But mostly I have to believe. It may be easier for me because I can start by believing in the world I write about. In some ways the twenty years before the First World War have become more real to me than the period in which I find myself living. I am mentally at home there, relaxed and happy. By comparison my life in the last thirty years has been one of almost constant struggle, a long defensive war for a cause that must be doomed in the end but not, thanks to my efforts, in my lifetime. The giants of my childhood—my great-great-uncle, Nanny Bassett, my mother—behaved and thought as though they still inhabited that earlier world, as though Cheadle could be maintained as a fortress loyal to the past while the present raged and ruined outside its walls. Wheatstone, who died less than three years ago, had come to Cheadle as an underfootman on getting his discharge from the Boer War. (He was invaluable to me to the end. My ‘Historical Consultant’. I got his funeral as a tax-allowable expense by hiring black-plumed horses and having it filmed for publicity purposes.) In fact my heroines are seldom born into houses like Cheadle, but I am convinced that my emotional grasp of what Cheadle was like towards the end of its heyday allows me an imaginative entrée into the reality of other possible lives of the period. My heroines are not fantasy versions of myself. You could say that my heroes are more likely to be that.
It happened that this new girl, because of the plot about the cousin and the inheritance, needed to come from a family of some wealth. Still, she was not going to be any possible version of myself. She had to be a horsewoman for a start, which I have never been. Or . . . yes, almost as I’d said yesterday, she could start as consumptive, doomed by the doctors. I’d never had a consumptive as a main character, surely, though I’d killed a few minor characters off with the scourge. Yes, she determines to spend her last few months finding her brother, but then the good sun, the open-air life on the veldt . . . really, it was extremely promising.
In desperation I began to rewrite yesterday morning’s stint, replacing horses with physicians. The wheel would not move. The day-bed was there, the view through the shaded windows to the croquet lawn, the telegraph boy bicycling up the curve of the drive, but no one lay on the stupid bed. No name was on the buff envelope. It was all Maxine’s fault. I would have to get rid of that stupid machine.
Or was it Ronnie’s?
I was not aware of having thought about his call, though I had a vague idea that I might have dreamed of something to do with Night and Day. I seldom remember dreams, unless they are nightmares that wake me in mid-story. Perhaps it would be wiser to put Ronnie off. I did not wish to think in detail about thirty years ago. I could manage two lives, one in the period of my books and one in the here and now. A third might be a disaster. The extreme, unrepeatable happiness of those ten months in 1952 and 1953 was better left down among the sediments. I was too busy in my other lives for that kind of day-dreaming. It was safer for it to stay where it belonged, in the night-dreams. But I had said I would see Ronnie and somehow the way in which I had agreed had seemed to involve a different level of promise from, say, the appointments with the man from Burroughs. I would think less of myself if I cancelled.
Having determined not to day-dream, inevitably I began. I was actually on my feet, standing by the window, running my fingertips vaguely down the bobbly old wallpaper and thinking about the room in Dolphin Square where I began my real writing, when I heard a faint but definite movement from the corridor. I stood still. At first I thought it was the East Wing Ghost. You never see him. He just moves around, muttering in what we think is Old Dutch, and opening and closing doors. There is something comic about him. I mean this literally. Strangers who have chanced on him have never been frightened but have often mentioned a sudden impulse to laugh. What was he doing over here? And comedy was far from what I felt at the sound. Footsteps and a slithering, trailing whisper.
I crossed the room and opened the door slowly.
My mother was shuffling towards me. She had contrived to get one arm into her dressing-gown and then had given up, so that it was trailing along behind her. As usual since her stroke her head was tilted sideways, but her mouth was not hanging open. She held in front of her, as though it was the purpose of her visit, one of the small towels we use for wiping the dribbles from her face. I was appalled to see her. How on earth had she managed the stairs? Was she going to start wandering round the house at odd hours? She might have slipped and broken her neck. Oh, but if only she had!
‘Mummy, darling,’ I said in the calm, amused voice I have trained myself to use, ‘what are you up to? It’s not breakfast for an hour yet.’
She looked at me with her old sharp arrogance, but with no apparent recognition, and came shambling on. I moved to meet her, intending to turn her gently in her tracks and lead her back to bed, but she tugged her arm determinedly free of my grip and pushed on into the room. I dare say I could have had my way with a struggle, though she is still surprisingly strong—the apparent feebleness of her movements is misleading, the result, according to Dr Jackson, of lack of confidence in her own motor control. I followed her in, mysteriously relieved to have a tangible reason for not being able to do my work.
‘I just came up to make sure you were all right, Mabs, darling,’ she said.
It was her old voice, perfectly clear, but slowed. She had not spoken to me but to the room. Now she faltered, apparently perceiving that it was empty. She shuffled to my desk, pushed at the chair, patted my typewriter. Being electric it responded by printing a few meaningless letters. She nodded approvingly, then turned and looked at me.
‘Where is . . . ?’ she began.
Her eyes dulled. Her mouth dragged open.
‘Urrh? . . . Urrh?’ she mumbled.
It was the same question. Where was Mabs? Where was the child she had borne and trained, and fought for, to take Cheadle over and keep it going, and to bear and train and fight for another child to do the same in its turn?
I guessed what had happened. Long ago, when I had first come back to Cheadle to live, and get ready to take up the responsibilities of my inheritance, my mother had deeply resented the two early-morning hours in which I lived a life beyond her grasp. Her attack had not of course been direct, but had consisted of excuses for interruptions, getting up earlier than she ever used to, for instance, and losing some essential article of clothing and then coming up to try and make me help her find it. My first permanent victory over her had been to make her stop, to keep my two hours mine, untouchable:
Over the years her attitude changed, partly because like many strong-willed people she was capable of thinking her defeats into victories, of altering the past so that what had happened became what she had decided would happen; partly also because she began to realise how my books were contributing to Cheadle; also because she read and enjoyed them, though she can hardly have read a book before in her life. (Mark used to say that the real reason for my success in my genre is that I have all the time been unconsciously striving to win her affection and approval. This may be true. I hope there is more to it than that.) Over the years too she must have grown used to the sound of my typewriter, as regular as the birds’ dawn chorus. Her room is not directly below my writing room, but only the opposite side of the corridor on the floor below, and the machine is ‘silent’, not silent. She may never have heard it more than subliminally, but this morning she must have missed it. The erratic connections of her brain had functioned after their fashion—indeed the momentary clarity of her speech showed that something remarkable of that kind must have happened. She had come to see why the noise was not there. What was wrong? Where was Mabs, her Mabs? Once, almost, Mabs had escaped, ceased to be hers. Had it happened again? Was she going to have to track her down, bring her home, all over again?