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Has he delivered the final manuscript yet?”
    Barbara tossed aside the manuscript she had been reading. It would never do. “Unpublishable,” she said, and added quickly, “This one, not Greatorex’s. This is by a man who set out to sail from Southampton to Istanbul in a small yacht barely the size of a bathtub.”
    Rupert smiled. “And?”
    “It all went terribly well, as far as I can make out. There were no storms, no incidents with larger vessels, and the Turks were terribly good to him when he arrived. It makes for dull literature when the Turks are kind to one. We can’t have books like that.”
    “But what about Greatorex?”
    Barbara sighed. “He’s in London at the moment,” she said. “He says that he’s still putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. He promised me that it would be ready soon, but I’m having great difficulty in getting it out of him.”
    Rupert sighed. There had been a lot of talk—
hype
even—about the launch of Errol Greatorex’s
Autobiography of a Yeti
, a story dictated to the author by a yeti who worked as a schoolteacher in a remote Himalayan village. But they had been waiting for some time now, and he was beginning to wonder whether the author would ever deliver.
    “Are you sure that he’s genuine?” Rupert asked. “The whole thing seems a little bit … How should I put it? Dubious.”
    “Oh, I think he’s the real thing,” Barbara assured him. “I had lunch with him the other day, when he came back from Tibet. He gave me a lovely Tibetan knitted hat. He picked it up in Lhasa.”
    “Generous of him,” said Rupert. “It’s nice when you meet an author who isn’t selfish—rare though it unfortunately be.”
    Barbara was impressed. “I love your subjunctives,” she said.
    And she was sincere in her praise. She
did
love a man who used the subjunctive mood, as Hugh had done that very morning when he kissed her goodbye at the door of the flat. “Were I to search for twenty years,” he had said, “I would never find somebody as lovely as you.”
    It made her feel warm just to think of it. A beautiful subjunctive, as warm, as loving as a caress.

10. How Dim Can You Get?
    I T WAS NOT ONLY Barbara Ragg’s remark about the subjunctive that made Rupert wonder about her; there were other things he had noticed, little things, perhaps, but which taken together indicated that something was afoot. She was engaged, of course, and he asked himself whether the mere fact of engagement could make a person dreamy and distracted. He tried to remember what he had felt when he had become engaged himself, but found it difficult even to recall when that was, and in what circumstances, let alone how he felt at the time.
    Of course Rupert knew that Barbara’s private life was none of his business, and he would never have dreamed of prying, but if her state of mind was affecting her work, then that was a different matter altogether. And there had been signs of it. A few days previously, Barbara had written to an author and told him that not only had his manuscript been accepted for publication by a well-known publisher but that a sizeable advance had been negotiated. This must have been good news for the author in question, who had not been published before and whose work, although worthy, was on the very margins of what was commercially viable.
    Her discovery two days later that she had written to the wrongauthor could hardly have been comfortable. The manuscript that had been offered for was by a quite different author—one who was widely published already and would barely have noticed yet another publisher’s advance.
    “La Ragg,” Rupert had said to his wife that evening, “made an absolutely colossal blunder. Colossal. She told somebody that his novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t. She got the wrong author. Stupid cow.”
    Gloria Porter smiled. “How dim can you get?”
    “Not much dimmer,” said Rupert. “And you know what? The story gets