Writer's Life (4 page)

"See anything?"

I held a swatch of vine aside as she peered in. She shivered theatrically. "Creepy."

I was about to suggest that we enter the Hall and find the wielder of the hammer, but Mina had other ideas. She took my arm. "You've seen enough, Daniel. I'm hungry. A Thai banquet awaits us."

The thought of food appealed to me, too. I wanted to stay a little longer, but I also wanted to investigate the track which Vaughan Edwards had taken prior to his disappearance.

"Okay, but there's something I must check, first."

Mina rolled her eyes. I took her arm and we returned to the car. "What?" she asked.

I reversed, then drove down the drive and onto the road. I turned right, continuing up the hill, and kept a lookout for a track leading into the woods.

I found it, and turned. Twilight enclosed us. "Daniel," Mina warned me.

"This, if I'm not mistaken, is where Vaughan Edwards left his car on the day he disappeared."

Ahead of us the track terminated in a clearing made magical by the dying light of the sun. When I cut the engine and opened the door, a deathly hush pervaded the clearing and I received the distinct impression that place regarded our arrival as an intrusion.

I climbed out and stood beside the car. In the gathering dusk I made out a worn path leading through the trees. I gestured for Mina to join me. She sat in the passenger seat, frowning her displeasure, waited a beat and then flounced out with ill grace.

"All I can think about is green Thai curry and you want to drag me through the mud on a wild goose chase." As is often the case with Mina, the tone of her voice was betrayed by the humorous light of tolerance in her eyes.

She took my hand and we hurried side by side along the footpath.

Perhaps it was the writer in me, the pathological creator of tales, but I was storing away this setting, and the feelings I was experiencing, for use in some future work of fiction. I was filled with the sense that time had dissolved, that all events maintained simultaneously, and that any second I might behold the figure of Vaughan Edwards striding towards his destiny through the undergrowth before us.

The path took a sharp turn to the left, and the trees thinned out: an aqueous, twilight lacunae glimmered before us.

"Stop!" Mina screamed, clutching my arm.

I halted, stock still. At my feet the earth crumbled away, and only then did I make out the sudden drop.

Mina hauled me back and we stood, our arms about each other like frightened children, and stared in wonder and fright at the suddenly revealed precipice.

Emboldened by survival, I took a step forward and made out, a hundred feet below, the muscled torrent of a river in full spate.

I rejoined Mina. She was staring at me.

"Perhaps that's what happened to your writer," she whispered, staring down.

"And his body?"

She shrugged, then gave a little shiver. "I don't know." She paused, as if considering. "Let's go, Daniel. I don't like it here."

"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts," I said.

She snorted. "I believe in the power of auto-suggestion," she replied.

We retraced our way back along the path to the clearing. I was heartened to see the car—as if some primitive part of me had feared that it might have vanished in our absence, stranding us in the haunted wood. I kept my musings to myself as I backed from the clearing and once again resumed the road, heading for Settle.

Over piled plates of green curry and five mushroom satay, we chatted. Mina was animated and affectionate, as if she wished to put from her mind all thought of Vaughan Edwards and Edgecoombe Hall, and concentrate instead on the simple commerce of intimacy. She laughed a lot, reached across the table to touch my hand—an uncommon gesture—and got a little tipsy on Singha beer.

I'd often lose myself in the miracle of her physicality, staring into her wide eyes, or at her exquisite hands. Mina had the finest hands I had ever seen; small, ineffably graceful, with a lithe, articulated elegance and long, oval nails. And these were hands that made a dozen beds a day, that mopped up after incontinent patients, washed and cooked and cared for two children and myself...

Ten months ago her hours at the hospital had been cut and the rent of her terrace house increased, and for two weeks she had fretted without telling me of her concern. When at last I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, I rashly escalated the terms of our relationship by suggesting that she move in with me. Until then she had always stipulated that I stay over at her place only twice a week, that she was not committed to me—and I had feared that my offer might frighten her away.

