I think this is my favourite of all Jan’s stories for older readers – it was published in her 1990 collection, A Can of Worms. Another take on the ‘school project’ …

When I saw the results that the others were getting I knew that a special effort was called for. The assignment was to produce, over the summer holiday, an in-depth study of your favourite author, which was amended, just before the end of term, to ‘an author whose work you admire’, as it turned out pretty quickly that half the class had the same favourite author who was shortly going to receive eleven identical questionnaires. We had to check with Mrs Montgomery to make sure that we all came up with somebody different which was tough on the ones who’d only read one book ever in their entire lives.

It wasn’t tough on me. I’ve always read a lot. I chose an admired author and typed out a grovelly letter and a list of questions, and sent it off to her publisher with a polite note asking them to forward it, but perhaps it was them I should have grovelled to, because they didn’t. What I got back was a sort of publicity hand-out with a list of answers to questions I hadn’t asked and I could tell from those that I would never have got answers to the questions I had asked, like, ‘Do you ever feel dissatisfied with a book after it’s published?’ and ‘Could you name any other authors you particularly admire?’ This lady obviously never feels dissatisfied with anything she’s done, and as for admiring anyone else, well, I looked at the photograph on the back of her last novel and I could just hear her saying, ‘Dahling, what an extraordinary suggestion!’ I decided to read that one again and then do a hatchet job on her (Grossly overrated hack, A S Lampson . . .) but then about the second week of the holidays some of us began comparing notes, and I had to think again.

I’d assumed that we’d all be having the same problem, but no. I’d drawn the short straw. All the other authors had sent nice letters back. Some said they were a bit busy and hoped that this would be what was wanted; one had written by hand and it took three of us most of the morning to decipher it, and a couple sent information sheets like the Lampson job, but they’d written extra things on to answer particular questions. And there was me with my miserable hand-out. It was a reasonable mistake – choosing her, I mean – because the characters in her books are all intuitive and sympathetic and spend hours sitting around in their stripped pine kitchens listening to each other’s troubles, which is just as well, as there’d be no book if they didn’t. No one ever does anything. Next time I read one of hers, if I ever do, I shall know it is all a sham. If she ever sits around listening to people’s troubles it is probably because she is memorizing them all to use in her next novel. Meanwhile I had only four weeks left to start all over again with my in­depth study and I had my reputation to consider. I always do well in English. I’ve always been teased for spending so much time reading. I’d been sure of getting a Grade A in GCSE and now it looked as if I was going to hand in a real bummer while Mrs Montgomery looked at me more in sorrow than in anger, saying, ‘Oh, Bridget, I’d have thought you would have done better than this,’ and everybody else got the Grade As.

It was due to be handed in on the first day of term, too, and I knew that if it wasn’t I was going to get behind with everything else, just trying to catch up. I went to sit on my bed and stare at the books on my shelves. Which lucky novelist was going to hear my letter hitting the mat? (Congratulations, Mr Golding. You have been selected to star in my forthcoming assignment.)

I keep my favourite books under the window in a special bookcase with other treasures. Mum calls it my shrine. I went through the writers’ names; seven had been chosen by other people in the class, one of them had been struck off after I saw him interviewed on television and he said things so racist and sexist and generally nasty that I began to wonder why he bothers with books. I’m sure he’d be happier writing for A Certain Newspaper. The other eighteen were dead. Sensible fellows; no one was writing to them asking why they had become authors. Were you good at English at school, Miss Bronte?

Then I noticed three books at the end of the shelf that had been there so long that I didn’t even see them any more, the first books that I’d ever bought for myself, years ago. I loved them. I read them over and over again, in fact, the reason I bought them was that I kept taking them out of the library and getting withdrawal symptoms if someone else had got there first, till my mother said, ‘For heaven’s sake, have the things,’ rather as if she was giving me the money to go out and get stoned, so I did, and then I had a great binge, reading straight through, one-two-three, several times in a row. After that I got diverted to someone else and didn’t open them again for – well, until that moment. But they were the beginning of my collection.

