Written From the Heart Read online

  WRITTEN FROM THE HEART

  Trisha Ashley

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  One: In a Jiffy

  Two: Fluffed

  Three: Of Mice and Men

  Four: I Believe in Miracle

  Five: Decimated

  Six: Affiliations

  Seven: Flat

  Eight: Vintage Chic

  Nine: Insalubrious

  Ten: Hot Beds

  Eleven: Don’t Stop Me Now

  Twelve: Playing With My Heart

  Thirteen: I Should Be So Lucky

  Fourteen: Frozen Assets

  Fifteen: Past Notes

  Sixteen: Fêted

  Seventeen: Fresh Cuttings

  Eighteen: In Demand

  Nineteen: Advances

  Twenty: Action Man

  Twenty-One: A Girl’s Best Friend

  Twenty-Two: The Butterfly Ball

  Twenty-Three: Occupied Territory

  Twenty-Four: Dished

  Twenty-Five: Watering Places

  Twenty-Six: Mixed Signals

  Twenty-Seven: Overtures

  Twenty-Eight: Pearls Among Women

  Twenty-Nine: Cross Currents

  Thirty: On Film

  Thirty-One: Picture This

  Thirty-Two: Sour Cream

  Tina’s Top Tips For New Writers

  Tina’s Espresso Ice Cream

  Sergei Popov’s Russian Blinis

  Linny’s Lebanese Baba Ganoush

  About the Author

  Trisha Ashley’s Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling novels have twice been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, and Every Woman for Herself was nominated by readers as one of the top three romantic novels of the last fifty years.

  Trisha lives in North Wales with a very chancy Muse.

  By Trisha Ashley

  Sowing Secrets

  A Winter’s Tale

  Wedding Tiers

  Chocolate Wishes

  Twelve Days of Christmas

  The Magic of Christmas

  Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

  Good Husband Material

  Wish Upon a Star

  Finding Mr Rochester

  Every Woman for Herself

  Creature Comforts

  A Christmas Cracker

  A Leap of Faith (previously published as The Urge to Jump)

  The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

  A Good Heart is Hard to Find (previously published as Singled Out)

  The House of Hopes and Dreams

  Written from the Heart (previously published as Happy Endings)

  For more information on Trisha Ashley and her books, please see www.trishaashley.com or visit her Facebook page (Trisha Ashley Books) or follow her on Twitter @trishaashley.

  For Juliet Greenwood – good friend, fellow author and teashop devotee

  Praise for Trisha Ashley:

  ‘Trisha Ashley writes with remarkable wit and originality – one of the best writers around!’

  Katie Fforde

  ‘Trisha Ashley’s romp makes for enjoyable reading’

  The Times

  ‘Full of down-to-earth humour’

  Sophie Kinsella

  ‘A warm-hearted and comforting read’

  Carole Matthews

  ‘Fast-paced and seriously witty’

  The Lady

  ‘Packed with romance, chocolate and fun, this indulgent read is simply too delicious to put down’

  Closer

  ‘A lovely, cosy read’

  My Weekly

  ‘Fresh and funny’

  Woman’s Own

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank my agent, Judith Murdoch, for all her endeavours on my behalf over the years, though I am happy to say that, despite occasionally performing miracles, she bears no other resemblance to the Miracle of the book.

  Foreword

  Originally published by Severn House in 2008 under the title Happy Endings, this is one of my earliest romantic comedies. It’s been long out of print and difficult to get hold of, so I’m delighted that Transworld has released this new edition, now titled Written from the Heart.

  It features Tina Devino, a moderately successful author who aspires to bestsellerdom. As do her clients, because Tina is also a literary consultant, who uses her own experience to advise other would-be authors. With her love life as precarious as her writing career, can she ever create her own happy ending?

  I haven’t rewritten it, merely tweaked and polished a little here and there, so since it was created on the cusp of the new century it’s obviously very much of its time, especially with regard to mobile phones and computers. It’s amazing how things have changed in such a short space of time, but back then they were a luxury, rather than the norm.

  Happy reading, everyone!

  Trisha Ashley

  One

  In a Jiffy

  Because you are my sister,

  I’ll take the time to say,

  I wish you health and happiness,

  On this, your special day.

  Because you are my sister,

  Though our ways have grown apart,

  I’ll always take you with me,

  Right here, in my heart.

  For Tina,

  With love from Antonio and all the bambinos

  So it was my birthday, and I’m not saying which one because it’s so middle-aged I couldn’t believe it was true, and someone had to be playing a bad joke on me. My friend Linny gave me one of those little Dictaphone things because she said I had an interesting life and should record my great thoughts right off the top of my head, just in the terribly spontaneous way I always spoke.

  ‘And look how those American universities snap up an author’s entire collection of scrap paper, so what wouldn’t they give in a few years’ time when you are rich and famous for actual recordings of the great Tina Devino’s voice?’

  I said that by the time I was rich and famous, technology would probably have made anything other than interactive holograms obsolete and then she said I watched too many ancient Star Trek reruns.

