A Rival Creation

by Marika Cobbold

  A Rival Creation

  MARIKA COBBOLD

  To Jeremy and Harriet,

  with love

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the same Author

  One

  Liberty wondered if she was alone in imagining herself far prettier as a corpse than she would ever be alive. She stood on the podium at the back of the village hall, admiring the image of her dead self, draped across the trestle table which was long enough to take at least four bodies laid end to end.

  ‘So beautiful,’ they would sigh as they arrived at the hall and saw her there, dead. ‘So young.’ There were few things for which one was considered young at thirty-nine, but dying had to be one of them.

  ‘I think I can hear a car.’ Nancy Sanderson, secretary of the Tollymead Women’s League, popped her head out from behind the curtain that separated the small kitchen from the podium. ‘You all set?’

  Brought back to the present, Liberty nodded, picking up the bunch of A4 papers that lay on the table in front of her.

  ‘It really was good of you to help us out like this at the last minute.’ The whole of Nancy appeared. ‘But I knew of your little classes, so when that wretched woman let us down again, I said to myself, “Liberty Turner is the girl you want.”’

  The door of the hall squeaked, hesitated, then opened altogether, letting the first of the ladies through to find their seats.

  At eight o’clock the hall was as full as it would get with most of the thirty or so members of the League in place. Nancy welcomed them all and went on to say how the evening’s speaker needed no introduction. She spoke on the subject for a good ten minutes before finally calling on Liberty.

  Liberty cleared her throat, then flinched as the sound was amplified with startling efficiency by the small microphone in front of her. Feeling she had not achieved an impressive start, she smiled apologetically.

  ‘I know you all came here tonight expecting to hear a talk on how to paint your walls to achieve an effect not unlike marble but, as you’ve just heard, Belinda Harrison, your speaker, had to cancel at the last minute. As I know very little about decorating, I will speak to you on an entirely different subject, deeply unfashionable but dear to my heart…’ Liberty put her hand out for the glass of water thoughtfully provided by Nancy and, looking out over her sparse audience, took a deep gulp before continuing, ‘Tonight I will speak to you of The Failure.

  ‘The yearning in man to do more than just survive is the making of both the greatness and the tragedy of being human. From that yearning stems every painting, every piece of music, every great garden and every book.

  ‘Now I expect most of you are familiar with the idea of the struggling artist who battles through neglect, even ridicule, poverty and illness, to win recognition in his or her chosen field. Less talked of is another kind of artist, one who shares the same burning desire to create and to breathe spirit into the stuff of life, the same need to describe and interpret the world around them, even the same foibles and neuroses. So where lies the difference, you might ask. The answer is simple: talent. When God created The Failure He popped in all the right traits but that single vital one. Was this a deliberate act, or simply an oversight? Who knows?’ Liberty paused and blinked nervously out across the hall, stretching out her hand for another drink of the water. One woman, her stout legs planted firmly apart, her modesty covered by a voluminous grey poplin coat, glanced at her watch.

  Liberty had been surprised herself when she accepted Nancy Sanderson’s late invitation to speak to the Tollymead Women’s League. The call had come at a bad time.

  ‘You’re obsessed!’ Tom had shouted as she sat weeping over the letter from her agent. ‘You know that, obsessed!’

  ‘“I am sorry to have to return yet another of your manuscripts, but as we have already discussed on so many occasions, the market for your kind of books has all but disappeared. I do feel now that we have done all that we can for you and that with the country in an ever deepening recession…” What’s that Tom?’ Liberty looked up from the letter.

  ‘I’m off, leaving for good!’ he yelled. ‘I’ve had enough living with a woman…’

  ‘Week-ending,’ she muttered. It seemed important somehow to get the facts right.

  ‘… who is only half there, if at all. Who spends the nights not in bed with me but locked away with a bloody computer. I’ll put up with playing second fiddle to your son, but not to a damn word processor. I’ve had enough. I want a woman who puts me before her hobby.’

  The word hobby made her flinch. She looked up at his handsome face that was all red and angry and at the eyes, brown like the skin of a conker and round with outrage. ‘It’s finished, I’m not a writer any more,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve quit trying. From now on, I’ll come to bed early every night and there’ll be no more ink stains on my nightie.’

  Tom looked hard at her for a moment. ‘Well it’s too late,’ he said finally.

  Liberty’s gaze sidled off in the direction of the letter, and with a deep sigh she said, ‘I suppose you’re right to go,’ her voice emerging much quieter than she had meant.

  ‘Look at you. Even now you care more about getting the boot from your agent than you do about me going.’ Most of the noise had gone from Tom’s voice now, leaving it twanging with grievances. ‘You are obsessed you know, neurotic too, and most probably a manic depressive.’

  Liberty had buried her face in the crook of her arm, but now she looked up at him with a small smile. ‘Just because you’ve stopped loving me you’ll grasp at any little fault.’

  Tom had given her a look that was a close cousin to hatred, and she had hidden her face again, feeling the puckered skin of her scarred cheek against her hand. When she looked up he was gone.

