ONE
Edwards, Vaughan, (1930-1996?). English novelist, author of twelve novels and two collections of stories. His first novel, Winter at the Castle, (1951), received considerable critical acclaim but, like much of his subsequent output, little widespread popularity. Edwards was very much a writer's writer, eschewing the trappings of sensationalism in his fiction and concentrating instead on his own peculiar and unique vision. In book after book, this singular novelist wrote of a rural England haunted by ghosts of the past—both the spirits of humans and the more metaphorical apparitions of times long gone. The novel considered his finest, The Miracle at Hazelmere, (1968), tells, in his customary highly wrought prose, the story of William Grantham, an estranged and embittered artist, and his (perhaps imaginary—it is never revealed) affair with the phantom of a sixteen year-old girl from the Elizabethan period. This novel, in common with the rest of his oeuvre, contains much striking imagery, pathos and a yearning for a long gone era of bucolic certainty. Artists and loners burdened with tragic pasts appear again and again in his writing, and there is speculation that the novels and stories drew much from the author's own life, though, as Edwards was an intensely private person, this has never been confirmed. Critics generally agree that his final novels, the Secrets of Reality series, marked the artistic low-point of his career. Though beautifully written, and containing much of ideative interest, the novels, beginning with Those Amongst Us, (1990), continuing with A Several Fear, (1993), and The Secret of Rising Dene, (1996), show an obsessive preoccupation with the arcane, and found only a narrow readership. The series, a projected quartet, was unfinished at the time of the author's mysterious disappearance in the winter of 1996.
From the Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century British Novelists, Macmillan, third edition, 1998.
~
The above entry was the first mention I had ever heard of the writer Vaughan Edwards. I was surprised that I had never happened upon his work, as I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of British writers of the last century and especially those publishing after the Second World War. The discovery filled me with a wonderful sense of serendipitous anticipation: there was something about the entry that told me I would take to the novels of Vaughan Edwards. The fact that he was relatively unknown now, and little regarded during his lifetime, gave me the sense that I would be performing a service to the memory of the man who had devoted his life, as the entry stated, to 'his own peculiar and unique vision'. Perhaps what gave me a certain empathy with the novelist was that I too was an unsuccessful writer, the author of half a dozen forgotten novels, as well as over fifty short stories buried away in long-defunct small-press magazines and obscure anthologies.
I showed the entry to Mina. For some reason—perhaps subsequent events have branded the very start of the episode on my consciousness—I recall the night well. It had been a grey, misty day in early November; a gale had blown up after dinner, and now a rainstorm lashed the windows of the cottage, instilling in me the romantic notion that we were aboard a storm-tossed galleon upon the high seas.
Mina was reading in her armchair before the blazing fire. Her favourites were the classic Victorians, the Brontës, Eliot and the rest. Now she lay the well-read paperback edition of Wuthering Heights upon her lap and blinked up at me, perhaps surprised at the summons back to the present day.
I set the thick tome on the arm of the chair and tapped the page with my forefinger. "Why on earth haven't I come across him before?"
She pushed her reading glasses up her nose, pulled a frown, and read the entry. A minute later she looked up, a characteristic, sarcastic humour lighting her eyes. "Perhaps because he's probably even more obscure and terrible than all those others you go on about."
I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She laughed. The masochist in me found delight in setting myself up as the butt of her disdain.
I relieved her of the volume, sat before the fire and reread the entry.
Why was it that even then I knew, with a stubborn, innate certainty, that I would take to the works of this forgotten writer? There was enough in the entry to convince me that I had stumbled across a fellow romantic, someone obscurely haunted by an inexplicable sense of the tragedy that lies just beneath the veneer of the everyday—or perhaps I was flattering myself with knowledge gained of hindsight.
Mina stretched and yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'm on an early tomorrow. Come up if you want."
Even then, a year into our relationship, I was insecure enough to ascribe to her most innocent statements an ulterior intent. I remained before the fire, staring at the page, the words a blur, and tried to decide if she meant that she wished to sleep alone tonight.
At last, chastising myself for being so paranoid, I joined her in bed. Rain doused the skylight and wind rattled the eaves. I eased myself against her back, my right arm encircling her warm body, and closed my eyes.
