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

She typed out a letter on the old Adler. She felt very calm, almost happy.

She told Thaddeus that she'd been crazy with grief and this grief and its craziness just wouldn't let her alone. She said: I guess the book said it all, if you read the book. Jean loves Bradley way too much and when he leaves her, she's destroyed. I let Jean die, but I'm alive (in certain ways, anyway) and I have a husband with a very English sort of kind heart.

But when it came to typing the word 'forgive' Beth faltered. Though in her dream, Thaddeus had been affectionate and quiet, Beth now thought that he would find the whole idea of 'forgiveness' sentimental. She could hear him say: 'You're way off, ma pute, way off! We had a few turns on the merry-go-round, or whatever the British call that little musical box thing that takes you round in a circle. And then one of us got off. That's all that happened. There was no crime.'

Beth tore the letter out of the Adler and threw it away. She opened another bottle of champagne, but found the taste of it bitter. She asked herself what was left to her by way of any consolation, if forgiveness was going to be refused.


'After that,' she tells Rosalita, 'I gave up on things. I drove back to Christopher. His emphysema was beginning to get very bad. I stayed with him through his last illness until he died. I ran out of money. Christopher left his whole estate to Matty, his gardener friend, so I had to leave Northamptonshire. I missed the apple orchard and my little cabin there. The Kensington house was valuable, but it was all mortgaged by then. And after that there was the crash.'

'Tell me . . .' says Rosalita.

It's a winter afternoon, but the lights are still on. Rosalita is coiling up the Hoover cable.

'Well, I'd hung on to that car. It seemed like the only thing that anyone had given to me and not taken away again. But I hadn't taken care of it. It was a heap of rust. People were right not to give me things, I guess. My brain wasn't big enough to take care of them.

'I wasn't trying to kill myself, or anything. I was driving to see my friend, Edwina, the one with the lovely skin, who'd helped me through the abortion.

'I was on some B-road in Suffolk. I braked on a bend and the brakes locked and that's all I can remember. The car went halfway up a tree. That long snout the E-Type has, that was concertina'd and the concertina of metal smashed up my legs.'

'Right,' says Rosalita, putting the Hoover away. 'Now you are going to do some walking, then we will have rum and hot chocolate.'


The Three Day Week has ended with the miners' defeat. Britain tries to get 'back to normal'.

'There is no normal,' says Beth to Rosalita. 'The only "normal" has been talking to you in the afternoons.' But that is ending, just as everything else seems, always, to end. Rosalita is leaving London to return to Setúbal, to nurse her dying mother.

'She doesn't deserve me,' Rosalita comments. 'She only loved Antonio, never me. But in my blood I feel I owe her this.'

'Don't go,' pleads Beth.

'Alas,' says Rosalita, 'it has to be like this. Some things just have to be.'

On Rosalita's last day both she and Beth feel unbearably sad. As Rosalita walks out of the flat for the last time, she says: 'All the secrets you told me I shall keep inside me, very safe.'

'And your brother, Antonio, the matador,' says Beth. 'I will keep his memory safe. I will think about the light on his face.' Beth waits for the clunk of the elevator's arrival. Then she hears Rosalita get into the elevator and close the door and she remains very still, listening to the long sigh of the lift going down.

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.