Rose Daughter (42 page)

We came home to southern England in a late, bleak, cold
spring, and I sat at my desk and stared into space, feeling as if I were barely
convalescent after a long illness.

A friend of mine who runs an art gallery in SoHo (New York,
not London) asked me if I would consider writing him a short-story version of
Beauty and the Beast for one of his artists to illustrate. I said no, I can’t;
I’ve said all I have to say about that story.

But as I sat at my typewriter—or looked over my shoulder at
the black clouds and sleet—I didn’t feel up to anything too demanding, like the
novel I was supposed to be working on. I thought, I’ll have a go at this short
story. Something might come of it. I can do a little more with roses; that’ll
be fun.

Rose Daughter
shot out onto the page in about six
months. I’ve never had a story burst so fully and extravagantly straight onto
the page, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

I’ve long said my books “happen” to me. They lend to blast
in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl, Write me! Write me
now!
But
they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before
they hurtle away again, and so I spend a lot of my time running after them,
like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying, Wait for me! Wait for me!,
and waving my notebook in the air.
Rose Daughter
happened, but it bolted
with
me. Writing it was quite like riding a not-quite-runaway horse, who
is willing to listen to you, so long as you let it run.

If you’re a storyteller, your own life streams through you,
onto the page, mixed up with the life the story itself brings; you cannot, in
any useful or genuine way. separate the two. The thing dial tells me when one
of the pictures in my head or phrases in my ear is a story, and not a mere
afternoon’s distraction, is its life, its strength, its vitality. If you were
picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy
instead. It’s warm; it wriggles; it’s
alive.
But the association between
my inner (storytelling) life and my outer (everything else) life is unusually
close in this book. I don’t know why die story came to me in the first place,
but I know that what fueled the whirlwind of getting it down on paper was my
grief for my little lilac-covered cottage and for a way of life I had loved,
even if I love my new life better.

1 think every writer fears doing the same thing again—and
thus boring her readers. But what “the same thing” is may be tricky to define.
I almost didn’t write
Beauty;
having written it, I had absolutely no
intention of reusing that plot. I read somewhere, a long time ago, a French
writer, I think, saying that each writer has only one story to tell; it’s
whether or not they find interesting ways to retell it that is important. The
idea has stuck with me because I suspect it’s true. Maybe I shouldn’t be
surprised that my favourite fairytale came back to me, dressed in a new story,
after twenty more years in the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart—and
the odd major life crisis to break it loose and urge it into my consciousness.

Maybe it’ll come to me again in another twenty years.

—Hampshire. England October 1996