Speechless Hours

He wrote for ten or twelve hours a day.

This was not an exaggeration, although people tended to assume it was when they first heard it. He began after breakfast and often did not notice the afternoon arriving. He would look up at four and discover that the light had changed. At seven, he might still be at his desk. Sometimes she would find him there after midnight, surrounded by empty cups of good coffee.

Whether his writing sold was another question. They did not discuss it much.

Perhaps one day people would discover him, the way people discovered Van Gogh. It was not impossible. Stranger things had happened. For now, however, he had the more immediate problem of finishing the next chapter. Then the next book. Or article, when it came to magazines.

His partner had always understood this.

That was part of what made her so good at loving him. She understood that writing was not simply something he did. It was where his mind went when it was left alone. She admired his talent, even when his talent became inconvenient. She brought him coffee without interrupting him. She learnt the difference between his various silences. She knew when a hand placed lightly on his shoulder would be welcome and when it would be met with a distracted grunt.

She also knew that something had gone wrong. It happened gradually, which made it difficult to identify. He began forgetting meals. Then appointments. Then conversations. He could be sitting beside her on the sofa while she told him about her day and suddenly his eyes would lose their focus.

‘Are you listening?’

‘Mhm.’

‘What did I just say?’

‘When?’

She would look at him. He would look back, sincerely puzzled. She tried to talk to him about it.

‘You can’t be inside your head all the time.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Me too.’

‘This isn’t good for you.’

‘No.’

‘And it isn’t particularly good for me either.’

A pause.

‘No.’

She had once thrown a cushion at him. He had caught it without looking up from his notebook. She had to admire the reflex. She tried other things.

Walks were one of them. She loved the beach and, when the weather allowed, she would persuade him to come with her. He would put on his favourite shorts and walk beside her, apparently present. But she could tell. His body was there. The rest of him was somewhere else.

She would talk about the gulls, the weather, a neighbour, something she had read.

He would say, ‘Mhm.’

Once, halfway along the beach, she stopped. He continued walking. She watched him go for several seconds before calling his name. He turned.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

He waited, smiling. But he did not understand. She did not explain.

‘Exactly.’

A few months later, she brought home a dog. It was a risky choice. She knew this as soon as she made it. The dog was lovely, though. A black-poodle rescue with thin legs, a solemn face and the patient expression of someone who had already forgiven the world for disappointing him.

At first, the writer did not know what to do. The dog brought him a ball. He returned to his desk. The dog lay beside his chair. He moved the chair. The dog followed. Eventually the poodle rested its head on his foot. The writer looked down as though he had discovered an unfamiliar object attached to his leg.

‘What does he want?’

‘You.’

‘Why?’

She stared at him.

‘Because he likes you.’

The writer considered the dog.

‘But I’ve done nothing.’

‘That’s apparently enough.’

He smiled politely and went back to his keyboard. Months passed. One evening, she found the dog asleep in the doorway of his study.

‘He waits for you,’ she said.

The writer looked down at the now-wagging tail.

‘He doesn’t speak.’

She thought she had misheard him.

‘What?’

‘I never know what to say to animals.’

She leaned against the doorframe.

‘You don’t have to say anything special. He just adores your voice’

He frowned.

‘I don’t talk to speechless creatures.’

She looked at him for a long moment.

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind.’

She left the room. The next morning, she booked a small cottage by the sea. She did not tell him. She simply waited. On Thursday evening, she packed a bag. The dog watched her. Surprisingly, the writer was at his desk.

‘I’m going away for a few days.’

He did not turn around.

‘Mhm.’

‘I’m taking the dog.’

‘Mhm.’

She stood there for a while.

Then she said, ‘You can come if you want.’

He turned.

‘Where?’

She almost laughed.

‘To the seaside.’

He looked at the clock.

‘I can’t.’

‘I know.’

She picked up the dog’s lead. The dog stood immediately. At the door, she stopped.

‘I’m not asking you to stop writing.’

He waited.

‘I’m asking you to remember that I’m here.’

Then she left. For several minutes, he remained at his desk. He tried to write. The sentence in front of him would not work. He deleted it. He wrote another. Deleted that too. He stood up and made coffee. He sat down again.

The room felt different.

He could hear the refrigerator.

He could hear a car passing outside.

He could hear the clock.

He had lived in that house for eight years and had never noticed how loudly the clock ticked. At eleven, he went upstairs. At midnight, he came back down. He opened the front door. The street was empty. He stood there for a while, breathing the cold air. Then he went back inside. He did not write. He had coffee and red wine, but they tasted completely different.

The next morning he drove to the cottage. He told himself he was only going for the weekend. She did not say anything when he arrived. She was sitting on the beach with the dog. He walked towards them. The dog saw him first. For a moment it simply stared. Then it ran.

He bent down instinctively and the poodle crashed into him with such enthusiasm that he nearly fell backwards.

‘Good boy.’

She laughed. He laughed too. It was the first time she had heard him laugh properly in weeks. They sat on the sand. For a while, neither of them spoke.

Then he said, ‘I think I have been confusing concentration with living.’

She looked at him.

‘That’s a very writerly thing to say.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you going to write it down?’

He shook his head.

‘No. Or, maybe.’

She smiled.

That afternoon, they walked for miles. He noticed things. The colour of the water. The sky. A child’s red bucket abandoned near the dunes. The dog chasing a gull and discovering that gulls did not intend to cooperate. He noticed her hand when she reached for his. He noticed that she was smiling.

None of those things became sentences in his head. That was the strange part. They were simply things. And for once, that was enough.

When they returned home on Sunday, he went back to his desk. She watched from the kitchen doorway. He opened the computer. He wrote for three hours. Then he stopped.

‘Coffee?’

She looked at him as though he had begun speaking another language.

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please. You’re finished?’

‘For today.’

She smiled. The dog appeared beside him. He looked down.

‘Good boy.’

The dog looked up.

The writer hesitated, then crouched.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

The dog wagged its tail.

He laughed.

‘I suppose we’ll have to work on your vocabulary.’

The dog barked once. From the kitchen, she watched them.

He still wrote. He still disappeared into his work sometimes. There were days when he wrote ten hours and days when he wrote twelve. Or days when he wrote two hours. There were even occasional nights when she found him at his desk at two in the morning. But now he came back. He ate dinner. He went outside. He listened when she spoke. And almost every evening, he took the dog for a walk.

The books eventually found readers. Some did better than others. One became unexpectedly successful. A journalist asked him in an interview where he found his inspiration.

He thought about the question. He thought about the years he had spent believing that inspiration required him to shut the world out. Then he looked through the window. His partner was in the garden. The dog was asleep at her feet.

‘I used to think inspiration was something you protected yourself from the world to preserve,’ he said. ‘Now I think it comes from paying attention to it.’

The journalist waited for more.

He smiled.

‘Also, my dog is very demanding.’

The journalist laughed. The writer did too. He had learnt, finally, that life could not be postponed until the book was finished. There was always another book. There was always another sentence. But there was only one evening like this one, with the windows open, the sea somewhere not so far beyond the houses and someone he loved waiting in the garden. He switched off the computer. And went outside.