Underpinnings The inhabitants of the basement are getting really restless. They keep intruding into my thoughts. Scarlet in particular, of the fiction al ones, is impatient. She has to get to her lover in Costa’s. (I just wrote Castro’s and had to go back and correct it – that’s poor Winter coming through from the fictional dead. All that folly and virility gone to waste. I actually seem to mourn him.) But I can’t leave Beverley yet. I have a special duty to her. I can’t leave her stranded and a widow, to play into the common belief that no woman’s life is really interesting after they get to be forty, and that’s pushing it. Why else are parts for women over thirty-five so thin on the ground, and novels about older women so hard to sell, though they are the bulk of the readers? No one wants to know is the brutal answer. I wrote my autobiography once and stopped when I got to thirty-seven. After that, really, who was going to care? Scarlet, Lola and the others will just have to wait.
