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  “One way to do that is to encourage their aspirations,” said Morgana.

  “Rrrrright!” Zena bared her teeth, as if—despite what she’d just told Emily—she’d sooner bite her readers than encourage their aspirations. Then she put a spoonful of sugar in her tea, stirred it vigorously, and drank a mouthful, as if she had just swallowed some nasty medicine.

  “It doesn’t matter how much encouragement you give, you can’t teach people how to write,” said Cerys. “Good writing comes with practice.”

  “Ach,” said Archie, very softly.

  Cerys said, “No offense.”

  Archie rubbed the palms of his hands on his knees, and then crossed his arms and clamped his hands on his biceps as if to keep his hands still, though Emily noticed his fingers scratching at his skin through his jumper; not in the scrabbly, frantic way of someone who is crawling with ants, but gently, the way that someone might scratch under the chin to comfort a dog or a cat. There was something wary and closed off about Archie. But Emily knew that few writers were as extrovert as the irrepressible Morgana, so Archie’s demeanor didn’t strike Emily as unusual. But watching him sitting there, hugging himself, Emily also saw that there was something boyish and vulnerable in Archie. He caught Emily looking at him and relaxed a bit, and smiled, as if they were two children in a classroom who weren’t paying attention to their lessons.

  “Archie was on my Write Back Where You Belong creative writing program,” Morgana explained to Emily. “It’s where we met. But you’re right, Cerys. He’s the only one of my students, so far as I know, to be making a living from writing. Studying creative writing is not necessarily a route to success as a writer.”

  Archie said, “No offense taken.”

  “It’s such a competitive business these days,” said Morgana. “I’m not sure we should encourage it.” She seemed to want someone to contradict her, but no one did. So she continued: “I had been thinking of asking you all to help me choose a winner from among these three. I know we voted online for these three from the short list—”

  “Did we?” said Cerys.

  “Did we?” said Zena.

  “Yes,” Morgana said. “But I’m wondering, should we choose one winner overall and make a fuss of whoever wins at the gala dinner tonight? Or make a fuss of all three of them as we’ve asked them here and they’ve been kind enough to come.”

  “‘I don’t remember a short list,” said Archie.

  “I’ve got the three winners here.” Morgana took a sheaf of pages from a plastic wallet in her enormous handbag. “First up is Maggie’s.” She put her glasses on her nose. The page on the top had a short passage printed on it. “The brief was to submit a very short romantic story, no more than two hundred words long.”

  “I don’t remember that, M, truly I don’t,” said Cerys.

  “Never mind, I’ll read it to you:”

  She stood by the hob, waiting for the water in the kettle to boil. She could hear the water bubbling and roiling like her emotions; she watched the steam rising, steadily building like the passion inside her. Steele advanced on soft-soled shoes, his muscled arms swinging. “NERIDA,” he said. “I want you. I have to have you.”

  “No!” she cried. “No, Steele, we can’t. We mustn’t. You know what Father would say.”

  But he grabbed her and whirled her away from the hob, and he kissed her, his mouth pressing down on hers.

  Though his arms still encircled her, she pulled her face away. “I can’t give myself to you now, Steele. I just can’t.”

  But his lips found hers again, his tongue opening her mouth like steam unsticking a sealed envelope. As he pressed the powerful length of his body against hers, the kettle whistled on the hob. It seemed to Nerida as though it was mimicking the song of desire that screamed its urgency inside her mind.

  She had told him she couldn’t give herself to him now. But if not now, soon. She knew it. He knew it, too.

  There was a short silence. Morgana took off her glasses and waited for a response.

  “We all have to start somewhere,” said Cerys.

  “Indeed,” said Morgana. “Writing doesn’t come as easily to some as to others.”

  “It’s quite ambitious,” said Archie. “You’ve to admire her for that.”

  “You gonna read this out tonight if it’s chosen as the winner?” asked Zena, jolted into speaking like a fairly normal person for once.

  Morgana looked anxious. “Well, it won’t take long. It’s under two hundred words.”

