Midnight All Day

Sucking Stones

Something to look forward to, that was what she wanted, however meagre. Every evening, when Marcia drove back from school through the suburban traffic, angry and listless, with a talking book on the cassette player and her son sitting in the back, she hoped she might have received a letter from a publisher or literary agent. Or there might be one from a theatre, if she had been attempting a play. She did, sometimes — quite often — receive ‘encouragement’. It cost nothing to give, but she cherished it.

As she opened the door, and her son Alec ran into the house to put the TV on, she found on the mat, handwritten in black ink on impressively formal grey card, a note from the famous writer, Aurelia Broughton. Marcia read it twice.

‘This is exciting‚’ she said to Alec. ‘You can look at it but don’t touch it.’ He was a pupil at the school where she taught seven-year-olds. She read it again. ‘Those swine in the writers’ group will be very interested. We’d better get going.’

Three years ago Marcia had had a story published in a small magazine of new writing. Last year an hour-long play of hers had been given a rehearsed performance in a local arts centre. It had been directed by an earnest, forceful young man who worked in advertising but loved the theatre.

Marcia had been dismayed by how little the actors resembled the people they were based on. One of the men even had a moustache. How carelessly the actors carried the play in a direction she hadn’t considered! After, there had been a debate in the bar. Several members of the writers’ group had come to support her. The young histrionic faces, handwaving, and passionate interruptions began to exhilarate her. It was her work they were arguing about!

The director took her to one side and said, ‘You must send this play to the National Theatre! They need new writers.’

He had forgotten that Marcia would be forty this year.

A couple of months later, when the play was returned, she didn’t open the envelope. She couldn’t see how to go on. She did sometimes feel like this, although it was more ominous now. She had been writing for ten years and had never given up hope. Her need for publication, and the pride it would bring, had grown more acute.

Recently she’d been writing in bed, sometimes for fifteen minutes. At other times she lasted only five. In the morning — oh, the wasted will and lost clarity of words in the morning! — she wrote standing up in her overcoat at the dining-room table, her school bag packed, as her son waited at the front door, juggling with tennis balls. This was the most she could do. At other times she wanted, badly, to harm herself. But self-mutilation was an inaccurate language. Scars couldn’t speak.

Marcia dropped the card in her bag along with her pens and the formidable sketchbook in which she made notes. She called them the ‘tools of her love’.

While Alec ate his tea, she phoned Sandor, her ‘boyfriend’ — though she had vowed not to speak to him — and told him about the postcard. He paid little attention to her enthusiasm; it wasn’t something he understood. But she couldn’t be discouraged.

They drove to her mother’s, ten minutes away. It was the plain, semi-detached house in which Marcia had grown up, where her mother lived alone.

She let Alec out and handed him his overnight bag.

‘Run to the door and ring the bell. I haven’t got time to stop.’

Marcia drove to the end of the quiet road in which she had ridden her bicycle as a child. She turned the car round and passed the house, hooting and accelerating as her mother hurried to the front gate in her flapping slippers, raising her hand as if to stop the car, with Alec standing behind her.

The members of the writers’ group were making tea and arranging their seats in the cold local hall where they met once a week. On other nights Scouts, Air Cadets and Trotskyists used it. Marcia had started the group by advertising in a local paper. Originally it was to be a reading circle; she thought more people would come. At the last minute she changed the ‘reading’ to ‘writing’. Two dozen poems, screenplays and a complete novel dropped through her letter box. It was not only she who wanted to put her side of things.

Twelve of them sat on hard chairs in a circle, and read to one another. During the past two years they had declaimed terrible confessions that elicited only silence and tears; dreams and fantasies; episodes of soap operas and, occasionally, there was some writing of fire and imagination, usually produced by Marcia.

The group was to have no official leader, though Marcia often found herself in that position. She enjoyed the admiration and even the spite and envy, which she considered ‘literary’. She always kept at least one author’s biography beside her bed, and was aware that writing was a contact sport. Marcia also liked to talk about writing and how creativity developed, as if it was a mystery that she would grasp one day. She knew that considering the relation between language and feeling, hearing the names of writers, and speaking of their affairs and rotten personal lives, was what she wanted to do.

She also felt it was an indulgence. Life wasn’t about doing what you wanted all day. But didn’t Aurelia Broughton do that?

The nurses, accountants, bookshop assistants and clerks who comprised the writers group — all, somehow, thwarted — were doing their best work. Every one of them had the belief, conviction, hope, that they could interest and engage someone else. They wrote when they could, during their lunch break, or in the spent hours late at night. Yet their spavined stories stumbled into an abyss, never leaping the electric distance between people. These ‘writers’ made crass mistakes and were astonished and sour when others in the group pointed them out. She didn’t believe she was such a fool; she couldn’t believe it. None of them did.

‘I grunt, I grunt. I grunt.’