  She had decided a long time ago that two errant fathers were quite enough in any child’s life, so it was only when Johnny, her son, was practically grown-up that she had allowed herself to become close to Tom. And now, with Johnny away and her work rejected, Tom too was gone. Her face had ached with all the crying, and her cheeks were so sodden that she half expected the skin to peel away like the label from a jam jar. It was then that the phone had rung. She only answered in case it was Johnny and, steadying her voice, padding it with false cheer, she picked up the receiver and said hello.

  ‘Mrs Turner?’ the woman at the other end had said. ‘Nancy Sanderson here. We haven’t actually met… quite terrible really, after all these years living in the same village. I do know of you, though, so anyway we, that is the Tollymead Women’s League, are having our monthly meeting…’ Liberty moved the phone half an inch away from her ear; her head ached and Nancy Sanderson had a voice like a hammer beating a tin tray.

  ‘… You can say anything y
ou like on any subject; we’re very catholic in our tastes. I’m sure you have some jolly interesting stories from your glory days. So many people seem to be keen on writing; anything you say will be fascinating, I’m sure. Mind you, they don’t seem to read as much as they used to. Maybe it’s because they’re all busy writing.’

  ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ Liberty had said when all she wanted, like Miss Otis in the Cole Porter song, was to give her regrets due to a sudden death: in Liberty’s case, her own. But she never could say no. Cowardice, her father called it, not kindness, cowardice.

  So she had sat down in the kitchen alcove where her computer stood, drawn back to the blank screen like a child to an abusive parent, trying to think of something to say to Nancy Sanderson’s ladies. She sat there until it grew dark outside and then, as she got up to switch the light on, Tom returned and gave her a subject. ‘I forgot my violin,’ he said. Then, leaning against the doorway he looked at her not unkindly. ‘You know Liberty,’ he said, ‘you really are the definitive failure.’

  Liberty was coming to the end of her talk. ‘But ladies…’ then she noticed Neville Pyke at the back of the hall so she added, ‘and gentlemen, my intention tonight has not been to depress,’ this bit was spoken with deep insincerity. ‘There are thousands of us out there failing; getting the sack from the organization to which we gave forty years of our lives. Seeing our business taken into receivership, being divorced by the husband to whom we dedicated our youth, having our golden-haired little cherubs mug old ladies, sitting on a small hard chair still playing second violin after twenty years in the symphony orchestra, being offered yet another part as the heroine’s overweight friend in a BBC sit-com. It’s hard, wanting so much and finding out that, quite frankly, you haven’t got what it takes to get it. But as I said, it’s no cause for despair. Failure is good, failure is necessary. Just think, without it, how could there be success?’

  The applause lasted just long enough for Nancy to take Liberty’s place at the microphone. ‘Mrs Turner will be glad to answer questions,’ Nancy said.

  Liberty drank some more water. There was silence. People looked around at each other, expectantly at first, then disapproving; surely someone could think of something, anything, to ask, they seemed to say. Liberty was easily embarrassed; a sign of conceit her father said, and she thought how she need not have put herself through this humiliation, minor though it was. She could just have gone right ahead and killed herself as she had planned, instead of agreeing to do the talk first. Mealy-mouthed to the end, she thought bitterly. No wonder she was a no-good artist, a no-artist, in fact. A real artist was strong and true, straight and good, not weasely and measly and frightened of things that did not even go bump in the night.

  ‘Surely,’ Nancy said invitingly, ‘someone has a question raised by tonight’s… stimulating talk.’

  It was the same when Liberty was eight and at a birthday party, one of those to which the whole class was invited whether the birthday girl wanted it or not. (No darling, you do have to ask Liberty. It would be very unkind to leave her out and besides, we know her father.) Liberty could see it before her still. She could hear the birthday girl’s mother’s voice with its barely masked irritation, ‘Now who will be Liberty’s partner?… I’m sure someone will… no?’

  Neville Pyke, who was a member of Liberty’s writing class, stood up, and relief rose like a pleasing scent from the audience.

  ‘I have to admit,’ Neville said, ‘that I took Mrs Pyke’s place here tonight, expecting to hear about how to achieve a marbled effect on any surface by the simple use of paint, but after my initial disappointment I must say I enjoyed the talk very much. You see when I was a lad I…’ From her place at the podium Liberty saw Neville turn pink as his voice trembled. ‘… dreamed of playing cricket for my native Essex. I was quite good too but, like Mrs Turner here, not quite good enough.’ Neville smiled up at the lighted podium. ‘But I found great satisfaction in my life with the railways, and I would like to say to Mrs Turner that I’m sure she too will find some other, equally satisfying occupation.’ Neville sat down to a fair amount of mumbled approval.

  A woman with a face like a cockatoo stood up. ‘Your story makes me think of Shirley Temple, Shirley Temple Black as she is now of course. She became an ambassador. But she was very, very famous wasn’t she? Anyway, when did you realize your career as a writer was over and what have you decided to do instead?’

