Crimson (13 page)

Just before publication, Billy hurled himself into a flurry of

activity. He wrote press releases; he. persuaded every suede-shod gossip writer he knew to mention the book, in return for various favours. Billy also carefully chose Elinor’s outfit for the book launch party, to be held at the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury.

Elinor did not care for his choice. Standing in a changing room at Fortnum and Mason, she exclaimed, “What’s gotten into you, Billy? I can’t wear a bright pink moire cocktail frock at three o’clock in the afternoon! Your mother would say it was dead common. And we can’t afford iff “Joe Grant’s paying for it,” Billy said, and turned to the saleswoman.

“The hat will be very important for the photographs. Let’s try that white silk turban with the pink ostrich feathers.”

“What photographs?” Elinor asked, bewildered.

Billy looked carefully at his wife; she was nearly thirty seven now. Elinor’s face was thinner, but her pink, white, and golden colouring was still striking.

“Pity they won’t be in colour,” Billy said.

“I’ve booked a sitting after lunch with Angus McBean he’s the best theatrical photographer. You’re going to be launched like a leading lady!”

And Billy saw to it that everything went according to his plan. He supervised the press coverage, the interviews on the wireless, and the trips to book shops for autograph sessions, to which Elinor travelled, at Billy’s insistence, in a hired white Rolls-Royce paid for by Elinor’s astonished publishers, who had never before done anything to attract publicity beyond sending review copies to a few literary editors.

To the surprise of everyone except Billy, Diary of an Elizabethan Housewife by Elinor Dove was an immediate success. The illustrations were copious and charming; the book was historically correct yet didn’t read like a dull history book, for Elinor had re-created Lady Rachel’s life so vividly that readers felt they could lean out and touch her. As Billy kept telling the press, almost anyone would find the book an acceptable Christmas gift, and many did.

Edward, who had won a senior exhibition and was now reading history at Merton, was as delighted by his mother’s success as he was by his new freedom. He loved Oxford all the more so as he had just acquired his first girlfriend. Her name was Jane, and she, too, was a first-year history student.

SATURDAY, I JANUARY 1938

Elinor leaned back against her pillows and stretched luxuriously in the weak warmth of the winter sun, marvelling at how her life had recently improved. This was the first time since she’d known him that Billy hadn’t had a hangover on New Year’s Day! He had started to cut back his drinking after a painful illness, when his doctor warned that his body wouldn’t stand up to such punishment. He hadn’t minced words, and Billy had been frightened by the verbal sketch of cirrhosis of the liver.

Lying naked beside her, Billy yawned and stroked his moustache.

“I’ve got a present for you, darling. A new contract for the next book.”

“Oh. good. The Elizabethan cookery book?”

“Not exactly,” Billy said.

“They want a novel.” In the crimson and gilt splendour of the cafe Royal, Billy had lunched with the publisher and his senior editor. They both thought that Elinor had a natural talent for writing. Her work showed a rare observation, fresh directness, and an eye for the unexpected. Her characters were not two-dimensional stereotypes but real people who leapt right off the page, prepared to talk or argue with the reader.

Billy had sat back, immediately th inking: international best-seller

… first novel … Margaret Mitchell … Gone with the Wind … Hollywood … movie rights. He said, “I have to tell you that we have already been approached by Billy Collins ..

The advance was agreed by the end of the meal. Billy now saw a new life stretching before him, and it was very like his old life before the war. It was clearly in his interest to develop Elinor’s ability as a novelist because if Elinor could earn good money, then Billy as her manager would never need another job.

As he sketched Elinor’s new career to her, she sat up in bed and blinked.

“But, Billy, I’ve never written a novel!” She was bewildered.

“I couldn’t do it I wouldn’t know how to star tV “I’ll teach you. It’s simple.” Elinor knew immediately that Billy was serious, and that it would be useless to argue. She realized that her day would be wasted trying to change his mind.

“I’ll get breakfast,” she said, shifting to get out of bed.

“No,” Billy said, restraining her, “I’ll get breakfast.” Ten minutes later, Elinor stared at a worn, flower-patterned tray upon which stood a jug” of milk, an apple, several slices of buttered bread, and a red exercise book.

