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by no means emptied hers, and said 'You won't be making her do anything we mightn't have to do ourselves.'
    'I don't think I follow.'
    'That's because officially you aren't hearing this till next week. Now we're part of the Frugo Corporation we need to look at books the way they do.'
    'Which is . . .'
    'Instead of buying books and then figuring out how to market them we have to turn it round. Unless you're sure how we can market it, don't make an offer.'
    'Is that how they buy products for their supermarkets?'
    'Same deal, or will be. They want Cheetah to produce books they can sell in every branch. They're going to be expanding into books there too.'
    The room felt darkened and shrunken, but perhaps that was her state of mind. She found his comments so dispiriting that the only positive response she could offer was 'My cousin Hugh works for Frugo in Yorkshire.'
    'Maybe soon the whole world will be working for them.' Glen added a laugh that seemed resigned to cynicism and said 'Your family for sure.'
    'Not my cousin Rory. He'd starve first.' She took a mouthful of wine before asking 'So how do you think we can market Ellen's novel?'
    'You tell me.'
    'Well, I think it reads as if she knows her subject and cares about it too.'
    'No, I mean sell the book to me. I'm a buyer. Thirty seconds or less.'
    Charlotte felt boxed in by the dull dim faded volumes and his insistence. She didn't know how many seconds it took her to think of saying 'It's about people getting their own back.'
    'That could sell. What kind of people?'
    'Old folk who've been treated badly because there's nobody to look out for them, and so they have to discover their own power.'
    'I'm just hearing old. I guess we're stuck with that, but why should I want to read about old guys in a home?'
    'Because there are a lot of people in that situation?'
    'No use going for my better nature. I'm shopping for product, not donating to charity. Don't hand me a collecting box.'
    'Because your parents might be like that one day? Yours and everyone's.' His relentlessly expectant look had begun to peeve her. 'You might too,' she said.
    'No point in giving me a hard time. We're talking fiction here. Guilt never sold that if it ever sold any kind of book.'
    'It's about how you'd like to be when you're old,' Charlotte said in some desperation. 'Not as helpless as you'd be afraid to be. Able to fight back.'
    'Me, I just want a quiet retirement on all the money I'll have made with books that sell. And by the way, your time ran out a while back.'
    'You're supposed to be enthusiastic about her book,' Charlotte said and downed some wine to douse her anger. 'Your turn.'
    'Hey, I'm only trying to show you how we'll have to think. I'm your friend, remember. Every book will need to have a concept we can package. Let's find one here.'
    Charlotte was distracted by the bookseller, who had lifted a large book of English landscapes off a shelf only for the yellowed photographs of vanished views to sprawl out of the binding. As the man thrust the handful of images between the dilapidated covers and dumped the infirm volume on the shelf she said 'You start.'
    'Try Sorcerous Seniors Strike Back. Magic's always going to sell, people need fantasy even if they know it's bullshit, and there's your revenge theme as well.'
    'Don't you think it sounds like a comedy?'
    'Sure. It should. That's what it needs to be.'
    Charlotte had found Ellen's attempts at humour painfully facetious, by no means an unusual reaction to manuscripts she had to read but in this case uncomfortably personal. 'You think she could bring that off,' she said.
    'I guess you'll do whatever it takes to show her how. Keep it black. Shock the readers, even the ones that think they can't be shocked. Get them arguing. Make it a book everyone will have heard of and won't want to say they haven't read.'
    Charlotte wasn't sure how much of his enthusiasm could be ascribed to the wine, especially when he said 'Take the nurse who ends up incontinent.