What a pleasure to spend an evening with ‘my readers’! That sounds very grand, a hall full of people rather than the five lovely women who were part of this club. But for me it was as good. To see my book in their hands, to be told that they’d connected with the characters, found them believable, had enjoyed the plot, was more than enough to make this author very happy. The cover also came in for praise.
The questions were mainly about how I came to write, how stories began for me. And how welcome it was to be able to recollect and talk about how I came to this obsession, for that is what it is, and to remember the inspiration for A Retrospective. However the one question that needed most thought and explanation was why did Eleanor visit the woman, an unknown stranger, her prospective landlady, in the hospital in Tooting? Why did she stay with her overnight and then go to find the church where the woman worshipped to tell the vicar of her condition? Basically how did this advance or add to the plot. A question that all authors need to examine a long time before the last edit or publication.
My answer was that Eleanor fears she is the angel of death. Originally brought about by Celia’s death, her dear neighbour and mentor, when she is ten, followed by her mother’s suicide, which she believes she foresaw, and her father’s dramatic heart attack which she witnessed. Arriving at her prospective landlady’s house to find the woman has been rushed off to hospital, therefore, substantiates this concern. She says, ‘What I thought I could do I don’t know, but death was familiar to me. If I wasn’t its angel, I could at least stay to ward it off, or comfort its arrival’.
As with all characters, they will only react in the way you have made them. I may be the puppet master but they become autonomous and pull their own strings. Try making them to do something other and it won’t work. Eleanor needs to stay beside the sick woman with her suitcase under the hospital bed which she will retrieve the next day and go back to Tom and Edward at the gallery where she’s left her portfolio.
And as for the cover – my handiwork, though unintentional. Using part of a brown card box, I was amusing my four year old grandson by helping him paint a picture. Between us the sky evolved, the tree trunks grew, and we added the blossom. With no thought of the novel I was writing. It was only later I realised its potential and added the bird cage.
If that all sounds like gobbledegook, you need to read the book!