Writer's Life (2 page)

Mina was soon chatting to the proprietor, an owl-faced, bespectacled man in his seventies. "We moved in just last week," he was saying. "Had a place beyond the Minster—too quiet. You're looking for the Victorians? You'll find them in the first room on the second floor."

I followed her up the precipitous staircase, itself made even narrower by shelves of books on everything from angling to bee-keeping, gardening to rambling.

Mina laughed to herself on entering the well-stocked room and turned to me with the conspiratorial grin of the fellow bibliophile. While she lost herself in awed contemplation of the treasures in stock, I saw a sign above a door leading to a second room: Twentieth Century Fiction.

I stepped through, as excited as a boy given the run of a toyshop on Christmas Eve.

The room was packed from floor to ceiling with several thousand volumes. At a glance I knew that many dated from the thirties and forties: the tell-tale blanched pink spines of Hutchinson editions, the pen and ink illustrated dust-jackets so popular at the time. The room had about it an air of neglect, the junk room where musty volumes were put out to pasture before the ultimate indignity of the council skip.

I found a Robert Nathan for one pound, a Wellard I did not posses for £1.50. I remembered Vaughan Edwards, and moved with anticipation to the E section. There were plenty of Es, but no Edwards.

I moved on, disappointed, but still excited by the possibility of more treasures to be found. I was scanning the shelves for Rupert Croft-Cooke when Mina called out from the next room, "Daniel. Here."

She had a stack of thick volumes piled beside her on the bare floorboards, and was holding out a book to me. "Look."

I expected some title she had been looking out for, but the book was certainly not Victorian. It had the modern, maroon boards of something published in the fifties.

"Isn't he the writer you mentioned the other week?"

I read the spine.
A Bitter Recollection
—Vaughan Edwards.

I opened the book, taking in the publishing details, the full-masted galleon symbol of the publisher, Longmans, Green and Company. It was his fourth novel, published in 1958.

I read the opening paragraph, and something clicked. I knew I had stumbled across a like soul.

An overnight frost had sealed the ploughed fields like so much stiffened corduroy, and in the distance, mist shrouded and remote, stood the village of Low Dearing. William Barnes, stepping from the second-class carriage onto the empty platform, knew at once that this was the place
.

"Where did you find it?" I asked, hoping that there might be others by the author.

She laughed. "Where do you think? Where it belongs, on the 50p shelf."

She indicated a free-standing bookcase crammed with a miscellaneous selection of oddments, warped hardbacks, torn paperbacks, pamphlets and knitting patterns. There were no other books by Vaughan Edwards.

I lay my books upon her pile on the floor and took Mina in my arms. She stiffened, looking around to ensure we were quite alone: for whatever reasons, she found it difficult to show affection when we might be observed.

We made our way carefully down the stairs and paid for our purchases. I indicated the Edwards and asked the proprietor if he had any others by the same author.

He took the book and squinted at the spine. "Sorry, but if you'd like to leave your name and address..."

I did so, knowing that it would come to nothing.

We left the shop and walked back to the car, hand in hand. We drove back through the rapidly falling winter twilight, the traffic sparse on the already frost-scintillating B-roads. The gritters would be out tonight, and the thought of the cold spell gripping the land filled me with gratitude that soon I would be home, before the fire, with my purchases.

For no apparent reason, Mina lay a hand on my leg as I drove, and closed her eyes.

I appreciated her spontaneous displays of affection all the more because they were so rare and arbitrary. Sometimes the touch of her hand in mine, when she had taken it without being prompted, was like a jolt of electricity.

The moon was full, shedding a magnesium light across the fields around the cottage. As I was about to turn into the drive, the thrilling, bush-tailed shape of a fox slid across the metalled road before the car, stopped briefly to stare into the headlights, then flowed off again and disappeared into the hedge.

~

Through focusing minutely on the inner lives of his characters, Vaughan Edwards manages to create stories of profound honesty and humanity
...

