Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody Read Free Book Online Page A

of Turtle Shore . She did not read poetry, she explained, but she was with some friends who did. She liked to know everything that was going on in the publishing world. That was her job. She even liked to know what was happening on the fringes.
    It wasn’t a proper party. Publishers of poetry could not afford lavish launches. He had done an after-hours reading in an independent book shop in Camden and followed it with a general invitation to the pub. All evening strangers had wanted to talk to him. Some of them wanted to talk to him about his new collection and about the life of a poet in the televisual world. Some of them wanted to talk about their own love of poetry, and about how sad they were that it was a genre in such decline. But most of them, in the end, really wanted to talk to him about their own attempts to write, and what they wanted him to discuss was not the gritty day-to-day realities of a modern poet but how they might go about getting their own work into print.
    So, much as he would have liked to take umbrage at her reference to the ‘fringes’, he couldn’t. This was indeed the fringes, not just of publishing but of society. The people he met on occasions like this were like earnest members of some tiny cult, as anachronistic and out of touch as those head-bangers who dressed up in medieval clothes and played recorders. Poetry was an archaic language, deader than Latin and read by far fewer. It had both feet in the grave, and only that great juggernaut of a life-support system, the Arts Council, was keeping the earth from closing over its corpse.
    She loved poetry, she told him, but she had no time to read it. She was busy. She had a hectic job. But poetry was the pinnacle of the written arts and deserved far more attention than it got.
    There was, he thought, a little electric charge between them, from the first moment they were washed up against the wall together. He despised people who worked in publicity. They were all, male or female, media tarts. But she had a kind of energy he seldom saw. Vivacity was an ugly and polluted word, not to be touched. Vitality. That was what she had, and that was exactly what he lacked. He was drawn to it like a mosquito scenting blood. It was love at first sight.
    {3}
    She stands in the middle of the kitchen floor in a state verging on panic. What she needs is a drink. On the table, in a ceramic jug full of melted ice and surrounded by a careful arrangement of ageing pink lilies, is a bottle. It is shaped like a wine bottle but she knows, before she pulls it out, that it doesn’t contain wine. There has been no alcohol in the house for more than six years, except for the rare occasions when they hold dinner parties. She has never minded. She likes a glass of wine but she willingly forgoes it so as not to put him in the way of temptation.
    There are good neighbours up and down the street, any of whom would happily lend her a bottle of wine without a moment’s hesitation. But she can’t face anyone now. She would have to pretend to be her usual, jaunty self and for once she finds she can’t do it. She is disarmed. Or if not disarmed, then disrobed. She would have to stand naked and vulnerable at her neighbours’ door. She would have to face that same moment of shock at what she has done. Not the cruelty, though. No one could deal her the kind of blow that he has just done.
    The realisation produces a little surge of anger. She is adept at restraining her temper – any job she has ever had has required it – but this is more comfortable than fear and for once she lets it loose. How could he do that to her? Just stare and stammer and run? How dare he treat her so callously?
    Energised, she puts on the kettle for coffee, and for a minute or two she patrols the kitchen, aimlessly opening cupboard doors and slamming them shut again. She picks up the paper and tosses it down. She begins to compose a speech for when he