Tenderness by Alison MacLeod

Author:Alison MacLeod [MacLeod, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Daughter of the House

i

On the 10 a.m. London to Pulborough, Bernardine – better known as Dina – had just uncapped her pen when a large family burst into the empty carriage and seemed suddenly to be everywhere. She smiled brightly at the children, who bounced into their seats, excited at the prospect of a rural adventure beyond London. They had inherited their father’s big ears, which shone on each fair little head, as translucent as petals.

She turned to the window where the last of summer flickered by like the fly-end of a film reel. On the embankments, plumes of buddleia tangled with wild sweet peas. Coca-Cola bottles winked and flashed and an old, green iron mangle surrendered to rust. She checked her watch. Half past already.

Time flew.

The child beside her pressed in to see whatever there was to be seen. Behind them, a brother and sister kicked and squirmed.

She bit her lip and shoved her manuscript – that’s to say, half of what she tried to convince herself was a novel – into her satchel. Modern novels could be very slim, she consoled herself. Surely, she could manage a hundred and fifty pages, the length of a Virginia Woolf novel – if not with the brilliance of Woolf. Her Great-Aunt Viola had produced respected novels. But could she? If only she knew about something – about anything at all, really – or had something to say. Then the task might not have seemed so difficult.

One had to make up such a lot.

It was infuriating being young, and being forever told that novelists needed age and wisdom. What was she supposed to do for the next twenty years? Resign herself to mediocrity until brilliance finally dropped? She had stamina but she was no masochist.

She had tried sending off stories to the university review, but the editors were all very clever young men, and the last story had been returned with a one-word dismissal: ‘Florid!’ She sent others off to a few small but choice literary journals, but these, too, were all returned. ‘Not for us’. ‘Not sufficiently convinced’. The most encouraging reply was ‘Try again’.

It was a depressing sight each month: the ‘returns’ envelopes in her pigeonhole in Peile Hall poking out at her like fat tongues. The porter would often look up from his desk, understand that the next instalment of her unhappiness had just arrived, and offer wordless commiseration with a glance over his specs, as if to say, ‘No luck? Well, damn them.’ She liked the porters of Peile Hall. They knew when to offer a hanky and when to turn a blind eye.

She thought she should begin her post-mortem assessment of her latest rejection, a short story which brooded in her satchel alongside her half-novel. Even her name looked wrong on the return envelope. It didn’t sound like a writer’s name. ‘Bernardine Wall’. Was there, she asked herself, any less evocative a name for a novelist than ‘Wall’? She sounded like something one crashed into. Why couldn’t

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.