Force of Feeling

‘No, you’re not obsessed by your weight,’ Guy agreed steadily, but the look in his eyes made her feel acutely uncomfortable. She felt as though he had looked right into her mind and seen things there that she would much rather he had not seen.

She offered to do the washing up, as much to escape from his too-close scrutiny as anything else. He had discarded the sweater he’d had on earlier, and she could see the fine, dark hairs curling in the open neckline of his shirt. She swallowed nervously, wondering why she was reacting so stupidly.

‘I’ll wash up. You’ll want to bring in the rest of your things.’ For some reason, his remark annoyed her.

‘Oh, I’ll do that later,’ she told him carelessly. ‘Right now, I want to start work.’ She turned her back on him and opened the door.

The small study had a radiator and was blissfully warm. She was just about to close the door and get to work when Guy suddenly appeared in the doorway, and casually reached down to unplug the machine.

Campion stared at him, her eyes revealing her baffled anger.

‘What on earth are you doing? I want to start work.’

‘Not yet,’ he told her calmly. ‘First, we have to analyse properly where you’re going wrong.’

For a moment, she was lost for words. She took a deep breath, holding on to her anger with difficulty, and said through clenched teeth, ‘I thought you’d already done that.’

‘Yes, I have, but you don’t seem to agree. So, before you so much as put another word on paper, I think we should both be clear on exactly what alterations are required.’

We? It was her book, her work, her characters. Campion felt ready to explode, so great was the resentment building up inside her, but she had taught herself long ago to control her feelings and to keep them hidden from others, and so all she could do was to glare at him and curl her fingers tightly into her palms.

‘Like a cup of coffee before we start?’

‘No, thanks, I think I’ve already got enough adrenalin pumping round my veins right now,’ Campion told him freezingly.

‘Well, if you’ll bear with me for a second, I’ll make myself one, and then we can settle down to work.’

Did nothing ever faze him? Campion wondered bitterly, watching him walk away. Was that smooth, laconic manner never ruffled by irritation or anger? He projected an image of being totally in control of his life, and now he was trying to take control of hers, and she didn’t like it.

She was still fuming when he came back, carrying a steaming mug of coffee.

‘I thought you said it was a secretary I needed, not someone to stand over me and monitor every single word I write,’ she demanded, glowering at him.

The study was only small, and she hated the sensation of having him so close to her. The desk was pushed into a corner, and she had a wall to one side of her and Guy to the other. She could smell the scent of his skin, tangy with the soap he had used to wash. His hair still held the fresh coldness of the outdoors and looked slightly damp.

‘My suggestion that you take on a secretary was simply made to relieve you of the pressure of trying to finish the book on time. I must admit that then I envisaged that you would submit your rewrites to me in the normal way; when I learned from Mabel that you’d decided to disappear, I realised that slightly more drastic measures were called for.’

‘I did not decide to disappear,’ Campion contradicted acidly. ‘I’ve already told you I came here to work, and I can do that work far better without you hanging over my shoulder. I’d get the alterations finished much faster if you would leave me alone and go back to London.’

‘Would you?’ His eyebrows lifted. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ He opened a briefcase he had put down beside the desk, and extracted a copy of her manuscript.

‘Right…Chapter four, when Lynsey first realises that her feelings for her cousin have become those of a woman and not those of a child. You say she loves him, but there is no real sense of any awareness from the reader’s point of view of her own sexuality. If you like, she’s like a robot reading the words off an autocue. So, what do you plan to do to make the reader aware of Lynsey’s burgeoning womanhood?’

Campion felt her skin start to burn with

a mixture of rage and confusion. Panic hit her. She tried desperately to blot out Guy and the emotions that were filling the small room, clogging her thought processes, and instead imagine that she was her heroine: a headstrong, spoilt girl of sixteen, who was just beginning to realise the power of her femininity, but somehow, no matter how much she tried to concentrate, no sense of any awareness of being in touch with Lynsey’s feelings would come. She might have been trying to imagine the feelings of an alien being from another planet!

Frantically, she tried to think back, to remember how she had felt at that age, but she had been shy and different. Frustratedly, she realised that she had created as her heroine the kind of girl/woman she had once ached to be, and that, for once, not even her powerful imagination was strong enough to give her an insight into how that girl might have felt.

‘Come on, Campion. The girl’s in love, as much with the idea of being in love as with anything else. She’s seen how her cousin reacts to her. What would she do?’

‘Why should she do anything?’ Campion countered huskily. ‘She’s only sixteen… She would wait for Francis to approach her.’

‘No, she’s not that kind; he’s the weaker of the two, you say so yourself later in the book. Think, Campion, she’s been indulged all her life; she’s self-confident, fearless, and most of all curious…I suggest that she would try to engineer a meeting between herself and Francis where they could be alone and she could test her new-found power.’

‘No!’ The sharp revulsion in her own voice startled her, and Campion avoided looking at Guy.

‘No? Why not?’ he asked her quietly.