Killing the Shadows

TWENTY-TWO

Georgia Lester sat at the kitchen table, hands cradling a china cup of weak Earl Grey tea, staring unseeingly down past autumn-bedraggled herbaceous borders to the skeleton apple trees at the bottom of her cottage garden. She didn’t register the perennials that were due to be cut back, the roses that would be pruned when next the gardener came. That was neither her interest nor her job. She only ever noticed the garden when it was beautiful. Ugliness she preferred to tune out. There was enough of that in her head without adding to it from outside.

What she enjoyed about her cottage was the peace. Being Georgia Lester was a tiring business. It was a constant effort to maintain the image of sophisticated beauty and elegance that the world expected from her. Of course, she had created that expectation herself, a conscious invention of a persona and style that would mark her out from the herd. But that didn’t make it any easier, and these days, whenever she looked in the mirror in the morning, it seemed as if the mountain was looming higher every day. Perhaps it was time for another visit to that charming man in Harley Street who had done such a good job with that loose skin around her jawline.

But here at the cottage, she could absolve herself from the need to maintain the facade. Well, she could when she was here alone, she amended, a sly smile of reminiscence lifting the corners of her mouth. A girl did need distraction now and again, and devoted as Anthony was, he couldn’t quite provide the stimulus of a taut young body with all the sexual energy that accompanied it. None of her flirtations lasted long, she made sure of that. Nor did they mean anything more to her than a kind of blood transfusion something necessary but somehow impersonal.

This weekend, however, Georgia had a different agenda. No dressing up for lovers, just working on her rewrites. Unlike most of the writers she knew, Georgia loved the revision process. It allowed her to step back from the nuts and bolts of getting her first draft on paper and focus on the quality of the writing itself. She’d established a reputation for finely crafted prose, and she always maintained that came from her attention to the detailed sentence-on-sentence shape of her book. She had three clear days of her favourite work ahead now, and she was looking forward to it.

Already, her mind was racing onwards to the section of the book she would be working on that day. The typescript was already sitting on her desk, next to the Mont Blanc Meisterst¨ck fountain pen she always used to make the revisions her secretary would later transfer to the computer. She wasn’t even going to bother dressing yet. She’d slob around in her fluffy dressing gown, hair hidden in a silk turban, until lunchtime. Then she’d soak in the bath while she listened to The World At One. A snack for lunch, then she’d have to venture out into Dorchester. There was plenty of food in the freezer, but she’d inexplicably run out of white wine, and dinner without a glass of chilled Chablis was unthinkable. She firmly believed that writers needed the discipline of routine. And that included the small pleasures of life as well as the habits of mind that made it possible for her to turn out a book a year.

Georgia finished her tea and poured a fresh cup. She planned to make the most of these three days. When they were over, she would be plunged into an author tour to promote her latest hardback. Thinking of it reminded her that she still hadn’t persuaded her publisher to foot the bill for the handsome bodyguard she’d hired before leaving London. She didn’t really think anyone was after her, in spite of her protestations to dear, sweet Kit that they should take those tiresome letters to the police. But she had no objections to cashing in on the possibility. It never hurt to keep one’s name firmly in the public eye. The notion that she was sufficiently significant a writer to attract the attention of a stalker would inevitably draw new readers to her, curious to discover what it was about her that was so special. And once drawn to her, Georgia was utterly convinced they would remain to devour her backlist in its entirety.

Thanks to astute planning like that, she had climbed to the top of the heap. She was well aware that her activities earned her disapproval from many of her fellows. It bothered her not a whit. They could pretend all they liked that they were too high-minded to stoop to her tactics. The reality was that they were jealous of the column inches she gathered.

Unaware that she was about to generate the greatest publicity of her career, Georgia sipped her tea and felt very, very contented.