Multiple-choice reading

Lena had prepared forty questions for Margaret Hale. She had written them on cards, numbered them and practised them on the train until the man opposite began to look worried. It was her first big interview for the magazine, and Hale had not spoken to a journalist in over ten years. Everyone in the office had told her the same thing: the old novelist would give her twenty minutes, answer three questions with one word each and send her home.

The house was at the end of a muddy lane, half hidden behind a hedge that nobody had cut for years. Lena knocked twice. When the door finally opened, a small woman in a gardening coat looked her up and down and said, “You’re younger than you sounded on the phone.”

“I’m twenty-four,” Lena said, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“That’s not a criticism,” said Hale. “Come in. Mind the cat.”

The kitchen was warm and untidy, with piles of books on every chair. Hale cleared one for Lena by moving the books onto the floor, then sat down opposite her and folded her hands. Lena took out her first card. “Your last novel came out eleven years ago,” she began. “Many readers have wondered why you stopped writing.”

“Have they?” said Hale. “How kind of them.” She said nothing more.

Lena looked at the second card, then the third. Every question now seemed either rude or stupid. She could feel the interview slipping away, and with it, she suspected, any chance of being sent on another one. Then she noticed something on the windowsill: a row of small clay birds, roughly made, each one painted a different colour.

“Did you make those?” she asked, before she could stop herself. It was not on any of the cards.

For the first time, Hale smiled. “My granddaughter did. She’s seven. She makes one every time she visits, and she tells me a story about each of them. That one,” she pointed at a lopsided blue bird, “is a pilot who’s afraid of heights.”

“That’s a good story,” said Lena.

“It’s a very good story,” said Hale. “Better than most of the ones I was writing at the end.”

Lena did not take out another card. Instead they talked about the birds, then about Hale’s childhood by the sea, and then, almost by accident, about the years when writing had stopped being a pleasure and become a job with deadlines. Hale did not say she would never write again. She said she was “listening for a while”. Lena wrote that down exactly.

When she looked at the clock, nearly two hours had passed. Hale walked her to the door and, to Lena’s surprise, handed her one of the clay birds, a green one with a chipped wing.

“My granddaughter won’t mind,” she said. “She says that one is a journalist. It asks too many questions, and then one good one.”

On the train home, Lena turned the bird over in her hands. She had used one card out of forty. Her editor, she knew, would want quotes, facts and a clear answer to the question everyone was asking. What she actually had was something less tidy and, she thought, more true. She took out her notebook and began, not with the question she had planned to ask, but with the row of birds on the windowsill.