To my joy she had agreed, and moved in, and I had adapted myself to part-time family life, careful not to impose myself on Mina in any way, to maintain a distance with the girls, not wanting to be seen to be usurping her maternal authority. For months I had walked on egg-shells.

I had never asked her if, even without the financial necessity, she would have eventually moved in with me. She hated my analysis of our relationship, the stripping to basics of her motivations. From time to time it came to me that she was with me not through bonds of strong affection, but merely because I was, to put it crudely, a meal ticket.

On these occasions I told myself that I should be thankful that I had found someone whom I could love, and left it at that.

We finished the meal and drove home through a frosty, star-filled night. It was as if we had agreed tacitly not to mention Edwards and the Hall. Mina lay a hand on my leg and talked of work, but I was conscious of the weight of the book in my jacket pocket, waiting to be read, at once inviting and, for some reason I could not quite fathom, not a little threatening.

~

"
Vaughan Edwards manages to capture the tragic truth of the human condition in his timeless works of fiction..."

Graham Greene, cover quote for
A Summer's Promise
.

~

One month passed.

For some reason, I could not bring myself to read the Vaughan Edwards collection of stories I had borrowed from the White Lion. The book remained on my desk, unopened. From time to time I would pick it up, admire the Val Biro cover of a village scene with a Maypole as the centre-piece, and read the description of the stories on the inside flap, and the scant biographical paragraph on the back. But I felt a strange reluctance to begin the book.

I wondered if, subconsciously, I identified Vaughan Edwards and his books with Mina's uneasiness at Edgecoombe Hall that day. That weak core of my being, insecure in our relationship, was eager to appease Mina in whichever way possible—even if that meant not reading
The Tall Ghost and other stories
.

How Mina would have laughed at my tortured self-analysis!

However, as the weeks since Edgecoombe Hall elapsed, our relationship seemed to take on a new dimension, become deeper and more fulfilling. Mina did not go so far as to profess her undying love for me, but she did become more affectionate. Our love-making—never breathlessly passionate—increased in regularity and scope: it seemed that suddenly we each learned more of the other's desires, and adapted accordingly. As ever, these things went unspoken between us. Mina was a great believer that things should happen of their own accord, intuitively, an attitude which I—forever needing to question and analyse—found maddening. I bit my tongue, however. The last thing I wanted was to anger her by asking how she thought our relationship might be progressing.

A month after Edgecoombe Hall, it came to me that my reluctance to read the collection was nothing more than groundless insecurity. I looked back at my self-censorship and something in me, forever critical of my behaviour, mocked such feeble-mindedness.

I began the book when Mina was working a night-shift. While a wind keened around the cottage, rattling the windows in their frames, I lay on the sofa and immersed myself in Vaughan Edwards' singular visions.

The stories, written in the late forties and fifties and first published in magazines as diverse as
Lilliput
and the American
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, were, if anything, even stranger than his novels. They comprised routine ghost stories, eerie fantasy tales set in the far future and the distant past, and two tales quite unclassifiable. These stories I found the most compelling. They told of visitors to Earth—though from where they came was never disclosed—their relations with lonely human beings, their perceptions of each other, and their attempts at conveying a sense of their separate realities. The impossibility of ever wholly comprehending an alien's viewpoint made for frustrating, if occasionally intriguing, reading. I finished the book in the early hours of the morning, convinced that I had been granted a privileged glimpse into the brilliant, if tortured, psyche of a fellow human being.

That morning we remained in bed until eleven, made love, and then lay in each others arms. The harsh summons of the telephone propelled Mina to her feet. I watched her stalk around the bed and retrieve her dressing-gown from the back of the door. Short and heavy-breasted, she reminded me of the Earth-goddess figurines of the Palaeolithic period, full-bodied idols of fertility.