  However, I’m happy to admit that I am an absolute sucker for people with knobbly faces wearing giant stretch Babygros and so cannot get enough of that type of programme.

  ‘You can’t talk, Linny, because anyone who watches old Buffy episodes shouting, “Bite me! Bite me!” whenever Spike appears is a truly sad person,’ I pointed out, and she went all defensive.

  But anyway, Linny hadn’t been gone five minutes and already I was making my first recording, so I could see I was going to be absolutely addicted to talking to myself, because naturally I am my biggest fan. Whenever two writers are gathered together, let’s face it, it’s not so much a question of conversation, more a case of, ‘Let’s talk about something more interesting, darling: me, me, me!’

  Linny arrived wearing a black T-shirt with ‘B.B.B.B.’ on the back, and the words ‘Big, Buxom, Brunette and Beautiful’ emblazoned across her chest in sequins. She could have added ‘Batty and Bossy’ as well. I bet that caused a stir when she walked through Shrimphaven on the way to my humble little fisherman’s cottage (unfortunately sans fisherman). She didn’t often deign to visit me as she lived in Primrose Hill, which was interesting to someone like me, who desired to live the Literary Life to the full. So I visited her instead, especially when Tertius the Tycoon was away, which was a lot of the time. Also my lover, Sergei, the ex-ballet dancer turned exercise guru, lived nearby.

  You must have heard of Sergei Popov? Even if you aren’t into ballet (I’m not) or exercise (ditto – or not out of bed, anyway), I bet y
ou have his SergeiYoga DVD, just for the pleasure of watching him bending his beautifully supple body into strange positions while looking dead sexy.

  It was lucky that the train service between Shrimphaven and London was fast and frequent, for I spent huge amounts of time shuttling up and down between the two. But, like Trollope, I found travelling terribly conducive to creative thought and so wrote much of my novels on the way, penned into large notebooks hand-bound by my friend Jackie (when she wasn’t making enormous quantities of totally useless paper flowers).

  Linny brought one of the sequined T-shirts for me, but I said, ‘Linny, you should have had the “Big” deleted from mine because, let’s face it, I’m vertically challenged so my bust measurement is almost the same as my height.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it could be Big as in Bestseller. You’re going to be huge! I can feel it in my waters.’

  Yuck.

  Then she ate the whole box of Godiva chocolates Sergei sent me, so she was the one who was going to be huge.

  Next morning found me printing off a new batch of flyers:

  NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY MANUSCRIPT ASSESSMENT SERVICE

  Dear Aspiring Novelist,

  By contacting Noveltina you have taken the first step on the long and rocky road to success as a writer. If you send me your manuscript you can expect to receive a full and constructive criticism that, if followed, will increase its chance of acceptance by a publisher. Yes, I am that vital stepping stone between the beginner novelist and the published!

  I hope that we can work together to achieve your dreams, and I look forward to receiving your manuscript, double-spaced and in clear type, in the near future, plus a cheque made out to T. Devino for the sum of £300, which covers manuscripts up to 150,000 words.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tina Devino

  This was my little moneymaking sideline, and so much more fun than the secretarial temping that I was never very good at anyway, being a fast but totally inaccurate typist easily distracted by ideas for new plot twists. I suppose it was amazing that I had any original ideas while temping, though, because all the offices seemed to have been hermetically sealed full of sterile dust and therefore incapable of nurturing anything but recycled thoughts. If there is any nutritive jelly in the Petri dish of the business world, I didn’t find it.

  I placed only one advertisement a year – in The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook – yet I got a steady stream of manuscripts of all kinds. Not only was I good at assessing typescripts but I could fit it around the rest of my life and my own writing, so it was a terribly convenient way of surviving until I had my own bestseller.

  When the postman rang I tossed the flyers aside and sprang like a hungry tigress for the door because he never rang twice. His finger barely touched the doorbell before he was sneaking off down the path again and I had to leap out regardless of how I was dressed (or undressed) to apprehend him.

  This time you’d think he would have been glad to get rid of the weight, because someone had sent me the most enormous manuscript for a critique. I didn’t know Jiffy bags came in gigantic, although the cheque certainly wasn’t, because I could see at a glance that there was a lot more than the 150,000 words he’d paid me for! Besides which, I was deeply disappointed that it wasn’t a late birthday present, although really I should have been grateful for anything that helped me to pay the mortgage on my picturesque heap of loosely connected beach pebbles.

  The accompanying letter didn’t bode well.

  The Ramblings,

  Bosson Surcoat,

  Cresney

  Dear Ms Devino,

  I enclose a synopsis and manuscript of my thriller, Banking On It, together with the cheque you requested and a stamped addressed envelope.

  I will be pleased to have your critique of the work as soon as possible, for although all my friends and family assure me that it is a fast, pacey and exciting book that they would beg to buy in the shops, the reactions of the publishers and agents to whom I have submitted it have not so far been encouraging – in fact, in some cases it does not appear that the manuscript has actually been read – so perhaps I am simply presenting the work in the wrong way?