You know how it is when you’re in love; everybody seems slightly out of focus except the person you’re in love with. I think I was in love with those books; nothing else I read then seemed to mean very much; not that the stories were nonsense, but the words themselves had no – no edge. But I never felt I was in love with the author, I never thought about him at all, and yet he lives in our town, only about a mile away. I didn’t know that then, and when I found out I was past caring because I’d moved on to other books; but as I sat there, looking at that row of spines, I suddenly thought, Why not? Why not write about him?

I looked him up in the phone book to see if he was still there, and he was: James Rudd, 56 Marlowe Road, but in a way I couldn’t be sure that it was still him. He wrote those three books years ago, before I was born; they were in paperback when I got them; and then he stopped.

I knew this because I’d checked on him in the library after I’d decided to get in touch, and he’d only written one other book, about eighteenth-century architects, which was what made me think I might be on to something different. One of the questions we had all asked our author was: Why did you begin writing? What I wanted to ask James Rudd was: Why did you stop? and then I had my best idea of all. I wrote to him, but I didn’t include a questionnaire. I put:

Dear James Rudd,

I have always admired your books. In fact I have read them so many times that I almost know them by heart. As I am doing an assignment on my favourite author for GCSE, would you please allow me to come and interview you? As you can see I don’t live very far away, so I could call at any time convenient to you.

Yours sincerely,

Bridget Galvin

‘Send him a stamped addressed envelope, that’ll soften him up,’ my mother advised.

After I’d posted it I began to wonder what I’d let myself in for. As I’d discovered from the Loathsome Lampson, authors are not necessarily what they seem from their books and as I said, I never thought much about what James Rudd might be like, while I was reading him, but I suppose I’d always had at the back of my mind the idea that the person who’d written those books must be kind, and rather serious and thoughtful; but a lot could have happened in seventeen years. He might have gone mad, for instance, or become poverty­ stricken and vicious; a wife-beater; a drunk. Maybe I wouldn’t be safe with him and would come screaming out of the house with my dress torn.

Then I realized that I ought to read the books again, because if he’d changed, so had I, and that meant the books would have changed, too. And the awful, awkward thing was, I didn’t want to read them again in case I was disappointed. I read almost anything in those days. A good book was a book I enjoyed reading; I didn’t care if it was well written or not because I couldn’t tell. In the four days between posting my letter and getting his reply, I tried to nerve myself to read at least one of them again, but I kept putting it off.

‘I ought to do the weeding first’ – that shows how distracted I was – or, ‘Perhaps he won’t even answer I’ll get on with my Geography assignment instead,’ but in the end, just in time, I got out of bed one morning and grabbed a book, it was the last one, without giving myself a chance to debate about it. I opened it at random, it opened itself, really, at a page I’d pressed flat and split the spine. And I read,

He stared, turned the bicycle and went back, and saw that it had not been an illusion. At the end of the cul-de-sac stood a street lamp, the old-fashioned kind that had once been lit by gas, and beyond it was the mouth of an alley. He dismounted: it was never wise to approach too quickly, and wheeled the bicycle down the middle of the deserted street, keeping his eyes fixed on the shadowy opening, and as he drew near he saw that it was a gas light: and he knew that he was right: he was about to find the garden again.

Relief; he used too many ands in my opinion, but it wasn’t illiterate rot. I could go back safely and read the rest, but before I could even turn to the first page Mum called up from the hall, ‘Letter for you! It looks as if the waters have returned your bread.’

We met on the stairs and she was holding out an envelope with my writing on it. Rudd had written.

Actually, he had typed, on a proper typewriter, not a word processor.

Dear Miss Galvin,

Thank you for your flattering letter. I am at home this weekend so perhaps you would care to call on Sunday afternoon? I have been living with GCSE assignments for two years, so understand that time may be of the essence.

Yours sincerely,

and then there was a tatty signature that could have said anything.

‘Oh,’ I said, still on the stairs with Mum. ‘Do you think that means everyone’s doing assignments on him?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I think it means he’s got kids your age who usually leave school work to the last minute.’ She gave me a heavy look.

I sent him a postcard saying yes, thank you, and settled down to read the books again, just like I had when I was a kid, holed up in the bedroom with food at hand, charging right through, one-two-three, without even stopping between books. And I was right. One of us had changed, me or the books.

