He turns the sheet of paper so that its typed face is away from him and holds it up to the light. In this manner the words are filtered by the paper’s thickness, and they run backwards, so that the sense will reach him in fragments.
The puzzle has its value. To crack the code is to win. In this way he draws the sting of the waiting words.
command of language
reluctantly
Faster than conscious thought he constructs the sense of the letter from four words. A little praise as an anaesthetic, then the knife.
reluctantly
Well what did I expect who said it would be easy? I will not let this defeat me. I will persist.
Oh but it would have cost them so little to believe in me and for me it would have been the breath of sweet life itself
reluctantly
The dull clog of disappointment forms round his heart or maybe his lungs. He feels breathless. Everything now takes a little more effort. Tiredness rising up within him. How long must I endure? For I am bound upon a wheel of fire.
Oh give it a rest. It’s only a radio play, only a shot at finding a patron and a public. Plenty more fish in the sea. But only one sea. Only one sea.
reluctantly
He turns the paper over, looks first at the signature. Lorraine Jones, Script Editor, Radio Drama. Then he scans the letter with extreme rapidity. My colleagues and I. Considerable ingenuity. Impressive command of language. Lacks the dramatic quality. Reluctantly concluded.
Who are you to reluctantly conclude, Lorraine Jones? Just a pushy little graduate eager to show your editorial skills to your boss so you can get promoted out of the crap job you’re in writing fuck-off letters to sad no-hopers and move up into the sweeter air where the real writers live and breathe.
Oh but I had hoped I had hoped I had hoped so much what do I do now what now?
Read the letter. Can’t get any worse.
Dear Alan Strachan.
Thank you for sending us your play Tunnel. My colleagues and I have now read it, and while we were struck by the considerable ingenuity of the central concept, and by your impressive command of language, we felt that the piece lacks the dramatic quality that makes for compulsive radio listening. Therefore we have reluctantly concluded that it is not for us. If you wish to have your manuscript returned please send a stamped addressed envelope to the above address in the next fourteen days.
Yours sincerely
Lorraine Jones,
Script Editor, Radio Drama.
Right, then, fourteen days and you bin it. Go ahead. What do I care? I’ve only been getting up at six in the morning to steal two hours before the working day for the last six months to refine my impressive command of language so that I can write something real and strong and true, and to hell with you all it’s good, I know it’s good, I know it’s better than good. How dare you tell me it lacks dramatic quality? Would you tell Harold Pinter his work lacks dramatic quality? Dear Mr Pinter if you wish to have your manuscript returned please send a stamped addressed envelope in the next fourteen days.
I had hoped I had hoped
* * *
He pulls the front door shut behind him and drives back to school, the letter folded in his breast pocket. The classroom still empty as he left it, pretending nothing has changed. Only five minutes of break remain. He has not marked the Year Six compositions.
He sits down at his desk and takes out the next one. My Journey, by Jack Broad.
My journey was in a dream in my dream I had to go a long way on a path only the path was thin I had to walk very carfully soon I saw I was walking on the top of a wall there was a drop on both sides I was afraid I must walk on because it was my journey there were walls everywhere I didn’t know where to walk the drop frihgtened me it was so far down there were clouds there after a while I didn’t mind any more I liked walking on walls and below only clouds I thought if I fell off the wall the clouds would be soft but I didn’t fall
The boys and girls drift into the classroom in twos and threes. Alan Strachan looks up and crooks a finger at Jack Broad. The boy approaches.
‘Jack. Your composition. It’s about a dream.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Haven’t I told you before that there is nothing in the world more boring than telling other people your dreams?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘A psychoanalyst will listen to your dreams. But you have to pay him a great deal more than you pay me.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘How many full stops have you used in this composition, Jack?’
He holds the sheet of paper before the boy. The boy squints at it and seems to be counting in his head.
‘None sir.’
‘Is it all one sentence?’
‘No sir.’
‘No sir.’ Alan Strachan sighs, takes out his red marking pen, and writes on the bottom of the page, You can do better than this. He gives the composition back to the boy. The bell rings for the new period.
‘Alice. How do you start a new sentence?’
‘Capital letter sir.’
‘So why haven’t you done it?’
‘Don’t know sir.’
‘Do any of you hear a single thing I say to you? Am I talking to myself here?’
They stare back at him, mute but unthreatened. They have no respect, he knows it well enough. His job is to get them into the expensive schools that will equip them for a life of privilege, that’s what their parents are paying for. He’s only another kind of servant, like the nanny and the gardener.
Why must it be so hard? Why so lonely and so hard?
Life must go on
Reluctantly
10
The way he looked at me, thinks Marion Temple-Morris, easing her car round the tricky corner by the Trevor Arms. The way his eyes look and then look away, he wants to look but he daren’t look, it’s so sweet. But what can I do? David would get into one of his rages. He’d say it was all my fault, he’d say I’d led him on. Then it would be, ‘You do it to yourself, Marion. I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself, Marion.’ But I’ve done nothing to encourage him. These things just happen sometimes. No more than a crush, of course, he’s still almost a boy, but he’s lonely, anyone can see that. Curious the way he was coming in as I was coming out. You’d almost think he’d been waiting for me. Not that he’s anything but the perfect gentleman, which if I’m being honest is more than I can say about David.
