Written From the Heart

by Trisha Ashley

  When I got home I was exhausted as usual, although I had had a refreshing glimpse of Tube Man in London, the dark, stubbly chinned, handsome hunk who had fuelled my fantasies for some time, and inspired the hero of my last three novels and my new one, even though I feared he might only be a figment of my fevered imagination.

  Sometimes I dreamed that I was struggling through a crowded tube carriage towards him, and then all the arms barring the way turned into thorny branches that held me fast while he smiled sadly and turned away … and why did I never dream I’d got a pair of secateurs in my hand?

  So, with one thing and another, I wasn’t quite in the mood when a woman phoned me at eight and said, ‘Hello? Is that Tina Devino?’

  ‘It was the last time I looked in the mirror,’ I admitted cautiously.

  ‘Well, I …’ There was a short pause, followed by a harrumphing noise that wouldn’t have disgraced a meditative bison. ‘I,’ she announced grandly, in the kind of voice usually heard through a megaphone at horse shows, ‘I am the president of the local branch of the WFIA—’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Women For Intellectual Advancement, Ms Devino. I discovered from the library that you are a local author, and although you only write romance, I thought my little group might get something out of a talk by you.’

  I was quite accustomed to these insults, so I said that was kind of her, but I didn’t do many talks because I was a bit busy trying to earn a living, and how much were they thinking of paying me?

  ‘Oh, we don’t pay our speakers! It is very prestigious to be asked to address us at all – quite an honour – and who knows where it might lead?’

  ‘If I spent all my time talking for nothing it would lead to bankruptcy,’ I informed her shortly. ‘I mean, you don’t call a plumber out and expect them to work for nothing, do you?’

  ‘That is hardly the same thing,’ she snapped. ‘Ramona Gullet, the famous crime novelist, recently gave us some fascinating insights into criminal psychology and she certainly didn’t ask for any fee, despite being terribly well known and respected!’

  The inference being, of course, that I was not.

  ‘Bully for her!’ I said.

  The woman turned all frosty and said she was sorry she’d ever asked me because I was clearly not quite what they were looking for, and then she put the phone down.

  Two

  Fluffed

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

  Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

  Dear Miss Noritake,

  Thank you for your recent letter.

  No, of course I wasn’t insinuating that your first language isn’t English! I advise all my writers to ask a friend with a particularly good grasp of English to read through their manuscript and indicate any words where the meaning is not quite apposite to the situation.

  Also, I did point out that although readers would love your colourful description of the pretty seaside village of Luton, especially the annual Dragon Dance along the sea wall, they might also be confused by the fact that there actually is a city called Luton, which is about as land-locked as it is possible to get. Nor is it much noted for its cherry blossom.

  These are all minor criticisms of your slight but poetic work, and I would urge you to make the changes I suggest before submitting it to the Arts Council for one of their grants as you intend – for I think, with a few minor tweaks, it will be just the sort of literary novel they are looking for and you stand every chance of some funding to continue your inspired and deeply meaningful work.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina Devino

  Jackie – one of my oldest and dearest Shrimphaven friends – caught me nattering away alone one morning and she said, ‘Tina, why are you talking to yourself?’

  And I said, ‘I’m not, I’m talking into this dictating machine that Linny gave me for my birthday. It’s got teeny tiny cassette tapes in it, and I’ve had to buy a teeny tiny cassette tape player to go with it.’

  Then she cut to the chase and said, ‘You had a birthday? Which one?’

  And I told her I didn’t really have birthdays any more, because if you don’t have them you won’t get any older, will you?

  ‘Michael Jackson seemed to have the same idea, only I hope you won’t resort to surgery,’ she said worriedly.

  ‘Probably not, unless I get those deep channels round my mouth like a river estuary, and even then, only as a last resort,’ I assured her.

  But she was right about me talking to myself, because I was. It was getting to be a compulsive habit, so I might end up dictating my books from a chaise longue like Barbara Cartland, but without all the pink and with all the sex. I’m sure I read somewhere that she left instructions that the leaves from the tree she was buried under were to be given to writers, but I don’t know why, unless it was for inspiration. Anyway, if I got a dead leaf in the post at least I would have some idea what it was, though what could you do with one leaf? I suppose it would make a bookmark, but it would probably swoon if pressed between the pages of some of my novels.

  Jackie had come to ask me to one of her parties the following Friday, and I said I would go, because you can’t get out of it when it’s one of your friends, can you? Usually I liked to keep Party Animal Tina and Shrimphaven Seaside Casual Tina quite separate, and sometimes I thought Sergei would have a fit if he saw me on the shingle with my hair blown into knots and a mac and wellies … or maybe not. I never quite knew with Sergei. But goings-on on the beach would get me drummed out of the place, that was for sure – if I didn’t get pneumonia first. I wasn’t convinced that would be quite the right kind of publicity, tempting though it was, and, anyway, I was fond of my little cottage.

  Linny went quiet for three days, which was almost unheard of, and then she phoned me and said I was quite right about her sending her manuscripts out, and she’d just posted three of them to different publishers and now she couldn’t sit still, wondering when she would hear.

  ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath – without an agent it might be months.’

  ‘Do you think Miracle would take me on?’ she asked hopefully. Miracle Threaple was my agent.

  ‘Not unless you can transform yourself into the beautiful, born-again blonde, twenty-something daughter of a famous family – or a journalist with connections.’

  ‘Well, she took you on, Tina, and you’re none of those things!’

  ‘Yes, I am, I’m beautiful!’ I said indignantly, and of course I’m also brilliant, but modesty prevented me from adding that.

  ‘My great-aunt Vava in Beirut was a famous beauty.’

  ‘No, Linny, she was notorious, that’s different,’ I said. ‘You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, though I’m not saying raking up a few old skeletons wouldn’t be good for publicity when you do get published, because I got loads of mileage out of being left a lonely orphan at an early age, and banished off to boarding school.’

  My poor brother Tony, who is fifteen years my elder (I was a surprise latecomer) and at the time unmarried, simply didn’t know what else to do with me. In any case, he was fully occupied running the family business.

  ‘Once you got to school, you weren’t lonely – you had me,’ she pointed out, which was quite true, but wouldn’t have made half as good publicity and anyway, I was lonely before we met.

  Palazzo Devino,

  Nr Cowbridge,

  South Wales

  Dear Tina,

  Christmas is nearly here and, as Maria points out to me, blood is thicker than water and you are my only sister, and so we will expect you to spend the Christmas season with us as usual. All the bambinos, even little Fabia, ask often after their auntie Tina, though I would be grateful if you would choose their Christmas presents with a little more thought than you give to their birthday presents, which Maria and I frequently find unsuitable, especially that magazine subscription you gave Bruno for his sixteenth birthday.

  Let me know which train you are getting so I
can meet you.

  Your affectionate brother,

  Antonio

  Dear Tony,

  From the tone (joke!) of your letter I infer that you have been reading The Godfather again. I do wish you wouldn’t.

  But thank you for your invitation to spend Christmas with you, Mary and the children as usual, which I will accept providing you don’t go on and on about my living in sin and committing adultery, like last year, which certainly cast a blight on the festivities; and besides, I don’t live with anyone, I’m not married, and even if I did it is none of your business.

  I’m afraid I will only be able to spend two nights with you, though, due to pressure of work, and I will drive myself down, because I haven’t forgotten how you collected me from the station in a vintage Devino Curly Cone ice-cream van last year, which is pure affectation when you have a perfectly good Mercedes in the driveway – and family roots might lie in ice cream but their lifeblood these days is coffee. At the rate you are expanding, every town in South Wales will soon have at least one Café Devino.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Tina

  I do hate private parties. There’s always someone who gets you in a corner and tells you at enormous length about the wonderful novel they’ve written, and how it’s all absolutely from their own life experience, only it’s got a truly original plot, and if they sent it to an agent or an editor someone might steal it, mightn’t they? Which, sure enough, is what happened at Jackie’s party. I told this woman that no, they wouldn’t steal her marvellous idea even if she’d got one, but I didn’t say that she looked like she’d never had an original thought in her life, because she was bigger than me – though that’s not difficult: practically everyone over the age of twelve is bigger than me as I’m only five foot two inches tall.

  So then she said she’d allow me to read it as a great favour and I said thanks very much but I was much too busy writing my own to read other people’s except for money. She said I’d soon feel differently once I’d read Clacton Stole My Heart and she’d drop it off the next day and then she just went.

  If I found out who gave her my address they would be straight off my Christmas card list because, lo and behold, there was a cardboard box on my porch the following morning when I staggered down, with a note saying here was her baby and to be gentle with it. It wasn’t a small box either. And when I opened the lid there wasn’t a manuscript in there at all, just a stiff moggy, so I rang the number on the letter and she went hysterical and said she must have buried the manuscript instead of poor Fluffy, who passed away while she was at the party, and did I think that was a bad omen?

  I said no, I thought it was just carelessness and what did she want me to do with Fluffy?

  She said she’d have to go out and dig up her manuscript like that Pre-Raphaelite poet did, the one who put all his poems in his lover’s coffin and then had a change of heart later and had her dug up. Only Fluffy wasn’t in there with it, fortunately. And then she said she’d be round later to swap boxes, and I said I could hardly wait and she’d find Fluffy in the porch.

  Sergei took me to Lemonia for lunch on the following Monday, which I felt I had quite deserved after a morning spent being Spring, scattering daisies in the path of the rampant faun or something – I never seemed to quite grasp his plots – and Russian tea and fish eggs would simply not have been sustaining enough to get me home.

  But actually we were celebrating my new book, Spring Breezes, which had quietly sneaked out wearing its hardback just before Christmas, as usual. Salubrious Press saved what little publicity budget they awarded me for the paperback in the new year.

  At lunchtime, Lemonia tended to be full of youngish actors, pop stars, models and other minor celebs (and occasionally one or two major celebs) and you could tell immediately which were the waiters and which were famous because the waiters were all better dressed, taller and more handsome.

