“Did he hit you?” Gregory, her therapist, asked. Gregory was very keen on domestic violence as cause and effect.
“Yes,” Viola said, because that sounded infinitely more interesting than the cold, damp truth of mutual indifference. As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.
Her children left home and she moved to Whitby, although technically Sunny didn’t leave home, Viola did. That was when she became a writer. Even Viola had to acknowledge that she needed to shake herself out of her indolent state of mind, engage with the realities of life—which was the kind of thing The Voice of Reason would say, of course. Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side—reading—and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities—polar opposites, in fact. And just because she could do joined-up handwriting, she discovered, didn’t mean that she could write books. But she persevered, perhaps for the first time in her life.
She had had a good apprenticeship—early reader, only child, semi-orphan, and a nature that was essentially voyeuristic. As a child she had loitered in doorways, listening and observing. (“Writers are just vultures!,” People’s Friend, 2009.) Sparrows at Dawn was sent to an agent, who rejected it, and then another one and another one until finally one wrote back and said it was “interesting,” and although the agent made “interesting” sound like an insult she did nonetheless sell it to a publisher who made a (modest) two-book deal, and less than a year later Sparrows at Dawn was a solid, tangible item in the phenomenal world rather than a jumble of ideas in Viola’s head. (“What next?” Bertie said to Teddy. “Badgers for Breakfast? Rabbits at Bedtime?”)
Her father did not seem as impressed by this achievement as she would have liked. She had sent him an early proof copy and then on publication day had come over to York, where he took her out for a meal and, surprisingly, ordered champagne “to celebrate,” but his critique of the novel was lacking in enthusiasm. She had wanted him to be overwhelmed and astonished by her talent instead of the “Very good” he awarded it, managing to make it sound like the opposite. He also failed (apparently) to understand that the book—young girl, brilliant and precocious, troubled relationship with her single-parent father, etcetera—was about them. Surely he knew that? Why didn’t he say something? Instead, on the way back to his house he sang, “And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist, I don’t think she’d be missed—I’m sure she’d not be missed!” as if the whole thing was amusing. Gilbert and Sullivan, he said. “I’ve got a little list.” Haven’t we all, she thought.
Sparrows at Dawn had limited success. “Overly sentimental,” “Rather baggy.” She had written herself into a hole, but she wrote herself out again with her second novel, The Children of Adam, “a bittersweet tragicomedy about life in a commune in the Sixties.” She had backdated her experiences to a more fashionable decade and told it from the point of view of a four-year-old child. “But isn’t that my story, not yours?” Bertie said, rather aggrieved. It was hugely popular (“For some reason,” Bertie puzzled to Teddy) and was made into a very English and largely forgotten film with Michael Gambon and Greta Scacchi.
And that was that, the beginning of her brilliant career.
Her bedroom at the Cedar Court was large and rather dark and must have once been someone’s office. She phoned the friends she had thought to meet up with and found that their phone number no longer worked, which was an indication of how long it was since she’d been in touch. To be honest (she was trying more of that too), she was relieved. All that catching up they would have been forced to do. And she had moved on so far from those days and they probably hadn’t. If she thought about them, she imagined them still dressed in thick jumpers and long skirts with clogs on their feet, curtains of hair hanging down over their faces, still dishing out horse feed from sacks (although actually one was a barrister in North Square and the other one was dead).