‘What is “jejune”？’ Ahmet asked. There was a suggestion of hopefulness in his voice. Perhaps he was thinking that it might be a compliment.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Maureen said. She was standing right next to him, white-faced, her lips pressed tightly together.
‘The bitch!’ Jordan had not raised his voice, but the words exploded out of him. His eyes were staring, his face filled with fury. ‘This isn’t a review. This is a filthy piece of slander! And it’s the third time she’s done this to me. Everything I do – every time – she has it in for me. I’ll kill her. I swear to you … !’ He was holding the dagger that Ahmet had given him. He slammed it down into what was left of the cake.
‘It’s just one review.’ Ewan was echoing exactly what I had been thinking, doing his job as director, trying to hold us all together. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘This is just her opinion,’ he went on, tiredly. ‘The other critics often disagree with her. It was the same when I directed Antigone.’
‘Someone should put a knife in her!’ Jordan hadn’t finished yet. ‘She’s a monster. She shouldn’t get away with it.’
‘How did she manage to write it so quickly?’ I asked. ‘The curtain only came down a couple of hours ago.’
‘She starts her reviews before the play’s finished,’ Ewan explained. ‘She’s famous for it. She writes about the first half during the interval and does the rest on her way home.’
‘She lives in the back end of Paddington,’ Sky said. ‘She’s got a place near the canal. She probably finished it in the back of a taxi.’
‘But why has she posted it?’ I went on. ‘Couldn’t she wait until Sunday?’
‘She must have wanted to get ahead of the pack.’ Sky hastily turned off her phone and slid it into her pocket. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t opened it now.’
Ahmet was sitting with his shoulders slumped, his face darker than ever. His hair was still wet from the rain and stuck to his skull like paint. He snatched up his cigarettes and lit one, then threw the packet down. ‘What this woman says is all lies,’ he announced. ‘In Bath, in Reading, in Windsor, people liked the play. I was there! I saw them. What she writes here … this is shit.’
‘She’s disgusting,’ Maureen said quietly.
Tirian hadn’t spoken for a while. He seemed to have shrunk inside his expensive clothes, as if he – rather than they – had just come out of the washing machine, and right then he looked a bit like a teenager, sullen and scrawny, biting his lower lip as if he’d been told off for talking in class. ‘Sod her!’ he said. ‘I’m going home. I’ve had enough to drink anyway.’ He collected his few belongings, snatched up his backpack and hurried out of the room.
We all wanted to leave, but to end the party immediately would be to admit that we’d been defeated by Harriet Throsby’s review, proving her power over us. So the six of us who were left talked for a few more minutes and drank some more vodka and whisky. But our hearts weren’t in it. Sky was the next to go. It may have been that she was more miserable than any of us – but then she was the one who had spoiled the evening by showing us the review. I followed her.
I couldn’t wait to get out. I wanted to go home, to put the Vaudeville behind me, to forget the play had happened. I knew I was being childish. It was only a bad review. But there isn’t a writer in the world who hasn’t felt that sense of anger, shame, resentfulness and sheer misery that comes when a critic lets loose. It’s just that some of us hide it better than others.
The rain had eased off, but I was still damp and shivering by the time I got back to my flat in Clerkenwell. It was one o’clock in the morning and I was worn out. I went to bed in the spare room and fell asleep almost immediately. Not surprisingly, I dreamed of Harriet Throsby. Once again, I saw those horn-rimmed glasses she’d been wearing and heard the brittle edge to her voice. Jordan Williams was also there, stabbing the cake, and I heard him too: ‘Someone should put a knife in her!’ That was when I woke up.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty past eleven. I don’t know how I’d managed to sleep in so late, but the pounding in my head told me that a mixture of whisky, vodka and Turkish wine had probably helped. The moment I padded out to the kitchen in my bare feet, I knew the flat was empty. Jill would have gone to work hours ago. Sure enough, there was a Post-it note from her stuck to the fridge. Quite a good review in The Times. Hope others are OK. Back at 6 p.m. Don’t forget laundry. Quite good. I knew Jill too well. We’d worked together for years in television and we both knew that ‘quite good’ was never good enough.