So what with packing, and hanging out with my family, and eating lots of good food, not much novelling got done today at all. -facepalm- I don’t know how much I can do on holiday, so I’m just going to write as much as I can, but not pressurise myself too much to finish it before December 1 (I am, first and foremost, on vacation). Finishing the 50,000 words is a bigger goal for me at the moment than the timeline… so no matter what, I will get there! Even if I have to eat a little into December.

In the meantime, some last excerpts before I take off tomorrow morning for 10 days! And good long hefty ones too to make up for the lack of posting lately.

Thursday, 2 October 1851, 9am
Outside the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park

J. Alfred Prufrock was standing in a queue of people.

It was a bizarre and quite foreign sensation to him. He was not accustomed to queueing. He was accustomed to frequenting establishments where, by some magical means, there was always someone free and available to attend to his requests immediately, where he was never kept waiting, where the service provided was swift and unerringly polite, where they knew his name and the name of his brother and his father and his mother and quite possibly his grandfather and grandmother too, and where there was never, ever a suffocating crowd of people. His tailor, for instance, or his shoemaker, or his favourite shop of curios and antiques from the Far East. Every single one of them discreet, subtle and understated, every single one comfortably familiar. He knew he was safe in these places.

He was not so sure he was safe here. Already in the morning he had been accosted and robbed by a boy in rags. All around him were men and women who appeared like nothing so much as grown-up versions of the boy in rags, perhaps a little better attired, now with jobs in factories perhaps that kept them off the streets and went some way towards remanding their thieving habits, but they all still seemed very rough to him indeed with their coarse language and badly-cut clothes. He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot in his waterproof leather boots. He felt out of place. Only the reassuring presences of John and Charlotte, chatting blithely to each other beside him, kept him from leaving in search of refuge in a tea room where the ladies wore pristine, starched white aprons and served you cream tea on silver trays. A pang of guilt tore through him. He was not being charitable in the least to this mass of great unwashed folk. He was letting his painfully inescapable upper-crust landed gentry breeding show, as he always did; no matter how much he tried to shake it off, it followed him around like a shadow clinging to his skin.

But he did feel so very displaced and uncomfortable.

[...]

They were now approaching the front of the queue. J. Alfred Prufrock was much relieved. He did not like to stand in the rain for too long. Already he felt he might have a chill coming on. He pulled out his monogrammed handkerchief, and discreetly sneezed into it.

“Three tickets, please, my good lad,” said John to the attendant in the pageboy cap at the ticket booth, as they came to the front.

“Right you are, sir. That will be five shillings each,” said the young man, ripping three tickets off his ticket-sheet and handing them over. J. Alfred Prufrock took five shillings out of his mercifully recovered wallet and placed it on the table as John set down ten shillings, taking the tickets and passing one over to J. Alfred Prufrock. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, he read. ADMIT ONE. He noticed that there was a subtle silhouette of the Crystal Palace imprinted in the background of the ticket paper. He was very impressed by the advancements that had been made in printing-press technology recently. He so rarely read anything beyond the printed word in newspapers, books and journals that he had not been paying attention to the progress made in printing pictures.

“Charlotte has been looking forward to this for many days now,” said John, laughing gently and glancing over at his wife as he snapped his umbrella closed. They were now under a hastily erected makeshift shelter of canvas and poles as they approached the door of the Crystal Palace. “She is in ecstasies at the prospect of seeing the silks, fabrics, fans and jewellery from India and China.”

“John!” said Charlotte scoldingly. “You make my head sound quite empty indeed. Prufrock shall think that I am nothing but an ignorant young girl whose only interest in life is foolish, frilly fancies. Next you will be saying that I have been eating nothing but bonbons and cake for the past week in my excitement.”

“I would never think you were an ignorant young girl, my dear Mrs Harman,” said J. Alfred Prufrock politely as they entered the Crystal Palace.

“How many times, Prufrock, must I tell you to call me Charlotte?” She smiled kindly at him.

“A few more times perhaps, Mrs Harman, or as many times as necessary till I have corrected my errant ways,” said J. Alfred Prufrock, returning her smile with a bashful one of his own.

“Prufrock is never errant,” said John, clapping him on the shoulder. “He is the mildest, most un-errant man of my acquaintance. I daresay you are far more infuriated with your wayward husband, my love, and his tendency to leave the books in the library strewn across the table and stay out late at the club, than you could ever be with any offense of Prufrock’s!”

Charlotte laughed. “You are quite right, of course, although I do not think you should be quite so thrilled with the fact!”

“Let us leave off bickering for now, my Charlotte,” said John, smiling warmly at her and gallantly taking her umbrella from her hand. “For the wonders of the British Empire await us.”

And wonders they were, indeed. J. Alfred Prufrock could barely take it all in as he gazed upon the panorama before him in awe; he did not know where to begin. As far as the eye could see there were sights and marvels to titillate the senses, to inspire and educate, incredible machines which cranked and creaked and steamed and emitted a great deal of noise, colourful curios from the far corners of the world where Queen Victoria reigned, beautiful and exotic works of art and scultpure. All this in addition to a formidable throng of folk from London and abroad, mingling with any number of over-excited exhibitors displaying their inventions and the latest, greatest innovations in engineering, some standing on chairs, some waving their hats and pocket handkerchiefs about to draw an eager, fickle crowd’s attention, all shouting at the top of their voices. All this, thought J. Alfred Prufrock, housed within what was in itself one of the great wonders of British industry – the magnificent Crystal Palace, with its high ceiling and glass and iron vaulted transept roof, and the shafts of sunlight, now peeking out from behind gloomy rainclouds, pouring into the interior of the Palace to light it up in a most breath-taking fashion indeed.

Like many of the British public, he had been sceptical of the Palace and of the Exhibition, thinking it a waste of funds from the government coffers and a most evident attempt to replicate the Exhibition in Paris. Britain, J. Alfred Prufrock and many of his peers had thought, could do a great deal better than to follow in France’s footsteps. Although polite in public, as always, he had even been a little inclined to laugh at the notion in the privacy of closed doors and his sitting room. But it had succeeded beyond even the wildest dreams of Prince Consort Albert. It drew crowds of 50,000 daily. It was Britain’s first public spectacle of this scale, first truly public spectacle of any scale, open to all and sundry. And all and sundry and their wives had descended upon Hyde Park that day.

They were silent as they began to stroll through the Exhibition, John casting an appreciative eye over the panoply of objects on display, Charlotte wide-eyed in wonder. There seemed to be no real order in the way exhibitions were placed, which only increased their eclecticism; here, a marble statue of Satan tempting Adam and Eve sat beside a dresser drawer of handsome dark mahogany wood with grape-vine embellishments, there, lengths of Dacca Muslins and elaborately embroidered scarfs and shawls from India and the Far East were proudly displayed side by side with a peculiar-looking steam-powered device of unknown purpose, the man standing in front of it gesticulating wildly and pushing or pulling an assortment of buttons and cranks as he demonstrated its use to a small group of onlookers.

“Let us go to the Indian Pavilion,” said Charlotte, with a small tug on John’s arm. “As John has so unkindly announced, I have been quite eager to see the latest fabrics from the East.”

“I am never unkind,” said John grandly. “Misbehaving and incorrigible, perhaps, but never unkind, my dear Charlotte.”

J. Alfred Prufrock felt that, all things considered, he was generally in agreement with that declaration.

They wandered down the hallways slowly, pausing every now and then to admire noteworthy exhibits and exclaim at something that had caught their eye. J. Alfred Prufrock found himself very moved indeed by Hiram Powers’ famous statue of The Greek Slave which depicted a pensive woman bound in chains; he could not take his eyes from it for a good while, and found that he was not alone in this, for a large crowd of excited folk were constantly gathered round the statue. Yet it seemed to him from their excited tittering and pointing that many of them were far more interested in its fame and its status than in the art itself; it had been in the newspapers, therefore, it was worth looking at. J. Alfred Prufrock had the uncomfortable suspicion that had it been the most hideous sculpture in the world with no beauty or artistic merit to it whatsoever, so long as a daguerreotype or a facsimile illustration of it had appeared in the penny papers praising it, there would still have been a most excitable crowd round it, simply content in the knowledge that they were in the presence of something that had appeared in the London news. He supposed this was no bad thing in itself. If the papers served their function of bringing great works of art and industry to public attention, that was well and good; the interests of the readership were being looked after, they were being educated and improved by their perusal of the papers, and it would be a penny well spent. He tried to justify it in his mind in this manner. He understood his own arguments, and felt they were both logical and benevolent. But they did little to rid himself of the discomfort and disappointment he felt with the people jostling for a view of The Greek Slave, and he could not help wondering in his mind if there was really so little merit to The Greek Slave that it could only be appreciated by a large number of common men (and women) if it appeared in the papers. He thought it was very beautiful. It captivated him utterly.

