‘So you dropped him.’
I shrugged. ‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’
‘Would it be fair to say that you took his friendship, his mentoring, and all his belief in you and simply threw it back in his face?’
I considered this for a moment. ‘Try to look at it from my point of view,’ I said. ‘What you’re describing is a young man utterly calculating and dishonest in his actions. But was Erich honest with me? Let’s face it, if I had been two hundred pounds overweight and looked like something that had been washed in on the tides after a particularly brutal storm, do you think he would have asked me to join him for a drink that night in West Berlin? I wasn’t the only waiter working that night, you know, but I was the one he chose. It’s easy to look at me as the villain of the piece but, really, Erich’s actions weren’t entirely honourable either.’
‘I suppose it comes down to motivation,’ said Theo. ‘Whatever Erich did was done out of love. And confusion. And regret for a wasted life. While you were just using him. And, really, did he deserve it? An elderly man who, many decades before, while he was still a teenager, had made a single terrible mistake, one that he’d had to live with ever since. How many young men in Germany at that time did something to send people to their death? Oh, it doesn’t make it right, of course it doesn’t, but he wasn’t a monster. Just a bewildered boy who acted without thinking. He spent his entire life punishing himself for that. Did he need that extra suffering at the end?’
I lowered my head, closed my eyes and tried to control my temper. It seemed a little rich to me that, with all the help I was giving this boy, he had the audacity to be so judgemental towards me. I looked up again, ready to say as much, but he was doing that thing again, tapping his index finger quickly against his thumb, just as Daniel had done, and I softened. I needed his forgiveness, not his condemnation.
‘Like I said,’ I continued quietly, ‘it’s all a long time ago. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to talk about Erich any more. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve spent half of my life discussing that man and, sooner or later, it has to stop.’
‘But—’
‘No, Daniel,’ I said, placing a hand flat on the table. ‘It has to stop.’
He nodded. ‘All right.’
The notepad reappeared and he turned to a blank page and started scribbling away, a curious smile on his face. He didn’t talk for a long time and I found myself fixated on his hands.
‘Do you remember when Miss Willow tried to get you to write with your right hand?’ I asked, smiling at the memory.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said, looking up.
‘When you were seven or eight. And Miss Willow said that it would be better if you stopped writing with your left hand. She tried to force you to write with your right and I had to go in to the head, Mrs Lane, and lodge a complaint.’
He said nothing, shook his head, and began scribbling in his notebook again. I ordered some more drinks and drank another neat whisky at the bar, which wasn’t like me. I had my strict drinking routine and preferred not to alter it. Somehow, though, I just felt like I needed more. I wanted to fade away.
‘Let’s move on to something else,’ he said, when I sat back down again. He moved his beer to one side, barely glancing at it, while I took a long draught from mine. ‘I’d like to ask you about your time in New York. You wrote two books there, am I right?’
‘That’s right. The Breach and The Broken Ones. Will they play a big part in your thesis?’
‘Of course, but I’m more interested in how you developed the ideas for those books. I’ve established how you worked on the first three.’
‘You’re not still angry at what I told you about The Tribesman, are you?’ I asked with a sigh. ‘Really, I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’
‘You were working for Storī at the time?’ he asked, ignoring my question.
‘Not working for, no. I owned Storī. I founded the magazine from scratch. I was the editor. The whole operation was under my control.’
‘Of course. Sorry. And what made you set it up in the first place?’
‘Well, when I left England I had an idea that it would be worthwhile to do something to help further the careers of new writers. I liked the idea of literary philanthropy. No one had ever helped me, after all, and—’
‘Except Erich.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘And Dash.’
‘And Dash, that’s true.’
‘And Edith.’
‘Yes, of course. You see, I wanted the magazine to become a place where writers longed to see their work in print, which is why I only published four editions a year, each with a dozen or so stories. It kept the quality very high. To be published in Storī, I felt, should be an honour. An aspiration. Like being published in the New Yorker.’
‘I’ve gone through all the old issues.’
‘Of the New Yorker?’
‘No, of course not,’ he said, rolling his eyes, and I sat back, astonished that he could behave so disrespectfully towards me. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. ‘Of Storī.’
‘Oh, of course. What, all of them?’
‘Yes. It’s important for my thesis to identify where your tastes lay.’
‘You’re very diligent. You really do want to be a biographer, don’t you?’
‘There’s some pretty brilliant writing in there. Some really wonderful work.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you discovered some great talents. Henry Etta James, for one.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, laughing a little. ‘Not that she ever gives me any credit for launching her career. You know, when she won the Pulitzer for I Am Dissatisfied with My Boyfriend, My Body and My Career, I sent her a floral bouquet and she didn’t even have the good manners to thank me. She’s held a grudge against me for a ridiculously long time.’
‘Over that story you refused to publish?’
I stared at him in astonishment.
‘How on earth do you know about that?’ I asked, trying to control the slight quiver in my voice.
‘She told me.’
‘Who did?’
‘Henry Etta.’
‘Henrietta James?’
‘Yes.’
I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled his face away to reveal hers lying beneath. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to explain. Are you … How on earth do you know Henrietta? She can’t be a friend of yours, surely?’
‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘We’re not friends as such. I wouldn’t even presume. But I went to New York earlier in the year, while I was doing some research for my thesis. I thought it was important to get some idea of where Storī fitted into your life. You were there for a long time, after all.’
‘All right,’ I said doubtfully. ‘But how on earth did you find yourself crossing paths with her?’
‘I contacted a few of the writers who had begun their careers by being published in your magazine. It wasn’t difficult; they’re all on social media. Most of them didn’t reply, but she did. She was very generous with her time, actually. She took me out for cocktails at the Russian Tea Rooms, which was pretty exciting. She even introduced me to her editor.’