Cauldstane (8 page)

‘No,
my interest is purely academic. There’s no one special.’

We set off along the gravel path, heading for the gate that led out of the walled garden. Alec turned to look at me.
‘Is there anyone special in your life? If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Of course I don’t. I can’t expect people to open
up and trust me with their stories without giving something of myself.’

He pointed to my left hand. ‘You don’t appear to be married.’

‘No. I lived with someone for a number of years, but we never wanted to make it permanent. Actually, that’s not true. I think maybe he
did
want to marry me, but I didn’t want to marry him. Especially when he decided he wanted to become a priest. I didn’t see myself as a vicar’s wife.’

‘No, I don’t see you as a vicar’s wife either.’

‘Thank you.’

I caught his sidelong glance and noted the grin again.
When I’d dismissed Alec MacNab’s looks as ordinary I’d possibly done him a disservice. His curling brown hair was actually tawny in the sunlight and there was nothing ordinary about that smile. It was just a rare occurrence.

‘No regrets, then?’
he asked.

‘No, no regrets. B
ut I think if I’d married I might have had them. Lots of them. I fear I might have sat brooding in the vicarage, railing against God and plotting my escape. You weren’t married long enough to know that misery.’

‘No
. But I’ve known what it is to want to escape from someone.’

I didn’t feel I could ask what he meant by this enigmatic remark
, so silence yawned between us again. I was relieved when I saw we were almost back at the courtyard. As we passed through the archway, he said, ‘Jenny, d’you mind if I ask you another personal question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’

‘No
, go ahead.’

He stopped walking and swung round to face me. ‘Are you Imogen Ryan?’

CHAPTER EIGHT

I blinked at Alec and said nothing. He must have thought I didn’t understand because he added, ‘I mean, Imogen Ryan, the novelist.’ I suppose I looked shocked, because he took a step towards me, then checked himself. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business.’

‘Yes, it is. I’m writing your father’s memoirs for him. He’s a notable and much loved man. You have every right to know who his literary
alter ego
is.’ I looked around and said, ‘Alec, is there somewhere we could go and sit down? Not in the castle. I don’t think I want to see any of the others. Not right now.’

‘Come into
the armoury. There’s an old sofa. It’s filthy, but comfortable.’

Alec opened the door to
his workshop and ushered me in. While he removed his leather apron and hung it on a peg, I looked round for somewhere to sit.

The workshop wouldn’t
have won any prizes for tidiness or cleanliness, but it was very warm. I felt as if I’d walked into a giant toolbox. Everywhere I looked, on walls, tables and workbenches, were tools and machinery, the function of which I could only guess. A pall of dust – or perhaps it was ash – had settled over everything in the room except some tools, which looked bright with use, and a sword blade that was obviously work-in progress. There was a furnace that looked like the mouth of a miniature hell, a machine with a big grinding wheel, two different anvils, a mallet I don’t think I could have lifted, quantities of oily rags and used emery paper, several coffee mugs – one growing mould – and an open packet of biscuits.

The room was lit
by a single window, bare hanging light bulbs and a dusty, black anglepoise lamp attached to a bench, its angular frame totally in keeping with all the tools, some of which looked like instruments of torture. There was something slightly sinister, almost Brueghelian about the darkness and chaos. The cleanest thing in the workshop was a notice board on which were pinned sketches, diagrams and news cuttings featuring Alec in fencing gear and various kinds of period costume. I noted in passing that he looked good in tights.

I headed for the sofa
, regretting my decision to wear cream trousers, but Alec got there before me and spread a clean tea-towel. I thanked him and sat down, clasping my hands in my lap in an attempt to compose myself.

He
wandered over to the window and appeared to be absorbed by the empty courtyard. Eventually he turned round and, leaning against the wall, his arms folded, said, ‘So you
are
Imogen Ryan?’ It wasn’t an accusation, just a question.

‘Yes.’

He frowned, then shaking his head as if in disbelief, he laughed and said, ‘But
why
?’

‘Why am I pretending to be someone else?’

‘Why are you
ghostwriting
? You were a best-selling novelist. Famous! Did you not win an award?’

‘Several. You know my work then?’

‘Not directly, no. I’m not much of a reader of fiction. But Coral was a big fan. She had all your books. I kept one when she died. Don’t know why exactly. It was very hard clearing everything out. I suppose I wanted to keep a few things that had meant something to her.’

