The Words I Never Wrote Read online

  The Words I Never Wrote is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Thynker Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Thynne, Jane, author.

  Title: The words I never wrote: a novel / Jane Thynne.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019034754 (print) | LCCN 2019034755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524796594 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524796600 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6070.H96 W68 2020 (print) | LCC PR6070.H96 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034754

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034755

  Ebook ISBN 9781524796600

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Laura Klynstra

  Cover images: © Lee Avison/Trevillion Images (woman in window), Shutterstock (paper, typewriter)

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Jane Thynne

  About the Author

  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

  [THE WORLD IS A WORLD OF TEARS AND THE BURDENS OF MORTALITY TOUCH THE HEART.]

  —Line from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas weeps for the carnage and grief of the Trojan War

  Seven years, I suppose, are enough to change every pore of one’s skin and every feeling of one’s mind.

  —Letter from Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

  —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

  Prologue

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 2012

  There’s no point in pretending. I did not want to attend the ceremony.

  Lunch at the Four Seasons, far too many speeches, the younger guests—which of course was absolutely everyone—checking their phones, tapping, scrolling, texting, itching to get back to their website or blog or whatever other corner of the digital universe has consigned print journalism to the ark. Polished, exquisite girls with degrees from three universities squinting up at me on the dais, like pilgrims come to see a relic from bygone times. An ocean of tables and suits and harsh yellow light. Air conditioning at refrigeration levels. A PowerPoint presentation celebrating my career highlights: the Pulitzer, the White House Correspondents’ Association Award, et cetera. Another request from a persistent biographer to cooperate on my memoirs; subtext: while there’s still time. As if that’s ever going to happen. Embarrassing levels of applause. And at the end of it all the president of the Press Club giving me a vase inscribed with gold lettering. CORDELIA CAPEL, THE FOREMOST CHRONICLER OF OUR AMERICAN LIFE—the caption they used to put under my byline picture.

  A memento of my long and distinguished career in journalism.

  I have never been keen on mementos. They only trigger a host of recollections that are almost certainly unreliable. Any journalist will assure you that most of what people swear blind happened is actually false. Psychologists say all memories alter, fade, and acquire their own bias. The stories we tell will always be different from what others recall. We misremember our own lives.

  What I can say, now I’m old, is that the memories laid down in the deep fossil bed of childhood last longest, while others blow away like topsoil. And if I have to have a memento, as I sit here in my apartment in the summer of my ninety-sixth year, I would choose the snow globe from the nursery at Birnham Park.

  * * *

  —

  OUR SNOW GLOBE WAS UNIQUE. A heavy, bespoke crystal ball made by an artist in London and featuring a perfect replica of our house, painted with the enameled detail and precision of an Elizabethan miniature. In the garden, ornamental roses bloomed alongside sweet peas, honeysuckle, gooseberries, and raspberries, and tiny beehives adorned the orchard. In front of the house stood the diminutive figures of two girls in short-sleeved dresses, one colored pink, the other cornflower blue. The pleasure of this plaything was that balmy summer could be turned to winter in an instant and a tempest unleashed with a single shake of the hand.

  It was clever of our father to commission this extraordinary ornament, because for us, Birnham Park was the world, entire and contained. All its rooms and recesses, from the stained-glass fanlight over the front door, to the black-and-white checkerboard tiles in the hallway and the beeswax-polished banister, were as familiar to me as my own body. If I try hard I can still glimpse the ghosts of my sister and myself running down the passages or hiding in the cubbyhole up in the eaves. In the nursery I can picture the rocking horse, his nostrils eternally flared, galloping past the dollhouse, and the flames leaping in the hearth behind the fireguard.

  I can still see the panel at the base of the window seat, inch my fingers behind it and withdraw a glossy volume, feeling the sheen of its soft leather cover and gilt-edged pages. It is the commonplace book where I kept all my thoughts and ideas for stories, jottings, snatches of poetry, and
fragments of words that delighted me. There are pictures too. A photograph of the family lined up along the terrace and a studio portrait of Irene and myself, heads bent close, Irene’s beauty effortlessly drawing the eye. A menu from Irene’s wedding breakfast—orange soup and quenelles of plaice—a theater program for Murder in the Cathedral, and two pressed honeysuckle flowers from the wall at the back of our garden. The petals are frail and translucent but the scent arises instantly, piercingly.