  “If you keep all three as equal winners,” said Emily, “perhaps there wouldn’t be time to read out all three stories?”

  Morgana looked at Emily gratefully. “Oh, indeed! Yes, perhaps we shouldn’t set our guests against each other by inviting them here and then naming one of them an overall winner. It’s not very nurturing.”

  “I take it the others are all of a similar standard?” asked Cerys.

  Morgana said, “There was one with a likable, ditzy heroine who had a Maine coon cat. And in the other one the heroine dies in the end.”

  “She dies in the end and this is a romance writing contest? For the love of all that’s holy, M! Whatever is the world coming to?”

  “You must remember. I put them on the RWGB Forum so we could vote.”

  “I don’t.” Cerys shook her head, bemusedly, as though she needed to move it from left to right or she might forget it was there.

  “Why do so many people want to be a writer?” Zena said. She looked at Emily. “Don’t tell me: you’ve got a book at home, half-started.”

  “Oh no!” said Emily. “I don’t want to be a writer. I mean, I like reading—”

  “What’s your favorite sort of fiction, Emily?” asked Cerys.

  Everyone suddenly turned to look at Emily. There was a sharp-eyed silence. Which would she choose? Historical fiction, like the books written by Archie and Cerys? Sensual romance, like the books written by Zena? Or how about the contemporary romantic comedies that Morgana specialized in?

  A small black man approached the group and hovered. He was slight and lithe, like a long-distance runner, neatly (though rather fussily) dressed in a dull brown suit with a mustard-colored waistcoat. It was a little old-fashioned given that he was probably in his late thirties or early forties. He was wearing light brown leather driving gloves, which had the effect of making his hands look slightly too large for his body. Emily hoped that he would interrupt and save her. But he stood there ever so politely, waiting to be noticed. Emily saw that he smacked his left fist into his open right palm a few times, very gently and quietly, with the restlessness of an impatient man who has never really got used to waiting. Everyone ignored him while they waited for Emily’s answer.

  After a slightly desperate pause, she said, “I only read nonfiction.”

  “Verrry good answer. Very good.” Morgana laughed and shook her head. The others joined in, appreciatively. Morgana said, “It’s difficult to get through these conferences without wanting to kill someone, but if you can get through it without anyone wanting to kill you, you can consider yourself a winner. I can see already that you’re going to be a winner, Emily, you really are.”

  “Mizz Blakely?” said the man in the waistcoat.

  “Monsieur Loman!” said Morgana, pretending she had only just noticed him.

  “I have brought the chocolates for your ladies,” said M. Loman. “Violet crèmes. They have been delivered to the kitchen.”

  “How kind of you. I think they can go straight into the gift bags. The hotel will deliver them to the rooms tonight.”

  “Shall I get them?” asked Emily.

  Morgana looked at her watch. “Would you?” she said. “And then the gift bags are in the basement conference area, under the table outside the Montagu room. They’re easy enough to find.”

  M. Loman nodded politely and turned to leave. But Morgana stood and grasped his hand. “Your chocolates are one of the highlights of our conference,” she said. “The aut
hors do so look forward to receiving them. Last year’s raspberry crèmes—mmmmm! I closed my eyes as I ate one and felt immediately as though I were strolling through a walled garden in Kent in my negligee, stripping raspberries straight from the fruit canes and cramming them into my mouth, only to find that some superior being, some God of confectionery had coated them with dark chocolate. The whole experience was so delicious it just made me want to lie down and die with pleasure.” She released his hand and smiled.

  M. Loman walked out of the bar with Emily. He didn’t seem happy. “These writers…” he said. “These women…” He looked as though the image of Morgana strolling through a walled garden in Kent in her negligee was not something he wanted to consider on a Saturday afternoon.

  “She’s very lyrical, the way she expresses herself,” said Emily.

  “But why express it only to me, in the bar of a hotel in Bloomsbury?” said M. Loman, irritably, punching his fist into the palm of his hand as he said “me,” as if to emphasize the injury this caused him. “Why not have every heroine of every novel discuss the merits of my beautiful chocolates? My Trio of Summer Fruits; my Lime and Coconut Caribbean Delights; my Violet Crème Caresses?”