[...]

Art should be shared. Perhaps Charlotte was right, after all, though he had felt at first that he was inclined to agree with John, he felt shamefully compelled to admit that the rare paintings, still lifes, portraits and fine sculptures of marble and granite in the Prufrocks’ private collection, tucked away in a room in their estate, had not brought very much joy to anyone of late. His late father had been a great collector of artworks, hoarding them as a miser hoards his gold, in the belief that they would be a source of solace and happiness to him; Simon, no connoisseur of art by any stretch of the human imagination, had not shared this thinking and had ceased the habit since coming into the inheritance, but neither had he released the collection back into the public domain. It had simply stayed in that curtained off room with the carefully controlled lighting, occasionally dusted off to show to visitors who came for teas, luncheons, suppers and balls, but mostly dormant and silent. J. Alfred Prufrock enjoyed art a great deal more than Simon did. He had spent many hours of his childhood in that room alone, gingerly brushing his fingertips across smooth cold marble, staring up and the bold brushstrokes that defined an apple, a table, or even a man with a horse. Yet that was the crux of the matter. He had always been alone in there. He had had no one else.

“Look,” said Charlotte, pointing into the distance. “There is John, waving us over.”

J. Alfred Prufrock peered in the direction she was pointing, trying to pick out John from the crowd, and finally spotted him by means of the two umbrellas he was holding. He was indeed waving at them and motioning for them to go over where he stood. Charlotte touched his arm gently. “Come, let us go then,” she said.

J. Alfred Prufrock felt an odd, uncertain, guilt-ridden tingle run up that arm suddenly. He twitched involuntarily, almost as if to shake it off. He was not sure what it meant. He – no, no, that was disingenuous altogether! And J. Alfred Prufrock could not bear to be disingenuous to himself in his own mind, even if he was shamefully disingenuous in so many other aspects of his waking life. He was always painfully honest, in dreams and in sleep. Sometimes he wished it were not so. It made his nights so restless, so uncomfortable that he felt he could never look forward to retiring to bed.

“John seems rather excitable,” said Charlotte. “I wonder what he has seen?” She took her hand off his arm, leading the way over to John, and he felt the feeling subside somewhat. It had been little more than a passing, fleeting fancy, it had been the imaginings of an over-stimulated mind. He gazed wistfully, wordlessly, at Charlotte’s departing form, an old familiar feeling of resignation welling up inside him. He had not been honest at all with himself earlier. He knew exactly what that sensation had meant. It had not changed at all since he had first felt it so many years ago. He was -

No! He could not say it, not even in his mind. Saying it would be admitting the fact, giving it voice, making it something real he had to face and to deal with. He could not deal with it. He was too much of a coward, too spineless and weak. He had always been. He was not half the man that John Harman was. Some days, he was not even sure if he was worth the ground that John Harman walked on. He was really not very much at all. He was good, mild, inoffensive Prufrock, always in the background, nameless and faceless.

He did not like this feleing at all, of pitying and feeling sorry for himself. He stuffed his hands in his pockets awkwardly and followed Charlotte as she made her way towards John. He tried to smile and mean it, and for a brief, glorious moment, he succeeded. Here he was, surrounded by all the marvels of their age within man’s imagination, and even more beyond his wildest dreams. He was here with one of his best friends and his lovely wife, and he could not think of anyone else he would rather view this magnificent Exhibition with. He was glad, at least, that he had not had to come alone. That might have been far worse than this. It was not a pleasant sensation to be alone and adrift among a crowd of thousands, and to have no ready companion with whom he could share his thoughts and feelings on the amazing curiosities they had the good fortune to bear witness to. He supposed this was what Charlotte had meant about art. Experiences needed to be shared, or, he thought with a sudden wave of panic, he may well have simply dreamed it all in his bed; it was no very little matter at all to have another there to affirm the reality and veracity of what one was seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, thinking. Talking about the fact afterwords simply did not do at all. It was not the same. It did the experience no justice. He could not put into words The Greek Slave, and he would have struggled quite mightily indeed, had he been asked to describe it afterwards. There was a statue. It was of a young Greek woman, loosely enrobed in a flowing fabric, her arms and legs bound in chains. She looked most forlorn. The marble was very smooth. No! It did not do, at all! These were words describing The Greek Slave. But they were not The Greek Slave. It defied description, as did so many other things in the Crystal Palace on this day.

“Look who I encountered while viewing some excellent landscape paintings of the East,” said John, smiling warmly in turn at the two women by his side, and at Charlotte and J. Alfred Prufrock as they approached. One of the women, dressed in a delicate baby blue frock trimmed with lace and a bonnet on a blonde ringlets, waved at Charlotte in excitement. J. Alfred Prufrock’s gaze flicked briefly over to Charlotte. Her eyes had lit up, and she was beginning to hasten forward to the other lady in a great, eager hurry.

“Lorina!” she called out, embracing the other lady as she drew close to her.

“Charlotte! What a surprise! It is so good to see you, of course, and what a great coincidence indeed!” said the other woman – Lorina – returning the embrace with one of her own, and kissing Charlotte once on each cheek.

J. Alfred Prufrock looked askance at John in puzzlement, feeling that he was missing something quite entirely here, and a little – just a very tiny bit – disoriented, and anguished at his disorientation. John’s smile widened as Charlotte let go of the other woman to hold her at arm’s length and look her up and down, remarking on what a healthy glow she had taken on. “Lorina is Charlotte’s sister,” he said to J. Alfred Prufrock, by way of explanation.

“Oh! How unforgiveably rude of me!” cried Charlotte, turning to J. Alfred Prufrock as if she had just remembered that he, too, was there. “Please excuse my sudden loss of manners, my good Prufrock. I quite lost myself with excitement there!”

J. Alfred Prufrock inclined his head in what he hoped was a gallant, dashing and forgiving manner, though he was only conscious of the fact that it drew attention to the bald spot growing in the middle of his hair. “No offence taken at all, Mrs Harman.”

“And once again, I must remind you to call me Charlotte,” she scolded gently. “Lorina, this is Mr Prufrock, a great friend of John’s from Cambridge. They were in the rowing team together, were you not? And in their final year, the Trinity rowing team finally beat Corpus Christi for the title after a five-year drought!”

“John was a most excellent captain,” said Prufrock, nodding. “I merely took his lead.”

“You will soon find, Lorina, that Prufrock is possessed of such qualities of meekness and humility that he would not be too out of place amid a cloister of nuns! He is quite impossible sometimes, and I do believe completely blind to his own good qualities.” Charlotte laughed, kindly. “Prufrock, this is my younger sister Lorina.”

Lorina held her hand out to J. Alfred Prufrock. He bent down to kiss it lightly, feeling awkward about his bald patch once again, and she curtseyed. “It is good to meet you, Mr Prufrock.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Miss Johnson,” he said, straightening up.

“Did you ever see a memory such as that?” asked Charlotte in admiration. “He remembers my family name from before marriage, still!”

J. Alfred Prufrock fidgeted and bit his lip. He had not meant to let slip any sign of how much he cared, and remembered, where Charlotte was concerned. He did not know what to say in response. He simply smiled awkwardly, and turned to Lorina. “Do you live in London as well, Miss Johnson?”

“I live in Sussex, out in the country,” said Lorina.

“I have not seen Lorina in a good few weeks,” said Charlotte, “and certainly I did not expect at all to meet her in London without having had some advance word from her of her impending visit! For shame, Lorina.” She turned to gaze accusingly at her sister, a playful, chiding smile upon the corners of her lips.

Lorina looked very slightly abashed. “I am sorry, Charlotte. I had not planned this trip in advance at all. It was all Edith’s idea.” She gestured to the woman beside her, who had been silently ovserving the exchanges thus far with a polite, shy smile on her pink round face. She was taller and more stately in build and stature than either Lorina or Charlotte, but seemed a little more timid, pale hands clutching tightly at her white silk handbag.

