On my first evening as tutor at the London Literary Society I wanted to look professional but approachable, and humble but superior. That was the look I was going for. I wore my red suit (my only suit) and leopard-print flats to walk to the college. It took longer than I thought and it started to rain. Never trust a weather forecast. I took a short cut via Euston station, dodged the six-lane traffic on Euston Road and ran to the London Lit building. Flashing my pass at the security guy who waved me past, I hurried to meeting room nine on the ground floor.
Result! I was the first there. I hung my jacket on the radiator to dry and collapsed on the long grey table with relief, damp, breathless, my heart beating so fast I could feel it in my eyeballs, and in a mild state of panic.
Room nine was a long, thin room. The table had grey plastic chairs placed around it. The walls were painted a stylish but gloomy French blue, and there was a round red clock on the wall with red hands and a startlingly loud tick that made me think of Edgar Allen Poe. I sat at the end of the table, like a CEO. But then I changed position and decided to sit in the middle. I had planned the session carefully. My approach was going to be that we were all in this writing business together, equals in the creative process. I was going to emphasise the power of perseverance and then we would take a look at the various works in progress.
I opened my bag and took out my spiral notebook and Berol pens. I flattened my sheet of A4 and studied the names of my students. In an optimistic frame of mind I saw that just having four students had its good points. I would have enough time to listen to everyone’s work. And at the end of it I would only have to read four assignments and submit four reports; and it wasn’t as if I was getting paid per head.
I could hear people laughing in the corridor. I smiled to myself and sat up all alert and welcoming and watched them walk straight past my door. Another little group came by and went past and they too sounded jolly. I wondered which course they were going to. Clown school, maybe? I knew a girl who went to clown school. She was five foot one and she was paired with a seven-foot-tall professional clown, and there you have visual humour without even trying.
Interspersed in the clatter-clatter of heels I heard the thud of leather soles on laminate and a tall thin bearded man in a leather jacket looked into the room. The jacket looked expensive and gave him the aura of an ageing rock star.
‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘Is this the Romantic Prose class, do you know?’
‘Yes it is,’ I said, putting my welcoming smile back on.
‘So; we’re the first,’ he said cheerfully, pulling out a seat. ‘Nice to meet someone else who likes to be early.’
‘Actually, I’m Lana Green,’ I said quickly before there was some horrible misunderstanding in which he confided that he didn’t like Love Crazy but he wanted to be published and that’s why he was here.
‘Oh!’ said my student. He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘I’m Arthur Shepherd.’ He hesitated for a moment, then he said, ‘Call me Turo. Arthur’s an old man’s name, as my girlfriend keeps pointing out.’
‘Turo.’
It was hard to tell exactly how old he was because of the greying beard. His eyes were a surprising deep blue, like the sky at twilight. Despite the jacket, he seemed more like an Arthur than a Turo. Arthur is a gentle name. He seemed gentle.
‘What are you writing?’
‘Historical,’ he said, taking off his leather jacket. ‘Second World War.’ He said with sudden feeling, ‘I thank God every day that I didn’t have to go to war. My generation has been lucky that way.’
It was a magnificent statement, being grateful for something you hadn’t had to do.
‘I’ve never thought of it like that,’ I said.
Turo stroked his beard and looked around at the empty room. ‘How many of us will there be?’
‘Four.’
‘Is that all? I thought there would be more.’
I was just about to explain the benefits of a small group to him when a girl with a red velvet coat twinkling with mirrors came into the doorway. Her black hair was in braids and she looked as if she had stepped out of a fairy story – she had the traumatised air of someone who had been lost in the woods for a while. She glanced at the two of us in alarm and then took a step back to check the door number.
‘Romantic Prose?’ I asked.
For a moment she didn’t answer. She stood on the threshold. ‘Is it just us?’ she said anxiously. ‘I thought it would be a bigger class.’
I looked up at the red clock, at the flick of the seconds. ‘It’s not quite seven yet,’ I pointed out.
Someone came up behind her.
‘Excuse me! You’re blocking the way!’
‘Oh! Sorry!’
