Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 57

Writers are territorial, and they resent intruders. My sister Susan (who prefers not to be reminded that her first name is Susan, though Susan it is, and who prefers to struggle along under the pen-name of A.S. Byatt rather than Susan, even though those of us in her family know all too well that the tell-tale ‘S’ definitely stands for Susan) said in an interview somewhere (I didn’t read it myself, not having time to waste) that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular tea set that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. I had some sympathy with Sue, who felt I had appropriated something that was not mine, even though, as my lawyer pointed out, it was, strictly speaking, not exclusively hers either, and if she had really wanted to write about that tea set then why hadn’t she done so when she had the opportunity, and not wait until she knew that I had done so before opening her big fat mouth and complaining that I had got there first?

I used the tea set in my novel The Chest of Drawers,^* but employed the power of my imagination to change it from a tea set to a coffee set, in an attempt, sadly misguided, to prevent an indignant outburst from Sue. Incidentally, the ‘chest of drawers’ in the title was originally not a chest of drawers at all but a small occasional table, of the type common in the East Midlands immediately after the 2nd World War; I changed it from a small occasional table to a chest of drawers for reasons that I no longer remember, but which (knowing her!) may have had something to do with not wishing to upset my big sister Sue. For the purposes of fiction, in this particular novel I used my imagination to transform Sue into a cut-price washing machine with an unreliable timing mechanism which the heroine, Meg, eventually throws away, for reasons I now forget.

MARGARET DRABBLE