Still Life. Zoeë Wicomb
which is to say something from the Impressionists, knowing that I pretend not to read her emails. She avoids the word I, and always ends with: So-o-o looking forward to the typescript. Do send first chapters. Happy to read and advise.
Nowadays I barely check the picture, and after a cursory scan, toss the card into the recycle bin. For some months Belinda has been pretending that I do not mean what I say. Of course you won’t give up on the novel, she states. A carefree signature it was and now the contract holds, no matter what I decide. By way of encouraging me to do the right thing, she warns that I’d have to return the generous advance for the two-book deal. She does not mind my not replying. Predictably, the invitations to meet never include the legendary literary lunch. Does that institution no longer exist?
Belinda is committed to the genre of life-writing, a term she finds more appropriate than memoir. You have such rich experiences, just get them down on the page, she says. Aim for the artless. And try not to be arch; it’s not nice.
I, who have been incapable of beating out as much as a word, am not above taking advice. Belinda is right about my abominable tendency to be arch, and rather than fret about the word nice I should pay heed, for she may well turn out to be the one to save me from this motley group of phantoms.
Belinda may not have in mind my day as a supply teacher in a comprehensive school – how else am I supposed to live? – but my fingers fly across the keyboard as I imagine a recording of the morning’s experience, one that, as she recommends, is simply to be transferred to the screen. Easier to start with the end, when after a morning of colourful abuse from teenagers, I nipped into the head teacher’s office to announce that I’d had enough and was walking out in spite of my promise to stay until half-term. (See then, dear Belinda, how practised I am in breaking contracts. I’ll have to find a new way of keeping the wolf from the door.) The event meticulously recast into the third person, there are nevertheless a couple of persistent ‘I’s that still have to be replaced. In no time at all I also knock off a beginning to the piece, recount the day as accurately as possible. If I’ve achieved the desired artlessness, there is nothing to be done about its failure as a short story.
Belinda’s reply comes within two days, in tiny, spidery writing on a picture postcard of mud-coloured Gauguin girls: Absolutely bloody marvellous. Don’t even mention a wolf at the door – it’s a brilliant story, just waiting to be developed. Perhaps turn into first person and then a little toning down? We NEED novels of this kind. See, you were made for better things than teaching ignorant teenagers. Why not come up to London for lunch and we’ll go through your plan. Can’t wait. Xxx
Her first X is always capitalised. So finally, the fabled literary lunch, the invitation to drop by, as if Scotland were a stone’s throw away and the journey indeed up to London. Mind you, no mention of the train fare. The word ‘plan’ makes me snigger. If only I had one, or even believed in the efficacy of having a plan. And if I were to have such a thing, it certainly would have nothing to do with uncouth kids in a classroom. I happen to believe in education and therefore cannot promote stories of failure. What can Belinda possibly mean by a novel when I’ve sent her what must pass for a short story? I have told her, admittedly over a year ago, explained in detail that the next novel was to be about the Father of South African poetry, Defender of a Free Press, Arch-enemy of the Cape Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, and as an Abolitionist, an enemy of all slavers: Thomas Pringle.
There, I’ve written his name – THOMAS PRINGLE – which surely has broken the spell.
But first a few more words about Belinda. Which may or may not be a delaying tactic: there is, as far as I can see, no reliable way of telling. Belinda is a feminist who believes in the category of women’s writing, which is to say women’s lives; believes in its value. She is not actually an editor. Belinda is an agent who believes her role to include that of editing, by which she means helping an author to shape a narrative. She demonstrates what she is after, what is required, by editing a page or ten – ever so lightly, she promises. She does not care for semicolons, and irony persistently ducks out of her ken. She has questioned me on unreliable characters and even insisted on the removal of what she calls an inconsistency.
Irony, I explain, but oh no, too obscure; readers would not get what you call irony, she insists. In other words, I am in her hands, although not in the way she imagines. But all things considered, including her slight frame, they are strong, supportive hands and I am indeed sorry to let her down in this way, especially since I’ve turned out to be her discovery. A puzzling term used by more than one reviewer, puzzling since I had, like anyone else, simply sent my first manuscript to Belinda, whom I had found in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. It was well after I signed up with her that she declared her belief that a novel should be a happy collaboration between writer, agent and editor. Vigilance therefore is the name of the game: there is no question of letting her loose on an unfinished manuscript.
A thumbnail sketch: Belinda is well dressed, usually in reliable linen, ever so lightly made up and often in fabulous red shoes; she speaks chummily (that’s when she slides down in her chair and waggles an exquisitely shod foot) about all women needing just a touch of eyeliner, a mere stain of lipstick. Then she crosses her lovely legs and puts her palms together thoughtfully. I know that she is preparing an assault when her fingertips are brought to rest ever so lightly on her top lip whilst staring fixedly ahead. (‘Ever so lightly’ is a favourite phrase of hers, her signature aesthetic; it is also a contagious term.) I fear that Belinda has too clear an idea of what women like myself ought to write. I fear that she believes readers to expect a true story, that she will have nothing other than could be read as Real Life; she has the capacity to turn my most fantastical tale into such a story, believes in the power, the necessity, of the authentic first person. Once, when we chatted about eating habits and dress sizes, she referred to my weight problems as a child. I have never been fat, I said, and she smiled knowingly, as if she had caught me out, as if I had forgotten a confession made in writing. Is that, I wonder, what drives me to the non-real, the magical? Even when my subjects are historical figures? And why do I now tease her with this nonsense about my day as a supply teacher? A shame about the lunch, but I do not want to see her in person. I shamelessly promise in writing to pursue the redemptive comprehensive-school novel, an updated, female version of To Sir, with Love, and Belinda, appeased, promises that we’ll have lunch next time, over the next chapter.
Perhaps I should give it a whirl; perhaps it will be less difficult to beat out a true story, although I will have to be on guard. Being a supply teacher for five weeks at St Mungo’s Hill Comprehensive School is not the whole story; hidden in it is another that has nothing to do with the ebullient racism of teenagers from the council estate fondly known as Muggers’ Hill, one that cannot be injected with redemptive elements. It is the story about Annie that may try to intrude; a story infused with shame that cannot be exorcised through writing, one that needs to be forgotten.
To Miss, with Love, I cackle wryly to myself – a matter of getting a move on. I really would hate to lose Belinda. Where would I find another agent? Who would put up with my dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying ways? Who would have a ditherer like me? I can after all not be discovered a second time. And there is the real possibility that Belinda will tire of jollying me along, will run out of encouraging words.
The slight poet, looking over my shoulder, feels his pectorals expand. Thomas Pringle. He has been named. Which, in this dismal state of affairs, must count as progress, he supposes. The stuff about Belinda and being a schoolmistress is an unhelpful digression and also a painful reminder of Harington House, although this lady writer’s Scottish Comprehensive School for the unruly lower orders is, of course, not to be compared with the 1820s Academy for Young Gentlemen that he established in Cape Town. But such nonsense will hopefully run its course. Now for a course of action, and for a while at least the others will have to step aside. Let him imagine for a moment that in this making he is she, she is he, that together they form a fleet set of hands that learn to fly in unison over the keyboard, pounding new life into the dormant material. It is a matter of pride: he refuses to remain a wraith, a spectral figure with hissing lungs. Unbelievable that he should have no choice but to wait in limbo for this woman to pull the strings at her will.
(I, on the other hand, reject the role of puppeteer;