Free Janice Gentle Gets Sexy by Mavis Cheek Page A

isolation, Janice,' she said. 'Sometimes I wish I could lock my door and throw away the key. I love this calm solitude, this undemanding colour scheme, this lack of busyness and ornament. How I should like to live somewhere like this and make myself a home — but then, I can't. One of us has got to be out there on the road, hasn't she?'
    Janice nodded, immediately feeling guilty.

Sylvia gave a martyred grimace. 'It must be wonderful to be incommunicado and have everything done for you . . And leaving Janice with that thought, Sylvia Perth buttoned her little Ungaro jacket and departed.
    Janice knew Sylvia was right. She always was. It was wonderful to be here, protected, alone. And it was the next best thing to rearing to a convent, which, had she lived long ago, she would have preferred. But still, with Sylvia Perth in the role of Mother Superior and her Battersea apartment more or less enclosed, it was the nearest she could get, and it would do very well. Besides, she couldn't really be a nun, or they might not let her out again to find Dermot Poll. She picked up her calendar and selected, with a pin, the day of her first tube-train outing. There was no point in delaying the beginning of the process any longer.
    The pin had selected today - and with the law of Sod continually in mind, it was the first day of rain for six weeks. But it was over. Concluded successfully. And that - she eyed the scones happily - was something.
    *
    Before telephoning Sylvia she crosses to the word processor and removes its cover.
    The only thing that comforts her is that somewhere, wherever he is, Dermot Poll is growing older, too. She has kept that roundness that he so admired (not at all hard to do). So he will certainly be able to recognize her when the time comes. And as for her, why, she would be able to pick him out on Brighton Beach in a heatwave. Of that she is absolutely sure. Dear God, she thinks, has not this waiting gone on long enough?
    Impatience and crossness flare again. She cannot help it. There is a limit, she thinks, to the amount of time you can keep a love alive without its object before you. She switches the machine on aggressively. She makes notes - notes about the characters, a plot sketch — and then she goes back to the beginning of the file and tides it. 'Phoenix Rising,' she types in bold. That makes it real. It's in the machine now. Sylvia Perth must simply accept it. If Christine de Pisan was allowed to choose her titles six hundred years ago, surely, by the laws of emancipation, Janice Gentle should be allowed to choose hers today?
    She dials the familiar number, keeping her eye very firmly on the screen. Just for once Janice intends to assert herself.
    *
    In her office near Claridge's Sylvia Perth has been giving an idealistic young author a pep-talk. And while the idealistic young author has been upturning her pretty flower-like face to the desk, perching Sylvia has been attempting, with moderate success, to look down the neck of the idealistic young author's blouse.
    Sylvia is fifty-four. She has spent most of her working life persuading publishers to publish books enthusiastically, and authors to write them in the same spirit. Sometimes she wondered whether the two kinds even occupied the same planet. But now she represents only one author, Janice Gentle, from whom the pickings have been gratifyingly good. Sylvia Perth feels that she has given up quite enough of the joys of ordinary mortalhood to be compensated in this way. She has given up the possibility of marriage, children, friendships, in pursuit of her career, and she has absolutely no qualms about either her business methods with her author or her attempts to look down the blouse of the young woman opposite. 'I might be a smutty old dyke,' she says with wry amusement to herself, 'but at least my author is pure and honest and squeaky clean.' She rather likes the oppositional comparison and the dot, dot, dottiness of the activity left unsaid. Janice's