From D.L. Shackleton's review of
The Tall Ghost and other stories
by Vaughan Edwards.

~

I began
A Bitter Recollection
that night after dinner, and finished it in the early hours, emerging from the novel with surprise that so many hours had passed. It was the first time in years that I had finished a novel in one sitting, and I closed the book with a kind of breathless exultation. It was not the finest book I had ever read—the prose was too fastidious in places, and the plotting left much to be desired—but it was one of the most emotionally honest pieces of fiction I had ever come across. It swept me up and carried me along with its tortured portrayal of the central character, William Barnes, and his quest to find his missing lover. There was a magical quality to the book, an elegiac yearning for halcyon days, a time when things were
better
—and at the same time the novel was informed with the tragic awareness that all such desire is illusory. Barnes never found his lover—I suspected that he was an unreliable narrator, and that Isabella never really existed, was merely an extended metaphor for that harrowing sense of loss we all carry with us without really knowing why.

I was moved to tears by the novel, and wanted more.

I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops up and down the country, and logged onto the Websites of book-finders on the Internet, requesting the eleven novels I had yet to read, and his two collections.

Mina read the book, at my request. I was eager for her opinion, would even watch her while she read the novel, trying to gauge how she was enjoying it. She finished the book in three days, shrugged when I asked her what she thought of it, and said, "It lacked something."

I stared at her. "Is that all? What do you mean? What did it lack?"

She frowned, pulled me onto the sofa and stroked my hair, her eyes a million miles away. "I don't know... I mean, it had no story. Nothing happened. It lacked drama."

"The drama was internalised in Barnes," I began.

"Perhaps that was the problem. I couldn't identify with him. I couldn't even feel sympathy for him and his search for Isabella."

"I don't think Isabella existed," I said.

She blinked at me. "She didn't?"

"She might have been a metaphor for loss."

Mina shook her head, exasperated. "No wonder I couldn't engage with the thing," she said. "If Isabella didn't exist, then it was even emptier than I first thought. It was about nothing..."

"Nothing but loss," I said.

She smiled at me. "You liked it, didn't you?"

"I loved it."

She shook her head, as if in wonder. "Sometimes, Daniel, I want to see inside your head, try to understand what you're thinking, but sometimes that frightens me."

~

Today I met a wonderful woman, Mina Pratt. "I wasn't born a Pratt," she told me, "I just married one." She is 36, divorced, has two children. We met in the Fleece and talked for an hour about nothing but the novels we were reading. I was instantly attracted to her. She's practical, down-to-earth, level-headed—all the things I'm not. I told her I was a writer, and cursed myself in case she thought I was trying to impress her.

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

Christmas came and went.

It was Mina's turn to have the girls for that year's festivities. Her parents came over from Leeds and the house was full, for the first time in ages, with goodwill and glad tidings. I disliked Christmas—the occasion struck me as tawdry and cheap, an excuse to party when no excuse was really needed, a time of sanctimonious bonhomie towards our fellow man, and the rest of the year be damned. I withheld my humbug from Mina. She loved Christmas day, the glitz and the cosiness, the present giving... It was a paradox, I know. She, the hard-hearted pragmatist, and me the romantic. I could take the romantic ideal of Yule, but not the actuality, while Mina enjoyed the occasion quite simply for what it was, a chance for the family to get together, enjoy good food and a classic film on TV.

The period following Christmas, and the even sadder occasion of New Year, strikes me as the nadir of the year. Spring is a distant promise, winter a grey, bitter cold reality: if the calendar were to be rendered as an abstract visualisation, then January and February would be coloured black.

The new year was brightened, on the second Saturday of January, by the unexpected arrival of a brown cardboard package. Mina was on an early shift, and the girls—Sam and Tessa, eight and six respectively—were filling in a colouring book at the kitchen table. I tended to keep in the background on the days when Mina had the girls; even after a year, and even though it was my house, I felt as though I were trespassing on emotional territory not rightfully mine. On the rare occasions when I was alone with the girls, I would give them pens and paper, or put a video on TV, and leave them to their own devices.