  * * *

  —

  THE TROUBLE WITH MEMORIES is, they’re treacherous. They come not single spies but in battalions. When I think of Birnham Park now I see myself there another time. The last time.

  I am standing in the nursery, looking down the garden, making the most important decision of my life.

  A distant sound snaps the skein of my thoughts and I tense, with a vigilance that is second nature, waiting for a footstep on the stair that doesn’t come. I adjust the mint green dress, smoothing down the skirt, wriggling the puffed sleeves, and touching the single strand of pearls. Inspecting my appearance in the mirror, I see only calm resolve. A responsible thirty-year-old woman with a frank expression and hair pushed back from her brow, who has managed, with a degree of ingenuity, to come by some Chanel lipstick and face powder in straitened times. The sight reassures me. What could possibly go wrong?

  In a parallel universe I would turn away at this point and cancel my plans. I would walk down to the drawing room for tea and some of Jennie’s Victoria sponge cake and discuss with my father the possibility of finding work in the civil service. Instead, I make my resolution and turn away from the mirror. There is no time to waste in fruitless contemplation.

  My secret is perfectly safe.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN NOW, THE THOUGHT of that moment makes me shiver.

  My helper, Everton, who is bringing me a cup of coffee, thinks I’m cold, and bundles a rug across my knees.

  “You okay, Miss Capel? You tired?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, Everton.”

  It amazes me that such a sensitive man as Everton should be single. He is middle-aged, but despite his immense kindness he is a solitary soul. I think he may have had a girlfriend back home in Jamaica, but I often catch him poring over the lonely hearts ads in the local paper. I suppose, as far as love goes, it’s as good a method as any.

  “Pass the radio, would you?”

  Restlessly I turn on the radio and let the noise of the outside world drown out my memories. The center of my universe is now this sitting room with its view of trees and a small park from where the sound of children playing floats up to me. Everyone comments on my remarkable health and fitness. The doctor says there’s nothing major wrong with me; I could, in his view, live beyond a hundred. My joints ache, naturally. I have no strength, and anemia leaves me pallid, but otherwise it’s not an unpleasant feeling. I’m fading like a book left out in sunlight, all words erasing gradually from the page. What was it Blaise Pascal said? All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

  Well, I can do that. I can sit quietly surrounded by the objects that have accompanied me through life—a few beloved books, and a painting of a garden propped on a gilt easel. And even if I am alone, I don’t feel it—my desk is crowded with photographs of all the dear people I love and have loved. Not that I need to look at them, because I have them by heart. They are always with me.

  Yet as I think of one face in particular, I admit a problem does remain. The problem I have spent most of my life running away from. And perhaps it’s something about that ceremony today, the sight of those slides on the PowerPoint, and the memory of my younger, more vigorous self, the Cordelia Capel who believed with all her heart words could change the world, that makes me think it’s not too late to fix.

  I feel urgency race through me, and a last shiver of energy run right down my fingertips.

  As if by telepathy, Everton senses my change of mood and pops his head round the door.

  “You had a tiring day, Miss Capel. You need to conserve yourself.”

  “You’re right, as always, Everton.”

  “You want a sleep?”

  “Actually, I want my typewriter.”

  Chapter One

  NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 2016

  Her first impression was of entering a church. Or if not a church, then at least a place of worship, its air scented with old metal and polish, its wooden shelves glimmering with holy relics. Juno Lambert had not much idea what to expect when she stepped out of the elevator and pushed open the door of the New York Typewriter Company three floors above Fifth Avenue, but she’d scarcely imagined this. Row upon row of them, stacked floor to ceiling: antique Olympias, Remingtons, Smith-Coronas, Olivettis, and Royals, their keys jet or smooth ivory, their steel casings gleaming pink, blue, green, and Bible black. It was not so much a shop, as a place of pilgrimage. A shrine.

