Chapter Twenty-One
The parent-and-baby nursery rhyme session was overrunning.
A circle of mums and one dad sitting on the carpet – some serene, with rapt small babies on their laps; others harried, with squirming infants grabbing at their hair – were gamely singing along to ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ as the session leader (curly hair, dungarees, a shirt with smiling leopards printed on it) over-enunciated and conducted them all with great zeal.
Those there for the writers’ workshop were hovering over by Non-fiction.
Olivia had perused the spines of several self-help books and a run of Italian cookery books, but was now transfixed by the only father and baby in the session.
The father, joining in with ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ but intermittently kissing his plump baby on the top of her head, was holding one of her feet and gently stroking it with his thumb; the baby, wide-eyed and velvet-cheeked, was softly gumming on a cloth book and soaking up her father’s smile.
Olivia thought them a wonderful duo, both imagining her father and her like this back in the day – not that Charlie would have actually come inside a library – and wondered if she would know such a moment with a child of her own one day.
The song came to an end and the leader clapped, and the parents clapped, and they took their babies’ hands and made them clap, too.
Bags were reached into, and miniature coats were pulled out; chubby arms were bent into the sleeves of fleecy jackets; rigid knees and stubborn feet were gently stuffed into the legs of snowsuits.
Pushchairs were retrieved from the corner of the library, one-handed, then blankets were tucked around little legs, and the parents and babies were ready to set off home to their milky evenings.
Into the space they had vacated, two library staff members made busy, moving in a table and some chairs, and calling over the workshop speaker – a moderately successful author from the Kent coast called Kitty Codwell, who shuffled over with her stack of notes and her white bob, and immediately picked up a muslin cloth from the carpet.
‘Has anyone left this?’ she called in a headmistress voice to the last of the departing parents.
Olivia and the other workshop attendees were making their way over to the horseshoe of chairs the library staff had arranged.
The dad with the wide-eyed baby turned in the doorway.
His baby was now in a white fleecy snowsuit and a pink bobble hat.
‘Oh, that’s me!’ the father said, and he swivelled buggy and baby and came to retrieve it. ‘All this stuff when you have a baby, some of it invariably gets left behind!’
Kitty handed the muslin to the dad between finger and thumb.
The dad thanked her with a smile and moved off again.
The attendees took their seats and Kitty Codwell, shrugging off her coat to reveal a tent-like dress and a beaded necklace made of tiny wooden books, stood before them with a big smile.
‘Shall we start?’ she trilled.
Kitty had a thing for brown Labradors and men with long, striding legs and luscious forearms. She spent the first half an hour of the workshop talking about how she got into writing – not much use for anyone else, unless they too had come from a very posh boarding school in Dorset, and wanted to get back at the girl in their English lit class who was an ‘absolute bitch’ .
. . but you know, ‘sod her’, as look at Kitty now!
The seated all laughed dutifully.
‘And now I’m going to give you my Top Tips!’
Olivia suppressed a sigh. She suspected Kitty was all bluster and not much information.
‘Write first, edit later,’ Kitty puffed. ‘Like most things in life, just do it, and you can always come back and make it perfect later on.’
This was not Olivia’s way of writing. She wrote meticulously, planning everything to the nth degree before she even got started on a scene or a chapter: character arcs, plot points, back stories.
She edited as she went along, trying to make everything perfect first time.
Well, she’d only written three chapters so far, but that was the way she was doing it.
Olivia was writing romance. She had read many love stories at Gillian’s Pimlico house in her teenage years, sitting cross-legged in the seat of one of the bay windows, and in occasional sunshine – including the entire Jane Austen oeuvre.
Written into those books, time and time again, was the happy ever after she craved for herself, a Perfect Love like her parents had known, and she wanted to craft her own perfect love stories.
‘Drink lots of tea,’ was Kitty’s next tip.
That was greeted with another laugh. ‘Also, research your subject thoroughly by travelling to your locations. This is, of course, not always possible,’ she tittered, ‘if your location is a makeshift surgery tent inside a Cornish WW1 hospital – or Mars.’ Again, everyone sniggered charitably.
