Mr Lynch’s Holiday

14

It was a secret between them, something tender and private. Eamonn had shown Laura some of the scraps of writing he had done over the years, a drawerful of stories and characters, fragments of novels. He had loved writing since boyhood. He confided that his dream was to complete a novel and in the same breath he disowned it. It was a fantasy, an embarrassment, the whole idea of having a dream so trite, so deluded. His life was ruled by the kind of self-imposed restrictions that Laura found impossible to understand. Much of her time was taken up trying to persuade him to declare a ceasefire with himself. And alone with her sometimes he did, speaking about the future and the past without qualification or irony — telling her stories of his childhood and stories he wanted to write, stories about him and stories about her. It was an unspoken pact between them — these glimpses of the real Eamonn to counterbalance the daylight hours of his refracted self-contempt.

The writing was the hidden element of their new life, the part they told no one. ‘But you’re out in the sticks,’ said friends, ‘the arse-end of nowhere. What will you do?’ And they smiled and said, ‘We’ll be OK.’ Because the isolation was fine, the distance was good, they would earn money in the daytime and Eamonn would write in the evenings.

There were initial difficulties. In the first few weeks he found himself distracted by the environment, the faultless blue skies, the irresistible allure of the pool, the overwhelming heat. He allowed himself a holiday. Then, within three months of arriving, Red Dot Publishing, their sole source of income, collapsed. In the days that followed the announcement, panicked by their mortgage, they bombarded every contact they had in search of any paid employment. Laura picked up some lower-paid freelance work as a proofreader for a rival publisher, but Eamonn could find nothing until a friend of a friend mentioned an online language school called LenguaNet. On the basis of a TEFL course he had done more than ten years previously he got a job as one of their tutors.

With new sources of income secured, Eamonn was free to write, but he worried about Laura. What, he wondered, was there for her to do in the evenings while he wrote? He’d settle in front of his laptop, but find his attention wandering to what she was doing in the other room.

‘Do you need some company?’ he’d ask, and she’d say, ‘No, I’m fine, I’m reading.’ And he’d take the book from her hands and lean over and kiss her, pushing her gently back on the bed.

It was around then that Laura decided that she too would try to write, if only, she said, to encourage him and stop unwittingly distracting him. She didn’t consider herself a writer, felt she had no particular flair or anything important to say, but she had an idea for a story, she liked the notion of research and loved the image of them spending their evenings at different desks, each working on their separate projects.

‘So … Goya?’ he said.

‘Well — the focus isn’t really on him, just one of his assistants. It was an interesting time.’

‘I guess there are quite a lot of books about it already, then?’

‘Possibly, but it’s not like I’m ever going to get it published, or even finish it, it’s just something to work on, keep my brain active.’

‘It’s hard work, you know, writing a novel.’

‘Yeah, I’ve gathered.’

‘Historical fiction.’

‘That makes it sound a bit grand.’

‘That stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.’

There was a pause. ‘“That stuff”,’ she repeated.

‘I’m not being funny. I just mean, I don’t ever read books like that, so I don’t have any knowledge about them. I might not be much good at feedback.’

‘Look, Eamonn. You have a gift. You’re the writer. You’re going to write an exceptional novel. You know that, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I do. You’re going to write an exceptional novel. I’m not. I’m just going to read some books and try to write a story. It’s not going to be ground-breaking or important and I don’t expect you to read it or like it, so don’t be worried about that. It’s just something to do.’

He smiled. ‘We’ll be a tiny artistic colony.’

She nodded. ‘We’ll need absinthe.’