Written From the Heart

by Trisha Ashley

  Of course when Sergei rang me, incandescently furious with the Sun, I sympathized with him no end, and he was actually grateful that I had defended him like that in print, so I didn’t mention my ulterior motives.

  But I would have defended him anyway, because I knew his affectionate and hands-on disposition, and just because Nureyev seemed to have been a bit AC/DC it does not follow as the night the day that all male ballet dancers are.

  Sergei did seem very fond of Grigor, though.

  Probably as a direct result of all the recent publicity, my new book seemed to be selling well, if my Amazon ratings were anything to go by. And people kept phoning me and asking me to do things, most of which I refused because I’d started on the next novel, so far untitled, even though I didn’t yet know if I still had a publisher, and I hadn’t found another agent either, despite writing to several. They were all ‘going to get back to me’.

  It all reminded me of the letters I used to receive with my rejected novels before I got published, which always said they’d enjoyed reading my work but it was ‘not quite for them’.

  Still, one evening found me addressing my local writing group, which may not sound very exciting (or lucrative) but they all bought my books in hardback, and it doesn’t do to neglect your roots, does it? (Which reminded me that mine were showing, and I must buy a bottle of Naturally Mine hair colour in Dark Rich Nigella on my way to Waitrose later.)

  During the question and answer bit at the end of my talk the chairwoman, who looked like a testosterone-laden Oxo cube on legs, stood up and said pretty belligerently: ‘It’s all right for you, writing salacious froth about nothing much! But what about the market for religious poetry, that’s what I’d like to know? Publishers won’t touch it, even though it’s straight from the heart and I’ve had countless personal tributes from people who have been privileged to hear me read it.’

  So I said there was a bit of a limited market for religious poetry, except possibly in America, where the market was naturally bigger for everything because there were lots more people over there, but I didn’t personally know much about the USA book scene.

  ‘Have you even been there?’ she demanded.

  ‘Only once, a few years ago.’

  ‘Then I am surprised you didn’t explore all the publishing opportunities while you were there.’

  I said I’d been more interested in exploring the shopping opportunities at the time, and then she said I was a light woman.

  Someone from the back called out: ‘Oh, shut up, Enid, we love her books!’ and several voices said, ‘Hear, hear!’

  Enid swung round, eyes narrowed. ‘Who said that?’

  Things might have got nasty if a pocket-sized ex-colonel type hadn’t got up and given me a hasty vote of thanks and declared it tea and sticky buns time.

  Libby Garnett phoned to say that since I seemed to be getting some publicity for Spring Breezes (no thanks to her, I might have said, but restrained myself), would I like to do a little book-signing tour of London?

  ‘Do you mean signing stock, like I did with my first Salubrious novel, Bad Seed?’ I asked, and she said yes, because there wasn’t much call for sit-down author signings these days except by bestselling novelists.

  She didn’t know about Necromancer’s Nook, where I always sat down very comfortably at a table with a glass of blood-red wine at my elbow and lots of people came, even if they were my friends.

  But I was prepared to do anything to promote my novels, and anyway, if I signed lots and lots of books at least they couldn’t send them back to the publisher, so the bookshops would make a push to sell them … perhaps. So we settled on Thursday and Friday.

  She emailed me an itinerary and, just as I remembered from last time, the bookshops were all over the place, involving much backtracking and tube journeying.

  I stayed over in Linny’s palatial guest suite, since she’d volunteered to come with me again, though I bet she wished she hadn’t when the weather turned cold, rainy and dismal.

  Well, we visited six bookshops in quick succession, and each one went much the same: a slightly scrofulous young man met us, led me to the designated spot – usually standing at the corner of the cash desk, or on the edge of a prominent book display (someone else’s) – and left me with a pen and a pile of virgin copies of Spring Breezes.

  I signed them all with a flowing ‘Best Wishes – Tina Devino’, and then we girded up our Burberrys and went on to the next.

  We were exhausted by the end of the first day, and my wrist hurt, my feet ached, and I’d forgotten how to spell my name. But the next day went much better after Linny insisted on going by taxi everywhere (she paid), and the day started with a signing at Harrods, where they were delightful, giving me a comfy chair and a nice pen and one of those ‘signed by the author at Harrods’ bands that they put around the books.

  We ended up later that afternoon at Selfridges, where someone actually asked me to sign a copy she was buying, and by that time Linny was wearing the Harrods ‘signed by the author’ band paperclipped into a tiara, drunk on the smell of new books.

  When we got home Tershie had come back from whatever moving and shaking he’d been doing and insisted on taking us out to dinner at the Ivy, where he frequently seemed able to magic a table up at short notice. He was so kind, rich, and away such a lot that I told Linny that husbands didn’t come much better than that, if you had to have one at all, which I didn’t, but if Salubrious did dump me I might soon be in the market for something similar.

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

  Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

  Dear Neville Strudwick,

  Thank you for your manuscript, Sons of the Soil, and the cheque.

  Yes, I am Tina Devino the novelist, and I’m so glad you enjoy reading my books.