Marcia put on her glasses and regarded the young man who had stood up to read, a waiter in the pizza restaurant in the High Street. He had come to the house and played with Alec. He was pretty, if not a little fey. He had a crush on Marcia. For a while, after reading some George Sand, she considered giving him a try. Before, he had cried if asked to read aloud. Marcia regretted persuading him to ‘share’ his work with them. You couldn’t tell how someone’s prose would sound by the look of them. This boy had been writing a long piece about a waiter in a pizza parlour attempting to give birth to a tapeworm growing inside his body. As the thick grey worm made its interminable muddy progress into the light, via the waiter’s rectum — and God had made the world more quickly — Marcia lowered her head and re-read Aurelia Broughton’s card.

At school two weeks ago, Marcia had seen in the newspaper that Aurelia Broughton was reading from her latest novel. It was that night. Spontaneously, but aware that she was ravenous for influence, she dropped Alec at her mother’s and drove to London. She parked on a yellow line, and obtained the last ticket. The room was full. People who had just left their offices were standing on the stairs. Students sat crosslegged on the floor. There was some random clapping and then a hush when Aurelia went to the lectern. At first she was nervous, but when she realised the audience was supporting her, she seemed to enter a trance; words poured from her.

After, there were many respectful questions from people who knew her work. Marcia wondered why they had come. What had made her come? Not only a longing for poetry and something sustaining. Perhaps, Marcia thought, she could locate the talent in Aurelia by looking at her. Was it in her eyes, hands or general bearing? Was talent intelligence, passion or a gift? Could it be developed? Looking at Aurelia had made Marcia consider the puzzle of why some people could do certain things and not others.

Aurelia had made an interesting remark. Marcia had sometimes thought of her own ability, such as it was, on the model of an old torch battery, as a force with a flickering intensity, which might run down altogether.

However, Aurelia had said, with grandiose finality, ‘Creativity is like sexual desire. It renews itself day by day.’ She went on, ‘I never stop having ideas. They stream from me. I can write for hours. Next morning I can’t wait to start again.’

Someone in the audience commented, ‘It’s something of an obsession, then.’

‘No, not an obsession. It is love‚’ said Aurelia.

The audience wanted a life transformed by art.

Marcia joined a queue to have Aurelia sign the costly hardback. The writer was surrounded by publicists and the shop staff, who opened and passed the books to her. Wearing jewellery, expensive clothes, and an extravagant silk scarf, Aurelia smiled and asked Marcia her name, putting an ‘e’ at the end instead of an ‘a’.

Marcia leaned across the table. ‘I’m a writer, too.’

‘The more of us the better‚’ Aurelia replied. ‘Good luck.’

‘I’ve written —’

Marcia tried to talk with Aurelia, but there were people behind, pushing forward with pens, questions, pieces of paper. An assistant manoeuvred her out of the way.

The next day, via Aurelia’s publisher, Marcia sent her the first chapter of her novel. She enclosed a letter telling of her struggle to understand certain things. Over the years she had tried to contact writers. Many had not replied; others said they were too busy to see her. Now Aurelia had written to invite her for tea. Aurelia would be the first proper writer she had met. She was a woman Marcia would be able to have vital and straightforward conversations with.

Today Marcia shook her head when asked if she had anything to read to the group. After, she didn’t go for a drink with the others but left immediately.

As she was getting into her car, the boy who’d written the tapeworm story ran up behind her.

‘Marcia, you said nothing. Are you enjoying the piece? Don’t be afraid of being ruthless.’

He was moving backwards even as he waited for her reply. She had been accused before, in the group, of being dismissive

contemptuous even. It was true that on a couple of occasions she had had to slip outside, she was laughing so much.

He said, ‘You seemed lost in thought.’

‘The school‚’ she said. ‘I’ll never get away.’

‘Sorry. I thought it might have been the worm.’

‘Worm?’

‘The story I read.’

She said, ‘I didn’t miss a grunt. It’s coming out, isn’t it, the piece. Coming out … well.’ She patted him on the shoulder and got into the car. ‘See you next week, probably.’

Her living-room floor was covered in toys. She remembered a friend saying how children forced you to live in squalor. In the corner of the room, the damp wall had started to crumble, leaving a layer of white powder on the carpet. The bookshelves, hammered carelessly into the alcoves by her incompetent husband, sagged in the middle and were pulling out of the bricks.

She wrote and told Aurelia that she was looking forward to seeing her at the appointed time.

With Aurelia’s card propped up against Aurelia’s novels and stories, Marcia started to write. She would visit Aurelia and take with her a good deal more of the novel. Aurelia was well connected; she could help her get it published.

Next morning Marcia rose at five and wrote in the cold house until seven. That night, when Alec went to bed, she put in another hour. Normally, whenever she had a good idea she would think of a good reason why it wasn’t a good idea. Her father’s enthusiasm and her mother’s helplessness had created a push-me-pull-you creature that succeeded only at remaining in the same place. She bullied herself — why can’t you do this, why isn’t it better? — until her living part became a crouching, cowed child.

