The Secret Intensity of Everday Life - Softcover

Nicholson, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569479569 ISBN 13: 9781569479568

Verlag: Soho Pr Inc, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

When her first love resurfaces after twenty years, Laura is forced to compare the passion of that relationship with the domesticity of suburban life. She has no idea that everyone in her town is struggling with their own unresolved crises.

Among the cast of characters are a rector who has lost his faith, a school teacher who longs to be a screenwriter but receives only rejections, a struggling farmer who resents the influx of young professionals and their privileged offspring to this formerly rural area, and a journalist who can't stop sleeping with her ex, even though it's ruining her life.

With humor and a keen eye for the subtle dramas of daily life, Nicholson creates a rich world of characters all grappling with the big questions in life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Two of William Nicholson's screenplays—Shadowlands and Gladiator—have garnered Academy Award nominations. He is the author of five previous novels, the most recent of which, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, is also published by Soho Press. Nicholson lives in Sussex with his wife and three children.

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1

She recognizes the handwriting on the envelope. She drinks from her
mug of tea, looks across the kitchen table at Henry, sees him absorbed
in the triage of the morning post. One pile for the bin, one pile for
later, one for now. He uses a paper knife when opening letters. Not
a kitchen knife, an actual slender, dull-edged blade made for the
purpose. The children silent, reading. Rain outside the windows
puckering the pond.

Laura wills the letter to remain unnoticed. It’s been forwarded
from her parents’ address.

‘You know Belinda Redknapp?’ she says.

‘Should I?’ Henry inattentive.

‘One of the school mothers. You rather fancied her. Husband like
a frog.’

‘They all have husbands like frogs.’

The bankers, lawyers, insurance company executives whose children
are their children’s friends, whose wealth makes Henry feel poor.

‘Anyway, she wants to meet Aidan Massey.’

Henry looks up, surprised.

‘Why?’

‘She thinks he’s sexy.’

Carrie pauses her absorbed scrutiny of the Beano.

‘Who’s sexy?’

‘The man on Daddy’s programme.’

‘Oh.’

‘He’s an evil dwarf,’ says Henry. ‘I want to kill him.’

The letter lies by her plate, immense as a beach towel, shouting her
unmarried name: Laura Kinross. She wants to muffle it, mute it, gag it.
Pick up a section of the newspaper, glance at it, lay it down just so. But
the desire inhibits the action. She’s ashamed to discover that she means
to leave the letter unopened until Henry has gone. So to mitigate the
shame she makes no move to conceal the envelope, saying to Fate, See,
I’m doing nothing. If I’m found out I’ll accept the consequences.

Jack is interested in the proposal to kill Aidan Massey.

‘How would you kill him, Daddy?’

‘Hello, Jack. Good to have you with us.’

Laura frowns. She reaches out one hand to stop Jack smearing his
sleeve in the butter. She hates it when Henry talks like that. Jack’s
too dreamy, he says.

‘No, how?’

‘Well.’ Henry puts on the face he makes when summoning facts
from his brain. He actually touches one finger to his brow, as if
pressing a button. ‘I’d tell the make-up girl to go on adding makeup
until he couldn’t breathe. Go on adding it until he’s got no features
left. Just smooth and round like a ball.’

Jack is awed silent by the detail.

Henry gathers up the pile of junk mail and takes it to the bin, which
is already so full the lid won’t close. He rams the wad of paper down
hard. This action makes Laura flinch, because now it will be impossible
to remove the bin bag without ripping it, but she says nothing. She is, it
strikes her, lying low.

Henry reaches for his leather bag, which is bursting with printed
matter.

‘Oh, yes,’ he tells Jack, suddenly remembering. ‘I read your
composition. I loved it.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘No. I did. I loved it.’ He leans down for a kiss, Jack back reading
Tintin. ‘I’m off. Love you.’

Laura gets up. She moves slowly because she wants to move fast,
to draw Henry out into the hall, out of sight of the letter. She squeezes
between Carrie’s chair and the dresser, remembering as she does so
that last night Carrie had been in tears.

‘Better now, darling?’ she whispers as she passes.

‘Yes,’ says Carrie.

Laura knows her behaviour is undignified and unnecessary. Surely
the past has lost its power. Twenty years ago almost, we’re different
people, I had long hair then. So did he.

‘When will you be home?’

‘Christ knows. I’ll try to be on the 6.47.’

Rain streaking the flint wall. He kisses her in the open front
doorway, a light brush of the lips. As he does so he murmurs, ‘Love
you.’ This is habitual, but it has a purpose he once told her. Henry
suffers from bursts of irrational anxiety about her and the children,
that they’ll be killed in a car crash, burned in a fire. He tells them
he loves them every day as he leaves them because it may be the day
of their death.

Recalling this, watching his familiar tall disjointed frame even as
he steps out into the rain, Laura feels a quick stab of love.

‘I think that letter may be from Nick,’ she says.

‘Nick?’ His head turning back. Such a sweet funny face, droll as
Stan Laurel, and that fuzz of soft sandy hair. ‘Nick who?’

‘Nick Crocker.’

She sees the name register. A family legend, or possibly ghost.

‘Nick Crocker! Whatever happened to him?’

‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t opened the letter yet.’

‘Oh, well.’ Henry shakes open an umbrella. ‘Got to rush. Tell me
this evening.’

Nothing urgent in his curiosity. No intimation of danger. His footsteps
depart over the pea-beach gravel towards the Golf, parked in front
of the garage that is never used for cars. Laura goes back into the
kitchen and harries the children into readiness for the school run.
She’s glad she told Henry, but the fact remains that she left the telling
to the last minute. She had known it in the same moment that she
had recognized the handwriting. She would open the letter alone.

A dull roar in the drive heralds the arrival of Alison Critchell’s
Land Cruiser. This immense vehicle parts the falling rain like an ocean
liner. Laura stands under an umbrella by the driver window conferring
with Alison on the endless variables of the run. Jack and Carrie clamber
in the back.

‘Angus is staying late for cricket coaching. Phoebe may be having
a sleepover at the Johnsons. Assume it’s on unless I call.’ The litany
of names that bound Laura’s life. ‘Assume the world hasn’t ended
unless you see flaming chariots in the sky.’

‘What if they cancel the chariots?’

‘The bastards. They would, too.’

The wry solidarity of school-run mothers. Laura confirms all she
needs to know.

‘So it’s just my two at five.’

She waves as they drive off. Carrie is demanding about the waving.
Laura must wave as long as they remain in sight. The car is so wide
it creates a hissing wake through the spring verges, and the cow
parsley rolls like surf. The drenched morning air smells keen, expectant.
Who is it who loves the month of May? ‘I measure the rest of my
life by the number of Mays I will live to see.’ Henry, of course, ever
death-expectant. How could he have slipped so far from her mind?


Seated now at her work desk in what was once the dairy Laura Broad
addresses the day ahead. Deliberate and unhurried, she makes a list
of people she must call and things she must do. The letter lies unopened
before her. This is how as a child she ate Maltesers. One by one she
would nibble off the chocolate, leaving the whitish centres all in a
row. Then pop, pop, pop, in they would go one on top of the other,
in an orgy of delayed gratification. Even so it sometimes seemed to
her as she tracked the precise moment of pleasure unleashed that
there was a flicker of disappointment. Here I am, whispered the
perfect moment. I am now. I am no longer to come.

She studies her list. ‘Call Mummy about...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Pr Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1569479569
• ISBN 13: 9781569479568
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 346
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar