A Rival Creation

by Marika Cobbold

  Phyllida Medley invited fifteen small boys and girls from the village into her kitchen on Saturday to show them the basics of baking. When I popped in for a cup of tea, they were just taking trays of Chelsea buns from the oven. Outside, it was one of those still, grey winter days, when the world seems wrapped in mist and you feel any sound could carry to the next county. While I warmed my hands by the Aga, Phyllida told me she feels quite evangelical about teaching young people to cook.

  ‘Cooking and eating well is an art form, and like all art it adds another dimension to our lives. Now just compare an individually prepared TV-dinner with a proper family meal: some vegetables roasted with garlic and oil, a bowl of pasta with a tuna, black olive and tomato sauce and a nice glass of Chianti for the grown-ups.’

  When I objected that working mothers don’t have time to prepare that kind of meal, Phyllida replied sensibly that that was exactly the reason why she was teaching the children to cook.

  While we are on the subject of tea and buns, if you like to use loose leaves but don’t like to use your teeth as a strainer for the disposal of the tea leaves afterwards, using a metal spice ball is the answer. You’ll find them in most good kitchen shops and a certain well known kitchen mail-order firm.

  Oscar was smiling as he handed the neatly typed page back to Alistair. ‘It’s different. Let’s see how it goes for the next few weeks. There’s a lot of interest in village life and in my experience, the more personal the information, the better. You know better than I the problems of finding decent contributors with the money we can offer them, so we’re in no position to turn down free copy. No, let it run for now.’

  His phone rang. It was Victoria saying she was going to her writing class so could he pick up some cold roast beef and potato salad from the delicatessen.

  The class had been discussing Neville’s DIY Manual For the Senior Citizen, and the use of dialogue in fiction. ‘Anyone got anything they’d like to read out?’ Liberty asked.

  ‘I’ve got a little piece.’ Victoria waved a black-and-silver striped folder at Liberty.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Liberty nodded and smiled.

  One thing that united the eleven members of Liberty’s class was their self-consciousness when reading out their work. The words stumbled from their lips, bumping into each other in their eagerness to get away, but Victoria, reading her story about a teenager on her first date, seemed to taste every word and find it to her liking. She paused at artful intervals and led the class in laughter at appropriate places. It was a story revelling in period pains and untimely zits, with everyone drinking a lot of black coffee, but it was an effective story, holding the attention of the class. Even Neville listened with obvious interest and almost no embarrassment.

  Victoria finished reading. The consensus was that it was a lovely story. Liberty said she thought it was very good too, but maybe it was worth looking again at one or two of the characters who were just a little bit stock-in-trade.

  ‘Oh I can’t change anything,’ Victoria said, ‘it’s been taken by “Blue Jeans” already. It’ll be out in next month’s issue.’

  Liberty took a deep breath, getting pumped up with envy. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Excellent, congratulations.’

  ‘She’ll be taking over the class next, won’t she Liberty?’ Melanie, the solicitor’s secretary, giggled.

  ‘Yes, absolutely, why not,’ Liberty nodded manically. Keep laughing, she told herself, envy is so ugly. Soar above your baser instincts on a gale of mirth, ha ruddy ha. She finished laughing and told Victoria how proud they all were of her. ‘Now get cracking and produce some more. You’ll have a career in writing before you know it.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Victoria shrugged her shoulders. ‘There’s so much else I like to do. I quite enjoy writing but I can’t really see myself spending all my time on it the way you used to. Life is for living, you know; for doing.’

  Liberty remained at her desk as the class packed up and trickled out into the late November gloom. Dear God, she thought, how could you? How could you give me running shoes and no feet? How could you fill me with passion and coat me with incompetence? She shook herself and rose from the chair, assembling her books and notes, not really looking at what she was doing.

  By the time she got back home it was dark, but she grabbed a torch and, switching on the small lantern by the back door, she went outside. Shivering in her thin black jumper and short skirt, she stared across the large square that was to be her vegetable garden, staked out already, waiting to be dug. She stepped out of the circle of lantern light, her stubby heels sinking into the lawn. Switching on the torch, she pointed it at the ground like Johnny had shown her long ago, to see it alive with worms out for the night, diving into holes for cover as they were hit by the light. It was winter now, but there was nothing dead about the garden. It was full of life and movement, just like a decomposing body.

