Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1.

All day long, lying on the sofa in the sitting room of her parents' London mansion flat, Beth hears the clunk of the elevator doors opening and closing.

Sometimes, she hears voices on the landing – people arriving or departing – and then the long sigh of the elevator descending. She wishes there were no people, no elevator, no pain. She stares at the old-fashioned room. She stares at her crutches, propped up against a wing chair. In a few months' time she is going to be thirty.

There is a Portuguese maid, Rosalita, who comes in at two o'clock every day.

She is never late. Rosalita has a gentle face and plump, downy arms. As she sprays the furniture with beeswax polish, she will often talk about her old life, and this is the only thing that Beth enjoys – hearing about Rosalita's old life in a garment factory in Setúbal, making costumes for matadors. The places Rosalita describes are hot and bright and filled with the sound of sewing machines or brass musical instruments. She describes how the matadors used to flirt with the seamstresses. They were young, she says, and full of ardour and their sweat was scented with incense, from the number of visits they made to the bullring chapels. These things remind Beth that there were days long ago when she was innocent enough to worship the ordinary beauty of the world.


In 1964, the lover came.

He was American. His name was Thaddeus. He came in and looked at Beth, who was nineteen years old. He was forty-eight, the same age as Beth's father. He was a commercial photographer, but when he saw Beth, with her serious, exquisite face, he said: 'I have to photograph you.'

Beth knew that she shouldn't go near him, that his skin would burn her, that his kiss would silence her. But she went. Her mother said to her: 'I know what you're doing. I haven't told your father. I really think you should end this. He's much too old for you. It's shameful.'

But all Beth could think was, I love this shame. I'm on fire with shame. My shame is an electric pulse so strong, it could bring the dead to life.

Thaddeus had an estranged wife named Tricia, an ex-model who lived in California. Something he liked to do with Beth was to describe the many ways he used to make love to Tricia. Sometimes, at moments of wild intensity, he called Beth 'Tricia'. But Beth didn't mind. She could be anyone he chose: Beth, Tricia, Julie Christie, Jean Shrimpton, Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot . . . it didn't matter. Whatever self she'd had before she met him was invisible to her now. At certain moments in a life, this is what a person can feel. She was her lover's lover, that was all.

* * *

While Rosalita is dusting Beth's crutches, which she does very tenderly, from time to time, Beth shows her pictures from her press file.

The picture Rosalita likes best is of the car. It's in colour. There's nobody in the photograph, just the car, parked on the gravel of the house Beth once owned in the South of France: a pillar-box-red E-Type Jaguar soft-top with wire wheels. Rosalita shakes her head and whispers, 'Beautiful car.' And Beth says, 'You know, Rosalita, there was a time when it was very easy for me to buy a car like that. In fact, it was given to me, but I could have bought it. I had all the money in the world.'


Thaddeus had no money. Only what he earned from his photography for the ad agencies of domestic appliances and food and hotel exteriors and yachts and London bobbies on bicycles, wearing what he called 'those droll Germanic helmets'.

'Jealousy of David Bailey,' joked Thaddeus, 'is my only flaw.'

Beth looked at him. He was thin and dark. There were dusty patches of grey in his chest hair. He let his toenails grow too long. He was beginning to go bald. There were times when Beth thought, He's just a very ordinary man. He doesn't have the grand, sinewy neck of Charlton Heston or the swooning brown eyes of Laurence Olivier. He's not even tall. But she knew that none of this made the least difference to her feelings.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.