romance – Page 20 – What Cathy Read Next…

The Start of Someting Wonderful Blog_Tour

I’m delighted to co-host today’s stop on the blog tour for The Start of Something Wonderful by Jane Lambert. You can read an extract from the novel below, a heartwarming and uplifting story about starting over and following your dreams.

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About the Book (previously published as Learning to Fly)

Forty-year-old air stewardess, Emily Forsyth, thought she had everything a woman could wish for: a glamorous, jet-set lifestyle, a designer wardrobe and a dishy pilot boyfriend. Until he breaks up with her…

Catapulted into a mid-life crisis she wishes she’d had earlier, she decides to turn her life upside-down, quitting her job and instead beginning to chase her long-held dreams of becoming an actress!

Leaving the skies behind her, Emily heads for the bright lights of London’s West End – but is it too late to reach for the stars?

Format: ebook (364 pp.) Publisher: HQ Digital
Published: 5^th January 2018 Genre: Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Barnes & Noble ǀ iBooks ǀ Kobo
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Start of Something Wonderful on Goodreads

Extract from The Start of Something Wonderful by Jane Lambert

I AM BEGINNING TO WORRY. There’s a dark side to my character emerging that I didn’t know was there.

Whilst I’m naturally over the moon and grateful for this understudy job, as the weeks go by, I’m becoming a teensy-weensy bit frustrated. I know the part now, and whilst I may not have starred in my own TV series or graced the cover of celebrity mags, dare I say it, I think I could play the role just as well. Does that sound conceited? Day after day, week after week, the waiting, the hoping …

Wishing someone to be struck down with laryngitis or a mild tummy bug is one thing, but willing someone’s foot to get trapped in a revolving set is something else entirely. Evil. I’m horrified that I’m capable of such a thought.

I breeze through the stage door, clutching the latest copy of Hello! and a bag of Jelly Babies.

‘Evening, Arthur. Dressing room ten, please.’

‘Reckon you’ll no’ be havin’ much time for readin’ the night, doll,’ he wheezes, glancing at my magazine as he hands me the key.

‘Mmm?’ I say, signing in, then checking my pigeonhole, mind elsewhere.

‘It’s no’ for me to say,’ he says, hoisting a shaggy eyebrow.

I slowly start to climb the spiral staircase, calling in at the greenroom on the way for a brew.

‘Company manager’s been looking for you,’ grunts one of the lighting guys from behind his Autocar magazine.

‘Right. Thanks,’ I say breezily, spilling milk everywhere, my stomach dropping ten floors. Surely not? I mean, I saw Sophie barely two hours ago. I watched her performance from the darkness of the stage-right wings and she was on fine form, giving her ‘I-love-you-but-we-must-part’ speech.

It was at that point that I’d decided to make a break for it. Technically, I’m not supposed to leave the building until the curtain comes down, but I’ve religiously watched and mouthed every performance from the wings of Brighton’s Theatre Royal, to this, our final fortnight at The Dukes in Edinburgh. With just five minutes of the matinée left, what could possibly happen to her?

Mistake no. 1: leaving theatre early

Mistake no. 2: gorging on all-you-can-eat buffet

Mistake no. 3: succumbing to large glass of house red

Mistake no. 4: ordering garlic bread

Mistake no. 5: forgetting to switch on mobile phone

Mistake no. 6: arriving five minutes late for ‘the half’

‘… so, the silly cow’s been whisked off to A&E to have it x-rayed. You know what this means?’ says Simon, our company manager, running his hand nervously through his mop of unruly hair.

An eerie sensation ripples through my body. I feel a stab of guilt. My visualisation powers have taken on a telekinetic life of their own, like in some Stephen King horror film. I hadn’t intended anything serious to happen – just a minor ailment, something to lay her low for a week, a cold perhaps, allowing my agent sufficient time to arrange invitations and tickets for casting directors and producers.

I swallow hard and force my lips into a weak smile. There is an expectant silence. This is the stuff of Hollywood musicals: the leading actress is taken ill, and the understudy has to take over at short notice.

I can do it. I’ve been practising for months, says the heroine, with an assured toss of her pretty head. Bravo! More! A star is born! This is the moment I have waited for, longed for all these weeks, these seventy-two performances, so why do I now have this overwhelming desire to flee the theatre and catch the first National Express coach out of town? Well, apart from my all-consuming guilt, the auditorium will be packed to the rafters with legions of excited fans waiting to see Sophie Butterfield and her co-star, Rick Romano, give their highly acclaimed, headline-grabbing performances as star-crossed lovers, Constance and Enrique.

The fact that their on-stage passion has spilled over into reality has fuelled the public’s imagination. The House-Full sign is now a permanent fixture on the pavement, while armies of eager punters camp outside in all weathers, hoping for returns.