  Everyone recognized Sergei, which was not surprising, what with his having enough personal magnetism to cure anyone rheumatic within twenty paces, not to mention the huge wolfskin collar pulled up around his pointy little ears, though thank goodness it was so flamboyant it looked fake, so no one actually ever complained about the exploitation of animals. The poor thing has been dead for centuries anyway, because an ancestor in Russia had actually shot it when it was chasing him …

  Anyway, I was glad I was wearing something trendy without being mutton dressed as lamb, though I only discovered when I got home later (after the usual tube and train journey) that I still had two daisies (silk, but very realistic) tangled in my hair, and when I phoned Sergei to demand why he hadn’t told me, he simply said: ‘But they suited you, Tsarina!’ (Considering what happened to the last Tsarina, he could have chosen a pet name more auspicious.) So I couldn’t really say any more, could I? I just hoped it would be put down to eccentricity, which is allowable in an author.

  When we came out of Lemonia, a photographer took our picture – Sergei just automatically falls into photogenic poses all the time – and when he was asked for the name of his companion he said very grandly that I was his dear friend Tina Devino, author of many, many famous novels, and he was surprised they didn’t know that. I must say that he had always seemed proud of me whenever we were out in public. It was just a pity we didn’t get out more often, but I wasn’t sure my body could stand seeing Sergei more than once a week, if that, and sometimes I was just happy to settle for the tea and fishy nibbles.

  My picture was in one of the tabloids, and I didn’t look bad, if I say so myself, except for the slight rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights impression, with my eyes stretched wide open and a slightly drunken daisy over one ear.

  Tertius took Linny to Lemonia for dinner the next night and she said her Rich Bitch friends were all talking about how cutting-edge-of-fashion I’d looked, with my slightly prom-style dress and the flowers, and did I think that sort of thing would suit her? I said she was built on more statuesque lines than me and so should go for a classical Greek draped look instead, and was she all right, because she sounded very tired?

  ‘Well, you know what Tershie’s like when he’s home,’ she said wearily. ‘He wants to make the most of his stopovers and he’s not satisfied unless he gives everything one hundred per cent of his attention – including me.’

  ‘Yes, but think of all the calories it will burn off. If it weren’t for Sergei I’d probably be the shape of a dumpling by now because, God knows, it’s the only exercise I take apart from the odd stroll along the beach, or round a garden.’

  ‘We could try his SergeiYoga classes again,’ she suggested, and I gave her a look of total disbelief. She may have forgotten the agonies of discovering muscles you never even thought you had, but I certainly remembered, and I hadn’t got the figure for Lycra anyway.

  Three

  Of Mice and Men

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

  Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

  Dear Honoria Snibley,

  I have now had a chance to glance at your manuscript, Clacton Stole My Heart, although, as I did try and point out at the party, I can only do a full critique on receipt of your cheque for three hundred pounds. I enclose an information sheet regarding the manuscript assessment service I offer should you wish to proceed with this.

  One or two things immediately struck me about your novel (apart from the style being a strange blend of Bill Bryson crossed with Barbara Cartland), the major one being that it contains no dialogue whatsoever. Reporting what your characters have said afterwards is not quite the same as having them actually say it, which gives more immediacy to the narrative.

  Should you decide to have your novel critiqued, could you please submit it double-spaced, with all the paragraphs indented, and in much bigger type?

  You will find your manuscript in the porch any time you wish to collect it. I hope you have recovered from the sad loss of poor Fluffy.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina D
evino

  I may have been the last woman in the country not to be connected to the Internet, but my computer was so old that Jackie’s daughter, Mel, said it should be in a museum. She hadn’t realized there was anything earlier than Windows 95 and there was no way it could handle emails.

  I get attached to things, however, and we did have a history together. I remember when I bought it with my first decent book advance. It was new and exciting and the white monitor was really trendy – they usually came in a used chewing-gum colour – so when did it turn that strange yellow, as if it had jaundice? I mean, it wasn’t like I’d ever smoked, so it wasn’t nicotine.

  But anyway, the poor thing was slowly dying. It had got Computer Alzheimer’s and got muddled, and that sort of thing was just no good to a professional writer, especially when everyone else, even Linny, was emailing away like mad.

  In fact, it was seeing Tertius’s new computer when I’d last visited Linny that made me make up my mind to do something about it, because Tertius’s was see-through and looked as if it had been sculpted from ice: quite beautiful, totally desirable, but horrendously expensive and way out of my league. But it got me thinking, and I finally accepted I’d have to get a proper computer, as I told this really nice man that I ran into down at the Frog and Bubble one lunchtime, where I’d gone with Jackie for a drink. He just happened to have one he didn’t need – brand new, with a flat-screen monitor, too – so of course I said I’d have it.

  Jackie tried to put me off, because she said computers emitted negative energy and wouldn’t do my karma any good, but I said not keeping up with technology wasn’t doing my karma much good either, because editors expected you to email your books to them these days and I was starting to look like an antique. She’s older than me, though – the hippie generation – so it’s amazing that Mel turned out such a techno-babe that she thinks the only way of surfing is with a mouse in your hand.