It was eight thirty the following morning when Sophie returned to Moor Court. She parked the car where she’d left it yesterday, retraced her footsteps around the side of the house, and emerged through the trees in the same place as before.
Was this how it felt to be a spy? She had the camera, her reason for being here, clutched in her hands. The odds were slim, surely, but some sixth sense had brought her back here this morning…
And ha, she’d been right. There he was. Sitting in the same chair, wearing the same T-shirt, as engrossed in his task as before. Unbelievable.
Sophie’s heart raced as she raised the camera and focused the lens again. Riley certainly looked as if he’d been up all night; his sun-streaked surfer’s hair was sticking out all over his head. There were four opened Coca-Cola cans and three empty coffee cups on the desk to the left of the computer. As she watched, he sat back and yawned, flexing his back and briefly stretching his arms above his head before getting back to work.
And yes, it was work. Zooming in on the computer screen, Sophie watched the words appear as Riley typed them. Yesterday afternoon he’d been on page 273. This morning he’d reached page 282. She was able to read what he was writing. She could see him pause to consider the next line of dialogue. He clearly wasn’t just copying out someone else’s words; he was choosing them himself.
She didn’t take any shots of what she was seeing. Apart from anything else, standing in the garden photographing someone inside their own home without their knowledge breached all kinds of privacy laws. Instead, she retreated through the trees, then made her way back to the driveway and up the front steps to the main entrance of the house. She rang the doorbell and waited.
It took a while, but eventually there was the sound of the door being unlocked. It opened to reveal Riley blinking in surprise at the sight of her.
“Sophie! Fancy seeing you here.” He yawned, looked at his watch, and said sleepily, “What time is it?”
“Almost nine o’clock.”
“What?” He looked horrified. “That’s practically the middle of the night.”
“Sorry, did I wake you? I thought you’d be in your cottage. Where’s Marguerite?”
“She had dinner with her publisher last night. Stayed up in London. When she’s away, I sleep here,” Riley explained. “Rather than leave the place empty.”
“You’re dressed.” Sophie indicated his T-shirt and jeans.
“Never got undressed.” His smile was crooked. “Fell asleep on the sofa watching the new Bond DVD.” Another yawn. “Bloody good film, actually.”
God, he was good. So completely natural, such an easy liar. Marveling at his skills, Sophie said, “Can I come in for a minute? Would that be okay?”
“Sweetheart, of course. Where are my manners? Come through. I’ll put the machine on. We’ll have some coffee.” He ushered her inside, through the hall, and into the kitchen. “But I’m not expecting Marguerite back before noon. Did she book you for another photo shoot?”
“No, don’t panic. She just asked me to pop over and see if I could get some pictures of a mystery bird she’s seen in the garden.”
“Oh, the bird… Right, she mentioned it a couple days ago.” Riley was nodding. “She and Lawrence had an argument about what it could be.”
“That’s the one. I’m guessing she spotted it from her office window,” said Sophie. “So I thought I might get a good view of the nest from there. Okay if I take a quick look?”
There was a millisecond’s hesitation before Riley shrugged and said, “Of course you can, no problem. Let me just go and clean it up before you—”
“Hey, no need. It’s only me.” Sophie smiled at him. “I’ve been in there loads of times before.” As she said it, she headed for the office.
Riley came with her, murmuring, “But she’s not always very tidy when she’s in full flow.”
He opened the door to the office. The screen saver had kicked in on the computer. Riley tut-tutted and collected the empty Coke cans, lobbing them into the trash beneath the desk. He piled up the coffee cups and said, “See what I mean? You only ever see this room when it’s been tidied up. Sorry, I should have cleared this lot away after she finished work yesterday.”
“Relax, I’m not a hotel inspector. I haven’t come in here checking for dust.” Amused, Sophie held up her camera and made her way over to the window. “Now, let’s see if I can find it… Ah, there’s the ash tree…and that must be the nest!” Delighted by her own brilliance, she fired off a few shots and said, “Okay, no sign of any birds at the moment, but at least I know where it is now. I can lie in wait outside.” Turning back, she knocked her hip against the edge of Marguerite’s desk and saw—bingo!—the computer screen shimmer into life.