Billy said, “That’s all you’re getting until you fill ten pages to my satisfaction.”

“But what shall I write about? What do I know about? Life on a farm? The horror of a French hospital in the war? Trying to survive after it? People don’t want to read depressing stuff like that they know too much about it!”

“Write what other people don’t know about,” Billy suggested.

“Then they can’t check on you. Write a historical novel. Start with a rape.”

“But I’ve never … I don’t know what2 “Then I’ll show you.” As Billy hurled himself upon her, the milk jug crashed to the floor.

“Later, Billy murmured, “You have talent, but that is only the beginning. The first thing a writer has to learn is discipline.

To teach her this, Billy locked Elinor in the bedroom. Her first reactions to imprisonment were defiance and revolt, She did not touch the red exercise book.

“What an ungrateful bitch you are!” growled Billy at midday, when he brought her bread and milk.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have had this success that’s so clearly gone to your head!”

Elinor, of course, knew that this was true, because Billy had said it to her so many times.

After a day of boredom, with no one to talk to and nothing to read, Elinor capitulated. At teatime, she dipped her pen into the bottle of Stephens” blue-black ink and started to write.

Billy made it clear that he was not satisfied with her efforts.

“You’re not trying hard enough!” he exclaimed with a frown as he read what she had written.

“You’d think ‘that Scott of the Antarctic wasn’t trying hard enough!” Elinor said, showing a flash of her old spirit.

He gave her a slim book on punctuation.

“Learn this by heart. I’ll test you on a chapter every evening, before supper. If you don’t know it, you get no supper.” When Elinor flubbed the third chapter, Billy locked her in the bedroom again, as if she were still a schoolgirl who hadn’t learned her lesson. Then he left the flat and stayed out all night.

He returned at eight o’clock the following morning, dishevelled and tired. He smiled at Elinor as he stood in the bedroom doorway.

“Can you now tell me the difference between a colon and a seinicolonT In a frenzy of jealousy, anxiety, and fear, Elinor quickly recited the carefully memorized lesson, moving all the while across the floor towards Billy.

I Her heart pounded when he bent to kiss her; she lifted her face towards his, as a prisoner towards the light. She felt his hand grasp her breast with rough passion; then, without a word, he swept her into his arms and carried her to their bed.

She felt the erotic, harsh scraping of his moustache against her soft hair, and the light scratch of the stubble on his unshaven face. Her anxiety was replaced by the tension of passion.

Eventually Elinor produced a story synopsis that Billy found satisfactory. Together, they visited the London Library and left with fifteen research books.

Elinor felt a little more cheerful.

“I suppose I must remember that everyone has at least one book in them,” she said.

“That’s a he, as any publisher will tell you,” Billy grunted.

“Some people haven’t got so much as a paragraph of a pamphlet in them.” Billy proved to be an unsympathetic, tough, but ultimately excellent critic, who repeatedly urged Elinor to concentrate on plot, pace, and action” scenes.

“Cut scenic descriptions to a maximum of two lines.” he told her.

“If your readers wanted to read about birds, trees, and sunsets, they’d buy a nature book.” Elinor wept when she didn’t understand what Billy wanted her to write, or felt that she couldn’t do it.

“Why? Why do I have to rewrite it aga in?” she complained one evening.

“I can’t see what’s wrong with what I’ve written!”

Then listen to me more carefully,” Billy said in a soft voice that raised the hairs on Elinor’s spine.

“As you write, you must think yourself into each of your characters. Be an actress! I want to know what Lydia feels when her sister’s husband kisses her!”

“But I’ve told you “Don’t tell me what’s happened show me what’s happen Billy roared. This dull rubbish it! ing! I want to experience sounds like a newspaper report. Get some life in it! Remem her that you are the eyes, the ears, the nose, and the heart of your reader. Always remember that. I want to feel that I’m there, hidden in the cold shadow behind the hedge, as Cynthia watches her husband kiss Lydia. I want to see them embrace in the garden, and I want to shiver in the moonlight as I bite my lip to stop myself from crying or cursing at them!”

Elinor stared at Billy with surprise. He had just sketched what it felt like to experience jealousy. He must therefore understand the pain that he had made her suffer.