While she spoke on the phone—it was her sister, arranging a drink for that night—I stared at the ceiling and wondered whether to tell her that I was planning another trip to Highdale. I would return the two books we had borrowed, and ask if I could take the remaining Edwards if I left a monetary deposit.

Mina came back, shed her dressing-gown and slipped into bed beside me, gloriously naked. She slung a leg over my hip and told me that she was seeing Liz that night at the Fleece.

She met her sister perhaps once a week for a customary four halves of cider, and each time she left the house I could not help but experience an involuntary and wholly unwarranted pang of jealousy. Mina lived up to the archetype of a nurse in her extrovert ability to engage socially with all and everybody; men found her not only physically attractive, but open and approachable. She was popular, and outgoing, and the immature child in me, like a boy who demands his mother's total attention, bridled at the fact of her sociability.

Of course, I hated myself for this... And, of course, I had never mentioned it to Mina.

She had once, months ago, told me that she could never feel jealous. When I expressed disbelief, she quoted an instance. When she was leaving her husband he, in a bid to make her jealous and win her back, made it obvious that he was seeing another woman. She said she had felt nothing, other than relief that it made her decision to leave him all the more clear cut.

I refrained from pointing out to her that of course she would not feel jealous of someone who, by that point, she had come to hate.

Now I held her to me and let slip, quite casually, that the following day I intended to drive up to Highdale.

She pulled away to get a better look at me. "You're not going to look around that house again, are you?"

I shook my head. "I want to collect the remaining Edwards books I haven't read."

"You can only take two at a time, remember?"

I laughed. "It isn't a lending library. I'll leave him a deposit and take the lot."

She regarded me. "You really like his stuff, don't you?"

"It's magical."

"I don't like it, Daniel. There's something... I don't know, not exactly creepy..." She stopped and stared at the ceiling. "There's some quality about his books that frightens me. Perhaps it's just that I like certainty. I like to know that everything has its place. With his stories, his reality is off-centre, skewed." She shivered. "Enough of Vaughan Edwards. Aren't you getting up today?"

"Not working," I yawned.

"No?" She looked at me, concerned. "You haven't worked for weeks."

Getting on for two months, to be precise. The creative urge had left me, and I had no pressing financial need to

commit another novelisation. A week earlier my agent had phoned, asking how the latest novel was shaping up. He said that, despite the fact that my publisher might be wary of looking at the next one, he was sure he could interest a senior editor at HarperCollins.

I had lied—the fantasy springing easily to my lips—that it was going okay, was still in the early stages; that, as he knew, I didn't like to talk about work in progress. I had replaced the receiver with a nagging sense of shame at the lie.

"When there's no bread on the table, Mina, then we'll worry, okay?"

She looked at me. "I'll make breakfast, Daniel."

As I lay in bed and listened to the blissful sound of domesticity going on in the kitchen, the sizzling of eggs, the perking of the coffee, I wondered about the next book, and my lack of desire to start it. Never before had I been pole-axed by such apathy, even in my twenties when I had written novel after bad novel with no hope of finding a publisher.

I told myself that the muse would return, one day, and went downstairs to join Mina for breakfast.

~

"I don't give a damn about things like facts in my novels. My books aren't about the factual, physical world. They're about what's in here. Critics may call my work old-fashioned and over-emotional, but I contend that our emotions are the only true barometer of our humanity
."

Vaughan Edwards, in a rare radio interview, BBC Third Programme, April 1959.

~

That afternoon, when I emerged from my study after doodling for a futile hour over the rewrite of a short story, Mina was kneeling on the rug before the fire, rump in the air. She had three books open on the floor, and was looking from one to the other, lost in concentration.

The girls were home from school, watching a noisy video on the TV in the kitchen.

Mina saw me and blinked, her face quite blank.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

I saw that the books she was studying were the E.V. Cunningham-Price and two of Vaughan Edwards' novels.

I moved to the kitchen and closed the door, diminishing the cartoon din.

"Daniel... This is strange."