~
Though the novels of Daniel Ellis are founded on a solid bedrock of integrity and honesty, yet they display the flaws of an excessive emotionalism which some might find over-powering.
From Simon Levi's review of the novel Fair Winds by Daniel Ellis.
~
But for Mina, I would never have come upon Vaughan Edwards' novel A Bitter Recollection. During the month following my discovery of his entry in the encyclopaedia, I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops enquiring if they possessed copies of any of his works.
Of the three replies I received, two had never heard of him, and a third informed me that in thirty years of bookdealing he had come across only a handful of Edwards' titles. I made enquiries on the Internet, but to no avail.
I forgot about Vaughan Edwards and busied myself with work. I was writing the novelisation of a children's TV serial at the time, working three hours in the mornings and taking the afternoons off to potter about the garden, read, or, if Mina was not working, drive into the Dales.
It was an uncharacteristically bright, but bitterly cold, day in mid-December when I suggested a trip to York for lunch and a scout around the bookshops.
As I drove, encountering little traffic on the mid-week roads, Mina gave me a running commentary on her week at work.
I listened with feigned attention. The sound of her voice hypnotised me. She had a marked Yorkshire accent that I have always found attractive, and an inability to pronounce the letter r. The word 'horrible', which she used a lot, came out sounding like 'howwible'. Perhaps it was the contradiction of the conjunction between the childishness of some of her phrases, and her stern and unrelenting practicality and pragmatism, which I found so endearing.
She was a State Registered Nurse and worked on the maternity ward of the general hospital in the nearby town of Skipton. In the early days of our relationship I was conscious, perhaps to the point of feeling guilty, of how little I worked in relation to her. I could get away with three or four hours a day at the computer, five days a week, and live in reasonable comfort from my output of one novel and a few stories and articles every year. By contrast Mina worked long, gruelling shifts, looked after her two girls for three and a half days a week, and kept up with the daily household chores. When I met her she was renting a two-bedroom terrace house, which ate up most of her wage, and yet I never heard her complain. She had just walked out on a disastrous marriage that had lasted a little over eight years, and she was too thankful for her new-found freedom to worry about things like poverty and overwork.
Her practical attitude to life amazed me—me, who found it hard to manage my bank balance, who found the mundane chores of daily life too much of a distraction...
She once accused me of having it too easy, of never having to face real hardship, and I had to agree that she was right.
There were times, though, when her pragmatism did her a disservice. She often failed to appreciate the truly wondrous in life: she fought shy of my romanticism as if it were a disease. She could be cutting about my flights of fancy, my wild speculations about life on other worlds, the possibilities of the future. On these occasions she would stare at me, a frown twisting her features, and then give her head that quick irritable, bird-like shake. "But what does all that matter!" she would say—as if all that did matter was a strict and limiting adherence to the banality of the everyday. She had gone through a lot: she was content with her present, when compared to her past. She feared, I thought, the uncertainty of the future.
We never argued about our differences, though. I loved her too much to risk creating a rift.
"Daniel," she said, her sudden sharp tone causing me to flinch. "You're miles away. You haven't been listening to a word... I might as well be talking to myself!"
"I was thinking about a dream I had last night."
Why did I say this? I knew that she hated hearing about my dreams. She didn't dream herself, or if she did then she failed to recall them. It was as if the evidence of my over-active sleeping imagination was something that she could not understand, or therefore control.
I had dreamed of meeting a fellow writer in an ancient library filled with mouldering tomes. I had gestured around us, implying without words the insignificance of our efforts to add our slight fictions to the vast collection.
The writer had smiled, his face thin, hair gun-metal grey—a weathered and experienced face. He replied that the very act of imagining, of creating worlds that had never existed, was the true measure of our humanity.
The dream had ended there, faded from my memory even though I retained the subtle, nagging impression that our conversation had continued. Even stranger was the fact that, when I awoke, I was filled with the notion that my partner in the library had been Vaughan Edwards.
More than anything I wanted to recount my dream to Mina, but I was too wary of her scepticism. I wanted to tell her that to create worlds that had never existed was the true measure of our humanity.