The following evening, she cried tearfully, “Yesterday you told me that I need more emotion in my work, that I must feel the passion that my characters feel and today you hand me this dusty little book on grammar. How can I feel passion when I have to think about gram marT “Try,” Billy advised grimly, “and never forget that I know what’s best for you.” Often, in despair, she Rung herself upon the bed and wept, but tear s did no good. Paradoxically, the only thing that made her forget her helplessness, her bewilderment, her anxiety, her indignation, and her despair was scribbling in the red exercise books.

Every morning, Elinor hurriedly threw on a bathrobe and ate the meagre breakfast Billy fixed for her. He then locked her in the bedroom, and did not unlock the door until she -banged on it at midday and then pushed ten pages of scribbled manuscript under it. If her pages were good enough, Billy carried a tray of fruit and coffee to the little desk at the bedroom window, where Elinor worked. If the pages were not good enough, he simply tore them up and threw the pieces out of the window, to flutter slowly down Ear Court Square.

When Elinor finished her frugal luncheon Billy feared a large meal might make her sleepy, she hurriedly washed and dressed while mentally preparing the next ten pages. After a further ten pages a total of five thousand words a day, she was released from the bedroom to prepare the evening meal.

While Elinor cooked supper, Billy scribbled his transitional suggestions in the margins of her work; he corrected her grammar, her punctuation, and her abysmal spelling. After supper, Elinor rewrote her work; Billy stood over her, urging her to cut this or emphasize that.

When her writing was finished to Billy’s satisfaction, he would pick up Elinor in his arms and carry her to bed.

There he would caress her exhausted body until it wearily responded to his touch, with increasing willingness, and finally with a passionate abandon she had not thought possible, spent as she was from writing. After a few weeks, Elinor no longer resented the sound of the key turning in the lock of the bedroom door after breakfast. Instead, she trembled with carefully concealed excitement as she waited for the little click of the lock, which now transported her into the mysterious and limitless world of her imagination.

By the end of the day, Elinor was not only exhausted but anxious; she worried whether her work was good enough. Only Billy could lull this anxiety; only Billy could reassure her that her work reached his high standards; only Billy could then cares singly transport her to a world of passion in which description and narrative thread were forgotten.

In Billy’s arms, Elinor felt successful, sensuous, desired, protected, happy and safe. She did not see herself as a bird imprisoned in a cage, for no cage was needed. Elinor was bound to Billy by the invisible, secret, silken cords of a voluptuousness of which she was ashamed but to which io6 was addicted. She was both captivated and motivated” by Billy, who, having made her totally dependent upon him both mentally and physically, kept her firmly under his thumb.

Elinor was bullied, cheated, rejected, and treated with amused and open contempt, but she was Billy’s victim, his invisibly shackled slave: she was helplessly, hopelessly enthralled. by him. Billy’s mesmeric gaze could still make Elinor feel worthy or unworthy, anxious or confident. And, sometimes he permitted her to be happy.

One of these occasions was in June 1938, when Elinor’s work was interrupted by the marriage of their son, Edward, to Jane, the girl he had fallen in love with at Oxford. The ceremony took place in St. Bartholomew’s, a small Norman church north of Oxford that had not been much altered in the past nine hundred years. Elinor helped with the decorations and, in the process, got to know more of her daughter-in-law, a young woman she found both intelligent and endearing. Elinor liked Jane’s quiet tenacity and her earnest but forceful speech. In truth, she wished that Edward had not insisted on rushing into marriage, but if he must and he had hinted that it was necessary, then he could not have chosen a mote appropriate bride.

Eventually, after much effort, anxiety, and pain, Elinor produced a well-constructed novel with well-developed scenes and believable characters; she finished it in early January Of 1939, two days before Jane produced her and Billy’s first grandchild.

As she sat by Jane’s hospital bedside and held baby Clare in her arms, Elinor was astonished to find herself a i.grandmother, for, at the age of thirty-nine, she still felt seventeen inside.. Again she examined the tiny, perfect toes as they curled sAd uncurled. She lightly stroked the miniature, Nefer titi like head, marvelling at the still-visible skull joins beneath the dark fuzz. With joy, she gazed into the old, wise eyes of this poised newborn baby.