Page 29 of Dear Daisy

Besides, she knew all the bad stuff about me, and vice versa, we had a lot invested in keeping each other close.

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Winter Gregory Author Page

You know that feeling when something happens and you’re not sure how you feel about it, or how you *should* feel about it? That.

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Tanis Brown: If it’s to do with the new book — we’re going to LOVE it!

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Wednesday morning dawned through a drizzly grey mist. I sat in front of the laptop for a few hours, mostly spent on Facebook, ran a tiny iron over the dress I’d decided to wear to talk to the book group, and turned out half a dozen copies of Book of the Dead that had been sitting in the boot of my car. I washed my hair and tried to make myself look presentable, and was just making myself a quick cup of coffee when Margaret’s head appeared beyond the glass panel.

‘Oh, good, you’re ready. You are ready, aren’t you? I mean, is cleavage very “novelist”?’

I narrowed my eyes and considered saying that John Grisham wore a Zara maxi-dress to do all his talks that gave him a cleavage like the Grand Canyon, but decided against it. ‘I haven’t got a lot of suitable clothes with me,’ I said, being very tactful in the circumstances. ‘Besides, it shouldn’t really matter, as long as I look professional.’

I put my two-buttoned London coat on over the dress and followed Margaret as she led the way across the High Street and down a narrow lane beside the river. ‘We meet in the old hall, by the bridge,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘We’ve got some new additions this week. One is a gentleman who’s just visiting Great Leys and is staying with me. On a B&B basis,’ she added, as though I might assume she’d acquired herself what she would doubtlessly call “a fancy man”. ‘The other is a couple from up on the moors. I think she wants to get out more,’ she added, although whether this was an opinion of Margaret’s or whether the lady herself had said as much, I couldn’t tell.

The hall was up a flight of stairs, and Margaret ushered me into a small cloakroom. ‘I’ll go and introduce you, then you can talk for a bit, show off your books and then we’ll have tea and biscuits,’ she said with relish, as though the tea and biscuits were the main reason for the gathering. ‘We’ve got chocolate digestives tonight.’

I hefted my bag of books and checked my reflection in the mirror. In the hall I could hear Margaret, surrounded by a buzz of conversation and the clank of tea cups, starting to call the meeting to order, and, having reassured myself that my hair was tidy and my dress didn’t show a ridiculous amount of cleavage, I stared out of the first floor window down into the darkening street while I waited for my intro.

The dismal weather was making dusk come early. Lights shone from the shops still open across the street, the road was highlighted with the shiny black of damp tarmac, and if I looked down I could see the cars parked along the river’s edge, all neatly slotted and aligned as though marking the boundary between water and land in glossy metal. I let my eyes unfocus and run dreamily along as I ran through what I wanted to say about writing Book of the Dead. Easy stuff, stuff I’d done a hundred times before. As long as no one asked me about the sequel, about how work was going, I reckoned I could cruise through . . . and then my eyes got a horrible jolt of familiarity. A big, silver SUV, very much like the one I’d nearly run into yesterday up on the moor.

Hastily raked-over memory refused to reveal any telltale details. It had been a big silver four-wheel drive, that was all I could come up with. I had no real knowledge of cars and their makes and I’d been too dreamy to really take in much yesterday, all I knew was that it looked similar, and then I had to scold myself for being so paranoid. This is the countryside. Where people tow horseboxes and sheep trailers as part of everyday life. There must be a million of those things round here, and even if it were the one you saw yesterday, what are you afraid of? That the driver is going to come looking for you to give you a good talking to about inattentive driving? He wouldn’t recognise you any more than you’d recognise him.

‘. . . so it’s my pleasure to introduce, Winter Gregory!’ said Margaret in the other room. I took a deep breath, shook my head and walked through into the meeting room.

Where the only thing, the only thing I could take in was the fact that Dan was sitting at the back.

People were clapping, a bit half-heartedly, over the buzzing in my head. I felt my stomach clench and beads of what felt like wax settled across my cheeks as I gripped the edge of the table in front of me.

He looks ill. Pale, anyway, and he hasn’t shaved in days. In fact, he looks as though he’s slept in his clothes.

‘Winter?’ Margaret stood next to me. ‘Are you all right?’

I straightened my back. Pushed my chin up and took a sip from the thoughtfully placed glass of water on the table. He’s not going to stop you. Whatever he’s come here for, whatever he thinks he’s playing at, you can top him, Winter. You are stronger, you are certain, you are his equal.

‘Sorry.’ I swallowed the water. ‘Bit of stage fright, that’s all. Big crowd.’

She looked at me dubiously. Apart from Dan, who was sitting right at the very back of the hall, half in the shadows, with his crazy big coat pulled tightly around him as though he was cold, the ‘crowd’ consisted of an elderly couple, two men in their mid-fifties, a small collection of late-teens/early twenties writer wannabes, judging from their earnest expressions and notebooks, and Margaret. I must have given the impression that I usually only spoke to one man and a dog — and that the dog wandered off halfway through. So I cleared my throat, fixed my eyes on the people sitting at the front . . . I will not look at him. I will not . . . and began the talk I’d given so many times already since the book came out.

I ran through my own writing history, how I’d left university and gone into advertising, then research, how I’d come up with the idea for Book of the Dead and how I’d written it. I left out Dan’s part, snipping mentally around the edges of the story until the part he’d played curled in on itself like old paper. Left out any hint that anyone else had had any input, apart from the publishing company who had taken the book on, all the while adamantly refusing to even acknowledge the corner of the room in which he sat. He made no move either, as far as I could tell with my careful avoidance of any eye contact; he seemed almost to be asleep on that chair, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles in a way that, if he wasn’t careful, would link the buckles on his boots and cause much staggering when he tried to stand. His coat was almost doubled around his body and his hair was weirdly misshapen, up on one side and flat on the other, as though his left hand side had been frightened.

‘Any questions?’ I finished, brightly. Dan was not going to know how sick I felt at seeing him, how my hands were bunching into fists at the sight of his face. There were a couple of well-thought-out questions from the writing group at the front, a long, and rather unfocussed diatribe on breaking into publishing from one of the mid-fifties men, and then Margaret was motioning for someone to turn on the tea urn and rattling a biscuit tin like a call to arms.

What are you going to do? You could run, make your excuses. Hide. But then, if you have to face him, if he’s come here to find you, wouldn’t it be better to do it here, in front of all these people, where he won’t be able to deal those vicious little hurts with such precision? Even Margaret might come to your defence if you start getting personally attacked in front of her book group, although, looking at them, they may just take it as affirmation of the bonkers nature of writers.

‘Tea, Winter? I’ve saved you some digestives here. The group can be rather lively when there’s chocolate involved, so I thought it would be a good idea to put some back.’ Margaret waved a packet and a loaded teacup. I tried to immerse myself in the conversation starting between two members, something, anything to stop my eyes from wandering over to that back corner of the room, where he lurked like a Scooby Doo villain, still seated, arms folded. Waiting. For me. Chuckle, chuckle, laugh, throw in some advice, pretend just as hard as you can, Winter, that the man you can sense moving across the room doesn’t exist.

‘Miss Gregory?’ A hand on my shoulder. A touch so light that it almost shouldn’t have registered, but it did, like the weight of an entire life. ‘I wonder, could I have a word?’

So. This was it. This was how it happened. I turned slowly to face him. Didn’t smile. Met his dark stare with one of my own. ‘Anything you want to say, Mr Bekener, you can say here.’

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