The Likes of Us (39 page)

Ruth said, ‘I'll get it for you now.' She went to her room and brought down the carbon of the typescript. Her mother felt the weight.

‘There seems to be a lot of it.'

‘It'll be a normal-length book when it gets into print.'

‘It's not the kind of thing you can read in bed, anyway. All that typing, and I never knew.'

‘The typing's the least of it,' Ruth said. ‘By the time you reach the final copy you're laughing.'

Mrs Hatton glanced at the first couple of pages. ‘Ruth... it isn't... well, sensational, is it? I mean, there's so much stuff between covers these days that I wouldn't have in the house.'

‘I've written a novel, Mother,' Ruth said. ‘It's neither a fairy story nor something that exploits dirt for its own sake or for money. You'll have to make up your own mind.'

The young reporter rang up the next morning to ask for a photograph of Ruth. Mrs Hatton lent him a formal portrait taken while Ruth was at college. Ruth didn't like it. She wasn't unattractive, she knew. She had been told more than once that her legs were good and there had been a time when she would stop on catching sight of her naked body in a mirror and take in the fineness of her skin and the way her narrow back emphasised the plumpness of her breasts in a sensual reverie of self-love which was a reflection of another's professed adoration, an exulting in what she had to give and the way in which it was taken. Once upon a time... But all the camera ever showed was a pale bespectacled face with an insipid half-smile: the face of one fitted for nothing more passionate than studying, passing examinations, writing a book. There was, she supposed wryly, a kind of justice in it.

Her mother read the manuscript during the day, when she was alone in the house. Ruth found herself tensed for the reaction and tried to interpret something from her mother's behaviour. But there was nothing to be seen and no word passed between them on the subject until Mrs Hatton had finished the novel.

‘I suppose it's well written. I don't know what other people will make of it, though.' Ruth was silent. ‘It's not... well, it's hardly the kind of book I'd have expected you to write.'

‘Oh?'

‘Did you... did you know somebody at college who had an abortion?'

‘You pick up all manner of information if you keep your eyes and ears open, if you talk to people, listen to what they tell you, and fill in the bits they don't.'

‘But this girl that the book's about, who has the love affair. Was it necessary to go into so much detail?'

‘I wanted to make it vivid and real.'

‘Yes, but... I must say, I felt myself blushing more than once. Why, there are things in there I hardly knew about myself.'

‘Oh, come on, Mother. You've had three children.'

‘Well, I didn't know till after I was married.'

‘Times change.'

‘Yes. So I'm to take it – I mean, I can't do any other than take it – that you've already
–
'

‘Mother,' Ruth said firmly, ‘the book's the book and my private life is my own business.'

‘All the same, when I think of the mortal danger you've been in. And I thought I'd brought you up so well, the three of you.'

‘I'm sorry, Mother, but if you call bringing-up well teaching your daughters to bake and sew, seeing they're fed and clothed, encouraging them to go to church once a week, but telling them almost nothing about some of the most fundamental aspects of life, then you can't wonder they expose themselves to mortal danger the minute they leave the house.'

‘Well, if that's what you think...'

‘I'm sorry, Mother, really,' Ruth said. ‘I didn't mean to hurt you.'

The words had, indeed, sounded shockingly harsh; but she was on the defensive, fearful of an attitude which could sap her confidence, turn her pride in something honestly achieved into a timid conformity with all those stultifying approaches to life that she most detested.

‘I'm sorry if you think I've failed you in any way,' her mother said stiffly.

‘Just so long as
–
' Ruth began, then stopped.

‘So long as what?'

So long as you don't cripple me now by imposing your small-town sensibility on me, was that she wanted to say. But that would only force her mother further into injured pride.

‘Mother, I know,' she said carefully, ‘that I'm bound to come up against a number of people who'll put the worst possible construction on what I've done. But I hope they'll be far out-numbered by the other people who'll like and appreciate the book, or at least respect it for what it's meant to be. I want to think you're one of the latter people and that you're on my side.'

