Longshot Read Free Page B

marginal book accepted, and remembered what the lady from the publisher’s had said when she’d taken me for the getting-acquainted lunch.
    “Ronnie could sweet-talk the devil. He says we need to catch new authors like you in their early thirties, otherwise we won’t have any big names ten years from now. No one knows yet how you’ll turn out in ten years. Ronnie says that all salmon are small fry to begin with. So we’re not promising you the world, but an opportunity, yes.”
    An opportunity was all one could ask, I thought. Daisy at length appeared in the doorway to say the food had arrived, and we all went along to the big room where the central table had been cleared of books and relaid with plates, knives, napkins and two large platters of healthy-looking sandwiches decorated with a drizzle of cress.
    Ronnie’s associates emerged from their rooms to join us, which made seven altogether, including Daisy and her sister, and I managed to eat a lot without, I hoped, it being noticeable. Fillings of beef, ham, cheese, bacon: once-ordinary things that had become luxuries lately. Free lunch, breakfast and dinner. I wished Ronnie would write summoning notes oftener.
    Tremayne harangued me again over the generic shortcomings of racing writers, holding his glass in one hand and waving a sandwich in the other as he made his indignant points, while I nodded in sympathetic silence and munched away as if listening carefully.
    Tremayne made a great outward show of forceful self-confidence, but there was something in his insistence which curiously belied it. It was almost as if he needed the book to be written to prove he had lived; as if photographs and records weren’t enough.
    “How old are you?” he said abruptly, breaking off in midflow.
    I said with my mouth full, “Thirty-two.”
    “You look younger.”
    I didn’t know whether “good” or “sorry” was appropriate, so I merely smiled and went on eating.
    “Could you write a biography?” Again the abruptness.
    “I don’t know. Never tried.”
    “I’d do it myself,” he said belligerently, “but I haven’t got time.”
    I nodded understandingly. If there was one biography I didn’t want to cut my teeth on, I thought, it was his. Much too difficult.
    Ronnie fetched up beside him and wheeled him away, and in between finishing the beef-and-chutney and listening to Daisy’s problems with scrambled software I watched Ronnie across the room, nodding his head placatingly under Tremayne’s barrage of complaints. Eventually, when all that was left on the plates were a few pallidly wilting threads of cress, Ronnie said a firm farewell to Tremayne, who still didn’t want to go.
    “There’s nothing I can usefully offer at the moment,” Ronnie was saying, shaking an unresponsive hand and practically pushing Tremayne doorward with a friendly clasp on his shoulder. “But leave it to me. I’ll see what I can do. Keep in touch.”
    With ill grace Tremayne finally left, and without any hint of relief Ronnie said to me, “Come along then, John. Sorry to have kept you all this time,” and led the way back to his room.
    “Tremayne asked if I’d ever written a biography,” I said, taking my former place on the visitors’ side of his desk.
    Ronnie gave me a swift glance, settling himself into his own padded dark-green leather chair and swiveling gently from side to side as if in indecision. Finally he came to a stop and asked, “Did he offer you the job?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “My advice to you would be not to think of it.” He gave me no time to assure him that I wouldn’t, and went straight on, “It’s fair to say he’s a good racehorse trainer, well known in his own field. It’s fair to say he’s a better man than you would have guessed today. It’s even fair to agree he’s had an interesting life. But that isn’t enough. It all depends on the writing.” He paused and sighed. “Tremayne doesn’t really believe that. He wants a big name because