A famous columnist from The Times is standing three feet away.
Dedication written, I tell the bouncer, “So glad you enjoyed it.”
The pavilion contains enough celebrity wattage to power a small sun: I spy two Rolling Stones, a Monty Python; a teenage fifty-something presenter of Top Gear joshing with a disgraced American cyclist; an ex — U.S. secretary of state; an ex — football manager who writes an autobiography every five years; an ex-head of MI6 who cranks out a third-rate thriller annually; and a lush-lipped TV astronomer who writes, at least, about astronomy. We’re all here for the same reason: We have books to flog. “I spy with my little eye the rarest of sights,” an old codger purrs in my ear by the champagne bar, “a literary writer at a literary festival. How’s life, Crispin?”
The stranger absorbs Hershey’s withering stare like a man in his prime with nothing to fear, notwithstanding the damage that Time the Vandal has done to his face. The clawed lines, the whisky nose, the sagging pouches, the droopy eyelids. A silk handkerchief pokes up from his jacket pocket and he wears an elegant fedora, but Sodding Hell. How can the incurably elderly stand it? “And you are?”
“I’m your near future, my boy.” He swivels his once-handsome face. “Take a good, long look. What do you think?”
What I think is that tonight is the Night of the Fruitcakes. “What I think is that I’m no fan of cryptic crosswords.”
“No? I enjoy them. I am Levon Frankland.”
I take the proffered champagne flute and make an underimpressed face. “No bells are going ‘dong,’ I must confess.”
“I’m an old mucker of your father’s from another time. We were both contemporaries at the Finisterre Club in Soho.”
I maintain my underimpressed face. “I heard it finally closed down.”
“The end of the end of an era. My era. We met,” Levon Frankland tilts his glass my way, “at a party at your house in Pembridge Place in, ooh, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, around the time of the Gethsemane jazzamaroo. Amongst the various pies into which I had thrust my sticky fingers was artist management, and your father hoped that an avant-folk combo I represented would work on music for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The plan came to nought, but I remember you, dressed up as a cowboy. You had not long mastered the art of bowel control and social intercourse was still years away, but I’ve followed your career with an avuncular interest, and read your memoir about your dad with relish. Do you know, every few months, I get it into my head to call him and arrange lunch? I clean forget he’s gone! I do so miss the old contrarian. He was sinfully proud of you.”
“Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”
“Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”
A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”
“I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”
“I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”
Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”
Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”
Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via Out on Your Arse!, the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a £100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to £150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show The Unput-downables, and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick the twentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It’s—”
“I knew you’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adore it. The only war novel to really ‘get’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”
“I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of All Quiet on the Western—”
“What German ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”
Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why The Naked and the Dead is so important, Rog — ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”
“To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.
“Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “The Naked and the Dead? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”
Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”
“Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”
I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”
“I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship Desiccated Embryos.”
“Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand, wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since Embryos is a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.”
“I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”
“So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”
“—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “after the Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”