The Home for Broken Hearts (13 page)

“You don’t. I only ever write one draft,” Allegra argued.

“Oh well, it’s just that it seems that this book is a little lacking in…” Ellen lost her nerve.

“Lacking in…? Spit it out, woman!”

“Substance.”

Ellen spoke the word quietly, as if she were revealing an unpleasant secret.

“Substance?” Allegra’s tone was neutral, her expression implacable. Miserably, Ellen realized that she was required to elaborate.

“Well, what lifts your books above the others,” she battled on, “is the historical context, the attention to detail, the way that you bring alive the sights and sounds of another age. The characters… the plot is brilliant but—correct me if I’m wrong—but I think
The Sword Erect
is the first book you have set in the English Civil War. It’s such a rich and interesting time, yet you skirt around it almost as if it were incidental, and…” Ellen faltered. For a moment her passion and interest had swept her along, but now she remembered that she was standing in her former dining room, telling one of the greatest historical-romance writers ever how to do her job. How could she, Ellen Woods, who had never done anything more than read books and correct grammatical errors, even presume to tell Allegra where she was going wrong?

“Of course that’s just my opinion, and my opinion is hardly worth knowing; in fact, when I think about it I’m not altogether sure that it’s right anyway.”

“And?” Allegra questioned.

“And?” Ellen repeated the word as the faintest echo.

“You told me that I was treating the backdrop of the English Civil War as if it were incidental and
then
you were about to add something further. What?”

“It hardly matters.” Ellen squirmed, wishing the voluminous folds of the overstuffed leather chair would swallow her up and spit her back out in
her
world, the world where she existed in simple suspended animation and read and daydreamed and waited for her husband to come home and her real life to begin at the touch of his lips on her cheek.

“Ellen.” Allegra enunciated her name with such care that it sounded as if it should have a good many more syllables in it. “If you and I are to work together, then we must be straight with each other. I know that you are sitting there wondering how you could possibly have anything to say to me about writing, and I understand why you would feel that way. But let me assure you, one does not become as successful as I have without listening to criticism. I might hate it, but I can take it, and I am not in the habit of shooting the messenger, only torturing them a little. Yes, you are little more than a housewife with barely any experience of the creative arts but you are my reader, you are the person I write for, and now that I have an opportunity to meet you face-to-face, I want to know what you think. You need not be afraid.” Allegra’s mouth hinted at a smile. “Not very afraid, anyway.”

Ellen braced herself.

“Your characters, especially your female characters, usually have something else about them. Wit, intelligence—bravery. Something else apart from their beauty and perfect bodies that makes the reader wish they were them. I know that in the end everything will come right for Eliza—knowing that is sort of half the fun of reading about the other things that happen to her—but at the moment I wonder if she is just a little bit too passive. Look at Helga in your Viking trilogy—despite being sold as a slave and ravished by her new master, she always maintained her dignity until he had no choice but to fall
in love with her. And Caroline in
The Pirate Lover.
Beaumont snatches her from the docks when she is lost and locks her in his cabin to have his wicked way with her for weeks, but she challenges him, constantly. She doesn’t let her circumstances change who she is. Although Eliza puts up a bit of a fight and runs away, she just seems to lurch from one ravishing to the next. I started to feel sorry for her, and I’ve never felt that for your heroines before.”

Allegra nodded once and then was silent. Not for a few seconds or a few minutes but for almost half an hour. For almost half an hour Ellen sat in the chair and waited for Allegra to speak, unsure if she should stay or go—or even if she still had a job. Finally, her thighs cramping from being clenched for an extended period, she moved to stand up. But just as she moved, Allegra spoke, forcing her back into the chair.

“You’re right,” she said simply. “You are quite right. I’ve been relying on all the clichés, all the things that make a work of art no better than pulp fiction. Sex sells and I know that; I’ve become little better than a whoremonger.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t go that far…,” Ellen began.

Slowly and with some difficulty, Allegra stood up, straightening her vertebrae one by one.

“Ellen, can I confide in you?”

Ellen gripped the arms of the chair, not absolutely sure she wanted the responsibility of being Allegra Howard’s confidante. Still, unable to refuse, she nodded.

“Of course.”

