Greyglass by Tanith Lee (story read aloud .TXT) 📕

“I mean the old woman. Catherine.”

With no warning Olivia turned and shrieked violently, malevolently into the ringing body of the silent painted house: “Go to hell, Catherine! Clear out, Catherine! Fuck off! Fuck the fuck off!” Then turning back to Susan, no longer quite flawless, and hair ruffled, her eyes like those of a scared bacchante, Olivia murmured, “Great to meet you, Susan. Take care.”

Book Two

V

This isn’t for me. It’s for Flat 6C.”

“I know. She’s out again. Can you take it?”

Susan looked at the postman’s pale, stare-eyed, harassed face. “All right.”

He, or one of the many postmen who came and went, was always pushing letters for Flat 6C through her own door, which was marked, obviously confusingly, 6E. This however was a package, not very large, but too big to fit in either door.

6C was directly across the hall. Susan had never glimpsed the occupant, although she knew her name from all the wrongly-delivered-letters – Ms Crissie Fielding.

Crissie Fielding, the only truly adjacent neighbour, was very quiet. Which was also explainable if she was out a lot. The faint strains of popular music or TV that frequently strayed from the other flats, (6A, B and D) down the corridor, never emanated from 6C.

Susan took the package back into the kitchen.

Sitting at the small table, with her half-eaten croissant, she glanced over the package. Apart from the address, it bore a small label. G.D. Register.

Vaguely, Susan felt reluctant to confront Crissie-of-the-unusual-spelling Fielding with the package. (Before it had only been a matter of putting post through the letterbox.) Why on earth?

Perhaps meeting anyone, here, talking to anyone, here – which generally, so far, for a whole seven weeks, Susan had meticulously avoided – was going to feel peculiar.

She had after all met so many people here, and none of them the original person, which person she had met over and over until she was nearly thirteen, but never met, never, in any real sense of the word.

Susan was thirty when two quite major things happened in her life. First she won the Cameron Award for Book Cover Art and Design, a prize that made her dear to Paragon Books, and also enhanced her bank balance with an astonishing ten thousand pounds. The following month, at a party thrown by Paragon, she was introduced to R.J. He was the writer whose work had had her prize-winning jacket.

“I liked your cover,” he said, rather stiffly, “thank you.”

After all the fulsome praise, this sounded grudging and awkward. Susan assumed R.J. had not liked her cover for his book at all.

It had been a difficult novel to exemplify. Ornamental yet subtle and convoluted, but having to have Paragon’s required bold, eye-catching image. In the end Susan had constructed the artwork from layers of cut and pasted paper, a method she hadn’t employed for some years. The three main characters of the book, represented in this glowing, yet ghostly and fragmented way, seemed to catch the eye of everyone, the prize committee included.

Susan was never sure what she thought, but then she never was with her own handiwork. Sometimes, looking, months or years after, at covers she and other people had only thought adequate, she sensed genuine effectiveness. Conversely, jackets which had been enthused over repeatedly, seemed lacking in anything save the careful draughtsmanship she had learned.

She still thought of herself as a fraud who had somehow managed to fool them all, Paragon in particular, that she was a bona fide artist. In the beginning, when she had had to work full-time in Paragon’s art department, and was herself commissioned only to execute one or two covers a year, Susan had thought this was probably her proper station. When more cover work came her way she was always sure she would soon be found out. And since the award, she lived in a sort of ironic guilty alarm, waiting for the clock at midnight.

“I’m sorry, I did try to reflect something of the novel, but I felt I hadn’t. It’s a complex book. And mostly in – quartertones. The watercolours I did though, were hopeless.”

R.J. gazed at Susan over his glass of red wine. He still looked preoccupied, but seeming to hear her now, if from a great way off.

“But you won the Cameron,” he said.

“Yes. That was wonderful.”

She felt self-conscious at confessing to him what he must already know, her failure to do justice to his work.

She also felt frightened of him, had done so as soon as she saw him, a thing that hadn’t happened for approximately a decade.

R.J. was forty-four, as his book jacket copy told anyone who cared to read it. He was tall, about six foot three, and heavily built, though it was bone and muscle, not excess flesh. He had an olive complexion, like a Spaniard or Greek, neither of which he was, dry dark curling hair beginning to lose its pigment, and bloodshot golden-yellow eyes like a bird of prey.

“Your glass is empty,” he said next.

“Yes. I don’t want any more wine.”

“Let me get you an orange juice,” he said, and turning round plucked one, she thought, fantastically, from thin air. This he handed to her. “No,” he said, “I did like your cover. I didn’t recognise it, that’s all.”

“No.”

“But you get used to that, and at least it was attractive. It was elegant, in fact. It reminded me – not of art but music. Bach, totally precise yet cunningly split in overlapping sections.”

“Your book reminded me of Chopin, the piano concertos,” she returned boldly, because she felt timid and refused to be. And because he had said something that might have been pretentious, but it was not, and she wanted to aid and abet this, somehow.

“Really? Chopin. Why?”

“I can’t explain. It’s sadness… the under-orchestration – I don’t understand music technically.”

“And you read my book too,” he said. “Few illustrators bother to do that now. They just want a note of what to draw. And my God, you’ve