The Typewriter

Rhys led her down a narrow corridor to a room she had taken for a cupboard. Inside, under a skylight streaming with rain, stood a heavy oak desk and, on it, the little typewriter from the windowsill. Beside it lay a neat stack of pages, still warm from the lamp. “Sit,” he said. “I shall tell you what I have told nobody, and then you will decide what to do with it.”

“My eyes are failing,” he began. “I can see the outline of this room, the shape of your face, the light in the window, but not words. Not any more. I stopped writing under my own name thirty years ago, long before that, when the success of The Salt Road destroyed the only things I cared about. My marriage went first. Then my peace. Tern was my way of writing without anyone being disappointed in me.”

“Mrs Pryor was my wife’s sister,” he went on. “After the divorce she came to look after the house. She was the only person who read the first Tern manuscript, and the only one who told me it was good.” He smiled for the first time. “She still tells me when a chapter is rubbish. I have learnt to be grateful.”

Iris listened with her pen motionless. It was the scoop of her career: a reclusive, prize-winning novelist who was secretly the author of forty bestselling lighthouse mysteries, now half blind, dictating to his former sister-in-law in a house cut off by the storm. Any editor in London would print it by tomorrow. “Why are you telling me?” she asked. “Because you noticed page 87,” he said. “Almost nobody who reads Tern realises that I have been stealing from myself.”

The lamp flickered, and the room went dark. For a while, the only sounds were the rain and, somewhere below, the heavy click of a fuse box. “Mrs Pryor will see to it,” Rhys said calmly. “She always does.” Iris found herself thinking, not about her article, but about how badly she wanted to know what happened in the next chapter of a book that did not yet exist. She wondered, uneasily, whether that was exactly what he had intended.