‘Have you decided on a name for this new girl yet, Lady Margaret?’
‘No. Must I?’
‘I can always put it in later.’
‘I suppose I’d better or I shan’t start thinking about her properly. Let’s have a look at the file.’
‘I’ve got them all on the processor now.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have bought that bloody thing.’
It was what they call a mini-computer, in fact. Its chief function was supposed to be to keep track of the Cheadle accounts, if ever I and the accountants succeeded in agreeing how we wanted them kept. Meanwhile Maxine had taken it over. I went and stood behind her shoulder and watched the names ladder up the screen.
‘Tara Faithfull,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s called Tara Faithfull, even in a romantic novel. Or Prudence Hastie.’
‘I think Tara Faithfull’s lovely. I can sort of see her already.’
‘Long raven hair with highlights like dark fire? Smoky voice? Slender fingers?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Not on your life, Maxine. I’m not that sort of writer. Almost, but not quite. I see this one as an Isobel, I think.’
‘You had an Isobel Grandison in Dark Pinnacles, only three back.’
‘I thought she sounded familiar. What’ve I called the last few hussies, do you remember?’
‘I’ve got them too. Just a sec.’
She poked at the keyboard. The screen blanked. New names appeared. They were accompanied this time by columns of attributes, height, hair-colour and so on. She’d really been playing with her toy while she had it. I seemed to have been alternating talls with shorts. No redheads, I was glad to see.
‘What does “Chuckles” mean, for heaven’s sake?’ I said.
‘Deep soft chuckles, like a man’s.’
‘Three of them?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’
‘Of course not. Dear God! I seem to be that sort of writer after all.’
‘You don’t have to decide about a name if you don’t want to. It’s so easy now. You can call her Ann Brown and when you’ve made up your mind I can just tell the machine to go through and change it. No sweat, honest.’
‘The trouble, my dear Maxine, is that I shall write differently about a girl called Ann Brown from a girl . . . one moment! Do you mean to say that suppose I’d made the current hussy a chuckler and then you pointed out I was getting into a rut I could tell you to give her a silvery gurgle and hey presto, she gurgles?’
‘Oh. Well, not quite like that. I mean you might have made a footman chuckle, or someone. I could tell it to find all the chuckles, though, and then tell it which ones to change.’
‘Really? This opens . . . No, don’t let’s let it open. I invariably get sick of a girl around Chapter Ten. I start happily off with some flaxen-haired romp of a Gibson Girl but by then I’m yearning for a lissom and consumptive brunette. Would your toy do that for me?’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you, Lady Margaret?’
Maxine is perhaps my most dedicated reader, against stiff competition. She sometimes seems to me to know all my books by heart. She came to Cheadle in a coach-party in the hope of meeting me and asking me for a job. When she didn’t she camped, metaphorically, on my doorstep, like some Indian would-be servant, until in an emergency I took her on for a fortnight, thinking that at least I’d be able to pay her less than an agency girl. She’s stayed two years now. Her devotion seems entirely uncritical. No book is better or worse than another, because the question does not arise, any more than it arises with episodes of real life.
‘Joking?’ I said. ‘Please God, yes.’
One’s personality is laid down in layers, like a landscape. Placid lives are like old lake-beds, sedimentary stratifications each scarcely different from the one below. Others, if one dug down, would show evidence of the long-ago upheavals that cause the rumplings of the surface under today’s thin turf. And in most lives there are outcrops, barely changed beyond a little weathering, persisting through all the sediments, still there.
For thirty years, winter and summer, I have risen at six and gone upstairs to write until breakfast. These words are leaping into existence letter by letter at twelve minutes past seven on a yellow September morning in what used to be the housekeeper’s bedroom in the top passage of the West Wing. The house at this hour is almost empty, and seems emptier since all Mark’s clothes went from his cupboard, though Simon and Terry are still here after the summer. Sally is in Sri Lanka. Maxine is in her own room, very likely with John Nightingale, the assistant gardener. I no longer try to keep track of Maxine’s affairs, but am still amazed by her ability to attract presentable young men and later get rid of them with, as far as I can see, no fuss at all. She seems to run her love-life with the same down-to-earth practicality with which she runs my office. This room, by the way, is not my office. It is the place where I write. I do not remember choosing it deliberately for being the same size as my living-room in Dolphin Square and for looking out over a well of the building; it is not in other ways very like, nor can I smell the Thames. But it is now necessary, just as this hour is necessary. Now as then I am too busy at other times of the day. Necessary in another sense too. I cannot imagine this part of me functioning anywhere else. Granite protruding through the strata.
The morning after Ronnie’s telephone call was a peculiarly bad one. Naturally I have bad days, not only when I have influenza coming on, but I have trained myself to slog through them. I imagine that on a real treadmill rhythm is vital, the work is only tolerable if you and your fellow-slaves keep it groaning round at an even pace. I do not like to write rubbish but I would sooner do that than let the treadmill stop. That morning I wrote nothing at all. Superficially I spent it trying to decide whether the new girl was tall or short, plump or skinny, quick-tempered or placid. Usually these things accrete and stick to a few early and almost random decisions, building up to a coherent character, but one has to make the random decisions and then stick to them. I couldn’t.
It was not as though it yet mattered. The important thing was to get the girl on to a boat for South Africa, where she was going to hire a laconic and embittered white hunter and start looking for her brother, missing since ‘the Boer War. There was also the business of the cousin, apparently in love with the girl and doing everything to help her, but in fact using his connections in the Colonial Office to thwart her efforts so that he could inherit. It had all seemed reasonably promising in a run-of-the-treadmill way, quite interesting enough in its own right to publish under my name and not as a Mary Mason, for which I would have had to hot up the affair with the hunter. There was almost no research to do—after thirty years I know the surface details of my period better than most professional scholars. Six months should see it through, one more step on the groaning wheel that helps to keep this house in being.
The wheel stuck. Jammed tight. No give at all.
Interviewers, patronising to varying degrees, tend to ask whether I actually believe in the people I invent. Usually I open my eyes very wide and speak with practised sweetness about how real they seem to me. Occasionally with an interviewer both intelligent and understanding (not at all the same thing) I feel impelled to greater candour. I write much better than average romantic novels, I say, with a big and loyal readership, and that means that readers must be aware that I am not simply exploiting them. They find my characters real because I, while writing, hypnotise myself into a similar belief. There are passages—the hot bits in the Mary Masons, for example—which are written with little enthusiasm. The reason this does not show is that similar parts of books by my competitors are; I’m sure, also inserted without any real gusto in response to a publishing fashion as tiresome (and let us hope as transient) as the hideous beehive hats at the end of my period. When I consider the difficulty of writing about something like Maxine’s actual love-life I am thankful for the set of wooden conventions that have evolved to cope with the problem in books like mine.