Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart

Author:Mary Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

13

I slept later than usual next morning, and woke to see half past nine on my bedside clock, and a cascade of raindrops chasing each other down the window. By the time I had had breakfast and done the morning’s chores it was after eleven and, though the rain was letting up, it was still wet enough to keep anyone indoors who didn’t have to go out.

I decided that I didn’t have to go out. It was not a hard decision to take. Rationalised, it meant that Neil already knew enough about Ewen Mackay’s record, and of course he was already on the watch for any more suspicious moves. If he, Neil, was content to leave the house unwatched by day, and to spend his time looking at rocks on the broch island, then I could stay indoors with a clear conscience, and wait for the rainstorm to pass.

I got back to work, by which I mean that I got my papers and notes out, and then sat looking at them for what seemed like a dreary lifetime, and was really probably only twenty minutes. The words I had written – and had almost, in the interval, forgotten – mocked me and were meaningless. My notes told me what was to happen next, but my brain no longer knew how to move plot and people forward. Block. Complete block. I sat and stared at the paper in front of me and tried to blank out the present and get back into my story – forward, that is, into my invented future, and out of the world of queries and vague apprehensions.

From experience, I knew what to do. Write. Write anything. Bad sentences, meaningless sentences, anything to get the mind fixed again to that sheet of paper and oblivious of the ‘real’ world. Write until the words begin to make sense, the cogs mesh, the wheels start to turn, the creaking movement quickens and becomes a smooth, oiled run, and then, with luck, exhaustion will be forgotten, and the real writing will begin. But look up once from that paper, get up from the table to make coffee or stir the fire, even just raise your head to look at the view outside the window, and you may as well give up until tomorrow. Or for ever.

It was the rain that saved me. I could not have looked out of the window if I had tried, the chores were all done, and there was nothing whatever to do except sit at that table and write.

I wrote. A year or so later, or it may have been an hour, I crumpled up four sheets of paper and threw them to the floor, and started another, and I was there. And in another light-year or two I was through the word-barrier, and the book had suddenly reached the stage – the wonderful moment to get to – where I could walk right into my imaginary country and see things that I had not

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