Windmill Hill

the wind had picked up, coming in off the sea, rushing over the ridge of the Downs, clear and hard, carrying salt and complicated scents of wildflowers with seagulls cresting in, and over, clouds travelling fast, faster, onwards, past; and the power builds and hums, the muscles strain for release and at last familiar feet run up inside, and there i

‘Your heart,’ she said, ‘will have been compensating for years without you even knowing there was something wrong. But then at some point it will have started to send out signals.’ Dizzy spells, tiredness, shortness of breath; a sense of things misfiring, spinning; palpitations, insomnia. The notion that her heart had been signalling to her made he

When Nina came in, if she didn’t close the door fast enough, a tornado would swirl in with her, flapping the curtains, blowing papers into the air, knocking over picture frames. Joe accepted this with equanimity. ‘It’s the windmill’s job to withstand gales. It calls the wind up here, and sometimes it’s too much, and it gets battered and torn up, an

‘So what?’ She cut him off. She was not going to allow him to undermine everything. ‘I’ve had a wonderful life, thank you. I have a very dear friend who looks after me. I have my beloved dogs. And I have a windmill! I wake up on the South Downs every morning. You might think that’s a small life, compared to yours, but I don’t think it is – I’ve don

Afterwards, she thought her life was over, but it really wasn’t; it had just been halted for a bit, then had changed tack. She’d been stripped of one identity but eventually she had adapted to being someone different. She didn’t mind that sometimes she was unhappy, it was silly to believe that one could be happy all the time. When circumstances cal

She shrugged. Astrid saw then that she’d been badly hurt, badly treated and had, like a winter shrew, responded with shrinkage. Somehow, she’d let herself get so small that she’d ended up in an isolated gatehouse on the edge of a Scottish estate, writing an old man’s life.

She hadn’t been terribly good at loving people after Magnus. Loving people involved cranking up the very mechanism that needed to remain shut down. Charlie used to say, ‘You’re completely unreachable.’

‘You’re on another planet!’ Mrs Baker would cry as she turned off the gas or saved the bath from overflowing. ‘God only knows what you did before I came.’ ‘Well,’ Astrid would say, ‘I had Charlie, and before Charlie I lived in squalor.’

But a good editor can make a film. You’re basically sitting in a room for sixteen hours a day with the director, and together you figure out what shots work best – you know, whether one scene is flowing, or a character’s dominating, or underplayed, or which look or cut best conveys a certain feeling or mood. It can be incredibly subtle. I could sho

‘Miss the theatre? Oh no, no. Well, I did for a while, but not any more. I still adore Shakespeare, of course, even though his women all end up mad or dead.’ What she did miss about acting, she thought, even now, was the relief of not having to be herself all the time. Being an actor was such a glorious escape from the self.