“Ellen, I’m seventy-two. Last year my home was destroyed by a flood, nearly everything I’ve ever loved, all my memories, all my photos, my works of art—they were all swept away in a river of muck and sewage. I didn’t think that it mattered. I always believed that mere objects weren’t what made a person human—that it was her feelings, her experiences and memories that made a person exist. But when I was alone in my hotel room I realized that without my things, my photos to look
at or my books to pick up, my memories were slipping away from me. And I’m slipping away with them, a little more each day. I’m vanishing.”

“No, no—you couldn’t be more alert and sprightly,” Ellen assured her.

“Sprightly.” Allegra pursed her lips. “It is always the curse of the elderly to be either ‘frail’ or ‘sprightly.’ I don’t mean that I am suffering from dementia, I mean simply that I have reached a crossroads in my life. After seventy-two years of knowing who I am and what I want and what I
do,
suddenly I’m no longer sure, suddenly I’m afraid. With this last book I’ve been writing by numbers, papering over the cracks and hoping that no one will notice or care—but if you can see it, then so will everyone else, and I’ll be vilified as a fraud. They’ll see that I don’t feel like a writer anymore. They’ll see that I am not a writer anymore. My creative fire was quite drowned in that flood along with everything else. Ellen, I am finished.”

Ellen sat across from Allegra Howard and looked into her pale blue eyes. “No,” she said. “No, you’re not finished. You’ve taken a knock, you’ve had a setback, and when you’re… a more mature person, then, well, it’s harder to move on from them. When my husband died, I couldn’t imagine another day, another hour without him in the world. If it weren’t for my son, I would have happily curled up and waited for my heart to stop beating. But I couldn’t do that, I had to keep going, and somehow I’ve got through my first year, and then the lodgers happened and working for you and for the first time I feel as if… there is a future.”

“There is a future for you.” Allegra looked down at her. “You are young and beautiful. But for me? My future is behind me now and suddenly I find I don’t have the energy to keep going. I don’t have a husband or a son to keep going for. After all of these years writing grand romances, I forgot to find the time to have one myself. I just can’t do it anymore. I just don’t want to.”

“But you do have someone to carry on for.” Ellen stood up, her legs on fire
with pins and needles, and came around the desk, only just resisting the urge to touch the older woman. “You have me and all the tens of thousands of people who have read your books. We need you, Allegra. We need the next Allegra Howard book and the one after that. You give us… hope. And even if what I said about your book is true, that doesn’t make it a bad book; I still couldn’t put it down. I still couldn’t wait to find out what happened to Eliza.” Ellen smiled. “It still made me daydream about having my own Captain Parker crazy with lust for me. All it means is it isn’t as good a book as it can be—yet.”

Allegra twisted her mouth into a knot of a smile.

“Let me help you fix those things,” Ellen went on. “I know a little about history, and what I don’t know I can find out. I can find the facts and backdrop and you can weave them into the story and make Eliza a true Allegra Howard heroine. Fearless, defiant, and undefeated by whatever life throws at her—just like you.”

Allegra looked into Ellen’s eyes and slowly one featherlight hand floated upward to cup Ellen’s cheek in its papery palm. “I believe that you might just be a very passionate person, Ellen Woods,” she said solemnly.

“Who, me? No, I’m just… normal.”

“A passionate person with a whole undiscovered universe locked away inside.”

“Really?” Ellen was skeptical.

“Really, and I hope that you and I will work very well together. The question is, where do we start?”

“Here,” Ellen said. “Well, not here in my dining room. Here as in London during the Civil War. You see, it was a Parliamentarian stronghold throughout the war. With Eliza intent on escaping from Captain Parker, it’s natural that she would head here, to a place where she would feel safe. Imagine the historical figures she could encounter, perhaps even Cromwell himself. She could become a sort of seventeenth-
century poster girl for the cause. And I thought if the captain followed her into the enemy’s lair in order to win her back, then—” Ellen stopped herself. “I’m sorry, of course it’s not up to me to think of the plot.”

“Nonsense. Keep talking,” Allegra said, easing herself back onto her seat. “Keep talking. I will see the pictures.”

