Chapter 4 #2
“You’ll never know unless you try,” Jeremy said. “And if it wasn’t up to snuff, if Iris didn’t like what you’d done, then who would know, apart from us? You’d go your merry way, go back to answering the morning post at Barlow and Barlow, and she’d find somebody else.”
“I suppose so,” Emma had to agree. “But I have to tell you I know nothing about the workings of Scotland Yard or the crime scene in London. I’ve only been here a short while, and I live in a little Australian enclave in Earl’s Court.”
“This book doesn’t take place in London,” David said. “I mentioned it was Melrose’s first case. In this book he’s a young policeman in Glasgow, solving a crime on the Isle of Skye.”
Now Emma laughed. “This is even more absurd. I’ve never been to Scotland. I’ve never even met a Scottish person. All I know is that they play bagpipes, wear kilts and eat haggis.”
“You’ll have to go there, naturally,” Jeremy said. “Go and see the location for yourself. Get the feel for the place.”
Emma shifted nervously on the bench, conscious of the two men sitting close to her. “I don’t think you realize that I’m living on a junior assistant’s salary. The money I have saved is for my ticket home. I simply couldn’t afford to travel to Scotland.”
“My dear girl . . .” Jeremy shook his head as he patted her hand again.
“Has it not sunk in that if you’re a cowriter this book will make you awfully rich?
You won’t need to live in Earl’s Court any more.
And of course you will be advanced the funds to go to Scotland for as long as you need.
Iris is adamant that you get everything right. ”
“Oh, I see,” Emma said, still digesting this. “But a few days in Scotland is not going to make me an expert on the Scots, is it?”
“Stay as long as you like,” Jeremy said. “And the good thing is that Melrose is also an outsider on the island of Skye. He’s from the slums of Glasgow. It’s like another world for him, too.”
“Gosh. It’s very tempting, I must admit,” Emma said. “But as I said before I don’t think I could imitate her style.”
“When you go home today you will take the chapters she’s written so far. I think you’ll be surprised. It feels quite different from the other books. More like a very young Iris Blackburn before she found the voice that made her famous. Quite descriptive, almost flowery.”
“Crikey,” Emma said. “I wonder what made her do this?”
She turned to Jeremy. He spread his hands as if he was as perplexed as she was. “I can only think that she wanted to show she was more than the Melrose books. She felt trapped in his world sometimes, you know. She said to me more than once, ‘Why did I ever invent that bloody man?’”
“If you want my opinion,” David began, making Emma swivel towards him, “I think she wants finally to understand Melrose, where he came from. To show him as a human being. You said yourself that we don’t know much about him.
A Scottish outsider in London, a reclusive sort of person in a way.
Smokes his pipe. Appreciates his whisky.
But we have never seen a glimpse of his life before he came south.
She wants to make the series complete, answer everyone’s questions. ”
“I see,” Emma said.
“Think of it as a literary swan song . . . only she’s bitten off more than she can chew,” David said. “She was diagnosed with dementia before she started the book, but she plunged ahead anyway, hoping to have it all on paper before her memory failed her. Now she just can’t come up with the words.”
“Poor thing. How horrible for her—to have a brilliant creative mind and then to know it’s slipping away.”
“So you’d want to help her if you could?” Jeremy asked, smiling again.
“If I could,” she repeated. “But how can I possibly know how she wanted her story to end? How can I reveal Melrose’s character when I hardly know anything about him?”
“You should probably work your way through the rest of the series,” David said. “See what snippets of himself he reveals.”
Emma nodded, chewing on her bottom lip, something she did when stressed.
“Iris will work with you, I’m sure,” Jeremy said. “Maybe her memory will come back in bits and bobs and what you’ve written will trigger exactly what she wanted to say.”
“At least this is what we hope,” David said.
Emma was still fighting to stay reasonable. A small voice whispered that what they were saying was true. If she was cowriter of an Iris Blackburn novel she’d be set for life. But she tried to picture herself writing about a reclusive Scot who drank whisky, and it seemed an impossible task.
“I really don’t know what to say,” she said at last.
“Then don’t make the decision now,” Jeremy said kindly. He patted her knee, which somehow didn’t seem like too familiar a gesture. “Read what she has written so far, and then you can decide whether you dare take it on. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I suppose it is,” she said. Another worry surfaced. “But what about my job, Mr Spencer? How can I go off to Scotland and come down here, then write a book if I’m supposed to be at work all day?”
“My dear girl, I think Barlow and Barlow will second you to Iris for as long as she needs you. In fact, if you decide to take on the book she’ll want you close at hand so she can keep up with what you’re writing.
There’s a guest cottage by the swimming pool.
Iris will put that at your disposal, so there’s no need to keep coming down from London. ”
Emma put her hands to her cheeks. She was conscious of the splashing of the fountain and the cooing of the doves now on top of the wall.
Images raced through her head: the allure of being rich and famous, the chance to sit and write in this lovely garden and above all the chance to prove herself as a writer. She’d be a fool to turn it down.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll read what she has written so far, and if I think I can give it a good shot, then I’ll do it.”
“That’s our girl.” Jeremy put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. “I don’t think you’ll regret this.”