Chapter Sixteen
Alex
The flat white seems to have worked its magic. That, and the terrible joke he has been using for years – decades, even – to soften people, make them smile. It was the first thing he’d said that made his stepsister Georgina laugh despite herself after his father had married her mother. More of a snort, really, but he caught her eye and laughed back, and it bonded them. So the bad joke has become more than just a bad joke. It’s become something that evokes fond memories for him, a part of his history that he usually feels vulnerable sharing, so that he surprised himself by coming out with it just now. But Jess seems to have appreciated it; Alex didn’t miss the glint in her eye.
He has to admit he is impressed with her work ethic. Setting down her coffee on the table in the kitchen, she gets out her laptop, and says, ‘Shall we get to work?’
‘Yes,’ he says, not wanting to tamp down this impressive show of enthusiasm. (Though it doesn’t seem as if it’s for show. It seems, like everything else about Jess, to be impressively genuine.) ‘Let’s. Let me just drop my bag in my room and get my bearings.’
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m just feeling a burst of inspiration. But of course. Feel free to pick whichever room you like.’
They’re both perfectly fine rooms, though one is more basic than the other, with a smaller double bed, and looks out onto the front of the house, which he guesses will be beautiful later on this month when the magnolia explodes in pink and white blooms. He hasn’t read Nathan’s Airbnb listing, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it emphasised the other room: its views of the countryside, its sense of being so much further away from London than their short, if slightly fraught, train journey might imply. He imagines that is the bedroom which Jess would like, though unexpectedly she hasn’t yet claimed it. And it feels like, despite the bringing of the coffee, which she had seemed disproportionately delighted by, he still has some ground to make up after how rudely he has behaved towards her. If they’re going to be locked together in such close quarters for a few days, it’s probably for the best, for both of them, that she be as happy as possible.
‘I’ll take the front room,’ he calls from his new quarters. ‘I like that it looks out onto such a pretty street.’
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Great choice.’
He thinks, though, that he can hear relief in her voice. That he wasn’t wrong about her preference. That he is beginning to be able to read her. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but this makes him happier than it has any right to.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she says, when he comes back with his notepad, his pen, his stack of notes. ‘That really hit the spot.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he says. ‘It’s the first rule of writing. You can’t write without coffee.’
He has a T-shirt that says as much, bought for him by his sister Jen.A writer is a mysterious organism capable of turning caffeine into books. He often wears it when he’s at his desk, a sort of sartorial pep talk.Come on, Alex, you’ve got coffee. That’s all you need to get some words out. Or even,Come on, Alex, this is who you are: a writer. With coffee, you can do this. It hasn’t always worked, but he goes on trying, valiantly. He doesn’t wear the T-shirt out and about, doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact he’s an author. He’d feel silly if he bumped into one of the literary luminaries of Hampstead – people who can probably write even without caffeine or sartorial pep talks. But he also doesn’t always feel like being stopped by one of his own fans, who might not be totally sure that it was definitely him without the T-shirt clueing them in. It’s happened once or twice; they say nice things; they sometimes ask for his autograph (one even had one of his books with him, which was more gratifying than it maybe should have been). But then conversation inevitably turns to what he’s working on now; they always feel the need to point out that it’s been a while, as if he doesn’t know, as if he hasn’t noticed. They say it inquisitively, almost as if they’re concerned for his well-being, as if they’re hoping he hasn’t succumbedto writer’s block, which, since they’re true fans, they know he doesn’t believe in. He makes a joke, deflects, asks if they’re writers, too. More often than not, they blush, shuffle their feet, own up to having attempted a short story or two or begun a novel.Don’t give up, he tells them, even though he’s on the verge of giving up himself, and because most people are most interested in themselves, they drop the subject of Alex’s writer’s block, eager suddenly to tell him about their own creative path. He’s heard some seemingly endless synopses of the kind he should probably read on nights he has trouble sleeping, but he’s also met some interesting people, and he loves watching the spring in their step as they walk away, newly buoyed and perhaps inspired by his words of encouragement and the idea that published writers are people just like they are, who wait in a queue at Gail’s for cheesy scones on Saturday mornings, or mutter to themselves when the wait for the zebra crossing is too long, or can’t help taking a picture of the London landscape from the top of Parliament Hill on a bright autumn day. But those encounters make him feel like even more of a fraud, more of a failure, and it’s exhausting. Goodness knows how George R. R. Martin ever showshisface in public.