***

It was one of those days that makes you realize how near to autumn August is. It was warm, sunny, but there was a sharpness about it that you don’t notice in July. In July you can still smell things growing, especially after rain, but in August you know the end’s coming. The sunlight’s paler. Some of the leaves have turned; the air tastes brown, not green. But I like autumn and that Sunday I walked across town to Marlowe Road, down the path beside the park and across the allotments, where there were bonfires burning, making the light hazy. That says ‘Autumn’ to me, too.

I could see the end of Marlowe Road all the way across the allotments. There was a little alley leading out of them with a plank bridge over a ditch, that ran alongside the back garden of the end house. As I went down it I noticed that there was an old-fashioned street lamp at the end, but not so old-fashioned it would have run on gas. Still, it made me think of the books.

Of course, I had been thinking about the books all the way, but mainly I had been rehearsing what I was going to say, and trying not to imagine what James Rudd would tum out to be like, because I couldn’t even guess, any more. I knew now that I had loved those books because I had felt at home in them, safe, certain. What I had never noticed when I was ten, eleven, twelve, was how terribly sad they were. I don’t mean they were gloomy, they weren’t, they were quite funny a lot of the time which is probably why I read them in the first place, but this time, when I came to the end of the last one, I felt really upset, as if I had lost something, almost tearful. It could have been partly because my period was due, but there was definitely something in those books that hadn’t been there three years ago, that I hadn’t been able to see, three years ago. I knew then, as I passed the lamppost, that I was going to meet a dreadfully unhappy man.

All the way across the allotments I’d been wondering if I was looking at the backs of the even numbers and, if so, which one was 56, but now I saw that 56 was the third house on the other side, the left-hand one of a pair of semi-detached villas, the kind that seem to squat there, bottom heavy, immovable, like Sumo wrestlers. The word slab comes to mind when I see houses like that. It was a nice-looking place, though, with a white front door. All the windows were open. Upstairs someone was playing a clarinet.

Often when I turn up for an appointment I arrive too early out of nervousness, and walk up and down outside till it’s time to ring the bell. But all those open windows! I was probably being watched, and I hadn’t been given an official time to call, so I walked straight up to the front door and knocked, because the bell was your average belly-button, but the knocker was iron, and old, a woman’s face with a most evil smile. I liked her and gave her a few good thumps. Immediately the clarinet stopped and a door banged and voices started yelling, ‘Dad! Dad! DAD!’ Mum had been right about the children.

I looked at the front garden, which was full of little clipped bushes, and pretended not to hear the racket inside, because clearly it had not occurred to them that I would hear. I began to get dingy visions of the interior; a pram in the hall, a smell of cats, worn lino, washing on a clothes-horse in front of the fire and – Good God! Rudd himself in a tin bath on the hearth rug, while his wife scrubbed his back. Straight off the telly; D. H. Lawrence, I expect.

Then a face looked out of a bay window overhead and shouted, ‘He’s in the garden. Can you go round the side?’

I had just time to see that it was a girl about my age, right again, Mum, before it withdrew and the clarinet started up. I went back off the steps and down along the side of the house, which was the usual network of drainpipes and tiny windows, through a high wooden gate and into the garden, and it was the garden at the end of the alley by the gas lamp. I had walked into the books.

It wasn’t a very big garden and it was full. I’d never seen a garden with so much in it, and all of it high. You couldn’t see for more than a couple of metres before the path turned and there were plants leaping out at you from all sides, with long tough stems and big leaves. Given a bit more space it could have become a rain forest, like the garden in the books, which was never the same garden; sometimes it was walled and enclosed, sometimes huge and landscaped, once there were statues and fountains, and once there was a second gate which led into wild countryside – it all depended on who found it each time, and what they were thinking of.

Halfway down the path was an arch with some kind of creeper trained over it, and beyond that something that only rarely appeared in the books – vegetables. Once they had found the remains of a kitchen garden with cold frames and cloches and old rhubarb bells, but never anything like this, rows of runner beans and cabbages and onions. A head rose up from behind some raspberry canes and said, ‘James, I think your visitor is here.’

Another head appeared, looming out like the green man from among the runner beans; Mr and Mrs Rudd. And they said, both at once, ‘Hullo, Bridget.’

‘We’ve been rehearsing,’ said Mrs Rudd, standing up. She was wearing nice old gardening clothes and wellies and when I saw her I thought, everyone should have a mother like that, even though there is nothing wrong with mine, nothing at all. I knew why I thought it, too, as soon as I’d finished thinking it. She was like one of the mothers in her husband’s books and then I thought, How did he know she would end up like that when he married her?

