On Heatwave Hours, the River in the Forest, and Finishing a First Draft — a writer’s diary entry, 31st of July

Forty degrees on the thermometer by the back door, which I don’t entirely trust, but the thermometer and I are in agreement about the general direction of things. The days have turned themselves inside out. I’m up before six now, when the light is still grey and thin and the stone hasn’t given back yesterday’s heat yet, and I work until about eleven, and then the shutters go over on the south side and the house closes like a fist and I close with it. Nothing happens between noon and seven. Not for me, not for the dog two doors down, not for the man who usually has opinions about my hedge. The whole village lies down.

Which means, and I hadn’t worked this out until this week, that I am writing more than I have all year. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one expects a thing of you between those hours, so I sit in the cool dark of the downstairs with one lamp on and I write. Then I write again at ten at night with the doors open and the moths coming in. The heat has taken away every possible excuse and handed me back the hours instead. I would not have chosen it. I’m not going to waste it either.

Yesterday I went down to the river. Through the forest and along the track and then that last bit where the path drops and you can hear the water before you see it. The temperature falls away as you go under the trees, ten degrees, twelve, the air changing character entirely. And then the water itself, which comes down off the hills and does not care what the sky is doing, and is so cold it makes your ankles ache in about forty seconds. I sat on a flat stone with my feet in it and my skirt hitched up like a woman of eighty and I stayed there until I’d stopped being able to feel my toes. There was a heron doing his patient nonsense downstream. Two children shrieking somewhere out of sight. I thought: this is free. Nobody is charging me for this.

The moon is two nights past the full one now, still fat but going, coming back down off the top of itself. I did what I said I’d do on the twenty-ninth. Took the paper out from under the candle where it had been sitting since the new moon, read it once, and burned it in the old tin dish on the step. The doubt, written down in my own handwriting, which is a horrible thing to look at in daylight. It went up quickly, the way paper does when it’s been sitting somewhere warm for a fortnight. I don’t say it fixed anything. I say I have not once this week caught myself doing the particular thing I wrote down, and I’m not going to interrogate that too closely.

And on Wednesday afternoon, in the shut-up dark, I finished the first draft.

I want to tell you it was a moment. It was not. I typed a line that I knew was the last line, and I sat there, and the fridge came on. That was it. That’s what finishing sounds like. I didn’t print it. I didn’t ring anybody, not even her, not yet. I went and stood in the kitchen holding the edge of the counter for a while like someone who’d got off a boat. Then I made tea I didn’t drink and went back and read the last page again to check I hadn’t imagined it. It’s a mess. Of course it’s a mess. First drafts are supposed to be. It exists, which yesterday it did not, and that is the whole of the difference and it is an enormous difference.

I keep coming back to the same thought and I’ll write it down and not be embarrassed about it. I do this for a living. I sat in a cool room in a hot country and made something up and that is the work, that is the actual job, and there are a great many people whose day did not look like that and never gets to. My mother worked. She worked hard and she worked at things she did not choose. She would have found the idea that this counted as employment very funny indeed, and she would also have been unbearable about it in the village shop.

Feet still cold from the river, hours after. Best thing that’s happened to me all week, and there was a finished draft in the same week.