Ghosting by Jennie Erdal Read Free Book Online Page A

marketing. “Two thousand pounds! Is that
all
? Then
do
it, darling! What are you waiting for?” But every so often there would be a crack-down, and he would rail against expenses claims, overuse of the telephone, fringe benefits and sundry perks. “What! Take an author to Bertorelli's? You must be
mad!
Where am I supposed to get the money to pay for these bloody authors and their bloody lunches?” Storms broke and storms blew over, leaving always a little wreckage behind, but nothing so devastating as to bring about any radical change.
    Naturally, the empire offered excellent conditions for the propagation of envy, resentment and all manner of psychological warfare. Tiger himself loved to stir up jealousies among the girls—it amused him, he said, his eyes quick with mischief. Gossip and rumour were just as good as the truth, and more interesting. When someone was summoned to the palace, for example, all eyes and tongues were turned on the chosen one. Tiger knew this and exulted in it, invariably enquiring into the repercussions of some intrigue he himself had set in motion. People could be playthings, their feelings a rich man's sport. “Was she upset?” he would ask gleefully. “Did she weep?” On being told that, yes, she was, and yes, she did, he was eager still for more. “You are
sure
? You saw her tears?” There was no harm intended; it was simply an entertainment for him.
    It was regarded as an honour to be asked by him to do something, however trivial, and a noticeable
frisson
would percolate through the Soho offices whenever a call was received from on high. There was a particular deportment that marked the imperial guard, a sort of latter-day flattery and lickspittling, a way of behaviour I soon learned to adopt, in spite of its being utterly against my grain. What he said was deemed to be oracular, and he had only tomention that he wanted such-and-such for the thing, whatever it was, to be pursued and hunted down with Holy Grail zeal. “Find me an orchid, darling!” he would command, his voice full of life-or-death urgency. “I
need
an orchid—the best in town.”
    Whenever he became agitated about something—a regular occurrence—it was noticeable that everyone competed to placate him. If children have tantrums, parents are generally advised to keep calm and ignore them. But Tiger's tantrums were both heeded and indulged; girls hosed him down with one gush after another as they rushed to pick up his toys and put them back in the pram. They swished their hair back and forth like curtains and drenched him with love till he calmed down. He wallowed in all this. Indeed there seemed to be a degree of self-awareness about the tantrums. “I got
hysterical
,” he would often say when recalling some incident that had upset him, his voice rising an octave or two in the recollection. And to a sober bystander his behaviour did come over as a kind of hysteria, the sort that in days gone by would have earned a woman a slap on the face and a threat to remove her womb.
    In Tiger's publishing house there were many passions. People often seemed to be in a bad mood, or at least pretended to be—I was never entirely sure about what was real and what was affected. What confused me was the amount of embracing that coexisted with the girls’ rages—a fascinating sequence of aggressing and caressing. There was also a degree of unsisterly cruelty as they jostled for position and tried to curry favour with Tiger. I say “they,” for it was clear that I did not belong in this world. I was looked upon, with some justification, as one of Tiger's whims: I lived in Scotland after all, and I turned up only for editorial meetings, staying for just a few days at any one time. Even then it was clear that I wasjust passing through this foreign land—I was in it, but not of it. Besides, I didn't know anyone. Not even anyone who knew anyone.
    It was a strange place for me to dip into and out of, and its sheer otherness never