The other head had gone back into the runner beans and the owner was crashing about inside. Mrs Rudd came towards me, wiping her hands on her sacking apron, just as I’d thought she would.

‘He’ll find his way out in a minute,’ she said. ‘Would you like a drink?’

I said I would, please. I said I hoped I wasn’t disturbing them.

‘Not at all,’ she said, and as she went past she whispered, ‘You’re our first fan. James has had letters, of course – well, he used to – but no one ever came here before. He’s awfully pleased.’

After that I expected something quite pathetic to shamble out of the runner beans, but at last he emerged looking perfectly cheerful, a medium-sized man with a tidy black and grey beard, carrying the runners in a garden riddle.

He shook my hand. ‘How nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘I thought we might stay out here as it’s so fine. Is that all right? You haven’t brought a tape recorder to plug in?’

‘Oh, no.’ It hadn’t crossed my mind to do anything so professional, and it did seem a bit sneaky, even if it was the professional way. I followed him past the bean rows and right at the end of the garden where most people have the compost heap, was a little grassy patch with some white iron chairs and a table. Mrs Rudd came back with beer. I’d been expecting a cup of tea.

‘Is beer all right?’ she asked, anxiously, when she saw me staring at it. ‘Perhaps you don’t . . .’

‘Oh, I do,’ I said firmly, although not at home, officially.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said and went back to doing something strenuous among the raspberry canes. ‘That’s a very business-like clip board,’ James Rudd said. ‘Are you going to fire questions at me?’

Well, I had been going to, but sitting there in the garden with the beer, I didn’t want to do that at all. ‘Can we just talk?’ I said. ‘About the books.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but start with a question or we’ll never get started at all. I haven’t done this before.’

‘Didn’t people want to talk about them when you wrote them?’

‘I was never very famous,’ he said, ‘in fact I wasn’t famous at all and anyway, it was quite a while ago. I wrote the first one in 1970. Writers didn’t go into schools much, or run workshops in those days. Meg and Katy­ – my two – seem to have a different author every term. I never did anything like that. I just sat at home and wrote books.’

‘Did you want to be a writer when you were at school?’ That was one of the questions we all asked.

‘No, I wanted to be an architect.’

‘Are you?’ I said, rather abruptly.

‘What?’

‘Are you an architect?’

‘No. I got sidetracked.’ He smiled, inside the beard. ‘I run a printing firm – not a big commercial press. We do leaflets, letterheads, catalogues, posters – you name it. We’re in Bank Street; you know. We call ourselves Foolscap.’

‘Why?’ I do know it. My sister had her wedding invitations done there. They did them nicely, too.

‘It was a size of paper, before we went metric, named after a watermark – are you writing all this down? It’s not important.’

‘Yes it is. I want to write about you as well as the books. It’s meant to be an in-depth study.’

‘Ah, I know the kind of thing: “Hairy Mr Rudd told me over a pint of beer . . .”’

‘I’ll just mention it,’ I said.

‘The beer?’

‘I haven’t done this kind of thing before, either,’ I told him. I looked at my list of questions. ‘Why did you start writing – if you were a printer, that is? Was it seeing other people’s books all the time made you want to try?’

‘No, I told you, we don’t print books, and this was long before the printing business. I was still trying to be an architect. Why did I start?’ He seemed to be asking himself. ‘I suppose I thought I had a story to tell.’

‘And why did you stop?’

‘That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t that you suddenly found you couldn’t do it any more, was it?’

‘Oh no, I could do it.’

‘Didn’t they sell?’

‘Modestly, but if I’d really been a writer I’d have gone on anyway, even if I hadn’t been published. You know how it is – how it’s meant to be; tormented genius, business goes to pot, starving children, wife on the streets, mistresses . . . sorry. You won’t get away with that for GCSE, will you? No, I finished the third book – what’s it called?’

I was shocked. He’d forgotten the name of his own book. ‘Off the Map,’ I said.

‘That’s it. Well, I’d finished it, and my editor said, “Right, that’s your trilogy out of the way, what next?” and I realized that there was nothing next. I’d had a story to tell and I’d told it. That was it. Kaput.’