I carried the package to my study at the top of the house, attempting to divine from the postmark some idea of its content. The package came from York.

Intrigued, still not guessing, I ripped it open.

Books, and books, moreover, by Vaughan Edwards: his first and third novels,
Winter at the Castle
and
A Brighter Light
. They were in good condition, complete with pristine dust jackets. They looked as though they had never been read, though the passage of years had discoloured the pages to a sepia hue, and foxed the end-papers. A bargain at five pounds each, including postage and packing.

The back flap of the jackets each gave the same brief, potted biography:
Vaughan Edwards was born in Dorset in 1930. After National Service in the RAF, he taught for five years at a public school in Gloucestershire. He is now a full-time writer and lives in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale
.

These terse contractions of an individual's life filled me with sadness, especially those from years ago. I always read them in the knowledge that the life described was now no more, or was at least much altered in circumstance. I thought of Vaughan Edwards in the RAF, then teaching, and then living the writer's life in Highdale... before the tragedy of his disappearance.

Highdale was a small village situated thirty miles from Skipton on the North Yorkshire moors. It occurred to me that Edwards might still have been living there at the time of his disappearance, six years ago.

I rationed myself, over the course of the following bitter cold days, to just three hours a night with the novels of Vaughan Edwards. While Mina curled in her chair and reread the Brontës, I lay on the sofa and slowly immersed myself in the singular world of the vanished novelist. I began with his first novel,
Winter at the Castle
, a strange story of a group of lonely and embittered individuals who find themselves invited for a month to the remote Northumbrian castle of a reclusive landowner. That the recluse never appears to the guests, nor in the novel, came as no surprise. There was no explanation as to why they might have been invited to the castle. There was little action, but much introspection, as the characters met, interacted, and discussed their respective lives—and then left to resume their places in a century that hardly suited them... I refrained from asking Mina what she might make of this one.

His third novel,
A Brighter Light
, was a monologue from the viewpoint of a young girl imprisoned in an oak tree, her recollections of her early life, and how her essence had become one with the oak. She befriended, through a form of telepathy, a young novelist who moved into the cottage where the tree grew. The book ends ambiguously; there is a hint that the man joins the girl's spirit in the tree, and also that the monologue might have been a fictional work by the young writer.

Unpromising subject matter, I had to admit that. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novels would just not work. But something in Vaughan Edward's mature handling of his characters' emotions, their honestly wrought inner lives, lifted the books from the level of turgid emotionalism and invested them with art.

I finished
A Brighter Light
and laid it aside, my heart hammering.

Mina smiled across at me. "Good?"

"Amazing."

"I'll believe you," she laughed.

Like all great art, which I believed these books to be, they had the effect of making me look anew at my life and the world around me; it was as if I saw Mina for the first time, was able now, with perceptions honed by Edwards' insight, to discern her essence, the bright light that burned at the core of her being. I felt then an overwhelming surge of love for this woman, and at the same time I was cut through with sadness like a physical pain.

Early in our relationship, she had told me that she did not love me, and that, "I can't bring myself to feel love for anyone, other than the girls."

I accepted this, rationalised that perhaps in time she might come to appreciate me, might even one day bring herself to love me.

I had asked her if she was unable to feel love because she had invested so much in her husband, only for that investment to turn sour. Perhaps she was afraid, I suggested, to risk giving love again, for fear of being hurt a second time. She denied this, said that she could not explain her inability to love me. I told myself that she was either deluding herself, or lying. Perhaps she was lying to save my feelings; perhaps she was capable of love, but I was not the right person. In the early days I was torn by the pain of what I saw as rejection... and yet she remained with me, gave a passable impression of, if not love, then a deep affection, and I refrained from quizzing her as to the state of her heart, and learned to live from day to day.