Writer's Life (7 page)

"Great," Mina said, "but does he pay?"

"Trust your grubby little mind to think of nothing but filthy lucre. As a matter of fact," I went on, "he does."

That stirred her interest. "More Thai banquets?" she said.

"Hardly. He's offering me a tenner per book."

"That's not much."

"About what a small literary magazine can stretch to. I get thirty from the Post. The London periodicals usually pay fifty or so, but not some small-press imprint based in Whitby."

I picked up the books. They were handsome first editions by a writer I'd never heard of, Ed Cunningham.

In retrospect, I was surprised the alarm bells didn't start ringing—but at the time I was oblivious to the tenuous connection.

Mina glanced across at me. "You will review them, won't you?"

"Of course. I've got to keep you in Thai food, haven't I?"

Mina began work at ten, and after driving her to the hospital I brewed myself a coffee, lay on the sofa before the fire, and began reading
Sundered Worlds
by Ed Cunningham.

How to describe the shock of recognition, and the subsequent turmoil of emotions, that passed through my head as I read?

My pulse throbbed at my temple. My mouth ran suddenly dry and I felt light-headed.

Ed Cunningham...

I read on, my hands trembling.

Sundered Worlds
was about a soldier invalided out of the army at the end of the First World War, and his fight to regain his physical and mental well-being at a sanatorium high in the Yorkshire Dales. There he met and fell in love with a young girl who, by the end of the novel, is revealed as the spirit of a girl murdered by Roundhead soldiers in the Civil War nearly three hundred years ago.

Lines and turns of phrase echoed those in the works of E.V. Cunningham-Price and Vaughan Edwards.

A minor character in
Sundered Worlds
was none other than the central character in Cunningham-Price's
The White Lodge
.

Description of the Yorkshire landscape eerily mirrored those of the earlier writers.

I finished the first book in three hours, and began the second,
Winter Harvest
.

Again and again: repeated lines, familiar characters, themes in common with the earlier books...

I read about the author on the back flap. There was no photograph, and the merest biographical information. Ed Cunningham was in his thirties and lived in the North Yorkshire town of Whitby.
Winter Harvest
was his second book. His first,
Sundered Worlds
, was now out in paperback.

I lay the books aside and stared into space, my mind dizzy with the impossible.

~

God knows, there are times when my existence, what is happening to me, is more than I can humanly bear... and I desire nothing more than the balm of oblivion!

From the personal journals of E.V. Cunningham-Price.

~

"Daniel, are you okay?" She stood in the doorway of the front room, staring at me.

It was eight o'clock. The house was silent, and in darkness. The girls were with Mina's ex-husband across town. I had no idea how long had passed since I had stopped reading.

She switched on the light and approached cautiously, as if at any second I might jump from the sofa and attack her.

"Daniel?"

I stared at her, shaking my head. I pointed to the books. "They're the same," I said. "I should have known. Ed Cunningham."

Mina sat beside me on the sofa and picked up the books.

"They contain lines and characters and descriptions from the other books," I said.

She looked at me. I could see the practical cogs of her mind spinning a reply. "So some hack discovered the plagiarism before you and he's doing his own take on it. It's all a big con."

"How did they know?"

She sighed. "How did
who
know?"

"Whoever sent the books. How did they know that I knew about Edwards and Cunningham?"

She reached out and ruffled my hair. "Haven't you ever heard of coincidence, Daniel?"

"Massive bloody coincidence," I said.

She pulled the editor's letter from one of the books, read it and then regarded me. "Daniel, this was written two days ago."

The course of her logic defeated me. I blinked. "So?"

"So... two days ago was April fool's day."

I shook my head, impressed, despite myself, by her dogged pragmatism. "Fact remains, how the bloody hell did they know?" I paused. "And it can't be a coincidence if it's an April fool's joke, can it?"

Touché. I saw her flinch.

A long silence came between us. Mina perched on the edge of the cushion, legs together, the letter open on her lap, her eyes downcast.