‘What about the book of architects?’

‘Speaks for itself, really, doesn’t it? My lost career – no, don’t try to look sympathetic. I hated being an architect. I knew that before I’d even finished at college. I wrote it to help out a friend; brilliant historian; writes like a ten-year-old. He just can’t string a sentence together.’

We didn’t seem to be getting far. ‘Where were you at college?’ I asked, briskly.

‘It was an art school,’ he said. ‘At the time we were just one of the departments. The Faculty of Architecture, we called ourselves – very grand. It was a row of Nissen huts across the car park from the Graphic Design Department, and we shared a canteen with the art students. We thought they were a very low-class bunch.’

‘Were they?’

‘Not at all. They just didn’t bother to try and look respectable while they were working. Some of us, I’m afraid, wore suits. We all went to each other’s parties and nicked each other’s girlfriends . . . It was one of the artists, I think, who made me realize why I’d come to the end of my story – yes – it was him. How extraordinary.’

‘What was?’

‘All these years and I’ve only just realized what he did. He was working at book illustration by then, and he’d come across Off the Map at my publishers, and followed it up and got in touch with me. We hadn’t met for about five years, right out of touch. Well, I went to see him, and we chewed the fat and I looked at his work, and in his studio I found his sketch book – one of his sketch books. He must have filled dozens, but this was from his final year. It was my final year, too, and in it there was this little pen and ink drawing of three people sitting on a bashed-up sofa on a traffic island. And I looked at it and I said, “My God, the travelling settee!”’

I just looked expectant. He was off; I didn’t want to say anything to make him dry up again.

‘I said, “Did you do any others?” and he said no, that was the only one. But it was enough. I’d forgotten about the travelling settee till that moment; then it all came back.

‘It wasn’t a residential college. Most of the students lived at home and came into the city by bus or train, but some of us had bedsits and a few lived in flats. I shared a mouldy basement with three other guys, down near the station, and just up the road from us was an auctioneer’s. We used to go up there sometimes and see if there were any job lots worth bidding for – we always needed household goods. Occasionally there would be some­ thing so awful that it would be shoved out on to the pavement for the council to dispose of, and one evening two of us were walking home from the pub when we saw this settee dumped in front of the auction room. You could see why no one had bid for it. It wasn’t old, not very old, not antique; it was just horrible, covered in a kind of mangy brown plush with orange seat cushions. And two of the castors had come off. One of them had been replaced with a wheel off something else, and someone had tried a kind of field surgery on the offside hind leg and driven in a six inch nail.

‘Alan, he was the fellow with me, sat down on it and bounced about a bit, and said, wasn’t it just what we could do with? I wasn’t too sure, myself, I thought that looking at such a monstrosity every evening could give you bad dreams, but we did need a settee – something to sit on. We’d had a party the week before and someone had lit a fire in our sofa. I said they were a low class lot, didn’t I? He was trying to cook sausages over it.

‘“See what the others think,” I said, so we left it there and went back to the flat.

‘We didn’t have house meetings or anything formal like that, but when the others got home, about midnight, we described it to them. I said it appeared to have been owned by a left-handed smoker with a limp wrist because the left arm was covered in cigarette bums, and added that he probably spent many days off work each year with unidentified back pains. Alan just said that there was room to sleep on it and that was enough to decide in its favour. We were short of beds. So we agreed that we’d all go down and look at it in the morning before taking final vote, but I was pretty sure I’d be out­ numbered, even though the others might have second thoughts when they saw the ghastly thing. It was,’ said James Rudd, ‘the most repulsive piece of furniture I’d ever seen. There was actually some form of vegetable growth between the cushions.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Mr McEnery in Just Down the Street. The man who grew mushrooms on a mattress.’

‘Could well be,’ James Rudd said, but he didn’t seem very certain. ‘Next morning we all went along to the auction rooms, but as soon as we were out of the gate we could see that the settee had gone. I was quite relieved, myself, but Alan was furious. “I expect the dustmen took it,” I said. Alan insisted that someone had got up early and crept out ahead of us to swipe the settee. Personally I couldn’t imagine anyone going to such lengths for anything so nasty, but the settee had gone and there was nothing to be done about it – fortunately.

