After nailing three puzzles, he kills the screen and turns to a pile of small boxes delivered last week. He slits the tape on the first, and lifts out the bubble-wrapped treasure: an anemometer destined for his chimney pot. Then he pauses. This is how Natalie would expect him to spend the day — fiddling with his gadgets — but he’ll surprise her and do something useful. His searching gaze falls on the cupboard where they keep their paperwork — Dan has had only partial success in his mission to eradicate paper — and into which an array of bric-a-brac has been crammed to keep it out of sight. It’s a mess. He starts to pull the contents out onto the floor.
James F. Saunders was runner-up in the university poetry competition in his second year at York. His poem, ‘Every hour, on the hour’, about Becks and all the little associations that summoned her memory, evoked such fierce melancholy that readers assumed he was bereaved. It seemed a promising start. Becks, to his knowledge, never read it.
Disappointments followed, but another little gust of hope arrived two years later in the shape of his agent, Martin — the only person who has ever believed in him. Martin was not computer literate and struggled with electronic submissions, but nevertheless achieved some tantalising near misses with James’ unfinished avant-garde novel, The Cormorant. So he said. Unfortunately, Martin died four years ago.
Suicide has always been a mere fantasy, a recurring frisson of dread, no more than a thought experiment for so many reasons. But recently James forgot what those reasons were, and became afraid of the sea, the long autumn nights and the voluptuously humped cliffs. London was a concentrated dose of humanity: cut with nasty chemicals, no doubt, and causing unknown side effects, but worth taking as a last resort. He did find grim satisfaction in its misspent riches, in its misery and filth, in lives even more wasted than his own — but grim satisfaction wasn’t going to be enough. He vaguely remembers hearing the end of the world — or at least the end of his world — galloping towards him on a tube train. It was that self-satisfied wanker Walley who saved him, by leading him to Brenda. Chainsaw Brenda is only a connection — a human soul he doesn’t instantly despise — but a connection was apparently all he needed to sidestep a crash that had seemed inevitable. And to invoke Project Q.
It wasn’t difficult to track her down. He has no internet access in his room, but during the summer he successfully campaigned for the Merry Ladies’ tearoom to install Wi-Fi. The proprietors ignored the suggestion when it came direct from him, but when he persuaded a few proper locals to ask for it, each separately and apparently unprompted, the old biddies surrendered. James’ weekly trips to Whitby Library, by bus or occasionally on foot, are now solely for the quaint purpose of borrowing books.
The grid reference led him, on his return last week, to the village of Invergarry, right in the heart of the Highlands and adjacent to a large swathe of the National Forest Estate. A few phone calls later, he struck lucky and was told that Brenda Vickers was off sick — wearily, as though this was habitual — and would he like to leave a message? She hadn’t seemed sick to him. Or maybe she had. ‘Yes. Tell her James called. Do you mind if I leave a number?’
The following day, a cold, sunny Wednesday, two good things happened. Brenda called him back, and, later in the evening, he had the idea for the novel. Not exactly a new idea, but a new way to unite old ideas. He was surprised by the sudden urge to tell her about it, and the opposing intuition that he should keep these cards close and tell no one. Was this momentary sense of conflict the point of conception? Had it really come at last? He had been burnt out, a charred log in the grate, a hunk of inert material in a bed of ashes. Did meeting Brenda turn him over? Were ideas coming out of him like foretokening smoke, and was he about to burst into flames?
Now it is Saturday, the day of beginning. James F. Saunders, a bitter and solitary man who has never fallen in love — unless you count harried Miss Morley from Year 3, or the determined blue-haired chugger in Scarborough last summer with the smile calculated and destined to break his heart, or Becks, who finally finished with James when he announced his absolute disbelief in love at her twenty-first birthday dinner — is writing a great novel about it. About love, so-called.
Natalie, still in the hospital ward but now sitting in an enormous chair apparently designed for the morbidly obese, tries to read. ‘Which books?’ Dan asked, yesterday. ‘Whichever ones you think I’ll enjoy,’ she replied, to his obvious annoyance. Their reading choices rarely overlap, so it was indeed a sort of test.
This morning he pulled a hefty tome from his rucksack and presented it with a flourish. ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Omnibus edition.’ She hadn’t intended a tone quite so cutting.
‘I thought maybe you’d like something funny,’ he said defensively, ‘to cheer you up.’
‘Comedy sci-fi’s not really my thing, is it?’
‘Well, I brought you these as well.’ An Iris Murdoch she’d read before — he’d no doubt thought a female author a good bet — and a grim-looking Zola. Parisian squalor. Bit of escapism.
‘Quite a selection. How will I ever choose?’
Dan doesn’t read fiction. Natalie, Dan would point out, doesn’t read fact.‘I tried,’ he muttered.
She smiled and squeezed his hand. ‘I know — thanks. I think I will try the Hitchhiker’s.’
She has now confirmed that it absolutely isn’t her thing, and flops it heavily back onto the table. She listens to the hospital sounds: brisk sweep of a privacy curtain; bang of a trolley against a yielding door; steady, determined crutching down an unseen corridor; gentle medley of coughs and beeps. Ostensibly peaceful. But there is that faint aura of dread, a sense that dehumanising horrors are enacted here behind closed doors. She’ll be glad to get out.
She and Dan have been together for ten years, and married for six. Should he be able to choose a book for her by now? Probably. But she has always thought of their personalities as complementary rather than two peas in a pod. Their first conversation, in a Sheffield University courtyard, was prompted by Dan overhearing her correct a friend’s misidentification of a swift as a swallow. But while Dan knew about birds from studying his field guides with nerdish fascination, Nat knew because she’d grown up on a farm where such things were not of any special interest but merely taken for granted: Dan had not, after all, found a birding ally.
Nerdy is not the worst thing a husband can be, not by a long chalk. And what’s done is done — love the one you’re with. They do like the same music, even though Dan sings like a donkey.
James F. Saunders has written an opening paragraph. He has tried to harness something of the daring, contradictory brilliance of Montaigne’s opening, in which the essayist explains why his book is not worth reading and bids his misguided reader a friendly but abrupt farewell. James imagines a publisher encountering such a sentiment in the slush pile: ‘Don’t bother reading this self-indulgent mind-wank.’ You’d have to read on, at least a page or two, wouldn’t you?