At last she said, "I'm sure there's some perfectly logical explanation, Daniel."

I wanted to hug her, to cherish her unfailing existential belief that was so much a part of her; at the same time I wanted to lash out at her in blind fury, angered by her inability to look beyond the mundane for fear of seeing something that might fill her with terror.

For a while, back in the darkness of the afternoon, my mind had glimpsed something that it had had no right to glimpse, and I was filled with a trembling fear of a myriad terrible possibilities.

"Daniel, I'm going to ring him."

"Who?"

"Who do you think?" she said, lifting the letter. "The editor of the magazine."

"Is there a number?"

She scanned the letter-heading. "Damn. No, but there's an address. I'll ring directory enquiries."

She hurried into the hall. I heard the low, reassuring sound of her voice as she spoke into the receiver.

She returned a minute later. "Strange. The magazine doesn't have a number."

She sat down beside me. I took the letter, read the address. "What's happening, Mina?"

She shook her head, brow drawn in furious thought. "It's a practical joke, Daniel. Or it's a coincidence. It's one or the other. It can't be anything else."

"Can't it?"

She snorted. "What else can it be?"

I was silent for a long time. At last I said, "Perhaps, just perhaps, E.V. Cunningham, Vaughan Edwards and Ed Cunningham are one and the same person."

She
tsk'd
in scornful disbelief.

"Think about it! There's no record of Cunningham-Price's death, Vaughan Edwards vanished, and now these turn up—books that bear a remarkable resemblance to the earlier novels-"

"Daniel," Mina pointed out with the sweet patience of a saint, "if he were still alive he'd be... good God, I don't know...
ancient
."

"At least a hundred and thirty, give or take," I said.

"Somehow, I don't think so."

I reread the address on the letter-heading.

"What?" Mina said, watching me.

"I'm going over there," I said. "I'll drop you off at the hospital tomorrow. Then I'll go over to Whitby, try to find out what's going on. According to the blurb, Ed Cunningham lives in Whitby-" I stopped.

"Daniel?"

"Perhaps this is his way of contacting me," I said.

Mina stared at me for a long time, and I relented.

"Or then again," I said, "perhaps it is one big practical joke."

I slept badly that night, and again and again reached out to touch Mina's reassuring warmth.

~

All we have, when all is said and done, for good or bad, is the constancy of our humanity.

From the novel
Summer in Ithaca
by Daniel Ellis.

~

The following day at ten I dropped Mina off at the hospital.

She had been quiet for the duration of the drive, but before she climbed from the car she gave me an unaccustomed peck on the cheek and said, "I hope you find the joker, Daniel. Take care, okay?"

I nodded and drove away.

Bright sunlight alternated with silvery showers as I took the long, high road over the North Yorkshire moors towards Whitby. I considered the events of the past few months, the strange occurrences at the Hall, the odd plagiarism that now connected three writers spanning as many centuries. I told myself that I had always kept an open mind as regards phenomenon considered... let's say...
bizarre
, but now I felt that I was fast approaching someone who might be able to answer some of my many questions, and quite frankly I was more than a little apprehensive.

The sky over the North sea was as leaden as the ocean itself as I came to the crest of the road and looked down on the bay and the tumbling town of Whitby. The sun was concealed behind a bank of cloud the colour of old bruises; the scene was drear and inhospitable, and I could well imagine why Bram Stoker had chosen as Dracula's point of arrival in England this grey and unprepossessing fishing port.

The address given on the note-paper was in the village of Throxton, a few miles north of Whitby on the coast road. I drove slowly, anxious now that the time had come to approach the man who had sent me the Cunningham books for review. He had signed himself as Gerald Melthem, the literary editor of
The Coastal Quarterly
.

What if Mina was right, and the whole affair was no more than a massive and unlikely coincidence? How might I explain myself to the editor then?

I decided to broach that eventuality if and when it occurred.

But if it were not a coincidence, then what might it be?

