Their backgrounds too couldn’t have been more different. Carole had retired early – been retired early, some might say – from working as a civil servant at the Home Office. Whereas Jude, having had a portfolio of careers including model, actress and restaurateur, had ended up working as a healer. This was a calling which Carole, though she no longer expressed the opinion quite so often to her neighbour, still regarded as ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo’. Illness, for her, was something that should be either snapped-out-of or dealt with by prescription medicine; she didn’t think the mind had anything to do with it.
Yet somehow the relationship between the two women survived, and even mellowed. They didn’t live in each other’s pockets, but they saw a lot of each other. They had even gone on holiday together to Turkey. And, apart from someone out there getting murdered and Carole nearly getting murdered, that had gone pretty well.
But the experiment hadn’t led to further mutual holidays. As her granddaughters, Lily and Chloe, grew older, Carole’s vacations now involved entertaining them for a few days on the South Coast. Jude spent her downtime in more varied ways, and her holidays were often connected with her work. For instance, the previous summer she had spent a blissful week at a Mindfulness Workshop in Périgord. Carole’s views on such activities were entirely predictable.
Yet the chalk and cheese somehow blended. And perhaps the strongest bond between Carole and Jude was their mutual passion for solving crimes.
Burton St Clair was fluent, Jude had to give him that. His presentation was clever too. It was clearly a routine he’d done many times before, but he didn’t let it sound rehearsed. He stumbled over his words occasionally and every now and then went off at a tangent, as if suddenly recalling an anecdote from deep within his memory. Jude, who had sat over many a dinner table with Megan, listening to Al Sinclair before he was published, had heard most of the material before, but could not prevent herself from admiring the way he made it sound new-minted.
He certainly held the literary ladies of Fethering in the palm of his hand. They had already been predisposed towards him. Probably every one of them had read his breakthrough novel, Stray Leaves in Autumn, whose paperback cover was so prominently displayed on the screen behind him. Why that book had caught the zeitgeist in the way it had, nobody could tell. His previous eight novels had received respectable but less than ecstatic reviews, and less than respectable sales. Burton St Clair’s future had appeared to be that of many other midlist authors, dutifully published by the same publishers for some years, until the inevitable moment of fate arrived. Some new broom appointed to the editorial department took a long hard look at the sales figures of his books and unceremoniously dumped him.
Burton St Clair would have coped with that. During his ‘undiscovered years’, he had got very good at moaning about what hell it is being a writer. Being dropped by his publisher would just have confirmed his view that the entire world was conspiring against him. Burton’s shoulders were home to more chips than McDonald’s.
But he was coping much more easily with being a success. Like many writers, he had spent a great deal of the unproductive times behind his desk imagining the answers he would supply when interviewed in a variety of arts programmes. So, when there was sufficient interest in Stray Leaves in Autumn for him actually to be interviewed on arts programmes, his replies were well rehearsed.
Quite why that particular book had taken off when the others hadn’t remained a mystery. His new-broom editor, who had been about to drop him from her list, asserted that it was a vindication of the publishing house’s ‘long tradition of nurturing exceptional talents.’ Burton himself claimed that, though no reader would ever recognize the author’s ‘self’ in the novel, it was the book in which he had ‘invested’ most of himself.
It was the view of Jude, who had of course read the book, that if there was any explanation of its sudden success, it was because Stray Leaves in Autumn was, at its most basic, an old-fashioned romance. In spite of some stylistic embellishments and the mandatory juggling of timeframes that qualified it as ‘literary fiction’, the book could easily have been shortlisted for an award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
Her own, private view was that Stray Leaves in Autumn was rather mawkish. While she could recognize the skill of the writing and structure, she found it horribly soft in the middle. She just hoped that, in the course of the evening ahead, Burton wouldn’t ask directly for her opinion of his novel. Jude had never been very good at lying.
Stray Leaves in Autumn chronicled the travails of a film director – clever that, not a writer, so that no one could ever imagine that the central character was actually the author. His name was Tony, which sounded nothing like Burton, and long ago he’d been at Oxford University (totally unlike Burton, who’d been to Cambridge). Mind you, both men, real and fictional, were fifty-three years old.
At the beginning of the book, Tony is in the doldrums. His career had never really taken off. He is creatively sterile and still in mourning for his wife, Maureen, who had died two years previously after a long battle with breast cancer. Tony’s prospects – and the possibility of happiness returning to his life – revive when he meets Celia, a former wild child from the fringes of the music industry who, now a divorcée in her fifties, has written a so-far-unpublished novel, which she is convinced would make a great movie. She is also convinced that the right person to direct it is Tony.
Experienced readers of romance would by this point in the book have realized that he and Celia were not only the right people to bond creatively, but also the right people to bond emotionally. Tony, however, proves remarkably unaware of this blindingly obvious fact, so it is not until the couple – and the development of their film – have endured a sequence of setbacks and tribulations that he eventually recognizes true love. This revelation happens, needless to say, at the premiere of the movie, which of course goes on to be an international success.
Though Burton St Clair would never have admitted it, Jude reckoned it was by serendipity rather than calculation that he’d managed to press so many relevant buttons in Stray Leaves in Autumn. Popular entertainment had taken a surprisingly long time to recognize the increase in average age of the first world’s population. It kept its focus on attracting new, younger audiences rather than catering for the growing numbers of the robust ageing.
When a couple of successful movies and television series featuring mature central characters woke the entertainment moguls up to this self-evident fact, suddenly you couldn’t move for late-flowering lust: in movies, on television and in bookshops. The publication of Stray Leaves in Autumn fortunately coincided with this wave of geriatric romance. Rather than fulfilling his own fantasies (like most middle-aged male authors) and making the object of his hero’s affections a much younger woman, Burton had been shrewd to focus Tony’s interest on someone of his own age. And the fact that his novel was just an old-fashioned romance with a happy ending had been disguised by enough tricks of post-modernism and magical realism for the literati not to feel they were demeaning themselves by reading it.
Thinking about Burton’s past had distracted Jude from listening to what he was pontificating about. She gave herself a mental rap over the knuckles and concentrated, to hear him saying, ‘… and obviously writing a book is an activity during which the author is constantly having to make moral judgements. And I am always aware of the ethical implications when I kill someone.’
TWO
The suggestion of murder got a predictable little frisson of indrawn breaths from the ladies of Fethering. Burton St Clair held the pause after his statement. It was clearly an effect that he had honed over many years of repetition. Then, with a wry smile, he picked up. ‘I should say at this point that I never have actually killed anyone in real life, but as an author one frequently is in the godlike position of deciding whether a character should live or die. And that’s a responsibility that one has to take seriously. I’m not in the business, as a crime writer