Sherry & Nuts With V.C. Andrews

She’s smaller than I imagined and somehow faded. I’m reminded of a small grey sparrow perched in the encompassing space of the large brocade armchair. She has her hair tucked up under a hat and her feet sit neatly on the carpeted floor beneath her as she waits.

I introduce myself and tell her I’ve been a fan for years. She smiles then, and pulls off her hat, and I know that my idea of her as a small grey sparrow was wholly incorrect. Her smile is devilish, teasing, and I can see that her eyes know more about me than I have yet managed to tell her. Her hair is a surprise too; white blonde and curled, like the characters in her most famous series of books.

She invites me to sit down now, in this grand old hotel of her choosing, and I do so gladly. Tell me more my eyes murmur and she nods as if I’ve said the words aloud. “The books were a mistake, in a way.”

I’m eager for her to continue but the black suited waiter interrupts to talk about today’s offerings and invite us to place an order. She waves the menu away without checking with me first. “Sherry,” she says firmly. “A glass of your best sherry and a small bowl of salted nuts. I’ve never been one for an extravagant lunch.”

I pass my own menu back to the waiter without looking at it. “I’ll have the same,” I say, although my memories of sherry are of ghastly sips stolen from my parents’ cocktail cabinet around the same time as I discovered V.C. Andrews startling and blushworthy Flower’s in the Attic book series. Well, blushworthy to a young teenage girl who didn’t yet know that such books existed.

“You don’t need to have it just because I am,” she says softly. Her voice is young and girlish, as if she is a person who is very careful of the number of harsh words she utters.

“No, I’m happy with sherry and nuts.” I clasp my hands in my lap, for no other reason than that it feels right. “The books. Tell me about the books.”

“I wrote them and I fell in love with them.” She looks wistful now, caught up in memories that I have no knowledge of. “Then I sent them to my publisher and he asked me to add something more.”

I nod. I think I know what the ‘something more’ is. However, I have no idea how she came up with such an outlandish ‘something more’ and I hope she will tell me.

“I think the incest factor was a shock to him,” she muses, “But what more could I add to the story of four children left on their own for years in an attic? Aside from murder of course, and I was far too fond of each of them to kill any of them off at that stage.”

“It clearly wasn’t so much of a shock to him that he refused to publish it,” I point out. “And you’re right. What else could you have done? They’d already been starved of love and food, tortured in a way, and endlessly punished by deprivation.”

She nods and whispers a quiet thank you to the waiter as he returns with a silver tray bearing two small glasses of golden-hued sherry and a crystal bowl of mixed nuts. We wait until he reverently places them on the table and leaves us alone again. “But they had love,” she assures me. “They had the love of one another.”

“I know.” I sip my sherry and it’s as ghastly as I remember. The hotel restaurant is busy now and the noise level has risen. I hope she will raise the volume of her voice to compensate or I might not hear her words. “The books had a special meaning for me.”

“Oh?” She arches one finely drawn eyebrow. “And what was that?”

“They were stories about two sets of blonde twins.” I self-consciously touch my own blonde curls. “That was us. My siblings and I. We’re two sets of twins, a boy and girl each time.”

Her eyes gleam and she chuckles with obvious delight. “Well I never! I always knew you existed.”

“No, no,” I say hurriedly, anxious to prevent any misunderstandings. “Our life was nothing like that of the twins in your books.”

She nods and her eyes tell me that she thinks the similarities may be closer than I think.

“No incest,” I clarify.

“That was the publisher’s request,” she reminds me. “I was happy with the original story. Other people’s ideas changed those children’s lives, and mine too. More than I thought possible.”

We smile at each other, finally understanding one another completely, and we quietly sit and drink our sherry as the pure ridiculousness of the theory of coincidence and fate washes over us.

The End