Emilia Gordon was almost 100 years old when her early writings were discovered by Tara Troubadour, a keen and very bilingual editorial assistant at Mango Press, an independent publisher with offices across various large bodies of water, depending on where its owner, Margaux Penelope Smith-Kline-Reade, felt like sitting in an urban café and managing her small but flourishing business in full view of fashionable young people bent over their phones and laptops. Sipping her own flat white in sync with their lattes made her feel young.
While Margaux moved freely between London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Tokyo, Sydney, Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Prague, and Shitterton (for the Dorset country air), her assistant Tara was firmly based at their small Soho office in London. Mango Press published an eclectic mix of novels by women and biographies by men. Tara didn’t agree with this distinction, but she was only twenty and on her first serious job after abandoning a degree in Computational and Artificial Linguistics (with a minor in Fashion Design) at King’s College, London. Her blend of post-pandemic anxiety and pre-pandemic depression created a vacuum in the very part of her mind where an interest in learning should have been. She dropped out of all her courses, began reading the French novels in her French father’s library, and found herself unable to leave the house. Maurice Troubadour, who owned a small strip club in Soho and wrote excellent French poetry in its quiet basement, gently asked his daughter to find a job. ‘Try waitressing at Brasserie Zédel,’ he had said. ‘It’s only around the corner and if you don’t like it, we’ll think of something else.’ He had raised Tara alone after her mother moved to Lviv with a famous Ukrainian pianist. ‘If you don’t like it, we’ll think of something else’ had helped them both through many difficult moments. It would be tempting to assume that his wife wouldn’t have left him if he hadn’t been the owner of a strip club. But Simone, his life-and-sex addicted ex-wife, actually loved the strip club and disliked everything else about Maurice. You might even say, without being entirely wrong, that she had originally married him for his strip club, having been one of his less successful performers. As the boss’s wife she could spend her nights watching her former colleagues do what she no longer had to but secretly still longed for. Tara was born in the first year of their marriage and couldn’t have been born any later, if you see what I mean. She was named after one of Maurice’s distant aunts who had once lent him the money to start ‘a creative business in London so he could devote his spare time to poetry’. The only thing no one understood was Simone’s sudden mid-life attraction to Stepan, an elderly, soft-spoken classical musician, a widower of no financial means but with a beautiful, rather nineteenth century touch on the ivories. Perhaps he loved her like his music. It is of no relevance for our story but I will tell you that Simone met Stepan when he stumbled into the strip club one night in search of a decent pot of tea after one of his concerts. Tea was indeed available, but he seemed so overhelmed by the gyrating action on stage and the noise in the establishment that Simone took pity on him and invited him to drink it in the basement office. There, in the presence of Maurice’s books (but in Maurice’s absence that evening), Simone and Stepan found themselves in fairy tale love. Nothing else in their lives, before or after, seemed to matter. Within a week, Simone was on Stepan’s return flight to Ukraine. (Within six months, they would find themselves on another flight back to London, but this was due to Putin’s war against Ukraine; wars often interfere with fairy tales). By the way, please don’t be put off by some odd and even inaacurate time frames in this story. They may be confusing, but nevertheless, in their own way, quite true.
Let us return to our main heroine, the novelist Emilia Gordon. The story of her almost-posthumous rediscovery is closely linked with the same very small perimeter of Soho where Tara Troubadour, her father Maurice and Tara’s boss Margaux happened to, in a sense, co-exist.
As literary luck would have it, Emilia was born in 1925 in the very same building where Maurice eventually founded his moderately famous strip club, The Shrinking Violet, during the no-longer-swinging 1980s.
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