The urgency of preparing something for Aurelia abolished Marcia’s doubts. This was how she liked to work; there was only pen, paper, and something urgent proceeding between them.

During the day, even as she yelled at the children or listened to the parents’ complaints, Marcia thought often of Aurelia, sometimes with annoyance. Aurelia had asked her to come to her house at four-thirty, a time when Marcia was still at school. As Aurelia lived in West London, a two-hour drive away, Marcia would have to make an excuse and take the day off in order to prepare to see her. These were the kinds of things famous writers never had to think about.

*

They were standing, a few days later, in the cramped kitchen looking out over the garden in which she, her father and younger brother had played tennis over a tiny net, when Marcia decided to tell her mother the good news.

‘Aurelia Broughton wrote to me. You know, the writer. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?’

‘I have heard of her‚’ her mother said.

Mother was small but wide. She wore two knitted jumpers and a heavy cardigan, which made her look even bigger.

Mother said, ‘I’ve heard of lots of writers. What does she want from you?’

Alec went into the garden and kicked a ball. Marcia wished her father were alive to do this with him. They all missed having a man around.

‘Aurelia liked my work.’ Marcia felt she had the right to call the writer Aurelia; they would become friends. ‘She wants to talk about it. It’s great, isn’t it? She’s interested in what I’m doing.’

Her mother said, ‘You’d better lend me one of her books so I can keep up.’

‘I’m re-reading them myself at the moment.’

‘Not during the day. You’re at school.’

‘I read at school.’

‘You never let me join in. I’m pushed to one side. These are the last years of my life —’

Marcia interrupted her. ‘I’ll be needing to write a bit in the next couple of weeks.’

This meant her mother would have to keep Alec in the evenings, and for some of the weekend. His father took him on Saturday afternoons, and returned him on Sunday.

Marcia said, ‘Could he spend Sunday with you?’ Her mother assumed her ‘put-upon’ face. ‘Please.’

Mother formed the same expressions today as she had in the past when caring for two children and a husband, and had made it obvious by her suffering that she found her family overwhelming and pleasureless. Depressives certainly had strong wills, killing off sentient life for miles around them.

‘I had a little date, but I’ll cancel it‚’ said Mother.

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

Since Marcia’s father had died six years ago, Mother had started going to museums and galleries. In the evenings, after a smoked salmon and cream cheese supper, she went often to the theatre and cinema. For the first time since she was young, she had friends with whom she attended lectures and concerts, sailing home in a taxi, spending the money Father had received on retirement. She had even taken up smoking. Mother had grasped that it was a little late for hopelessness.

Marcia didn’t want to wait thirty years.

She had, recently, gained a terrible awareness of life. It might have started when she began meeting men through the dating agency, which had made her feel — well, morbid. Until recently, she had lived as if one day there would be a salve for her wounds; that someone, a parent, lover, benefactor, would pluck her from chaos.

Marcia didn’t become a teacher until she was almost thirty. She and her husband had started wanting to smash at one another’s faces. She had, literally, kicked him out of bed; he ran into the street wearing pyjamas and slippers. Without him, she had a child, a mortgage and only a nugatory income, working in a bar and writing in the mornings. The first day at teacher training college had been awful. She had believed she would wear scarves like Aurelia Broughton and write with a gold fountain pen.

Marcia collected stories of struggling women who eventually became recognised as artists. She believed in persistence and dedication. If she wasn’t a writer, how would she live with herself and what value would she have? When she was a proper writer, her soul would not be hidden; people would know her as she was. To be an artist, to live a singular, self-determined life, and follow the imagination where it led, was to live for oneself, and to be useful. Creativity, the merging of reason and imagination, was life’s ultimate fulfilment.

If she passed a bookshop and saw dozens of luridly coloured blockbusters, she knew these bad and, often, young writers were making money. It seemed tragic and unfair that, unlike them, she couldn’t go to a shop and buy the furniture, clothes and music she wanted.

‘You hate me interfering‚’ Mother said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to have got to the end of your life and realised you’d wasted your time.’

‘Like Father?’

‘Filling bits of paper with a lot of scribbling the whole evening.’

‘How can expressing yourself be a waste of time?’

From the age of eight, after seeing Margot Fonteyn dance, Marcia had wanted to be a dancer; or at least her mother had wanted that for her. Marcia had attended an expensive ballet boarding school while Mother, who had never worked, packed boxes in a local factory to pay for it. Marcia left school at sixteen to get work as a dancer, but apart from not being as good as the others, and lacking the necessary vanity and ambition, she was terrified of appearing on stage. Now Mother kept three pairs of Marcia’s ballet shoes on the mantelpiece, to remind Marcia of how she had wasted her mother’s efforts.

‘Alec is always round here‚’ said Mother. ‘Not that I don’t need the company. But it would be good if that writer woman could offer you some guidance about your … work. I expect she knows people employed on the journals.’

