Janice Gentle Gets Sexy by Mavis Cheek Read Free Book Online

been paid?'
    'For what?'
    'The book?' His pen was fairly itching to begin.
    'Nothing,' said Janice. 'It's in a drawer at home.'
    The pen nib splayed. 'Well, it's no good there, is it?'
    The upshot of this meeting was that Janice should go away and consider her position - both with regard to the immediate and pressing concerns of her debt to the bank, and with regard to the future concerns of making a living. Janice should then return the following week with some clear ideas. Frankly, he thought, after she had gone, the likelihood of her doing any of those things was remote. The issue preyed on his mind. Only three more months to go and bright and bouncing Barnfather would be sitting in his chair, and he didn't want bright and bouncing Barnfather dining out on this. It was extremely irritating and took far too high a profile, as he kept telling himself, but if he wanted to hold his head erect in the golf club he needed to find a solution.
    A day or two later, enthroned in the en suite, and having become bored with rereading the Harpic bottle, which celebrated the fact that his wife's preferred toilet cleaner contained sodium hypochloride and should not be allowed to enter the eyes (and who, he wanted to know, would want to put it anywhere near their eyes but a mental defective?), he brought Janice Gentle back to mind. He reached for one of the magazines his wife kept to while away the evacuatory hours, and flicked through it. A competition caught his attention and, with the juxtaposition of Janice Gentle and the page, a possible, if remote, solution raised itself. The competition was for a 'first novel by a yet unpublished woman writer'. Well, Janice Gentle was certainly that. Why not? It was a chance. He tore out the page, took it to his office, got his secretary to ring her — he being weary of any further encounters -and request delivery of the manuscript. Janice, not much inclined to relinquish it, was reminded that she had a responsibility to do so, and did. The secretary scooped it from her unwilling hands and passed it on to the bank manager, the bank manager passed it on to his wife, and she, in turn, passed it on to her daily. Both women thought it was wonderful. The bank manager's wife liked the lack of smut, the daily liked the romance of it, and the bank manager, who did not read it, sent it off to the magazine. It did not win. It did not even qualify.
    The magazine immediately put it on the reject pile because it was handwritten; the rules specifically stated it should be typed. And, lest detractors bemoan this as a cavalier approach to literature, they should first be made to sit in a silent room attempting to interpret spider scrawl and backward slopes day after day after day. Despite Janice's manuscript being reasonably legible, on the reject pile it remained. And would have done so for ever were it not for the bounty of England's temperate clime.
    The judge of the competition, her task completed, rang for a taxi after her final meeting with the magazine's editor. The winner had been chosen and a lady from Bournemouth was about to be honoured for her nineteenth-century tale of a shepherdess made good.
    It was raining.
    The judge, in years to come, had reason to bless this English phenomenon. While she waited for the taxi, she grew fidgety and began sifting through all the failed manuscripts - rejects, non-qualifiers, plagiarists. She picked out one at random, then another, then a third. She expected to laug h or at least to smile deprecat ingly. It was something to do and a literary agent, for such was the calling of the judge, is never more at home than with a manuscript in her hand and half an hour to kill.
    In Bangkok the trishaw drivers positively thrive, burgeoning like desert blooms, during the heaviest showers. In Madrid, given a cloudburst, you can scarcely move for taxis. In Venice, for some quaint reason, even the water taxis are not averse to helping a stranded pedestrian when a flood descends on San