  “They’ve got some bloggers coming this year,” said Emily. “Perhaps they’ll mention the chocolates?”

  “Bloggers!” M. Loman’s horrified expression suggested he might be getting them confused with something he considered unrefined, like truckers. Or muggers. Or joggers.

  When they reached the dining room, Emily and M. Loman parted company—he to return to his confectionery shop in Knightsbridge, she to fetch the violet crèmes from the kitchen. Following directions from M. Loman—fingers thick and clumsy in his leather gloves as he pointed the way—Emily walked through the hotel restaurant to where swing doors marked “staff only” led into a suddenly much shabbier and utilitarian corridor, beyond which was the kitchen. She stared in at the Titanic-engine-room steam and noise, at the kitchen staff, and the chefs in their anachronistic uniforms, and she was struck again by the artificiality of the place, and felt again as if she had inadvertently traveled back in time. An angry chef in a white jacket and checked trousers came forward, knife in hand. “No public access!” he hissed. “No! No!”

  “I’m trying to find some chocolates that were delivered here,” said Emily. She looked past him and thought she saw the boxes of violet crèmes on a table near a door at the back of the kitchen.

  The chef pointed to a side door at the end of the shabby corridor that would take Emily outside the hotel, the long way round to the door at the back.

  “Are you sure?” Emily asked. “Where does that go?”

  “Shortcut. British Museum,” he said, and laughed nastily.

  Behind him, another of the kitchen staff—a pot washer or porter—stared at Emily curiously as he passed. He didn’t look friendly. The chef shouted furiously at him in a foreign language Emily recognized: it was Portuguese (she lived near Stockwell, a part of London that claimed the largest Portuguese-speaking population in the UK; it had the custard tart shops to prove it). But then, deeper within the interior of the kitchen, Emily heard other, shouted exchanges in a language she didn’t understand or recognize. Emily had heard—or read, perhaps, in the Sunday supplements—about intrepid young people who crashed private parties in fancy hotels by creeping in through the kitchen. She just couldn’t imagine wanting to go to any party badly enough to try to make her way through the hostile men in this kitchen, not knowing if the people around her were threatening to kill her or asking each other if the soup needed more salt.

  “A man,” said Emily, “the man who delivered the chocolates—he said I should come through here.”

  The chef shook his head, pointed again to the side door and then folded his arms. There was no way Emily would be allowed to walk through the kitchen. How on earth had M. Loman managed it? Perhaps he had put up his two fists in his gloved hands and threatened the chefs until they let him in. Or perhaps he had just walked round the long way, as she was going to have to do.

  She opened the side door and stepped over a pair of polished men’s shoes that had been left there, neatly lined up side by side. She was now outside in a smelly courtyard area where the rubbish bins and recycling bins were kept. Emily walked past chest-high, color-coded plastic bins containing empty glass bottles, or kitchen waste, or paper and cardboard. There were cigarette ends on the ground near the door, where people had sneaked out here to smoke. In contrast to the spotlessly clean interiors of the public areas of the hotel, you wouldn’t consider eating your dinner off the floor out here.

  A chain-link metal fence ran along one side of this ugly, unseen part of the hotel premises; leafy climbing plants had been trained up the fence to disguise it from anyone passing by outside. At the end of this area was a low brick wall, and beyond that Emily saw a housing estate that had been built in the 1970s from gray concrete, now streaked with greenish mossy slime. It rose above the hotel like a malignant ogre that had risen from a swamp and was trying to work out how to take its first few steps; an ogre that wanted to get close enough to swat the pinkish, beautiful brick-built hotel out of its way before stamping off to ruin the beauty of everything else in its path.