‘Are you talking about the newspapers again?’

Mother often suggested that Marcia become a journalist, writing for the Guardian Women’s Page about stress at work, or child abuse.

Marcia went into the front room. Mother followed her, saying, ‘You’d make money. You could stay at home and write novels at the same time. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were doing something that brought something in.’

Marcia had secretly written articles which she had sent to the Guardian, the Mail, Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines. They had been returned. She was an artist, not a journalist. If only mother would understand that they were different.

Marcia paced the room. The wallpaper was vividly striped, and there was only one overhead light. Her brother used to say it was like living inside a Bridget Riley painting. The fat armchair with a pouffe in front of it, on which Mother kept her TV magazines and chocolates, sat there like Mother herself‚ heavy and immovable. Marcia didn’t want to sit down, but couldn’t just leave while there were favours she required.

Marcia said, ‘All I want is for you to help me make a little time for myself.’

‘What about me?’ said Mother. ‘I haven’t even had a cup of tea today. Don’t I need time now?’

‘You?’ said Marcia. ‘You pity yourself, but I envy you.’ Her mother’s face started to redden. Marcia felt empty but words streamed from her. ‘Yes! I wish I’d sat at home for twenty years supported by a good man, being a “housewife”. Think what I’d have written. Washing in the morning, real work in the afternoon, before picking up the kids from school. I wouldn’t have wasted a moment … not a moment, of all that beautiful free time!’

Mother sank into her chair and put her hand over her face.

‘Better find a man then, if you can‚’ she said.

‘What does that mean?’ said Marcia, hotly.

‘Someone who wants to keep you. What’s that one’s name?’

Marcia murmured, ‘Sandor. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s only a man I’m vaguely interested in.’

‘I wouldn’t be interested in any man‚’ said mother. ‘Those dirty creatures aren’t really interested in you. What does he do?’

‘You know what he does.’

‘Can’t you do better for yourself?’

‘No, I can’t‚’ said Marcia. ‘I can’t.’

Her mother loved living alone, and boasted of it constantly. When Marcia was a child six people had lived in the house, and apart from Mother they had all died or left. Mother claimed that alone she could do whatever she wanted, and at whatever time, apart from the small matter of giving and receiving emotional and physical affection, as Marcia liked to point out.

‘Who wants a lot of men pawing at you?’ was Mother’s reply.

‘Who doesn’t?’ Marcia said.

Marcia recalled Father as he sat on the sofa with his pad and pen. He would casually ask Mother to make him a cup of tea. Mother, whatever else she was doing, was expected to fetch it, place it before him, and wait to see if it was to his liking. It was assumed that she was at Father’s command. No wonder she had taken loneliness as a philosophy. Marcia would discuss it with Aurelia.

They were three generations of women, living close to one another. Marcia’s grandmother, aged ninety-four, also lived alone, in a one-bedroom flat five minutes’ walk away. She was lucid and easily amused; her mind worked, but she was bent double with arthritis and prayed for the good Lord to take her. Her husband had died twenty years ago and she had hardly been out since. To Marcia she was like an animal in a cage, starved of the good things. Where were the men? Marcia’s grandfather and father had died; her brother, the doctor, had gone to America; her husband had decamped with a neighbour.

Marcia went into the bathroom, took a Valium, kissed Alec, and went to her car.

*

That night, alone at home, writing and drinking — as desolate and proud as Martha Gellhorn in the desert, she liked to think — she rang Sandor and told him of her mother’s indifference and scorn, and the concentrated work she was doing.

‘The novel is really moving forward!’ she said. ‘I’ve never read anything like it. It’s so truthful. I can’t believe no one will be interested!’

She talked until she felt she were speaking into infinity. Even her therapist, when Marcia could afford to see her, said more.

She had met Sandor in a pub, after the man she was with, picked from a black folder in the dating agency office, had made an excuse and left. What was wrong with her? The man only came up to her chest! One woman in the writing group went out with a different man every week. It was odd, she said, how many of them were married. Sandor wasn’t.

After her monologue, she asked Sandor what he was doing.

‘The same‚’ he said, and laughed.

‘I’ll come and see you‚’ she said.

‘Why not? I’m always here‚’ he replied.

‘Yes, you are‚’ she said.

He laughed again.

She saw him, a fifty-year-old Bulgarian, about once a month. He was a porter in a smart block of flats in Chelsea, and lived in a room in Earl’s Court. He considered the job, which he had obtained after drifting around Europe for fifteen years, to be ideal. In his black suit at the desk in the entrance, he buzzed people in, took parcels and accepted flowers, went on errands for the tenants, and re-read his favourite writers, Pascal, Nietzsche, Hegel.

