circles made by the shaggy hooves and flowing mane, the slight movement caught Ellen Thomas’s eye.
The man approached the windows and felt with his hand to see if he could ease them open. They slid smoothly and he stepped inside.
Ellen Thomas shifted her limbs fractionally to be more comfortable for death. Well, it had come at last. She waited for the touch, sudden and appalling, praying that Robert might be on hand to see her safely through.
The man, not seeing the still figure on the sofa, stole towards the farther door revealed in the cool moonshine. Feeling along the wall, he found his way to the kitchen. Nothing much in the fridge but a starving man is not fussy. He pushed aside a cut-glass bowl with three tinned prunes in it and plucked out a couple of hard-boiled eggs.
He had crushed the shells of the eggs between his palms when a light was turned on and he was clean caught in the sudden illumination.
1
M R G OLIGHTLY HAD MADE LITTLE PROGRESS with his soap opera. In the early evening, he turned on the black-and-white TV set, for which he had to adjust the aerial many times, and watched Neighbours , hoping to pick up tips. There was no doubt about it, the writers of the series had a knack he lacked. When, after a simple supper, he took his regular evening stroll up to the Stag and Badger, to do the crossword with Luke and compare notes (somewhat pessimistic ones) about the day’s output, he heard all round him, in the talk of the people of Great Calne, just the kind of everyday dramas that he was vainly trying to work into his script.
This raised a question in his mind. Did the characters on television talk the way they did because that was how people naturally thought and talked? Or was it, he wondered, the other way round? Did flesh-and-blood people come to resemble fictional characters, imitating what they heard on the TV or cinema screen or read in fiction? In which case, how you wrote and what you wrote about was God’s own responsibility.
Perhaps it was the weight of this burden which held up Mr Golightly’s project. He woke each morning with firm intentions. After a walk round the garden, during which he would inspect the sky for signs of the coming weather (hehad little faith in forecasters), he would chat to Samson before returning inside where he put on music. (He had become keen on some of the minor Italians and was currently on Corelli which, rather enterprisingly, he couldn’t help feeling, he had ordered from Amazon.) Then he washed and shaved and made a cup of coffee and, very often, another. After all this, he was ready to sit at the gateleg table.
But try as he might, as the days passed, he could not get beyond the re-creation – or regeneration rather – of the original cast of characters. These he could see clearly in his mind’s eye.
The eye of Mr Golightly’s mind was no near-sighted one and it was easy enough to bring before it the familiar forms and faces of the characters he had created all that time ago. The action, after all, was, as Luke would say, already ‘blocked in’ from the original work. Put like that, the task he had set himself should be child’s play. But where to find a child? he ruefully asked himself one morning.
His own son, now…he had retained the childlike mentality he was after, had kept, to an extraordinary degree, that uncompromising quality which was so often a thorn in the parental side. Children, in fact, were very like characters in fiction: you couldn’t legislate for, never mind predict, how they might turn out. Once you’d created them they took on an independent, and often defiant, turn of life.
The drama he had written all that time ago, for example. How far had he been responsible for all the upsets and disasters? Could it have turned out differently? And thelove story – which he had hoped, might redeem the tragic elements in the plot and had ended so ambiguously – was that all down to him? The tale, and the participants, had
The man approached the windows and felt with his hand to see if he could ease them open. They slid smoothly and he stepped inside.
Ellen Thomas shifted her limbs fractionally to be more comfortable for death. Well, it had come at last. She waited for the touch, sudden and appalling, praying that Robert might be on hand to see her safely through.
The man, not seeing the still figure on the sofa, stole towards the farther door revealed in the cool moonshine. Feeling along the wall, he found his way to the kitchen. Nothing much in the fridge but a starving man is not fussy. He pushed aside a cut-glass bowl with three tinned prunes in it and plucked out a couple of hard-boiled eggs.
He had crushed the shells of the eggs between his palms when a light was turned on and he was clean caught in the sudden illumination.
1
M R G OLIGHTLY HAD MADE LITTLE PROGRESS with his soap opera. In the early evening, he turned on the black-and-white TV set, for which he had to adjust the aerial many times, and watched Neighbours , hoping to pick up tips. There was no doubt about it, the writers of the series had a knack he lacked. When, after a simple supper, he took his regular evening stroll up to the Stag and Badger, to do the crossword with Luke and compare notes (somewhat pessimistic ones) about the day’s output, he heard all round him, in the talk of the people of Great Calne, just the kind of everyday dramas that he was vainly trying to work into his script.
This raised a question in his mind. Did the characters on television talk the way they did because that was how people naturally thought and talked? Or was it, he wondered, the other way round? Did flesh-and-blood people come to resemble fictional characters, imitating what they heard on the TV or cinema screen or read in fiction? In which case, how you wrote and what you wrote about was God’s own responsibility.
Perhaps it was the weight of this burden which held up Mr Golightly’s project. He woke each morning with firm intentions. After a walk round the garden, during which he would inspect the sky for signs of the coming weather (hehad little faith in forecasters), he would chat to Samson before returning inside where he put on music. (He had become keen on some of the minor Italians and was currently on Corelli which, rather enterprisingly, he couldn’t help feeling, he had ordered from Amazon.) Then he washed and shaved and made a cup of coffee and, very often, another. After all this, he was ready to sit at the gateleg table.
But try as he might, as the days passed, he could not get beyond the re-creation – or regeneration rather – of the original cast of characters. These he could see clearly in his mind’s eye.
The eye of Mr Golightly’s mind was no near-sighted one and it was easy enough to bring before it the familiar forms and faces of the characters he had created all that time ago. The action, after all, was, as Luke would say, already ‘blocked in’ from the original work. Put like that, the task he had set himself should be child’s play. But where to find a child? he ruefully asked himself one morning.
His own son, now…he had retained the childlike mentality he was after, had kept, to an extraordinary degree, that uncompromising quality which was so often a thorn in the parental side. Children, in fact, were very like characters in fiction: you couldn’t legislate for, never mind predict, how they might turn out. Once you’d created them they took on an independent, and often defiant, turn of life.
The drama he had written all that time ago, for example. How far had he been responsible for all the upsets and disasters? Could it have turned out differently? And thelove story – which he had hoped, might redeem the tragic elements in the plot and had ended so ambiguously – was that all down to him? The tale, and the participants, had
Similar Books