‘It was the following evening before I found out where it had gone. I took a short cut back from college, after a late class, through the coal yard behind the sidings, and there was the settee, parked between two piles of coke. I could see how it had got there because of the tracks in the coal dust; three wheels and the six inch nail. Against my better judgement I told Alan when I got back. “Right,” he said. “We’ll go out after supper and get it.”

‘“Suppose the others don’t like it after all?” I said. “I don’t care,” said Alan, “we’re not letting it go this time.” “Perhaps the men at the coal yard want it?” I said. “They got it first.”

‘ “Probably kids fooling around,” Alan snarled. He really did seem to have set his heart on that settee. But the others didn’t come home that night. Owing to the acute bed shortage they spent a lot of time on other people’s floors and in other people’s baths. Officially they weren’t supposed to be in our flat at all. We’d sublet, to raise the money for food. So when they hadn’t come back by Saturday morning Alan and I went round to the coal yard on our own. And it had gone. You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?’

I hadn’t known. I was listening to a story. I didn’t want to guess what would happen next, I wanted to hear it being told.

‘At first Alan thought I’d been kidding him along, but I showed him the tracks in the coal dust and he had to believe me. Moreover, you could see where the settee had stood because the tracks led away from the place where I’d seen it, between the coke stacks and out towards the Thanet Road. “Right,” says Alan, “let’s follow it.”

‘I’d been hoping that the settee, having had a head start, would have got clean away, but as we came out of the coal yard on to the Thanet Road, I spotted it standing on the corner outside the Plasterer’s Arms. It was surrounded by children, five of them creeping up on it and three defending it and, I was pleased to note, it was getting severely hacked about. Alan – anyone would have thought it was his settee – charged across the road yelling “Oi! Gerroff!” He must have thought they’d all scatter in terror, but most of them just went on bashing each other and the biggest said “Whyyyyyy?”

‘“Because it’s ours,” Alan said. In our household Alan was the arch slob, the tearaway, changed his socks once a month when they stuck to his shoes and claimed he was a socialist anarchist. Now he sounded like a headmaster, but this lad ate headmasters for breakfast. “Why was it in the coal yard, then?”

“Didn’t you put it there?” I asked, giving the game away. “How could we put it there if it was yours?” says Genghis Khan junior, and went back to beating his friend over the head with a fencing stake.

“‘Let’s come back for it later,” I said, not wanting to take on the whole mob, so we walked manfully away while they all jeered, and went to the pub. We ought to have gone to the Plasterer’s Arms, to be on the spot, but we were meeting some friends, and when we came back – you know what’s coming, of course?’

‘It had moved again?’

‘Not a trace of it – literally. The first thing I looked for was the track of the six inch nail, but they must have carried it; eight of them could have managed it easily. I wasn’t sorry and hoped we’d seen the last of the settee, but of course we hadn’t. The next time I came across it it was standing on the grass verge at a comer near the front entrance of the art school. It looked as if it had been the scene of several more battles. The fabric had been ripped off the back and one of the cushions was gone, and there were springs sticking out. The principal of the college was a hard-eyed Scot, and suspected horseplay. Were we responsible? No, we were not. Overnight it shifted again, a little way up the road to the traffic island at the next intersection: we were on our way to the pub when we found it; that was when my friend did the drawing, me, Alan and an art student called Althea. I remember her because she and Alan got very friendly that night and agreed to meet again the following evening.

‘“Where?” said Althea.

‘“Oh, at the settee,” said Alan. That was what started it, really. Because, naturally, the following evening the settee had gone elsewhere, but Alan didn’t know where Althea lived and she didn’t know where Alan lived, so they had to find it. We finally located it down a side street by the main Post Office, and Althea was there before us. After that it became a routine; “See you at the settee.’’ After all, it never went far, and wherever it went it left that trail behind it where the nail dug into the pavement.’

All the time he was telling me this I was watching James Rudd. Remembering the settee seemed to make him melancholy, in a pleasant sort of way. I hadn’t written anything down for a long time.

