birds. It had once been on her parents’ bed in Simla, and in their other houses in Nepal and Kashmir, and the houseboat in Srinagar. She had a brass lamp, a few kitchen utensils hidden under the bed (“No kitchen privileges,” said the sign in the hall), boxes and boxes of books and typing paper and a Remington typewriter perched on a packing case. The secretarial course was only a means to an end. What she wanted more than anything in the world was to be a writer. After work each night, she changed into some warm clothes, lit up one of the three Abdullah cigarettes she allowed herself each day, touched her little green glass statue of Ganesh—Indian god of writers, among other things—and set to work.
She found happiness in that room, hearing the clack of her typewriter and the occasional whoomph of the Winterbourne, the last lavatory chain being pulled. Around midnight, stiff and yawning, she undressed for bed, and as soon as her head hit the pillow, fell dead asleep.
And then, via the agency she did temporary typing for, she was sent to work for Mrs. Nancy Driver, who was the real thing: a prolific writer of romances, two of them set in India, where her husband, now dead, had been a major in the Indian Cavalry. Mrs. Driver, who spent much of her day furiously typing in a camel-haired dressing gown, might have seemed at first, with her Eton crop and fierce pouncing style of conversation, like an unlikely fairy godmother, but that was what she’d been.
She and Viva had settled into a routine together. At eleven-thirty, when Mrs. Driver had bathed and eaten her breakfast, she wrote furiously in longhand for an hour or so while Viva dealt inexpertly with her correspondence. After lunch, while her employer relaxed with another glass of sherry and a cheroot, Viva would type up the morning’s work and, if a large red cross was in the margin, she was allowed to add what were called “the spoony bits.” Mrs. Driver was convinced, quite wrongly, that Viva, being young and good-looking, was having lots of exciting romances.
It was Mrs. Driver who subscribed to the magazine Criterion, and who first introduced her to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. “Listen to this! Listen to this!” She’d struck a dramatic pose with her cheroot still smoldering between her fingers and her eyes closed, declaiming:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
And it was in this flat, typing and proofreading and drinking coffee, that it gradually dawned on Viva that as far as being a writer was concerned, she was in kindergarten. Before, she would bash out her stories and then, when she came to the last full stop, send them out. Now, she watched how hard Mrs. Driver struggled to find “the right way in,” how she paid close attention to the smallest and oddest things, often writing about them in her many notebooks; how she talked her stories out loud when she got stuck, how she’d leave them in drawers for several months to mature.
“There is no magic recipe,” her employer said. “Each one cooks in its own way.”
When Viva, shaking with nerves, told Mrs. Driver over sherry one morning that she had dreams herself of writing some stories, Mrs. Driver had been kind but pragmatic. She told her if she was serious and needed to earn money immediately (for Viva had been unusually frank about her dire financial straits), she should try and sell to women’s magazines like Woman’s Life and The Lady, the kind of gentle romances they published on a regular basis.
“Awful tripe,” Mrs. Driver had warned. “And you will write from your own heart eventually, but it will get you started and give you some confidence.”
She’d showed her how to prune her stories ruthlessly (“Sharpen, lighten, tighten,” she’d written all over her margins) and in the last six months, Viva had penned thirteen stories in which a variety of granite-jawed heroes seized women of the blond, helpless, and dim variety. Back had come ten rejection slips but three had been published.
And oh, the impossible elation of that first moment of hearing that her first story had been accepted. She’d got the letter after work on a wet November evening, and run around Nevern Square on her own in the dark. She’d been so sure then—ridiculously sure in retrospect—that this was a turning point and from now