The telephone is ringing again. I listen to the click of the answerphone, followed by my message, recorded in Latin, and then a breathy, girlish voice speaking:
‘Hello, Mr Fate … It’s Eleanor Bates from Jonathan Cape here, and we were just wondering how you were progressing with Thomas Turridge. We’re all so – well, we’re dying to read some more, even if you just have another chapter. There’s no rush, of course. I just wanted to – well, touch base – and – we look forward. Very much. OK. Thanks. Bye for now.’
Eleanor Bates: an unfamiliar name. Perhaps she is the new girl. Last month I received a message from a Miss Rose Harriet-Jones. I found it to be more than a little demanding in tone and after I complained about her, I was assured that she would be fired. My editor, a Mr John Sturgeon, sent me a letter after reading the recently redrafted opening of Thomas Turridge. It was penned in blue ink and the stiff, awkward flourishes, the gloopy twists of his Gs and Js, suggested that he was uncomfortable without a keyboard. I suspect he thought that it was an old-fashioned touch which would impress me. He congratulated me at length on the first twenty-three thousand words. He informed me that the character of Thomas was beautifully conceived – a vulnerable, sweet and deeply sympathetic protagonist. He was moved by the loss of Thomas’s mother and is eager to know if he might save Rachel from being sent to the 112asylum. He added that Mr Gwent is a hilarious creation and he never grows tired of his cameos in my novels. The crisis involving the helicopter came as a surprise, he concluded, and he wonders if it might be best to maintain the tone and atmosphere of the Victorian era, which I have sustained so well. Then the note of melodrama: We are keen to publish and capitalise on the recent surge of interest in your work.
He is referring, of course, to the newspaper pieces on the missing Jaime Lancia. I have been announced as a suspect, which has served to give me cachet: the idea of the author as murderer supposedly upset my fans; the fact that all my books went back into the Sunday Times top ten suggests otherwise. (After a recent plateau in my sales, this has been a welcome revival, the sort of resurgence in popularity usually only experienced after one has died. Alas, I have begun to worry of late that I might be a breed in danger of extinction: the mature male novelist. Literary fashion has unexpectedly taken a perverse swerve in favour of gossipy, slim novels by young women exploring romances with unkind boys, bodily angst and the delights of Marxism.)
I sit down at my desk for my morning session. I weigh my paperweight, Gwent’s carpal bone glinting in its fissured centre. I open my Moleskine notebook, I dip my Montblanc fountain pen in my well of deep-blue ink; I fire my mind with two espressos and soothe it with tobacco pressed into my favourite pipe; I imbibe several chapters of David Copperfield, adding words such as querulous and phlegmatic temperament to my list of Dickensian flourishes; I play Beethoven. Several hours pass. Desperation wearies me. Now that Jaime and Rachel have fled, the characters of Thomas Turridge and the governess revert to little more than mannequins. The pages I produce are fit only 113for the fire. Once more, I curse Mr Gwent for assisting in their escape, ushering them into his inferior text. He will suffer punishment for that, but for now I shall follow Dickens’s advice and make them wait: let him writhe in vexed anticipation of possible tortures.
Eleven times, my grandfather clock chimes, reminding me that it is time to feed my characters. I shuffle into the kitchen and remove two packets of Nutrifeed from the cupboard. Gently kicking Dorothea’s dirt-tray to one side with my slippered foot, I peel back the newspaper, and unlock the wooden trap door. Dimitte me: it is such clichéd villainy, to lock them in the basement! And I am too old to risk daily descents down such a steep staircase without a rail: one slip and I would require a new hip. However, it remains the safest place for the present. When the police calm down, I shall return them to the bedroom.
I check on them five times a day, my visits as regular as a devotee attending to his prayers, whether in person or on the live feed from the CCTV playing out on a twelve-inch black-and-white TV screen in my shed. There is something so peaceful about seeing them there on the mattress, laid out like the dead, wandering in my created world. My little ducklings. Then I recall this morning’s creative frustrations and the urge to slap them tingles in my fingertips. I busy myself with unscrewing tubes, adding nourishment to the drips that flow into their catheters. They are fortunate that I am a benign care-taker of their souls, for when they fled into Gwent’s book the temptation to stop their feed briefly assailed me.
Gently, I stroke away a curl that whispers over Rachel’s forehead. It is the boy that I blame for their flight. Jaime and Rachel are the pulsing heart of my novel, the bloodflow of its plot. They were not as foolish as I had anticipated and the Grand 114Kuding tea wore off more quickly than I had expected too; when Jaime became enlightened that he was trapped in my creation, I thought he might join Rachel in the asylum. He had told me of how he loathed the mob mentality of social media; I gave him its Victorian equivalent in the form of a congregation. He rebelled against me no matter how outrageous my plotting became, even as the centuries collided. I concede that my editor might be correct on this front: the incident with the helicopter will, perhaps, need to be rewritten, for I got rather carried away. Their resistance to me was such a thrill. I understood then how much fun the God of the Old Testament must have had, tormenting nations with surreal weather, thunderbolting tragedies at Job. It was the friction between Jaime and I that created the flow of words. I never allowed them to suffer boredom; I tested them to the very depths of their souls. But no, they prefer other plots: they’ve opted to laze in Gwent’s tepid sub-Ballardian nonsense.
Upstairs, I return to my desk to discover another message burbling through on my answerphone. Two calls in one morning: O bonitas misereatur mei! My telephone’s shrill is such a rarity that it usually makes me jump vehemently with the sudden awareness of its existence; I am ill-used to such popularity. But it is only the Welsh constabulary, with some tedious request that I attend another interview to discuss ‘the ongoing investigation into the disappearance …’ and other such rot.
I dip my pen’s tip into my well. An ink blot drops on to the paper, spreads, dries. My pen trembles. I know that they will return soon, and I will finish Thomas Turridge, and it will be my masterpiece.