‘I don’t know.’ I licked the icing from my fork.
She shook her head. ‘How can you write a book without a proper plan?’
‘I’ve always done it like this.’
‘Not exactly like this,’ Jane corrected me, running her thumb down the side of the pages to straighten the stack. ‘I’ve never seen you write a book this fast.’
‘It must be the Scottish sea air. I’m inspired.’
I kept my tone carefully light. Jane only knew about the one episode of the castle floor plans, and she’d already put that down to overwork, and I had let her go on thinking that was all that it had been. It was a strange thing, but I found it much easier talking about what was happening to me with someone I barely knew, like Dr Weir, than with someone I felt closer to, like Jane. Or Graham. Maybe it just mattered more to me that they not think that I was crazy.
And I’d known Jane long enough to know there was no place for unexplainable phenomena within her ordered life.
She told me, ‘If you’re so inspired here, you ought to move to Scotland. Buy a little house. There’s one the next street over, coming up for sale.’
Jane’s husband Alan had been clearing dishes from the table where we’d eaten lunch, but now he felt the need to interject, ‘She wouldn’t want to live the next street over, Janie.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d hardly make yourself invisible, would you? You’d be over there the whole time, nagging. “How’s it going with the book?” and “When will it be finished?”’
‘I would not.’ Jane tried her level best to look indignant.
‘Besides which, Carrie needs her privacy.’
‘She’d have it.’
‘Oh, aye?’ Alan gave his wife a sideways glance. ‘You want her to believe that, after all the grief you’ve given her this morning?’
‘I only said she should have let us fetch her and not come by taxi.’
With a smile, I interjected, ‘All that way. It’s what, ten minutes?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is not the point.’
‘The point is,’ Alan said, ‘you thought she’d bring a man.’ To me, he added, ‘That was why she made the cake. She’d never bother with a cake for only us.’
Jane couldn’t quite manage to look truly offended with Alan. ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for another one if this is all the thanks I get.’ Shifting position, she sent him the same sort of withering glance she might use on a bothersome publisher. ‘Anyway, when I talked to Carrie last she said that she might bring a man.’
‘I did?’
‘You said you’d let me know.’ She gave a shrug as though the wording didn’t matter. ‘It’s the same thing. I just wanted to be welcoming, in case he came.’
Her husband rolled his eyes at me in silence, and I smiled. Jane missed the interchange, because at that same moment baby Jack, upstairs, let out a sudden wail to let us know he had awoken from his nap, and by the time he had been brought downstairs the focus of attention had been shifted on to him.
He was a lovely baby, bright and interested in everything, with Jane’s blue eyes and reddish hair and happy, fearless nature. ‘They’re remarkable things, babies,’ Jane told me. ‘Such little things, and yet once they come into your life they just change it completely. Take over.’
Which led us back to talking of my character, Sophia, and of how her life would change once her child came.
‘I don’t know that I’m actually going to write a scene about the birth itself,’ I said. ‘It isn’t something I’ve experienced.’
‘You’re wise.’ Jane’s voice was dry. ‘Speaking for myself, I can’t think anyone who has gone through it really wants to read about it.’ Giving little Jack a hug, she said, ‘The end result’s all right, but I don’t need reminding of the process, thank you all the same.’
I did convince her, though, to talk a little bit about it so I’d have the knowledge there in case I needed it. And by the time we’d finished talking it was nearly two o’clock, and time for me to leave.
I called another taxi, over Jane’s objections.
‘I can drive you,’ was her protest, as she walked me to the door and watched me tuck the story pages back into my briefcase. It was an oversized case, built to carry my laptop computer and a couple of changes of clothes. Jane wouldn’t have missed that, I knew, but I’d already thought up a good explanation.