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10. EIGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

The words in Nancy’s manuscript did not break me. They made my heart race, they stirred me up, but they did not break me. When I’d read A Special Kind of Friend, written by the young Nancy, I had heard her voice so clearly and it had made me weep. Now, with this later work, her last work, I heard her just as clearly, but as the mature woman I had been married to for over forty years. As the woman I had cared for when she was dying: washed, read to, fed, comforted as best I could. I had not expected to find this woman in print, but there she was. I had given up on writing but she had not. And, after spending time with her book, after reading it over and over, her words, which at first had unsettled me, gradually settled down within me, finding little nooks and crannies where they made themselves comfortable, until I trusted them, and they trusted me.

I came to understand that Nancy wanted me to find her manuscript, just as she had wanted me to find the photographs. She had hidden them in places where she knew, eventually, I would come across them. She could have destroyed them, but she chose not to. She was waiting until I was ready and I hadn’t been ready during her lifetime. I needed time with them on my own. Nancy’s manuscript churned me up, shook me about and sparked some life back into me. It reminded me of something Nancy and I had always agreed on: fiction is the best way to clear one’s head.

It had been such a long time since I had put words down on paper and this was the first time I had done it without Nancy being there — she has always been my motivation. Doubts I’d had in the past, questions I’d tormented myself with, vanished because I knew why this book had to be written and I was in no doubt who it was for.

I turned my desk towards the window so I looked out on to the house opposite and could see the comings and goings of the young family who lived there. Off to school in the morning, mum coming back in the afternoon with the children. Their day was a useful shape for me, it reflected the shape I’d had all those years ago when Nancy would leave for school with Jonathan and then return with him at teatime, and I would finish my last sentence of the day.

I had put the photographs out of sight in my desk drawer but they were at the heart of the story so I took them out and pinned them to the window frame. They formed a collage of sex and deceit, a kind of mood board. Every time I watched that young family coming in or out of their house I was reminded, by the frame through which I viewed them, of how innocence is so easily corrupted. It kept me focused.

I didn’t rush it, I spent months copying out Nancy’s manuscript into my own hand. I wanted to know how she had felt when she constructed those sentences; I wanted to get into her head, to see what she had seen when the words appeared on the page. I wrote by hand because I needed to feel the shape of each letter; for my skin to make contact with the paper and feel its smoothness as my hand moved from left to right, slithering across the page. There could be no distance between me and it. Skin, pen, paper, skin — I wanted them to become one. I took as long as I could and enjoyed the rhythm of the words, digesting every one. There were moments when I felt a sentence could be improved on, but I didn’t stop to make corrections at this point, I pressed on, telling myself that only when I had reached the end would I allow myself to look back, like a climber approaching the summit. Don’t look down.

I remembered how Nancy and I had laughed at writers who made the preposterous claim that they had been possessed by their characters, that it had felt to them as if their book had written itself. For me, at least, this was true. I saw the characters leap from the page, alive, fully formed. Fleshed out and breathing. My hand, slippery yet firm, ejaculating the words as they flowed from Nancy into me.

The experience was life giving, opening the door for Nancy to come back to me, her gentle, loving presence returning to our home. At the end of each day’s writing, when my hand ached from it, I made myself tea and toast and read aloud to her, as if she were sitting in her old chair opposite me.

And then, when I was finally satisfied, I typed it up. Bang, bang, bang went my fingers, nailing each word to the page. And then it was done. How long did it take? From beginning to end? I spent a year with Nancy’s manuscript, copying it out, but the real beginning of course was years ago, I just hadn’t recognised it then. I felt Nancy smiling at me, encouraging me on. She always said that one day my writing would break through.