And there it was again, the work in progress: chapter nineteen of Marguerite’s next novel.
“You know, she really should save and log out when she finishes work for the day,” said Sophie.
“Tell me about it.” Riley rolled his eyes in good-natured despair. “I’m always reminding her. She just gets carried away and forgets.”
“Well, you need to remind her again, before she manages to lose a whole lot of work. Oh, look, I’m sorry I woke you up. Don’t worry about that coffee… I’ll head on outside and wait for the bird to turn up. You still look shattered.” Sophie patted him on the arm. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
***
Well, she’d been right about one thing. As soon as Sophie was out of the house, Riley saved the work and emailed it to himself for extra security.
Then he checked his inbox and saw that an email had just come in from Marguerite:
Hi darling, just a quick note to let you know that Sophie will be dropping by in the next couple days to try to photograph that bird in the garden. So be aware. See you later—home around 3.
M x
Oh well, better late than never. Riley glanced out of the window at Sophie, who was now leaning against the trunk of the tree, aiming her camera up at the nest. Then he closed down the computer and left the office, rubbing his hand over his gritty, overtired eyes as he made his way through to the kitchen. A cup of tea and a slice of toast was what he needed right now, followed by some long overdue sleep.
It had all started quite suddenly, six years ago. Up until then Marguerite had never faltered. The words had flowed from her; she’d been a magnificent one-woman book-producing machine. In the three years he’d been living down here with her, he’d seen for himself how hard she worked. In almost two decades she’d produced thirty novels, putting in the hours, creating unputdownable reads that would satisfy her millions of fans around the world. Intellectual literary fiction it wasn’t; Marguerite’s aim was to entertain and enthrall, and that was what had always been her forte.
Until the day the tap had been abruptly switched off. Riley remembered it with crystal clarity. He’d come back from surfing and had cheerily asked Marguerite what her word count had been for the day. It was a routine exchange; she always liked to try to outdo herself.
But Marguerite, mystified rather than alarmed, had said, “Zero. Well, a few words, but I deleted them. Just couldn’t seem to get into it today.”
And he’d made a joke about it, distracting her with stories of his own afternoon at the beach. They’d each assumed that tomorrow all would be well again, back to normal, back in the old routine…
Except it hadn’t happened. Marguerite had sat and gazed at her computer screen for ten hours straight without writing anything.
The next day she tried pacing around the house with a pen and notebook. That hadn’t worked either.
By the end of the seventh day, she was in a state of full-blown panic, unable to understand what was going on and petrified of what it meant—of what it could mean. Riley had taken charge, ordering her to stop worrying and packing her off on a luxury cruise around the Med. For two weeks, he told her, she mustn’t even think about writing, and when she came back she’d be raring to go again, guaranteed.
It hadn’t happened. Marguerite returned as blocked as ever. Fear of not being able to write then morphed into fear of writing, of trying to do it and getting it wrong, of making the sickening discovery that the talent she’d taken for granted for so long had fizzled up and died…
And coupled with the overwhelming fear had come shame, because losing the ability to write meant losing her sense of pride in herself. Years of supreme self-confidence threatened to be swept away by her own abject failure.
And the more she panicked, the more entrenched the mental paralysis became.
Riley was at as much of a loss as Marguerite. He wanted to be able to help her, but how? She flatly refused to speak to anyone else about it, convinced that admitting the problem would have disastrous consequences; her agents and publishers around the world would lose confidence in her, other writers might pretend to be sympathetic but would be secretly celebrating the downfall of a rival, her friends would gossip endlessly, and word would spread…
The weeks went by, the writer’s block settled like cement around Marguerite, and her agitation escalated. Finally, out of desperation, Riley sat down and read his way through the half-written manuscript she’d abandoned midsentence. Her heartbreaking refrain was “I just don’t know where it’s going.” All these years she’d written without plotting ahead, simply immersing herself in the story and experiencing the twists and turns along with her characters.
