Stanley, representing the publishing conglomerate of George Allen and Katzenjammer, thinks there is money to be made out of Essieâs biography of Matthew. Her biography of Isherwood won an award, and made money for GA and K, though only a pittance for Essie. Essie is only the content provider after all. Everyone except Essie was very pleased with how things turned out, both the book and the simulation. Essie had hoped for more from the simulation, and she has been more careful in constructing Matthew.
âOf course, Corley isnât as famous as Isherwood,â Stanley says, withdrawing a little.
Essie thinks he wants to punish her for slapping him down on sex by attacking Matthew. She doesnât mind. Sheâs good at defending Matthew, making her case. âAll the really famous people have been done to death,â she says. âCorley was an innovative director for the BBC, and of course he knew everybody from the forties to the nineties, half a century of the British arts. Nobody has ever written a biography. And we have the right kind of documentationâenough film of how he moved, not just talking heads, and letters and diaries.â
âIâve never understood why the record of how they moved is so important,â Stanley says, and Essie realises this is a genuine question and relaxes as she answers it.
âA lot more of the mind is embodied in the whole body than anybody realised,â she explains. âA record of the whole body in motion is essential, or we donât get anything anywhere near authentic. People are a gestalt.â
âBut it means we canât even try for anybody before the twentieth century,â Stanley says. âWe wanted Socrates, Descartes, Marie Curie.â
âMessalina, Theodora, Lucrezia Borgia,â Essie counters. âThatâs where the money is.â
Stanley laughs. âGo ahead. Add the simulation of Corley. Weâll back you. Send me the file tomorrow.â
âGreat,â Essie says, and smiles at him. Stanley isnât powerful, he isnât the enemy, heâs just another person trying to get by, like Essie, though sometimes itâs hard for Essie to remember that when heâs trying to exercise his modicum of power over her. She has her permission, the meeting ends.
Essie goes home. She lives in a flat at the top of a thirty storey building in Swindon. She works in London and commutes in every day. She has a second night job in Swindon, and writes in her spare time. She has visited the site of the house where Matthew and Annette lived in Hampstead. Itâs a Tesco today. There isnât a blue plaque commemorating Matthew, but Essie hopes there will be someday. The house had four bedrooms, though there were never more than three people living in it, and only two after Sonia left home in 1965. After Annette died, Matthew moved to a flat in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. Essie has visited it. Itâs now part of a lawyerâs office. She has been inside and touched door mouldings Matthew also touched. Matthewâs flat, where he lived alone and was visited by young men he met in pubs, had two bedrooms. Essie doesnât have a bedroom, as such; she sleeps in the same room she eats and writes in. She finds it hard to imagine the space Matthew had, the luxury. Only the rich live like that now. Essie is thirty-five, and has student debt that she may never pay off. She cannot imagine being able to buy a house, marry, have a child. She knows Matthew wasnât considered rich, but it was a different world.
Matthew believes that he is in his flat in Bloomsbury, and that his telephone rings, although actually of course he is a simulation and it would be better not to consider too closely the question of exactly where he is. He answers his phone. It is Essie calling. All biographers, all writers, long to be able to call their subjects and talk to them, ask them the questions they left unanswered. That