Olivia looked at her watch. In exactly forty-seven minutes, she would be meeting Leo outside. Kitty was talking about some of the settings in her latest novel, continually gesturing to a fresh pile of her own paperbacks, in a deft sales manoeuvre.
‘Research, research, research,’ she continued.
‘As readers will sure as hell pull you up on something if you get a detail wrong, and so they should! Do you know, I once had a reader write to me to complain I had included the use of a parking meter on the coastal road at Deal, when in fact, there were none! So be alert, romance writers! And finally, everything you do, and everywhere you go, make mental – or, if possible, physical – notes. Any adventure you go on in life, however small, could be used as fodder for your writing.’
Olivia realised the other women and one man in the audience were taking notes now, so she tugged her notebook out of her bag.
Kitty wanted to set an exercise. They were to write freeform for twenty minutes and have their work read aloud by the person on their left.
The person on Olivia’s left was the sole man, who had a beaky nose and a hard stare, and had complained about the overrunning nursery rhyme group when they’d come in.
She didn’t want him reading the best day she’d ever had out loud, as it was the special day, aged twelve, when her father had taken her on the train to Clacton-on-Sea and she’d been on all the rides and had an ice cream at the end of the pier, so instead she wrote about her second best day – the day she met Stella and Annabel in the queue for the Wine Society at Canterbury University.
Everyone else wrote something romantic, or about their wedding day, or the day they had given birth to their first child, and Olivia felt a little embarrassed when the beaky man read out her funny prose about meeting her friends and wished she had told the tale of the day out with her father instead.
And that, at twenty-nine, her best days had been spent with her friends and her lovely father, and not with a romantic partner, her own family not yet created.
‘And now I want you to write something else,’ said Kitty, once the last of the attendees had read out their neighbour’s best day.
‘Just for you, just in the here and now, that you won’t share.
Something about love, or something you feel in your heart, and I want you to take that piece of writing home and work on it, and improve it, and polish it until you think it’s as perfect as it can be. And I shall do the same.’
Kitty had a soft look in her eyes. She sat at the desk and brought out a notebook. Popped the button at the end of a biro.
Olivia looked down at her own book and turned to a new page. She thought of the father and the baby she had witnessed in the singing session, and she began to write . . .
I saw a father and a baby today at a library. The baby was sitting on her father’s lap, a muslin square caught in her fist and her father’s attention equally captured . . .
She glanced briefly around the circle, everyone quiet, everyone concentrating.
She wrote about this father, this baby. She wrote about the love between them.
Then she wrote about her own father, the feeling of how it had been between them, right from the beginning.
All those memories, all that love. And she concluded with:
For fathers need daughters, and daughters need fathers.
We need each other like the meadow in spring needs sunshine and rain.
My father taught me it’s good to be humble, but it’s also great to create something long-lasting.
My father often told me he was proud of me.
I wish I had found the words to tell him I was proud of him, too.
And as she wrote the final word, and set down her pen, she let the sadness wash over her.
‘Well, I hope that was really useful!’ said Kitty, looking at her watch and closing her notebook with such satisfaction that Olivia suspected she had set this exercise for her own benefit.
‘I wish you all well in your publishing journeys, and if anyone would like a signed copy of Love Comes to Dorset Bay, here they are!’ she added, slapping the top book on her stack.
A few of the crowd circled. Olivia grabbed her coat and scarf and made her way to the exit. Outside, the chilly air was a blast of goodwill after the stuffiness of the library.
She looked up and down the street. Leo wasn’t there.
The other attendees, and Kitty, came out of the door and disappeared one by one.
She waited ten minutes. She waited a further five minutes, but just as she was telling herself that he wasn’t coming and she shouldn’t have expected him to, there was a honking of a horn to rival Mr Toad’s in Wind in the Willows, and a navy-blue sports car steamed around the corner.
Leo stopped the car at the kerb and lowered down the window.
‘Sorry I’m late! Get in, it’s freezing!’
She hesitated for a moment, then opened the passenger door and climbed into a low bucket seat, upholstered in navy leather.
‘I have an invitation for you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all the way here, and that was a lot of thinking as the traffic was awful.’ He twitched the stereo down, which had been blaring the Arctic Monkeys. ‘Would you like to come to Wiltshire with me?’