Alison MacLeod, "Tenderness"

Alison MacLeod, photograph by Kate MacLeod

Alison MacLeod is the author of the novels The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013, and two story collections. Her new novel is Tenderness. She is the joint winner of the Eccles British Library Writer's Award 2016. Her work has been awarded the Olive Cook Award, shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, the Sunday Times EFG International Short Story Award, the Edge Hill Prize and Canada's Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and lives in Brighton. Here website is here.

About Tenderness, by Alison MacLeod

D. H. Lawrence is dying. Exiled in the Mediterranean, he dreams of the past. There are the years early in his marriage during the war, where his desperation drives him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is a woman in an Italian courtyard, her chestnut hair red with summer.

Jacqueline Kennedy and her husband have already been marked out for greatness. Passing through New York, she slips into a hearing where a book, not a man, is brought to trial.

A young woman and a young man meet amid the restricted section of a famous library, and make love.

Scattered and blown by the winds of history, their stories are bound together, and brought before the jury. On both sides of the Atlantic, society is asking, and continues to ask: is it Obscenity – or is it Tenderness?

From Tenderness

The dead could look after the afterwards, but here, here was the quick of the universe: the town lifted from sleep in a vast net of light, and the Mediterranean, five miles away at Cagnes, flickering like a great opal. He’d woken early and had watched the dark gravity of the night yield to daybreak. Now the streets were a mirage, half-dissolved in the dazzle of morning. Even the town’s ancient walls were erased, while a barking dog in the road below was more bark than dog. On the balcony, among the geraniums, he squinted: the coastline as far as the Cap d’Antibes shook and shimmered. It was impossible to say where sea turned to sky. The smudge of an ocean-liner materialised at what might have been the horizon, while light streamed – the run-off from the warp and weft of the world. Nothing the day touched remained solid, nothing held, nothing except the geraniums and their defiant fists of red.

The previous day, upright in his underwear in the medical bay, the exile had learned that he was, even still, five feet nine inches tall, or that he was when the state of his lungs allowed him to straighten. He would have been cheered by this fact had he not weighed in at forty-five kilos on the French scales, and one hundred pounds on the imperial – or not quite seven stone. He had insisted on both scales, but the two nations were agreed.

It meant at least that he could go, almost literally, where the wind blew him. The almond trees of the town were a pink-and-white froth of blossom. The breeze, slight as it was, had a reviving salt tang. He needed only his hat and shoes. ‘Are we ready?’ he called into the room.

Gill Mann, "A Song Inside"

Gill Mann has always loved writing. To keep her parents happy she started her working life as a solicitor but sixteen years after qualifying she re-trained as a professional photographer, becoming an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. Finally she worked out what she really wanted to do and returned to university to study for a Post-graduate Diploma and Masters degree in Psychodynamic Counselling and has worked as a therapist ever since. Her interest in people informs her writing. Although she writes mainly from life she has recently turned to fiction, starting work on a collection of short stories based on the theme of therapy. Below you can read about her first book, the new memoir A Song Inside, as well as an extract from it.

A Song Inside, by Gill Mann

‘You are a song inside me now, a melody that stirs and bursts into life when I think of you.’

In this heart-breaking, thought-provoking and ultimately uplifting memoir, Gill Mann remembers life with her son Sam - a boy and young man who enchanted and infuriated in equal measure. Sam saw colours where others saw grey. He made people feel alive. His unvanquishable spirit sings out as Gill reflects on the joys he brought, the difficulties of his struggles with schizophrenia, and the impact of his death.

Part journal, part journey into the past, and part conversation with Sam, in this beautifully written memoir, Gill thoughtfully and tenderly reveals her relationship with her son, both before and after his death. A Song Inside explores universal issues of love and loss to reveal how we can move forward and find happiness again, without leaving behind the people we have lost.

Featured below is an excerpt from the opening of the memoir.

From A Song Inside

At the garden table, mug of tea in hand, I sit and wait for the young policewoman to speak. It is Bank Holiday Monday: a day of bright sunshine and impossible clarity. Colours around me shout and sing. Blood-red geraniums in terracotta pots, fresh-cut grass as green as newly minted peas, wisteria hanging in swathes of smoky mauve. 

"You have a son," she says, placing one hand on the swell of her unborn child. It is such a simple statement of fact, a lovely truth, but a strange one for this young woman to be telling me, sitting in my own garden beneath a sky of cobalt blue. It seems she doesn’t expect an answer for she is carrying on, but

"Yes," I agree in my head, "I have." She tells me his name too.  

"Samuel Edward Roberts," she says.  

 

"Yes," I agree in my head, again, and then I realise. Of course, not the burglary. It’s about Sam’s passport, stolen ten days ago as he slept on a train from Bangkok to Chiangmai. 

 

More words come, yet still there’s no mention of the passport. I feel a sudden, cool waft of foreboding, as fleeting as the shadow of an aeroplane passing before the sun. Then a strange thing happens. The words cease to belong to the young woman opposite me. They take on an embodiment all of their own. I can see and feel them, floating on the garden air.

"He’s travelling in Thailand, in Mae Hong Son province," her words continue, relentless. Suspending themselves in the space between us, above the table, they hang in the air like an executioner’s axe. 

 

There is no faltering, no change of pace or tone when she speaks again. "Your son has been found dead in his hotel room. We’ve been contacted by the Thai police."

There is silence as the words sway in front of me. Such an innocent conglomeration of consonants and vowels; but put together, such devastating words. Words which must not be allowed to turn that simple, lovely truth, "You have a son," into a terrible lie. 