‘So you recognised me from a photo
on the dust jacket?’

‘I didn’t. Wilma did.’

‘
Wilma?
’

‘She
was turning out my room, dusting the books. She’s very thorough. Takes them off the shelf to dust. I was in the room at the time and I heard her make a wee noise, as if she was startled. I thought maybe she’d seen a mouse. I asked what was wrong. She held up the book and said, “Is she not the living image of Miss Ryan? And what a coincidence! The same name.” ’

‘So she guessed.’

‘I’m not so sure. You look very different with short hair.’

‘
I decided that was my distinguishing characteristic – long blonde hair. Without it, most people wouldn’t recognise me – people who didn’t already know me, I mean. So you’re saying Wilma didn’t guess?’

‘She
looked at the photo for a while, then said, “Like two peas in a pod. It must be her sister. Writing obviously runs in the family.” ’

‘
And you think that’s what she believes?’

‘
Maybe. Maybe not. But Wilma’s worked for this family for more than forty years. She’s learned there are some things it’s best not to know. Best not to
see
. She’ll say nothing more about it. And neither will I.’

‘
Alec, I didn’t lie to Sholto. My CV was partial, I’ll admit that, but I’ve been ghostwriting for years now and my books have enjoyed a lot of success. I’m very good at what I do.’

‘I don’t doubt it.
But
why
, Jenny? You must have been earning a tidy sum writing bestsellers. Wasn’t one of your books made into a film?’

‘Two, actually.’

‘Well, you can’t be doing it for the money. I know Sholto will be paying you a pittance.’

‘Yes, he was ra
ther apologetic about that. I’m doing it for love really. I used to travel a lot researching my novels. But I never went anywhere extreme – the desert, Antarctica, the Himalayas. Sholto did all that and more. I wanted to hear his stories, be a part of them. So I accepted the job. I still don’t know why he offered it to me. He said he would have preferred a man.’

‘Aye,
that’s what he thought, but Sholto would always choose a woman as a companion. Especially a good-looking one. And I imagine he liked your work. Did you send him samples? Not Imogen Ryan’s, your ghostwritten books.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t get the impression he’d read them. I think it all went on the interview. I fear I gushed
a bit about Cauldstane. That’s the way to his heart, isn’t it?’

Alec turned and gazed out the window again. ‘I don’t know,’ he
said quietly. ‘It’s not a path I’ve trodden.’

I
looked up at him but could only see his profile which gave nothing away. I gathered my thoughts and started to explain. ‘Things started to go wrong for me, you see.’

He turned
his head and said, ‘Wrong? In what way?’

‘My career. I decided I wanted to stop writing fiction.’

‘Writer’s block, you mean?’

‘No,
much worse than that. It wasn’t that I
couldn’t
write, I just didn’t want to any more.’

‘Why
?’

‘
Oh, it was a gradual thing. There was a downward slide. But I know exactly when it began. I was cornered by a drunk at a party. He asked me what I did and when I said I was a novelist, he sneered and said. “There’s no such thing as fiction”. I think he might have been a writer himself. Or a failed writer. He said, “Don’t kid yourself, darling – fiction is just somebody else’s reality.”

‘I thought nothing of it at the ti
me. Well, not consciously. But you know how people are always worried you’re going to put them into your book? Use them as raw material?’

‘No, I didn’t
know that. But then I’ve never known any writers.’

‘
Well, novelists do get some of their inspiration from real people, but we don’t usually put them into books.
Bits
of people, perhaps. Their looks, or certain aspects of their personality. You absorb so much about people, even people you don’t know. You see someone on the news and it gets you thinking, asking questions… Anyway, many of my characters can be traced back to a real person who provided the inspiration in some way. Usually it’s just a sort of physical template that you have in mind while writing. The person might have nothing in common with your character. Nothing at all. I knew a terribly sweet lady who used to do the flowers at my ex-boyfriend’s church. There was something about her that intrigued me. She was so obsessive about her arrangements. So
controlling
… I used her as the basis of a psychopath, poor thing. But she’ll never recognise herself, even if she reads the book, because I changed so many physical things about her. And that’s how people operate, you see. No one will ever recognise me as Imogen Ryan because she had long, blonde hair. And I don’t.’

