My Life as a Fake: A Novel by Peter Carey

Author:Peter Carey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Literary forgeries and mystifications, Australia, Psychological fiction, Women editors, Poets, British, Fiction, Psychological, Malaysia, British - Australia, British - Malaysia
ISBN: 9781400030880
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2005-03-15T05:57:33+00:00

26

I suppose Slater had been lying to women all his life, but what he did the following morning still takes my breath away. Sleep in, he told me at six. The plane is broke. The flight is cancelled.

It would take all of five years, by which time we’d become much better friends, before he confessed that it was he, not the airline, who had cancelled our flight to London.

The effect of this vast untruth was to bring me rather violently awake. It was good news, of course—a second chance to get the poetry. On the other hand my board meeting was on the fourteenth, tomorrow. Lord Antrim was about to leave for Italy on the fifteenth. Without him present it was very likely that Mrs McKay would not bother coming down from Manchester and without her cheque book, there was, quite bluntly, no point in having a meeting.

Telephone them, darling, Slater said. Talk to London all day long if that is what you need to do. But of course I could not phone London then. I spent a completely wretched day waiting until I judged that Antrim would have finished breakfast.

I realise now my calculation was off, but desperation never makes one sensitive. Without preamble, I begged him to delay his departure.

Sarah, you might as well ask me to change the date of Christmas.

What would make you stay in London one more week?

Nothing.

A death?

Only my own, possibly not even that.

Bertie, I said, do you remember that night in Cheltenham when you made me cry?

Please, Sarah. This call must be costing the firm a fortune.

You said I had not published a single great poem in fifteen years.

Silence.

Bertie, I do know how you love to be in Italy on time, but if you will only stay in London just five more days I will bring you a really nice surprise.

This meant leaving on the eighteenth and going to the meeting straight from Heathrow.

If you are not there when I open the manuscript, I said, you will be exceedingly jealous of those who are.

There was a second silence, somehow rather warmer than the first. What I had laid so recklessly before Antrim was the very thing that kept him coming to our meetings—the thought that we might one day publish a work like ‘The Waste Land.’ I could hear the singing of the submarine phone cables.

Sarah, he said at last, are you smuggling ganja?.

You know exactly what I am saying.

Well, certainly you haven’t found a genius in Malaya.

It was my turn to be silent.

In Malaya? His voice had changed.

I now knew he would postpone his departure. Immediately I felt ill. It may take a little guts, I said.

That cheered him even further. Antrim was so easily bored, so mischievous. It was the best thing about him.

You will put the cat amongst the pigeons?

Bertie, I promise there will be feathers floating in the air all over Bloomsbury.

By the time I had rung off, he had given his agreement and I had not so much as a limerick to put before him.

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