Raking the Ashes (22 page)

‘I can’t. They arrive in such pitiful-looking batches. I can’t help wanting to know what’s going on. And it is painful.’ I almost heard him make the decision to press on and say it. ‘Tilly, you really should get in touch with him. You ought to get it together to summon enough common charity to put this poor bloke out of his misery once and for all.’

And so I did. I wrote the letter that explained I’d gone for good, and why. With fulsome apologies, I enclosed the very few pieces of Geoff’s paperwork I claimed had ‘by an oversight’ ended up in the wrong van.
Somewhere
among them, as if by accident, lay a clean copy of the information sheet I’d used as a bookmark in that little hotel, all those long years ago. On one side, photocopied onto fresh paper at one of Mr Stassinopolous’s brilliant new Print-It! franchises springing up all over, was the pretty Victorian etching of Lartington Tower itself, with ivy tumbling all over. And on the other there was the little hand-drawn map, unchanged, showing the Folly Edge Hotel, and the way that the roads lay. Of course I’d blotted out the ancient prices and the opening hours and, in their place, put in a reasonable weekly rental charge and, in an assumed hand, the dates booked by ‘Ms Tilly Foster’. The end date had been chosen very carefully. I know how Geoffrey ticks. The instant he realized he only had, at most, one day to catch me before I left, he would be up and away. To get the timing how I wanted it, I had no choice but to deliver the package by hand on the right evening. I left it to the very last to shove the whole lot in an old used envelope with a smudged postmark, stick on a label addressed by hand to Geoffrey and, making some excuse about a sprained wrist, even persuade some amiable rambler passing my door to do me the favour of scrawling the words ‘Sorry. Package misdelivered next door’ across the top.

Then I locked up this nice bright house that overlooks the duck pond, and drove back a hundred miles
to
the drab little one-eyed town in which I’d thrown away so many years. Without much trouble I found the block of flats into which Geoff had moved so recently. Sol had referred to the area as ‘pretty grungy, frankly, if you can judge by the tenants I have in that street’. And I admit that Geoff had certainly come down in the world.

Still, not a problem much longer. Raising my raincoat hood, I left the car and crept down the darkened street. I was quite careful estimating floors and windows. Twice I went softly up and down the communal stair and back outside, to check that that sad blue flicker against the curtains came from a television in the right flat. I still had worries. Push the package through too soon and things might not work out right. Leave it too late and Geoffrey might have got so stuck into his drinking that even he might judge himself unfit to drive.

In the end, I simply had to tell myself, ‘Go on, Tilly. Take a chance.’ I shoved the package noisily through his letterbox and legged it down the smelly concrete stairs and out of sight round the corner, back to my car, to start the long drive back.

And of course he came after me. That very night. I’d done my homework well. I knew how long it would take him to drive that far down the coast on roads he didn’t know. I knew that, by the time he arrived, the
tide
would be out, exposing the vicious rocks. I knew there’d be no moon. Oh, bad Bad Tilly! I even knew that, if the gate a hundred yards beyond the Folly Edge Hotel had had its padlock removed with wire cutters, and been swung ajar, then anyone trying to follow some little hand-drawn map on a small sheet of paper would almost certainly fail to notice the first of the two warning signs.

Dirt tracks to private properties by the sea are common enough. I knew that wouldn’t slow up Geoff when he was so determined to reach me before I left. As for the last sign –
DANGER OF DEATH
!
CLIFF EDGE
– well, to be frank, he simply can’t have seen it. Is it so bad to lean one giant safety warning against another? And the sign I had smuggled from the company store –
YOU BREAK THIS RULE, WE FLY YOU OUT
– was, after all, a lot more relevant to the occasion. I do expect he noticed that. But by the time it gave him pause for thought, it was too late. His car was already flying of its own accord off Folly Leap out into solid blackness and down to the rocks, where it burst into flames.