A grey-haired woman pushed past her wearing a purple knitted beanie. She had a disappointed face – her eyes and her mouth drooped, like one of those drawings that you can turn upside down and suddenly they’re all smiley. She sat next to Turo, one empty chair between them.
‘Joan Parker.’
‘Turo,’ he said, holding out his hand.
She shook it briefly. ‘That’s an unusual name,’ she said.
‘It’s short for Arturo,’ he replied.
‘Are you Italian?’
‘No, but my girlfriend is.’
‘It’s lucky for you that your parents had the foresight to give you an Italian name,’ she remarked wryly.
He looked at her, unamused. ‘My parents christened me Arthur.’
‘Very wise. I don’t know why you’d want to change it. You look more like an Arthur than a Turo. Tu-ro,’ she said, listening to the word as if trying to make something better from the sound of it. She shook her head and gave up.
The girl in red with the dark hair seemed reassured by the new arrival and she finally sat down. ‘A is the beginning of the alphabet,’ she pointed out. ‘T is almost at the end?’
‘And?’ Joan asked.
For a moment I thought the girl was going to shy away back into the corridor, but to my surprise she laughed. ‘I’m Kathryn,’ she said, sitting next to Joan.
‘And I’m Lana Green,’ I ventured, holding my hand up, hoping it was obvious; but one has to be modest about these things just in case.
The three of them looked up at me as if they expected me to say something profound.
It was like being at an interview. My mind went blank. I tried to think of something intelligent to say to impress them. I looked at the clock.
‘It’s nearly seven,’ I observed.
Luckily my last student came in just then; a plump, middle-aged, dark-haired woman in a trouser suit: Neveen.
I always like to start exactly on time these days. When I first did talks, I would start a little late just in case there were latecomers. But then I found out that latecomers can sometimes be really late and it didn’t seem fair to make the ones who come on time wait. Why should they be punished? Anyway, some people are always late for everything, which is passive-aggressive, if you ask me.
‘Hello!’ said I, the bestselling author, cheerfully. ‘I’m Lana Green and it’s a pleasure to be here with you on your journey towards publication. It’s not always an easy journey,’ I added truthfully, ‘but if there’s one great quality that makes a writer, it’s not genius or vocabulary, it’s perseverance.’
When I’d first been offered the role, I’d had some ideas of who my students would be, based on the demographic of my readers and the fact we were doing Romantic Prose. They would be young, good-looking and ambitious, with love on their minds; old enough to be looking for a soulmate and young enough to be scared of not finding one. I’d imagined them tweeting from my class until I trended. I’d planned this course for them. It was too late to change it now.
‘How long did it take you to write your book?’ Turo asked.
‘Nine months,’ I said.
‘What had you written before that?’
‘I was a reporter, and when I lost my job I went travelling and started my blog and that led to a book deal.’
‘So, in what sense of the word did you need perseverance?’
‘Good question.’ Obviously I hadn’t needed perseverance, personally, because Love Crazy came easily enough, but I needed it now and I was pretty sure that they would too. I was trying to be encouraging. ‘Many aspiring writers find it very hard to finish a story. I mean it in that sense. You mustn’t give up.’
‘Did you find it difficult to finish your book?’ Joan asked, her head tilted inquiringly. She was still wearing her purple hat, as though she hadn’t decided yet if she was staying.
‘No, because I’d come to the natural end of the narrative. The road trip was over and that’s where I ended it.’
‘In the middle of the story when Marco comes back to see her the second time, she says she’s tamed him,’ Kathryn said. ‘I liked that.’
‘Tamed him?’ Joan said sharply. ‘What on earth’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I meant it in a jokey way,’ I said. ‘It was irony. Let’s go back to—’
‘Excuse me, that’s not how I read it,’ Kathryn interrupted, holding her red coat defensively around her throat. ‘I thought it was because, when they’re bonding in a domestic environment, men in love have lower testosterone levels.’
Eh?
‘Nonsense,’ Joan said. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘If anything, living together makes those levels go up,’ Arthur declared, jutting out his beard shamelessly.