~
I frequently feel the need to lie about my profession. When people ask what I do, I want to answer anything but that I am a freelance writer. I am sick and tired of repeating the same old clichés in response to the same old questions. When I told Mina this, she was horrified, appalled that I should lie about what I do. Perhaps it's because Mina is so sparing with the details of her personal life that she feels the few she does divulge must be truthful, and cannot imagine anyone else thinking otherwise.
From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.
~
We parked on the outskirts and walked across the Museum Street bridge and into the city centre. Even on a freezing winter Thursday the narrow streets were packed with tourists, those latter-day disciples of commerce: mainly diminutive, flat-footed Japanese with their incorrigible smiles and impeccable manners. We took in one bookshop before lunch, an expensive antiquarian dealer situated along Petergate. Mina lost herself in the classics section, while I scanned the packed shelves for those forgotten fabulists of the forties, fifties and sixties, De Polnay and Wellard, Standish and Robin Maugham, minor writers who, despite infelicities, spoke to something in my soul. They were absent from the shelves of this exclusive establishment—their third-rate novels neither sufficiently ancient, nor collectable enough, to warrant stocking.
Mina bought a volume of Jane Austen's letters, I an early edition of Poe. We emerged into the ice-cold air and hurried to our favourite tea-room.
Was it a failing in me that I preferred to have Mina to myself—the jealous lover, hoarding his treasure? I could never truly appreciate her when in the company of others. I was always conscious of wanting her attention, of wanting to give her my full attention, without being observed.
One to one we would chat about nothing in particular, the people we knew in town, friends, incidents that had made the news. That day she asked me how the book was going, and I tried to keep the weariness from my tone as I recounted the novelisation's hackneyed storyline.
Early in our relationship I had told her that my writing was just another job, something I did to keep the wolf from the door. I had been writing for almost twenty-five years, and though the act of creating still struck me as edifying and worthwhile, it no longer possessed the thrill I recalled from the first five years. She had said that I must be proud of what I did, and I replied that pride was the last thing I felt.
She had looked at me with that cool, assessing gaze of hers, and said, "Well, I'm proud of you."
Now I ate my salad sandwich and fielded her questions about my next serious novel.
How could I tell her that, for the time being, I had shelved plans for the next book, the yearly novel that would appear under my own name? The last one had sold poorly; my editor had refused to offer an advance for another. My agent had found some hackwork to tide me over, and I had put off thinking about the next Daniel Ellis novel.
I changed the subject, asked her about her sister, Liz, and for the next fifteen minutes lost myself in contemplation of her face: square, large-eyed, attractive in that worn, mid-thirties way that signals experience with fine lines about the eyes. The face of the woman I loved.
We left the tea-room and ambled through the cobbled streets towards the Minster. She took my arm, smiling at the Christmas window displays on either hand.
Then she stopped and tugged at me. "Daniel, look. I don't recall..."
It was a second-hand bookshop crammed into the interstice between a gift shop and an establishment selling a thousand types of tea. The lighted window displayed a promising selection of old first editions. Mina was already dragging me inside.
The interior of the premises opened up like an optical illusion, belying the parsimonious dimensions of its frontage. It diminished in perspective like a tunnel, and narrow wooden stairs gave access to further floors.
Mina was soon chatting to the proprietor, an owl-faced, bespectacled man in his seventies. "We moved in just last week," he was saying. "Had a place beyond the Minster—too quiet. You're looking for the Victorians? You'll find them in the first room on the second floor."
I followed her up the precipitous staircase, itself made even narrower by shelves of books on everything from angling to bee-keeping, gardening to rambling.
Mina laughed to herself on entering the well-stocked room and turned to me with the conspiratorial grin of the fellow bibliophile. While she lost herself in awed contemplation of the treasures in stock, I saw a sign above a door leading to a second room: Twentieth Century Fiction.
I stepped through, as excited as a boy given the run of a toyshop on Christmas Eve.
The room was packed from floor to ceiling with several thousand volumes. At a glance I knew that many dated from the thirties and forties: the tell-tale blanched pink spines of Hutchinson editions, the pen and ink illustrated dust-jackets so popular at the time. The room had about it an air of neglect, the junk room where musty volumes were put out to pasture before the ultimate indignity of the council skip.
I found a Robert Nathan for one pound, a Wellard I did not posses for £1.50. I remembered Vaughan Edwards, and moved with anticipation to the E section. There were plenty of Es, but no Edwards.