  Annoyed with herself, she turned and hurried inside. There was something wrong with her imagery. Her garden was supposed to be a thing of beauty and solace, not a corpse. Enjoying the trail of mud (clay with a bit of green sand running through it, according to Evelyn) that she left behind on the carpet, she threw herself down on the sofa. Her mind was cluttered with ballast these days, unused pictures and scraps of conversations that had been snatched from their context and stored. Stored but not used, shaken but not stirred, mumbled, jumbled, scrambled. She pressed her hands against her temples. Her head felt weighed down, like the pockets of a small boy who couldn’t stop picking up all those useful things like chalky stones and bits of string and the rings from coke cans.

  She closed her eyes, but after a while she opened them again to look at her watch. It was a quarter to six. At six o’clock she could pour herself a glass of wine. She had begun to look forward to that glass in the evening, but at six, not before. Before would be sluttish. She lay back down on the sofa, looking at her feet in their muddy lace-ups dangling over the armrests. She was so ridiculous she might as well have bought those red Dr Martens she had liked since she saw a friend of Johnny’s wear them in the summer. The ones that laced right up the ankles. She looked at her watch, and she kept on looking every few minutes. The moment six o’clock came, she was up and into the kitchen, grabbing the bottle of Australian burgundy that she had left on top of the cupboard by the kitchen table. She skewered the cork with the opener, and managed as usual to leave a deposit of crumbs round the neck of the bottle. She fetched the dishcloth and wiped them off before pouring herself a glass. Everyone knew you had to watch out once you started drinking on your own, and without even the excuse of a meal, so after a moment’s thought she fetched an open packet of stale peanuts and tipped what was left into a small bowl.

  Sitting down at the table, she could hear Victoria’s treacly voice reading her soon-to-be-published story. She splashed some more wine into her glass. ‘Supper,’ she said. She had some more wine. It was not a very good wine, but after a while she got to like it. She gave the bottle an affectionate look and heaved herself out of the kitchen chair. She peered inside the fridge. Tinned herring: out of date. She put it back on the shelf. Ah, ham! No, that too was past its sell-by date and dark-edged, like a card of condolence. Right at the back she found a lone egg. ‘Right you little bugger,’ she reached in and grabbed it. She decided to fry the egg. Once that was done she splatted it down on a limp piece of ready-sliced bread. She brought the plate over to the table and sat down. She looked at the egg. The egg seemed to look back at her. Liberty raised her knife and fork. She shook her head. ‘No? You’d rather I didn’t? OK.’ She grabbed the wine bottle instead, about to pour herself some more, but stopped, bottle in mid-air. She was meant to limit herself to two glasses a night, three on special occasions. Then this was a special occasion. How often, after all, did she corrode with envy? Holding the bottle up against the light she saw there was only a glass or so left. She got tearful. It was so sad, so very like life itself; no sooner had you got into your stride when suddenly the end
was in sight. Bloody typical. She buried her head in her hands, but after a while she got bored with that. She squinted at the bottle. Maybe there was more left than she thought. There was only one way of finding out. She managed to fill the glass and drank it quickly before she had time to change her mind.

  She smiled. There was a silver lining, indeed there was, she had just spotted it, a little sliver of glitter at the edge of the dirty great black cloud: Victoria could not appear on Wogan, no siree, Wogan had finished its run, stopped, ceased to transmit. Then she got sad again; there was still Pebble Mill at One. The thought upset her so that she had to pour herself some more wine. She emptied the last of the bottle into her glass and wandered through to the sitting-room. She had the oddest sensation, as if she were walking on a giant marshmallow. She peered down at the carpet, just to make sure. No, it was the same old green carpet.

