! A Novel Situation

She looked not unlike the anti-heroine of her own novels or was it the other way around? mousey but together, neatly dressed in an understated way like her Paris dressmaker mother who'd fled Vienna Though in fact she was a brilliant bluestocking lecturer and trenchant critic who'd embarked, on the side, on novel writing However the British don't like people who do two things well and the critics - mostly men - panned her rotten while the women reserved judgment. She had a standard plot - mousey, together spinster meets possible, quiet Him who might be The One but who turns out too morally wet for Her. But her increasing sublety with variations to this and increasing literary skills won her praise from feminist critics and even a minor prize. I had expressed envious admiration for her trenchant criticism to a colleague; one day the unsolicited word came: she had expressed interest in meeting me... A shared life of letters - the Sunday papers read in bed - with her reviews in them - the flow of sparkling wit - a shared life of letters - the plot of all her books the same.. the failed romance, the material to hand... the literary world's knowing gossip.. I flunked it Subsequently, on Friday afternoons, I sat opposite her on the bus from Piccadilly to her small but dress-maker- neat flat just off King's Road, Chelsea bought with the prize-money, I guess and the increased royalties (the men still scoffing at her standard plot, the women admiring her subtlety in describing the bruised but knowing human heart...) I knew her face, from in the press; she didn't know mine. I sat opposite her on the bus - neatly dressed, together - contemplating in bittersweet incongruity the novel I never lived and she never wrote differently