How he lost respect for you.
Treated you like a commodity.
Did he even love me anymore? And if not, what did he want? I wondered.
I stood up and looked in the mirror. I smoothed back the skin on my cheeks and the years fell away and I wondered whether Dan was doing something more than just seeking a renovation project. He had to want us here, by Stoke Woods, for a reason. I just didn’t know what it was.
My phone rang. It was Max. I didn’t pick up. I couldn’t face it. A text followed.
We’re coming to see you. Tomorrow. Angela and me. She wants to see you in person to talk about how we can turn this situation around. I’ve booked a table somewhere nice.
“Oh, God, no,” I said.
This had never happened before. Usually, I went to them, got on the train to London, made a day of it. That they were coming here gave me a sense of shifting power, but it was a slippery sense, difficult to decipher. They wanted an Eliza book. They had used the stick, threatening not to pay me for it, and now this was the carrot, because if they wanted Eliza, they needed me.
I would go, I decided, and listen to what they had to say. A small, hopeful part of me wondered if I might be able to talk Angela into reconsidering the novel I’d written. I still felt proud of it, hopeful for it.
“Maybe just talk to them about putting me back in the book?” Eliza said.
“I can’t.”
“You could, you know,” she said. “Trust me.”
I scrunched my eyes shut and put my hands over my ears and hummed a song that Teddy used to love.
How could I trust anyone else when I couldn’t even trust myself?
V.
Teddy is still heavy on your lap. He hasn’t revived. He says he’s too tired to dance any longer, even though you’re desperate to keep going. You want to worship that fire like a whirling dervish. But at least you’re more comfortable now. You’ve shifted him to a better position, and the ground where you sit feels soft and dry.
“Take him home,” Eliza whispers.
“He’s okay,” you tell her, and you tighten your arms around him.
The scene beyond the bonfire is more enthralling than ever. The people have formed a circle and are holding hands, their faces turned to the darkness above. Chanting starts up, low at first, impossible to understand, but growing louder, and above the spit and crackle of the fire, words are repeated over and over, and you feel as if they’re casting a spell on you, drawing you in, as if something more important than all of you is happening, and it includes you and Teddy and Eliza, and you look up to the skies just like the people do and you understand that they are communicating with the spirits, because that’s possible on a night such as this when what is real melts away and the unreal is invited out to play. You’ve been obsessed with this idea since you read about it. On the summer solstice night there’s no need to shut your eyes or open a book to make an enchanted world come to life.
“Can you feel it, Teddy?” you whisper into his hair.
“Teddy can,” he says, even though his eyelids are drooping and he’s nuzzling his blankie.
11.
That night, Dan and I slept in different rooms, and in the morning he made it clear he was still sulking by sighing loudly and a lot.
When I told him—and I purposely waited until late morning because he hated it when I withheld publishing news of any sort from him—that I was going to lunch with Max and Angela, he warmed up and hovered closer, predictably enough. He had questions and he wanted details. I told him the bare minimum.
He helped me put my coat on and picked a hair off my lapel. “You can tell how much you mean to everyone, and how much Eliza means to them, if they’re dashing down here to wine and dine you at this short notice,” he said. “They wouldn’t do that for every author.”
I drove into Bristol to collect Angela and Max from the station. I didn’t need to, but I wanted to show I was making an effort. It perhaps wasn’t the best idea. After a few minutes in traffic, my nerves about the lunch had built, my hands gripped the wheel too tightly, and my head felt so scrambled that I wasn’t sure I should be driving at all.
On the way there I found myself at a stoplight outside the cinema where Dan and I had met. So much had happened in the last few years that I sometimes forgot where we had started. He had worked at this cinema. Introduced by a mutual acquaintance, we’d been a match made in heaven and it had been a simple courtship: opinionated, geeky boy meets shy, geeky girl, both are virgins in spite of being a few years into their twenties, both socially awkward, a little bit emotionally needy, but they share a passion for writing, film, art, music, all things creative. They talk and talk. They fall in love and move in together, feeling lucky, full of dreams.
And for the longest time we were settled and happy, with Dan actively pursuing his writing alongside his part-time job, his ambition soaring, me working full-time and writing, too, but more as a hobby, downplaying it so I didn’t steal his thunder.
I loved our life then. If you’ve experienced trauma as a kid, what you want most as an adult is a still pool to bathe in, one where you can see the edges, where the surface of the water is glassy. How ironic it was my writing that had shattered the calm for us; that I had found a literary agent and publisher in just months after Dan had spent years trying to get representation for his work, and that things had moved unstoppably for us ever since then.
Where would we be now, I wondered, if I’d never published a book? Happier? Apart? And what if Dan’s dreams had come true and he were in my shoes? It was impossible to know.
Angela, my editor, looked larger than life when she emerged from the station. There was a polish to her plumage, as if she’d brought a little bit of London with her. She stood in the station forecourt and scanned the car park, looking for me. Max, a few steps behind her, was dapper in a peacoat, dark slim jeans, and brogues. His thick-rimmed glasses made me think of Scandinavian architects.
I drove us to the restaurant.
“I’ve never been to Bristol before,” Angela said. “It’s very nice.” I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She was in the back seat, gazing out a side window, her view a grimy budget hotel that loomed over the choked traffic lanes, part of its signage missing. I understood that I wasn’t the only one here feeling nervous.
The restaurant was on the first floor of a Georgian building with wide views across the floating harbor. It was fancy.
“I have something for you,” Angela said, “because I want you to know what you mean to us.”
She drew a large envelope from her bag and passed it to me. My name was inscribed on the front in beautiful cursive handwriting. I opened it, ineptly tearing off little scraps of paper that scattered unattractively on the table before I managed to access the contents. I pulled out a card. The front was a montage of the covers of all my Eliza books and inside were dozens of handwritten testimonials from members of my publishing team. Each one began with “I love Eliza because . . .”
I read them all and could sense Eliza reading them, too. The card was a master class in emotional blackmail, I knew that, but it affected me, too. I loved Eliza just as much as they did, in fact more than they did because she’d been part of me for as long as I could remember. The card touched a nerve.