Authors: Julie Cohen
‘She says she’s looking forward to it.’
‘So am I. Did you come up with any ideas together?’
I sit up straighter. ‘Pull over,’ I say.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, yes! Pull over!’
He pulls into a lay-by and I jump out of the car. ‘Come on!’ I say, and run to a stile between the hawthorn
hedges.
‘What are you doing, Felicity?’ Quinn has turned off the engine, but left the car lights on. He stands with the door open, looking after me. The road is quiet, the night scented with growing things.
‘Turn off the lights and come and join me! We need to see.’
‘Are you—oh, all right.’ The car door shuts. I swing a leg over the stile and jump over. A nettle stings my bare ankle, but I
keep on going, threading through a stand of trees. There’s just enough silver light up ahead for me to see. Behind me, I hear the rustle of Quinn’s footsteps. I wait for him to catch up, and when I feel him standing beside me I walk forward, through the last of the trees into a field.
Without the trees in the way we can see the full moon. It’s silver and enormous, perfectly round, hanging in
the sky.
‘Is this why you had me stop the car?’ Quinn asks.
‘Isn’t it worth it?’ I gaze up at the moon. He stands beside me and gazes up at it too. ‘I wish I knew what all of those shapes on it are called.’
‘Mare Tranquillitatis,’ he says. ‘Mare Serenitatis, Mare Imbrium.’ He points to different parts on the huge disc. ‘Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Serenity, Sea of Showers.’
‘They’re beautiful
names. How do you know them?’
‘Many, many misspent hours with a telescope and a book. There’s an Ocean of Storms, and a Lake of Clouds. All on a surface with no water at all.’
‘It was worth stopping the car, wasn’t it?’
He takes my hand. His fingers are warm in the night, which has become cool. ‘Yes.’
I look up at the moon some more.
‘I know whose field this is,’ Quinn says. ‘He’d be quite
surprised to see me standing in it at this hour.’
‘Let’s sit in it, then.’ I sit down on the rough grass at the edge of the field. As I do so, there’s a crinkle from my handbag and I pull out a box of macaroons. I offer one to Quinn. ‘Macaroon? It’s only slightly crushed.’
He begins to laugh. ‘You’re as daft as a brush,’ he says. ‘I do love you.’
‘I love you too.’ I lean my head against his
shoulder and let my thoughts float away into the tranquil seas of the moon.
‘A little bit late isn’t a problem,’ my editor Madelyne had said, yesterday afternoon, ‘but this is more than a little. It’s been eighteen months, and we have schedules to think of. Don’t you have anything to show me yet?’
We were in her office, in the corner, overlooking the park. Her assistant had made us tea in a
proper teapot, on a proper tray. There was a little box of macaroons, which Madelyne insisted I take because she was on a diet. The whole office was so quiet, as if everyone was reading at the same time. Books lined every wall that wasn’t a window. Above the door I’d come in there was a framed original of the cover of my first picture book. I could feel Igor’s wide owl eyes staring at the back of
my neck as I sat in the wooden chair.
‘I’ve been working on it,’ I said to her, lying. ‘But nothing seems to come out quite right.’
We’d always met in restaurants before. Long, boozy lunches where we got the business bit out of the way at the beginning and spent the rest of the time trading gossip, tossing around ideas. Behind her desk, Madelyne seemed different. Her posture was straighter,
her pulled-back hair more severe.
‘I’m sure it will all be fine,’ I added.
‘Even some sketches would be useful,’ she said. ‘A title, something we could bring to the Frankfurt Book Fair. We’ve already put back publication twice. I’m worried that we’ll lose the momentum on this series, with such a long gap.’
‘I understand. I completely agree.’
‘We all love Igor so much! And we miss him.’ She
smiled then, for the first time, and put down her cup. ‘I know you’ve had a very eventful couple of years. So many ups and downs, with getting married, and your mother—’
‘Yes, but it’s fine. It’s fine. I’ll send you some sketches.’
‘I can help you with ideas, you know. That’s what I’m here for. You can pass me anything and we can bounce it around together.’
But not if there aren’t any ideas
at all. Not if the only thing I’ve ever been any good at has gone for ever. ‘Of course.’
‘And you know that if you ever want to talk—’
‘Yes. Of course. I’m sorry the book is so late, Maddie. I’m always late for everything. I was even late to my own wedding.’