None of the men she had met through the agency had been interested in literature, and not one had been attractive. Sandor had the face of an uncertain priest and the body of the Olympic cyclist that he had been. He was intelligent, well mannered and seductive in several languages. He could, when he was ‘on’, as he put it, beguile women effortlessly. He had slept with more than a thousand women and had never sustained a relationship with any of them. What sort of man had no ex-wife, no children, no family nearby, no lawyers, no debt, no house? She marvelled at her ability to locate melancholy in people. She would have to unfreeze Sandor’s dead soul with the blow-torch of her love. Did she have sufficient blow? If only she could find something better to do.

‘See you, Sandor‚’ she said.

She swigged wine from the bottle she kept beside her bed. She managed to fall asleep but awoke soon after, burning with uncontrollable furies against her husband, Mother, Sandor, Aurelia. She understood those paintings full of devils and writhing, contorted demons. They did exist, in the mind. Why was there no sweetness within?

*

She arrived an hour early at Aurelia’s house, noted where it was, parked, and walked about the neighbourhood. It was a sunny winter’s day. This was a part of London she didn’t know. The streets were full of antique shops, organic grocers, and cafés with young men and their babies sitting in the window. People strolled in sunglasses and dark clothes, and gathered in groups on the pavement to gossip. She recognised actors and a film director. She looked in an estate agent’s window; a family house cost a million pounds.

She bought apples, vitamins and coffee. She chose a scarf in Agnès b. and paid for it by credit card, successfully averting her eyes from the price, as she had earlier avoided a clash with a mirror in the shop.

At the agreed time Marcia rang Amelia’s bell and waited. A young woman came to the door. She invited Marcia in. Aurelia was finishing her piano lesson.

In the kitchen overlooking the garden, two young women were cooking; in the dining room a long, polished table was being laid with silverware and thick napkins. In the library Marcia examined the dozens of foreign-language editions of Aurelia’s novels, stories, essays — the record of a writing life.

There was a sound at the door and a man came in. Aurelia’s husband introduced himself.

‘Marcia.’ She adopted her most middle-class voice.

‘You must excuse me‚’ the man said. ‘My office is down the road. I must go to it.’

‘Are you a writer?’

‘I have published a couple of books. But I have conversations for a living. I am a psychoanalyst.’

He was a froglike little man, with alert eyes. She wondered if he could see her secrets, and that she had thought he’d become an analyst so that no one had to look at him.

‘What a ravishing scarf‚’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Goodbye‚’ he said.

She waited, glancing through the chapters of the novel she had brought to show Aurelia. It seemed, in this ambience, to be execrable stuff.

She caught sight of Aurelia in the hall.

‘I’ll be with you in one minute‚’ said Aurelia.

Aurelia shut the door on the piano teacher, opened it to the man delivering flowers, talked to someone in Italian on the telephone, inspected the dining room, spoke to the cook, told her assistant she wouldn’t be taking any calls, and sat down opposite Marcia.

She poured tea and regarded Marcia for what seemed a long time.

‘I quite enjoyed what you sent me‚’ Aurelia said. ‘That school. It was a window on a world one doesn’t know about.’

‘I’ve written more,’ Marcia said. ‘Here.’

She placed the three chapters on the table. Aurelia picked them up and put them down.

‘I wish I could write like you‚’ she sighed.

‘Sorry?’ said Marcia. ‘Please, do you mean that?’

‘My books insist on being long. But one couldn’t write an extended piece in that style.’

‘Why not?’ said Marcia. Aurelia looked at her as if she should know without being told. Marcia said, ‘The thing is, I don’t get time for … extension.’ She was beginning to panic. ‘How do you get down to it?’

‘You met Marty‚’ she said. ‘We have breakfast early. He goes to his office. He starts at seven. Then I just do it. I haven’t got any choice, really. Sometimes I write here, or I go to our house in Ferrara. For writers there’s rarely anything else but writing.’

‘Doesn’t your mind go everywhere except to the page?’ said Marcia. ‘Do you have some kind of iron discipline? Don’t you find ludicrous excuses?’

‘Writing is my drug. I go to it easily. My new novel is starting to develop. This is the best part, when you can see that something is beginning. I like to think‚’ Aurelia went on, ‘that I can make a story out of anything. A murmur, a hint, a gesture … turned into another form of life. What could be more satisfying? Can I ask your age?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

Aurelia said, ‘You have something to look forward to.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘One’s late thirties are a period of disillusionment. The early forties are a lovely age — of re-illusionment. Everything comes together then, you will find, and there is renewed purpose.’

Marcia looked at the poster of a film which had been made of one of Aurelia’s books.

She said, ‘Sometimes life is so difficult … it is impossible to write. You don’t feel actual hopelessness?’

Aurelia shook her head and continued to look at Marcia. Her husband was an analyst; he would have taught her not to be alarmed by weeping.

‘It’s those blasted men that have kept us down‚’ Marcia said. ‘When I was young, you were one of the few contemporary writers that women could read.’

‘We’ve kept ourselves down‚’ said Aurelia. ‘Self-contempt, masochism, laziness, stupidity. We’re old enough to own up to it now, aren’t we?’