Raking the ashes after, before the tide swept in to wash the mess away, the coastguard may even have come across a few charred scraps of a flyer that had a drawing of the old Lartington Tower. But when the coroner asked himself what Geoff was doing there, the answer seemed clear enough. I’d told them all
about
my final letter, and Sol had made it perfectly plain I’d only written it in the first place because he’d urged me. As everyone agreed, a woman has every right to leave her partner – especially if she’s not married. And when they looked into Geoff’s life, even the most ebullient investigating officer could understand how suicidal instincts might trouble a man so very clearly on the way down.

Indeed, they’d been as kind and sensitive as they could be when they had tracked me down.

‘An accident?
Dead?
Truly? Oh, how horrible!’

My hands were shaking. (I don’t believe they stopped till I had got that warning sign and the wire cutters safely away to the tip.) But both the police officers said it, again and again, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’ Sol said the same. ‘I know I called you wicked, Til. But really, if the man hadn’t got the bottle to keep on going just because you’d given him the final flick, you can’t be blamed.’ Ed took an even tougher line. ‘Don’t quote me, Tilly. But personally, I think that suicide’s despicable. It heaps so much onto the person who’s left.’ And Donald’s note, enclosing the last few letters, went further. ‘It was an aggressive act. Don’t let it spoil your new life, Til.’

And they are right, of course. I mustn’t blame myself. No one can have it both ways. There can’t be one rule for some and another for everyone else. So
either
Geoff and I were both responsible for every single thing we did – or neither of us had a choice in how our characters made us deal with these matters. I sit here, blissfully happy that honours are even at last. He’s paid for twenty years of my life with twenty of his own – even a few more. I smile and watch the ducks and wonder what to do and where to go when I am ready. Sometimes I like to play with the idea that the two of us were both guilty as sin. At other times, I like to think that we were both innocent victims.

One thing at least is true. We are successfully parted at last. And nothing will ever get to spoil that.

THE END

LIFE at a glance

BORN

1947, Leicester, England.

EDUCATED

Northampton High School for Girls; University of Warwick.

CAREER

After short stints of teaching in both a school and a prison, Anne Fine worked as an information officer for Oxfam. In 1971 she moved to Edinburgh with her husband and first baby. Since then she has been a full-time professional writer. She has won numerous
awards
for her writing for children of all ages, including the Carnegie Medal (twice), the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (twice), the Guardian Children’s Literature Award and a Smarties Prize. From 2001–3 she was Children's Laureate.

Her first adult novel,
The Killjoy
, was published in 1986, winning a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and recommended for the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

Since then, Anne Fine has published five further novels for adults to great critical acclaim. In 2003 she was awarded the OBE and Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature.

Q & A

How did you start writing?

The library in Edinburgh closed because of a blizzard. Stuck at home with nothing to read, I picked up a pencil, put my feet in the oven (on Regulo 1) and started my first book.

Is that how you still work? With a pencil?

Until each chapter is quite advanced, yes. I write in silence (apart from my own demented mutterings) and hide the page if anyone comes near. When each chunk’s finished I’ll type up and print out. Then I correct in pencil. Over and over again.

How long does each novel take?

Without interruptions, usually just over a year. But all authors have a natural speed and they tamper with that at their peril. I feel a bit sorry for young writers. They’re flattered and bribed into signing contracts with deadlines for books that aren’t yet even a rustle at the back of their brains. Small wonder there are so many fast downward trajectories in writing careers.

Does that mean you don’t sign contracts?

Not till I’ve almost finished, no. I’d hate to find myself beached up somewhere halfway through a book, wondering where it should go, yet having to keep churning the words out to meet some deadline. I think I agree with Raymond Carver: ‘If the writing isn’t the very best that you can do, then why on earth bother to do it?’

You write for children as well. Is that very different?

