Ali Smith: Autumn

But then she says, still without looking up,

he’s eaten a good lunch today, enough for like three people. Well, older people. We told him you’d be delighted he’d woken up and he said, please let my granddaughter know I’m looking forward to seeing her.

Elisabeth walks down the corridor, comes to his door and looks in.

He is asleep again.

She gets the chair from the corridor. She puts it beside the bed. She sits down. She gets out A Tale of Two Cities.

She closes her eyes. When she opens them again his eyes are open. He is looking straight at her.

Hello again, Mr Gluck, she says.

Oh, hello, he says. Thought it’d be you. Good. Nice to see you. What you reading?

November again.It’s more winter than autumn. That’s not mist. It’s fog.

The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like — no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.

There’ve been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring.

The furniture in the garden is rusting. They’ve forgotten to put it away for the winter.

The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still.

Look at the colour of it.

I’m deeply indebted to everyone who’s written about Pauline Boty but above all to the seminal work of Sue Tate and to her two volumes, Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman (2013) and, as Sue Watling, with David Alan Mellor, Pauline Boty: The Only Blonde in the World (1998); and also to the interview with Boty by Nell Dunn in Vogue, September 1964, the full-length version of which is published in Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women (1965). The stories about Christine Keeler which feature briefly in the novel can be found in Nothing But…, by Christine Keeler with Sandy Fawkes (1983), and Secrets and Lies, by Christine Keeler with Douglas Thompson (2012). I’m also fortunate to have been able to read a typescript of Sybille Bedford’s as yet unpublished account of Stephen Ward’s trial in 1963, The Worst We Can Do: A Concise Account of the Trial of Dr Stephen Ward, some of whose details of the trial (the court transcriptions of which still haven’t been released into the public domain) have slipped into this novel.

Thank you, Simon, Anna, Hermione, Lesley B., Lesley L., Ellie, Sarah, and everyone at Hamish Hamilton.

Thank you, Andrew and Tracy and everyone at Wylie’s.

Thank you, Bridget Smith, Kate Thomson, Neil MacPherson and Rachel Gatiss.

Thank you, Xandra. Thank you, Mary.

Thank you, Jackie.

Thank you, Sarah.

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