‘I'm always on your side, you know that, whatever you do and I shall defend you to the last. I just can't help wishing you'd written, well, a nicer book, something more wholesome. I don't know what your father will make of it, I'm sure.'

‘Doesn't it affect you at all?' Ruth said. ‘Don't you find yourself concerned for the girl in any way?'

‘Oh, yes, I'm sorry for her. All that sorrow and pain. And there's no doubt that the young man does treat her shabbily. But on the other hand, I can't help feeling that most of it's her own fault. And as for that awful mother, always putting her husband down…'

Ruth began to smile but her mother, not looking at her, didn't see. There was a silence, then Mrs Hatton sighed.

‘I suppose it'll be all right in the long term.'

‘A nine-day wonder,' Ruth said.

‘All the same, I'm rather sorry now I was in such a hurry to ring up the paper. I could have had a little time to get used to it all if I'd read the book first.'

Ruth laughed.

‘Never mind. Let's hope it makes a lot of money for me. That'll justify it in everybody's eyes.'

 

But oh, that damned self-consciousness!

It started at the beginning of her first class on Monday morning, with whispers in a group of junior-school girls.

‘Saw your picture in the paper, Miss.'

‘Have you really wrote a book, Miss?'

‘Written,' Ruth corrected. ‘Written a book.'

‘Well, have you, Miss?'

‘Yes, I have.'

‘What's it about, Miss?'

‘Are you going to be on the telly, Miss?'

‘Now, look, let's all settle down, shall we? This isn't the time to go into all that. This morning we're going to make some biscuits…'

She met Arthur Debenham drinking coffee in the staff room during morning break.

‘Ah, here's our own Edna O'Drabble. Or is it Margaret Brien?'

‘What a lot of ignorance you pretend to, Arthur,' Ruth said. ‘Have you really not read either of them?'

‘You ought to know by now, Ruth, that only the literary dead have any chance of winning Arthur's grudging respect,' Lois Rayner said. ‘His secret vice is lesser known women novelists of the Edwardian period.'

Ruth laughed. Lois was a toughie; a stocky, flat-chested spinster of about Debenham's age, with yellow in the roots of her grey hair and ferocious flyaway frames on her glasses.

‘No, I wanted to congratulate you,' Debenham said. ‘I suppose it's still something of an achievement to get a book published, even in these days. Perhaps it's expecting too much to hope that it might be readable as well.'

Ruth gasped and flushed heavily as he put down his cup and walked away. Even Lois was taken aback.

‘Of all the miserable devils!' she said as the door closed behind him.

‘I don't suppose he meant it to be taken like that,' Ruth said.

‘If he knows so much about English Literature he should have learned how to frame his words at his age.' Lois's eyes flashed behind her glasses. She poured coffee and handed Ruth a cup. ‘Here you are, honey. I think you'll learn more about stupidity than malice. Though they do say the literary world's riddled with it. That and back-scratching. You do my washing and I'll do yours.'

‘I wouldn't know about that. I'm just a novice.'

‘First steps,' Lois said. ‘Who knows what they can lead to? Anyway, I hope you'll give me a signed copy for sticking up for you.'

Ruth smiled. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

‘They do say his wife gives him hell.'

‘Oh?'

‘Oh, yes. Makes his life a misery, by all accounts.'

From the members of the evening class she received an envy in which she basked, behind an outward demeanour that was quietly modest. The class met in an adult-education centre in a larger town some miles from Ruth's home, and the first some of her fellow students knew of her success was when their tutor, Jim Thomas, announced it at the start of the session.

‘Our congratulations are due to Ruth Hatton, who's got a novel accepted for publication. And our admiration for her reticence in keeping the fact that she was working on one to herself until it was proved successful.'

Thomas shared the envy of the others. ‘D'you know I've written three novels without one offer of publication?' he said to her afterwards.

‘But you've published poems and stories.'

‘Yes, just enough to reassure me that I'm not wasting my time entirely.'

