I love the intricate, semi-understandable fiction of those women writers who were either Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Bowen's contemporaries who wrote in her vein. Dialogue was Ivy Compton-Burnettish to the nth degreee, often murkily fustian but, on clearer days, clear as clouded crystal. Intervening prose of description and scene-stetting and mind-setting and passion-posing was dense at times but, at others, crepuscular with emerging meaningfulness. Words which stretched you. Thoughts that imbued you with thoughts you dared not earlier think you could even have the capacity to think. It made me want to write further fictions their pens had not had time to write. Days of the heart where plots bleat for escape. Heat of the death in a night's hotel. A house in a city called Eva Trout. Eva she was the one I'd love. A country where maps were made like her face. Ley lines giving form and favour to a sweetheart's beauty. This was the fiction I needed. A fiction that fabricated a real-life lover I would not otherwise meet.
"And now you have made me, what next?" she asked, splitting from the page like a woodknot made proud.
"Let's explore the place you live."
I looked around at a city I knew was like Paris but was not Paris. It had canals like Venice, museums like Vienna, statues like Florence, lakes like Maggiore.
"What here?"
"It made itself as a sort of non-sequitur in admiration of your own gratuitous serendipity."
"Your big words are too clumsy for real thoughts." She looked even prettier as she mewed this plaint.
"Real thoughts don't touch the sides ... least of all the sides of paper. They flow along wordless channels like these mock gondolas." As I spoke and as if she had not seen them, I indicated, with a slightest finger, the ghostly craft that threaded the ever-developing veins of my city.
"Even if your words are plain and simple, being used in complicated structures of thought and meaning does not absolve you." Eva, now thinking herself autonomous enough to stalk off into parts of the city I had not yet created, toppled into a canal I had only just deemed possible. She sleeked off into the splintery rainbows of false tides, before I could catch her in my all-weather, all-fable net.
Perhaps it was the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen herself. But do ghosts have scales and eyes in the sides of their heads? Human ones, surely, don't.
The city faded around me to the north. To the nth degree.
(Published ‘Oasis’ 2001)
