Original Cyn Read Online Free PDF Page A

three-hundred-thousand-word tome of unrelenting darkness and misery—usually set in a Neolithic cave or a windswept, disease-raddled Viking settlement. By the time she was halfway through, she was practically reaching for the Prozac.
    Even now, when a rejection letter arrived, Hugh would hibernate in his flat, marooned in a Strindbergian depression. He would sit there for days on end, putting venomous reader reviews on Amazon; his anger was aimed at any author to whom he considered himself superior, from Salman Rushdie to John Irving. Then, miraculously, he would manage to pull himself round and throw himself into a new project. “All literary geniuses have struggled,” he would declare, convincing himself that this next oeuvre would have the publishers or film companies “coming in their pants.”
    To make ends meet (the Thorpe Duffs were penniless, having sold the family seat years ago to pay death duties on Hugh’s grandfather’s estate), Hugh worked at Selfridges as a surrogate boyfriend. The revolutionary scheme had been introduced a few months ago. His job was to escort women around the store and help them shop for clothes, while their boyfriends stayed in the boyfriend crèche playing video games and reading lad mags.
    It should be said at this point that if male sexuality was represented on a continuum that began with Jack Nicholson and ended with Jack McFarland, Hugh came in round about Will Truman. He was straight looking, tall, with a great figure and boyish upper-class good looks—think a young Jeremy Irons—but with a style and elegance that few straight men either achieved or desired. Hugh happily described himself as a “fashion savant.” “And since I am also endlessly enthusiastic, attentive and admiring, I am the perfect retail therapist. And it’s not easy, particularly when you’re trying to buy a frock for some brick of a woman with an arse like a mobile home.” Hugh’s mother, who knew her son was gay and had no problem with it, also knew what her son did for a living. His father had no idea and never asked.
    The reason he pretty much lived for free was that the Thorpe Duffs’ extensive circle of aristocratic friends were extremely mindful of the family’s embarrassed financial position. Hugh’s parents, who lived in a delightful but shabby Gloucestershire farmhouse, were always being offered villas for the summer. The same friends—desperate for a house sitter while they flitted off on six-month jaunts to their second and third homes—would offer Hugh their London flats and houses. For the last eight months he had been living in a majestic four-story house in Knightsbridge, which he was “keeping an eye on” for friends of his parents who were busy remodeling their house in Cape Town.
    Tonight, Hugh was feeling particularly gung ho because he had just submitted a screenplay to Warner Bros. “Come on,” Cyn said, “what’s it about?”
    “OK . . .”
    As he stared off into the distance for dramatic effect, Cyn prepared herself for the rest of the sentence, which usually went: “Picture it: winter AD 900, a small Hebridean settlement. A lone, wounded rider emerges from the dawn mist . . .”
    “I’ve made something of a historical departure,” Hugh said. “It’s set in the twentieth century for a change.” Hmm, already an improvement, Cyn thought. “Picture it: 1940, a courtroom in South Carolina.” He was leaning in toward her, his voice soft, but urgent. “It’s summer. The air is like thick, hot soup. A ceiling fan is turning relentlessly. The camera pans round and stops at two men sitting next to their lawyer. He’s short and overweight and wears rimless glasses and suspenders. The camera moves in for a close-up of the two men. It takes awhile for you to work out that there is something odd about them. They are identical, clearly twins. But not just ordinary twins. These men are Siamese twins, joined at the abdomen for the last forty-seven