  Nailed on the opposite wall was a rusting tin sign.

  TYPEWRITERS: SALE & REPAIR. ALL MODELS.

  From the back of the shop, behind a partition, came the sound of someone negotiating on the telephone, murmured interjections and agreement, accompanied by a rapid, atonal symphony of clattering keys.

  Otherwise, she was alone.

  Inhaling the acid tang of oil and ink, Juno eased the auburn hair from the sticky back of her neck and twisted it up into a ponytail. Her cotton dress clung to her and she longed to fan herself vigorously. Outside, the Flatiron Building loomed over another choking hot day, the Manhattan air fogged with fumes and the city’s arteries clogged with noisy traffic, but inside this store a stillness presided. The only wall space not covered by typewriters was plastered with newspaper clippings and photographs of them. Pictures of collectors’ items. Thank-you notes from grateful purchasers. Articles about how vintage machines were selling for thousands of dollars amid cyber-hacking fears. How people suffering from “digital burnout” were seeking a fresh connection to the past.

  Juno loved vintage too, but mostly in the form of Chanel jackets or Dior dresses or battered Bottega Veneta bags found from hours of scouring eBay. She had never given typewriters a second thought until she was commissioned to photograph an actress performing in a Tennessee Williams play in a pop-up theater in SoHo and she had the idea to evoke a forties feel with a black-and-white shot of the actress gazing out of a window. Moody lighting, draped silk dress, plume of cigarette smoke. The addition of a typewriter was a last-minute inspiration.

  From behind the partition, the voice could still be heard, talking on the phone. Moving over to examine a sleek model in lime green, Juno tentatively brushed the keys. She had never used a typewriter—hardly even touched one, unless you counted the machine in the attic of their old family home, its workings caked with dust and stuck fast—imagine having to crank in a piece of paper every time you wanted to put something in writing! Her instinct had been correct, though; merely the sight of a machine like this inspired a host of associations. Dorothy Parker with her Smith-Corona, George Orwell and his Remington. Jack Kerouac used a Hermes. Ian Fleming’s typewriter was gold plated. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed. Whose novelistic tip was that? Ernest Hemingway, wasn’t it?

  There was an irony too. The previous day Juno’s laptop had been hacked, and as the virus rampaged through her hard drive, it might as well have swallowed her whole life. Contacts, past writing, years of photography. Friends, recent pictures of her mother taken just before she died. Her brother, Simon, in his London apartment. Everything gone. Yet even as she opened up the computer and discovered its memory dissolving like an aspirin, it had seemed weirdly appropriate.

  After all, wasn’t half her life in the process of disappearing?

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS THREE MONTHS since Daniel Ryan, her partner of the past fifteen years, had depa
rted. People change, Juno knew that, it’s the oldest complaint in the world, but the changes in Dan had played out before her eyes as inexorably as time-lapse photography. When they first met—she a twenty-one-year-old photographer fresh out of college, he a fledgling actor—Dan had just won a cameo role in an art house film. He got noticed, and great reviews, and they were both ecstatic. Once they moved in together Dan drifted away from movies to spend time in theater “learning his craft,” and that proved the right decision. His talent was real and he began to turn heads.

  For a while Juno enjoyed accompanying Dan on his steady rise to fame. Being consort to celebrity brought distinct advantages. She liked the double takes and the whispers when he was recognized in the street or at parties, the subtle rise in status, the overspill of curiosity as eyes turned to her and tried to puzzle out who she was. The best restaurant tables, the premiere tickets, the weekends in Connecticut and Long Island with producers and directors, the vast ranks of his new best friends.

  Then Dan’s success was crowned by the call from Hollywood. He had been cast in a Netflix World War II drama, to be shot in L.A. and on location. Even now Juno could recall the excitement in his eyes as they began the inevitable dispute about priorities. Her job was infinitely portable, Dan coaxed. Her mother—how to be gentle about this?—had been dead for months. For what possible reason could Juno cling to Manhattan? What kind of person wanted to live in the same city all her life? This wasn’t the Juno he knew. Sometimes he didn’t recognize her anymore.