[...]

“I have heard much of you from Charlotte,” said Lorina. J. Alfred Prufrock turned to her, and noticed, suddenly, Charlotte’s face in hers, so alike, but with differently coloured eyes (Lorina’s were green where Charlotte’s were blue) and slightly higher cheekbones. It disconcerted him a little. “She speaks so often of you,” Lorina went on, oblivious to J. Alfred Prufrock’s slowly growing distress. “It is such a privilege to finally meet you!”

J. Alfred Prufrock was utterly racked with anxiety. A million questions seemed to flood his mind. He could not give voice to all of them. He felt he might go mad. Charlotte? Charlotte had spoken of him to her sister? Had she spoken of him to the rest of her family? And why, why had she done so? When? What had she said of him? His mind raced beyond all his control. He felt himself clinging on lamely, desperately, to the last vestiges of his reason, or what little of it remained where Charlotte was concerned. He was so nervous his palms were beginning to sweat in a most unbecoming fashion, and he found himself privately grateful that there had not been a gentleman with Lorina and Edith, or he would most certainly have embarrassed himself greatly with his grip on the handshake. He could imagine a great number, any number, of things that Charlotte might have said about him. Not all of them were compliments. Even when there were compliments, he could not help thinking she might also have added a remark on his shortcomings, of which there were so many that one as clever as Charlotte simply could not help but take notice. Perhaps she had remarked on the poor cut of his suits or the unoriginality of his tweed coat, which so many other gentlemen in London wore. Perhaps she had made a comment on the thinness of his neck and his arms and legs, so uncharacteristic for a rowing man, so unlike John’s well-built, toned and muscular physique. Perhaps – oh, the thought did not bear thinking! – perhaps she had said in hushed whispers that she had lately noticed the bald patch in the middle of his hair, whenever he removed his hat, and that she could not look at him and take him seriously because of that!

What could Charlotte possibly have said to Lorina, now beaming so beatifically at him, completely unaware of the havoc she had just unleashed within J. Alfred Prufrock’s mind?

In a fit of madness, I decided to make myself stay up as late as I possibly could without my head exploding, and to just keep churning out words without paying much heed to whether they made sense, which has added another 1,000+ to my total!

I’m beginning to think though that, realistically, if I want to go on holiday with my sanity intact, I won’t be able to hit 50K before I leave. I do think I may well be able to handwrite enough to hit 50K on the road, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to upload it before the clock hits midnight Nov 31 and the validation window closes :/

Well – even if I don’t manage to finish in time, or finish in time to be an official winner, it will have been worth it and at least I fought hard. We will see.

So the dreaded days of intercontinental travel came and went, and as suspected, they have royally messed with my ability to write. I feel like I am so close that I have to finish this now or I shall forever be mad with myself, but at the same time… this jetlag is really getting to me.

I managed to handwrite a good amount while travelling, and I haven’t finished typing it all up yet – which is good. I do on the other hand have a grand total of one day left to finish this before heading off on holiday, which… will be very difficult, to say the least, and will probably involve an acute shortage of sleep. But hey. Onwards and upwards. If I can’t finish it, I’ll just handwrite on holiday, and keep my fingers crossed that I manage to type it all up somewhere along the way and upload it before December 1…!

It does actually get easier once you’re past 30,000! It’s not a NaNo myth after all! I’m trying to think of it in blocks of 1,000 words, and considering that there are only 16 more blocks to go, and I can churn out 1,000+ words (or questionable quality, admittedly) in about an hour, give or take, all I need is a few hours a day to sprint to the finish. My computer-less holiday is drawing pressingly close, but… I think it’ll be all right.

Last of the Polly and Eve excerpts for a while. They speak to a bookstore owner, and get some hopefully helpful information.

Excerpt

It did indeed seem very quiet, Eve thought, as she shut the door as gently as she could behind her. She took a few steps down the entryway and turned left into the main bookstore. There was a counter and a cash register as well as an enquiries and reservations desk on opposite ends of the room, but no one attending to either. The rafters were unusually high for a Victorian building, and the bookshelves in the store made full use of this, stretching from floor to ceiling almost. There were sliding ladders at the ends of the shelves and a few footstools lying about. The height of the shelves, and the sheer number of books that fitted on each shelf meant there were less of them to clutter the shop space; as a result the usual display cases and shorter shelves which stood in the middle of a second-hand bookstore such as this were absent, leaving a curiously blank space lit by a single shaft of light streaming through a high, circular window that made the room feel far larger, airier, and decidedly more otherworldly than it actually was.

Everything in the store as far as she could make out was wooden, which, thought Eve, was so obviously a fire hazard and a Health and Safety violation that it probably wasn’t legal. She had a brief but hilarious mental image of an old, doddering man signing the lease to this store, blithely agreeing to whatever safety terms and conditions were on the contract, and then stubbornly building everything out of wood anyway and simply pretending to be hard of hearing every time a Health and Safety Inspector came over. Perhaps they were a bit more lax with Cecil Court. Perhaps some of it was faux wood. She had no idea what faux wood was or would be made of. Acutely conscious of the echoing noises that her footsteps made in the empty store, she walked over to the nearest bookshelf, marked “BIOGRAPHY”, and tapped a shelf experimentally. It was real wood. She began reading the spines of the old, canvas and leather-bound volumes with interest, running her fingers across the rows of books almost absently. The smell and feel of old books stirred up long-forgotten warm feelings and memories within her; had she not become a filmmaker, she thought, she would have loved to work in a store like this.

Polly followed her into the store, and wandered over to a shelf on the next wall, labelled “CONTEMPORARY ART HISTORY”. She pulled down a large book on modern installation art, and began leafing idly through it.

“Is someone there?”

Eve jumped and very nearly dropped the book on Samuel Pepys that she had just begun to pull out. She turned, and saw Polly carefully replace her book on the shelf as she looked round her in confusion. The voice had come from a flight of stairs to her right which she hadn’t noticed was there.

“Erm.” Eve started hesitantly. “Hello…?”

She heard a door shut and footsteps hurry up the stairs. “I’m so sorry. We’re not opened yet – I must have forgotten to lock the door as I came in this morning – entirely my fault, I’m impossibly absent-minded that way – “

Eve tried to hide her surprise at the man who had appeared at the top of the staircase, hand on the parapet and smiling awkwardly at her and Polly. He was far, far younger than she had imagined just a few seconds ago, in his mid-thirties perhaps, with messy sandy brown hair and a rumpled checked shirt half-tucked into a pair of un-ironed grey pinstripe trousers. She noticed with amusement that his socks, in addition to his outfit, did not match.

He’s too young, thought Eve. He must be a shop assistant. He can’t be the owner. “We’re… not exactly book shopping. Well, we are looking for some books, but – actually, we had some questions for the owner,” she explained. “We’ll just come back when he – er, or she – is here.”

“You don’t need to come back later. He’s here now.” The man grinned and ran a hand absently through his unkempt hair. He leaned against the banister and crossed his arms, glancing from her to Polly questioningly. “Mike Morris, at your service. How can I help?”

Well, that was embarrassing. Eve found herself in the unpleasant position of having been thrown off guard by this man twice within the space of about ten minutes, and felt annoyed for no reason.

Polly had walked up to stand beside her as they spoke. “I’m Polly,” she said. “This is my cousin Eve. We’re looking for some books that used to be in our family, but were sold to the bookstore that was here before yours…”

“Ah,” said Mike Morris, his eyes lighting up in comprehension. “So now you want them back, do you? I have to warn you, once a second-hand bookstore owner gets their hands on rare books, we’re very unlikely to want to hand them back without putting up a good fight.”

“We don’t precisely want them back,” said Eve. This venture of theirs sounded more and more ridiculous, the more she talked about it. “We’re looking for some information, and we think it might be in the books that were sold. We just want to look at them.”

“Hmmm. I have some of the books from the lady who was here before me,” said Mike. He turned back towards the staircase, and waved for Eve and Polly to follow him. “Come this way.”

