But sometimes hope is stronger than the dead fall of failure, the weight in the heart, the bitter taste rising. Because at 5.40 the phone rang again, and there was Mai’s singsong voice: ‘We have had our meeting, and I am ringing to say Yes, we would like very much to publish your novel, if we can come to an agreement …’ We finished off with compliments—looking forward.
In fact, I was ‘struck down, pole-axed. Floored by emotion, almost exhaustion, almost blankness, something I could hardly give a name to, but which possessed me, beyond words. I didn’t know what to do with myself.’ (I see now it was like the aftermath of the endoscopy which began this book: my body was left behind by my mind; it had to find itself again.)
I felt I had to move, to go out, to walk, to find people, to shout, to dance, to sing. I ended up walking down the road under an extraordinary thunderstruck black-and-sun sky, in the teeth of an icy wind, headed for my friend Hanna’s, bits of whose life and wisdom are in that book—rang at her door, the doorbell was run down they—were out. Maybe in a way that was better, because I was in such a strange stunned state …
Then I walked through hard cold rain to Willesden, foraging for my fair folk—I had a ten-pound note and some change in my pocket; bought a bottle of cheap fizz, a pizza for Rosa, mushrooms, good bread—thinking ‘feast-time, feast-time, happiness’.
Walking back home from the bus down Liddell Gardens there was a blaze of late warm-toned sun and suddenly the Victorian school for the disabled was lit with red beauty—warm, warm, reaching up to the rain-cleared sky. I just stood and gazed; the sun, which had already set at my eye-level, shone above me in a high red band; it caught and lit the top of a tree of blossom; as I looked at the heights of the burning school, a small dark bird swooped up and over, made for the tower on the roof with a weather vane, and before my eyes landed on the very top in the sun—Hurrah, bird of my heart, well aimed.
And then down the long straight street of gardens towards my home, and everything was all at once illuminated with the joy I was too overcome to feel at first. The sky—such a sky. Pearly complicated clouds with a patch of warm sandy-gold and high fans of whitish silver, too bright to look at long, and behind them the pure thin blue—cherry trees that looked black against the sky until you got close and looked up and there as your blindness peeled away they were, deep maroon leaves and keen pink blossoms, nothing was black, everything swam with colour—and the sharp fresh smell of the altar of redcurrant flowers pulled me across the wet road to bury my face in them—I wanted to live for ever.
Yes: the joy. I can still feel it. It was not about money. It was the work. The work, in which I’d put my soul and my heart, the bird on its arc across the thin blue sky.
(But what if I had not had a friend? What if Moris Farhi had not known Mai?)
Nearly a year later, I was in Australia with Rosa, a month or so before The White Family was published. We were happy, on bikes, a late balmy afternoon, tied them up and went into an internet café. I opened Hotmail and saw a puzzling blizzard of emails. Most of them were headed ‘Congratulations …’ The book had been long-listed, pre-publication, for the Orange Prize, the global prize for women writing in English. It came out on that ready-made wave of approval, and gained excellent reviews. Then, to the excitement of my publisher and my triumphant, unreasonable joy, it was shortlisted. And then, again, it was shortlisted for the International Dublin Impac Award of 100,000 Euros, the largest award for a single book, and ran into many editions and translations. I suppose you could say I was vindicated.
The ‘Disaster’ years came more or less exactly in the middle of my career to date, with my sixth, out of twelve, books (this is my thirteenth). It turned out to be the middle, but it could have been the end. Ever after, my memory of that time has added a resonance, a shading, a depth of pleasure when good things happen; each time a new foreign right is sold, each time I get the chance to travel for my writing. Since the ‘Disaster’ years, I have been asked, for work, to Rome, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Majorca, Ankara, Istanbul, Zurich, Tripoli, Geneva, Copenhagen … so many foreign cities. So little time on this beautiful planet, and writing is helping me travel around it. A new and quite unexpected African connection opened up for me in 2003 when my enterprising editor, Anna Wilson, said the right thing to Cheltenham Literary Festival, and they sent me to Kampala, Uganda, on an exchange with the Ugandan novelist Ayeta Anne Wangusa, which inspired friendships, short stories, two novels. My luck, my luck, sitting writing in Kampala with the weaver birds darting outside the open door. When, in 2004, I became Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, the first woman to hold that post, it meant more to me because, not so long before, I thought my life as a writer might be over.