Never Close Your Eyes Read Free

out.

Chapter Two

    London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Present day
    â€˜â€œThe handsome face of Spiculus, turned brown by the sun, moved closer to hers. Cornelia had an overpowering urge to run her fingers through his thick, dark locks. His lips were dangling there, like ripe cherries . . .”’
    There was a cough. Evie stopped reading and looked up from the page. She sighed. There was an unwritten rule that no one should speak until whoever was reading out loud had finished. But this was the third interruption in as many minutes.
    â€˜Did you want to say something else, Pamela?’ Evie asked. It came out slightly more sharply than she’d intended. After all, the whole idea of the writing group was that it was supposed to be friendly and collaborative, not confrontational: the last thing Evie wanted was to get into an argument, and with Pamela of all people.
    Pamela, who was sitting up ramrod straight in the front row, nodded. The half-moon glasses slid down her long thin nose a little further. Evie hoped they’d drop off.
    â€˜Do lips really dangle?’ Pamela enquired. She made it sound like an innocent enough question but the expression on her face gave her away: she was smug, no doubt about it, delighted to have found fault. She really didn’t have the right attitude.
    â€˜And why on earth don’t you say hair rather than locks?’ Pamela went on. ‘Nobody says locks in real life.’ She scanned the rest of the group for approval.
    The ten or so others sitting in front of Evie glanced at their feet, embarrassed. Several cleared their throats.
    At last Tristram raised a hand. ‘Let, erm, er . . .’
    â€˜Evie,’ someone stage whispered.
    I’ve only been coming here for four years.
    â€˜Evie, of course,’ Tristram continued, straightening his tie. ‘Let Evie finish, please.’
    Pamela sniffed.
    Tristram was self-appointed chairman of the St Barnabas’s Creative Writing Group, so called because of the church hall where they met each month. But members didn’t hold him in particularly high regard.
    For a start, he was forever going on about the army and his old boarding school, wasting valuable time. And being rather hard of hearing, he tended to get the wrong end of the stick, too. At least he’d had the good sense to intervene now, though. It was really bad manners of Pamela to have jumped in like that. She should have waited till the end.
    Evie felt crushed. She couldn’t help it. She was trying so hard to finish The Roman’s Wife , her historical romance. It wasn’t coming easily to her and she knew that she was making a lot of mistakes. But it was her dream to get published one day and, let’s face it, we all have to dream.
    The only person whose writing Pamela seemed to have any respect for at all was Becca, and Becca already had a high-powered job. Writing was just a hobby to her. It really wasn’t fair.
    Evie looked down at the page again and tried to find the spot where she’d left off. Suddenly a voice piped up from the back of the hall: ‘Well, I think “lips dangling like ripe cherries” is rather a nice, sensual image.’
    It was Nic, confident, outspoken Nic, who could always be relied on to leap to Evie’s rescue at moments like this. Evie peered over Pamela’s stiff helmet of grey hair into the rows beyond and smiled at her friend.
    Nic beamed back and did a furtive thumbs up. But Pamela had the bit between her teeth and would not be constrained. She gave a bitter little smile.
    â€˜It’s, ahem, a bit of a cliché though, isn’t it?’ she said.
    Evie saw Nic look down at her lap and start to flick furiously through a book. ‘Hold on a moment,’ she said, her blond bob quivering. ‘Here we are. It says in my dictionary that a cliché is “a phrase or word that’s lost its original effectiveness or power from