Eve tentatively made her way down the creaking spiral stairs behind Mike, Polly following her. He led them into a small back room in the store basement filled with an assortment of sealed cardboard boxes. One was open, and a quick peek inside revealed, to Eve’s complete lack of surprise, that they were crammed with books of varying shapes and sizes. There was an old computer set up on a rickety desk in the corner. “This is where I keep the books that I haven’t yet catalogued,” said Mike, waving an arm round the room at the boxes. “And here – ” he tapped the computer, and switched it on, ” – is where I keep the catalogue. If you give me a title or two from the books that were sold, I can find out for you if I have them here.”

Eve glanced helplessly at Polly, who looked at her blankly and shrugged. “If you don’t know,” murmured Polly, “I’m not going to have any idea either.”

“Well,” said Eve, awkwardly. “Actually. We don’t know what books were sold.”

Mike, now sitting at the desk and clicking on something on the computer desktop, turned to stare at them. “You’re looking for some books, which have information you need in them, but you don’t know what they are?”

“In a nutshell, yes.” Eve bit her lip. “This is sounding really stupid, isn’t it?”

“Curious, yes,” said Mike. “Intriguing, yes. Stupid, not quite yet. So how did you propose to find these books in the first place if you have no idea what they are?”

“We know the year they were sold,” Polly offered, her gaze flicking over to Eve.

“Yes. Uh…” Eve stared at the ceiling, trying to do some maths very quickly in her head. Her brain stalled. “What’s fourteen years ago? Or maybe it was fifteen.”

“1997 or 1996,” said Polly.

“Yes. That,” Eve finished, looking at Mike hopefully.

He nodded, and turned to type something in. “That might help. Anything else? Surely you didn’t propose to waltz into a bookstore and then look through all the books sold to them in 1996 or 1997, right?”

“Well,” Eve started, then paused uncertainly. “I don’t know if this will help. I mean, I think it’d help the old owner, if she remembers the books she’s bought and where, but I don’t know if it comes up in your catalogue. These books were bought from the auction of the Prufrock estates. I don’t know how many there are, or what sort of books they were…”

“Hmmm. All right, I’ll see if I can find anything. It might come up in the notes on books, and I have a list of books I got from the lady who used to be here, so that narrows it down a little. Have a seat if you like. Or you can head back up to browse the books,” said Mike, turning back to his computer. “How do you spell ‘Prufrock’?”

“P-r-u, plus frock. As in, dress,” said Eve. She felt far too restless and antsy to browse the books upstairs, and felt that she would rather remain here, insofar that she wanted to be here at all; she couldn’t stop thinking of the BFI and the evening. She looked round her for the proffered seats, but could only see upended cardboard boxes propped up against walls in the tiny room. She sat down gingerly on a cardboard box, hoping that it wouldn’t give way under her. It turned out to be surprisingly solid and Eve suspected that there were actually piles of books below. She shifted, trying to perch as lightly as possible on the box.

Polly did the same on a box next to her, and they exchanged glances briefly – Polly’s unreadable, Eve’s fraught with doubt. This is never going to work, thought Eve sceptically. At least I got to see Cecil Court again. Maybe I’ll go to Marchpane’s later and see if they still have the large-print Alice with the big, coloured Tenniel illustrations. But really… I’m surprised this bloke hasn’t thrown us out yet for being an utter waste of time.

She leaned over to peer into the opened box beside her. There were a variety of hardcover books in it, which largely seemed to be, as far as Eve could gather from her quick once-over, books on the topic of flora and fauna of the Americas. Scattered among them were a few odd books on 18th and 19th century psychology in Europe. She resisted the urge to reach for one of them, and fidgeted, twiddling her thumbs. Next to her, Polly sat eerily still, gazing up at the wall across from her and fiddling idly with the end of her braid in her fingers. They sat in silence, punctuated only by the clicking of the keyboard and mouse from Mike’s desk. Eve looked down at her Skechers shoes. There was a hole beginning to form in the ankle of one of her socks. She made a mental note to blackmail Sam into darning it for her somehow, as she was completely incapable of even threading a needle without pricking herself somehow, and was too poor for new socks. Well, I won’t be, if we find this sodding treasure. Dammit, we’d better, now that Little Miss Sunshine has got my hopes up and all. She turned to glance impatiently at Mike, who was taking a leisurely sip from a mug of tea.

After what seemed to Eve like an eternity, Mike turned round and stood up. Eve sprang to her feet, nearly knocking over a precarious pile of books as she did so, and Polly got up more slowly, dusting off the seat of her jeans. “Sorry, ladies,” said Mike, with a rueful shrug. “I don’t think it’s here.”

Eve didn’t feel in the least surprised, but still, irrationally, a part of her was disappointed.

“That’s all right,” said Polly evenly. “We’ll ask the lady who owned the store here before yours, if you have her contact information?”

“That I do. And she did take a load of books away with her, so she might be able to help. Especially if you mention the name Prufrock… it’s quite an unusual name. Nothing else with that name came up on my catalogue,” said Mike. He went over to a filing cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and rummaged through it briefly before pulling out a faxed sheet of paper which he held out to Polly. “Here you go. Keep that, it’s a photocopy, and I have a few of it.”

Polly took the paper and glanced at it briefly, holding it out to Eve for them both to read. It was a receipt for the books Mike had bought, with a residential address in Earl’s Court and a phone number in the top left hand corner. Eve pointed to it, looking up at Mike. “Is this it?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. It was just a couple of years ago, so she’s probably still living there. Look her up. Nice old lady. Makes good scones. Her name’s Sandra, Sandra Langley.”

“You’ve been really, really helpful,” said Eve. “Thank you.”

Mike nodded and smiled. “Not a problem at all. Good luck. I hope you find your books. Family heirlooms?”

“Of a sort,” Eve hedged. “We think there might be something important to the family in one of them.”

“I hope we find them, too,” Polly murmured, so softly and wistfully that Eve could barely hear her.

They walked out of the bookstore, Mike bidding them a cheery farewell at the door where he made sure to hang his “CLOSED” sign up. It was still sunny out, but the breeze had grown stronger while they were indoors, and Eve had pull her scarf out of her bag to wrap round her suddenly cold neck. Polly was putting on a pair of mittens. “Do you know where that place is?” she asked, turning to Eve and handing her the piece of paper still in her hand.

Eve nodded. “Yeah. Earl’s Court, that’s easy. We can get the Piccadilly line all the way there. Boy, I hope this Sandra Langley is still alive.” She shivered slightly as she tied her scarf into a snug knot.

“You are so morbid,” said Polly accusingly.

“What? Don’t tell me you’re not thinking the same thing. If she’s dead, then there goes our only lead. I’m perfectly happy to spend the rest of the day in bed and leave you to be a tourist with your giant tourist map, then.”

“I was not actually thinking the same thing, believe it or not,” said Polly.

I missed an update yesterday! That’s how tired I was after cooking dinner, talking to my dad, doing some packing, clearing my fridge by literally tossing all the bakeable ingredients together into a tray, sticking it into the oven and hoping for the best, and then banging out another 600 words before bed.

Anyway, I haven’t started writing yet this morning, but have an excerpt to make up for yesterday’s lack thereof. I’ll post another after this morning’s writing sprint. Cecil Court is as accurately described as I can glean, from internet research – despite the real thing being a short Tube ride away from me, I have yet to spend a lot of time there, rather shamefully!

Excerpt

“We’re here now, anyway. What do we do?”

“Follow me and don’t get lost. That’d be a start.” Eve led the way out of the station and towards Cecil Court. It was oddly quiet, and she realised she had never seen Leicester Square so early in the morning before, or at least, couldn’t remember if she had – perhaps her parents had brought her here at times like this when she was little, when they holidayed in London during weekends and they queued early at the half-price ticket booths for cheap theatre tickets – but she could barely remember now. Her one overriding memory of those trips was Cecil Court.

“What’s going on at the BFI later?” asked Polly suddenly. Eve nearly fell over a crack in the pavement.

“Why are you asking that?” she retorted, a tad defensively, as she steadied herself.

Polly shrugged. “Your housemate Sam. He said it in the sticky note. ‘Meet you at the BFI at 8.’ That’s your imperative appointment, isn’t it? What’s the BFI, anyway?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re really, really annoying when you’re curious?”

“Not so explicitly,” said Polly, with a small grin.

“The BFI is the British Film Institute,” said Eve, shortly. “And we’re going to watch a movie.”