  She put on some music. ‘Sing along with Placido,’ she crooned, waltzing round the room. What an artist, old Placido! Puccini too. So why not me? She stopped in the middle of the room. Her mind seemed to clear like a summer’s day, with brilliant thoughts breaking through like rays of sunshine. What had she been thinking of, giving up her passion, turning her back on the very purpose of her existence simply because of a few years of rejection? Crazy! She hurried back into the kitchen and on her way to the desk she stopped and picked up the empty bottle. Giving it a disapproving look, she turned it upside down over her head, feeling the last drops scatter in her hair. With a slow grin spreading across her face she sauntered over to the computer and switched it on. The faint humming of the machine was like the whisperings of a lover, and she caressed the grainy plastic, letting her fingers run down to the keyboard. She had the germ of a story already in her head. The first sentence came swiftly, without effort: ‘I always was an ugly little batard…’ correction, ‘bastard’.

  She worked well into the morning. At around midnight she had pulled the cork from an already open bottle of white wine in the fridge. It was all right to have some, she told herself sternly, after all, today already was the next day. A new, hitherto wine-free day. Now and then she would get up to stretch her legs and change the music that was on so loud, it reached into the kitchen.

  At four o’clock in the morning she had finished the first chapter – the speed of it! Peering at the keyboard, she pressed the Save button. There were many people, she thought, as she plopped the empty bottle into the wastepaper basket, who would go to bed after so many hours of intensive work, forgetting to Save. But not she. No way. She gave the computer a little pat before switching it off. Upstairs she crept into bed and fell instantly asleep, vaguely aware that apart from a broad smile that refused to leave her lips, she was still wearing her socks.

  Sixteen

  ‘Start the day with a song,’ Liberty croaked, avoiding her face in the bathroom mirror. She poured herself some danktasting water from the tap and drank it greedily.

  For two weeks her routine had not varied. She got up late, her mouth dry, her head pounding, and made herself a pot of tea and a slice of toast. At around eleven she began work on the translation of a series of three children’s books, stopping only for a quick lunch. At six she slumped in front of the television with a glass of wine and some bread and cheese or an egg. Around nine she got up and went into the kitchen, settling down at the computer with a bottle of wine at her side, ready for the real day to begin.

  She had never worked so well, with such ease and fluency. It was as if a huge funnel hung above her, its point right on top of the keyboard. Men and women, houses and gardens, love and sacrifice, all came tumbling through the giant funnel in a stream of flowing sentences, down to the tips of her fingers. Sometimes the excitement of creation was so acute that it felt like a pain in her gut and she would have to get up from the desk and pace the floor, taking deep breaths, before she could settle down again. She never printed out and never read the previous night’s work. Nothing was allowed to break the flow. Around four in the morning she would turn off the computer and fall into bed, her last thought often being that there was no-one now on God’s earth she would rather be than herself.

  In the bathroom she brushed her teeth until her gums bled. She had gone to bed without washing again and woken up with a mouth that felt as if one of Tollymead’s protected belfry bats had died there during the night. She showered, and as she dressed the phone rang. Margaret, a friend from Everton, called and wanted to know how she was. Liberty had no sooner assured her that she was well and hung up, when the doorbell rang. It was Evelyn wanting to know if she had some good beef dripping for the birds.

  ‘You look awful.’ Evelyn pushed her face close to Liberty’s. ‘What’s up?’

  Liberty blinked in the clear December sunlight. ‘Nothing. Nothing is up.’ She stood aside to let Evelyn in. ‘In fact, things couldn’t be less up.’ She paused for a moment, having confused even herself. ‘Which isn’t to say that things are down, because they’re not, in fact they’re quite the opp—’

  ‘Do stop twittering dear.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Of course.’

  ‘Victoria said your class was cancelled last week and the week before.’

  ‘Ahh that.’ Liberty shifted her weight from one foot to another. ‘Just a cold that’s all, two colds really, one after the other. Or maybe it was the same cold returning…’ Catching Evelyn’s eye she said quickly, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow.’ But the days seemed to come round like the baskets in a Ferris Wheel and until Evelyn reminded her, she had completely forgotten that it was Wednesday’s turn again.