Riley wrote her a detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the story so far and made up his own mind as to what might happen next. He worked through the night, describing everything that needed to take place in order to keep the characters on track. The next morning he showed Marguerite what he’d written and said, “See if this does the trick.”
Marguerite was grateful, but it didn’t drag her out of her numbed state. Despite liking the ideas he’d come up with, she was still stuck.
“All the characters are there. I can see them waiting for me…” She shook her head in despair. “But I just can’t make them speak. I don’t know them anymore… It’s like they hate me and they’re refusing to do or say what I want them to.”
It hadn’t been the answer he’d hoped for. Riley looked down at the pages and pages of notes he’d so painstakingly compiled. Marguerite might not feel as if she knew her characters anymore, but in his own mind they were completely fresh and full of life, bursting to carry on where she had left off, abandoning them like puppets frustratingly frozen in time.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to help.”
“I know, darling, and it’s sweet of you. But you can’t.” Marguerite, who never cried, blinked away a tear. “That’s the thing; no one can. God, look at me.”
Riley grabbed a tissue from the box on the shelf behind him. “Here, you’re okay. Mascara hasn’t run.”
“No, I mean look at me.” Marguerite indicated the paused YouTube clip on the computer screen, filmed at a hugely popular book festival last year. She pressed play and they both watched the confident, glamorous version of Marguerite Marshall, author extraordinaire, being interviewed up on the stage in front of a jam-packed audience.
“…and you’re known as a plain-speaking woman,” the interviewer continued. “Tell me, what are your views on the subject of writer’s block?”
He was asking the question because a particularly pretentious and generally disliked literary novelist had been banging on in the broadsheets about the tortuous process of having to produce words to order when the muse refused to comply.
“Ha!” With a dismissive snort of laughter, Marguerite said, “Well, I’m sure we all know who you’re talking about. And my reply is that the man in question needs to get a grip, pull himself together, and stop being such a ridiculous whining drama queen.” This statement was greeted with laughter and the beginnings of applause, but she didn’t stop there. “Seriously, whining and making a fuss like that, it’s just attention-seeking nonsense. Real writers don’t suffer from these namby-pamby problems, let me tell you. We just work our socks off, put our heads down, and jolly well get on with it. Writer’s block is nothing more than an excuse for failure.” With glittering eyes and utter disdain in her voice, she concluded, “Trust me, writer’s block simply doesn’t exist.”
On the screen, the audience applauded wildly. Another tear rolled down Marguerite’s cheek as she closed the link. Without looking at Riley, she shook her head. “I sounded like Margaret Thatcher. I can’t believe I sat there and said all that. Talk about karma.”
There was simply no answer to that. She was right. Unaccustomed to so much reading and intense concentration, Riley rubbed his eyes and said, “Okay, sorry. I tried.” Another huge yawn almost dislocated his jaw. “I’m going to bed.”
But despite his exhaustion, sleep had proven elusive. Eventually he’d dozed, waking every so often to the sound of Marguerite’s characters in his head.
Bloody ridiculous. What were they doing pestering him?
At lunchtime he got up, jumped into his car, and drove along the coast road to Mariscombe Bay. The sun was out, the wind was up, and the waves were crashing onto the beach. Conditions were perfect, and there were plenty of surfers already out there, taking advantage of an unexpectedly good day.
Riley surfed for a grand total of twenty minutes before giving up, peeling off his wet suit, climbing back into the car and making his way home again. His friends couldn’t understand what on earth had gotten into him. He couldn’t work out what had gotten into him; all he knew was that the voices were still there in his head, the characters were… God, it felt as if they were harassing him, demanding impatiently to be allowed to get on with whatever was about to happen next in their lives.
It was almost scary; when people with mental illnesses got arrested for doing something bizarre, didn’t they always say it was the voices in their heads that had made them do it?
And that was kind of how it felt—like being taken over, possessed. Back at Moor Court, Marguerite had gone out, leaving a note as she always did on the kitchen table:
Giving retail therapy a try. Home by seven. If anyone calls, tell them I’m working and can’t be disturbed. M x
Riley made himself a strong coffee and took it through to the office. He sat down in front of the computer, switched it on, and took several deep breaths. Then, refusing to allow himself to panic that this was crazy, of course he couldn’t do it, he began to type.
