The Right Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

game.
    ‘Susan.
Sue. Hello, m’dear.’
    There
was an un-Susan-like pause before she spoke.
    ‘Guy, I’m
really sorry to call you like this.’
    ‘Pas de
problemo, Susan. I like to speak to a real person at least once a month. How’re
Dave and Polly?’
    ‘They’re
fine. He loves the tennis racquet.’ I’m godfather to Dave, the Planters’
eldest. There are some agents who prefer to keep all their client relationships
on a purely business level, knowing nothing about their clients’ personal lives
or inner thoughts. They don’t really take any interest in what makes an artist
tick, so long as he or she is still ticking. I am not that kind. I couldn’t
operate like that. I like to know everything that is going on. It’s more
satisfying this way, more fun, and also, I believe, better business in the long
run. Artists trade off their emotional life — they’re a one-product line — and
it’s as well to know what’s going on in it so that you can get a feel not only
for what they say they want but for what other possibilities there might be.
What they may want in, say, a year’s time, so that you can use the old intuition.
    ‘Have
you spoken much to Jeremy recently?’
    ‘Well,
we haven’t had one of our curries for a while, but I was at the recording
Friday before last, so … Why?’
    ‘The halfwit
has gone off with one of the bimbos, Chrissie or Bella or Samantha or
something, something tacky like that, some piece of furniture. Do you know her?
He says he’s in love with her. Well, he sort of nodded sheepishly when I
challenged him about it. He means it, Guy, he hasn’t been back here for eight
days, except once when I was at work, to pick up his camera equipment, the
little bastard.’
    ‘Oh, Lordy
Lord.’
    ‘He
didn’t mention any of this to you?’
    A ‘definitely
not’ noise from me.
    ‘No,
well he wouldn’t, would he? Cowardly little shitbag. I’m sorry to do this to
you, Guy, but I’m really distraught back here. The kids are going bonkers. Did
you know anything about all of this? Anything at all?’
    ‘Christ,
no. Oh, this is awful.’ After years on the phone I can have a very convincing
tone when required.
    I knew
that Jeremy had done a fair amount of shagging in the past. He was easily
flattered by the attentions of women — well, by any attention, come to think of
it — and I suppose in the last couple of years he had been increasingly exposed
to temptation.
    ‘I
think there’s a photograph of them together, of him coming out of her house or
something yukky like that, Guy.’
    A
tabloid headline using the famous Planter delivery shuttled across my mind and
flickered there awhile. ‘J-Jack the L-Lad J-Jeremy W-Wants to P-Plant One On ‘Er.’
I must admit that, for the teensiest moment, I did consider whether this affair
would be a good thing or a bad thing for Jeremy, career-wise.
    ‘Oh,
no. That’s the last thing we need,’ I said, and then, ‘How is it your end
sewer-rat—wise?’
    ‘Oh,
you know, pretty hopeless really. We had the Sunday Mirror going through
the dustbins last night — I thought it was an urban fox. Luckily they didn’t
wake the kids. And last week I had this woman with a bicycle pump and a CND
sticker on her duffle-bag, claiming she came from some women’s group and would
I like to talk to her, she knew how I felt, et cetera. Turned out she was from
the Sun. I saw her off the premises. I mean, he’s only a game-show host,
for Christ’s sake. A cheap, shitty little scummy fucking arsehole of a
game-show host.’
    I
murmured an affirmation. I reminded her to ring round any relatives and friends
and warn them not to be taken in by phone calls from anyone who was ‘an old
friend of Jeremy’s’ but who’d ‘lost his number’.
    ‘They’re
not really doorstepping us or anything. Yet. But me and the kids had one of
those guys with the snoopy lenses bugging us in the supermarket.’
    I
crushed the bit of me that was disappointed that my client