‘But we are — or at least were — political victims.’

‘Balls.’ Aurelia softened her voice and said, ‘Would you tell me about your life at the school?’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘The routine. Your day. Pupils. The other teachers.’

‘The other teachers?’

‘Yes.’

Aurelia was waiting.

‘But they’re myopic‚’ Marcia said.

‘In what way?’

‘Badly educated. Interested only in soap operas.’

Aurelia nodded.

Marcia mentioned her mother but Aurelia became impatient. However, when Marcia recounted the occasion when

she had suggested the school donate the remains of the Harvest Festival to the elders of the Asian community centre, and a couple of the teachers had refused to give fruit to ‘Pakis’, Aurelia made a note with her gold pen. Marcia had, in fact, told the headmaster about this, but he dismissed it, saying, ‘I have to run all of this school.’

Marcia looked at Aurelia as if to say, ‘Why do you want to know this?’

‘That was helpful‚’ Aurelia said. ‘I want to write something about a woman who works in a school. Do you know many teachers?’

Marcia’s colleagues were teachers but none of her friends were. One friend worked in a building society, another had just had a baby and was at home.

‘There must be people at your school I could talk to. What about the headmaster?’

Marcia made a face. Then she remembered something she had read in a newspaper profile of Aurelia. ‘Don’t you have a daughter at school?’

‘It’s the wrong sort of teacher there.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I was looking for something rougher.’

Marcia was embarrassed. She said, ‘Have you taught writing courses?’

‘I did, when I wanted to travel. The students are wretched, of course. Many I would recommend for psychiatric treatment. A lot of people don’t want to write, they just want the

kudos. They should move on to other objects.’

Aurelia got up. As she signed Marcia a copy of her latest novel, she asked for her telephone number at school. Marcia couldn’t think of a reason not to give it to her.

Aurelia said, ‘Thank you for coming to see me. I’ll look at your chapters.’ At the door she said, ‘Will you come to a party I’m giving? Perhaps we will talk more. An invitation will be sent to you.’

From across the road Marcia looked at the lighted house and the activity within, until the shutters were closed.

*

Marcia waited beside Sandor at his porter’s desk until he finished work at seven. They had a drink in the pub where they had met. Sandor went there every evening to watch the sport on cable TV. He didn’t ask her why she had suddenly turned up, and didn’t mention Aurelia Broughton, though Marcia had rung to say she was coming up to see her. He talked of how he loved London and how liberal it was; no one cared who or what you were. He said that if he ever had a house he would decorate it like the pub they were sitting in. He talked of what he was reading in Hegel, though in such a garbled fashion she had no idea what he was saying or why it interested him. He told her stories of the criminals he’d known and how he’d been used as a getaway driver.

He asked her if she wanted to go to bed. His request was put in the tone of voice that said it was just as fine if she preferred

not to. She hesitated only because the house in which he had a room could have been a museum to the 1950s, along with the failure of the two-bar electric fire to make any impression on the block of cold that sat in the room like death. There was also the hag of a landlady who would sit at the end of his bed at midnight.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve just given her Crime and Punishment to read‚’ Sandor laughed, following Marcia into his room. Books were piled on the floor beside the bed. His washing hung over the back of a chair. All his possessions were here.

Lying down with him, she noticed his loaf of white sliced bread and carton of milk on the chest of drawers.

‘Is that all your food?’

‘Bread and butter fills me up. Then I read for four or five hours. Nothing bothers me.’

‘It’s not much of a life.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not in prison.’

He looked at her in surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that he wasn’t in prison, and didn’t have to make the best of nothing.

He kissed her and she thought of inviting him to her house at the weekend. He was kind. He would entertain Alec. But she might start to rely on him; she would always be asking for more. If anyone requested him to yield, shift or alter, he left them. She might not want him, but she didn’t want to be forsaken.

After, she stood up to get dressed, looking at him where he lay with his hand over his eyes. She couldn’t spend the night in such a place.

*

That night, for the first time, she wished Alec weren’t in mother’s bed. Marcia slept with her face in his unwashed clothes. In the morning she didn’t write. She had lost the desire, which was also her desire for life. What illusory hopes had she invested in Aurelia? Seeing her had robbed Marcia of something. She had emptied herself out, and Aurelia was full. Where would she find the resources, the meaning, to carry on?

Aurelia had asked her to bring someone to the party; another teacher, a ‘pure’ teacher Aurelia had said, meaning not a teacher pretending to be a writer. Maybe Marcia should have said no. But she wanted to leave the door open with Aurelia, to see what might develop. Aurelia might read the three chapters and be excited by them. Anyhow, Marcia wanted to go to the party.

‘How did it go with Miss Broughton?’ asked her mother the next time Marcia went round. ‘We’ve chatted on the phone, but you haven’t mentioned it.’

‘It was fine, just great.’

