On the way back up Kingsway I point out Tesco at East Didsbury and tell her about Richard Madeley.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard about that. You would barely have been born.’
‘Very funny. I’m doing my project about book clubs, so I’m very interested in Richard and Judy.’
‘In that case,’ I say, ‘there’s somewhere we can have a quick look at on the way back.’
I turn left into Fog Lane and a couple of minutes later I’m turning right off Wilmslow Road into Old Broadway. This wide avenue, its only exit at the far end by foot into Fog Lane Park, is lined by large Victorian houses. Trees run down the middle. I drive up the left-hand side and stop outside number 23.
Helen looks first out of her window, then at me, eyebrows raised.
‘They lived here,’ I say. ‘Richard and Judy. When they were doing their show from Liverpool.’
‘Really?’ She is impressed.
‘Really.’
With her right hand she finds my left and gives it a little squeeze.
Grace emails and asks if we can schedule a tutorial. I tell her it’s now so close to the Residential, we might as well wait until then. The truth is I have been avoiding Grace. If she has been happy to agree to a phoner instead of a tutorial in person, that’s what we have done. I have tried to limit my feedback to highlighting clichés and any loss of verisimilitude in her dialogue. There are not a lot of problems with her work, but from time to time she fails to meet her own high standards.
I have no control over who attends the Residential; the departmental office handles such matters. Nor can I back out of it, having agreed to do it some months ago. I will just have to see how it goes. Invariably on these residential courses there is one nutjob. There is rarely more than one, but there is always, always at least one.
Lumb Bank, an old rambling house where Ted Hughes once lived, is located on the north side of a wooded gulley in a valley above Hebden Bridge. It is operated by a charitable organisation, which runs week-long residential writing courses with two tutors and a guest reader, all three published writers. Some weeks are set aside for groups from universities or other institutions with creative-writing schools, which hire the centre and its staff, and bring in their own students and writers.
My institution’s Residential is one of those weeks.
In previous years our department has assigned two tutors to the Residential. But with staffing problems at the university, the department has decided to see if the week can be run by a single tutor. Either that or none of my colleagues wanted to spend a week at Lumb Bank with me.
I arrive on the Monday afternoon. Climbing out of my car, I am greeted by Nikki, one of the three administrators. She shows me around — the main house, the woodshed, the barn and the garden — and leaves me at the door to my room on the first floor of the main house. The room has a double bed, a chest of drawers, a writing desk and chair, and a view over the garden and valley. Below the house is a large field patrolled by a pheasant with a cry that is a harsh metallic squawk. There are also two rams and a heavily pregnant ewe. Beyond this field another one runs down to the river. The far side of the valley rises steeply and is thickly wooded. Here and there, criss-crossing paths can be made out. At the top of the valley side, fifty feet higher than my vantage point, a sandstone bluff stands proud of the mixed woodland; it and the scrubby ridge either side form the horizon.
The students begin turning up around 6 p.m. Grace is one of the first to arrive. Nikki brings a tray of tea, coffee and cake into the main room, a low-ceilinged, white-walled snug with an open fireplace and mismatched chairs and sofas. Grace perches on the edge of a low armchair in one corner where she can look through the poetry magazines and other journals stored on shelves in the alcove next to the chimney breast. The silence is broken only by the sound of Nikki pouring tea. She hands a cup to Grace, who mutters thanks, and then we all hear the sound of more arrivals and Nikki bustles off to welcome them, leaving me and Grace alone.
‘So,’ Grace says after a moment.
‘So,’ I say. ‘So.’
In the field below the house, the pheasant gives its industrial croak.
Within an hour, all the students are gathered in the snug. Every square inch of space on the sofas and armchairs is taken. Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — sits cross-legged on the floor. Helen sits at the end of the green sofa with her legs drawn up on to the cushion and her shoes removed. I know one or two of the other students — there’s Kieran, who’s writing an experimental novel about a bear that shaves off its fur and joins human society; Greg, an American student who has already published a collection of stories in the US and is now writing a novel; Geeta, whom I have advised to abandon her historical novel of Ancient Greece and concentrate instead on a voodoo mystery set in her native Trinidad — but several students I’m meeting for the first time because they are taught or supervised by my colleagues.
Nikki runs though her housekeeping announcements, then I remind the students how the week will be structured. I tell them I’ve made a grid on the flip chart in the dining room, dividing the afternoon sessions into half-hour slots, and I ask them to sign up for a one-to-one tutorial.
Grace asks if people can have more than one tutorial and I say that if everyone signs up, it’s unlikely there will be enough time. She wears a look of slight disgruntlement and I add that I hope everyone will get all the face-to-face time they think they need.
The evening proceeds with drinks, dinner and more drinks. Before anyone gets too drunk I make my excuses and retire to my room, where I keep the light off and sit by the window watching the smokers who have gathered outside in the garden. Grace, who doesn’t appear to be smoking and never seems to smell of cigarettes, sits with the smokers yet slightly apart from them. Her broad shoulders seem tense, hunched. It strikes me I have never seen her looking relaxed.
I pull the curtain and switch the light on. I am reading Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold. Thirty pages in, I have a strange sense of déjà vu as if I have read it before and know what’s coming next, and yet I’m certain I have never read it and in fact I have no idea what’s going to happen. When I start the second part of the novel it takes me a while to accept that it does not follow on from the first part, yet it seems inevitable that the different parts are obscurely connected.
In the morning, I am sitting outside looking across at the sandstone bluff on the other side of the valley when Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — comes and sits next to me.
‘Dude,’ he says.
‘Hiya.’
‘How’s it going, man?’
‘OK.’
‘Coolio. Nice view.’
‘Yes.’
‘You reading to us tonight, then?’ he asks.
‘That’s the plan.’
A small bird with a red face and yellow and black bars on its wings alights on the railing in front of us.
‘Do you know what that is?’ I ask him.
‘It’s a bird, innit?’
I smile. ‘It’s a goldfinch.’
‘Cool.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I say. ‘They used to represent death.’
‘Wicked.’
‘Mind you,’ I say, ‘most birds have represented death at one time or another.’
‘What about tomorrow night?’ he asks.
‘What about it?’
‘Who’s reading then? Who’s, like, the guest reader?’
‘Oh right. Lewis Harris. Writes crime novels. Independent publisher. That kind of thing.’
‘Cool.’
After breakfast we all sit around the large table in the dining room and I get the students to do a couple of ice-breaker exercises. First some automatic writing and then I ask them to pair off and interview each other about their novels-in-progress and to be prepared to feed back whatever they’ve learnt to the whole group once we have reassembled.