Chapter one #3
As I pulled up – hazards on, ignoring the double yellows – I saw Martine too had taken the opportunity to run a comb through her hair and reapply the raspberry lipstick, but unlike me, she now looked ready to chair a committee meeting.
I got out, unsure of how much help would be acceptable.
I opened the passenger-side door for her, then I hesitated.
Did she need a hand with the seatbelt? I didn’t have much experience with older people.
Neither of my parents was around; Mum had died when I was twenty-two, and Dad now lived in France with his new, easier family.
How old was Martine? I did some quick maths. Fraser was forty-one now, and he was the youngest, a surprise baby, so Martine had to be . . . nearly eighty?
Martine firmly brushed away my tentative offer of help, in any case.
‘I’m quite capable, thank you,’ she said, and I retreated to the driver’s side and got in.
We set off.
I quickly regretted my lax car-cleaning regime; it smelled strongly of Tomsk.
Who also smelled very strongly, albeit significantly less than he did when I first met him.
Love had rendered me completely nose-blind to his oily odour of biscuits and old raincoats until Martine got in the car and my nose abruptly returned to factory settings.
I saw her wrinkle her brow, confused and mildly horrified, then an expression of deliberate politeness replaced it, which was somehow worse.
‘I’ve got a dog,’ I explained, just in case she thought the smell was down to me, at the same time as she said, ‘So, what’s happening with you?’
‘Oh, the usual.’ I concentrated on the road ahead, which was busier than I remembered.
My sporadic ‘bumping into Martine’ daydreams, in which I casually dropped nuggets of information about my new, successful life for her to relay to Fraser, hadn’t included wobbly cyclists and speed cameras.
‘I’m moving house and of course it’s tax return month! ’
‘Ah! You’re still an accountant?’
I nodded. I’d started at Jacobs Martine did not.
‘Or was it a novel?’ Martine added, when I didn’t respond.
‘No, it’s a screenplay. I’m still working on it.’
Martine laughed. ‘Beth. You were saying that when I first met you! I’m still working on it. It’s the Forth Road Bridge of screenplays.’
I attempted a similarly tinkly laugh in lieu of a reply I might regret. It came out badly. Strangulated.
‘The best advice anyone ever gave me,’ said Martine, ‘was this: you just have to finish it.’ She tapped my knee with each word. ‘Just. Finish. It.’
Martine had, in the space of a couple of years, written two historical romance novels ‘to see if I could’.
(She could, naturally.) They’d been published under her pen name, Elizabeth Buckingham.
I hadn’t read them; Fraser and his sisters had, in a rare moment of unanimous agreement, decided that it would be best if the family remained in happy ignorance of their mother’s romantic inner life and nominated Jackie’s husband to take one for the team.
He reported back with a detailed synopsis and the slightly damning verdict: ‘Better than I expected, surprisingly saucy in places’ which only cemented the family decision to remain supportively in the dark.
I’d started the first, The Dancing Heart, but got distracted and, if I’m honest, resentful at how good it was.
‘I’m very busy,’ I responded. ‘Maybe when I’m retired I’ll have more time to focus on writing.’
I hadn’t meant to put the emphasis on the I’m but Martine ignored it. Now she was back in the position of offering help instead of needing it, she was energised.
‘You don’t need more time, you just need to make better use of some time. Ringfence an hour a day. That’s what I did, I set my alarm an hour earlier. What was it about? Remind me.’
I gritted my teeth. My screenplay was a historical romance and the subject matter had shifted around over the years.
It had started life as a novel, until Martine wrote hers, and broadly Jane Austen-ish, until Martine staked her claim on the early nineteenth century, and I’d had to revise it to a later, darker Victorian period which had never really suited my heroine, whom I’d always pictured in empire-line frocks.
Plump arms, plump bosom, skin like a ripe peach, etc. Not forced into crinolines and corsets.
I’d got Act One perfect – Seraphina’s (or Camilla’s or Josephine’s: it varied) shock at her family’s unexpected fall on hard times, her hopes of education dashed, the sudden death of her consumptive mother, and her relocation to Highchurch House – but breaking into Act Two was proving a problem.
I’d been rewriting the same two scenes for nearly seven years.
It was like knitting one sleeve of the same jumper, unravelling it, and reknitting it with a very slightly different pattern only to find it was still too short.
‘It’s a historical romance,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ said Martine. ‘Would it be helpful for me to put you in touch with a mentor? I’ve met so many romantic novelists since I published The Dancing Heart. I know a terrific writer whose just had her novel optioned by—’
‘And also a thriller,’ I lied. ‘There’s a thriller element now.’
Martine raised her eyebrows and I inwardly cursed my own defensiveness.
But then again, maybe there could be a thriller element? And would it be so bad to let Martine help? No one else had ever taken the slightest interest in my screenplay, not even Fraser. Perhaps particularly not even Fraser.
‘Right here,’ said Martine, pointing towards the turning down into Coleridge Drive.
She hadn’t needed to point. I’d driven the entire way across town on autopilot, and now we were almost home.
Not home, I corrected myself. Martine’s home. Fraser’s home.
A tight, dark sensation spread through me as we passed the postbox, the cherry tree, the mysterious car that was always covered over with a tarpaulin and never moved, until there it was: the pine-green front door and white railings of 13 Coleridge Drive. Home of the Hendersons since 1968.
I realised my hands were gripping the steering wheel.
‘Well, thank you so much, Beth,’ said Martine smoothly, reaching for the handle. ‘I’ll see myself out, there’s absolutely no need to— Agh!’ There was a painful catch of breath as she attempted to open the door and couldn’t exert enough pressure.
She sank back, momentarily defeated.
‘Let me help you.’ I got out and went round to the passenger side to open it for her.
Martine checked up and down the street first to make sure no one could see her accept my help, then reluctantly leaned on me to get out of the car. We made our way up the steps and suddenly, there I was – going back into the house that led straight into my previous life.