  ‘Well, as I said, you look dreadful. Come and have dinner with me tonight.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Liberty shook her head, knowing Evelyn was far too polite to ask why not.

  In class, the next day, Neville Pyke peered at her over his reading glasses. ‘Oh dear, you really have been under the weather haven’t you? Flu was it?’

  Liberty nodded. Settling at her desk she asked the class, ‘Anyone brought a piece to discuss?’

  Tobias Fry, who had lost his job as manager of an electrical shop, waved his hand in the air. He had started off wanting to write spy stories in the mode of Frederick Forsyth, but with no Berlin Wall or Soviet Union he had problems with his plots. Instead he had decided to try his hand at comic articles. He read out a story set in a supermarket; all the characters other than the un-named hero were called after their style of dress. ‘As the Pink Shell Suit disappeared round the next aisle I grabbed my trolley and hurried off in pursuit, almost knocking over a Green Puffa on my way…’

  Liberty’s head ached while through the pain came line after line of Tobias’s story of droll happenings, all involving people with colourful clothes. With her eyes fixed on him in an interested manner, Liberty poured herself some water from a flask at her side. The story came to an end.

  ‘Good use of your visual senses. You’ve remembered my advice about using active verbs, always active verbs,’ Liberty intoned. She wondered why, with these virtues, Tobias’s work was so excruciating. She stifled a sigh and turned to Victoria. ‘Have you got anything new you’d like to show us?’

  Victoria shook her head. ‘No, nothing new I’m afraid. Sorry.’ She gave a regretful shrug of her shoulders. ‘I’ve been really busy lately. I just don’t think it’s in my nature to sit cooped up on my own for hours on end.’ She smiled. ‘I remember when I was small and in hospital with scarlet fever, all the staff called me Little Miss Sunshine…’ catching Liberty’s look she added, ‘after the Mr Men and Little Misses books, you know.’

  ‘Little Miss sodding Sunshine,’ Liberty muttered, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Aloud she said, ‘Anyone else?’

  Later that day, Hamish looked at her in much the same way as Evelyn and her class had earlier, as if he didn’t know whether to pity her or hose her down. ‘You should go and have yourself checked out,’ he said. ‘Your eyes are puffy and you’ve put on weight as well.’

  He had called in unannounced at six o’clock and now
he sat in the kitchen, a mug of tea clasped between his liver-spotted hands.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Liberty said, ‘seldom been finer actually.’ She was about to say she did not like the look of Hamish much either. For the first time in his life he seemed his age, nearly seventy. ‘I’ve just been working rather hard,’ she added. But she did not tell him about the novel, not yet. ‘What about you?’ she asked instead.

  Hamish looked up from fiddling with his un-lit pipe. ‘They’re getting rid of the old man. Falling numbers, unpaid fees. They’re letting younger staff go, so I won’t escape, not this time. The headmaster told me as much himself the other day.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘And at my age, I won’t even have the satisfaction of adding to the unemployment figures.’

  Her father retiring? He had been teaching on borrowed time for the last five years, but still… Tollymead Manor without Hamish – worse, Hamish without Tollymead Manor. ‘Surely not,’ she said weakly. ‘They couldn’t do without you.’

  It was Hamish’s turn to smile. ‘There are very few people in this world who are indispensable; I’m not one of them,’ he said. He was supervising prep that evening and he left before Liberty had a chance to work out how best to deal with her father’s sudden inclination to face the truth. She was sure that his unfailing good humour and positive outlook on life was possible only because he never saw things for what they were, but for what he wanted them to be. But if he was going to start facing the truth all of a sudden, what would happen to him then? Liberty sighed and wandered across to the looking-glass on the wall behind the aspidistra. Hamish was right; she looked disgusting. She peered at the pale face that looked back at her with blood-shot eyes. The whites of her eyes had little yellow lumps on them, and her hair looked as if it had been rinsed in paint stripper. No matter. She bared her teeth in a grimace and turned away. By the end of the night she would have completed the first half of her story. Only a couple of hours’ work, and she would at last allow herself to print out and read. If it was as good as she thought it was, maybe she would let her old agent see it.