‘Oh, come now. I don't know how you can talk like that.'

‘Don't you? It's one thing spouting in a knowledgeable way about the subject, and another doing it oneself.'

‘But isn't there an awful lot of stuff published that you wouldn't put your name to?'

‘Oh, yes. And quite a bit I'd give my eye teeth to have written.'

‘Well, you don't know yet which category my book comes into.'

‘No, that's true.' He looked at her reflectively for a second, then they laughed together.

‘And now I shall be terribly self-conscious about your seeing it.'

‘You won't have any choice, though. If you offer something to the world, the world has a right to express its opinion.'

‘Yes.'

‘Does the thought bother you?'

‘A little.'

‘The excitement must more than make up for it, though, eh?'

‘Oh, yes!'

The sudden clear blaze of delight in her eyes made him laugh out loud again. He put his hand on her shoulder as they walked to the door.

‘I wish you luck with it.'

 

An antidote to Mrs Hatton's reaction, and the largely uncomprehending wonder of the family's friends and acquaintances, was provided by a trip to London to see the publishers. Half-term was fortunately near so Ruth was able to arrange to go within ten days of their asking to see her.

London was hot, the air heavy. After a short journey on the Underground she took a wrong turning and for a time was lost. When she rediscovered her direction she was late and had to hurry, arriving at the tall old house in a leafy square, near the British Museum, with the composure she had gradually drawn round herself on the train evaporated in the heat, and feeling her body sticky inside the suit which had seemed just right in the chilly morning at home, but which was far too heavy for the weather here.

Ruth had imagined vaguely, in her naivety, a place like a newspaper building, with glass-partitioned offices and the faint hum of printing presses from below; but here she was reminded of a solicitor's premises as, after waiting in the reception office for a few minutes, she was led up the narrow creaking stairs past the blank doors on each landing.

The room she was shown into had two tall paned windows looking out onto the green foliage of the trees. It had obviously been an upstairs drawing-room when, in the time of a novelist like Thackeray, the houses in the square were occupied by London's prosperous upper middle class. She wondered how many distinguished literary figures of today had been shown into this room, offered a seat in this overstuffed armchair of indeterminate age, and plied with cigarettes and sherry, as she was now while polite enquiries were made about her journey and small talk exchanged about London and the unexpected warm weather. The cigarette she refused; the sherry she accepted. The diversion of an incoming telephone call allowed her a few moments to turn her head to the books on the fronted shelves behind her: row after row of the firm's titles at which she peered to see the names of those writers published under the imprint to which she herself would soon belong.

‘Well...' Raymond Waterford put down the receiver and smiled at her across his desk. He was the firm's editorial director, the person with whom she had corresponded, a bulky man in his middle forties with untidy thinning wavy hair and a square fleshy face. He wore a navy-blue pinstriped suit and, in flamboyant contrast, a huge yellow bow tie with blue spots. He fiddled with a new briar pipe but didn't fill it. He wasn't a pipe-smoker, he'd already told her, but he was trying any method he could think of to break himself of the habit of an enormous daily consumption of cigarettes.

‘We like your novel very much, Miss Hatton. All my colleagues agree with me about its exceptional quality.'

‘Thank you.'

‘It isn't always the case. Are you working on something else?'

‘I haven't had the time since I finished that one.'

‘You mean we're the first people to see it?'

‘Yes.'

‘What made you choose us?'

‘You publish one or two writers I admire. If you're good enough for them you should be all right for me.'

Waterford laughed. ‘Quite. And I think you'll find we're as good as anyone else in London at selling fiction. You are going to write another novel, though, I take it?'

‘Oh, yes. I'm mulling over an idea now.'

‘Good. A publisher likes to look to the future, you know. Most first novels don't make any money; it's with the second or third that the dividends start to come in. In this case, though, providing the reviewers can see what's in front of their noses, and the public respond in the right way, we might have a small success. But don't let me build you up too much. This business is full of people who've come unstuck with their predictions.'