It was unpaid but not without remuneration — a rent-free room in Soho was worth a lot, while bookshops on the Charing Cross Road gave me a quarter of the cover price of any review copy I took in. I wrote to Francine, giving her my new address and boasting about my part-time job. She would never have heard of the LR, but I had to tell someone, and there was nobody else. She wrote back within a week, asking if I had ‘someone special’. (Francine seemed to have a different boyfriend every letter. ‘He is not as nice as you,’ she would always say.) I was meeting writers, answering calls from publishers, building up a network of contacts that would one day be of inestimable use, or so I hoped. I was finding out the way things worked. Instead of studying for my first year exams, I spent whole days looking through the archives, putting the house in order, as Tony had requested, in lieu of rent. My first task was to ensure that we had a complete run of the magazine. When this task was complete (only two issues were missing), I began to delve into the box files full of correspondence and old manuscripts.
