‘You! Who are you?’ she asked me crossly, pointing her finger inches from my face.
‘Lana Green,’ I said, thinking she might recognise the name as she’d taken my book out of the library. I felt a shiver of intense happiness. Nancy Ellis Hall had read my book!
‘What have you come as?’
I didn’t understand the question, but I had a stab at it anyway. ‘A visitor.’
‘Oh. In that case, come on in and sit in the parlour, said the spider to the fly. Not you,’ she said to Jack.
‘Nancy, it’s me.’
‘Oh! Well you’d better watch yourself because they will be after you if you talk to me. I met a nice young man today, and these policemen sprang out of nowhere while we were having a drink and took him away.’
‘VUL-NER-ABLE,’ the CPSO mouthed from behind her.
‘And she’ – Nancy turned and pointed at the officer – ‘was jealous because he was taking an interest in me.’
‘I was not jealous. That man is a known offender,’ the officer said tightly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! He didn’t offend me in the slightest. And that constable tried to take my glass of wine before I’d finished it.’ She turned to me crossly. ‘What have you got to say about that?’
‘Very bad-mannered of him,’ I said.
‘Exactly. They think they know better, but I’ve been – what have I been?’ she asked Jack.
‘A novelist and a feminist,’ Jack said.
‘Exactly.’ Her mood lifted. ‘I’m awfully good at it, you know,’ she said happily, and as she smiled I noticed the gaps in her teeth.
The officer’s phone rang. ‘I’ll take this outside,’ she said. ‘John!’
The police officer appeared from another room. He seemed to know Jack. He said he’d taken a statement from Mrs Ellis Hall and he raised his eyebrows meaningfully – although exactly what it meant I wasn’t sure – and that they would be in touch.
‘So, this guy you arrested, what’s happening with him now?’ Jack asked.
‘Sorry,’ John replied. ‘I can’t tell you anything at this point.’ He was interrupted by Nancy Ellis Hall trying to shoo him out of the door with sweeping movements.
‘Off you go! Off you go!’
Once the officers had left, shutting the door firmly behind them, she turned back to look at us with intense curiosity. ‘Are you two sweethearts?’
Jack glanced at me. ‘Potentially,’ he replied.
Unexpectedly, I blushed. Potentially? It’s always nice to get a compliment.
‘In that case, I’m so glad you’ve dropped by,’ she said graciously. ‘I do feel I add to the happiness of the occasion.’
While Jack made the tea, Nancy Ellis Hall took me into her parlour. It was a writer’s paradise.
The room was large and high-ceilinged, with books everywhere, decorated in a dusty pink with polished mahogany furniture bearing silver-framed photographs. My heart leapt to see her posing with Beryl Bainbridge in a cloud of cigarette smoke and sitting in a field at Hay, sandwiched between an elderly Molly Keane and Germaine Greer. She had a leather-bound, gold-tooled visitors’ book. And there was a colour photograph in an oval frame of her cheek to cheek with a young, dark-haired man who looked familiar but whose name I didn’t know.
‘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