Joan turned her head to look at him and a strange smirk crossed her face so briefly I wondered if I’d imagined it.
‘These testosterone levels,’ she said, tapping her pen on her notes. ‘I can’t see how nature would benefit a man to have lower levels once he has a wife.’
‘It stops him straying,’ Kathryn said.
‘If that were true, there would be no children,’ Joan observed.
‘And no affairs,’ Neveen added suddenly.
There was no disputing that. We all fell silent, considering the implications.
Kathryn shrugged and poked a finger through a dark braid to scratch her head. ‘Sorry. That’s how I perceived it. It’s something I read.’
‘Okay!’ I’d completely lost my thread. It was like stage fright: the actor’s version of writer’s block. I scanned my notes quickly. Perseverance! That was it. I had five tips on how they could persevere with their writing but they didn’t really seem relevant any more. No one seemed to suffer from lack of perseverance, apart from me, since other than doing an outline I hadn’t even got started on my sequel. We’d pretty much covered the subject, I felt. I looked up at the wall. What? The red clock had stopped.
I chewed the end of my pen gloomily. I felt cheated. I’d imagined my class of students listening to me intently and taking notes. My whole ‘we’re all in it together’ speech was meant to show how modest and approachable I was. I hadn’t imagined them disagreeing with me and dissing my book.
‘Kathryn,’ I said, ‘tell us a little about your hero.’
She looked startled and reared away as much as it was possible in a grey plastic chair.
‘It’s a woman,’ she said.
‘Ah! Good!’
‘She kills the abusive partners of women who come to her refuge.’
Whaddaya know? I would have put money on the fact she was writing magic realism. I didn’t realise that under that red velvet coat with the twinkling mirrors throbbed the heart of an imaginary killer. What was she doing in a Romantic Prose class, anyway?
‘Would you like to read some of your work to us?’
‘No, thanks,’ she said quickly.
‘This course is not about me, it’s about you.’ Ha! ‘Does anyone have anything they would like to read out to us?’
‘Not yet,’ Arthur said.
Joan shook her head.
Neveen doodled on her notepad.
If this was what being a teacher was like then it wasn’t surprising my mother was the way she was; all prickly.
Arthur cleared his throat. ‘So now that we know we have to keep writing until we get to the end, could you tell us how to get started on a story?’ he asked. ‘After all, that’s the hardest part, isn’t it? Deciding on the right place to begin.’
‘True. You need an inciting incident,’ I said. ‘Something that provokes the action, acts as a catalyst.’
‘But some authors start off with normal life and then bring the inciting incident in later so that you can contrast it with how life used to be,’ Arthur pointed out.
‘Well, that works too,’ I agreed. ‘It depends, really.’
‘On what?’ Joan asked. ‘Because I don’t have an inciting incident in my story at all.’
Just then, there was a tap on the door and Carol Burrows popped her head round. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Lana, but I have some learning outcome forms for the students to fill in.’
I hurried over to get them.
‘Everything going well?’ she asked eagerly as she handed them over.
‘Oh yes!’ I lied.
‘Good, good! I’ll leave you to it.’
I handed out the forms, deep in thought. I knew what the problem was. Taking a class diminished me. Successful writers haven’t got the time to give classes; they are a publisher’s production line, going from one book to the next, sticking to a schedule. I didn’t expect to give these students all the answers but I assumed I’d have a few for them, at least. I had wanted to give them the impression I was one of them and they’d sussed me and realised even before I had what I really was. No one had asked what I was working on and Joan, for one, hadn’t read Love Crazy.
When they handed the forms back to me I glanced at the clock and saw to my relief that the lesson was over.
My four students scraped their chairs back and put on their coats and picked up their bags and said their goodbyes.
I put on my jacket, warm from the radiator. Obviously I waited until they’d left before I read the forms. In answer to the: I feel this is the right course for me question, out of the four categories to be ticked, I got one completely agree, one agree, a disagree, and a completely disagree.
I dropped them in at the office. The forms were anonymous but I was sure the one who completely disagreed was Joan.