We had a lovely weekend and I was very sad to leave him and go back on the train to Ipswich. There’s not much I can say about the next couple of years because I hardly saw him at all, although we talked on the telephone. He loved the course. He wasn’t too sure about some of the other students. I’ll be honest and say that there was a prickly side to Alan, which I hadn’t noticed before, but which seemed to be growing. Maybe it was because he was working so hard. He clashed with one or two of the tutors who criticised his work. The funny thing is that he had gone to UEA for guidance, but now that he was there he had come to believe he didn’t need it. ‘I’ll show them, Claire,’ he used to say to me. I heard it all the time. ‘I’ll show them.’
Well, Look to the Stars never got published and I’m not sure what became of it. In the end, it was over a hundred thousand words long. Alan showed me the first two chapters and I’m glad he didn’t ask me to read the rest because I didn’t like them very much. The writing was very clever. He still had this wonderful ability to use language, to twist words and phrases the way he wanted but I’m afraid I didn’t understand what he was going on about. It was like every page was shouting at me. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t the audience for the book. What did I know? I liked reading James Herriot and Danielle Steel. Of course I made the right noises. I said it was very interesting and I was sure publishers would like it, but then the rejection letters started coming in and Alan was terribly disheartened. He was just so sure that the book was brilliant and you have to ask yourself, if you’re a writer sitting alone in a room, how can you keep going otherwise? It must be awful having that total self-belief, only to find that you’ve been wrong all the time.
Anyway, that was how it was for him in the autumn of 1997. He’d sent Look to the Stars to about a dozen literary agents and a whole lot of publishers and nobody was showing any interest. It was even worse for him because two of the students on the course with him had actually got deals. But the thing is, he didn’t give up. That wasn’t in his nature. He told me he wasn’t going back to advertising. He was afraid that he wouldn’t continue with his real work – that was what he called it now – because he’d be too distracted and he wouldn’t have the time and the next thing I knew, he’d got a job as a teacher, teaching English literature at Woodbridge School.
He was never particularly happy there and the children must have sensed it because I got the impression that he wasn’t very popular either. On the other hand, he had long holidays, weekends, plenty of time to write and that was all that mattered to him. He wrote another four novels. At least, those are the ones that he mentioned to me. None of them were published and I’m not sure Alan would have been able to continue at Woodbridge if he had known that it would be eleven years before he finally got a taste of success. He once said to me that it was like being in one of those Russian prisons where they lock you up without telling you the length of your sentence.
Alan got married while he was at Woodbridge. Melissa Brooke, as she was then, taught foreign languages, French and German, and started the same term as him. I don’t need to describe her to you. You’ve met her often enough. My first impressions were that she was young, attractive and that she was very fond of Alan. I don’t know why but I’m afraid the two of us didn’t get on very well. She barely even acknowledged me at Alan’s funeral but I have to admit that it may have been partly my fault. I felt we were in competition, that she had taken Alan away from me. Writing this now, I can see how stupid that is but I’m trying to give you as honest an account as I can of Alan and me and that’s how it was. Melissa had read all his novels. She believed in him 100 per cent. They were married at the register office in Woodbridge in June, 1998 and had their honeymoon in the south of France, in Cap Ferrat. Their son, Freddy, was born two years later.
It was Melissa who advised Alan to write the first Atticus Pünd novel. By this time, they had been married seven years. I know that’s a giant leap forward but there’s nothing else I can write about in this period of time. I was working for Suffolk constabulary. Alan was teaching. We weren’t living far apart geographically but we had completely different lives.
Melissa had her light-bulb moment in the Woodbridge branch of W.H. Smith. Who were the bestselling authors on the shelves? They were Dan Brown, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Clive Cussler. She knew Alan could write better than any of them. The problem was that he was aiming too high. Why bother writing a book which all the critics rave about but which hardly anyone reads? He could use his talents to write something quite simple, a whodunnit. If it sold, it would launch his career and later on he could try other things. What was important was to get started. That was what she said.
Alan showed me Atticus Pünd Investigates not long after he’d written it and I absolutely loved it. It wasn’t just the cleverness of the mystery. I thought the main character of the detective was brilliant. The fact that he’d been in a concentration camp and seen so much death and here he was in England solving murders – it just seemed so right. It had only taken him three months to write the book. He had done most of it during the summer holidays. But I could tell that he was pleased with the result. The first question he asked me was if I’d guessed the ending and he was delighted when I told him I’d been completely wrong.
I don’t need to add much more because you know the rest as well as me. The manuscript found its way to Cloverleaf Books and you bought it! Alan went down to your offices in London and that night we all had dinner together: Alan, Melissa and me. Melissa cooked; Freddy was asleep upstairs. It was meant to be a celebration but Alan was in a strange mood. He was apprehensive, subdued. There was something between him and Melissa, a tension that I couldn’t quite understand. I think Alan was nervous. When you’ve been pursuing an ambition all your life, it’s actually quite frightening to achieve it because where will you go next? And there was something else. Suddenly Alan saw that the world is full of first novels; that every week dozens of new books fall onto the shelves and not many of them make any impact. For every famous writer, there must be fifty who simply disappear and it was quite possible that Atticus Pünd might not just be the realisation of a dream. It might be the end of it.