Her mother said, ‘You’re sullen, like a teenager again.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

Mother said, more softly, ‘What came of it?’

‘You should have seen the house. Five bedrooms — at least!’

‘You got upstairs?’

‘I had to. And three receptions!’

‘Three? What do they do in all that space! What would we do with it!’

‘Have races!’

‘We could —’

‘The flowers, Mum! The people working there! I’ve never known anything like it.’

‘I bet. Was it on a main road?’

‘Just off. But near the shops. They’ve got everything to hand.’

‘Buses?’ enquired her mother.

‘I shouldn’t think she goes on a bus.’

‘No‚’ said Mother. ‘I wouldn’t go on another bus again if I didn’t have to. Off-street parking?’

‘Yes. Room for two cars, it looked like.’ Marcia said, ‘We chatted in her library and got to know one another. She invited me to a party.’

‘To a party? She didn’t invite me?’

‘She didn’t mention you at all‚’ Marcia said. ‘And nor did I.’

‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I came with you. I’ll get my glad rags on!’

‘But why?’ said Marcia.

‘Just to go out. To meet people. I might interest them.’

Before, this would have been a kind of joke, and Mother would have returned to her moroseness. She certainly was getting healthy, if she thought she might interest people.

‘I’ll think about it‚’ Marcia said.

‘I can’t wait!’ sang her mother. ‘A party!’

*

Aurelia rang from her car. The connection wasn’t good, but Marcia gathered that Aurelia was ‘in the neighbourhood’ and wanted to ‘pass by for a cup of tea’.

Marcia and Alec were having fish fingers and baked beans. Aurelia must have been close; Marcia had hardly cleared the table, and Alec hadn’t finished throwing his toys behind the sofa, when Aurelia’s car drew up outside.

At the door she handed Marcia another signed copy of her new novel, came in, and sat down on the edge of the sofa.

‘What a beautiful boy‚’ she said of Alec. ‘Fine hair — almost white.’

‘And how are you?’ said Marcia.

‘Tired. I’ve been doing readings and giving interviews, not only here but in Berlin and Barcelona. The French are making a film about me, and the Americans want me to make a film about my London … Sorry‚’ she said. ‘Am I making you crazy?’

‘Of course.’

Aurelia sighed. Today she looked shrewd and seemed to vibrate with intensity. She didn’t want to talk, or listen, rather. When Marcia told her that her will to work had collapsed, she said, ‘I wish mine had.’

She got up and glanced along the shelves of Marcia’s books.

‘I like her‚’ said Marcia, naming a woman writer, of about the same age as Aurelia.

‘She can’t write at all. Apparently she’s a rather good amateur sculptor.’

‘Is that so?’ said Marcia. ‘I liked her last book. Did you read the chapters I gave you?’ Aurelia looked blankly at her. Marcia said, ‘The chapters from my novel. I left them.’

‘Where?’

‘On your table.’

‘No. No, I didn’t.’

‘Perhaps they’re still there.’

Marcia guessed Aurelia wanted to see how she lived, that she wasn’t looking at her but through her, to the sentences and paragraphs she would make of her. It was an admirable ruthlessness.

At the door Aurelia kissed her on both cheeks.

‘See you at the party‚’ she said.

‘I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Don’t forget — bring someone pedagogical.’

Marcia put Aurelia’s novel on the shelf. Aurelia’s books were among the rows of books; the books full of stories, the stories full of characters and craft, waiting to be enlivened by someone with a use for them. Or perhaps not.

*

Mother refused to have Alec to stay. It was the first time she had done this. It was the day before the party.

‘But why, why?’ said Marcia, on the telephone.

‘I realised you weren’t taking me to the party, though you didn’t bother to actually tell me. I made other arrangements.’

‘I was never taking you to that party.’

‘You never take me anywhere.’

Marcia was shaking with exasperation. ‘Mum, I want to live. And I want you to help me.’

‘I’ve helped you all my life.’

‘Sorry? You?’

‘Who brought you up? You’re educated, you’ve got —’

Marcia replaced the receiver.

She rang friends and a couple of people in the writers’ group, even the boy who’d written about the tapeworm. No one was available to babysit. Half an hour before she needed to leave, the only person left to ask was her husband, who lived nearby. He was surprised and sarcastic. They rarely spoke but, when necessary, dropped notes through one another’s doors.

He said he had been intending to spend the evening with his new girlfriend.

‘How sweet‚’ said Marcia.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

‘Can’t you both come over?’

‘Desperate. Must be another new boyfriend. Have you got any crisps … and alcohol?’

‘Take what you want. You always did.’

It was the first time she had let her husband into the house since he had left. If the girlfriend was there he wouldn’t, at least, snoop around.

When they arrived, and the girlfriend removed her coat, Maria noticed she was pregnant.

Marcia changed upstairs. She could hear them talking in the living room. Then she heard music.

She was at the door, ready to go. Alec was showing them his new baseball cap.