  No, surprising as it may seem, I don’t have a huge garden myself – the tiniest seaside pebble and driftwood garden, in fact – but I love visiting gardens and adore flowers, so don’t find the research part of my novels at all difficult.

  I look forward to reading your novel.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina Devino

  I am having a website made! No longer was I a dinosaur, but firmly into the twenty-first century, and Minnie the mouse was proud of me. She was my little mascot, and worth her weight in sunflower seeds and Mousienibs, the Rodent Fitfood.

  I saw an advert for someone who specialized in creating author websites and rang up, and this really nice young man came out to see me. I had to give him back, though; they wouldn’t let me keep him.

  He was going to put these links on the Net, like ‘Sexy Flowers’ and ‘Hot Beds’, and all the details and covers of my books, and my reviews … and then I’d have even more mentions on Google! Hurray!

  I heard at last from Salubrious about Dark, Passionate Earth – but not from Tim the Suit, just that little anxious-looking girl who took me to lunch. Jinni, was it? Anyway, she said it just needed a little tweaking here and there, nothing much, and was I happy to let her do it? Only they had decided to bring publication day forward to June in both hardback and paperback, so it was going to be a bit tight.

  So I said yes, it certainly was! And my previous books had always come out in hardback just in time for Christmas and paperback early the following spring, like the aptly named Spring Breezes, and why were they changing that?

  ‘It’s a managerial decision,’ she said reverently. ‘I’m just passing on the message. So it’s all right for me to go ahead with the changes, is it?’

  ‘No, it certainly isn’t,’ I informed her crisply. ‘I want to see the whole manuscript and make any strictly necessary changes myself.’

  She’d obviously been told to avoid this at all costs, but she wasn’t up to the job because there was no way I was letting that happen. So the upshot was that the manuscript with notes arrived by motorcycle courier not much more than two hours later, and it was just as well I insisted because the copy-editor ha
d changed all my half-French hero’s dialogue, which I had written with the merest hint of an accent, to something farcically ‘’Allo ’Allo, zis is ’ow you are saying I am loving you, chérie?’ style.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, several of the sexier paragraphs had been totally rewritten in the style of Tiger Tim, a novelist manqué, and not to their improvement either.

  So I just made the minor sensible changes they asked for and then phoned Tim (after a battle with Jinni) and told him straight out that if he rewrote any part of the book I would demand that my name be taken off it and then tell the press, with whom I was very well in just then, exactly why he was doing this to me!

  Tim backed down right away, as you would if faced with a tigress guarding her cub – and believe you me, no novelist likes to have anyone else rewrite their words, let alone their ex-husband! He said he’d just thought the changes an improvement, but he wouldn’t insist on them, and he was glad to see I’d finally been given some publicity after all this time.

  Then he suddenly said he had to go, and I could hear poor Jinni bleating in the background so it looked like she was up for sacrificial goat.

  Flown by a triumphant adrenaline surge, I phoned Miracle, who was ‘too busy to come to the phone’ according to Chrissy, so I outlined to her what I’d done, and she said, ‘Go, girl!’ in her warm and enthusiastically American way, and I nearly asked her what the market for religious poetry was like in her native milieu and then thought it would just muddy the situation.

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

  Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

  Dear Angie Heartsease,

  No, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that fairies guided you to choose my agency out of all the others, because one of my closest friends will not now perform any action, no matter how everyday, without a protracted if silent negotiation with her guardian angels.

  However, I am afraid your little friends were wrong on one point: I still have to charge you the full amount for reading and assessing your manuscript, even though you are a single mother eking out a living selling fairy-inspired craft items at a tented encampment in mid-Wales, because this is how I make my living.

  There is another possibility, though, since the brochure of craftwork made by your commune that you included was most interesting, especially page three: the hand-beaded, handkerchief-hemmed Midsummer Night’s Dream gossamer skirt in Titania Blue, should you happen to have one in size eight, would be perfectly acceptable payment for my services, and I would not require the matching wings.

  Let me know if we can come to some arrangement.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina Devino

  My computer kept telling me I was performing an illegal action as if I’d hacked into the Pentagon or something, which I hadn’t as far as I knew, though how could I possibly tell? I didn’t suppose a little sign came up saying ‘Welcome to the Pentagon’, did it? I wondered how hackers knew where they were.

  But it certainly wasn’t helpful to tell me it was an illegal act when I didn’t even want to do it. I was only trying to find yet more exciting mentions on the Internet of wonderful me.

  Who were these machines to try to boss me about, anyway? I mean, who programmed them to interfere in innocent people’s lives? Next thing they’d be telling me to stop talking to my Dictaphone so much and do some work!

  Eleven

  Don’t Stop Me Now

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

  Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

  Dear Neville Strudwick,

  I was more than happy to sign the copy of Spring Breezes you sent me, especially since you enclosed return postage. I’m so glad you enjoyed it even though your wife, Glenda, found it a trifle too risqué for her taste; but, as you say, a shared love of nature makes a strong bond.

  Yes, the photo on the back is fairly recent, but I am afraid it is terribly flattering – I assure you the reality is far different!