It’s differently pitched, yes. I write for the reader inside myself: myself at five, at eight, at twelve. The level of writing comes naturally. And I bear the old journalists’ dictum well in mind: never overestimate the reader’s knowledge and never underestimate his or her intelligence. But I am more protective of my younger readers. I try to be honest, but also try not to leave them with such a black picture of the world that they might not want to stay around in it.

You write so much about families. Tell us about yours.

My father was an electrical engineer. My mother stayed home to raise five daughters (me and my elder sister, then their last ditch attempt to get a son: triplet girls). I married at twenty, had my beloved daughters, and lived in America and Canada for seven years. Their father wanted to stay. I wanted to come home. So after nearly twenty years the marriage ended. I’ve lived with Richard, an orchid specialist, for almost as long now. He has a son and daughter.

Do you put friends and family in your books?

Bits of them, here and there (though you do have to make efforts to disguise them, or they won’t stay your friends and family very long). Bits of myself too, of course. But characters grow so much under the pen that they end up surprising even their creators. I think what it boils down to is that writers don’t so much write about people they know, as write what they know about people.

Plots. Do you have those all worked out before you begin?

Never. In fact I tend to find myself snared into most of my plots by mistake, and have very carefully to pick some way out at the end. I’d love to write a book knowing from the start exactly where it’s going, but that sort of thinking, like the gift for chess, is simply not in me.

Do you like the films of your work?

No. Some even less than others. But I’m always aware that, as the author, I did get one very significant artistic decision, and that was whether or not to take the cheque. I reckon, if you’re paid, it’s only polite to keep your mouth shut, at least for a while after.

What is the worst thing about the job? And the best?

The worst thing used to be patronising men at parties. ‘You’re a writer, are you? So what do you write? Romances?’ Then I discovered the perfect answer: ‘No. Why? Is that what you read?’ That usually saw them off.

The best thing is having no colleagues. As far back as infant school I hated the words, ‘Now choose a partner’. I’m terrible at sharing. I like the feeling that it’s my book – mine alone. I’ll happily listen to advice, but in the end it’s my decision – every last word, every last comma – and no one can override me. I love that.

On writing
Raking the Ashes

The germ of
Raking the Ashes
came from a quote from William Hazlitt (1778–1830). ‘Good nature is, nine times out of ten, the result of simple idleness of disposition.’

This really shocked me, not least because the man with whom I’ve lived so happily for the last twenty years is famously good-natured. So should I more accurately have been thinking of him over that time as ‘notoriously’ good-natured? It was a striking and disturbing thought.

Any author will tell you that, once the idea for a book has been born, it is as if the author grows invisible antennae that strain towards anything, however unlikely, that might feed into the novel. Suddenly all round me there seemed to be examples that proved Hazlitt right. The couple who, rather than face the unpleasantness of insisting their drunk guest went home in a taxi, end up halfway responsible for the predictable road death. The father who can’t be bothered to make sure his former wife’s partner installs proper car seats. The neighbour who won’t sign the petition to keep the primary school or the stand of ancient trees for fear of raising local hackles.

As the American saying goes, ‘If you ain’t never stepped on anyone’s toes, then you ain’t never been for a walk.’

The book deals, too, with the issue of being a stepparent. I've long been fascinated by the special problems of mix-and-match families, and tackled the topic more than once, most particularly in a book called
Step by Wicked Step
, written for children. To become a step-parent, it seems to me, is very often to accept
responsibility
without power. It’s all too easy to turn into a sort of living pleat in the new family economy – let out and taken in again at others’ convenience with the two other adults in the equation not even thinking twice about the fact that you might, for years, be driving their children to and from a school they let you have no part in choosing.

Tilly is clear-thinking and tough. Geoffrey is kind and amiable and, above all, weak. (And, as an exasperated Tilly soon discovers, the only power of weak people lies in their secrets.) An engineer for an oil company with special responsibility for hundreds of workers’ safety, Tilly must live in the real world. Geoff can afford to prefer his comfortable and unthreatening cloud-cuckoo-land.