Touched (20 page)
Authors: Joanna Briscoe
In 1963, parochial England was still muffled in a time warp, little changed since the fifties. The Swinging Sixties had yet to take hold. While the new decade was beginning to explode elsewhere, it would only just have been starting to spread its tendrils into the quaint cluster of pensioners and churchgoers, of sewing circles and obedient children that formed a village such as Letchmore Heath. Kennedy was still alive that summer; the moon was still virgin territory; fashion, music and casual sex were happening, but not for married women. In that tension between different eras, between women's status and their suppressed desires, lay much that was simmering, seething and capable of transforming anger or despair into mental distortion.
Ghosts don't sit easily with our vision of that decade, and I liked the idea of setting Victorians â a real one, and an odd, aspiring one â there among the bright home-knits and mown grass. Crowsley Beck uses the very heart of the village of my infancy, and then invention takes over. There was no Brinden there, though shades of that house once existed elsewhere; naturally, no nuclear power station was ever built so close to London; no cottages that I knew were knocked through, and nor was there a school for disabled children, though the aerodrome and the psychiatric hospital existed.
All my novels are haunted, but until I was asked to write
Touched
, I didn't realise this. One way or another my characters are haunted by their pasts, their mistakes, their longings; pursued by guilt and desire so strong, it could infiltrate a life. If you make that haunting manifest, there is much to experiment with, and playing with the conventions of the ghost and horror story affords a strange sort of pleasure. Houses in rebellion, secret rooms, figures glimpsed obliquely, unexplained smells are here juxtaposed with more earthly horror. I wanted the discomfiting, downright dodgy element of the Pollards in my story so that live humans coincide with more benign presences, the living wreaking more damage than the restless dead. I wanted to explore love so determined it goes rotten, poor Evangeline unable to move beyond her identification with her grandmother; I wanted to find haunting where characters don't expect it, while they're looking elsewhere.
I wrote this novella with an urgency and intensity that was a release after the agonies of creating a longer novel. Strangely, I did something I had never done before as a writer: I saw the plot in almost complete form, perceiving the structure, the time frame and the characters simultaneously, and I sat there in a frenzy of invention one afternoon in the British Library. It was only Freddie, the lost child, who â appropriately enough â came in later, starting out as an imaginary friend of Eva's but taking on an independent life and past.
The supernatural or paranormal comes into its own in film and shorter fiction. There are very few full-length ghost novels, the short story or novella allowing a suspension of disbelief that would be strained by a longer work. The novella seems the perfect length for a ghost tale, and the greatest of all,
The Turn of the Screw,
is only around forty-three thousand words long.
I had always liked the Gothic, the dark, disconcerting and somewhat unsavoury in literature. It's the glimpse of the intangible that intrigues me; the almost-thereness, the glimmer of awareness of another presence, or the stain of an emotion, just beyond our normal comprehension. Giving free rein to what might lie in the shadows taunts and tantalises, and in strange ways liberates the writer to move into unexplored realms. As a reader, I love to be disturbed. In
Touched,
I wanted the darkness in the brightness to spring to life.
Joanna Briscoe, 2014
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185320
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books in association with Hammer 2014
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Copyright © Joanna Briscoe, 2014
Joanna Briscoe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Arrow Books in association with Hammer
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099590828