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‘Who’s this?’ I asked her, pointing to it.
‘Yes …’ She picked it up and looked at it closely. ‘Yes, now I’ll tell you exactly who it is. This is a lonely young man that I met in a bookshop. The police officers came in, hundreds of them, and pounced on him, and they tried to take my wine from me.’ She put the frame back on the table and sat in the armchair. ‘Ooh!’ she said, admiring her own yellow-patterned skirt as though she was seeing it for the first time.
‘Mrs Ellis Hall,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you, are you writing anything at the moment?’
‘Yes. Yes you can,’ she replied.
I waited for her to elaborate, but she was still looking at me patiently. ‘Go ahead,’ she prompted.
‘Er – are you working on a new book?’
‘Yes! I have all my notes. I never throw anything away.’
‘What’s your advice on how to start a new book? What’s the secret?’
She didn’t even have to think about it. ‘Words, words, words!’ she said, waving her hand in a dramatic flourish.
Jack opened the door with his foot and came in with three mugs rattling on a tray. The three of us sat on the largest, softest sofa and while we drank our coffee Nancy told us the story of the interrupted drink with a stranger a few more times, with creative variations; editing it in the retelling. Then she began to tear squares from a peach toilet roll, counting each one carefully, like a meditation.
I looked around at the bookshelves, hoping to see the library copy of my own book so that I could ask her opinion of it. I spotted it on top of a small pile of Jiffy bags. Just a minute – was that a photograph of a young Kingsley Amis?
My heart soared. I loved this room. And I loved her. She was an inspiration, and surrounded by literature I was, for the first time in a long while, fired up with the urge to write.
Words, words, words!
Jack was quiet when we left.
The sun was low and golden and it was cold in the blue shadows of the buildings. He turned his jacket collar up and shoved his hands into his pockets.
‘What did you think?’ he asked as we walked past Hampstead Heath station on our way to the bus stop.
‘You didn’t tell me she was Nancy Ellis Hall the novelist; you just said she wrote a bit,’ I said indignantly.
‘I didn’t know if you’d have heard of her. She hasn’t been published for years.’
‘My mother was a fan, being a feminist and things. She signed a book for us once. Wow … So she’s taken to biting people.’
He gave me a strange look. ‘She hasn’t taken it up as a hobby. She just gets frustrated when she can’t find the words. It’s the illness.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s got dementia.’ He pressed his hand over his forehead. ‘It’s here, this is where the damage is. In the frontal lobe.’
‘Dementia.’ I couldn’t associate the word with the woman I’d just met. It didn’t fit my idea of it as a disease that gradually erodes the personality, the sense of self. Nancy Ellis Hall was all personality. ‘Apart from a bit of repetition she seems perfectly fine. I mean – she’s even writing a new book,’ I said.
‘She’s always writing,’ Jack said with a flicker of a smile. ‘She gets edgy when she doesn’t.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I said ruefully. ‘It wears off after a while.’ I couldn’t wait to tell my mother that I’d been in her house. ‘She’s lively, isn’t she?’
‘That she is.’ He looked at me, his eyes troubled. ‘Do you think she’s vulnerable?’
‘Not particularly – I can’t imagine anyone being brave enough to mug her.’
‘That’s the problem,’ he said sadly. ‘She isn’t scared of anyone. And according to the CPSOs, it makes her vulnerable. If she stayed in all the time, being fearful, that would be fine. How does that make any sense?’
I shook my head in sympathy.
‘All their worries are theoretical anyway,’ he went on. ‘People are nicer than you think – they can see that she’s odd and generally they make allowances for her. And that guy she met, she didn’t take him home, they went for a drink in the pub. She’s not stupid and she’s done nothing wrong. Police officers, they see bad things happening all the time and I get that. But most people live perfectly safe lives.’ He glanced at me. ‘You know what the secret is?’
‘No. What?’
‘Always keep under the radar.’
We stood by the bus stop and watched the bus creep slowly down the hill towards us in the line of traffic. I was going home – it was too late to go boating now.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked him.
‘Mornington Terrace,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘Parliament Hill Fields. The other side of the Heath from Nancy’s.’ We were heading in opposite directions.
The C11 bus pulled up alongside us, gusting hot air from the brakes.
‘I’m sorry our fake date didn’t work out,’ he said.
The bus stopped and the doors slid open. I tapped my Oyster card and turned round to wave goodbye. Didn’t work out? He had a famous literary stepmother!
I gave him my brightest smile to remember me by, because: ‘There’s always a next time,’ I said.
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