Throxton was a hamlet consisting of a dozen large houses strung out along the clifftop beside the coast road. I came upon Hapsley House quite by accident. I slowed and braked before the first big house in the village, intending to ask directions, and was surprised to read on a cross-section of tree-trunk, affixed to the gate, the title: Hapsley House.

The rain had abated, and the sun was out again. A mist hung over the road, and when I stepped from the car, my heart beating like a trip-hammer, I found that the afternoon was unseasonably mild.

I opened the gate and approached the front porch, only to be informed by a hand-written sign that visitors should call at the side entrance.

I walked around the tall, grey-stone building, past rhododendron bushes spangled with rain, and found the side door.

Before I rang, I heard the sound of a child's laughter emanating from the rear garden, and when I looked I saw, obscured by a stand of apple trees, the distant sight of a tall man in a white shirt, pushing a radiantly blonde girl in a swing. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and her uninhibited laughter, as it carried over the garden on the sea wind, brought suddenly to mind the long gone summers of my youth.

I remembered myself, and rang the bell.

Almost immediately the door was opened by a grey-haired woman dressed in the old-fashioned garb of a housekeeper or maid. She looked at me severely, as if unaccustomed to receiving callers.

"Can I help you?"

"I've come to see Mr Melthem."

She appeared unmoved, so I continued, "If you could tell him that Daniel Ellis wishes to see him."

She said, "Are you a writer?" as if admission to this might prove the open sesame.

I nodded. "Mr Melthem sent me some books to review."

"In that case do come in, Mr Ellis. Please, follow me."

She closed the door behind me and led the way up a narrow flight of stairs to a long room overlooking the sea. The lounge was stuffed with too much old-fashioned furniture, cabinets full of china, and an abundance of chintz.

"One moment while I inform Mr Melthem..." She left the room, and I moved to the window and stared out.

The tall man—I would guess that he was in his sixties—was leaning against the iron frame of the swing and talking to the girl. Even at this distance I was overcome with her Alice-like beauty; something in her laughing manner filled me with delight.

The housekeeper came into view in the garden beneath me and called to the man. He turned and looked up at the window where I stood, and involuntarily I took a backwards step so as to be out of sight.

When next I looked, the man was striding up the garden path towards the house, but of the young girl there was no sign.

A minute later I heard footsteps on the stairs, and the door opened suddenly.

He stood at the far end of the room for a second, lost in the shadows, as if assessing me. Then he strode forwards, his hand outstretched.

Closer to, I could see that he was much older than I had first assumed. Though he held himself stiffly upright with an almost military correctitude, the skin of his face and hands had the tissue-thin, translucent quality of great age.

I reached out to take his hand, my own trembling. I recalled the dream I had had, several months ago, of meeting a writer in an ancient library—and how I had been convinced, upon awakening, that the writer had been Vaughan Edwards.

The man before me bore an uncanny resemblance to the hazy figure in my dream...

"Mr Ellis," he said warmly. "Please, take a seat." He indicated a wicker chair beside the window and took one positioned opposite, a wicker table between us.

The housekeeper appeared at the door, and Melthem asked me, "A drink? Tea, coffee?"

"Tea, black," I said.

The old man said, "I have enjoyed your novels, Mr Ellis. They embody a spirit, let's say an attitude of mind, not often found in these modern times."

I shrugged, at a loss. I always find flattery, on the infrequent occasion it was directed my way, more difficult to handle than criticism.

"That's kind of you. I try to write what I find most important to me."

He sighed. "Don't we all, Mr Ellis?" he said.

"You write yourself?" I asked, idiotically.

His reply was interrupted by the arrival of the housekeeper with our tea. Melthem poured the Earl Grey into two improbably delicate china cups.

I took mine on a saucer, the china chattering a quick signal of my nervousness.

Only then did I notice, on the table between us, a slim book. It was the collection of Vaughan Edwards' short stories—
Improbable Visions
—that I had yet to read.

I wondered if Mina would call this a coincidence, too?

My vision misted and my head reeled. I thought, for a second, that I was about to collapse. The feeling passed. I sipped my tea.