‘Have you ever read Tolstoy?’
‘No, but I’m guessing he didn’t go in for the homosexual passion bit. I don’t know, Bill. I don’t read a lot of books. All I can say is that it wasn’t boring in the least, you have a voice, and I can’t imagine there’s anything else out there like it.’
They talked about characters for a little bit – it was, Bill said, supposed to be a picaresque novel, although he had to explain the word, and it was stuffed full of memorable, hilarious rogues, Soho chancers, down on their luck artists, the kind of people you could find in the Colony Room, according to Bill. And they talked about a section in the middle, a long description of the narrator’s childhood, that Tony thought was the only place where he’d started to feel as though he were reading a book.
‘It is a bloody book.’
‘It never felt like that. I never felt I was reading. And that bit was, you know. “Oh. Here I am, ploughing through an Important Novel of Today.” ’
‘I hate that bit,’ said Bill eventually. ‘It took me fucking for ever, and it didn’t come naturally. I just didn’t want to cut it because of all the work.’
‘What are you going to do with it now?’
‘I’m going to give it to Hazel.’
Hazel was now their agent as well as their secretary. Every year, when Dennis phoned to make an offer for a new series, Tony and Bill made Hazel talk to him about money, because she could be bolshie on the subject and Dennis was scared of her, so they’d started to give her 10 per cent instead of a salary. She was gentle with Dennis, which Bill and Tony wanted her to be. But she was ferocious with anyone they didn’t know, the ITV producers who had commissioned Reds Under the Bed, and the film producer who wanted them to write the Anthony Newley script. Bill and Tony couldn’t bear to be in the same room when she talked to them.
‘Will she have to read it?’
‘I suppose so. I just want her advice. Her sister works in publishing.’
‘Right,’ said Tony doubtfully.
‘She’s made of stern stuff,’ said Bill. ‘And it’s not like I keep things a secret.’
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘But you don’t shout them from the rooftops either.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Bill. ‘She’ll know what to do with it.’
‘Give it to Michael Braun of Braun and Braun,’ said Hazel the following morning.
She didn’t make eye contact with him as she handed him the bag containing the manuscript.
‘Right,’ said Bill. ‘Michael Braun.’
Hazel sat down at her desk and picked up the telephone receiver, ready to start her day’s work.
‘Is that … it?’ said Bill.
‘Yes,’ said Hazel.
‘Thanks,’ said Bill. He started to walk towards the back office and then stopped. ‘What did you think?’
‘Braun and Braun,’ said Hazel.
‘If they’re interested, will you represent me?’
‘No,’ said Hazel.
‘Thanks for reading it.’
‘I didn’t read it. Not all of it. Just enough to know that you should give it to Michael Braun.’
Bill gave it to Michael Braun, and never mentioned the book to Hazel again.
There was only one Braun. Michael Braun didn’t think Braun sounded like a proper publisher, so he simply made up another one. ‘Who’s the other Braun?’ people would ask him sooner or later. ‘Oh, they’re both me,’ he would reply airily.
He was ten years older than Bill, handsome, loud, almost certainly a drunk, certainly queer, and he took great interest and pride in books that upset people, including but by no means limited to Hazel. He published French novels about incest, and American novels about drug addicts, and he very much wanted to publish an English novel about homosexuality. He spent a lot of his time preventing his books from being seized by various authorities, customs officers, the police and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, but he didn’t seem to mind much. Indeed, he seemed to regard legal battles as the quintessence of a publisher’s job. As far as he was concerned, publishing a book that caused no offence to anyone was a waste of his time and energy. ‘That’s what everyone else does,’ he said.
He took Bill to a Pall Mall club that served steak and kidney pudding and treacle tart; he seemed permanently amused by the incongruity.
‘Half the members here are lawyers who spend their time trying to close me down,’ he said. ‘Except none of them know it’s me.’
Bill doubted whether that was true. He hadn’t known Braun for very long, but it was obvious that he had no talent for discretion, or even for talking at a volume level that could be described as conversational. He seemed to enjoy emphasizing the words likely to offend, so anecdotes involving, say, buggery and a young Catholic priest could be shared, albeit piecemeal, by the furthest corners of the dining room.
‘I think your novel is remarkable,’ he said after the claret had been poured and appreciated. ‘Where have you come from? Why don’t I know about you? What do you do all day?’