In the Tesco car park there’s a space free in the row nearest the river, and not far at all from the store. Marion takes this as a good omen. Sometimes you have to walk miles bumping your trolley over uneven tarmac, dodging the incoming cars. Everyone lives in the hope of a newly vacated space near the set-down. Of course it’s silly to think this way but she does have a belief, call it a feeling, that there are good days and bad days. On the good days it’s as if the world is on your side. As for the bad days, well, we all know about them. We’ve heard quite enough about them, thank you very much, as David used to say.
She picks out one of the shallow trolleys. The deep ones are hard to unload, you have to bend right over to reach the bottom, and whoever needs that amount of shopping? Just an organic chicken breast, some broccoli perhaps, a bottle of Cinzano. A vermouth at the end of the day does no harm, though strictly speaking alcohol is not on the agenda. One must have one’s little pleasures or life wouldn’t be worth living.
Perhaps, she thinks, I should ask Alan over for supper one day. He lives in that house all on his own, heaven only knows what he eats, it would be a kindness to the boy. But what if he really is sweet on me? Would it be fair to show him what he might take to be encouragement? After all it’s not as if I can give him what he wants. The way he can’t even look at me, you can tell he’s got it bad. He must have been sitting in his car waiting until I came out of the house so he could jump out and pass me on the path. Such a tiny moment, you’d hardly think it was worth it, but of course it’s not how long it lasts, it
’s how intensely you feel. People can fall in love in one second, bang, just like that. They meet and they know it. And what do you do then? Well, it’s tragic, really. Some people pine to death. Love is so rare. It’s like an endangered species, the nest of a rare bird where the hen-bird is sitting on a clutch of precious eggs. You have to protect it. You have to tread lightly as you go by, or the bird takes fright and then the eggs grow cold.
The woman in front in the checkout queue has a large family, to judge by the load in her trolley. Nobody seems to have told her that Coca Cola and Honeynut Cheerios are a kind of poison for her children. Also eating that sort of diet is far more expensive, which only goes to show that the working classes aren’t poor at all any more, just stupid, or perhaps I should say uneducated. But you can’t tell them. If I so much as tried to point out the dangers of such a high-fat diet the woman would abuse me, might even use obscene words. David did that once. He shouted an obscene word. I just stared at him, as if to say, So that’s how low you’ve descended. Then he said, ‘I can’t help you any more, Marion.’ This was news, that he’d been helping me. Yes, quite a news flash that was. Hold the front page, David cares about someone other than himself.
Alan is quite another breed. He has a gentleness, a sweetness, that is altogether unusual. If he does have a little crush on me I must be sensitive about it. A clumsy rebuff could dash his confidence for ever. It should be possible to respect his feelings without leading him to expect more than I can give.
No, I don’t want any cashback. Yes, I could have taken advantage of the Ten Items or Less checkout, but I’m in no hurry. David won’t be coming back until – well, truth to tell, I don’t even know. So if he’s away so much he could hardly blame me if I showed a little kindness to a lonely neighbour.
Such a sweet funny car Alan has. When you touch it after he comes home at the end of the day it’s still warm. Now that the evenings are getting longer he sits at his computer in his front room with the curtains open and the glow of the screen makes his face shine with a pale light. He has a beautiful face, but who is there to tell him so? Such a waste.
He doesn’t usually come home at lunchtime. Lucky that I happened to hear his car pull up in the road. Of course it’s quite possible that he came back in the hope that he might meet me, if only for the briefest of moments. There was something about him as he came up the path, a nervousness you could call it, as if he wanted something very much but felt he was wrong to want it. Then that quick intent look, and at once the look away. Oh, the poor boy. Not that he’s a boy, of course. He must be thirty at least. Younger than me, but you get men like that, they fall for older women. They want to be looked after.
Crossing the car park back to her car Marion recalls her words to Alan about David. Not that he ever makes himself useful. The remark, she now sees, has a double meaning. She blushes a deep hot red. He might have understood her to be criticizing David’s performance. At the very least he would have understood her to be implying dissatisfaction, and that, surely, is a kind of invitation. A sensitive young man like Alan could not fail to pick up the deeper meaning. And why deny the truth? David does lack the qualities a woman looks for in a man. Once he said to her, ‘All I am is your nurse, Marion.’ Well, there you have it in a nutshell. A woman doesn’t want a man as a nurse. She wants a provider, a protector, a lover.
But suppose Alan did construe her words as an invitation? What should she do? She realizes she must prepare with care and delicacy for their next encounter. To a sensitive young man the slightest nuance of word or look could be critical. It would be quite wrong to ask him to supper, for example. To do so would be to invite an open declaration of his feelings. And what would she say then?
