The Woman Who Painted the Rain

There is a blue window at the heart of my new novel, and it has no glass in it. There never was any. It was built for a stage, and from the audience it looks out on a rainy afternoon so convincing you might reach for an umbrella. Walk round the back and you find timber, a separate painted panel and somebody's patient brushwork. Put your hand through the frame and nothing stops you.

I kept thinking about that window while I wrote Scenery for a Second Life, because it seemed to me the truest picture I had of a long marriage. From the front, a lovely view. From behind, all the work that made it, and very often the wrong name on the box.

A label in the wrong hand

Merryn Saye is sixty three. She has spent twelve years becoming someone nobody introduces as Corin Vennor's wife, and she has done rather well at it: a small studio of her own, work she enjoys, friends who know her mind. When she hears that Latchlight Hall is closing, she goes back to the old scenery store for one thing only, the blue window she painted years ago, which she would quite like on her own wall.

What she finds instead is a fresh label calling the room she designed a fine example of Corin's early work. She reads it twice, in case the second reading improves it. It does not.

I wanted to begin there because it is such a small injury, and small injuries are the ones people find easiest to wave away. Nobody meant anything by it. The archive notes were thin. And yet anyone who has stood slightly behind somebody else's applause will know exactly how that label feels in the hand.

She could put her hand straight through the place where the world appeared to begin.

Two people at one long table

The hall is to have a farewell exhibition, rooms people remember shown from the front and from behind, and it needs the truth about who made what. It also needs Merryn's eye and Corin's skill, which means two former spouses sorting old drawings at the same worktable, disagreeing politely about a curtain, and rediscovering how much they enjoy making something together.

This was the part I loved writing most. Corin still knows how to make her laugh. Merryn still knows when he is hiding behind a joke. Their hands remember where the other person's hand will be long before either of them is ready to say so. Around them stand painted parlours and staircases that stop before the landing, a young man called Ren with a clipboard and a new inventory the old hands keep forgetting to use, and Petra, who is putting the exhibition together and wants its farewell to matter.

Then there is Iona, their daughter, who remembers the marriage from a different height and is not at all sure this is a good idea. I am very fond of Iona. She arrives with pastries that have suffered in transit and asks the questions her parents have spent years stepping carefully round. And there is Dulcie, an old friend who once played women waiting beside windows, who prefers in life to choose her own view, and who has a farewell of her own to make.

The heart does not retire

People sometimes assume a romance for people in their sixties must be a quieter thing, all cardigans and consolation. I have never found it so. Later love has more to lose and more to remember, and it is often funnier, because both people have long since stopped pretending to be perfect. Affection can come back in an afternoon. Trust takes longer, and I wanted the book to take its time over that.

Corin is not a villain. He is a charming, gifted man who let the applause stop at him for years without quite noticing, and that is a harder habit to change than any single wrong. Before he can ask for another chance, he has to see what his comfortable version of the past has cost her, and he has to change the story even when she is not there to hear it. Merryn, for her part, has spent a lifetime making convincing rooms for other people to stand in. Being properly seen in one of them takes a different kind of courage.

Come round the back

If you have ever been introduced as somebody's other half, or done the work while someone else took the bow, or simply wondered whether there is still a first kiss left in you, I think you will feel at home in Latchlight Hall. Bring a cup of tea. It may well turn into dinner.

Scenery for a Second Life is waiting for you, painted rain and all. Step through the window: there is no glass, and there never was.