and the bird life is wonderful. Duck, partridge, pheasant. Everything he
liked to kill.
I
have spent most of the last three weeks on a title.
The
Hemingway Project is a good name for a grant application, but a bummer
for a book. I finally came up with one I like. Admiring Ernest. It’s
from Dashiell Hammett’s line about him, you know the one — ‘Ernest has never
been able to write a woman. He only puts them in books to admire him.’
It
may sound a tad playful for a university press so I’ll have to attach some
suitably dry subtitle: Admiring Ernest: Contradictions, Correlations and
Gender Roles in the Life and Work of E. H ., that sort of thing.
What
do you think? I like it. It has fashionable irony and hopefully will lull those
macho reviewers into a false sense of security. Reviewers? Who am I kidding?!
I
bought a car! Nothing exotic. It’s called a Cherry (no wonder they don’t sell
them in Trenton!) despite being bright yellow. It’s perky and has a funny
little thing called a gear-stick! The countryside is very gentle and not at all
impressive until you get to the sea which, I’m told, is eating up the land at
the rate of a foot a year. Nice to know that, by the time I leave, England will
be a foot shorter! There are villages hidden away all over the place, and the
nearest town is Theston. Untidy but everyone very friendly. The church is beautiful and ancient and has a rood-screen that’s older than Atlantis and I’m quite
seriously thinking of believing in God again. Well, at least for a year.
What
more can I tell you? My little laptop sits in the alcove (south-facing) winking
at me greenly. There are cats up at the farm, and one fat marmalade fellow has
been eyeing me up with a view to making friends. I am trying to encourage
things to grow inside the house as fast as they grow outside but my green
fingers have turned blue in the cold and I may have to lure in a hawthorn hedge
or the corner of a sugar-beet field. As to human contact, well, not a lot yet.
Mr Wellbeing (sic!) the farmer is pure Thomas Hardy and barely comprehensible.
His wife a bit of a dragon. I shall have to make an effort to MIX, won’t I?
Missing you,
and everyone.
Never-ending
Love from Everend,
Ruthie.
She
took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm. She didn’t like it lukewarm and she
didn’t like drinking it on her own. Coffee break at the English faculty was
when everyone got together and grumbled about funds and gossiped about absent
colleagues. It was a noisy sociable time, as opposed to classes, which were
just noisy. Here she drank in silence, which was beginning to be much less
attractive than she had expected. A cottage in England had always featured in
her dreams of contentment but at this precise moment she would have exchanged
all the green fields and oak-fringed lanes of Suffolk for an hour in
Quakerbridge Shopping Mall.
Ruth
shared a house in uptown Trenton with Suzy Weiss and Beth Lucas, one a fellow
Assistant Professor, the other a TV weather-girl. Her apartment was known
affectionately as the Jungle, on account of Ruth’s propensity for plants that
crawled, climbed, entwined and otherwise romped about the place.
When
she was in it, it seemed quite ordinary. Convenient for the faculty but close
to the city. The generous expanse of stripped pine floor and tall south-facing
windows only just made up for the dust and noise from the traffic below.
Still,
it was hers now. And hers alone. No longer rented. Why then had she left so
soon after buying it? Because she prided herself on being a free spirit,
belonging to no one, and the idea of a sabbatical year in Europe was a way of
proving it?
She
stood up purposefully, hummed to herself, and went out of the small,
brick-floored kitchen and into the leathery low-beamed parlour. She hadn’t lit
a fire, and the room, with its barely detectable, omnipresent whiff of damp,
was not yet welcoming. She crossed to the desk at which she worked, a scrubbed
pine bargain
liked to kill.
I
have spent most of the last three weeks on a title.
The
Hemingway Project is a good name for a grant application, but a bummer
for a book. I finally came up with one I like. Admiring Ernest. It’s
from Dashiell Hammett’s line about him, you know the one — ‘Ernest has never
been able to write a woman. He only puts them in books to admire him.’
It
may sound a tad playful for a university press so I’ll have to attach some
suitably dry subtitle: Admiring Ernest: Contradictions, Correlations and
Gender Roles in the Life and Work of E. H ., that sort of thing.
What
do you think? I like it. It has fashionable irony and hopefully will lull those
macho reviewers into a false sense of security. Reviewers? Who am I kidding?!
I
bought a car! Nothing exotic. It’s called a Cherry (no wonder they don’t sell
them in Trenton!) despite being bright yellow. It’s perky and has a funny
little thing called a gear-stick! The countryside is very gentle and not at all
impressive until you get to the sea which, I’m told, is eating up the land at
the rate of a foot a year. Nice to know that, by the time I leave, England will
be a foot shorter! There are villages hidden away all over the place, and the
nearest town is Theston. Untidy but everyone very friendly. The church is beautiful and ancient and has a rood-screen that’s older than Atlantis and I’m quite
seriously thinking of believing in God again. Well, at least for a year.
What
more can I tell you? My little laptop sits in the alcove (south-facing) winking
at me greenly. There are cats up at the farm, and one fat marmalade fellow has
been eyeing me up with a view to making friends. I am trying to encourage
things to grow inside the house as fast as they grow outside but my green
fingers have turned blue in the cold and I may have to lure in a hawthorn hedge
or the corner of a sugar-beet field. As to human contact, well, not a lot yet.
Mr Wellbeing (sic!) the farmer is pure Thomas Hardy and barely comprehensible.
His wife a bit of a dragon. I shall have to make an effort to MIX, won’t I?
Missing you,
and everyone.
Never-ending
Love from Everend,
Ruthie.
She
took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm. She didn’t like it lukewarm and she
didn’t like drinking it on her own. Coffee break at the English faculty was
when everyone got together and grumbled about funds and gossiped about absent
colleagues. It was a noisy sociable time, as opposed to classes, which were
just noisy. Here she drank in silence, which was beginning to be much less
attractive than she had expected. A cottage in England had always featured in
her dreams of contentment but at this precise moment she would have exchanged
all the green fields and oak-fringed lanes of Suffolk for an hour in
Quakerbridge Shopping Mall.
Ruth
shared a house in uptown Trenton with Suzy Weiss and Beth Lucas, one a fellow
Assistant Professor, the other a TV weather-girl. Her apartment was known
affectionately as the Jungle, on account of Ruth’s propensity for plants that
crawled, climbed, entwined and otherwise romped about the place.
When
she was in it, it seemed quite ordinary. Convenient for the faculty but close
to the city. The generous expanse of stripped pine floor and tall south-facing
windows only just made up for the dust and noise from the traffic below.
Still,
it was hers now. And hers alone. No longer rented. Why then had she left so
soon after buying it? Because she prided herself on being a free spirit,
belonging to no one, and the idea of a sabbatical year in Europe was a way of
proving it?
She
stood up purposefully, hummed to herself, and went out of the small,
brick-floored kitchen and into the leathery low-beamed parlour. She hadn’t lit
a fire, and the room, with its barely detectable, omnipresent whiff of damp,
was not yet welcoming. She crossed to the desk at which she worked, a scrubbed
pine bargain
Similar Books