To his delight and surprise, Jess laughs at his quip about coffee. A bright, sparkling laugh that somehow lights up the room. A laugh he’d like to hear more of.
‘Really?’ she says, nodding at the stationery in front of him. ‘Is the second rule expensive pens and Moleskin notebooks?’
‘That’s just a life rule,’ he says.
She nods earnestly, as if absorbing a valuable lesson. ‘I see.’
Jess closes her laptop, pushes it to one side. ‘So how do you want to do this?’
He’s wondered this himself – where to start. Truth be told, he wonders this every time at the editing stage. Reading through his own first drafts, he usually goes through all the stages of grief – most notably, one of sadness that the book isn’t as good as he imagined or hoped – before arriving at acceptance: it’s an okay draft, but there’s a lot of work to do, still. And now what? That’s when he usually calls in Nathan for extra wisdom and a little reassurance.It’s a first draft, Nathan always tells him.First drafts aren’t supposed to be good. Their only job is to exist. Alex tellinghimselfthis doesn’t seem to cut it, but when it’s Nathan, it seems to make sense.
He could start by asking Jess what she thinks of his book, but he already knows, because she’d told him in detail, through her big loopy writing on his manuscript that communicates friendliness even as it eviscerates him:Too much description here. OrYou’ve said this already. OrHmm, I find this part hard to believe.She’s written him a long, thoughtful editor’s note on the strengths and weaknesses of the book, what she thinks needs to be added, what should be pared back. He read it angrily once – those stages of grief, again – but after a walk around the block to clear his head, he read it again, and found himself nodding, relieved that some of his instincts about what didn’t work were beingconfirmed and that she’d helped explain the unease he hadn’t quite been able to put his finger on at some points in the manuscript.
She must take his silence now to mean uncertainty, to mean that he needs her to take charge, because she leans down into her bag and pulls out a multi-coloured block of Post-It notes. ‘I brought these,’ she says. ‘I figured they might help.’
He usually goes for plain white index cards for novel-planning purposes himself, but maybe he can be flexible on this one tiny thing. Pick his battles and keep his powder dry for when she insists that the passengers on the plane all have to survive, deleting his favourite scene: the moving (if he does say so himself) death of a child in the arms of his mother. (His mother! A woman, let it be noted. He has not ignored women, as Jess has unfairly suggested.)
‘You’ve come prepared,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
She sits up straighter, presses her lips together. He gets the sense she is trying not to show how much she enjoyed the compliment.
‘I take this seriously,’ she says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he says. He didn’t need the Post-Its to tell him as much. He could tell in the meticulousness of her notes, in the care she’d obviously taken to closely read his book more than once.
‘Good.’ She searches out his eyes with hers. ‘I know this whole thing isn’t easy for you. But I feel very honoured to get to be part of your process. I hope you know that.’
Once upon a time, the way she clearly stated this might have freaked him out. But his years in America have got him used to people who freely share how they are feeling, who don’t just leave it to be read between the lines, passive-aggressively or otherwise. He wouldn’t say he is comfortable with it, as such. He’s a long way fromthat. But it doesn’t unnerve him in quite the way it used to.
‘I appreciate that,’ he says, forcing himself to hold her gaze. Feeling, as he does so, his stomach inexplicably lurch.
Jess is the first to look away. She picks up the manuscript. ‘Maybe we should talk through it in macro terms first,’ she says. ‘What’s working, what isn’t. Which characters maybe aren’t adding much to the plot and how we can introduce others that do.’