And we both laughed, even though it was true.
The next morning, I wake up after Quinn has gone off to work and I go straight into my
studio, pulling on a dressing gown and pushing my hair into an elastic. I turn on the computer and the scanner, even though I don’t have anything to use them for yet, and I clear off a stack of books from my chair beside the window, pick up a sketch pad and a pencil and look out at the morning.
My studio is actually the back bedroom of Hope Cottage, the house Quinn and I bought when we married.
It has better natural light than the front bedroom where we sleep, and looks out over the garden – a jumble of flowers and weeds, a lawn that needs mowing, gnarled fruit trees. Petals from the cherry and the apple have drifted over the grass like pink and white snow. On warm days, sometimes I take a cushion out to the metal bench, painted with flakes of peeling blue, and read in the shade. I fell
in love with the garden as soon as we saw this cottage: overgrown, wild – the sort of garden that harbours fairies in foxgloves. I love the cottage too, with its crooked floors and bulging walls, the suspicion of damp in the dining room, and a thatched roof that really should be replaced soon, this summer or next. But the garden is my favourite place.
A blackbird hops across the grass. I make
a mark on the page, a black curve of head and wing, then fill in sharp beak, gleaming eye. I sketch in the dandelions behind him. This is all very well, but it’s not Igor the Owl.
I’ve drawn and written six
Igor the Owl
books in the past four years, all of them before meeting Quinn. They’re not complicated things: Igor is a tiny, fluffy owl, much smaller than all of his owl family and owl mates.
To make up for being so tiny and fluffy, not much bigger than a chick, he solves puzzles.
For example, in the first book,
Igor the Owl Takes to the Air
, Igor has a problem because his wings are too little. He can fly in a fluttery way, but he can’t soar on silent wings like the rest of his family, and he’s feeling quite down about it. He’s worried he’ll never be a proper owl. Meanwhile, he makes
friends with a family of squirrels who are living in a hole in a dead tree by the river. When the river floods, Igor tries to help his friends but he’s too small to carry them to safety, so he quickly invents a sort of hang-glider thing with wings made out of discarded feathers and a framework made out of twigs, and the squirrels use it to fly to safety. And then Igor uses it to soar with his
family, on silent wings. He’s the only hang-gliding owl in children’s literature, apparently, and the book sold much more than I expected it to, so I created more of the stories for publication, though I would have continued doing so anyway.
Igor has also solved crimes, in
Igor the Owl and the Monkey Puzzle
(nobody else noticed the ants stealing the nuts), and saved lives, in
Igor the Owl and
the Good Eggs
(he was so small he could crawl right into a broken eggshell). In his last book, the one I wrote and illustrated nearly two years ago now, before I knew my mother was ill, Igor the Owl had started his own Owl School; here he taught other woodland creatures to solve puzzles, but he was sabotaged by a jealous magpie. In the end, Igor worked out who the culprit was, and they became
friends.
I press my lips together and draw Igor next to the blackbird I’ve sketched. Big eyes, smiling beak, stubby wings. I never have a problem drawing Igor; I’ve been drawing Igor for years, ever since I was a teenager and invented him to amuse my mother and me during long train journeys, or on candlelit nights when the power would go out because Esther had forgotten to pay the bill. My mother,
a proper artist, worked best on big canvases; I liked scraps of paper and ballpoint pens. I would breathe on a window and draw in the mist. I could tell a story anywhere with a few lines and shapes, as long as it was a little story.
I’ve been on plenty of trains since my mother got cancer, and I’ve even been in a power cut. But I haven’t found any new stories that I want to tell, any puzzles
that a tiny owl could possibly solve.
Sighing, I rest my elbows on the sketch pad and stare out at the garden. The old glass is uneven, and when I move slightly to either side, the grass appears to swell and subside. Madelyne was pleasant and kind, charming as always, but she wasn’t pleased with me. Perhaps I should do something else for a job. But this is the first thing I’ve done which I’ve
really liked. Before I stumbled into it, I was waiting tables, working in bars or shops, earning enough money to travel and then spending it all. People said they were interested in my art, but that was just because of who my mother was. Drawing Igor, writing out his story, being paid for it, holding the book in my hands – all these made me feel as if I were finally taking root somewhere. Finding
the sort of life I was meant to have.
