The Editing Process

Running alterations

A couple of brief verbatim extracts from the manuscript, to illustrate the process of evolution of the finished text — square-bracketed sections have been inserted (and sometimes subsequently deleted), while struck-through words were deleted either at the time of composition or as a later edit:

Raoul’s impromptu repairs had come to an end. She felt him hesitate a moment, his breath warm against the back of her neck, then brush the tinest of kisses there. Her heart twisted [turned over] [ached] within her. “Raoul —”

But already he was walking on again, tucking her hand under his [proferred] arm, and still nothing was said between them.

But he had turned, and was [drawing a] untwisting [of] something from around his wrist. “Here, this might help...”

A [familiar] gauzy scrap; she caught a glimpse as he knotted it [around her] against the wind, and began to laugh. “Mine! How did you —”

“Force of habit, possibly? [Ah — well,] It’s harder than you’d think to get out of old habits.” Raoul tucked the ends in at her throat and stepped back to admire the overall effect of his handiwork [a certain mischief lurking [dawning] [lurking] [wakening] in his eyes]. “I ran lost track of the hat, but I did manage to save your scarf...”

And grin Grinning openly, he dodged the childhood cuff she aimed at him, Both of them laughing now, and slipped an arm about her waist as hers tightened round his neck and [he] caught and held her as she flung herself [came] [came back] into his arms.

And twenty minutes after that, Gustave had evidently succeeded in insinuating himself into the crook of Raoul’s arm, a position of which — judging by the beaming [blissful] satisfaction of his expression — he had long been envious to attain: the two fair heads were bent close together over the workings of Raoul’s his grandfather’s prized repeater, [which had been] one of the young Vicomte’s most hallowed boyhood possessions. Christine remembered her own awed honour at first being permitted to touch Christine still remembered the awed air with which the small Raoul had first displayed to her the intricate mechanisms of the watch [that summer at Perros]; she had barely dared do more than stroke the burnished case with one slender finger. She could only imagine the joy with which her mechainically-minded son [offspring] [son] must have discovered such an object.

And Raoul had looked... not exactly comfortable at having the child curled up against him, but a little less apprehensive of accidentally breaking him. She had set an arm around the shoulders of both, her heart too full for words, and laid her cheek against Raoul’s in silent gratitude as Gustave wriggled free. “Look, Mother, look! You touch this spring, and...”

His parents [had found themselves] exchanged[ing] looks of identical apprehension and amusement. She had laughed — not least at her husband’s expression — and kissed him.

Yes, Mathilde would have loved [to be there] to see her two former nurselings ensconced together in the corner of the saloon [that this morning] over an article on ballooning that Gustave Raoul had found... and she [Raoul’s old nurse] had known [guessed], perhaps, [at] what Christine had not guessed: that it was not only Gustave who had been shut up too long [stood] in want of boyish activity.

Deleted scenes

As can be seen above, most of the ‘false starts’ in the process of composition were discarded and replaced by finalised versions before they had progressed beyond a sentence or so in the wrong direction; but there were a few places where an extended passage was struck out after having been worked over for some time. The majority of such material was generally salvaged for immediate re-use, with surprisingly few changes being necessary to ‘shade’ sentiments that just weren’t working in their original context into a nicely appropriate turn of phrase when preceded by a different preamble. However, one notable scene was removed from the opening of Chapter Two in order to improve the pacing (resulting in a somewhat abrupt transition between the first paragraph and the start of the dialogue), with only the second half of this being edited for re-use a little later in the chapter: the result was that the events described ‘fell down the crack’ between the end of Chapter One, where they had originally been located, and the beginning of Chapter Two, to which they had been reassigned in flashback.

The ‘putting Raoul to bed’ paragraph of the scene in question is thus an interesting relic in that it is conceived as still taking place in the storyline as published (being hinted at in various places in the current text), but is nowhere actually described! I give here the more or less finalised version as it stood when struck out: this had already been heavily edited with many sentences having multiple false starts, due to the fact that it wasn’t really working even at that point.

...Christine turned her face up to the vast blue-washed sky as if she were the only person to witness it in a thousand years.

While ecstacies of solitude had their charms, however, they soon began to pall. She found herself glancing more and more often up and down the deck in search of the man she’d come to meet, wondering, as the quarter-hour stretched on, if the arrangements she’d tried to make had fallen through — if the attendant had been able to wake him at all. It had taken two of them, last night, to get Raoul between the sheets, and despite manhandling he’d shown no signs of stirring.

It was not until impatience had propelled her into nervous pacing that she caught sight at length of the figure leaning against one of the stanchions. The careful immobility with which he had laid his forehead against the cool metal might have suggested, in anyone else, an attack of mal-de-mer; in Raoul, who had always been an excellent sailor, it was more likely to be a case of the self-inflicted misery of the morning after. Her heart sank, remembering other unwelcome occasions.

But the wince with which he raised a somewhat bedraggled head at her approach was outweighed by the look of boyish indignation with which he swung round. “Did you tell that steward to throw water over me?”

She’d imagined all kinds of strained awkwardness in their meeting, after last night; but never this. “Oh, darling —” She couldn’t help laughing. “Come here...”

He looked so very young and outraged, with his hair clinging in damp tendrils, that she pulled his head down without a second thought, reaching for her scarf to rough-towel him dry as she had done when they were newly-wed. ...

The other scene that was removed altogether and only partially re-used was the result of my struggles with the unplotted Epilogue, in which Christine threatened to turn what I’d complacently conceived of as a happy ending into an exercise in angst, and I had to turn to Raoul for some calm good sense to produce the desired outcome. Here, an extended metaphor wasn’t working, and Christine was getting more and more paranoid... Again, elements from the second half were eventually salvaged much later on in the chapter and in a different context — in this case I’ve included the complex mess of editing that preceded the decision to dump the paragraphs altogether. (This section is thus the reason why Raoul at one point puts his arm ‘almost fiercely’ around Gustave’s shoulders: it was intended to culminate in the father-and-son imagery here used, but was eventually followed by a sequence in which the boy burrows against Christine instead!)

Gustave.

And that one thought cut through the web like hot sun through mist, [seared through the dark] the tendrils of attraction curling up and ebbing away. web like a hot knife wire, awakening sweeping her back to a sense of centred self and of determination. She was conscious again at last of the prickle of sweat across her back, the lacing that heat [enveloping warmth] of Paramaribo beading burning [blazing] [midday heat soaking clear] the deepdown chill from her bones.

And Gustave stood there straight and fair and proud in his father’s [arm] embrace, a child [[a child] claimed for as] of the sunlit day sunlit noon; and the moonless dark had no [could] should have no call on him [should not take him from her]...

She took a long breath, still shaken. If they had gone to New York —

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