‘Because I finished my first novel first, and then it sold, and things just took off on their own after that. ‘You’ll only dig yourself in deeper,’ was his warning. ‘No, it’s no use now, you’ve said it.’ Leaning back, he studied me with obvious amusement.

Teachers always knock the life out of the subject, somehow.’ Then remembering what he did for a living, I tried softening that statement with, ‘Not all teachers, naturally, but-’ ‘Well, again, I’d rather read it for enjoyment.

‘And anyway, I thought it might come in handy, somewhere. ‘I had ideas of changing the world,’ I admitted. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I’d rather just read for enjoyment. And that’s how I feel about studying English. There’s a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street-you know, the play-where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning’s poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her that when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. Winnie-the-Pooh as a political allegory, that sort of thing. I love to read, but all through school I hated it when books were pulled apart and analyzed. When I first started writing-really writing, not just playing-I was still at university. Mind you, I can’t tell the difference myself from the pictures he paints in the daytime-they all look like great blobs of color to me.’Īfter this past week and what I’d learned about Sophia Paterson, I’d formed a few opinions on the subject of subconscious thought and how it ruled my writing, but I kept these to myself. A friend of mine paints, and he says the same thing, that it’s easiest working at night, when his mind starts to drift and he’s nearly asleep. ‘Maybe at night your subconscious takes over. Maybe because I’m half-conscious.’ I’d said that last part as a joke, but he nodded, considering. But I do my best work late at night, I don’t know why. When I get towards the last part of a book, I write all hours. It kept me up till three o’clock this morning.’ Whatever they had been, he didn’t tell me. ‘I assumed you’d had your reasons for not telling him.’ I didn’t really think.’ And then, like him, I threw the ball back. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I said, ‘I don’t know. When he was near me I felt half-electric, half-confused, excited as a teenager caught up in a new crush, and I had wanted that to last a while, to hug it to myself and not let anyone intrude upon it. It was because…well, Graham, like the horses, was a private weakness, too. I knew why I’d kept silent, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t wanted to conflict with his own story, or the lack of it. But when he spoke, his voice was hard to read. I wished, through the long minute of the pause that followed, that I could have seen his face, and known what he was thinking.

The winter sea book