Exquisite pairing!
The chemistry between Romano and Butterfield
is electric. Beg, steal or borrow a ticket!
~ The Billingham Gazette

This romantic duo sets the stage alight.
You’d be mad to miss it!
~ The Yorkshire Evening Post

‘You up for it?’ Simon asks, knowing full well it doesn’t matter whether I’m ‘up for it’ or not. Why else have I been travelling up and down the country, getting paid £500 per week plus touring allowance? So I may sit in my dressing room, stuffing my face with Hobnobs and tea whilst reading trashy magazines, or to be allowed to finally finish reading Doctor Zhivago, which I started back in 2010?

Nah – if it’s all the same to you, Simon, I’d rather give it a miss.

About the Author

Jane was born in Yorkshire and brought up on the west coast of Scotland. She studied French and German at Stirling University, taught English in Vienna and travelled the world as cabin crew before making the life-changing (and slightly mad) decision to become an actress in her mid-thirties. She has appeared in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, “Calendar Girls” and “Deathtrap” in London’s West End.

While hanging around as an understudy in draughty theatre dressing rooms and grotty digs on tour, she wrote her first novel, The Start of Something Wonderful, and has now discovered her true path in life

Connect with Jane

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About the Book

Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store when a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter. Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese is an awkward nineteen-year-old with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn’t love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter. As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol’s world, she soon realises how much they both stand to lose…

Format: Paperback (312 pp.) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2015 [1952] Genre: Literary Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Carol on Goodreads

My Review

Carol was first published under the pseudonym Clare Morgan in 1952 with the title The Price of Salt. In the book’s afterword, Patricia Highsmith, writing in 1989, explains the story’s real life inspiration: a woman wearing a fur coat she glimpsed whilst working in the toy section of a New York department store shortly before Christmas in 1948. She writes: ‘Perhaps I noticed her because she was alone, or because a mink coat was a rarity, and because she was blondish and seemed to give off light.’ Highsmith recounts how she was left feeling ‘odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.’

From the germ of this idea was born The Price of Salt, published under a pseudonym because by that time Strangers on a Train had been published to great success and Highsmith was now considered a ‘suspense’ writer. Her publishers wanted more of the same and The Price of Salt was anything but. As it happens, The Price of Salt did turn out to be a commercial success, selling nearly one million copies when it was published in paperback in 1953. And so the story of Carol…

Raised in a children’s home following a difficult upbringing, Therese has ambitions to be a stage designer. Finding it hard to obtain openings in that profession, she reluctantly takes a job in a department store for the Christmas period. It makes her feel trapped and she fears a future like some of the worn out, drab women she sees around her: ‘…She knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her…the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and doing the things that person would do.’ Therese’s disillusion with her job is equalled by her dissatisfaction with her relationship with her boyfriend, Richard. She finds she cannot return Richard’s love or relish the future together for which he hopes so fervently. ‘She was cold, and felt rather miserable in general. It was the half dangling, half cemented relationship with Richard, she knew. They saw more and more of each other without growing closer.’

Therese’s first glimpse of Carol in the department store is life-changing; it awakens an overwhelming but quite unexpected attraction to this cool, stylish, beautiful woman. When Therese initiates contact, it becomes apparent that the attraction is mutual and the two embark on a relationship that will become all-consuming and have consequences for them both. For Therese, the relationship with Carol brings a sense of freedom and adventure. As time goes on, it also seems to bring about a new maturity in Therese. For Carol, a woman going through a divorce and custody battle, the relationship means agonising choices. For them both, it means the opprobrium of society. ‘In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.’

It is difficult now for most of us to imagine the prejudice two women in such a relationship faced. However, as Highsmith reminds us in the afterword, those were the days when ‘gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being homosexual.’

The story is told from the point of view of Therese so Carol always remains something of an enigma, slightly distant and often unreadable. So, like Therese, the reader, is left to try to interpret the extent of Carol’s feelings for Therese from her actions and her often opaque comments and unexplained moods. Therese wonders, ‘Was life, were human relationships always like this… Never solid ground underfoot’. At times, it feels as if Carol is afraid of the intensity of Therese’s feelings for her, of what loving her might mean for Therese. Unspoken thoughts, not being able to say the right words are something of a theme of the book. ‘She [Therese] did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat.’

In her foreword to my edition, the Val McDermid writes: ‘Some books change lives. This is one of them.’ She describes how Carol, the story of a lesbian relationship, didn’t so much fill a niche as ‘a gaping void’. It may well have been groundbreaking at the time but, in the end, Carol is simply the tender, emotional, passionate story of two people exploring the attraction they feel for each other. I found it a wonderful book and the ending simply beautiful.

Carol is part of my TBR Pile Challenge and one of the books on my Classics Club list. It also forms part of my From Page to Screen reading project. I will be posting my thoughts on the comparison between the book and the film (starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) in due course.

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In three words: Passionate, stylish, intimate

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her parents moved to New York when she was six, and she attended Julia Richmond high School and Barnard College. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allen Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels.

Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, on 4 February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously a month later.

Website ǀ Goodreads

The Classics Club TBR Challenge 2018 From Page to Screen