Honey-Dew

by Louise Doughty

  I understand now that, however momentous a story is, it begins when you first know of it. The Cowpers’ murder began as I stood at my kitchen window one Friday morning, sipping tea, and heard the ambulance and police cars speeding quietly through the village. We all like to pretend that when we hear an ambulance our hearts quicken with sympathy for the person or people it is going to collect. What we really experience is a small thrill. We would like to follow it, if we could. It is hurtling towards a story.

  I’ve been spending so much time at the office that I haven’t really done anything else. Doug’s filing system was a mess, and I wanted to re-structure the advertising department. You have to do that kind of thing when you take over, to let people know you’ve arrived. I’ve been working in the evenings, on my own, opening the skylight to evict the deadening heat that builds up in that attic. Sometimes, when it gets too soporific, I go downstairs and sit at my old desk in the silent office, glancing through the window from time to time at the empty market square. I would rather sit there and get some work done than sit alone at home.

  I rang David Poe from there one evening, just for a chat. I left a message on his mobile. He hasn’t got back to me.

  I saw Doug once, in August. He was in the butcher’s. I saw him through the window as I passed. The butcher was handing him one of those white translucent bags, bulging with fresh pink mince. They were talking. I hesitated, wondering whether I should go in and say hello, but they seemed engrossed. He was using a stick but other than that he looked well. Everybody thought that Doug would curl up and die after he left his beloved Record, but I hear he’s doing fine.

  I don’t make much effort to converse with people these days. I don’t even play badminton with Lizzie on Fridays any more – I haven’t visited my friends in Birmingham all summer. I dropped in to see my parents once, for half an hour. Mum hardly spoke to me.

  I haven’t heard from Andrew since he left and don’t expect to for a while. I know his silences. I can interpret them. I know when he is not in touch because he is abroad or busy or on drugs – and I know when he is angry with me. It’s fine by me because I’m angry back. I don’t know why he made such a fuss about Gran’s money. He could have had it back any time: all he had to do was ask.

  All summer, I have had the sensation that people are avoiding me – peculiar, when it is I who am avoiding them.

  Nothing much has changed in Nether Bowston. Miss Crabbe is still working on her masterpiece. She sent a couple of chapters to a publisher in London called the Co-operative Press and they wrote back with a glowing reader’s report. They want four thousand pounds to publish but they assure her it will be a huge success. She came round to my place clutching the letter, wanting to know if I thought it was worth it. Apparently, even George Bernard Shaw paid to have his work published. She’s very excited.

  The village shop is closing. The owner says it’s because of the increase in business rates since Independence. I ran a front-page story headlined IS THIS WHAT WE FOUGHT FOR?

  The Cowpers’ place is up for sale but as yet there are no buyers. I haven’t been past it for some time – I have no reason to. It seems strange that the building is still standing. Memories fade, bodies rot, stories become history; but there is still a modern, red-brick monolith on the edge of our village, a far more potent memorial than any gravestone. I can’t imagine that anyone would want to live there but apparently some people get a kick out of buying that sort of place. With house prices still rising, property round here is going to be hard to find. Someone will take it.

  I think about Gemma sometimes. I think about the photo we ran in the paper, how little it resembled a real girl. That’s the trouble with those school pictures. It could be anybody. You look at a photo like that and you think, dead – so young, and already dead.

  I can’t picture what I saw in Ashpit Spinney, not any more. I can picture the yellow roots of the oak tree, the lice and millipedes. I can hear the buzz of the flies. I hear them in my dreams sometimes. They wake me. I sit up, bolt upright, certain that there is a fly in the room, but when my heart has quietened, there is nothing.

  Postscript

  Louise Doughty gave herself until she was thirty to be a full time writer. She made it with a week to spare. Eight days before her thirtieth birthday in 1993 she sold her first novel, Crazy Paving, on the strength of its opening 100 pages, and signed a contract to write a second, Dance With Me.

  Crazy Paving was published in 1995 and was shortlisted for four awards, including the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Dance With Me was published to great critical acclaim in 1996. By the time she came to write Honey-Dew in 1997 Doughty was established as an author, radio playwright, critic and broadcaster.

  Honey-Dew and the earlier novels share several themes and a bleak sense of humour. Crazy Paving was interpreted by many critics as a black comedy. Doughty is, however, anxious that readers don’t expect her books to be laugh-out-loud funny. The humour usually comes from bitter situations in everyday life.

  All her novels are plot driven. Even though she writes what is categorised as Literary Fiction, the plot always comes first for her. Her skill with plotting is also shown to good effect in her radio plays and she has written several for BBC Radio. She is currently working on a film adaptation of Honey-Dew.

