Greyglass by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [LEE, TANITH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575120877
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

Book Two

V

This isn’t for me. It’s for Flat 6C.”

“I know. She’s out again. Can you take it?”

Susan looked at the postman’s pale, stare-eyed, harassed face. “All right.”

He, or one of the many postmen who came and went, was always pushing letters for Flat 6C through her own door, which was marked, obviously confusingly, 6E. This however was a package, not very large, but too big to fit in either door.

6C was directly across the hall. Susan had never glimpsed the occupant, although she knew her name from all the wrongly-delivered-letters – Ms Crissie Fielding.

Crissie Fielding, the only truly adjacent neighbour, was very quiet. Which was also explainable if she was out a lot. The faint strains of popular music or TV that frequently strayed from the other flats, (6A, B and D) down the corridor, never emanated from 6C.

Susan took the package back into the kitchen.

Sitting at the small table, with her half-eaten croissant, she glanced over the package. Apart from the address, it bore a small label. G.D. Register.

Vaguely, Susan felt reluctant to confront Crissie-of-the-unusual-spelling Fielding with the package. (Before it had only been a matter of putting post through the letterbox.) Why on earth?

Perhaps meeting anyone, here, talking to anyone, here – which generally, so far, for a whole seven weeks, Susan had meticulously avoided – was going to feel peculiar.

She had after all met so many people here, and none of them the original person, which person she had met over and over until she was nearly thirteen, but never met, never, in any real sense of the word.

Susan was thirty when two quite major things happened in her life. First she won the Cameron Award for Book Cover Art and Design, a prize that made her dear to Paragon Books, and also enhanced her bank balance with an astonishing ten thousand pounds. The following month, at a party thrown by Paragon, she was introduced to R.J. He was the writer whose work had had her prize-winning jacket.

“I liked your cover,” he said, rather stiffly, “thank you.”

After all the fulsome praise, this sounded grudging and awkward. Susan assumed R.J. had not liked her cover for his book at all.

It had been a difficult novel to exemplify. Ornamental yet subtle and convoluted, but having to have Paragon’s required bold, eye-catching image. In the end Susan had constructed the artwork from layers of cut and pasted paper, a method she hadn’t employed for some years. The three main characters of the book, represented in this glowing, yet ghostly and fragmented way, seemed to catch the eye of everyone, the prize committee included.

Susan was never sure what she thought, but then she never was with her own handiwork. Sometimes, looking, months or years after, at covers she and other people had only thought adequate, she sensed genuine effectiveness. Conversely, jackets which had been enthused over repeatedly, seemed lacking in anything save the careful draughtsmanship she had learned.

She still thought of herself as a fraud who had somehow managed to fool them all, Paragon in particular, that she was a bona fide artist.

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