Two hours later he noticed the untouched mug of coffee next to him on the desk.
At six thirty, he sat back and stared at the screen with a mixture of befuddled achievement and disbelief. According to the computer, he’d produced two thousand two hundred and seventeen words. The last time he’d written anything longer than a text or a quick email had been… God, it must’ve been when he was back at university. As for fiction, he had a vague memory of writing a short story for the school magazine about a stunning female chemistry teacher seducing a young male pupil called…ahem, Riley. When the headmaster had refused to allow it to appear in the magazine, that had been the end of his literary efforts. He’d read plenty of books in his time, but it had never once occurred to him that he might have the ability to write one.
He scanned the screen, reading the words that had poured out of him this afternoon. At times his fingers hadn’t been able to keep up with the ideas in his head; there were typing errors all over the place. A couple of repetitions jumped out at him too… He’d used the word shouted twice in one paragraph there. But the characters felt right—they seemed real—and as far as he could tell, they sounded like the same people Marguerite had created.
Whether or not he was right about that, only time—and Marguerite—would tell.
For the next twenty minutes he corrected the errors, tidied up the manuscript, and printed off the pages. At ten past seven, Marguerite returned loaded down with expensive shopping bags. When she’d kicked off her shoes and thrown herself down on the sofa in the living room, he handed her a stronger than usual gin and tonic and a folder containing the pages.
Then he left the room and waited. What he’d written was probably rubbish. And if that were the case, at least he knew Marguerite wouldn’t be afraid to point it out. Suffering fools gladly had never been her forte.
Oh well, if it was that bad, maybe this would give her the jolt she needed, spur her on to show him how it should be done.
Which would be the very best outcome, of course.
Although even as he was thinking this, Riley inwardly experienced a twinge of unease at the prospect of Marguerite taking over what now felt like his cast of characters. Because what if she made them do and say the wrong things, took them off in directions he didn’t want them to go?
The kitchen door burst open and Marguerite appeared, white-faced and trembling with fury. “You told someone. I asked you not to and you did it anyway.”
“What?” Startled by the venom in her voice, Riley said, “I haven’t told anyone.”
She shook the sheaf of pages at him. “So who wrote this?”
“I did!”
“You? But you can’t have!”
“Well, I did.”
The outrage had given way to utter disbelief. Marguerite was staring at him as if he’d just turned into a hobbit. “But…but you don’t know how.”
“I know.” He shrugged. “I just gave it a try. So, does it make you want to rip it up and rewrite it yourself?”
“No.” She shot him a suspicious look. “Did you get someone to help you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t, I promise. I wrote every word myself.”
“How? Just…how?”
“I got to know the characters. Then I listened to them. They started doing stuff…” God, it was hard to explain how it happened. “And I kind of wrote everything down. Is it awful?” He had to ask, needed to know.
“No. It’s not perfect, but it’s a damn good first draft. I still can’t believe you did it.” Her expression softening, Marguerite said, “You’ve got the voice right, that’s the extraordinary thing. It sounds exactly like me.”
“I’ve spent long enough listening to you. I know what you sound like.” Emulating her direct, punchy style had been surprisingly easy. If she’d been a writer of very light romantic fiction, he’d have found it harder.
“Well. I’m in shock,” Marguerite declared. “How long did it take you to write this?”
“Five hours.”
“Good going.”
“It just came out of nowhere. I didn’t want to stop.”
“I remember that feeling.” Her tone was wry. “And what happens next? Do you know?”
Would she be offended if he said yes? Would it sound like he was barreling in and taking over, wrestling the characters out of her control? After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Kind of.”
“Yes or no?”
What the hell. “Yes.”
“Fantastic.” Marguerite broke into a huge smile. “My God, this is incredible. Can you carry on doing it, do you think?”
Could he? He was already itching to get back into the story. The characters were giving him grief, hassling him to pay them some attention. He smiled back and said, “I’ll give it a go.”