Ten minutes later she opened the door again and handed me my folder. I looked through it quickly — all the stories appeared to be there. The pages were well thumbed, and some parts were underlined.
“He — er — he read them?”
Suddenly I felt as if I could knock this woman down and charge into his study, pull up a chair, and settle down to talk. As if she knew what I was thinking, she took a firmer stance in the doorway. She twirled her pencil between her slim fingers. “Yes. He did.”
I didn’t like the look in her eyes. My throat went dry. “And?”
She shook her head. “You don’t really want to write. . What you want is love. Go find yourself a beau. You’re so young, Miss Foxe. Go have a little fun.”
“Did Mr. Fox say that? Or is this coming from you?”
She looked down.
“It’s coming from me,” she told the floor.
“I want to talk to Mr. Fox,” I said.
I stepped towards the secretary, and she held her pencil out at eye level, in an unmistakably threatening gesture. The point was very sharp.
“What did Mr. Fox say?” I said. “Just tell me that and I’ll go.”
She didn’t answer, and I said, “Are you Mr. Fox?”
She laughed. “No.”
“You are, aren’t you? You’re Mr. Fox—” I caught sight of a bare passageway, a telephone on a stand, the receiver off the hook — I heard no dial tone. “You’re him.”
She frowned. “I’m not.”
“What did he say, then?”
“Wait.”
The door closed again. When it opened, the secretary was holding a lit taper. The flame cast her eyes into shadow.
“He said. .” She paused, and sighed. “He said I should do this.”
She touched the taper to the black folder, and it caught fire. She blew the taper out before the flame struck her fingers. But I didn’t let the folder go. The leather cover burned with a harsh sound like someone trying to hold back a cry between their teeth. Still I held the folder. I felt the skin on my fingers shrink. I watched words turn amber and float away.
I liked these stories. Katherine liked them. I’d worked hard on them.
There was so much smoke in my eyes.
But I held on.
Mary Foxe had known that it was more than a matter of snapping her fingers and having Mr. Fox change his ways — she’d known it would be difficult, but this was beyond all her expectations. She’d been asleep for days, in a four-poster bed in a dark blue room. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Her brain ached most of all. She’d felt terrible burning his stories, which she’d actually thought were rather good. She couldn’t have let Mr. Fox get away with beheading her, though. That was exactly the kind of behaviour she had set out to discourage. She was aware of a large clock ticking outside the bedroom door, but it didn’t wake her up. Mary was busy having a very long dream.
In her dream, she was a spinster. Fastidious, polite, and thirty-eight years old. Her features were plain and unremarkable — they had always been plain and unremarkable. She had been a dutiful daughter when her parents were alive, and now Dream-Mary lived in the attic of the house her parents had left her. The remainder of the house she had hoped to let to a family — but no family liked the idea of living there with her up in the attic like that. So Mary let the house below to a solicitor named Pizarsky. He was out all day — that was good. He was punctual with his rent — also good. In the evenings, however, he hosted parties that were exclusively attended by attractive young ladies who giggled for hours on end. That was tiresome.
Mary and Mr. Pizarsky kept their exchanges as brief as possible.
“Morning, Miss F.”
“Good morning, Mr. Pizarsky.”
“Here’s the rent, Miss F.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pizarsky.”
“Off home for Christmas now, Miss F.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Pizarsky.”
On Valentine’s Day, Dream-Mary bought herself a single red rose, then immediately ran back into the shop, confused and embarrassed, to return it.
Most days Dream-Mary stayed at her desk until sunset, working in the special quiet of the otherwise empty house, the settling of floorboards and the ticking of clocks. She wrote romance novels under the pen name Wendy Darling. Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty. They were in great demand, Mary’s novels. They were read-them-once-and-throw-them-away sort of books, really. And Mary had seen people doing just that, throwing her novels away, or very deliberately leaving them behind on park benches and bus seats once they had finished. She tried not to let it get her down. She didn’t like to brood. She kept a framed photograph of her parents on her desk, to remind herself of their story, which amazed her. They had fallen in love and kept it up far into old age; that was all. Her father was the hero in every story she wrote, and her mother was the heroine. They had been gone five years, but she brought them together again and again, thirty-five lines of cream-coloured foolscap folio at a time. And they never tired of finding each other, even when she was reduced, in the final chapters, to typing with just one finger, her little finger, jabbing out words until her hand curled up and could do no more. She completed a novel every other month and took August and December off.
It was Dream-Mary’s custom to read the local newspaper as she ate her evening meal in the dining corner of her attic. She read it thoroughly, without omitting a single paragraph or page. It was much more difficult to be alarmed by the events of a day that was almost over. After that she would go for a walk, to keep fit. And upon her return to her attic she would say a few phrases aloud, experimenting with a friendly tone of voice. She didn’t often socialise, but it was important to keep her hand in. She rehearsed small talk about the weather, and about children and the cost of living. From Mr. Pizarsky’s party below, a gramophone puffed jazz up at her like smoke rings until she stopped trying. She put on her nightgown, did her stretching exercises, applied cold cream to her face, and went to bed. Her days were pleasant and her mood was even.
One evening Mary went for her after-dinner walk as usual. She went through town, passing the tidy shop fronts, their signs beautifully lettered in glossy paint and print, striding over the mushy bank of sawdust outside the butcher’s. The entire neighbourhood was at home; wireless sets buzzed gently at her as she passed. Each house stood in its own square of garden, each garden with its own picket fence and its own garden gate. Not a curtain twitched. Mary climbed Murder Hill. It was a funny old hill. It started off as easily as walking on flat ground, and continued to seem flat, even after she had begun to feel short of breath. She looked down at all the chimney tops and picked lavender.
When she returned from her walk she found the house suspiciously quiet.
There was no rustling or giggling, no chiming of glassware to be heard anywhere in the house, she noticed. No party this evening. Mr. Pizarsky appeared, carrying a cake. It prickled with lit candles; at first glance there appeared to be hundreds of them. “Happy birthday, Miss Foxe,” he said, smiling warily.
He was right. It was her birthday. Dream-Mary thought she might be sick. “Mr. Pizarsky,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.” It was meant to sound light-hearted, but it didn’t.
He looked crestfallen. “You don’t like cake.”
“No, I do. How did you know it was my birthday?”
In the kitchen, Mr. Pizarsky carefully dropped his burden onto the table. He stared at the candle flames. They both did. It seemed rude to look at each other just then.