“Oh. Is that all?” Polly stared quizzically at her. “Then why are you being so secretive about it.”

“I’m not being secretive,” Eve said impatiently, nearly snapping, even though she knew she was being secretive and that it was probably quite silly of her. But still -

Should I tell? she wondered. But then, what if – No. I can’t. I’d die of embarrassment.

“I’m not,” she repeated, sounding, she hoped, more firm about it than she felt. “I just don’t see the need to fill you in on every detail of my schedule, that’s all.”

“Oh. All right, then,” said Polly. She began glancing around her curiously, seeing Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Road, and all the weird, wonderful and varied shops and cafes in the area through, Eve realised, the eyes of someone taking it all in for the first time, and being truly fascinated. Eve envied her the experience. Perhaps the most aggravating thing about that entire exchange, thought Eve, was that Polly didn’t seem in the least annoyed by her reticence, leaving Eve feeling somewhat at a loss for how to respond. It was like Polly had simply dropped a new toy, having been told she could no longer play with it, and wandered off to a new distraction. Somehow, Eve thought as they neared their destination, I don’t think she’ll let it go so easily. She’s just going to keep batting me around like a cat with a ball of yarn till she gets it out of me. Dammit.

She shook her head, as if to rid herself of the idea, and turned into Cecil Court. “Well,” she said, pausing at the corner of the antique shop at the top of the street. “Here we are.”

Polly’s eyes widened. “This is it? Cecil Court?”

Eve nodded. “It’s something else, isn’t it?” she murmured, and all her niggling frustrations faded away gently as she stood at the entrance to the her favourite childhood haunt.

She’d heard it said that Cecil Court was the real Diagon Alley, the place that had inspired its wizarding equivalent. She could believe that. The best word to describe it was magical. Perhaps, thought Eve, that was just the child in her coming back up to the surface, but for her it had lost none of its almost fantastical charm. The street was fully pedestrianised, and as far as the eye could see there stretched a dazzling array of specialist antiquarian bookstores where, Eve genuinely believed, one could probably unearth all the world’s surviving printed material from the 19th century and before if one looked hard enough; everything from historical maps to 16th century folios to stamps and banknotes could be found here, not to mention books, more books than Eve had ever seen in one place in all her life. The Victorian shopfronts were exactly as she remembered them, unaltered for over a century, all with suitably evocative signboards hanging from above their doorways, swinging slightly in the autumn breeze. Scattered in between bookstores were eclectic little shops selling all manner of curios and knickknacks from round the world, and a contemporary art gallery.

“Oh, wow,” Eve breathed. “Marchpane’s is still there.”

“What’s Marchpane’s?” asked Polly, still gazing round her in wonderment.

“It’s a children’s bookstore. It’s amazing. They specialise in first editions of classics – you know, Narnia, A. A. Milne, that sort of thing. They have an unbelievable number of illustrated ‘Alice’ books in their store. I used to sit in there and read them, as many as I could, one after another, when I was young,” Eve finished wistfully. “It looks just the same. I wonder if they remember me.”

Polly turned to look at her in puzzlement. “You mean you haven’t been back here at all since you moved to London?”

Eve shook her head. She looked away awkwardly.

“Why? I mean, if you loved it so much…” Polly’s voice trailed off uncertainly.

Eve wasn’t really sure how to answer. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about it. She just didn’t know how to put the feeling into words. It was something that needed to be in pictures, in stop-motion freeze frames stretching over the years, like it was in her head. “I guess – ” she started, then paused again, staring up at the signboard above Marchpane’s as she strolled slowly down towards it. “I guess, for me it was part of the past. I came here when my parents brought me to London. When I look at it now, I remember being here with them. And I came here to get away from them. Ugh, that didn’t come out right at all, did it?” She frowned. “It’s not that I hate them – I’m actually quite fond of my dad – “

Polly walked up to the shop and stood next to Eve. She looked thoughtful. “No, not really. I think it came out all right. I think I know what you mean,” she said.

“You are a terrible influence, Polly Payne.” Eve turned to glare at her cousin. “First you make me wake before noon on a Sunday, then you make me drink two cups of terrible coffee, and then you get me all sappy and philosophical and reminiscing while standing outside a shop where I spent a truly tragic amount of time reading ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ about, oh, two hundred times over when I was little. I swear that book messed me up, much as I love it. I mean, hookah-smoking caterpillars and homicidal queens? And here I am, reminiscing about it. Honestly.”

“I’m not a terrible influence,” Polly protested. “Just… different. Different is good.”

“Really?” said Eve sceptically. “When you start being a good influence, let me know. I’m sure it’ll be a blink-and-you-miss it moment.”

Polly, fumbling in her bag and pulling out a camera, appeared not to have heard her. Eve ignored her photo-happy cousin briefly as she walked up closer to the door of Marchpane’s, gazing through the frosted glass into the store within. She was, as a rule, generally opposed to doing too many things that made one look like an ignorant tourist in London, but Cecil Court was the sort of place that had to be immortalised on film. Even if it looked exactly the same as it did a hundred years ago. That was perhaps part of the reason. It would, thought Eve musingly, be a fascinating project to pull together video and photographic footage of Cecil Court over the decades and create a montage of it, documenting its changes, its lack thereof -

But that was only a pipe dream, one of many. Till she could fund her own projects.

She snapped back to the present rapidly. “Right. Let’s find this shop,” she called out to Polly, who had wandered back to the top of the street to snap a picture of its entire length.

Polly walked back towards her, putting her camera away. “You have the address?”

“No. I left it at home, after going through all the trouble of ringing Dad in the morning, and having to put up with all these questions about why I was up before noon on Sunday and whether I was feeling well and had an appetite.” Eve pulled out a Post-It note from her jacket pocket and waved it at her. “Of course I have it, idiot.”

“We are getting along, aren’t we,” murmured Polly with a small, annoyingly enigmatic smile which Eve chose to pretend she hadn’t noticed. She began leading the way down the street, glancing up at shop numbers along the way.

“You’re extraordinarily lucky,” she remarked to Polly. “A few years ago, practically none of the shops opened on a Sunday. It was like… a dead zone in here. If you tossed in some sewage and rubbish and a drunken, homeless man in rags, and maybe a rat or two, you could actually have believed you were in the 19th century.”

“How charming,” said Polly, raising an eyebrow.

“I know. Just another reason why I love Cecil Court,” said Eve. “But more and more shops in London and around this area have been opening on Sundays – not for long, mind you, and mostly just for a five hours a day or so – but at least they’re open.”

“Why the change?” Polly asked.

“Tourists,” said Eve succinctly. “Same as why more and more West End shows are now doing Sunday performances as well. I don’t mind it, really, it makes my life easier if a shop I desperately need to visit is open an extra day a week, and it creates employment for extra staff on Sundays, which god knows this country needs right now. Everybody wins.” She stopped in front of a nondescript bookstore with an etching of an art-nouveau style woman in a wheat field above its door. “Here we are.”

“At least the new store’s still a bookstore,” Polly said brightly. “Maybe it kept the old owner’s books.”

“Have I told you already that I absolutely and completely just love your irrepressible perkiness?” asked Eve, in as deadpan a voice as she could manage while pushing the door open.

“No,” said Polly, “you haven’t. Thank you.”

“The scariest thing there is I have no idea if you actually mean that or not,” said Eve, “while you know I don’t mean what I just said. This really isn’t fair.”

“Who said life is fair? Where is that written? Life is pain, princess,” quipped Polly. “Anybody who says differently is trying to sell you something.”

“Two quotations from The Princess Bride in one breath. Colour me impressed. You’re not as much of a Philistine as I thought you were,” said Eve.

“It’s one of my favourite books to read to children. They understand it a lot better than most adults do.” Polly leaned over Eve’s shoulder and glanced down the doorway of the bookstore. “It seems… very quiet.”

Past 30,000! Yay!

I am quite pleased with today’s progress… I think I have made up quite a bit of ground. I’ll have a whole lot more to make up in the coming two days though, as I will be losing an entire day on the 18th while I fly back home – and I am not bringing my laptop back with me, as I plan to buy a new one when I’m home. Which means any writing I do at the airport or on the plane will have to be on paper. Joy! (I do have a fat writing notebook ready to go but I’m terrible at writing on paper, so I’m not hopeful… though it will probably help with the ‘write first, edit later’ mentality if I can’t hit backspace on paper).

