19.

I had developed a routine for writing my books around my job, which enabled me to publish a novel or non-fiction book every eighteen months. On Saturday and Sunday mornings I retreated to the end of the garden (I prefer writing outdoors), began work at 7 a.m. and never went on much beyond 11 a.m. Four hours: if I wrote 250 words an hour (which isn’t a lot) that amounts to 2,000 words per weekend, 10,000 a month, 120,000 a year = a 350-page book. Keep your foot on the pedal a bit longer, and it’s 500 pages.

I wrote for very particular reasons: because I enjoyed it – the craft and planning and structure it imposed on the weekend. I don’t play golf or shoot, and the growing shelf of novels was testament to the passage of time. And I relished the control of the author over his characters, conforming to my absolute will (you sometimes hear distinguished novelists saying, ‘I never know what a character will think or do next,’ but I always knew). It was the polar opposite to my magazine day job, where decisions are consensual, the product of large teams and creative compromises and the talent of others. A bid for the permanence of hard covers in an ephemeral world. And a chance to process and refashion the vagaries of real life into a shape with a beginning, middle and end.

I write longhand with green Pentel pens on yellow American legal pads. I find the process of writing by hand more satisfying, without the intrusion of tech, glare of screen, battery fatigue, cutting and pasting.

Friends sometimes tried to guilt-trip me by saying, ‘I’m surprised you have time to write anything at weekends. What about your poor children?’

But when they were small our children happily messed about for hours in their pyjamas, slopping cereal and watching telly; and when they became teenagers, they were asleep until after my day’s writing was done. New books took them by surprise. ‘When did you write that, Dad?’

‘While you were still asleep.’

And, after I’d reached my daily word count, I overcompensated; cajoling them into long walks, which luckily they have developed a taste for.

I had written a non-fiction book, Paper Tigers, ludicrously fat at 600 pages, about the world’s 30 top newspaper proprietors. This necessitated multiple trips to New York to interview the super-civilized Sulzbergers of the New York Times, Washington for the celebrity Grahams of the Washington Post, Los Angeles for gunslinger-eyed Rupert Murdoch and geeky Otis Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, Mumbai and Delhi for the great Indian owners and, one by one, stalking and bagging all the British ones from patrician Vere Rothermere to bombastic Robert Maxwell.

Normally I tape-recorded these interviews, which were three hours in length. But, for some reason, Rothermere of the Daily Mail sent word that I could only take notes, not subject him to a tape recorder. (Presumably for deniability later on, if required.)

My shorthand is quick, but I wanted to catch every nuance of speech, which is tricky when you are writing notes and trying to sound intelligent at the same time.

There was a shop I passed each day on South Audley Street called The Counter Spy Shop, which sold surveillance equipment to amateur detectives and snoops. It had always intrigued me, it was probably run by ‘Q’ from James Bond as a side venture.

Inside, at considerable expense, I bought a fountain pen with a recording device concealed in the nib, which I was advised to place on the table between me and my ‘target’ for crystal-clear results.

For three hours, the clandestine pen whirred and vibrated on the coffee table between me and Lord Rothermere, making me increasingly anxious. I was afraid that, at any moment, it would reach the end of the tape and noisily rewind, exposing my sneakiness.

The interview concluded and, on a park bench in Kensington Gardens, I played back the tape. All you could hear was the rattling of coffee cups on saucers and a distant, incomprehensible drone of voices.

Conrad Black was my favourite proprietor. I found him mesmerizing, his voice, his looming physical presence and tycoon posturing. And the way that his sentences – often paragraphs long – were formed like Russian dolls, each containing a sub-clause or parenthesis, and then another one inside that, and then another. Transcribing a taped interview, some sentences ran to several pages, as complicated to unravel as tangled headphone cable. And his declarations rattled with arbitrary prejudices, feuds, accusations, insights, erudition and mogul-class name-dropping.

Georgia and I were at a charity event at Buckingham Palace, guests of the advertising tycoon Maurice Saatchi, and found ourselves standing in line with Conrad to be presented to the Princess Royal, Princess Anne.

As the royal presence approached, Lord Black of Crossharbour began to preen.

‘Your Royal Highness,’ he declared in booming, senatorial tones. ‘May I commend you on the magnificence of your paintings here in the Picture Gallery. They are considerably more impressive than those at the White House in Washington, where I was privileged to be dining with the President earlier this week.’

Princess Anne stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Oh, really? Well, one seldom notices the pictures here oneself, having known them for so long.’

And then she moved on.

I wrote two novels set in the magazine industry, both edited by Rosie Cheetham. She is a famously astute book editor, and I learnt a lot from her, about structure above all. And she had a way of quizzing you about your characters, probing you on motivation and foibles, that obliged you to consider them more deeply.

