“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
-- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Recently I've been very interested in the Woolfian ideal of the room, both as a physical space and a metaphor: a private space, for reflection, introspection and creativity. Confession: I've not actually read A Room of One's Own, but I will, very soon.
Starting Sparks is a monthly link-up for writers, hosted by me and Ashley. |
Do you remember Teresa Ruskin?
I conceived the Ruskins -- a large, literary family living in an old dilapidated house in Surrey -- at Easter last year, and have subsequently written four pieces about them. They bounce around in my head, demanding that they get their own book.
I posted about them in Starting Sparks in October, a story called In Rain.
For this month's Starting Sparks, the prompt is:
I was really excited about this prompt, but in the end it didn't work for me. I tried to write a story based on an idea I've had floating for a while, about a girl who meets a character from a book she's reading -- he's fallen through the fabric of the universe, or something like that, into her world -- and she has to help him solve a murder or something; except she is actually a character from a book he's reading, so they are like parallel book universes? However this is a very complicated idea with a lot of logistics to work out, and in the end, I didn't find myself up to the task, at least not for a short story that you guys would actually enjoy reading.
The idea needs more time to simmer in my head.
So, it's Teresa again.
A bit of context: she's nineteen and she's in her second year of an English Lit degree at Durham. This story is set in January.
[source] This is The Bridge. |
I wrote this story a few months ago. It's not inspired by a song, but you could listen to a song here or here or here or maybe here to find something relevant. (All favourite songs, anyway, so I'm almost following the prompt ... ish.)
My initial working title was Write About Love, which is basically a command to myself because I, er, never do. As resident hopeless romantic I love reading about love, but I guess I'm always a bit scared of writing about it, because I'm terrified that I'll end up with vapid contemporary teen girl fiction, which I really don't want. TCATT (my WIP novel) is a romance-free zone. Yes, obviously, there's Corem (FMC and MMC), and I ship them forever to eternity, but they don't know that yet. Nothing “happens" between them, not in Book 1.
However, after thinking, as I have been recently, about rooms, my current title -- which is also the working title for the book -- is A Room Alone. I'm interested in the concept of being alone, which can be both negative -- loneliness -- and positive -- solace, especially for an introvert like Teresa, and a time to reflect and create. Exploring the dual nature of “alone-ness" will be a central theme of the novel, I think.
And if you want to link up with Starting Sparks, there's still time!
~***~
A Room Alone
For Teresa, the room was her refuge and her
prison.
Like
a stage it was the scene of so many reflections and visions. It looked like any
room in halls – a low bed with a steel frame; a desk; a swivel chair – but it
was also hers, indubitably, with her posters on the walls and her paper
lanterns hanging from the ceiling. She had affection for its buckled floor and
narrow bed; it was a slightly musty haven, and she imagined it as the cabin of
a ship, or a sleeper train’s compartment, rocking her to sleep as the horizon
shot closer. She enjoyed the rain on the double-glazed window when she nestled
in bed with tea and paperback; her view of the narrow cobbled street was one of
wistful beauty, and she had come to love it. Yet the room was also a symbol, in
her mind, of cut off hopes and shattered dreams, because it represented
loneliness, and things she wanted but couldn’t have. It was in her room that
lucid sorrow washed over her, stretching out in the grey nights she spent
alone.
Alone: a solace, always, for her, to be
by herself, away from the exhausting rush of the world. Teresa – reader,
thinker, dreamer of dreams – cherished solitude, and the room was a paradise,
therefore, a place to step from the physical world to the planes of the mind.
She read Coleridge, “and what if in your
sleep you dreamed”, and that wandering dream state was her habitat and her
home. Yet now to be alone was sullied; for
alone had a double meaning, a connotation not of solace, but of heartbreak.
To be alone, now, in those long rain-washed evenings, was to be vulnerable, for
those were the nights when he came to her, flooding her mind and her stomach,
stealing the oxygen from her blood.
He
came suddenly, obtrusively, always with the same sickening swoop beneath her
diaphragm.