More Polly and Eve – this is a monster section that I want to get out of the way, so it will be Polly and Eve for this post and the next at least, and maybe the one after too. I’m expending a lot of time (and numerous words) describing their day in detail, but I kinda want them to see some actual action soon

Excerpts

Eve walked back into the room with a cafetiere and a large mug in her hands as Polly was blowing dry her hair. She sat at her desk, pushing some books and stray pieces of paper out of the way to set down her coffee. A stack of photocopies with a neon yellow sticky note on the top sheet fell off the table and onto the floor. “Oh, great,” Eve groaned, bending down to gather up the sheets of paper. “And it took me ages to get these into the right order.”

Polly leaned over and grabbed a few stray sheets that were lying near her. There were some arcane-looking diagrams of old projection equipment on them, and some scribbles which she guessed was Eve’s handwriting. It was thin and oddly old-fashioned, snaking across the page elegantly, with long curling ends on letters like f, g and y. It looked nothing like her own scrawly, rounded script.

“What’s this?” Eve had picked up the sheet with the yellow sticky note on it. She peeled it off, and looked at it more closely. “I didn’t write this – oh. How typical.”

“What is it?” asked Polly curiously.

“It’s a note from my flatmate Sam,” said Eve. She tossed it over to Polly to read. The handwriting on it was small and neat. Buenas dias, Evita. I can’t believe you’re up and out at this time. Pigs are flying past my window. Great big ones. I’m at work the rest of the day today. Meet you at the BFI at 8? P.S. Buy milk PLEASE. Don’t argue that you don’t take it in your coffee. You positively DROWN your cereal in it.

“Evita?” Polly read aloud, looking quizzically at Eve.

Eve scowled. “No, that’s not actually my name. As if Dad would ever name me something so exotic. He’s the most English Englishman of his age you will ever meet. Eve is short for Evelyn [...] Sam just has a habit of calling me Evita. I think he thinks it’s cute. Like a dimunitive pet name or something. He’s a film student too, and we met at a departmental film screening of Evita, so it was one of the first films we saw together. Not one of my favourites, though.”

“I saw three rooms in the flat,” said Polly. “Do you share with another person?”

“Yes. Marianna. Art student at Central St Martin’s,” said Eve. “She’s Greek, and makes amazing tzatziki and fried halloumi cheese, but is hopeless at everything else. She could burn the bottom of a pot just boiling pasta. Fortunately for you, she is back in Greece at the moment for her sister’s wedding, and she may just have left some tzatziki in the fridge if you want it with a pita or something.”

“Maybe later,” said Polly. “Those hotcakes were really filling. So why did you ring your dad?”

“Persistent, aren’t you?” Eve took a long sip from her coffee. “Now that’s proper coffee. I was just being a thoughtful daughter and thought I’d check in with him, of course.”

Polly narrowed her eyes and continued to stare questioningly at Eve.

“Oh, all right. And I asked him if he knew the name of the bookstore which bought all those books at the auction.”

Polly, who had dragged her suitcase over to her in search of a fresh change of clothes and a new pair of socks, froze. Her eyes widened and she felt a sudden skip in her heartbeat. “And? Did he?”

“Maybe,” said Eve, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards into a sly grin. “Are you sick of me yet?”

“I’m a kindergarten teacher,” said Polly with a calm smile. “Kids throw up on me regularly, pull my hair, fling toy bricks at me, and don’t listen to about three-quarters of the things I say. It takes a lot to make me sick of something or someone.”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Eve in exasperation. “Okay, well, you’re not going to like this. The bookstore that bought them isn’t there anymore – “

Polly’s heart sank. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Eve held up a hand and continued. “But I got the address. We can go there, and ask if the new people know how to contact the previous owner. That’s all we have to go on, really. Sorry.”

“Hey, you got an address,” said Polly gratefully. “That’s better than we started off with this morning – “

“It is still morning, you know,” Eve interrupted indignantly.

“Thanks,” finished Polly.

“Hmph. You’re welcome,” said Eve. “Quite the aggravatingly sunny optimist, aren’t you?”

Polly gave a little shrug. “It’s easier than giving up and going home.”

“I guess.” Eve poured the last of her coffee from the cafetiere into her mug. They sat in silence for a few moments.

Polly unzipped her suitcase and started rummaging through it. “So how do we get to Cecil Court?” she asked, packing away her hairdryer and pulling out a large folded map of London as she sat cross-legged on Eve’s dark blue carpeted floor. She felt alive and very hopeful, now. She felt that this might go somewhere after all, thin as their only line of enquiry was, at least they had one; she had come here with barely a lead to follow, and already had found out plenty. Even if they didn’t find the treasure eventually, she thought, it would have been worth it after all.

[...]

Sunday, 2 October 2011, 9:45am
Leicester Square Underground station

It had been an unusually silent tube ride to Leicester Square, for Eve anyway. Polly seemed quite happy to let the deafening rumble of the tube take the place of conversation, and beyond asking a couple of questions about things Eve had not thought of for ages, such as how old the tube was and how Londoners lived with half the lines going down every weekend, and what would happen when the Olympics hit next year, she was fairly quiet.

Eve, on the other hand, felt she had a lot of questions to ask Polly, but she didn’t know where to start. Instead she had spent much of the tube ride turning over her conversation with her dad in her head. She hadn’t actually been lying to Polly when she told her she’d asked about Aunt Katie. She had, in fact, asked a number of possibly rather awkward questions about Aunt Katie. She just hadn’t mentioned Polly.

“How’s Aunt Katie, dad?”

“Skateboards? Do they have tattoos, too?”

“Send my love to mum. I have to go now.”

Eve wondered if it would be very rude to ask Polly if she knew who her father was. At least some of the mystery surrounding the origins of her mysteriously long-lost cousin had been cleared up. She supposed Aunt Katie had had her during this gap year, left her at a home – or maybe with this man she’d almost married, who had then left her at a home – and gone back to England without telling any of her family anything. It was so like her not to think twice before doing things like this. Did she ever wonder about Polly? Did she feel bad?

“Do you – ” she had started to ask Polly about her father, mentally squashing the idea that it was any ruder than Polly barging into Eve’s life like this, but it was just at that moment the train had pulled into Leicester Square station and the voice of the announcer saying to change here for the Northern Line had drowned her out.

I am sneaking this late, exactly 53 minutes after midnight on the 15th. I blame this on a tiring afternoon of errand-running (who knew there were so many things to take care of before going on holiday? Why can’t I just up and go, I say?), and a sudden desire to bake to eliminate stress and give me something to snack on while I hunker down to write. This then became nearly 3 hours spent baking snickerdoodles; I had been lulled into complacency by the ease of the recipe and had forgotten to note the fact that it yielded a prodigious number of cookies, which took a VERY long time and many, many, many, many batches in my tiny oven.

The end result of this all is, I am inching up on 30K (w00t!), and I now have more snickerdoodles than is humanly possible for one person to finish.

Also, because I am a few days behind in posting excerpts, I now have a nice big buffer of stuff to post… i.e. my writing is a few days ahead of my posting. Hopefully this means that I will be able to post more regularly and frequently.

Excerpt

Other possibly useless things she had also packed included a bunch of her favourite books for comfort reading, ranging from The Phantom Tollbooth to The Lord of the Rings, and the hideously expensive (also, Polly felt, just plain hideously hideous) brown Ugg boots that her colleagues at the kindergarten had pooled together to buy her as a sort of leaving gift. It had all been a little bit odd, because it wasn’t as if she were leaving for good, and they had thrown her a leaving party with the children, who had all thought she was going for good and had caused something of a riotous commotion of tears. Perhaps, thought Polly, even the other teachers hadn’t been sure as well. Perhaps they thought she might not return. The funny thing was that Eve had been quite right. She had no intention whatsoever of staying on here beyond the one year break; the thought had not even crossed her mind, and she had always, since first conceiving of this madcap plan, intended to go back to her job. She loved her job. It was what she wanted to do. This was… temporary.

“I rang my dad,” said Eve to her as soon as she stepped out of the steamy bathroom, long hair still dripping wet and towel round her shoulders.

“You rang your dad?” Polly repeated questioningly. “Okay… about what?”

