No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (23 page)

Her fellow classmates did not seem to have such difficulty. She had had a long chat with Roger the previous week about how he had written not one but three unpublished books. He would come home after a day working in the archives of the New York Public Library, cook himself dinner, and then write for a couple of hours. This in itself seemed to give him great pleasure, and he described how seeing letters form his words on the screen in front of him made him feel alive. Lucy found this inspirational. She found the sight of Marian, Dianne, and Jennifer reading their paragraphs out loud to one another before class moving. She came to admire Betty's dogged refusal to accept that her own life was less valuable or interesting than anyone else's. Even withdrawn Stu opened up, telling her he loved books because he was fascinated by typefaces and the effect they might or might not have on the reader. Because she had worked in publishing she was able to discuss with him the different meanings of regal Times New Roman or perky Arial or reassuring Rockwell.

There was no doubt about it, Lucy loved books and words and using phrases like
a
concatenation of circumstances
, but, although comfortable with the life, as she had always relished a certain amount of aloneness, she quickly came to feel that she was not cut out to be a writer. Take adjectives, for example. How could you ever describe something in a new way, a way that wasn't a cliché? When Lucy thought about the snow at Julia's over Christmas, the only adjective that came to mind was “white.” It was frustrating and she was useless, and Julia had been quite wrong to give her false hope. She would have to train to be a teacher, the only other profession she could think of to do, despite the fact she disliked all children except her own. She lamented her hubris at length to the puppy inside and outside the apartment, and because the little dog woofed adoringly whenever Lucy paused for breath, passersby thought she was training her and not crazy.

She was full of fear and self-loathing as, halfway through the course, she trudged into the classroom fifteen minutes late, the sound of the boys' hysterical refusal to eat their spaghetti ringing in her ears. Ryan introduced her to his partner, Catalina, who had arrived in leather leggings, bearing cupcakes for the break, and at whom Dianne was staring viciously. Perhaps because of the presence of the leather leggings, Ryan was in top form this particular evening, announcing that the session tonight was inspired by William Carlos Williams, doctor and poet, and his philosophy that poetry could be about the everyday circumstances of life. Ryan scribbled
NO IDEAS, BUT IN THINGS
on the blackboard and allotted the group fifteen minutes to write a free-form poem about a specific incident in their life with no embellishment or allusion other than what
actually happened
,
before disappearing out the door with Catalina.

Oh, God,
thought Lucy.
Now it's like an exam I haven't prepared for,
which was a nightmare she still occasionally endured, sitting bolt upright in the early hours of the morning, trying to remember how to use a slide rule to calculate average speed using distance traveled/time taken. But then she reminded herself that she had always been very good at exams and the trick with an exam was to answer the questions. So she focused on thinking about something that had actually happened that afternoon and, to her amazement, she started to write.

She had just dotted the full stop at the end when Ryan reappeared, ever so slightly disheveled with what looked like photocopier ink on his neck, and told them to read their poems. Lucy was anxious to get her turn over with so she could concentrate on the others, so she hurried through her effort, which she called “Homework with My Nine-Year-Old.” Dianne point-blank refused. (Lucy guessed she had written about a romantic incident designed to inflame Ryan's jealousy, then thought better of it.) Marian, in monotone, described hiding in a wardrobe the day her father walked out to live with the woman with the big nose, which left Jennifer in tears as she read her poem about growing a beautiful sunflower from a seed. Roger told of the day he touched a first edition of
Leaves
of Grass
, Betty of her hip replacement, and Stu recalled being on vacation in Jamaica and his taxi driver being shot in front of him, brains spattering all over the windscreen (
No wonder he needs a therapist
, they all thought).

Ryan did not congratulate or criticize, he listened and made constructive comments, and all felt proud and energized and excited, apart from Dianne. But now that she had witnessed the reality of Catalina, and was liberated from the burden of flirting with Ryan, she, too, started to concentrate.

Meanwhile, Lucy's block had disappeared, risen like a portcullis, allowing invading ideas to storm in, and, as she looked round the room, sentences were forming, images appearing,
no ideas, but in things
. And wasn't that what Julia had been trying to say to her all along? Begin with what you see and go from there.

That evening she came through the door and found Richard half asleep on the sofa, the
Times
crossword half finished across his chest.

She leant over and kissed his forehead. His eyes flickered open, and he looked at her and told her she looked beautiful, and he asked her what she had done at her class. She replied that she had written a poem in fifteen minutes and he asked to read it, which she then did. He told her it was good and he was proud of her and she should really give writing a go and, if she did, she'd have to give it at least a year or two to see.

She lay on top of him, her head pressed into his neck, and whispered, “Thank you” and said she would and what she wanted to thank him for was not only his generosity and support, financial and emotional, but also the gift of taking her seriously, despite all the years and all the reasons not to.

All she had to do now was take herself seriously.

HOMEWORK WITH MY NINE-YEAR-OLD
by LUCY LOVETT

(with apologies to William Carlos Williams)

You should walk away

I tell my son at the kitchen table.