I moved on, disappointed, but still excited by the possibility of more treasures to be found. I was scanning the shelves for Rupert Croft-Cooke when Mina called out from the next room, "Daniel. Here."
She had a stack of thick volumes piled beside her on the bare floorboards, and was holding out a book to me. "Look."
I expected some title she had been looking out for, but the book was certainly not Victorian. It had the modern, maroon boards of something published in the fifties.
"Isn't he the writer you mentioned the other week?"
I read the spine. A Bitter Recollection—Vaughan Edwards.
I opened the book, taking in the publishing details, the full-masted galleon symbol of the publisher, Longmans, Green and Company. It was his fourth novel, published in 1958.
I read the opening paragraph, and something clicked. I knew I had stumbled across a like soul.
An overnight frost had sealed the ploughed fields like so much stiffened corduroy, and in the distance, mist shrouded and remote, stood the village of Low Dearing. William Barnes, stepping from the second-class carriage onto the empty platform, knew at once that this was the place.
"Where did you find it?" I asked, hoping that there might be others by the author.
She laughed. "Where do you think? Where it belongs, on the 50p shelf."
She indicated a free-standing bookcase crammed with a miscellaneous selection of oddments, warped hardbacks, torn paperbacks, pamphlets and knitting patterns. There were no other books by Vaughan Edwards.
I lay my books upon her pile on the floor and took Mina in my arms. She stiffened, looking around to ensure we were quite alone: for whatever reasons, she found it difficult to show affection when we might be observed.
We made our way carefully down the stairs and paid for our purchases. I indicated the Edwards and asked the proprietor if he had any others by the same author.
He took the book and squinted at the spine. "Sorry, but if you'd like to leave your name and address..."
I did so, knowing that it would come to nothing.
We left the shop and walked back to the car, hand in hand. We drove back through the rapidly falling winter twilight, the traffic sparse on the already frost-scintillating B-roads. The gritters would be out tonight, and the thought of the cold spell gripping the land filled me with gratitude that soon I would be home, before the fire, with my purchases.
For no apparent reason, Mina lay a hand on my leg as I drove, and closed her eyes.
I appreciated her spontaneous displays of affection all the more because they were so rare and arbitrary. Sometimes the touch of her hand in mine, when she had taken it without being prompted, was like a jolt of electricity.
The moon was full, shedding a magnesium light across the fields around the cottage. As I was about to turn into the drive, the thrilling, bush-tailed shape of a fox slid across the metalled road before the car, stopped briefly to stare into the headlights, then flowed off again and disappeared into the hedge.
~
Through focusing minutely on the inner lives of his characters, Vaughan Edwards manages to create stories of profound honesty and humanity...
From D.L. Shackleton's review of The Tall Ghost and other stories by Vaughan Edwards.
~
I began A Bitter Recollection that night after dinner, and finished it in the early hours, emerging from the novel with surprise that so many hours had passed. It was the first time in years that I had finished a novel in one sitting, and I closed the book with a kind of breathless exultation. It was not the finest book I had ever read—the prose was too fastidious in places, and the plotting left much to be desired—but it was one of the most emotionally honest pieces of fiction I had ever come across. It swept me up and carried me along with its tortured portrayal of the central character, William Barnes, and his quest to find his missing lover. There was a magical quality to the book, an elegiac yearning for halcyon days, a time when things were better—and at the same time the novel was informed with the tragic awareness that all such desire is illusory. Barnes never found his lover—I suspected that he was an unreliable narrator, and that Isabella never really existed, was merely an extended metaphor for that harrowing sense of loss we all carry with us without really knowing why.
I was moved to tears by the novel, and wanted more.
I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops up and down the country, and logged onto the Websites of book-finders on the Internet, requesting the eleven novels I had yet to read, and his two collections.
Mina read the book, at my request. I was eager for her opinion, would even watch her while she read the novel, trying to gauge how she was enjoying it. She finished the book in three days, shrugged when I asked her what she thought of it, and said, "It lacked something."
I stared at her. "Is that all? What do you mean? What did it lack?"
She frowned, pulled me onto the sofa and stroked my hair, her eyes a million miles away. "I don't know... I mean, it had no story. Nothing happened. It lacked drama."