And as the morning rolled into the afternoon they had talked over ideas, Allegra painting plotlines in the air with a sweep of her hand and Ellen suggesting historical figures and events that they could weave into the plot.

Finally, Allegra held up her hand.

“You must forgive me, Ellen, I’m not as invincible as I used to be. We missed lunch and I fear I must eat something soon or perish.”

“Oh no!” Ellen looked at her watch; it was just after three, and before she knew it Charlie would be ambling through the front door. “How awful!”

“Not at all, it was rather wonderful, actually.” Allegra’s smile was warm. “Let’s finish now. Today we laid the foundation. Tomorrow we will write.”

As Ellen had shut Allegra’s door behind her and headed for the kitchen, she realized that she hadn’t felt so excited, so optimistic, or such a part of something in a very long time. It was almost as if she had only just started to exist.

Charlie had bowled into the kitchen as Ellen had been making a smoked-salmon salad for Allegra, one of the components of her eating plan that had been delivered by the supermarket earlier that day along with Earl Grey tea.

“That stinks,” he said, peering over Ellen’s shoulder briefly.

“So what did you get up to at school today?” Ellen asked.

“You know, the usual,” Charlie said, ripping open the packaging of a new loaf of bread even though there was still a third of a loaf left in the bread bin.

“No, I don’t know, because you never tell me anymore.”
Ellen turned to face her son as he slathered the slice of bread with butter. “When you were a little boy I couldn’t shut you up, you’d tell me about what you’d learned, the games you played—you’d skip home holding my hand and talk and talk.” She smiled at him, seeing that tousle-headed little boy who’d once been her best friend. “Now I can barely get two words out of you half the time. I know you’re growing up, and changing, but—well, I’m still your mum. Come on,
something
must have happened today.”

Charlie crammed a bite of bread into his mouth and observed Ellen while he chewed.

“Not really,” he said on a swallow. “Oh, wait—James Ingram asked Emily Greenhurst out and she said no.”

“James asked a girl out!” Ellen felt unsettled. “Really, you are all asking each other out now, are you, getting girlfriends and things?”

Charlie looked gratifyingly horrified at the idea. “No, not all of us—just James. Most of the girls at my school are right skanks. James likes Emily because she’s in this band and she’s cool and not like the other girls, you know—she doesn’t just giggle and talk about crap. She has opinions and she’s funny, and she’s got long hair sort of like the color of honey right down to her waist and… well, anyway—James likes her but she knocked him back. It was funny.”

“
James
likes her.” Ellen smiled, reeling from the longest burst of conversation she’d had out of her son in a long time. It took her some effort to ask him exactly how he felt about this mysterious Emily Greenhurst.

“Yes,” Charlie said. “He was gutted. It was really funny.”

“So you gave him lots of friendly sympathy then?” Ellen asked.

“No! We told him he was gay for liking girls in the first place.”

“I think that’s probably a contradiction in terms.” Ellen smiled.

“A what?” Charlie looked at her.

“Never mind—so you’re not planning on asking any girls out just yet, then? Not this Emily, for example?”

“God, no, Mum—I’m not gay!” Charlie exclaimed in horror before scrambling up the stairs, no doubt to find his DS, leaving Ellen alone with her salad, wondering exactly when and how “gay” had started meaning the opposite of… well, “gay.” And she wondered if she had been sticking her head in the sand a little, determined to still think of him as her little boy. Clearly he was becoming interested in girls, even if he wasn’t ready to admit it. If Nick were alive, it would have been simple. Nick would have guided him along the rocky road of adolescence, helped him find his way from boyhood to manhood. But, as Ellen had to keep reminding herself daily, Nick was not here—she was all Charlie had in the way of guidance, and she was only too aware of her inadequacies. She barely knew anything about being a woman, let alone how to be a man.

Later, when he had reappeared for fish fingers, his eyes still glued to his video game, Ellen had tried to talk to him.

“Charlie, you and I have never really talked about… well, about the things that you are beginning to be interested in.…” She slid the plate of fish fingers garnished with ketchup toward him. “The thing is, you are learning to grow up and turn into a man, and I’m learning, too, learning how to be the mum of a young man. But you know, if you ever want to talk to me about those
things,
then of course you can, and I will try and help as best I can.”