Alex clenches his teeth and counts to ten. Why does it feel as if Jess is poking at a bruise with every one of these suggestions?
‘Okay,’ he says, opening his notebook to a fresh page. Scribbling notes feels safe; it feels like a way to look down, for her not to see the impact her words are having on him. He is a professional, for Pete’s sake. He should have thicker skin than this. It’s embarrassing how vulnerable he is feeling.
He writes, then underlines:Characters to reconsider. And he waits for Jess to speak, for the axe to fall. When it doesn’t, he looks up to find her reading, seemingly caught up in his words on the page.
‘I love this section,’ she says, pointing to a paragraph he has agonised over. ‘I just don’t think that’s quite theright word here.’ And the thing is, she’s right. He’s writtencraving, but even as he wrote it, he thought,No, I don’t think I mean that, exactly. ‘What if we changed it toyearning?’
He snaps his fingers three times in quick succession and she looks up, startled.
‘What does that mean?’ she says.
It’s funny, the things you start to think are normal when you’re doing an MFA. ‘Oh, sorry. It means,bingo. It’s what we used to do during discussions in writing workshops to show we agreed with what someone was saying.’
‘I see.’ She sounds mildly disapproving. Alex doesn’t really blame her.
‘So, in other words, thank you. That’s exactly the word I was looking for, and I didn’t even realise I was.’
Those lips of hers pressed together, again. He finds it very endearing – almost as endearing as her precision in language. It’s the first time, he realises, that he’s said thank you. He suspects it won’t be the last. That this book will be all the better for her involvement, that if anyone can rescue him from the scrapheap of yesterday’s forgotten writers, from the fear of being recognised on Hampstead Heath, it might, after all, be Jess.
Chapter Seventeen
Jess
Jess is enjoying herself. She has the flutter in her belly she recognises from when she’s in the flow of writing a good review, or interviewing an author who’s giving some fascinating, unexpected answers, or taking a photograph for Instagram with the light falling just right on her bookshelves. She’s treading as carefully as she can, not wanting to unnecessarily hurt Alex or even cause him to bristle, if she can avoid it, but in her enthusiasm, it’s possible she is not being careful enough. She makes as much eye contact as possible. She touches his arm gently to communicate, she hopes, empathy and kindness. She gets Jaffa cakes from her bag and offers them to him on a regular basis, usually just after suggesting they delete a scene she can tell he’s worked hard on or questioning the existence of a particular character – the novelist, say, who seems to be a stand-in for Alex himself, the kind of meta thing authors do sometimes that works best with a subtlety he has not quite brought to it.
‘Cup of tea?’ she asks now, after winning a battle on deleting some paragraphs from an overly long description of the plane’s fuselage.
Alex stretches, his arms high above his head, his grey T-shirt rising slightly to reveal a sliver of skin below his belly button. Jess tries not to look; it feels oddly intimate that she would know the pattern of his body hair or the exact colour of his skin beneath his clothes. It occurs to her that out there on the bookternet, there may well be some young women who would kill – possibly killher– to be in this exact position right now, breathing in the same air as Alex Maxwell, being able to name the elements that make up his particular scent. Sharing Jaffa cakes and the home-made flapjacks her grandma slipped her when she called in on the way to get her train. Never mind getting to work with him. In her googling, in her research of the many online pages bearing the suave black-and-white author picture where he rests his chin on his upward-facing palm and gazes thoughtfully into, presumably, his own glorious future, she has found evidence of past workshops where people have paid thousands of pounds to do just that: to sit not quite as close to him as she is now and absorb the wisdom that she is getting for free.
Because sheisgetting wisdom from him too. If it was up to her, she would, for example, merrily cut most of the descriptions and get straight to the action, to the meat of the relationships between the characters. When he explains his narrative choices, when he sticks to his guns as to why certain things belong where they do, when he insists that certain characters retain the backstory he has given them – or certain longdescriptions have a purpose besides showcasing his brilliant prose – she has to admit that it all makes a lot of sense. He is thoughtful – the more considered yin to her sometimes hasty yang – and she knows that she can learn from that.
‘A cup of tea would be great, thank you,’ Alex says now.
‘Milk, no sugar?’
‘Exactly. Because—’
She resists the temptation to gently whack him on the back of the head.‘Don’t say it,’ she says instead.
He pouts, playfully she thinks (hopes!), clearly disappointed to have the wings of his terrible joke about sugar and sweetness clipped. ‘Okay,’ he says, relenting. ‘Fair.’
The pre-boiling hum and bubble of the kettle fills the silence, and she lets it. She knows she has a tendency to talk, talk, talk, and she is gathering from Alex that he only speaks when there is something to say. That silence is his lifeblood. That a whole weekend with her talking non-stop might actually kill him. And, surprisingly, she finds that she definitely doesn’t want to do that.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks him, setting the cup of tea on a coaster to his left.
He looks a little frightened. Perhaps talk of feelings is a little much for a privately educated Englishman, even one who has spent time in America, where, if films and TV are any indication, everyone is forever discussing their emotions.
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
She resists the urge to tease him by explaining what an emotion is.
‘About the work we’ve done so far. Are you happy with it?’
He chuckles, two quick breaths through his nose. Jess finds this endearing. ‘I don’t know abouthappy,’ he says. ‘I’m feeling a little bruised.’
‘Bruised in … a good way?’
Alex frowns. ‘How can a bruise ever be good?’