"The drama was internalised in Barnes," I began.
"Perhaps that was the problem. I couldn't identify with him. I couldn't even feel sympathy for him and his search for Isabella."
"I don't think Isabella existed," I said.
She blinked at me. "She didn't?"
"She might have been a metaphor for loss."
Mina shook her head, exasperated. "No wonder I couldn't engage with the thing," she said. "If Isabella didn't exist, then it was even emptier than I first thought. It was about nothing..."
"Nothing but loss," I said.
She smiled at me. "You liked it, didn't you?"
"I loved it."
She shook her head, as if in wonder. "Sometimes, Daniel, I want to see inside your head, try to understand what you're thinking, but sometimes that frightens me."
~
Today I met a wonderful woman, Mina Pratt. "I wasn't born a Pratt," she told me, "I just married one." She is 36, divorced, has two children. We met in the Fleece and talked for an hour about nothing but the novels we were reading. I was instantly attracted to her. She's practical, down-to-earth, level-headed—all the things I'm not. I told her I was a writer, and cursed myself in case she thought I was trying to impress her.
From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.
~
Christmas came and went.
It was Mina's turn to have the girls for that year's festivities. Her parents came over from Leeds and the house was full, for the first time in ages, with goodwill and glad tidings. I disliked Christmas—the occasion struck me as tawdry and cheap, an excuse to party when no excuse was really needed, a time of sanctimonious bonhomie towards our fellow man, and the rest of the year be damned. I withheld my humbug from Mina. She loved Christmas day, the glitz and the cosiness, the present giving... It was a paradox, I know. She, the hard-hearted pragmatist, and me the romantic. I could take the romantic ideal of Yule, but not the actuality, while Mina enjoyed the occasion quite simply for what it was, a chance for the family to get together, enjoy good food and a classic film on TV.
The period following Christmas, and the even sadder occasion of New Year, strikes me as the nadir of the year. Spring is a distant promise, winter a grey, bitter cold reality: if the calendar were to be rendered as an abstract visualisation, then January and February would be coloured black.
The new year was brightened, on the second Saturday of January, by the unexpected arrival of a brown cardboard package. Mina was on an early shift, and the girls—Sam and Tessa, eight and six respectively—were filling in a colouring book at the kitchen table. I tended to keep in the background on the days when Mina had the girls; even after a year, and even though it was my house, I felt as though I were trespassing on emotional territory not rightfully mine. On the rare occasions when I was alone with the girls, I would give them pens and paper, or put a video on TV, and leave them to their own devices.
I carried the package to my study at the top of the house, attempting to divine from the postmark some idea of its content. The package came from York.
Intrigued, still not guessing, I ripped it open.
Books, and books, moreover, by Vaughan Edwards: his first and third novels, Winter at the Castle and A Brighter Light. They were in good condition, complete with pristine dust jackets. They looked as though they had never been read, though the passage of years had discoloured the pages to a sepia hue, and foxed the end-papers. A bargain at five pounds each, including postage and packing.
The back flap of the jackets each gave the same brief, potted biography: Vaughan Edwards was born in Dorset in 1930. After National Service in the RAF, he taught for five years at a public school in Gloucestershire. He is now a full-time writer and lives in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale.
These terse contractions of an individual's life filled me with sadness, especially those from years ago. I always read them in the knowledge that the life described was now no more, or was at least much altered in circumstance. I thought of Vaughan Edwards in the RAF, then teaching, and then living the writer's life in Highdale... before the tragedy of his disappearance.
Highdale was a small village situated thirty miles from Skipton on the North Yorkshire moors. It occurred to me that Edwards might still have been living there at the time of his disappearance, six years ago.
I rationed myself, over the course of the following bitter cold days, to just three hours a night with the novels of Vaughan Edwards. While Mina curled in her chair and reread the Brontës, I lay on the sofa and slowly immersed myself in the singular world of the vanished novelist. I began with his first novel, Winter at the Castle, a strange story of a group of lonely and embittered individuals who find themselves invited for a month to the remote Northumbrian castle of a reclusive landowner. That the recluse never appears to the guests, nor in the novel, came as no surprise. There was no explanation as to why they might have been invited to the castle. There was little action, but much introspection, as the characters met, interacted, and discussed their respective lives—and then left to resume their places in a century that hardly suited them... I refrained from asking Mina what she might make of this one.
