THE BRITFONE PAVILION was designed by an eminent architect I’ve never heard of and “quotes” Hadrian’s Wall, the Tower of London, a Tudor manor, postwar public housing, Wembley Stadium, and a Docklands skyscraper. What a sicked-up fry-up it is. A holographic flag of the BritNet logo flutters from its pinnacle and you ingress through a double-sized replica of 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. The security men are dressed as Beefeaters, and one asks for my VIP lanyard. I check my jacket; my trousers; my jacket again. “Oh, sod a dog, I put it down somewhere—look, I’m Crispin Hershey.”
“Sorry, sir,” says the Beefeater. “No ID, no entry.”
“Check your little list. Crispin Hershey. The writer.”
The Beefeater shakes his head. “I got my orders.”
“But I did a sodding event here only an hour ago.”
A second Beefeater comes over, eyes ashine with fan-glow: “You’re never—are you really … him? Oh, my God, you are …”
“Yes, I am.” I glare at the first. “ Thankyou.”
The Worthy Beefeater walks me through the small lobby where lesser mortals are patted down and have their bags checked. “Sorry about that, sir. The Afghan president’s here tonight so we’re on amber alert. My colleague back there’s not au fait with contemporary fiction. And, to be fair, you do look older on your author photos.”
I double-check this pleasing sentence. “Do I?”
“If I weren’t such a fan, sir, I wouldn’t have recognized you.” We enter the pavilion proper, where hundreds are mingling, but the Worthy Beefeater has a favor to beg: “Look, sir, I shouldn’t ask, but …” he produces a book from inside his ridiculous uniform, “… your new book’s the best thing you’ve ever written. I went to bed with it and read right through to dawn. My fiancйe’s mother’s a huge fan too, and, well, for premarital Brownie points, would you mind?”
I produce my fountain pen and the Beefeater hands me his book, already turned to the title page. Only when nib touches paper do I notice I am signing a novel called Best Kept Secretby Jeffrey Archer. I look up at the Beefeater to see if he’s taking the piss, but no: “Would you write ‘To Bridie on your Sixtieth Birthday from Lord Archer’?”
A famous columnist from The Timesis 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 Gearjoshing 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 Gethsemanejazzamaroo. 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 sinfullyproud 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 Ј100K 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 Ј150,000. 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 thetwentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It’s—”
“I knewyou’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adoreit. 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—”
“ WhatGerman ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”