurs and countless others.

It was a world I could only imagine existed, once upon a time.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025