‘It stuck in an alley near the cathedral for a couple of nights and we wondered if it would break the rules if we moved it ourselves. After all, the joy of the thing was not knowing where it would turn up next; the fear that the authorities would remove it, but I suppose they could never catch up with it. Some irate shopkeeper would complain that the settee was obstructing his entrance or obscuring his window, no doubt, but by the time the dustmen arrived the settee had moved on. It had the sense not to go into the cathedral precinct – it wouldn’t have lasted long in there – but it went all the way up Haymarket, stopped three days in the car park and one night at the war memorial, and then began a circuit of the city wall. “Anyone seen the settee?” we’d ask. It became a kind of rallying cry. More and more people joined in. Sometimes there’d be twenty of us gathered round it and I began to wonder how much longer it could go on. It was so silly, and so nice . . . it had to stop; and I’d noticed something.’

He paused.

‘It was disintegrating?’ I said.

‘Oh, it was certainly doing that,’ he said. ‘By now it was down to the frame, one cushion and a few rags of upholstery. No, one night it made a decisive move. It turned into a street that led to the bypass. The settee was leaving town.’

‘What happened?’ I said, ‘when it reached the bypass?’

‘I don’t know. I lost sight of it. It was the end of term, you see, and it was the final year for all of us at the flat. We were packing up, moving away, most of us never met again. The last – no, the next to last time I saw it, it was standing at the end of a cul-de-sac, quite near the bypass, under a street light, the old-fashioned kind that used to run on gas. I was on my bike, didn’t stop, just wondered briefly if I’d ever meet anyone at the settee again and rode on.’

‘And did you? Ever meet at the settee again, I mean?’ ‘No. A few days later I left the place for good, by train, and when we were a couple of minutes from the station I sat forward for a last look at the city and the cathedral, because there was a view across the fields, just before the line went under the bypass. After that you couldn’t see anything. And I didn’t get my last sight of the cathedral because under the bridge was the settee, standing beside the track like a bench in a park. I felt like crying. It seemed to sum up all the happiness of those last few weeks. You can be terribly sentimental at that age,’ he said, and smiled at me. ‘You have that pleasure to come. It is a pleasure, believe it or not.’

‘Was that the end of it?’

‘Just a vague memory that faded completely – until I saw my friend’s sketch book years later, and then it all came back and I understood where the books had come from.’

‘But you said – just now – you’d only just realized what he’d done.’

‘Oh yes; because he told me at last what happened to the settee afterwards. A few nights later somebody wedged it across the railway line and derailed a train. No one was killed; I think it was a milk train, something slow, but afterwards, after I knew, I kept thinking, what a lousy thing to do; what a lousy thing, that is, to do with our settee. But now, you see, I knew how the story ended. That’s what he did, my friend, quite innocently. He made me understand that I had nothing more to write. You must have realized . . . I mean, you’re not going to ask me where I get my ideas from, are you? You know now, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I knew then that there weren’t going to be any more ideas. Either I’d go on writing the same thing over and over again, or I’d stop. So I stopped. But it’s taken me eighteen years to see that. Thank you.’

We chatted a bit more and finished the beer. I asked him the rest of the questions, although not the one about where he got his ideas from. And then Mrs Rudd came back and we all said goodbye and I walked home across the allotments. I felt very mournful, just as he had described, thinking about the travelling settee and how happy they had all been because they knew it wouldn’t last. I wondered if any of the others had remembered it too, or if James Rudd had been the only one who cared, cared so much that he wrote three books about it.

Though, obviously, the books aren’t about a settee. The first one was Just Down the Street, then Over the Wall and the last one was Off the Map. They are about three friends who are coming home from school one day when they take a short cut down an alley they haven’t noticed before, and find a gate into a garden, and they love it, although they think they’re probably trespassing, and decide to meet there again the following evening. But they can’t find the alley again, or the garden, not for a long while, until they come across it by accident, only it’s a different garden, things have changed. Each of the books is about a different person, but they are always looking for the alley that leads to the garden, and as the books go on, and they get older, it gets harder and harder to find because the alley is never in the same place twice, and by the end of the last book they’ve more or less given up trying to find it, just hope that perhaps . . . one day . . . by chance . . . When I was little I could never quite understand why they gave up looking for the garden; now I could see how sad it was that they knew they didn’t need it any more. And I wondered what James Rudd would have written next if he hadn’t found out just in time what had happened to the travelling settee, but I guessed that he was glad that he stopped when he did. You have to know when to let go.

(c) the Estate of Jan Mark. All rights reserved.