I refined the plot of Godchildren with Rosie at The Ivy restaurant in Soho, and later at her kitchen table in Gloucestershire. The premise of my fattest, 711-page novel was rather neat: mysterious tycoon has six godchildren – rich, poor, pretty, plain, posh, insecure. As the story unfolds, the godfather’s life becomes ever-more intertwined with his godchildren – as boss, benefactor, lover and object of fascination. The godchildren’s lives also become enmeshed, cemented by godfatherly trips to the South of France and the Bahamas, and rides on his private jet. The character of the godfather, Marcus Brand, drew on at least six role models from different parts of my life: Jocelyn Stevens and James Goldsmith, with a twist of Robert Maxwell and a nod to Conrad Black; there might be a dash of the banker Evelyn de Rothschild in there too, and indeed Jacob Rothschild.

Godchildren enabled me to write about a whole sweep of time from the fifties to the millennium, bringing it all in: school, drugs, love, the Feathers Ball, Hong Kong, India, New York. The longer I worked on it, the longer it grew. Soon the manuscript needed to be bound in two volumes, then three. I used to slip away for a week alone, usually to Morocco, to concentrate on it undisturbed. Another long chunk was written in a glass-sided bus shelter on a family holiday to the Isle of Bute, while Scottish rain battered against the cliffs.

Like The Fashion Conspiracy before it, Godchildren had one glorious week at the top of the charts, mostly read, as it had been written, on long-haul flights or poolside at hotels. A friend sent me a photograph of five different people reading copies on adjacent sunbeds at the La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech, and another group was spotted at the Amanpuri in Phuket. My kind of readers.

I had dedicated it to my own godchildren: to Helena, Edie, Ione, Ewan, Cara, Ned and Willa. They rather gamely assembled in a suite at Claridge’s, to be photographed for the publicity campaign. Years later, a gossip columnist tried to imply that Godchildren was based on my godchildren’s actual lives, and that Marcus Brand, the predatory tycoon, is based upon me (this was after Cara Delevingne and Edie Campbell had become supermodels). But they were all aged about eight when the novel was published, so it clearly wasn’t.

My literary agent, by this point, was the great Ed Victor, the party-minded super-agent. Georgia and I had met him and his wife, Carol Ryan Victor, one Easter holiday at the Gazelle D’Or hotel in Taroudant. That year, the Moroccan hotel was filled to the brim with vaguely famous guests: Charles and Caroline Moore plus the ad-man Charles Saatchi, the Conservative Cabinet minister Michael Portillo and the photographer Terence Donovan, and their wives.

Under normal circumstances, being British, we would have kept ourselves to ourselves, fearful of intruding on holiday privacy. But Ed, being Ed, had no inhibitions. Each morning, he patrolled the line of sunbeds.

‘Carol and I have reserved the big table under the olive trees for lunch. Charles and Kay are joining us, so are Michael and Carolyn …’ and so on. We were all drawn into Ed’s gregarious orbit.

After lunch, he organized cut-throat Monopoly tournaments. Portillo, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, always came second. Saatchi always won, with hotels on every property on the board.

Ed became my agent before the end of the week.

It was a thrill when Godchildren was shortlisted for the naffest-named literary award in publishing: the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. But not quite thumping enough to win.

Every other year, another fat multi-character novel appeared: A Much Married Man, Deadly Sins, The Adventuress. I think I’ve written fourteen. I could never have lived on the proceeds of my books, let alone supported a wife, four children, school fees, holidays and the rest, despite the foreign editions.

The mechanics of plotting a story absorbed me, moving characters like chess pieces: knight to f4 to trap bishop, queen counters and takes rook. Or, in my case: Marcus to Tetbury to trap Saffron, Jamie counters in Annabel’s to take Abigail. I have always found it easy to empathize with other people’s points of view, even when my own are emphatically different, so multi-character sagas suit me.

Ed Victor copy-tasted my books at the halfway point. That was our system.

Georgia read them thoroughly first, then Ed who could gut a manuscript over a weekend. Then he’d call: ‘Nick, you know, I like this. I really do. I can sell this for you. But there’s one thing you’ve got to change first, I insist.’

‘What’s that, Ed?’

‘In chapter fourteen, the character Hannah, the girl he meets on the flight from Jakarta and has sex with in the hotel. You’ve given her ginger-coloured hair. It doesn’t work. Better if you make her blonde or brunette.’

‘Sure, Ed. I’ll change it.’

Then he would talk for an hour or two about his more famous clients, and the megadeals he’d pulled off for them. ‘I spent Saturday night with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, both my clients, and then lunch on Sunday with Tina [Brown] and Harry [Evans] in Quogue. Her new book deal is fabulous, Nick.’

When my own were published, Ed took me to lunch at The Ivy Club. He could be wonderfully warm. He would say kind things, then couldn’t resist: ‘You know, Nick, it was very fortunate I caught that detail about Hannah’s hair colouring. It didn’t work. You remember I told you to change it?’

He used to say, ‘I think you’ve made a pact with the devil, Nick, to get twenty-five hours out of every twenty-four-hour day.’ It was flattering, until I discovered he used exactly the same line on Nigella Lawson, Dylan Jones and Geordie Greig.

He was in all respects a super-agent.