Alec gave me a
confused, almost worried look. It reminded me of the look my hairdresser had given me when I told her I wanted her to cut off most of my hair.

‘I’m guessing
,’ he said tentatively, ‘this all went bad somehow.’

‘Yes, it did.
I was writing a novel about a famous TV personality. Fictional. Someone who was meant to be a household name. I needed someone with a lot of style and charisma, so I based him on a rather glamorous politician. In my story, the household name stunned his fans by coming out as gay and living openly with his partner. Well, after I’d written all that into my plot, the politician on whom I’d based my gay hero came out. I was very surprised but, naturally, I put it down to coincidence. Then when it transpired this guy had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, I got really rattled.’

‘Why?’

‘My fictional character came out because he discovered he was dying of cancer.’

Alec shrugged. ‘A
nother coincidence. Cancer’s common enough.’

‘Of course. But for some reason, I was consumed with guilt. Even though I didn’t know this man
at all, when he died, I sent flowers and a card to his partner. But really I wanted to apologise, to tell him it was all my fault. That I’d killed his partner. I’d actually plotted his death. But I was still sane enough then to realise it was just a massive over-reaction to a distressing coincidence. Nevertheless, I deleted the novel from my hard drive.’

‘
That was drastic.’

‘
I even burned the print-out. Two years’ work down the drain. My agent and publisher were livid because I was contracted to produce a book a year. That’s what I’d always done. But they assumed it was just… a hiccup. Some sort of creative burnout.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I found I couldn’t write a thing. I had no ideas – or only bad ones. I got into a dreadful state, frightened I’d never be able to write again. Then I realised, that wasn’t the problem at all. I wasn’t afraid I could no longer write, I was frightened of
writing
, of actually doing the thing that earned me a very comfortable living.

‘
By then I think I’d lost it, but my agent persuaded me to see a counsellor. She tried to persuade me it was all just coincidence. When I resisted that, she suggested I see a different counsellor. I found another one but he was a bit alternative.
Too
alternative. He told me I was obviously very sensitive and suggested I’d tuned in to something, some non-specific cosmic suffering. I decided he was battier than me and stopped seeing him. In fact I pretty much stopped seeing anyone.

‘
By now it seemed perfectly clear to me that the drunk at the party had been right. Fiction
was
just someone else’s reality. But which came first – the fiction or the reality? Supposing everything I wrote happened to somebody, somewhere? Supposing I had the power to create
and
to destroy?... I’d always received fan letters, you see. Cries from the heart from grateful women I’d never met, telling me I’d written
their
story. Some sounded like they needed psychiatric help, but others seemed perfectly lucid and claimed they wouldn’t have believed it possible anyone could make up fiction that so resembled
their
reality. I’d never really thought much about it before – I’d been too busy working – but now everything seemed to make sense. To me, anyway.’

‘
Sounds like it was some sort of creative overload. Allied to a very tender heart. What did you do?’

‘Well, I might have been going mad, but I took my
new responsibilities very seriously. I stopped writing gritty novels about wife-battering, aids and addiction and started writing books for children. Stories about a family of squirrels who lived in a wood.’ I glanced up at Alec whose face was impassive. ‘You’re allowed to laugh.’

He
continued to regard me intently. ‘What did these squirrels do?’

‘C
ollect food and eat it. That’s
all
they did. They were unrelentingly nice to each other and to the other woodland animals. The biggest drama was when they ran out of beech nuts – a temporary crisis resolved by the quick thinking of a wise old owl.’

Alec
laughed then and immediately looked shame-faced. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not funny, it’s just the way you tell it. Could you really not see how…
bizarre
your thinking was?’

‘
No, I couldn’t then, even though I had an agent and a partner telling me I needed help.’

‘Were these
children’s stories published?’

‘Yes, but they didn’t sell. I wasn’t surprised. They were
crap. Nothing ever happened! Nothing dramatic, nothing violent, nothing bad. The books were sweet, but boring. The first two appeared as novelty items one Christmas, then sank without trace. I didn’t mind. I didn’t really need the money, I wanted peace of mind and a quiet conscience. Money and success hadn’t brought me that. But I knew when I wrote those feeble little animal stories, I was doing no one any harm. Not even bloody squirrels.’