His third novel, A Brighter Light, was a monologue from the viewpoint of a young girl imprisoned in an oak tree, her recollections of her early life, and how her essence had become one with the oak. She befriended, through a form of telepathy, a young novelist who moved into the cottage where the tree grew. The book ends ambiguously; there is a hint that the man joins the girl's spirit in the tree, and also that the monologue might have been a fictional work by the young writer.
Unpromising subject matter, I had to admit that. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novels would just not work. But something in Vaughan Edward's mature handling of his characters' emotions, their honestly wrought inner lives, lifted the books from the level of turgid emotionalism and invested them with art.
I finished A Brighter Light and laid it aside, my heart hammering.
Mina smiled across at me. "Good?"
"Amazing."
"I'll believe you," she laughed.
Like all great art, which I believed these books to be, they had the effect of making me look anew at my life and the world around me; it was as if I saw Mina for the first time, was able now, with perceptions honed by Edwards' insight, to discern her essence, the bright light that burned at the core of her being. I felt then an overwhelming surge of love for this woman, and at the same time I was cut through with sadness like a physical pain.
Early in our relationship, she had told me that she did not love me, and that, "I can't bring myself to feel love for anyone, other than the girls."
I accepted this, rationalised that perhaps in time she might come to appreciate me, might even one day bring herself to love me.
I had asked her if she was unable to feel love because she had invested so much in her husband, only for that investment to turn sour. Perhaps she was afraid, I suggested, to risk giving love again, for fear of being hurt a second time. She denied this, said that she could not explain her inability to love me. I told myself that she was either deluding herself, or lying. Perhaps she was lying to save my feelings; perhaps she was capable of love, but I was not the right person. In the early days I was torn by the pain of what I saw as rejection... and yet she remained with me, gave a passable impression of, if not love, then a deep affection, and I refrained from quizzing her as to the state of her heart, and learned to live from day to day.
"Mina," I said now. "I love you."
She sighed and closed her eyes, and then snapped them open and stared at me. "Daniel, I wish you wouldn't..." Her plea was heartfelt.
"Sorry. Had to tell you. Sorry if that disturbs you. You know, most women like to be told that they're loved."
"Well, I'm not most women-"
"I'm not going to leave you, Mina. You can tell me that you love me, and I won't walk out, hurt you again-"
"Oh, Christ!" She sat up and stared across at me. "Why do you have to analyse? Why now? Everything's been fine, hasn't it? I'm here, with you. What more do you want?"
What more did I want?
Perhaps it was possessive of me to demand her love when I had everything else she could give me? Perhaps she was simply being honest when she admitted that she could not extend to me something that she claimed she no longer believed in. Perhaps I was an insecure, thoughtless bastard for demanding that she should open her heart.
"I'm sorry. I just wanted you to know."
She sat and stared at me, as if at a wounded animal. In a small voice she said, "I know, Daniel. I know."
~
Mina's professed inability to feel love for me can only be a reaction to what she went through with her husband. She denies this—but is this denial her way of not admitting me past her defences, of not allowing me a glimpse of her true feelings and emotions?
From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.
~
The following week I received an e-mail from a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, informing me that they had located three novels by Vaughan Edwards. I sent a cheque and the books arrived a few days later.
One of the novels was his very last, The Secret of Rising Dene, published shortly after his disappearance. The biographical details made no reference to the fact that he had vanished, but did give the interesting information that, in '96, he was still living in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale.
That weekend I suggested a drive up into the Dales. I told Mina that I wanted to visit Highdale, where Edwards had lived. After the spat the previous week, things had been fine between us. She made no mention of my interrogative faux pas, and I did my best not to rile her with further questions.
"Highdale? Don't we go through Settle to get there? There's that wonderful Thai place on the way."
"Okay, we'll call in on the way back. How's that?"
She laughed at me. "I hope you don't expect Highdale to be a shrine to your literary hero," she said. "He wasn't quite in the same league as the Brontës-"
"Then let's hope that Highdale isn't as trashily commercialised as Haworth, okay?"
Deuce.
She elbowed me in the ribs.