  Although Doughty denies there is any autobiography in Honey-Dew, she chose to set the novel in Rutland, the county in which she grew up. She believes that there comes a point in any writer’s life when they must address their place of birth. Rutland, a land-locked county in the middle of England, is also emblematic for her of a certain kind of Englishness that she wished to explore.

  Serious crime was unknown there until 1993 when a man killed his parents and buried them by the side of Rutland Water, a local beauty spot. The Severs Case, as it became known, made national headlines. The case intrigued Doughty and it set her thinking about murder within the family. She wanted to develop the idea that whilst we all have locks on our windows and doors to keep danger out, it is perhaps the darkness within our own homes that we should most fear. With this in mind she decided her story would be about a teenage girl who murders her parents.

  Comparing the traditional American and English murder story, Doughty concluded that in general terms the American murder story is about the darkness outside whilst the English version is about murder within a community, by someone from that community. A community such as the one she envisaged in Rutland. She also found, in her reading of everyone from Dorothy L. Sayers to P.D. James, that the traditional crime novel has very strict rules and conventions. Aside from sending up rural England she aimed to subvert these conventions and turn the crime novel on its head by basing the story on the investigator and not the murderer.

  Louise Doughty was born in Melton Mowbray but grew up in Oakham, Rutland’s county town, one of the three children of an engineer, Ken Doughty, and his wife, Avis. The family were, she says, ‘amused bystanders’ of the wackier elements of the Seventies campaign for Independence for Rutland.

  From an early age she was, she says, ‘bookish – definitely a torch under the blankets type when I should have been asleep’. She read voraciously, ‘with an absolute passion’. She preferred fantasy and science fiction, ‘books that created whole universes you could lose yourself in’.

  Academically precocious, Doughty went to Leeds University at the age of seventeen to study English Literature. Although she had always written stories, her ambition then was to be an actress. She had acted at school and continued to do so at university. Her most memorable role was playing one of the eponymous sacks in Two Sacks, an obscure drama by an Iranian playwright, but in her final year she realised that she wasn’t good enough to make it her career.

  Six months of uncertainty followed until she asked herself what she really wanted to do. The realisation that she should write was, she says, like a religious conversion. She eventually applied to do an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and was accepte
d.

  Doughty’s contemporaries on the course included writers Anne Enright and Mark Illis and her tutors were Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, whom she regards as a mentor. Although she doesn’t believe a writer can be taught talent, she thinks such courses teach technique and show how talent can be used. She expresses bewilderment that people might think otherwise, since it is accepted that music and art can be taught in a similar way.

  Doughty left East Anglia in 1987 and moved to London, where she began a succession of part-time jobs which gave her the freedom to write. In 1991 her first breakthrough came not with the novel but with a short story and a radio play. She won third place – a much-needed £2,000 – in the Ian St James Awards for unpublished writers, with a short story she’d written several years before. Shortly afterwards she came third (and won £500) in the Radio Times Drama Awards with a radio play she had adapted from another of her short stories. The play was later broadcast on Radio 3.

  Whilst Doughty was writing and winning awards she was also working as a part-time secretary for London Transport. It was her longest lasting part-time job. The experience was dismal but gave her the idea for Crazy Paving.

  After almost ten years of secretarial work she had become, she says, ‘evangelical’ about the need to write about secretaries since there was, at that pre-Bridget Jones time, no tradition of writing about working women. The ‘crystallising factor’ came in February 1992 when, now living in Catford and commuting to London Bridge on working days, she narrowly missed being a victim of an IRA bomb that exploded in the railway station.

  Such random happenings, combined with a very loose application of chaos theory, provided her with the plot for Crazy Paving. (In the book her London Bridge experience figures almost exactly as it happened.) The heroism of ‘ordinary’ people became one of its themes.

  Doughty followed Crazy Paving with Dance With Me, a ghost story that also examines the relationship between men and women. She wrote it in the daytime before going to the theatre each evening as the critic for the Mail on Sunday – a job she had signed up for the day before her thirtieth birthday.

  Writing Dance With Me was relatively easy. Writing Honey-Dew was made more difficult because at the time she was researching it she was pregnant. She gave birth to her daughter Nathalie in November 1996, shortly after she had written the first draft of the first chapter of the book. As a new mother, Doughty found it unsettling to be writing a book about a girl who murders her parents – especially when she stayed with her own parents in Rutland to research it.

  She encountered another problem when she went back to Rutland in 1997 for the celebrations to mark the county regaining its old status. She was hoping to get material she could use in the book but found that the celebrations were ‘beyond parody’.

  It reinforced something she has always believed about writing fiction: ‘It is not a question of art imitating life or vice versa. Real life is often far too ludicrous to be rendered literally in fiction. It is more a question of toning it down.’

  Peter Guttridge