  ‘I think it was yesterday,’ Liberty answered, thinking with some pleasure that to embarrass someone you only need to tell them the truth. ‘Yes, yesterday, when I had my fifth rejected manuscript in eight years returned with a letter saying I should think of taking up some other profession. Call me hasty if you will but I decided it was time to bow out.’

  Before sitting down, the woman added that Liberty’s typing skills would come in handy, and Liberty asked if Shirley Temple typed.

  The next question was again from Neville. ‘I meant to ask you in class, do you write under a pseudonym? I’ve been searching for your work in our local library. They suggested you might be writing under a pseudonym.’

  ‘No,’ Liberty said with a deep sigh. ‘No, I didn’t use a pseudonym.’ As if I would, she thought, after all the trouble I went through to get a decent name.

  ‘The children at school say my name is silly.’ Six years old, fair-haired and plump, Liberty Bell had turned accusing eyes at her father. ‘And they say their mummies think I’ve got a silly name too.’

  Hamish Bell couldn’t help but look amused, but there was no corresponding flicker in his daughter’s anxious face. ‘Why did you call me a silly name?’

  ‘It’s not silly, it’s interesting. People always make fun of what’s unusual. It shouldn’t bother you.’

  ‘Mormor and Morfar don’t like it either.’

  ‘Your grandparents are Swedish; a lot of things probably sound strange to them.’

  The child thought of tea with her grandparents. They had given her a watch for her birthday, so she knew that tea was always at four o’clock. Milky tea and ginger nuts, always at four o’clock. The thought caused a brief smile to cross the child’s solemn features before she turned again to her father. ‘They wouldn’t think Anne sounds silly. Anne is a nice name,’ she said nodding emphatically, ensnaring her father’s neck in her podgy arms. ‘A really nice name.’

  Hamish had freed himself with an irritated flinch. ‘It might or might not be a nice name, but your name is Liberty.’ And he had stood up and walked from the room.

  Liberty had gone into her bedroom in their flat at the top of the school’s senior boarding house. Sitting down, straight-backed, on the green shag-pile rug that looked just like a lovely patch of grass, she was a very pretty girl called Anne on a picnic with her mother and father. Anne looked at her watch. It was exactly four o’clock, so she knew tea would be served right then. As she ate her ginger nuts another very nice girl appeared and asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Anne.’ Liberty-Anne would say in a proud sort of voice.

  ‘That’s a nice name,’ the other girl would say.

  In the village hall a woman, much younger than the rest, put her hand up.

  ‘Yes?’ Nancy said in the voice of a teacher to a promising pupil.

  Liberty looked at the lovely young woman who sat at the back of the room, as out of place as Colette at a Tupperware party. ‘What did it feel like, producing a book?’ the woman asked. She lowered her voice. ‘I imagine it’s rather like the birth of a child.’

  Liberty was taken aback. The birth of a book, the birth of a child, it was such an obvious comparison that she had never paid it any attention. Was it like Johnny being born? And if it was, did that matter? Did it make either event more, or less, important? ‘I regained my figure quicker after the books.’ Liberty felt annoyed at herself as soon as she had said it; a serious question, however commonplace, merited a serious answer. She tried again. ‘Both events were marvellous and both are in the past, my crea
tive part in them, over.’

  ‘I don’t think you should call yourself a failure, though,’ the girl said. ‘Everyone is good at something.’ There was a general muttering of approval.

  Wouldn’t they just like to believe that, Liberty thought. She looked across at the young woman. ‘I don’t know that I agree with you. There is a tendency in modern society to abolish anything uncomfortable. We used to have a heaven and a hell; if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Nowadays… it’s all right to tell a child that Granny has gone to heaven. But even if Granny was a well known axe murderer and paedophile, try getting away with saying that, in your view, odds are that Granny has, in fact, gone straight in the opposite direction. Opposite is the word here. I think it’s wrong to tell people that they can have just one side of the coin. It’s too easy and life, as we all know, is not easy. Failure just isn’t fashionable; it goes against all modern ethics and ideas of what is right and above all fair. Failure is not politically correct – unless of course it’s the failure of a politician – but failure is there, all about us.’

  Nancy hastened up from her seat. ‘And on that truly fascinating note,’ she concluded, ‘I invite you all to join Mrs Turner and me for a glass of sherry.’

  Liberty stepped down from the podium. Smiles like nervous tics were all around, as the ladies of the Tollymead League sipped their sherries and tried to think of something to say. A few of them had known Liberty as a child, when she lived with her schoolmaster father at the nearby prep school, Tollymead Manor. But now it seemed that she confused them by being someone they felt they ought to know but didn’t. Most of the ladies, though, were barely familiar faces to Liberty, glimpsed in church or at some drinks party. Tollymead was like that: you drove through it on your way to somewhere else, even when you lived there. In fact, Liberty often thought it was just the sort of place where you could lie dead in your house for days without anyone noticing, particularly if your milk was stacking up by the back door rather than the front.