She
didn’t remember exactly the first time she saw him – there was no blinding
flash, no sudden total devotion – but she had tumbled into heartsickness as
late summer fled into autumn, those first weeks of first year, right on the
threshold of her new university life: there he was, dominating her horizon, so
that she had virtually no memories of her time in the city that were not tinged
by him. The room, from the first, had fluttered with the idea of him, then the
firm-rooted thought, making it jagged and erratic to Teresa, a place of
glittering shards of dreams, through which he strolled, always, reflecting
light back to her. He spread through her mind unstoppably, and she was a
bystander, watching as something unprecedented overcame her, frightening and
glorious in its intensity. Teresa read Fitzgerald, “all great happiness is a little sad”, and knew that she had
stumbled into the soul-deep point where joy and grief overlap; she had found
something that knifed through her with physical pain, and yet was purer than any
desire she’d ever imagined.
She
thought about him constantly, a never-ending cycle of colour and words; the
conversations she reeled off went on for hours, winding back and forth. Perhaps
they joked at first – light-hearted, a chance meeting, somehow alone together –
but then the tone would change like a gathering of clouds. His altered voice,
looking down, I’ve never told anyone
this, but … His realisation, then, that she was the single person to whom
he could bare his soul; she understood as no one ever had, was right on a
molecular level. They were meant to spend long days talking, heartbeats in time
at the convergence of sound and silence. He would have this epiphany, and then
Teresa’s night would end and he would be there, him, glowing in the dawn.
It
was ridiculous to imagine, and she knew it. What was the truth, after all? That
they had lots of mutual friends, existed in the same wide group, might find
themselves walking to the train station together or beside one another in the
cinema; but they were not close, did not share secrets, were barely alone
together. That though she imagined their hearts side by side, the whole world
falling into place, to him she was another face in a crowd – a nice girl, no
doubt, clever and generally decent – but neither close friend nor confidant.
These were the facts. Yet reason was useless, longing inescapable; she was a
tearstained fugitive, always desperately turning the page, fraying her mind
with the constant question: when would the denouement finally come?
Once,
on a clean-skied day in late October, a month into second year and a year after
she had started, terrifyingly, to live for him alone, it had happened as Teresa
had envisaged so many times. She was walking from her lecture, one strand of
her mind on Wordsworth but the other as usual full of him, and suddenly there
he was, a saint stepped from a dream into bright life. He was standing on the
bridge, wearing a black raincoat which was endearing in its practical ugliness,
and when he saw he raised his arm in latent hello.
With
painful pulse Teresa had fallen in beside him, and it had been perfect: the
greeting, his smile, the way her name sounded when he said it.
“I
was stopping for the view,” he’d said, and gestured across the river, which was
grey and glorious in its reflections of the trees; and in that moment its
beauty was his beauty, so that Teresa could hardly speak. Now the bridge was
marked for her: the Place, the Time, the Autumn Day. It had a radiance to it, a
secret stamp that changed it in her eyes. It became the scene of some of her
fantasies.
They
had started walking, talking – he liked the Romantics too, her heart more or
less burst – and somehow, as they agreed it was cold, that they had nowhere to
be, there was the coffee shop ahead; and there they were, across from each
other in the window, and Teresa span among the constellations.
Only
it didn’t follow her pattern.
He
talked excitedly about his course and his family, they discussed what they were
reading and watching and listening to, and outside the light was fading and
Teresa felt that the world was leaning forward and lowering its voice. But
there was no change in the atmosphere; no veer of subject into deep,
unchartered waters. He stayed as friendly and kind as he’d always been. When
they parted, it was with a smile, an assertion that we should do this again, and a wave.
That
was all.
Afterwards
she felt dazed, wandering in an elated mist of colour and the sound of his
voice, because it had been far better than all her reveries, he high above any
holograph she conjured; but it didn’t take long for the sorrow to set in again.
That was the trouble, that the eternal fly in the ointment; however much of him
she had, she wanted more. Once upon a time he’d been a face in a crowd, a
little flutter of attraction; then they’d been introduced, but for a while,
still, he’d been a faraway figure, so that even the exchange of a word set her
dizzy with joy. But as they moved into the same circles, as they become,
indisputably, friends, she craved more and higher. For the Teresa of a year
ago, the thought of an hour over coffee would have been an inenarrable wonder.
Now it made worse the dull ache that never left her. In one way she cherished
it – and she never would never go backwards, never – but she knew, also, that passion and suffering have the same root in Latin. She holed up in her tiny
room, replaying every moment and wishing for the if and the maybe.
~***~