CHAPTER 10

 

Grose sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and groaned. The words just wouldn’t come. He’d sat at his desk for the best part of two hours and all he had to show were two hundred words and he’d crossed most of them out. He just couldn’t concentrate. He pushed back his chair, stood up and walked over to the window. It was dark outside and there were thick clouds obscuring the moon and stars. He looked down at the garden. There was a block of light from the kitchen illuminating part of the lawn and a shadow moved across it. His wife, probably making herself her evening cocoa. She’d had the same evening routine for the last ten years. A TV movie, usually on the Hallmark Channel with a mug of cocoa followed by half an hour in bed reading one of her insufferable romances. Grose had long given up complaining about her choice of reading matter and more often than not he stayed in his study until she was asleep.

He sat down again and picked up his pen. He sighed. He was trying to start a new novel but his mind was still buzzing with the characters in The Homecoming. The Homecoming was unfinished business, it was in limbo, trapped in a netherworld between being written and being published and he had no way of knowing how long it would remain there. The Homecoming was a good book, possibly a great book, as good as any of his earlier works. The fact that Pink hadn’t wanted to sell it had come as a shock. It was the last thing that Grose had expected to hear. He knew that the sensible thing to do would be to send it out to another agent but Pink’s rejection had been so hurtful that Grose couldn’t bear repeating the experience. At some point he’d have to, but not just yet. He’d thought of rewriting the book, giving it another polish, but after rereading it he’d decided that there was nothing he could do to improve it. The Homecoming was perfect, and Pink was an idiot for not realizing it.

He tapped his Mont Blanc fountain pen on his notepad. He didn’t have a title for the book that he was about to start writing. Generally he didn’t, the titles of his books usually came to him about halfway through the writing. He had the outline of a plot. A father who discovers that his twenty-year-old son is gay and disowns him. Five years later the son is sick and needs a kidney transplant. The father offers one of his own kidneys but the son refuses. It’s not a kidney he wants, it’s acceptance, but the father can’t give that. The book would go to the heart of what it meant to be a father, and Grose was drawing on his own experiences with his own father who had died three years earlier. It would be a moving book, powerful and emotional, but try as he could the words just wouldn’t come. He wasn’t even able to come up with names for the characters, and that was always a bad sign. Titles could wait, and sometimes were even changed before publication, but names were crucial. Names went to character and Grose needed a name before he could write. The father’s Christian name was Gideon, Grose knew that. It was Biblical and Gideon was a man who believed in the Bible. But Grose couldn’t come up with a family name and until he had that he couldn’t even start to describe the man or put words in his mouth.

The opening paragraph was going to be a description of the man’s house, as if the reader was approaching it from the road. It was winter and there would be a thin plume of grey smoke rising from the chimney. Grose could picture the house and the snow that covered the garden, but every time he tried to put words down onto paper they came out stilted and forced. He dropped his pen and ran his hands through his hair. It wasn’t that the words wouldn’t come – he had nothing but contempt for writers who claimed to be blocked – it was simply that the words that were coming were the wrong ones. The few sentences he had written would have shamed a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

He stood up again and paced over to the window. The block of light had gone. His wife would be in front of the TV with her feet up on the coffee table, her mug of cocoa by her side. He went over to his desk, pulled open the top drawer and took out his cell phone. He hadn’t saved Jenny’s number just in case his wife ever went through the phone’s contacts list. He tapped out the digits from memory and held the phone to his ear as it rang out.