Mereward

London, 1920. A newspaper columnist meets a woman twice — a bakery, a queue, the smell of flour, two pennies pushed back across the counter. Nothing is spoken. Nothing is promised. Then she is dead, and the small ordinary warmth of her becomes the one thing he cannot put down. Unable to write a word, he takes a room at Mereward — a beautiful, failing house in the west country that has, for generations, taken in writers. By day its lawns run green to a still lake. He begins, at last, to write her: the wrist, the turned tooth, the way she could not abide a crooked sum. The words come easily. They come too easily. Then the pages begin to appear that he does not remember writing. Pages in a hand almost his own. Pages that know things he never knew — and that are not trying to tell her story. They are trying to make one. For at Mereward the unfinished do not rest. Abandoned letters, interrupted lives, half-written books — they gather in certain places, hungry, waiting for a hand to complete them. And the more beautiful the woman on the page becomes, the less she resembles anyone who ever lived; the more he loves her, the more of himself she takes; and the closer he comes to the ending, the more terrible the question grows of who, in this house, has been the author all along — and who the material. A love story that is also a haunting; a haunting that is also a confession. MEREWARD asks what we steal from the people we turn into stories — and refuses, to the last page, to tell us whether what waits in the ground is a curse, or a mercy.