Today it's my pleasure to be shining the debut spotlight on author T.A. Cotterell on the latest leg of the blog tour for his debut novel
What Alice Knew.
T. A. Cotterell read History of Art at Cambridge University.
He worked in the City before resigning to become a freelance writer. He is now a writer and editor at the research house Redburn.
He is married with three children and lives in Bristol.
How far would you go to keep a secret?
Alice has a perfect life – a great job, happy kids, a wonderful husband. Until he goes missing one night; she receives a suspicious phone call; things don’t quite add up.
Alice needs to know what’s going on. But when she uncovers the truth she faces a brutal choice. And how can she be sure it is the truth?
Sometimes it’s better not to know.
I had hoped to review What Alice Knew today alongside this spotlight feature but sadly a manic few weeks has put paid to my reading time so I'm only 2/3rd's way through reading it. But thanks to Becky at Transworld you can still get a taster of What Alice Knew as I have the first chapter to share with you below.
A portrait is a quest for the truth. It spares no one.
I was painting the portrait of Julie Applegarth. She was sitting in a high-backed chair covered in crushed scarlet velvet in the drawing room of Applegarth Park. Julie had golden highlights, the green marble eyes of an alley cat, and was beautiful in the way of a woman who was not yet handsome but no longer a girl. Her dress was too tight, her hair too big and blowsy, and her caramel tan spoke of Monaco and Mustique, but she was more Harlow than Hollywood.
It had not been an easy sitting. I had hoped we would finish before tea but the demon time had marched too fast. Julie had tried but concentration was not her forte and she wasn’t used to being told what to do, at least not by anyone other than her husband. Certainly not by another woman, particularly as I was only a hired hand – and what is a portrait painter if not literally a hired hand? She couldn’t sit still for longer than it took to have her legs waxed without calling a friend or making a hair appointment. She fidgeted. She wriggled. She posed like a tragic actress. She gave the impression she had important business to think about, but that was a fiction. Julie played at business as she played at being chatelaine of the park, yo‑yoing between self-assured entitlement and the fear she’d be rumbled.
She had been sitting in her high-backed chair, with breaks, for nearly five days. I had been standing at my easel looking directly at her and thinking about her, thinking around her, painting the idea of her, for almost five days. Mine, by some distance, was the more interesting task. It demanded full concentration. I don’t like talking while I work. I pick up everything I need to know in the breaks and the meetings I have before a sitting. These are always more useful when the sitter is female. Men – successful men as my sitters invariably are – are always positioning themselves as something they’re not, nicer perhaps, more generous or more cul-tured, better connected, and they have to flirt, it’s a power thing. It all finds its way into the painting.
As we neared the end of day five, an unscheduled but necessary extension into Saturday, Julie seemed bored. She’d been through the usual stages: the early excitement, wallowing in the attention, pretending being painted was just another inconvenience of her in‑demand life. Then the novelty and self-obsession wore off and the hard grind of sitting with nothing to do but thinking began. Yet still sometimes she refocused, gathered herself around the attention and basked in the hot eye of an artist paid a not inconsiderable sum to do nothing other than capture her beauty for the benefit of posterity and her husband.
At the far end of the room the double doors opened simultaneously. They were painted a spirit-sapping mustard, a colour that could only have been chosen by a very expensive interior designer. I’d tried, not entirely successfully, to avoid looking at them. Sir Raymond Applegarth – ‘Call me Ray, darlin’’ – entered with the anticipatory air of a man who had two ladies and a drinks cabinet to hand.
‘Ah, there you are the both of you. How’s it going Jules?’
He pronounced her name with two syllables, ‘jewels’.
Somehow he managed to sound surprised to find us exactly where we’d been for the best part of a week. Maybe he’d expected me simply to take a photo and disappear, or to finish the painting en plein air like some latter - day Monet. Ray had a shiny skull with a band of grey hair semicircling his head like a slipped halo and eyes that absorbed the light. Even in his sixties his body was packed tight in his camouflage of combat trousers and wheat-coloured shirt. Most people over the age of eight who wear combats are children’s TV presenters or lone gunmen – and Sir Raymond was not a children’s TV presenter. His nose was wide and broken, the result, he told me, of park rugby in south Ipswich where he scrummed down on Sunday mornings until his early forties with men who didn’t believe in rules.
Julie twisted a band of hair into a rope. Her calves tapered impressively, expensively honed in gym and pool.
‘I think we’re nearly done here . . .?’
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