Recently she’d been writing in bed, sometimes for fifteen minutes. At other times she lasted only five. In the morning – oh, the wasted will and lost clarity of words in the morning! – she wrote standing up in her overcoat at the dining-room table, her school bag packed, as her son waited at the front door, juggling with tennis balls. This was the most she could do. At other times she wanted, badly, to harm herself. But self-mutilation was an inaccurate language. Scars couldn’t speak.
Marcia dropped the card in her bag along with her pens and the formidable sketchbook in which she made notes. She called them the ‘tools of her love’.
While Alec ate his tea, she phoned Sandor, her ‘boyfriend’ – though she had vowed not to speak to him – and told him about the postcard. He paid little attention to her enthusiasm; it wasn’t something he understood. But she couldn’t be discouraged.
They drove to her mother’s, ten minutes away. It was the plain, semi-detached house in which Marcia had grown up, where her mother lived alone.
She let Alec out and handed him his overnight bag.
‘Run to the door and ring the bell. I haven’t got time to stop.’
Marcia drove to the end of the quiet road in which she had ridden her bicycle as a child. She turned the car round and passed the house, hooting and accelerating as her mother hurried to the front gate in her flapping slippers, raising her hand as if to stop the car, with Alec standing behind her.
The members of the writers’ group were making tea and arranging their seats in the cold local hall where they met once a week. On other nights Scouts, Air Cadets and Trotskyists used it. Marcia had started the group by advertising in a local paper. Originally it was to be a reading circle; she thought more people would come. At the last minute she changed the ‘reading’ to ‘writing’. Two dozen poems, screenplays and a complete novel dropped through her letter box. It was not only she who wanted to put her side of things.
Twelve of them sat on hard chairs in a circle, and read to one another. During the past two years they had declaimed terrible confessions that elicited only silence and tears; dreams and fantasies; episodes of soap operas and, occasionally, there was some writing of fire and imagination, usually produced by Marcia.
The group was to have no official leader, though Marcia often found herself in that position. She enjoyed the admiration and even the spite and envy, which she considered ‘literary’. She always kept at least one author’s biography beside her bed, and was aware that writing was a contact sport. Marcia also liked to talk about writing and how creativity developed, as if it was a mystery that she would grasp one day. She knew that considering the relation between language and feeling, hearing the names of writers, and speaking of their affairs and rotten personal lives, was what she wanted to do.
She also felt it was an indulgence. Life wasn’t about doing what you wanted all day. But didn’t Aurelia Broughton do that?
The nurses, accountants, bookshop assistants and clerks who comprised the writers group – all, somehow, thwarted – were doing their best work. Every one of them had the belief, conviction, hope, that they could interest and engage someone else. They wrote when they could, during their lunch break, or in the spent hours late at night. Yet their spavined stories stumbled into an abyss, never leaping the electric distance between people. These ‘writers’ made crass mistakes and were astonished and sour when others in the group pointed them out. She didn’t believe she was such a fool; she couldn’t believe it. None of them did.
‘I grunt, I grunt. I grunt.’
Marcia put on her glasses and regarded the young man who had stood up to read, a waiter in the pizza restaurant in the High Street. He had come to the house and played with Alec. He was pretty, if not a little fey. He had a crush on Marcia. For a while, after reading some George Sand, she considered giving him a try. Before, he had cried if asked to read aloud. Marcia regretted persuading him to ‘share’ his work with them. You couldn’t tell how someone’s prose would sound by the look of them. This boy had been writing a long piece about a waiter in a pizza parlour attempting to give birth to a tapeworm growing inside his body. As the thick grey worm made its interminable muddy progress into the light, via the waiter’s rectum – and God had made the world more quickly – Marcia lowered her head and re-read Aurelia Broughton’s card.
At school two weeks ago, Marcia had seen in the newspaper that Aurelia Broughton was reading from her latest novel. It was that night. Spontaneously, but aware that she was ravenous for influence, she dropped Alec at her mother’s and drove to London. She parked on a yellow line, and obtained the last ticket. The room was full. People who had just left their offices were standing on the stairs. Students sat cross-legged on the floor. There was some random clapping and then a hush when Aurelia went to the lectern. At first she was nervous, but when she realised the audience was supporting her, she seemed to enter a trance; words poured from her.