He looks at me

Blue-eyed, curious, pencil in hand.

When the feeling starts,

I say, the red mist.

Like Taz the Looney Tune, he says,

Yes, but Taz never walks away

so it isn't the best example.

When Patrick laughed at me

it felt like wasps were buzzing

in my brain. Let them out

I reply. Now, long division. (A long groan.)

And, look! You have four bonus words

for spelling. Paragraph,

Business, Communication, Literary.

Oh, sweet Jesus, he mutters,

glancing up to see if anything explodes.

But it's only the sweet corn boiling

for I have walked away.

Lucy was touched when Johanna Riordan, great with child, at the end of a wonderful, gossipy lunch in the penthouse, handed her a beautiful leather-bound notebook and a packet of pens. She needed it. She no longer measured out her life with school plays or sports days or soccer tournaments. Ideas and stories were flooding her, images like the woman with a live snake around her neck, the horizontal rain that coursed through the avenues, Robbie peeing in the snow upstate. As she walked through the lobby and saw the handsome doorman playing with a couple of toddlers who lived in the building, Lucy reflected on Johanna's life, immured in luxury, and what would happen if she fell in love with someone else. She jotted down this idea, which she called “The Doorman,” felt a little guilty, as Johanna had given her the notebook, then remembered what her friend Rosanna had said about changing names. She thought about Rosanna, the first proper writer she had ever been close to, and her heroic struggle to be true to herself as well as those who depended on her. Rosanna had once told her that she loved the movie
Julia
. Lucy decided that was what she would call her.

The epic historical novel, the sci-fi spectacular, or the big thriller would have to wait. Lucy had no clue how to write one of those. But if she wrote some stories about events in her life or the lives of women like and unlike her, it might turn into something. A book that she would buy at an airport, or waiting for a train, or read exhausted in bed, in the twenty minutes her body gave her before she sank into comatose sleep. And if she would read it, maybe someone else would too? But soon she stopped thinking about that. And then she understood what Ryan meant by
If you want to write, you just have to write
. One thousand words a day. Whatever the ending of your writing, if you have the willpower to do it and it keeps you sane, why not?

She noted down words to describe her feelings about New York, and soon the city became a character, as real to her as any other. She cut out pictures from magazines and took photographs and stuck them in her notebook. She thought about her life back in London and her life now. What she had wanted to be and what she had become. She thought about sentences and how they might work together, and she wrote incredibly long ones (which sometimes she broke up by using brackets) just for the fun of it. Some days, many days, she wrote nothing; she clawed at a couple of ideas, she stared at the keyboard, she composed a humiliating critique of her ideas by one such as a Miranda Bassett that made her cry.

Then came the horse course, the Hamptons, the opera with Carmen, and Ryan (Evan), and the Mother from the School she would call Robyn who ran off with the fantastically handled Schuyler Robinson, whose name she would have to keep, at least until copy editing. And finally, she realized that she'd have to be a character herself, or rather a version of herself with some of the tedious and unpleasant bits edited out. Or maybe left in. Maybe that was the point.

After three months, she gathered all her notes into one document, but before she could start she needed a title. She looked out the window at the last sleet of spring and typed the first thing that came into her head.

no one

could have

guessed the weather

She paused. It looked okay.

She rocked back and forward on her chair and took a big swig of coffee.

She cracked her knuckles and stretched out her fingers.

They arrived in early September.

She had begun.

Thank you to my beloved husband, Joseph O'Connor, for everything.

Thank you to our sons, James and Marcus, and our families, especially my mother, Monica Casey, Sean and Viola O'Connor, Fidelma Casey, and Eimear O'Connor.

Thank you to Amy Einhorn, my editor and publisher, and all at Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, especially Liz Stein.

Thank you to my agents and friends, Nicky Lund and Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates in London, and Allison Hunter at Inkwell Management in New York.

Thank you to all those colleagues and friends who encouraged my writing through the years and the different careers, especially Georgina Abrahams, Jane Wellesley, Lavinia Warner, Dorothy Viljoen, Maggie Pope, Martha O'Neill, Mary Callery, Andrew Meehan, Charlotte Cunningham, much-missed Maeve Binchy, Sarah Barton, Emma Broughton, Gavin Kostick, Michael Barker Caven, Michael Colgan, and all at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

Thank you to all my friends, old and new, in England, Ireland, and America, for their enthusiasm, support, and inspiration, especially Amy Jackson, Katey Driscoll, Angela O'Donnell, Dianne Festa, Cathy Kelly, Rosamund Lupton, and Rebecca Miller.

And remembering always, my father, John Casey, and my friend Dominic Montserrat.

Anne-Marie Casey was a script editor and producer of prime-time UK television drama for ten years before becoming a writer full-time. Her film and TV scripts have been produced in the UK and Ireland, and her theatrical adaptation of
Little Women
enjoyed a sellout run at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2011.
No One Could Have Guessed the Weather
, her first book, was inspired by her time living in Manhattan and her love-love relationship with the city. She is married to the novelist Joseph O'Connor. They now live in Dublin with their two sons.