Stop it! Stop it! Amy shouted the words, forcefully vanquishing her beloved husband, the tiny ill-equipped Spanish hospital, Honoria’s enraged descent and the dreadful flight home. If she was going to write herself out of her present miserable existence she would not do it by endlessly picking over the past.
She took down the hat box, removed the manuscript and re-read the last three pages to get in the mood. She was not entirely dissatisfied. The prose seemed to her quite robust and she had been careful to keep out even the slightest hint of irony. But how would it come across, Amy now asked herself, under the hard commercial eye of a tough fiction editor?
At least this time round (for Rompers was her third attempt) she had got the social class and settings right. At first, when Sue pointed out that the quickest way to make pots of money was to write within a genre which she called ‘cuddling and buying things’, Amy had quite misunderstood. Her heroine, Daphne, a dental receptionist, had been shyly approached by a divinity student while selecting a cauliflower in Tesco’s. Now, stylishly renamed, she was wheeling and dealing in Hong Kong.
Amy chewed on her Biro. When she was just thinking above writing it seemed so easy. All sorts of jolly phrases leapt to mind. Pacy, beautifully shaped, packing a punch. But when the time came to deface the dreaded blank page they never seemed to belong in what she was working on.
Likewise individual scenes. Great fun to write; difficult to fit in to the grand overall scheme. Amy had wondered about missing this step out entirely. Why should not readers buy all the bits - perhaps in a prettily decorated box - and assemble them to their own designs in their own homes? After all, people did it with furniture. It could be a new trend. And publishers were supposed to be always on the lookout for originality.
Amy looked at her watch and gasped. Half an hour since Honoria had left. All that time wasted in sad recollection instead of working towards a better future. She seized her pen.
‘Damn, damn and damn again!’ cried Araminta saltily as she picked up Burgoyne’s latest fax with trembling lips.
Honoria cycled alongside the Green in solitary and deluded splendour, pursing her mouth savagely as she spotted a single Coca-Cola tin lying meekly on its side beneath the village notice board.
Powerfully present on the parish council, Honoria had so far fought successfully against the placing of a litter bin on, or even anywhere near, the beautifully maintained verdant oval. But if this sort of loathsome despoliation was to be the result she may well have to think again.
Without doubt the article in question had been thrown down by someone from the municipal dwellings. Although these hideous breeze-block buildings were placed, quite rightly in Honoria’s opinion, on the very edge of the village proper, the social pariahs housed within seemed to think they could go wherever they liked, shouting, playing music, revving their disgusting motor bicycles. In the summer they even swarmed all over the Green to watch the cricket, bringing pushchairs and picnics and hideous tartan rugs. If Honoria had her way the dozen or so council houses would be contained behind high wire fences and patrolled by armed guards.
She turned into the driveway of Laura’s cottage and dismounted by crossing one stout leg in front of the other and jumping down. She leaned her bicycle, a large old upright with a semi-circle of yellow oilskin laced over the back wheels and a fraying wicker basket, against the garage and tapped on the front door.
Honoria was there by invitation. At her own request Laura had been looking out for a stone figure to grace the Gresham garden’s clematis walk. She had rung the previous evening to say that a catalogue had arrived for a coming sale in Worcester containing pictures of some charming statuary. Perhaps Honoria would like to come and look at them? She suggested tea time the following afternoon, which was early closing at her shop.
Honoria rapped again, but no one came. She lifted the latch, which was very old, a highly polished brass heart with a lion’s paw handle, and the door opened. All was quiet but for the tock-tocking of Laura’s tall ebony grand-father clock. Honoria peered into the two tiny rooms opening off the hall then moved, silent on thick cherry-red carpet, towards the kitchen. As she approached she heard a most strange sound - a long, juddering, in-drawn breath as if someone was being severely shaken.
Honoria hesitated, not from nervousness but from an inbred aversion to tangling with any situation not proceeding along smoothly conventional lines. She also had a distaste verging on abhorrence for minding anyone’s business but her own.
She decided to open the door just a chink to see if she could discover precisely what was going on. Unfortunately the door creaked. Loudly. Laura, who was sitting at the table, her head resting on her arms, weeping, looked up. The two women stared at each other. It was impossible for Honoria to withdraw.