I saw the Ingmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata a few months ago, in the cinema, and really liked it. The plot follows a famous pianist visiting rural Norway to see her daughter, who is a bereaved mother. They’ve not met in seven years. Also in residence is her vicar son-in-law and the pianist’s other daughter, who has an unnamed progressive illness.
Conversations ensue on the role of a mother, the duty you owe your children, the lure of ambition when in your limbs and mind you carry pure talent. It’s really great. I liked It was not a movie about forgiveness or empathy - which I think these sort of narratives these days edge towards. Who can blame someone for walking away etc. But in Autumn Sonata there is a reckoning of sorts. And I appreciated that. A few years ago, someone was contextualising a falling out to me, and I was a bit yes, you have that perspective but X is allowed hate Y, you can’t dictate someone else’s feelings.1
I didn’t know what Autumn Sonata was about going in, I was fully blank, and I feel the better for having seen it that way.
It got me thinking, directly and indirectly, about some characters I’ve been playing with for a while, they’re a long way off being finished, one is in another short story, they both are in a story that this is part of or related to… It’s all in the ether, skirting each other. Maybe it’s a novel or a novella. (I wish novellas came back to us.)
These are characters who are writers or are in the publishing world, which you’re told to never write about by esteemed writers and teachers. People are bored by writers, I’m told. But these people are living lives in my head and drafts, so here is a glimpse at two characters. This is taken from an unruly, long simmering so-far-unfinished draft. I both know and don’t know what it is, if that makes sense.
Rita meets India for breakfast
Rita looked at her watch. She had expected India to be early. Sitting here cradling pottery, a fresh book in front of her cracked open on the first chapter. Was this not a summons? When India Mulcahy asked for a meeting in a Saturday morning message, Rita knew the only way out was through. A checked inbox, bank balance, weighing scales of a morning.
Monday in town, quiet, some tourists in waterproof jackets passing by the café window. Then, your one. Lips stained dark, skin so pale it was blue, hiking boots, unruly blonde curly hair, and a big loose casual coat you’d find in an 1980s wardrobe, a Saved by the Bell aquamarine. Evelyn’s coat. Rita remembered seeing it before. It was the type of thing she didn’t own, had never seen on her own mother in their Drumcondra house of brown woods and inherited carpets. Rita was an indoor cat. Proud about it too. Meanwhile Evelyn had been one of those people who knew the Atlantic had pockets of heat, if you trusted it enough.