an imagined life: 3

Later in the Sloop the music’s a relief from the intractability of the unrealised image, the unforgiving stone. Music, she writes in her head, flows and joins and connects players with players with audience in a way that visual art cannot mimic. 
   It’s jigs and reels, the repeats a cycling that the transitions between the two forms seem to throw into confusion like currents and eddies around the little stony outcropping headlands on these coasts, before resolving into a new continuity.

   The opposing currents fight against each other until one of them surrenders, and something new becomes possible for both. 
   She thinks of the lump of stone. 
   She thinks of Ben.
   She takes a pull of her Guinness.

She lights up, sits back, crosses her legs, taps a foot.

*

Whether you have been reading the previous 'an imagined life' posts or not, perhaps I should say here that these are excerpts from a draft of a fictionalised life of a famous Westcountry sculptor. I also need to tell you that the story – my version – stops abruptly after the 4th/next excerpt. I had just begun this, alongside another novel set also in West Cornwall, when my father had a stroke. My mum had not long been diagnosed with Alzheimer's when that happened, and the ramifications on the family have been huge and much of my own work has been set to one side. So I haven't yet picked this thread up; maybe I will, although the other novel has progressed a lot further. Meantime, as you will know, Imago, my first novel is due out any day now (actually it arrived and had to go back, as the cover was wrong and a section was missing); and The Burning Season has been accepted by the same publisher.