What would she say?
For the first time Marion allows herself to imagine what it would be like if she did not resist. She would make him happy: of that she was sure. She believes she would be happy herself. But what about David? She owes him very little really. He was there when she went through that bad time, but that’s the best that can be said of him, that he was there. She came through it all on her own, and with the help of Dr Skilling, of course. If Alan needs me, why shouldn’t I make him happy? All we have in this short life is a chance of happiness. Such a chance may never come again.
Back in her own little kitchen she takes out of a drawer in the dresser a small brown button. She spotted this button on her neighbour’s path some time ago, and picked it up to give back to him. It must have come from one of his jackets. When you lose a button it’s often hard to find a match, so it’s worthwhile keeping the old ones.
She holds the button between her two palms, pressing them tight together. Yes, she thinks, it may be that it’s time I let change into my life. It may be that he loves me. It may be that I must learn to love him.
With this thought there comes a sensation of deep blessed calm, that she recognizes as the gift of a power greater than herself. She closes her eyes and lowers her head and gives silent thanks.
This will be a good week.
11
Laura crosses the west terrace at Edenfield Place and makes her way slowly down the lime avenue to the lake. There, fringed by rushes, stands the lake house, derelict, long abandoned, considered to be unsafe. A short railed bridge links it to the shore. A cord tied from side to side to indicate that access is not permitted hangs low as a skipping rope. Laura steps over it and passes between tall reeds to the main structure.
It stands on piles encircled by a broad grey deck, its single room timber-walled, hexagonal, many-windowed. The roof is shingled with larch. Some of the shingles have slipped. The doors facing the big house have gone. Inside a mass of dead leaves has been swept by the wind against one wall. Two iron chairs stand looking through blurred windows over the calm surface of the lake.
She steps carefully across the deck, which has rotted away in places to reveal the dark water below. She sits in one of the iron chairs, holds her handbag on her lap as if there’s a danger it might be stolen. In her bag is the letter, headed by an address and a phone number. In her bag is her phone.
The burden of memories. So long in storage, impossibly undamaged, as good as new.
A hesitant voice breaks over her reverie.
‘Hello? Laura?’
It’s Billy Holland on the land side of the bridge.
‘Don’t want to disturb you.’
‘It’s all right. I shouldn’t be here anyway. It’s supposed not to be safe.’
‘Oh, it’s safe enough.’ He crosses the bridge. ‘Not that I’ve been here in years.’
‘Watch where you step.’
But he comes to her without caring where his feet fall.
‘Do you have a moment?’
They sit on the iron chairs side by side and watch the patterns made by the wind on the water. She holds her letter, he holds his letters. A bundle of fifty-year-old papers no longer tied with string.
‘Was I wrong?’ she says. ‘Maybe I should have left them where I found them.’
‘Wrong? No, not at all.’
He’s breathing slowly, heavily. With one broad white hand he keeps smoothing the fabric of his trousers over his thigh.
‘Haven’t been here in years,’ he says. ‘Funny old world.’
She wonders what age he is. Sixty, perhaps.
‘My mother fell ill after I was born,’ he says. ‘She had to go away. A nursing home. So you see, my father was alone.’
‘Please, Billy,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to explain anything to me.’
‘There’s no one else.’
‘Did you know?’
‘Oh, no. No, no.’
‘So you don’t know who she was.’
‘A girl from the village, it seems. He calls her Doll. A private name, I suppose. It means nothing to me.’
He stares out over the lake like a man in shock. She says nothing, giving him time and space.
‘I never really knew my mother,’ he says at last. ‘I was so young.
She was mostly away. Then she died. I was seven.’
‘I’m so sorry, Billy.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not that.’
Again the silence, and the slow rising up to the surface of inadequate words.
‘What my father did. What he felt. I suppose it was wrong. But I had no idea that it was possible.’
‘People have always had affairs.’
‘Was it an affair? There’s nothing in the letters to say so. No doubt it was. The main thing is, she made him happy.’
He looks round at Laura and she catches the wistfulness in his eyes.
‘That’s all we want in the end, isn’t it? Someone who makes us happy.’
‘Yes,’ says Laura. ‘That’s all we want.’
‘Her handwriting. She’s not educated, you can tell. And my father, he was very correct. Very proud. But of course all that came afterwards. I only really knew him after it was all over.’
He clears his throat. Then he coughs, covering his mouth with one hand.
‘It’s possible,’ he says, ‘that she’s still alive. This Doll. I imagine she was quite young. She would be in her seventies or eighties.’
‘Yes, it’s possible.’
‘The thing is.’ He coughs again. ‘I would like to meet her. If she is still alive. But it’s not easy. Not easy.’
‘No. I suppose it isn’t.’
‘I was wondering if you. In the course of your researches. The name discovered, you see. Perhaps one could say the letters belong to this person. This Doll.’
Laura understands.
‘You want me to trace her.’