Free Ithaca by David Davidar

older than Mandy, she thinks sourly, but better looking, definitely better looking) she knows she still looks good – the burnished fall of brown hair with just the occasional furtive strand of grey, the eyes that Zach had once compared to wild honey, the face unlined except for a faint latticework of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes – and could find a man without any trouble, she has no doubt about that. But until she can excise Zach from her life she knows there is no point in thinking about that option. She laughs when she remembers she quoted Einstein at him (where did that come from?); perhaps she should direct the quote at herself. She brushes and flosses, creeps into bed, switches off the light, and composes herself for sleep.

    When the money started to pour in with the third
Angels
book, Gabrijela bought a Georgian townhouse on a leafy square in Soho for slightly less than four million pounds and moved the thirty-two people who worked out of the London office there. Litmus’s employees loved their new offices, all five floors of it; the best space in the whole building was the top floor, with its oak panelling and tall windows through which the light streamed in to illuminate the gigantic boardroom table made of Canadian maple, which couldcomfortably seat twenty. This was where the drama of Litmus’s working day was at its most intense – it was here that all the important decisions whether at the board level or at a production meeting were taken.

    The hot, life-giving star at the centre of the frenetic universe of publishing is the editorial meeting. This is where it all starts, and in whichever part of the world it takes place its format is essentially the same, and the business it transacts is the same: it is in this forum that the books that the company is thinking of buying are first revealed, appraised, discussed, fought over, and bought or turned down.
    Through a process of deduction, experience, and whimsy Zach has decided that Thursday is the best day of the week to hold his editorial meeting. Monday and Tuesday are necessary to get the motor up and running at full rev after the slacking off over the weekend; Wednesday, like the middle son, is just dull and without promise, a pit stop before the highperformance day, Thursday, after which the slow tapering off to the weekend begins. The meeting begins at nine. He is a morning person and is half asleep by three in the afternoon, especially if he has had a glass of wine or two with lunch (an all too rare occurrence these days compared with when he started his career), which is why he schedules all his inessential meetings – with colleagues wishing to whine about this or that, bloviated agents who have sold him nothing of consequence for years, and so on – for the late afternoon.
    Of late, as the company’s fortunes have sunk, and the threat of layoffs and salary freezes looms, the editorial meetings that were the highlight of his week have become filled with tension as his colleagues, terrified of losing their jobs, battle each other grimly, trying to boost themselves at each other’s expense.
    This is his first editorial meeting after his holiday, and he makes it a point to get to the meeting room early, the better to compose his thoughts. He wanders over to a window and looks down on the square. It is a grey London day, a thin drizzle, which has temporarily dispelled the heat of the summer, knitting earth and sky together. It is the sort of weather that would have normally filled him with energy (this astonishes his sun-worshipping native English colleagues but Zach has always loved rain in whatever form, a throwback to his years growing up in one of the rainiest places in India), but this morning the sight leaves no impression on him. Today’s meeting, which is going to have a module on future editorial strategy bolted onto the regular business of the week, is not going to be easy, for either his staff or himself, as at the end of it he will