Her husband held up a record sleeve. ‘You know, this is my record.’

‘I’m in a rush‚’ she said.

In the car she thought she must have been mad, but what she was doing was in the service of life. People don’t take enough risks, she thought. She didn’t, though, have a teacher who might interest Aurelia. However, Aurelia wouldn’t turn her away at the door. Marcia had done enough for Aurelia. Had Aurelia done enough for her?

It was Aurelia’s husband who let her in and fetched her a glass of champagne, while Marcia looked around. The party was being held on the ground floor of the house, and Marcia recognised several writers. The other guests seemed to be critics, academics, psychoanalysts and publishers.

The effort of getting there had made her tense. She drank two glasses of champagne quickly and attached herself to Aurelia’s husband, the only person, apart from Aurelia, she knew.

‘Do you want to be introduced as a teacher, or as a writer?’ he said. ‘Or neither?’

‘Neither, at the moment.’ She took his arm. ‘Because I am neither one nor the other.’

‘Keeping your options open, eh?’ he said.

He introduced her to several people, and they talked as a group. The main topic was the royal family, a subject she was surprised to hear intellectuals taking an interest in. It was like being at the school.

She liked Aurelia’s husband, who nodded and smiled occasionally; she liked being afraid of him. He understood other people and what their wishes were. Nothing would shock him.

He was a little shocked later on, in the conservatory, when she reached up to kiss him. She was saying, ‘Please, please, only this …’ when, across the room, she saw the headmaster of her school, and his wife, talking to a female writer.

Aurelia’s husband gently detached her.

‘I apologise‚’ she said.

‘Accepted. I’m flattered.’

‘Hallo, Marcia‚’ said the headmaster. ‘I hear you’ve been very helpful to Aurelia.’

She didn’t like the headmaster seeing her drunk and embarrassed.

‘Yes‚’ she said.

‘Aurelia’s going to come to the school and see what we do. She’s going to talk to the older pupils.’ He lowered his mouth to her ear. ‘She has given me a complete set of her books. Signed.’

She wanted to say, ‘They’re all signed, you stupid cunt.’

She left the house and walked a little. Then she went back and traversed the party. People were leaving. Others were talking intensely. Nobody paid her any attention.

*

Sandor was lying on his bed with his hand over his eyes. She sat beside him.

‘I’ve come to say I won’t be coming so often now. Not that I’ve ever really come often, except recently. But … it will be even less.’

He nodded. He was watching her. Sometimes he took in what she said.

She went on, ‘The reason, if you want to know the reason —’

‘Why not?’ he said. He sat up. ‘I’d get you something … but, I’m so ashamed, there’s nothing here.’

‘There’s never anything here.’

‘I’ll take you out for a drink.’

‘I’ve had enough to drink.’ She said, ‘Sandor, this is hateful. There’s a phrase that kept coming into my mind at the party. I came to tell it to you. Sucking stones. That’s it. We look to the old things and to the old places, for sustenance. That’s where we found it before. Even when there’s nothing there we go on. But we have to find new things, otherwise we are sucking stones. To me, this’ — she indicated the room — ‘is arid, impoverished, dead.’

His eyes followed her gesture around the room as she condemned it.

‘But I’m trying‚’ he said. ‘Things are going to look up, I know they are.’

She kissed him. ‘Bye. See you.’

She cried in the car. It wasn’t his fault. She’d go back another day.

She was late home. Her husband was asleep in his girlfriend’s arms, his hand on her stomach. On the floor was an empty bottle of wine and dirty plates; the TV was loud.

She carried the record from the deck, scratched it with her fingernail, and replaced it in its cover. She roused the couple, thanked them, pushed the record under her husband’s arm, and got them out.

She started up the stairs but stopped halfway, took another step, and went down again. She returned to the living room and put on her overcoat. She went out onto the small concrete patio behind the house. It was dark and silent. The cold shocked her into wakefulness. She removed her coat. She wanted the cold to punish her.

Early in the morning, during the summer holidays, she sometimes danced out here, with Alec watching her, to parts of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

Now she put the kitchen light on and laid a square of bricks. She went back into the house and collected her files. She carried them outside and opened them. She burned her stories; she burned the play, and the first few chapters of the novel. There was a lot of it and it made a nice fire. It took a long time. She was shivering and stank of smoke and ash. She swept up. She ran a bath and lay in it until the water was tepid.

Alec had got into her bed and was asleep. She put her notebook on the bedside table. She would keep it with her, using it as a journal. But otherwise she would stop writing for a while; at least six months, to begin with. She was clear that this wasn’t masochism or a suicide. Perhaps her dream of writing had been a kind of possession, or addiction. She was aware that you could get addicted to the good things, too. She was making a space. It was an important emptiness, one she would not fill with other intoxications. She might, she knew, turn into her mother, sucking stones at the TV night after night, terrified by excitement.

After a time there might be new things.