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eating his beetroot salad, his elbows digging into the diners on either side of him, revolving his head violently as though wanting to shake out more teeth. ‘Mmm,’ he said, whenever our eyes or knees met. Not knowing what else to do, I began ripping at my fingernails under the table.
    There are ‘mmms’ which denote quiet acceptance of the state of things, the slow workings of reflection, or simply embarrassment. Merton’s ‘mmms’ were none of these. Merton’s ‘mmms’ indicated the futility of speech.
    For which reason they were infectious. ‘Mmm,’ I said in return.
    In the old days when a publisher took one of his writers out to lunch he’d ask how the work was going. But now, like all publishers, Merton dreaded hearing. What if the work was going well? What if I had a book to show him? What if I was expecting an advance?
    Eventually – as much to bring the afternoon to an end as to start a conversation, because the way things were going I would soon have no fingernails left, and because I cared for Merton and couldn’t bear what he was going through – I said something. Not, Christ, these chairs are uncomfortable , Merton , not Do you remember when you used to take me to L’Etoile and we ate cervelle de veau, not spotted dick? but something more sympathetic to his state of mind. A couple of senior publishers – immediately castigated as dead white males – had gone public that weekend about the decline in the literacy of new writing: manuscripts turning up misspelt, ill-punctuated and ungrammatical, an uneducated jumble of mixed metaphors, dangling participles and misattributed apostrophes, less where there should have been fewer, mays where there should have been mights, mights where there should have been mays, theres for theirs and theirs for theres. We hadn’t only forgotten how to sell books; we had forgotten how to write them. I didn’t doubt that whatever else was at the root of Merton’s depression, misattributed apostrophes weren’t helping. ‘You look,’ I said, putting my paper napkin to my mouth, as though I too was in danger of losing teeth, ‘like a man who hasn’t read anything halfway decent for a long long time.’
    I wanted him to see I understood it was hell for all of us.
    ‘No, the opposite,’ he said, probing the corners of his eyes with the tips of his fingers. He might have been trying to prise oysters out of their shells, except that he couldn’t any longer afford oysters. ‘The very opposite. The tragedy of it is, I’ve had at least twenty works of enduring genius land on my desk this month alone.’
    Merton was famous for thinking that every novel submitted to him was a work of enduring genius. He was what was called a publisher of the old school. Finding works of enduring genius was why he’d entered publishing in the first place.
    ‘Mmm,’ I said.
    Talking works of enduring genius made Merton almost garrulous. ‘It would be no exaggeration,’ he exaggerated, ‘to say that eight or ten of them are masterpieces.’
    I pulled a couple of hairs out of my moustache. ‘ That good?’
    ‘Breathtakingly good.’
    Since none of these was mine, no matter what they said on Amazon, I had to labour to be excited for him. ‘So where’s the tragedy?’ I asked, half hoping he’d tell me that the authors of at least four or five of them were dead.
    But I knew the answer. None was suitable for three-for-two. None featured a vampire. None was about the Tudors. None could be marketed as a follow-up to The Girl Who Ate Her Own Placenta .
    It was even possible that none was free of the charge of dangling a participle. Though Merton was a publisher of the old school, the new school – which held that a novel didn’t have to be well written to be a masterpiece, indeed was more likely to be a masterpiece for being ill-written – had begun to wear away his confidence. He didn’t know what was what any more. And whatever was what was not being submitted to him.
    ‘Do