Featured Author: Louisa Treger

Louisa Treger is a classical violinist who turned to literature, earning a Ph.D in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women's writing and was awarded the Rosa Morison Scholarship 'for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.' Louisa's first novel, The Lodger, was published by Macmillan in 2014. The Dragon Lady is her second novel (Bloomsbury, 2019). She lives in London. Her website is http://louisatreger.com/

About The Dragon Lady 

Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia 'Ginie' Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie's extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional person who rejected the submissive role women were expected to play. 

Ostracised by society for being a foreign divorcée at the time of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Ginie and her second husband ,Stephen Courtauld, leave the confines of post-war Britain to forge a new life in Rhodesia, only to find that being progressive liberals during segregation proves mortally dangerous. Many people had reason to dislike Ginie, but who had reason enough to pull the trigger?

Deeply evocative of time and place, The Dragon Lady subtly blends fact and fiction to paint the portrait of an extraordinary woman in an era of great social and cultural change.

You can see more details about The Dragon Lady on the publisher's website here, you can read a review of the novel on Everybody's Reviewing here, and below you can read an excerpt from the opening chapter. 

From The Dragon Lady

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CATHERINE, 1990s

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget, yet the smallest thing takes me back to the time the Dragon Lady was shot. I was thirteen years old and living on a forest reserve near the Mozambique border. My father, a naturalist and forestry consultant, visited her regularly, but it was the first time he had taken me.

Her house was long and low and painted white, with a turret on one side. It was like a castle in a storybook, unexpected and incongruous in a remote Rhodesian valley. The interior was all hushed, cool spaces and we had to wait a long time for the Dragon Lady to see us.
At one point her husband, Stephen, came to talk to us. He had a stern face, but there was a glint in his eyes while he spoke to Dad about the new trees he had planted. I had a boys’ comic tucked under my arm and he wanted to know why.

‘Cathy doesn’t like girls’ things,’ Dad told him. ‘She plays with tin soldiers and a train set.’

My father’s words caused a pang. I’d grown out of trains and soldiers a long time ago, but he hadn’t noticed. I was about to retort that I was too big for toys, but I saw Stephen was smiling; he found it funny. He left, saying that he had a meeting in town, but that his wife wouldn’t be much longer.

We sat in silence. It was hard not to fidget, and soon Dad suggested I go outside and have a look around. I walked onto the veranda and down a flight of steps, and found myself in a never-ending garden.   

It was beautiful and eerie, not like a garden at all to me. My school friends had gardens with mowed lawns and tidy hedges. This was wilderness with paths and deep shade, dense with trees, ferns and flowering creepers. Under the spreading branches of an old cypress tree, I stumbled against a protruding object and nearly fell. Righting myself, I looked down and saw a moss-encrusted grave so small it could only have belonged to a young child. There was no headstone or inscription. The only decoration was a posy of white roses made out of porcelain. 

A cloud slid across the sun, shrouding everything in a gloomy light. The wind came up, making the tree branches writhe back and forth. The dry rustling of their leaves was like a whispered warning and a chill snaked up my spine. Turning away, I hurried back to the house in time to see Dad and the Dragon Lady exiting the back door.

I stopped at the edge of the lawn to watch them. Her real name was Lady Virginia Courtauld; Dad called her Ginie. She was gesturing and calling to a gardener to show him something. Tall and thin, she wore a long-sleeved blue dress; her face was in shadow under a large hat. 

Beneath the swish of her dress I could make out the famous tattoo. It was this that had earned her the nickname Dragon Lady, though the creature on her ankle was in fact a snake: a savage thing, heavily inked in black, its head rearing up, jaws open, ready to strike. People whispered that it went from her ankle right the way up her thigh and no one but Stephen knew where it ended.

I had a vague impression that she was agitated or anxious, fidgeting and walking up and down; her voice was vivacious, fractured. I was used to observing my own mother’s unhappiness and I saw something there that reminded me of her.

The monkeys in the treetops started up a tremendous disturbance: shrieking and chattering; flinging down gourds from the oyster nut vines that split open as they smacked the ground, scattering seeds over the grass. 

‘What’s bothering them?’ asked the Dragon Lady, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked towards the trees. 

At that instant, a loud noise splintered the air. I only realised it was a gunshot when I saw the Dragon Lady’s body jolt violently and the garden boy screamed. She seemed to bow down and one hand went out as if she was reaching for something. She toppled over with a choked cry and I saw the wound in her side. Her body tensed and convulsed, her limbs sprawled gracelessly, blood spilled onto the ground. 

For a few moments, there was an unearthly stillness. Then things moved quickly: my father was bending over her, his ear by her chest. He stripped his shirt off and pressed it to the wound, tying to staunch the bleeding. Blood poured out regardless, soaking through the fabric: a scarlet rosette blossoming grotesquely on khaki. 

‘We must get her to the hospital – quickly!’

A servant came running with blankets and they lifted her, a limp shape wrapped in soiled blue wool, and hurried her away. Moments later, I heard the cough and rattle of our truck start up and speed off.

I leaned against the rough bark of a tree and watched a pair of bright red and green lizards darting through the grass. High above, a company of hawks circled in a flawless blue sky. With my teeth, I took hold of a ragged piece of skin at the edge of my thumbnail and pulled. It came away in a long strip. A drop of bright blood welled up in the cuticle and ran down my thumb, though I felt no pain. 

I waited for my dad, but he did not come back. The light deepened and spread, staining the trees gold and casting stripes on the grass where it slipped between them. The glow lingered on the treetops, while the shadows of dusk began to creep over their lower branches. A bird called and crickets started up a low, persistent creaking. Two poodles appeared and made their way towards the house, agitated. They paused by the rust-coloured stain the Dragon Lady had left on the grass, sniffed at it and started to lick it. I realised that they were as forgotten as I was.