Someone from his agent’s rang to ask for her address.
The very thing she’d tried to avoid from the start, third-party intervention. Things slipping from her control.
Two days later a postcard from him arrived:
We are rather conscious, verbal beings, you and I, don’t you think, to be venturing together into Lawrence country? We could make ourselves look very foolish.
Q
Q? The affected bastard. His Christian name was Sam.
The card itself was from a gallery in Romania and showed Ionesco looking playfully bored in a Chaplinesque hat.
Cute bastard. Not Ionesco, Q.
She put a message on his answerphone, loud and clear. ‘No need to say it again, Sam. Got you loud and clear.’ And, louder and clearer still, L.
L for Love? No, L for Lily.
And then. ‘No need to call back.’
She set her mouth, returned her blue book to the shelf and rang her commissioning editor to say progress on the Lawrence film had stalled.
‘Good timing,’ he said. ‘We’re a director down, can you do Byron?’