Editing, I tell my students, is writing. Writing is only editing, nothing more. You edit and revise and you edit and revise yourself into a book; it is all elbow work; a violin playing off in a side room. The room is lonely. I edit myself through my ear, by pitch, like music. Perfect pitch, you have perfect pitch my friend said this week. It was lovely to hear. It takes hours of practice, hours and hours, a lifetime. And hours of reading other people’s books, books better than mine, books with more accomplished voices.

I learned how to write by reading poetry, by listening to music, to songs; to people singing, to hymns, to nursery rhymes, to folk tunes, by humming. Writing is a kind of underground humming; it is your unconscious speaking. And she was telling me to keep Dorothy before I keep my ‘I’ voice. Let Dorothy speak. So I have removed my ‘I’, or rather, I have handed it back to Dorothy. I have removed the portentous ‘‘I that would tell us that ‘this is a metaphor I find useful for life’ — this business of timing. That can come later. Later, at the right time, the ‘I’ will burst out upon the scene: as reader, as me but not me, because of course this is all fiction. So much of life is as we tell it to ourselves inside our head. As we write ourselves into a version of ourselves and others. Ourselves as others.

The plums fall heavily in June, when we are away, yes, we are away when they fall. Always on one of our little holidays, clambering over rocks, watching the tide drag in and out, because Henry insists, I must have a rest.

And so I rest, and there is a sea of plums fat and squashed for the birds to feast upon, because we are away, we are away, Dorothy’s voice grows faint. She is climbing over rocks, she is distracted by the shore, can you see her? And you know, someone is always away on holiday, along the coast where the air is softer, where Dorothy squeezes his hand more often. Dorothy, his lovely wife, who has been away for so long. You have been away a long time!  Visiting children and grandchildren, rescuing one marriage or another, a muddle, a mess, an unfortunate affair, such poor timing, which leads to nasty accidents you know, and so the plums fall wickedly and smile with their own significance, and we are too late to feed from them properly. So they rot, they run away to find the worms, because it is all in the timing this living, in the lines you deliver, when and where. To whomsoever is listening; to the air -- and Pond Man nods his head.