The Adventure - Part Three

Interlogue
“How do you do it, Clarice?”
“How do I do what, dear?”
“Decide what to write. I see you forever scratching away in those notebooks of yours, and I think to myself, ‘what could she possibly have to say?’”
            “Putting aside the insult, Claude, I’ll tell you how it is. Writing is no different than playing cricket. One has to make oneself fit for the match.”
            Claude did not see see the connection.
            Clarice poured out large cups of tea and pushed a plate of hot buttered crumpets toward Claude.
            “That’s the stuff,” he said, buttery crumbs sifting down from his whiskers like dough-scented snow.
            Claude had not been himself lately. What began as mild ennui on the afternoon of their thwarted attempt to see the Gutenberg Bible had developed into a full-scale slump. Clarice had the buying and selling of antiques, books and manuscripts to keep her busy, but Claude had no such intellectual pursuit.
            “When I was a postgraduate – that was before Harold died – I got into the habit of making notes on every book I read,” Clarice continued.
            “I went from writing once a week, to writing every couple of days. And then it wasn’t long before I got my notebook out every day. And I found that I had much more to say than simply observing what I read in books. Writing became a habit, you see. A way of thinking.”
            “Is that so?” said Claude, polishing off the last crumpet and pouring out more tea for both. A flash of déjà vu swept Claude back to the time when he and his two brothers would sit with their father by the fireplace after tea. Their father would tell a story – often it was one that he was working on for the publishers Unger & Bilk – trying it out on the Appleyard boys.
            “Claude!”
            “What’s that?”
            “You were miles away!”
            “Sorry my dear. I was just thinking of the ‘tea reads.’”
            Claude felt surprise in seeing now, so many years later, how much pleasure he had taken in those stories. To be an inventor of a world; the author of a life. Now that was something! He felt a slash of regret at the casual contempt he sometimes felt for his father. Growing up, it was more often an embarrassment than a point of pride among the lads that Claude’s father wrote adventure stories. Now Claude wished he could have that time to live again. For there were things he wanted to know from his father.