  The function of the low wall was to delineate the boundary between the hotel and the housing estate, rather than to keep people in or out. There was a gate to the side of the courtyard that could be unlocked for deliveries, and to allow the refuse trucks to collect the bins. Since it was easy enough to walk in through the front door of the hotel, and more difficult to get in to the courtyard, Emily amused herself by speculating that the rubbish in the bins had a higher status or was more valued than the guests. But she knew that it only seemed that way because most of the security in the public areas was more discreet. Subtlety was not important at the back gate.

  She thought that security must be an odd business in a hotel because the management wanted people to come in and spend money in the restaurant and bar. Visitors were free to come and go. It wasn’t a hospital or a prison or a school. But the hotel management wouldn’t want members of the public just wandering in and unwrapping a packet of sandwiches and soaking up the atmosphere; it wasn’t a public park. Despite attempts to recreate the ambience of a rich person’s country house, with Wi-Fi and decent plumbing, a hotel wasn’t a rich person’s country house and guests were not really guests so much as customers. Security in a hotel like the Coram was bound up with snobbery. It involved letting the right sort of person come in. The people who lived on the estate next door—though it would never be put quite like that—were not the right sort.

  Emily was just thinking that no one would ever come this way unless they had to—and it certainly wasn’t a shortcut to the British Museum, that had been the chef’s little joke—when she saw a pale, graceful woman walking toward her. She had a face Emily recognized but couldn’t at first place. Had they met? The other woman was a few years older, around thirty. Was it someone she had seen on TV? Then she knew who it was. There had been several newspaper articles recently about her wealth and success, no doubt timed to coincide with her new book release: it was Polly Penham. “Polly!” Emily shouted, strangely relieved not to be alone here; it was a bit creepy. “It’s Emily. From the conference? Were you looking for me?”

  Polly stared back at Emily in frank bewilderment for a few seconds. She looked like a fox that has been caught rootling among household rubbish and doesn’t know whether to run into the road and risk getting killed by the traffic, or stay put and keep digging until it finds something to eat. “No,” said Polly. “I wasn’t looking for you. I came out here for a cigarette.” She opened her right hand to reveal the long stub of a barely smoked cigarette. It was white tipped, probably menthol. Emily was impressed that Polly hadn’t just thrown it on the ground—all the other smokers were much less scrupulous. “Don’t tell anyone,” Polly said. “I’m supposed to have given up. Did you see that article in Women’s Health magazine?”
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  Emily had not. She didn’t read Women’s Health magazine.

  Polly shrugged and smiled, a little guilty. “I was paid quite a big fee. I made a fuss about giving up smoking and how wonderful I feel…Is that awful? It was true at the time, but I keep relapsing. Thank goodness my livelihood comes mostly from fiction. Let’s get away from this hideous, stinking place.”

  “I have to get some chocolates from the kitchen,” said Emily, pointing in the direction she had been heading.

  “Oh, nonsense! You can get one of the porters to do that for you. Or, look, let’s ask the manager.”

  Considering how unpleasant it was out here, it was certainly getting crowded. But here was Nik Kovacevic, walking slowly toward them from the kitchen end of the courtyard, head down, swinging arms covered hand to elbow in grubby gauntlet gloves. His gait was strange. He was wearing galoshes, and he had a cabbage leaf stuck to the sole of his left boot, but it wasn’t that. He exaggerated each step, as if he was trying to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. Emily wondered if he had a drink problem. He had almost reached them before he even noticed them. His face was greenishly pale, his lips pressed together as if there was a bitter taste in his mouth.

  “Ladies,” said Nik when he eventually noticed them. “This is no place for guests. Are you lost? Please follow me.” He began to make small but vigorous circular motions with his right arm: a small boy churning up his bathwater to make bubbles. They walked with him back toward the door that would take them into the shabby corridor, and then into the hotel dining room.

  “I don’t know,” said Emily, feeling guilty now for neglecting her duty just so she could get away from the smell of the bins. “The chocolates? They’re in the kitchen. I really ought to—”

  “They will be delivered to the conference area,” said Nik, removing his gloves and galoshes, and slipping his feet into the polished black shoes that had been left by the door. “Allow me to arrange it.”