  It is topical and set in the thrilling world of international accounting, which I am well qualified to describe, but it also has ecological implications that give it an extra dimension, and I know you will be swept away by the scale of the epic story as it unfolds. Several of my friends have said that they are so amazed by the breadth of it that they simply don’t know how to describe it.

  I expect you have male readers working for your agency, who will be more suited to assessing a work of this type, since it is definitely a man’s novel.

  I look forward to your prompt response.

  Yours sincerely,

  Harold Snaith, ACA

  It didn’t exactly sound a laugh a minute. I read the letter out to Sergei when he phoned later to tell me about some minor ailment that was troubling him, and he was quite indignant.

  ‘Why must you do this work – this drudgery?’ he demanded, as though I’d been gulagged into the salt mines. ‘You have a soul above these things, my darling.’

  ‘I don’t have a soul above paying the mortgage, though,’ I pointed out. ‘And actually, I’m good at it. It will be ironic if I help someone become a bestseller while I’m still languishing in the midlist, won’t it?’

  ‘To me, you are always a star,’ he said simply. ‘Tsarina Tina!’

  You have to love a man with a beguiling accent who makes bad jokes.

  Monday morning came round, and I was sitting in Sergei’s basement flat wondering how our red-hot passion had dwindled down to a once-a-week habit followed by Russian tea from his samovar and accompanied by caviar. He’s definitely a bit Nureyev. Mind you, although he was teaching only SergeiYoga and the odd ballet masterclass by then, rather than performing, he could still jump with the best of them. I’d be deeply unwilling to think the worst of him even if he did wear eyeliner in bed and was as vain as a budgie: give him a mirror and he’d be happy for hours. Besides, in so many ways he’d never given me cause to suspect he was anything other than one hundred per cent heterosexual male.

  But how did we get to this stage? And what was he doing the rest of the week, other than overseeing SergeiYoga classes at his studio in Primrose Square, going to the ballet, and hanging out with his dancing chums and various dubious-looking arty Russian émigrés until all hours? Maybe it was better not to know.

  Of course, when we were apart he still phoned me at least once a day, with a bulletin about his imaginary ailments and all his little troubles, but he had been distracted lately. Well, I say lately, but it had been about a year, actually, and it did make me speculate about whether there was someone else in his life – or even several someones. I’m sure Linny would have loved to be one of them, despite having a perfectly good husband of her own. She found Sergei a little scary too, even though I told her that although he had a beautiful body, his feet look like loose bundles of old rope knotted around twigs.

  When we did go out together he was always being recognized, because not only was he famed for his years of leading roles with the Royal Ballet, not to mention the success of the SergeiYoga DVD and accompanying book, but he also had an exotic face and a magnetic personality. This was good for my Brilliant Career too, because I tried to plug my books whenever I got a chance; and quite frankly I was tired of being a hanger-on at the fringes of London literary life. I wanted a piece of the action.

  But by then I generally saw Sergei only on Monday mornings and the furthest we ever got out was to walk round to Lemonia for lunch occasionally. He just seemed to want to stay at home. Perhaps he was simply getting older. And so was I (older than he thought!). Sometimes when he leaped on me I wasn’t sure I’d got the stamina any more and I wished someone would ring a bell and end the bout.

  Of course, I had always been aware that he had this other life, because I could have become p
art of it when we first embarked on our grand passion. But I chose not to because, despite loving him madly, I simply couldn’t do with all that ballet, not to mention all the arty types draped around his flat most evenings, any more than I could do with my ex-husband’s mania for football. I was not prepared to fake enthusiasm for anything, including bad sex (fortunately not a consideration with Sergei), besides not liking to live with anyone, so clearly I was not cut out for marriage, or indeed any other kind of permanent relationship. Sergei said I reminded him of his beloved cat, Petruschka (deceased), which was good, but Linny said I had the emotional depth of a puddle and when I finally lost my looks I would decline into a lonely and embittered spinsterhood.

  Anyway, that Monday morning, after tea and fish eggs I staggered round to Linny’s to recover before I caught the train home. It was quite a walk really because although Sergei always says he lives in Primrose Hill, his garden flat is actually on the furthest fringes of Chalk Farm and you’d drop off it if you went further, while Linny is in the posh part and can see famous geriatric dads playing outside with their second- or third-marriage toddlers any day of the week.

  Poor Linny was in absolute despair because the publishers weren’t taking on any new writers unless they were skinny blonde twenty-somethings with interesting connections, and look at her, fat, dark and the wrong side of forty, with a facial hair problem. I wouldn’t say she looks like a walrus but she should get that ’tache waxed more often … So we had coffee and I agreed it was all dreadful, and it was so hard to break in with a first novel, and yes, rejection was really hard to take – so personal, when your novels are just like your babies, and what on earth could she do?

  So then I suggested she stopped stuffing her novels into filing cabinet drawers and actually sent them out to editors or agents. (Or even me!) She burst into tears and said she couldn’t possibly show anybody one of her efforts, could she? And I said I couldn’t think of any other way of getting published and she told me I was a hard woman.