Resnick had nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.
That had been first thing, before his meeting with Norman Mann. Now Resnick was slowing to turn in past the gate at Midlands TV, identify himself to the security guard on duty.
Suzanne Olds was easing her beige Honda out of the visitors’ car park. Seeing Resnick, she stopped.
“Your client,” Resnick said, braking, leaning across towards her. “You did us a favor.”
“Buy me dinner.”
“Anything but Chinese.”
“Polish, then. Isn’t there supposed to be a good Polish restaurant in the city?”
They dressed up in traditional costume and each meal began with a full glass of vodka. “Yes, there is.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“What are you doing here?” Resnick asked. “Another client?”
Suzanne Olds removed her glasses for a moment, the kind with lenses that are sensitive to changes in the level of light. “Mackenzie’s an impatient man. He was worried you weren’t taking his alleged assault seriously. Now that you’re here, I can see his fears were groundless.”
“I’m surprised the company are letting him proceed. I’d have thought they’d have preferred the whole thing hushed up.”
Suzanne Olds considered before speaking, tapped one end of the spectacle frame against the dip of her upper lip. “I didn’t say this, but I don’t think a punch on the nose …”
“The mouth.”
“Wherever. I don’t think that’s the concern. I think they’re using it.”
“What for?”
“To lean on Harold Roy. Exert pressure? I’m only guessing.”
“Sounds as if he should be your client, not Mackenzie.”
She slipped her glasses back into place, the car into gear. “Don’t forget,” she said, “Gobtaki, isn’t it?”
“Gotabki,” corrected Resnick, stuffed cabbage in a garlic-and-tomato sauce, but she was already passing the gate and signaling right.
Mr. Mackenzie was in the editing suite with Mr. Freeman Davis and had left a clear message that he was not to be disturbed. As far as the receptionist knew, Mr. Roy was not in the building. Miss Woolf? He could try the canteen.
Diane Woolf didn’t appear to be there, but Resnick recognized somebody who was. Robert Deleval was sitting alone in a corner, staring out through the glass and watching the grass grow.
Perhaps, thought Resnick, he was searching for inspiration. Wasn’t that what writers did?
“Mind if I join you?”
Deleval flapped a hand vaguely in the direction of the empty chairs. He looked like a man who had just written The Great Gatsby and discovered that his only copy of the manuscript had been lost in the post.
“Seen better days?”
Deleval cut one corner from a solid-looking portion of cheesecake; then another, and another. Don’t play with your food, Resnick’s mother had told him. It’s not a toy that you should play with.
“You know what they used to say,” Deleval began, still dismembering the cheesecake, “anything vaguely gynecological, anything below the feminine belt. Women’s problems. What’s wrong with Aunt Sophie? Women’s problems. Okay, so that’s what it is with me.”
Resnick looked at him with new interest. “Women’s problems?”
“Writers’ problems.”
“They’re the same?”
“No, just equally inexplicable to anyone who isn’t suffering from the same things.”
It was going to be, Resnick realized, one of those less than fascinating conversations. Why had he always assumed that writers must be interesting people to talk to?
“So have you come to arrest him?”
“Arrest who?” Resnick said. At the back of his mind, something was nagging at him-shouldn’t that have been arrest whom? What it was, you sat down with a writer for five minutes, miserable bugger or not, and that was enough to have you questioning your own grammar.
Either way, Deleval didn’t seem to have noticed. “Our esteemed director, of course.”
“For taking a swing at Mackenzie?”
“Bang on the button. Bust that mouth of his wide open.” Deleval seemed to have cheered up. “Butterfly stitches, pain killers, the whole works.” His expression soured again. “Only thing, he should have hit him harder. More. What was missing from that little scenario, a couple of good low blows.”
“Last time we spoke,” Resnick reminded him, “you were issuing death threats to Harold Roy, not Mackenzie.”
“That was before Harold became a hero of the unofficial confederation of shafted screenwriters.”
“He was ruining your script.”
Deleval made the final incision into the cheesecake. “Better than stealing it.” He let the knife fall against the edge of the plate. “A couple of years ago I approached Mackenzie with this idea, a series about an ordinary family that wins a lot of money, gambling, lottery, football pools, it didn’t matter. Mackenzie’s interested, excited even. We work our way through the whole gamut of lunches, breakfasts, afternoons in leather armchairs that become the first of several drinks before the taxi home. Ideas are jotted down on serviettes and menus, backs of cigarette packets. Let me have an outline. Mackenzie says, we’ll talk it up. Another month and I’m working on a rough treatment. Channel 4 are interested, Mackenzie and I, we’re forming our own company, the funding’s promised. Do it that way, he says, we get to keep control. You, he says, you develop that treatment the way you see it. Your baby.”
Deleval glanced around, suddenly aware that the level of his voice had risen and that others were beginning to pay attention.
“Almost a year along the line,” he went on, more subdued, “Channel 4 are out the window, the Beeb are interested, really interested. If there was some way I could restructure the treatment so it could be shown to Felicity Kendal, they’d be positively slavering. So, fine. There’s still no money around, nothing up front, but I do it anyway. After all, like the man said, it’s my baby and you don’t let your baby starve for lack of effort, right? At this point the entire series and serials department of the BBC gets sucked down one end of the corporation vacuum-cleaner and blown out the other. Nobody seems to know if they’re on their heads or their heels. That treatment’s out, Felicity Kendal’s out, Mackenzie’s bringing our cherished, now slightly aging infant here into the heartland of independent television drama. Suddenly my idea has become something else, someone else’s idea. Ideas. Now it’s some many-headed hydra, trying to run in half a dozen directions at once, desperate to be all things to all people and almost none of those things that I had in mind in the first place.”
“But,” said Resnick, “it was your idea.”
Robert Deleval threw back his head and laughed. “Signed, sealed and delivered, sold along the dotted line to the highest bidder. Hey, even writers have to eat. Your baby? Here’s the adoption papers. Of course we’ll bring him up right. Oh, we might need to slap him around a little, bring him into line. A little rough treatment, but then, who did that ever hurt?”
Resnick was looking around the canteen for signs of Diane Woolf. What had begun as interesting had degenerated into a mixture of spleen and self-pity.
“You know what a writer needs to succeed in this business?” Deleval demanded.
Resnick shook his head; it was time he made his excuses and left.
“You know?”
Deleval was almost roaring now and the occupants of all the adjacent tables had dropped their indifference and were openly staring.
“What he needs,” Deleval was on his feet, turned towards the interior of the canteen, “aside from the skin of a rhinoceros and a permanently nodding head, is an extra-long tongue that won’t go brown at the edges.”
He seized the plate from his table and held it close to his face. “What any self-respecting writer has to be able to do …” he was pawing his hand into the pieces of cheesecake and pushing them inside his mouth, shouting through the ensuing spray, “… is eat shit and look as though he’s enjoying it.”