What will happen if I can’t think of any more stories? I’ll be dropped by my publisher. I’ll have to pay back my advance, probably, which wouldn’t be a huge problem, but it would be humiliating. I’ll have to find something else to do, something that the other wives in the village do to use up their time if they haven’t got a job. Coffee mornings. Charity
events. Book clubs.
I think back to the rising sense of panic I had yesterday on my way to the restaurant. Was it fear, because somewhere down deep I knew that Igor was finished for me, that I’d used up all the stories I made up to amuse my mother because I loved her, and I would have to decide to do something else with my life? Because I can’t fall back on what I used to do now. I can’t get
a job in a bar somewhere and flit off to India when I’ve saved enough money. I’m married, I’ve chosen to live here in Tillingford with Quinn, and all the possibilities of my past life have faded into air.
What was the perfume that woman was wearing who passed me on the street? It smelled so familiar. It made me think of the past, some unspecified moment, something I’ve forgotten.
The phone rings
and I sit up. Outside, it’s started to rain and the blackbird has flown away; inside, my computer screen has gone to its screensaver of random moving lights, each one leaving a coloured meteor trail behind it. My sketch pad is empty aside from two birds, one real, one imaginary. I make my way through the dark cottage to the kitchen, where the phone is.
‘Hello, love,’ says Quinn. ‘How are you
getting on?’
‘Slowly.’
‘Can I help?’
‘Oh, thank you, no, I don’t think so. I’m just having an off day.’
‘Envelopes keep on disappearing from the stationery cupboard here. You could have Igor solve that.’
I pick at an unravelling hem on the flowered tablecloth. People who aren’t creative, people who spend their lives structuring real-life stories and checking facts, rarely have any idea of
the energy that’s generated by a really good idea. They think you can choose any old thing and make it work. My mother never used to make suggestions for the Igor stories; she would wait for them to happen, and then she would listen.
‘I was joking,’ Quinn says.
‘I thought you were in meetings all this morning.’
‘It’s lunchtime,’ he says, and when I look at the clock over the sink, it is. ‘Anyway,
I just thought I’d ring to see how you were getting on. You seemed …’
‘I’m fine. Everything’s fine.’
‘… preoccupied.’
On the draining board are Quinn’s mug and his bowl from breakfast which he has washed up and left to dry. He has, I see, left a mug out for me by the kettle, my favourite one with the leaves painted on it. I know without looking that he’ll have put a tea bag inside it, so I
wouldn’t lose vital seconds when I could be drawing. It’s sat here while I’ve been in my dressing gown, staring out at the garden, accomplishing nothing. I should thank him, I should say something warm and loving to make his lunchtime special after a morning of meetings, but I’m irritated by this as well because it reminds me of a future time when I may have nothing better to do but Quinn’s washing
up, nothing better to do but make tea.
I close my eyes. This is another thing about marriage: second thoughts. Doing what’s best, saying what’s best, instead of what you feel.
‘Sea of Tranquillity,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t the moon amazing last night?’
THE CHRISTENING HAD
gone well. Baby Jacob Edward Isaac Harrington, swaddled in antique white, slept through the water dousing, and the rain had confined itself to a tiny shower while they were all in Tillingford’s twelfth-century stone church. Now most of the village was crammed into the Harringtons’ back garden. The new family stood in the centre; the baby, now awake, bounced from one person
to the next, emitting tiny gurgles. Quinn stood with his back to the yew hedge, holding a glass of prosecco and trading opinions about sheds with Patrick, his sub-editor, who lived in one of the new builds just outside of town.
‘I’m telling you, it’s the only five minutes’ peace I get at home these days, when I go out to sort through the spanners,’ said Patrick. ‘You’ve got your nappies and your
baby food for a start. Then you’ve got the Weetabix. Have you ever tried to get dried Weetabix off a wall?’
‘Like cement, is it?’
‘I’m thinking about using it to replaster the house. And the questions from the older one. “Why are snails, Daddy?” she asked me yesterday. Not why are snails slimy, or why do they have shells, no.
Why are snails?
Had me stumped. And then there are the toys everywhere.
I stepped on a piece of Lego this morning in my bare feet. You probably heard the swearing all the way over in your house.’