The principal stared at him, barely registering that he had asked her a question, and swallowed hard, looking down at the notebook before her and smoothing its pages with trembling hands.
‘I read your most recent one,’ she said. ‘When I realized who Daniel’s father was I went to Barnes &—’
‘The Broken Ones.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that novel doesn’t have very much sex in it at all,’ admitted Maurice. ‘But then, if you’ve read it, you know that. Anyway,’ he smiled, slapping his hands down on his knees so loudly that he made her jump, ‘I shouldn’t keep talking about myself like this. It sounds as if it’s me who needs the services of a counsellor and not my son.’
Mrs Lane said nothing, and he took pleasure from seeing how uncomfortable he had made her. It was reassuring to know that he still had this sort of power over people.
‘So is that everything?’ he asked, standing up. ‘Or was there something else you wanted to discuss with me?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Lane, remaining seated. ‘No, that was it. You may leave.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, laughing a little at the manner of his dismissal.
‘I’ll email you details of a psychologist that the school recommends,’ she said as he turned away. ‘And you and Mr and Mrs Dell can liaise on that. I think you’ll find them very accommodating. Believe me, if Daniel had to hit a girl, then Jupiter was probably the best one to hit.’
When he opened the door he smiled when he saw a small, seven-year-old boy sitting on a chair outside, his legs swinging in the air, his hands pressed together as if in prayer.
‘Am I in trouble?’ asked Daniel, looking up. Not for the first time, it struck Maurice how beautiful he was.
A fresh collection of manuscripts had arrived at home from the Storī office and Maurice piled them up on the coffee table. There looked to be about twenty in total, the usual amount selected for his evaluation, whittled down by the interns from the three hundred or so that arrived unsolicited every month. Having got past those merciless gatekeepers, each one should, in theory, have something to recommend it and, as he was judicious in his reading, it typically took him the best part of a week to get through them, pulling out the wittiest and most perceptive dialogue, the most ingenious plot lines and arresting images, and entering each one into a file on his computer. He’d pick four or five to publish too, of course, but send letters to the rejected authors, signed by a fictitious employee, apologizing that, due to time constraints and the pressures of writing a new novel, Mr Swift had not personally had an opportunity to read their submission – it was important that he should make this clear in case of any future problems – but that the editorial team at Storī had considered their work and decided it was not quite right for them at this time. Generally, he assumed, the writers would be so pleased to have received even an acknowledgement of their writing that their disappointment would be salved and they would set the piece aside for ever, believing that it just wasn’t good enough.
The pile arrived four times a year and there was often very little in it worth stealing, but once in a while he came across a moment of brilliance that justified his decision to set up the magazine in the first place. His fourth novel, for example, The Breach, had been constructed around two different ideas that he’d discovered in stories by an American and a Chinese-American writer. Combining them into one, and using a central character that he created himself as the link between the pair, he’d managed to build a novel that had been highly praised upon publication and sold even more copies than The Tribesman, which of course was always going to do well after it was shortlisted for The Prize. His most recent book, The Broken Ones, published three years earlier, in 2008, had found its origin in a story written by a nineteen-year-old Viennese student that recounted a couple’s visit to Paris on the eve of their twentieth wedding anniversary, where an unexpected infidelity took place in a restaurant. （He had changed the setting to Israel, the wedding anniversary to a birthday, the restaurant to a museum, and when combined with a comic character he purloined from the work of a young British writer, the book had once again been a commercial and critical hit.） He’d been putting off starting a new book for a while now as he hadn’t found the right idea yet, and had been rather looking forward to receiving this group of submissions, hoping that there might be something in there that would be worth appropriating as his own.
The sound of a door opening to his left made him turn around, and he watched as Daniel walked towards him. The boy was wearing his favourite Spider-Man pyjamas and carrying a furry animal of no obvious species. He smelled of the lavender bubble-bath that he’d been splashing around in only an hour before and he was carrying his blue Ventolin inhaler. His asthma had been particularly aggressive lately and he’d had to spend ten minutes sitting quietly when they got home, taking puff after puff, before the congestion in his lungs cleared.
‘Feeling better?’ asked Maurice as the boy jumped up on to the sofa next to him, leaning over to bury his body into his father’s side. Maurice held him close, kissing him on the top of his head, breathing in his scent.
‘If I say sorry to Jupiter tomorrow, will I still have to go to see the doctor?’ asked Daniel, sounding a little less anxious about that particular ordeal than he had when they’d arrived home. There had been tears then and a declaration that he shouldn’t have to be kissed if he didn’t want to be, a sentiment that Maurice thought was actually rather fair.
‘I think so,’ said Maurice. ‘Otherwise this could all end up in a big drama that neither of us needs. I’m sure the doctor will be very nice, anyway.’
‘Will she use a needle?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The doctor. Will she use a needle when she sees me? I don’t like needles.’
Maurice shook his head. ‘She’s not that type of doctor,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nothing like that. All you’ll do is talk to her, that’s all. And then it will be over.’
Daniel frowned, his expression suggesting that he couldn’t believe you could attend a doctor with no pain being involved, just conversation.
‘I didn’t like it when she kissed me,’ said the boy.
‘I never really cared for it much either,’ said Maurice. ‘But you can’t go around committing random acts of violence when people do things you don’t like. You should have just told her not to do it again.’
‘Everyone was laughing at me,’ whispered Daniel.
Maurice hugged him again and looked down at the perfect feet and toes emerging from the ends of his son’s pyjamas. He had always expected to feel unadulterated love for a child, if he ever had one, but things hadn’t quite worked out that way. He was terribly fond of Daniel, certainly, but the boy irritated him as often as he pleased him. He was always there, was the problem. Hanging around. Needing food, toys or new clothes. Saying that it was time to go to school or to be picked up again. It was endless harassment. Maurice did his best to keep an even temper with the boy – he was just a child, after all, and he recognized that – but still, he looked forward to the day that he turned eighteen and was heading off to college. He might get his life back then.