G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

Natasha braced herself, neck whiplashing, as George again attempted to jackknife his car into a too-small space on St. Andrew’s Street.

“Ouch! Park in the garage, for God’s sake.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

George, as Natasha knew by now, had a high tolerance for pain-other people’s pain.

“Oh, forget it. Look, where shall we meet up? And when?” While she could usually trick George into giving his plans away, he had been maddeningly close-lipped about his reasons for this trip into town.

“The Eagle. In about an hour. Maybe two.”

Which meant closer to three.

“George, I really don’t fancy hanging around a pub by myself.”

“I’ll be there when I get there. Cheer up. Who knows? You might get lucky and meet another rich bloke.”

With an unpleasant laugh, he retrieved a Gucci backpack from the back seat, got out of the car, and slammed the door. A small avalanche of snow fell from the bonnet.

It took all her considerable control not to tell him to sod off. Something like prudence won out as she decided the better course of dealing with George-usually-was to ignore him. It was a long taxi ride back to Waverley Court and he was more than capable of leaving her stranded.

Not looking back, she started down Sidney Street, headed toward Market Square and the shops, preparatory to doubling back to see which way George was headed. A half-dozen awestruck undergraduates watched her silken progress. One of them wrote a highly derivative sonnet about her that night, something about women lovely in their bones.

She ignored them. She ignored traffic, with near-fatal consequences. One day, she thought, George would go too far. With the wrong person.

Violet was bored. Bored, bored, bored, and wondering how soon she could decently make an escape.

Redecorating Waverley Court, top to bottom, to which she had initially looked forward as the ultimate challenge, could wait, although as she looked around her sitting room now, she knew it couldn’t wait forever. With a delicate shudder-purple velvet draperies with gold tassels. Really!-she returned her gaze to the Vogue through which she had been flapping in a desultory way for the past half hour. That was boring, too, as she already owned nearly everything pictured in the issue worth owning, thanks to Adrian.

She stood up and stretched her lithe dancer’s frame. Smoothed her hair. Checked her makeup. Perfect, as always. Simple perfection. But… what, she wondered, peering closer, had happened to the girl who had set all of London on end? Where most people saw only the taut, transparent skin, Violet saw crow’s feet, the nap of loosening flesh at the jaw, and lines etching the brow and upper lip, despite the best efforts of the creams advertised on every other page of her magazines.

A phrase from a poem she had once read drifted into her thoughts. Something about “thy mother’s glass.”

When Violet had been young and aspiring to join the Aristocracy, as she thought of it, she had read straight through an anthology of famous poetry, trying to make up for her lack of formal education. But once she had breached the portals of the upper classes and realized most of them were far stupider than she was, she had given it up, specializing instead in the small talk that greased the wheels of cocktail and weekend parties, along with copious amounts of alcohol. Not that she really drank-bad for the complexion-but she had perfected the art of carrying around the same half-full highball glass for hours, flitting from group to group, laughing maniacally at jokes she only half understood. For some reason, this had gained her a reputation for wit.

What a long time ago it all seemed now. Looking back on the path her life had taken, she could only say now that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. Not really. Not even Winnie…

Perhaps a cruise…

Sir Adrian was stumped. He had scribbled away happily in his study for hours, rewriting the pages of the day before and adding a page or two more, but when it came time to write about the Chloe of his youth, he ran straight into a wall. It was not as though he had drained the well of his malice-far from it-but when it came to remembering Chloe as she once had been, he found only the haziest ghost could be summoned, like an out-of-focus photograph faded even more by time.

Chloe as she became, he could recall with clarity. Frequent child-bearing had inflated her, rounding her moon face like-yes, he thought: like a pink balloon. Sir Adrian laboriously scribbled the words in a margin of the page, stared at them a moment, and angrily crossed them out.

Let’s see. Tap tap tap went his sausage fingers on the desk.

The young Chloe had been tiny, with slim legs tapering down into narrow, elegant feet. A gust of wind could have blown her over. That had changed, too, the straight piano legs swelling into something like those umbrella stands made from elephant feet.

But apart from balloons, pianos, and umbrella stands, Sir Adrian had made little progress in the past hour, and the writer’s block remained cemented in place, impeding the normally smooth flow of vitriol onto the page.

He threw down his pen-that same special pen that had helped him so much in Paris. These were the times he most resented the aspic of writerly isolation. Maybe a talk with Mrs. Romano would help. Strangely enough, he did not think of going to see what Violet was doing. He was slightly afraid of Violet: Having captured his long-sought prize, he feared too much familiarity might breed contempt-on her part.

Sir Adrian reached for the tasseled bell pull to summon Mrs. Romano, then decided he would visit her in the kitchen instead.

Slowly, painfully, he raised himself onto elephantine legs and began his long progress to the back of the house.

Sarah was again at large in the rambling house, and without the book with which she had hoped to while away the hours. Having told Jeffrey she was needed in the kitchen, she felt morally obligated to be as good as her word, in keeping with her general inability to separate the white from the black lie, and her footsteps led her in the direction of Mrs. Romano’s domain, where she knew she was neither needed nor, probably, welcome.

The smell of something delightful on the cooker greeted her as she walked in.

“Oh, what’s this then?” she said, lifting the lid on a large saucepan.

“Sauce. For the cappelletti.”

“Alpine hats? Wonderful. I’ve published a cookbook, you know. It’s been quite well received. Perhaps I could help…”

Sarah rummaged in a drawer and produced a teaspoon. She again lifted the lid of the saucepan. Mrs. Romano, ruler of all she surveyed, watched her with growing annoyance. She had flipped through one of Sarah’s books one day at W. H. Smith’s in Cambridge. All lentils and dried grass and barley, from what she could tell. She wouldn’t have fed such food to a donkey.

“It needs some mace,” pronounced Sarah.

“Mace? Mace ? Most definitely it does not need some mace.”

“I assure you-”

“This is a traditional dish. I make it always the same way. For years. Always. The. Same. No. Mace.”

“You’ll see. Mace is just like nutmeg, only slightly more robust. It’s actually made from the nutmeg shell. Few people realize that.” Sarah was now innocently rummaging among the spices over the cooker. She found the mace jar and, turning, held it aloft, beaming, triumphant, and blissfully unaware of the gathering storm.

“And you shouldn’t keep these spices right over the cooker, you know,” she went on. “They get overheated. Spoils the flavor.”

Mrs. Romano, ire thoroughly aroused, appeared to be the only thing in the kitchen in danger of overheating. Stepping smartly (for her) across the kitchen, she snapped shut the door of the cupboard over the cooker, nearly onto Sarah’s fingers.