After, there were many respectful questions from people who knew her work. Marcia wondered why they had come. What had made her come? Not only a longing for poetry and something sustaining. Perhaps, Marcia thought, she could locate the talent in Aurelia by looking at her. Was it in her eyes, hands or general bearing? Was talent intelligence, passion or a gift? Could it be developed? Looking at Aurelia had made Marcia consider the puzzle of why some people could do certain things and not others.
Aurelia had made an interesting remark. Marcia had sometimes thought of her own ability, such as it was, on the model of an old torch battery, as a force with a flickering intensity, which might run down altogether.
However, Aurelia had said, with grandiose finality, ‘Creativity is like sexual desire. It renews itself day by day.’ She went on, ‘I never stop having ideas. They stream from me. I can write for hours. Next morning I can’t wait to start again.’
Someone in the audience commented, ‘It’s something of an obsession, then.’
‘No, not an obsession. It is love,’ said Aurelia.
The audience wanted a life transformed by art.
Marcia joined a queue to have Aurelia sign the costly hardback. The writer was surrounded by publicists and the shop staff, who opened and passed the books to her. Wearing jewellery, expensive clothes, and an extravagant silk scarf, Aurelia smiled and asked Marcia her name, putting an ‘e’ at the end instead of an ‘a’.
Marcia leaned across the table. ‘I’m a writer, too.’
‘The more of us the better,’ Aurelia replied. ‘Good luck.’
‘I’ve written –’
Marcia tried to talk with Aurelia, but there were people behind, pushing forward with pens, questions, pieces of paper. An assistant manoeuvred her out of the way.
The next day, via Aurelia’s publisher, Marcia sent her the first chapter of her novel. She enclosed a letter telling of her struggle to understand certain things. Over the years she had tried to contact writers. Many had not replied; others said they were too busy to see her. Now Aurelia had written to invite her for tea. Aurelia would be the first proper writer she had met. She was a woman Marcia would be able to have vital and straightforward conversations with.
Today Marcia shook her head when asked if she had anything to read to the group. After, she didn’t go for a drink with the others but left immediately.
As she was getting into her car, the boy who’d written the tapeworm story ran up behind her.
‘Marcia, you said nothing. Are you enjoying the piece? Don’t be afraid of being ruthless.’
He was moving backwards even as he waited for her reply. She had been accused before, in the group, of being dismissive, contemptuous even. It was true that on a couple of occasions she had had to slip outside, she was laughing so much.
He said, ‘You seemed lost in thought.’
‘The school,’ she said. ‘I’ll never get away.’
‘Sorry. I thought it might have been the worm.’
‘Worm?’
‘The story I read.’
She said, ‘I didn’t miss a grunt. It’s coming out, isn’t it, the piece. Coming out … well.’ She patted him on the shoulder and got into the car. ‘See you next week, probably.’
Her living-room floor was covered in toys. She remembered a friend saying how children forced you to live in squalor. In the corner of the room, the damp wall had started to crumble, leaving a layer of white powder on the carpet. The bookshelves, hammered carelessly into the alcoves by her incompetent husband, sagged in the middle and were pulling out of the bricks.
She wrote and told Aurelia that she was looking forward to seeing her at the appointed time.
With Aurelia’s card propped up against Aurelia’s novels and stories, Marcia started to write. She would visit Aurelia and take with her a good deal more of the novel. Aurelia was well connected; she could help her get it published.
Next morning Marcia rose at five and wrote in the cold house until seven. That night, when Alec went to bed, she put in another hour. Normally, whenever she had a good idea she would think of a good reason why it wasn’t a good idea. Her father’s enthusiasm and her mother’s helplessness had created a push-me-pull-you creature that succeeded only at remaining in the same place. She bullied herself – why can’t you do this, why isn’t it better? – until her living part became a crouching, cowed child.