Eve was sitting at her messy desk, now in contact lenses and changed into a black polo tee and white jeans. Polly read with amusement the back of her shirt, which said “DON’T HATE ME ‘CAUSE I CALL THE SHOTS” and had a logo of a clapperboard on it with some smaller print she couldn’t make out from where she stood. She guessed it was from a directors’ training course of some sort.

Eve turned round in her red swivel chair to face Polly and leaned backwards, rocking slightly in the chair and gazing up at her cousin with her arms crossed. She smiled smugly. “Oh, about Aunt Katie.”

Polly’s heart felt like it might stop. “You – what did he – what did he say? Did he know about – about me?”

“Oh, he was absolutely scandalised,” said Eve, her eyes glinting wickedly. “It was amazing. I’ve never heard him yell that much. He said he would disown you both immediately. I told him that disowning you was pretty pointless, since he didn’t even know you existed before five minutes ago, so disowning you would be like continuing with the status quo anyway – “

Polly sank down to the carpeted floor and leaned against the wall. She put her head in her hands. “Oh no. Oh no, it wasn’t meant to happen like this. I – I was going to contact them when I was ready…”

“Oh, snap out of it,” said Eve. “I’m only kidding.”

“You what?” said Polly, looking up at Eve again, and not knowing whether to be angry or to feel enormous relief. She thought it was sad that there was so much of the latter now washing over her that she didn’t have the heart or energy to be angry, considering what she’d been so wound up about hadn’t even happened.

Eve had a dry, sardonic smile on her face as she drummed her fingers on the armrest. “I wouldn’t ask about something like that without giving myself at least three months of mental preparation. Dad would freak. And he’d probably ring Aunt Katie right away, and they would all come to London in a frantic hurry to look for you, and who knows what family drama might happen right here in my room when all I want to do is study. Because I’m very studious on Sunday mornings, as a habit.”

“You don’t want them to come to London?” asked Polly.

“No,” said Eve. “No way. It’s – well. It’s not that we don’t get along. I get along fine with Mum and Dad, and I’m fine with Aunt Katie too, other than the fact that she keeps vicious, violent felines for pets, which were probably velociraptors in their past lives. I just don’t want them here. I want them there, where they belong, and I want my life here, where it belongs, and I don’t want the two meeting. And I really don’t want drama in my living room. Aunt Katie can be very dramatic,” she added.

Polly had a mental image of a changing Venn diagram, where Eve’s London life and her family life were two distinct circles, or had been before this morning – and had now suddenly been brought together by her sudden arrival, a strange, unfamiliar zone of intersection with her name in it, filling up the whole space. She felt a little guilty. All things considered, she thought, Eve was taking it very well. She was not sure how she would have reacted to her own arrival. She thought that same automatic instinct that kept her together and tearless during her parents’ funeral, that spirit and state of mind which the British so quaintly termed Keep Calm and Carry On, would probably have kicked in and she would have dealt with everything in her own efficient way, but on the inside – would she have been all right, to suddenly have her worldview and everything she knew about her aunt turned upside down? Was Eve all right?

“You are so gullible,” said Eve, laughing. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”

Polly felt rather wronged and injured. “I was afraid! It’s not like I haven’t thought about this. I have. I’m sure I must have had nightmares about ripping your family apart. I was afraid something like that might happen.”

“I like how you still say your family instead of our,” Eve remarked.

“I’m still getting my head round things. It’s… old habits die hard,” said Polly slowly. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking of everyone back in Canberra as my family.”

“If you’re still getting your head round things, think what a joyous ride of it I must be having,” said Eve pointedly.

“Sorry,” said Polly.

“Hmm. Apology accepted,” said Eve. But then she smiled nonchalantly, and shrugged. “It’s not a big deal, anyway. The your, my, our thing, I mean. You being here on this crazy quest and dragging me into it is still a big deal. Don’t think I’m ever going to let you forget that.”

“Oh, I’ll be glad enough if you stay on speaking terms with me for long enough not to let me forget that,” said Polly. She smiled back at Eve. “I’ll take what I can get.”

“You have low standards. Most people can’t wait to shut me up.” said Eve, swivelling back to face her computer and reaching for her mouse. She stretched, and yawned. “I might go make myself some real coffee, now that I can be bothered to go to the kitchen. Do you want some?”

“I’m fine, thank you. I’m feeling pretty awake. That shower really helped.” said Polly. She unzipped her suitcase and rummaged around for her hairdryer.

“Suit yourself.” Eve stood up and headed for the door.

A thought suddenly struck Polly. “Hang on,” she said. “So why did you call your dad?”

“Oh, that,” said Eve. She grinned at Polly. “I think I might be cruel and leave you hanging for the answer till I get back. Don’t you love the cousinly affection I’m showing you this morning?” She slipped on a pair of fuzzy blue bedroom slippers sitting by the door, and walked out of the room.

Oh well, thought Polly. I guess she is okay after all. I hope. She plugged her hairdryer into its travel adaptor and looked under the wobbly wooden table for a spare power point. Eve’s room was comfortable and homely, with the right amount of clutter randomly strewn across its various surfaces to make it feel lived-in, without being snowed under with too much stuff. There were a number of posters on the walls, mostly in black and white, and Polly didn’t recognise any of them other than the bright yellow Kill Bill Vol. 1 poster with the katana on, which stood out by way of being the only coloured one in the room. She supposed they were from old movies which had since fallen into obscurity and become lost to common knowledge. Eve, judging by her choice of specialist research topic, seemed to like old things; Polly on the other hand had previously found to her chagrin that she had a memory like a sieve when it came to history and never seemed to be able to retain any of it, nor generate enough enthusiasm to learn more about the past. There was too much already to take in, she thought, in the present.

Plodding right along…

Sorry I never got round to posting yesterday’s excerpt (and will have to disappoint you further by not posting it today). I got REALLY insanely busy this week. I personally think that given the number of things which suddenly appeared on my plate, it is a miracle that I still managed to bang out 999 words this morning (how sad is it that I was too tired to add a couple more to bring it to >1000?).

Fortunately, the weekend approaches, hopefully bringing with it plenty of writing time!

I AM PAST THE HALFWAY MARK.

That is all for now

Excerpt later!

The writing is just not happening this morning. Very sleepy, and my mind keeps blanking out. But I am definitely going to hit 25K today, by hook or by crook! In the meantime, back to Prufrock and his various agonies.

(An interesting bit of trivia: it actually was raining on 2 October 1851. The weather is historically accurate. So is the fact that in spite of the rain, a ridiculous number of people turned up for the Great Exhibition anyway, getting soaked. Crowd mentality never changes.)

Excerpt

Thursday, 2 October 1851, 8:37am
Hyde Park Corner

J. Alfred Prufrock was in despair. He was over thirty minutes late. He was unfashionably out of breath, his clothes were in disarray from the frantic running about he had had to do, he had not been able to hail a single hansom-cab as they had all been full of people taking shelter from the downpour, and he had had a most unpleasant conversation with the constable at the police station which had very nearly turned into an altercation.

It had been very difficult to convince the dull, plodding, frustratingly obstinate constable that he had come by the stolen goods entirely legitimately. It had not been an enjoyable task. The constable, like others of his kind, had been inclined to be disbelieving and suspicious, and had not, at first, believed his admittedly false story that he picked up a bag containing these items in the street, which he presumed had been dropped by a thief or pickpocket. J. Alfred Prufrock had optimistically hoped that his smartly presented attire and his obviously expensive tweed coat would reinforce his status as a man of good standing and improve his crediblity. He had forgotten how very wet and bedraggled he seemed, and he very soon discovered that to this particularly dull-witted and diligent individual of the police force, there was no such thing as a man of good standing. All men could be men of ill repute given the correct motivations and circumstances. All men had to be put through the prescribed procedure of questioning and cross-examination. He had had to endure numerous embarrassing and uncomfortably probing queries regarding his profession, his purpose in being out to-day, the exact location where this bag of items had so serendipitously been discovered, what he had been doing there, where he lodged and with whom, and many more that he did not care to recall.

Paperwork! Laborious, tedious, painful paperwork! And all the things he had had to sign, and fill in, and put his name to. It had been unbearable. He was amazed he had managed to get away at all. And here he was now, at Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace and a massive sea of people within sight, beneath a layer of multi-coloured umbrellas. He had never seen so many people in one place. It was as if the entire population of London and then some had congregated and descended as a great wave upon Hyde Park that day. The Crystal Palace, of which he had heard and read so much, and marvelled at the pictures in the newspapers, was barely visible amid the throng. He could make out the architectural wonder that was its roof, gleaming from the rain. That was all.