  I will get back to you about your manuscript, Sons of the Soil, in the near future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina Devino

  It was Valentine’s Day, so even though it wasn’t a Monday I made the trek up to Sergei’s flat carrying a huge plastic sack of crinkled tissue-paper roses made by Jackie, who had been compulsively making paper flowers since the early seventies and didn’t know what to do with them.

  When I moved to Shrimphaven the first thing I did was join the local library, but to do it I had to fight my way through a crinkled jungle of foliage to where Jackie sat at her desk like an ageing Pre-Raphaelite Sleeping Beauty. I came out with her phone number, three good murder mystery novels and a giant sheaf of bright orange paper poppies.

  When Sergei returned from the Royal Ballet, where a couple of times a week he puts a select few through their pliés and pirouettes, I knew he would appreciate a bank of ruby-red roses leading to his door and a big, glossy, over-the-top card on the mat.

  I was glad I didn’t see Tube Man en route because there’s nothing elegant about carrying black plastic bin bags about, but actually I was later setting out than I’d meant to be and so it was well after the commuting rush and into quiet mid-morning time when I approached and stood looking down through Sergei’s windows.

  He’d left a light on and the wooden shutters were not quite pulled across, so I could see into the flat through the airy muslin curtains … And then – quite suddenly – something big in nude pink and wearing a feathered blue butterfly mask darted fast past the window and was closely, if more slowly, followed by a satyr-masked and totally naked Sergei, clearly about to get a Popov someone that was not me.

  Well, the next thing I recall was standing by the little fountain in the gardens nearby, the water in the white marble shell-shaped basin beneath all covered in a mat of roses leaking red dye, like the aftermath of a watery St Valentine’s Day Massacre, which it was, come to think of it, and then I came to my senses and made off hastily towards home before anyone caught me.

  I just couldn’t face even Linny just then, though why I should feel so hurt when I sort of half-suspected I wasn’t the only one in Sergei’s life and had just been kidding myself I was, I didn’t know. But seeing it in the all-too-solid flesh was something else entirely.

  And yes, I know I’d been mentally unfaithful to Sergei with Tube Man on several occasions, not to mention between the pages of my books with numerous sexy heroes, but none of that counted, did it? I didn’t care what anyone said, carnal thoughts were not the same as carnal goings-on.

  Who was that woman in the butterfly mask? (If it was a woman, that is, for I only noticed the mask because she – he? – was looking back over one shoulder … and yes, of course it was a woman. I couldn’t start doubting Sergei’s inclinations, even if I did have serious grounds for doubting his fidelity.)

  I got home somehow, though I don’t remember much about that either, except that I am sure I cried the whole way because my face looked like a red sponge in the hall mirror. I expect my fellow passengers on the train ignored my tears with true British embarrassment or perhaps nervousness engendered by my scarlet-stained hands.

  In my absence my neighbour had taken delivery of a Valentine arrangement of expensive orchids, which he passed to me over the fence as I was fumbling with the door key. (My eyes were a bit swollen, so it was hard to see what I was doing.)

  They were from Sergei, of course, and simply too beautiful to jump up and down on … and in fact the whole scenario, with the roses and the unfaithfulness and the orchids and the doubts, not to mention the Lady Macbeth aspects, suddenly all clicked in my head so that I immediately dropped the novel I’d begun and started writing a new one, to be called The Orchid Huntress.

  Even though I was agent-less and contract-less, I couldn’t stop writing, a bit like Jackie and her tissue-paper flowers: it was a compulsion.

  Tears dripped and blistered on the paper as I scribbled and my heart sat leadenly embalmed by betraya
l in my chest. But as Miracle always used to say, ‘Life’s little tragedies make such good copy, dear – don’t waste one agonizing second of them.’

  Between frenzied bouts of scribbling (I always wrote the first draft longhand), alternating with hours spent crying into my pillow, I pondered various courses of action, such as phoning Sergei up and ending it, or sneaking into his flat at a time he would definitely not be there to look for clues as to who Blue Butterfly Mask was – or both.

  I’d still got a key from the days when Sergei had his ancient and ailing Siamese moggy, Petruschka, so that I could pop in and see how she was when he was working. I was sure he’d forgotten I had it – I rarely went there uninvited … and look what happened when I did!

  Was this why he’d been so distracted for the last year or so? He had someone else and hadn’t told me? And if so, he’d kept it very dark, because no one had dropped any hints about it to me, though Linny was usually one of the first to pick up tasty bits of gossip, her antennae covered such a wide range …

  Oh God, that made me think of butterflies again.

  But although I kept getting out the door key and fingering it, I managed to restrain myself. Meanwhile, the writing was very cathartic, and all my unvoiced and previously largely unacknowledged suspicions about Sergei’s faithfulness had surfaced in it, forming a scummy mat across what were once the limpid depths of our love …

  I wrote that down; it could find its way into the novel.

  For a couple of days I didn’t answer the phone to anyone, just checked for messages.

  One of Linny’s aunts was in town, and as usual Linny was detailed for escort duty around the shops, so I knew she would be too busy to wonder why she hadn’t heard from me, but Sergei kept leaving plaintive little bulletins about his back, and how he wished he could hear the sound of my voice, and why wasn’t I answering his messages? All of which I deleted.