The urgency of preparing something for Aurelia abolished Marcia’s doubts. This was how she liked to work; there was only pen, paper, and something urgent proceeding between them.
During the day, even as she yelled at the children or listened to the parents’ complaints, Marcia thought often of Aurelia, sometimes with annoyance. Aurelia had asked her to come to her house at four-thirty, a time when Marcia was still at school. As Aurelia lived in West London, a two-hour drive away, Marcia would have to make an excuse and take the day off in order to prepare to see her. These were the kinds of things famous writers never had to think about.
*
They were standing, a few days later, in the cramped kitchen looking out over the garden in which she, her father and younger brother had played tennis over a tiny net, when Marcia decided to tell her mother the good news.
‘Aurelia Broughton wrote to me. You know, the writer. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?’
‘I have heard of her,’ her mother said.
Mother was small but wide. She wore two knitted jumpers and a heavy cardigan, which made her look even bigger.
Mother said, ‘I’ve heard of lots of writers. What does she want from you?’
Alec went into the garden and kicked a ball. Marcia wished her father were alive to do this with him. They all missed having a man around.
‘Aurelia liked my work.’ Marcia felt she had the right to call the writer Aurelia; they would become friends. ‘She wants to talk about it. It’s great, isn’t it? She’s interested in what I’m doing.’
Her mother said, ‘You’d better lend me one of her books so I can keep up.’
‘I’m re-reading them myself at the moment.’
‘Not during the day. You’re at school.’
‘I read at school.’
‘You never let me join in. I’m pushed to one side. These are the last years of my life –’
Marcia interrupted her. ‘I’ll be needing to write a bit in the next couple of weeks.’
This meant her mother would have to keep Alec in the evenings, and for some of the weekend. His father took him on Saturday afternoons, and returned him on Sunday.
Marcia said, ‘Could he spend Sunday with you?’ Her mother assumed her ‘put-upon’ face. ‘Please.’
Mother formed the same expressions today as she had in the past when caring for two children and a husband, and had made it obvious by her suffering that she found her family overwhelming and pleasureless. Depressives certainly had strong wills, killing off sentient life for miles around them.
‘I had a little date, but I’ll cancel it,’ said Mother.
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
Since Marcia’s father had died six years ago, Mother had started going to museums and galleries. In the evenings, after a smoked salmon and cream cheese supper, she went often to the theatre and cinema. For the first time since she was young, she had friends with whom she attended lectures and concerts, sailing home in a taxi, spending the money Father had received on retirement. She had even taken up smoking. Mother had grasped that it was a little late for hopelessness.
Marcia didn’t want to wait thirty years.
She had, recently, gained a terrible awareness of life. It might have started when she began meeting men through the dating agency, which had made her feel – well, morbid. Until recently, she had lived as if one day there would be a salve for her wounds; that someone, a parent, lover, benefactor, would pluck her from chaos.
Marcia didn’t become a teacher until she was almost thirty. She and her husband had started wanting to smash at one another’s faces. She had, literally, kicked him out of bed; he ran into the street wearing pyjamas and slippers. Without him, she had a child, a mortgage and only a nugatory income, working in a bar and writing in the mornings. The first day at teacher training college had been awful. She had believed she would wear scarves like Aurelia Broughton and write with a gold fountain pen.
Marcia collected stories of struggling women who eventually became recognised as artists. She believed in persistence and dedication. If she wasn’t a writer, how would she live with herself and what value would she have? When she was a proper writer, her soul would not be hidden; people would know her as she was. To be an artist, to live a singular, self-determined life, and follow the imagination where it led, was to live for oneself, and to be useful. Creativity, the merging of reason and imagination, was life’s ultimate fulfilment.
If she passed a bookshop and saw dozens of luridly coloured blockbusters, she knew these bad and, often, young writers were making money. It seemed tragic and unfair that, unlike them, she couldn’t go to a shop and buy the furniture, clothes and music she wanted.
‘You hate me interfering,’ Mother said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to have got to the end of your life and realised you’d wasted your time.’