[...] There was John, tall, smart, and impeccably well-dressed in his hat and grey woollen overcoat, holding a large white umbrella which J. Alfred Prufrock recognised from Trinity. And beside him, his arm around her protectively, was Charlotte. J. Alfred Prufrock forced himself to look away from her and towards John.

Even when slightly damp, Charlotte was enchanting. But he could not think that. He could not allow himself to. There were doubtless many other very enchanting sights at Hyde Park today. He would have to distract himself.

“John!” He called out as he walked up to them. “I am very sorry. I can only offer my deepest apologies. I – “

“Ah! Prufrock! No need for apologies. We are pleased that you were able to join us after all.” John smiled at him, not at all angry, and J. Alfred Prufrock’s earlier fears dissolved away as he breathed a silent sigh of thankfulness to himself for John Harman’s easy-going, unbegrudging nature. He never seemed to take offense from anything. In the earlier days of their acquaintance at Cambridge, J. Alfred Prufrock had found this a most annoying trait, and had been convinced that wealthy, handsome John Harman, captain of the Trinity College rowing team, had an opinion of himself which was so pompous, so inflated and overblown, so high in self-regard, that he could not imagine anyone ever meaning to insult him by virtue of the fact that he thought himself beyond reproach. Having now had many more years to understand John Harman, and even, over time, grow to befriend and to like him, he now saw that he had not been entirely wrong. The difference that time had wrought in his assessment of his friend’s character was simply that he had come to realise the utter lack of duplicity or ill-feeling within John Harman’s breast. He was without doubt one of the most unconditionally civil, inoffensive, and warm-hearted persons J. Alfred Prufrock had ever known.

He had not understood it at all at first. Men who seemed to have everything they wanted in their lives were not usually also such very pleasant people. He had been suspicious and wary. But he did understand now, a little, better than he had at Cambridge and in the years immediately following. John Harman was a confident, capable man; he held himself up to high standards, and he expected to meet them. Almost all of the time, he did. A man who was successful, thought J. Alfred Prufrock wistfully, could afford to be generous towards others; he could afford to extend his largesse and benevolence towards others less fortunate than he, pity them and do what good he could for them, all the time secure in the knowledge that he had his place in life and did not want for anything. J. Alfred Prufrock felt he wanted for a lot of things. He felt selfish for feeling this way, with a roof over his head and hot breakfasts, lunches and suppers when he wanted them, not to mention an endless supply of home-made jams, tarts, pastries to whet the appetite at all hours of the day. He did not have to lift a finger for this. And yet – and yet -

“We feared that you had been unavoidably detained elsewhere,” John’s voice broke into his thoughts. J. Alfred Prufrock blinked, and saw John looking askance at him in concern. “Or that perhaps something had happened to you.”

J. Alfred Prufrock fidgeted slightly with his necktie, which he was now uncomfortably aware had become rumpled and disarrayed at some point during the whole sorry episode with the street-urchin. He continued still to studiously avert his gaze from Charlotte’s direction. “I am unimaginably sorry to have made you worry. I was indeed detained, but all is resolved now. I…” He paused. Where should he begin? And what should he say? “I… there was an unpleasant incident with a street urchin, who attempted to pick-pocket my wallet.”

There was a small gasp from Charlotte. J. Alfred Prufrock permitted himself a peek at her. Her gloved hand had flown to her dainty lips, her already large, beguiling eyes were open even wider, and he was entranced almost into silence.

“These incorrigible boys on the street! They will do anything these days. It is ridiculous what they get away with,” said John with righteous indignation. “What did you do then?”

“I gave him chase. I… it was not a matter of great difficulty. He was small, and malnourished. I caught up with him in a back alley before too long, and recovered my wallet,” said J. Alfred Prufrock. “But the detour delayed me unexpectedly, and the rain had become very heavy by then, and I could not hail a hansom-cab. They were all full with passengers.”

“We too had difficulties hailing a cab,” remarked John, incling his head toward Charlotte. “We were quite surprised that such a large number of people had gone out in such weather as this. We had hoped that we would be one of the few on the pavements vying for a cab.”

“I told John that we should just walk,” Charlotte interjected, leaning towards J. Alfred Prufrock conspiratorially. “But he insisted that he could not make me, even though I am quite capable of walking. My dear Prufrock, you must tell him not to spoil me so horribly. He listens to you, and he does not listen to a single thing I say! You menfolk!”

And she laughed. That bright, tinkling laugh, that same laugh that had captivated J. Alfred Prufrock so very long ago, when he had first met her at that May Ball in Trinity. She had come to the ball on John Harman’s arm, and she had worn the sapphire blue silk ballgown that went so perfectly with her sparkling, deep blue eyes, and she had laughed when John introduced them and said with a knowing smile that his good friend Prufrock should be very weary of her company before long, as he had for the past three years had to endure so much talk and so much endless prattle from John about his beautiful betrothed!

She had laughed, and said chidingly that now his good friend Prufrock had finally met her, she was sure she had proven a great disappointment indeed, for she could not possibly match the overgenerous descriptions of her face and character and charms that John had a habit of giving out to others. And then – she had turned to him, and smiled a gentle, sweet, dazzling smile, and he had found himself at a complete loss altogether.

He had made a fool of himself. An even bigger fool of himself than he normally made. He could not remember a single thing he did that night after that, but he remembered everything about her.

“I say,” said John, “It was very brave of you, to give chase to a pick-pocket. I hear some street-urchins are exceedingly vicious and will not hesitate to attack even a fully grown man.”

J. Alfred Prufrock shrugged uncomfortably. “It was not a big matter. He was easy to follow. I retrieved my wallet with little difficulty.”

“It is a worthy cause and a fine morning’s work that has kept us waiting, then,” said John warmly. “Charlotte, to think Prufrock has managed to apprehend a thief today barely a few hours into the morning, while all we have done is have breakfast and wait for a cab to Hyde Park!”

“If we had walked as I suggested,” said Charlotte, with a teasing smile, “perhaps we too would have been able to catch a thief.”

J. Alfred Prufrock, feeling torn, said nothing. He would let John and Charlotte think that he handed the boy to the police. He did not mention bumping into Mr Horne, or that gentleman’s gold-framed snuff box set with diamonds, which sat still in his coat pocket, a weighty little reminder of the morning’s jaunt. He did not mention recovering other stolen goods, or his ordeal with the maddening constable in the police station. He did not mention giving marmalade to the pick-pocket. Most of all, he did not mention letting him go. He had a feeling that John would not have done so. Good, upstanding, civic-minded John Harman would have marched the young boy straight to the police station, and felt justifiably satisfied in the public service he had done society that morning.

J. Alfred Prufrock could not find the words to explain why he had allowed the boy to go. Had he been foolish? Had he been uselessly soft-hearted? But it really did not do, he thought, more firmly than he really felt, to see children in the stocks or in the jails. The jails were crowded enough.

“I still say it was a brave act indeed,” said Charlotte. “You are ever modest, as always.” She smiled merrily.

J. Alfred Prufrock shifted his weight from one foot to the other awkwardly. He was not brave. They had got it all wrong. He had only given chase to the boy because he could not bear either the shame of having to borrow money from John for the Great Exhibition, or having to lie to Charlotte about his reasons for not keeping their appointment. He had been trapped. A mouse in a trap was not brave, thought Prufrock. It simply did what it had to do to escape from it.

He did not like all this talk of his bravery. It made him feel like a fraud. Already, he always felt like a fraud around Charlotte, a helpless, bumbling fool who could not say what he really meant, who had to hide beneath a layer of pretense to himself and to her whenever they were together.

He did not respond to Charlotte’s praise. He merely bit his lip to keep from saying anything he should not, then immediately regretted it for he felt he would have a sore growing and be immensely cantankerous for the rest of the day. “Shall we enter?” he asked, gesturing towards the Crystal Palace. “There are such a lot of people, and we may have to stand in a queue.”

John nodded. “Let us go, then.” He led the way towards the Great Exhibition with Charlotte on his arm. J. Alfred Prufrock followed, like he always did.