Victoire.

Thank you for meeting me at the Three Broomsticks today. I thought it might be a nice meeting between friends. Friends, by the way, being people you don't abandon at the drop of a hat to go walking with some bloke you're fancying yourself madly in love with.

I'm not some master writer, Vicky, but I'll try to be in the hope that for once you'll understand. Maybe writers speak a different version of English gamekeepers do. You'll have to let me know. Make sure you don't use any long words, it's a bit tricky having to go to the dic-shun-arry all the time.

Give me a minute to flex, Vicky. I've got to get in the zone. Maybe I'll do a few writing exercises. I've got to get the right words flowing into my brain, you know. Living the high flying life of a master writer. Start throwing around words like discourse and description and denouement. Let's see. Plot, dialogue, characterisation -

Oh! Here's somewhere my lowly gamekeeper self can hold his own in this conversation. Characters. That's how you see us all, isn't it, in your little drama you're playing out with Thomas? He's the main character. The leading man, the hero, the protagonist. And the rest of us? Well, you can't have a compelling plot without a few minor characters to talk to every now and then. You know, just as a quick little reminder that no, despite all appearances to the contrary, the heroine's life does not in fact revolve around the hero's, and every now and then she goes off for a few minutes to chat to some of her old mates -

Until the hero turns up. Yeah, that's where the real scene starts, isn't it? I'm just a bit of fodder, a background, a launching point for a dramatic encounter with Sir Lancelot - I'll assume you've already let Thomas know he's going to have to start dressing in all black, haven't you? If you haven't, you'd better hurry. Now's your chance. There's that awkward thing called real life that starts after the dramatic kiss in the hallway and the final page of the novel, after all. You might not have heard of it. Thank me later for introducing it to you.

Dammit, Victoire, I can't do this any more. Maybe I'm not the main character in your life but I'm leading my own life too. And when I go out of my way to meet you in the middle of Scotland, despite all the work that's building up on my desk, despite the fact that there was a work function on Friday night that I had to leave early so I'd be ready to see my friend Vicky all nice and refreshed - well, sometimes it's nice if I'm not ditched half an hour into our meeting.

That's how long we spent talking. And do you know what you said at the end of it? I can't decide whether you record every sentence and every word you say - for future dialogue, of course, because everything you say is the most marvellous and witty thing to grace the pages of a romance novel since the sword and the sheath... or if you genuinely don't care what you say about me, because none of your readers care about the shitty secondary characters?

"That's just Teddy. He's nothing."

That's what you said at the end of our conversation. Sure, I could have waited. But I guess I see where I stand in your books. Teddy, the nothing. That's what you said, and then you left, arm in arm with some bloke you say you hate and you're pretending you love. So I went home, and I did some paperwork, and I put the kettle on, and I didn't wash my hair or trim my lawn* but do you know what I didn't do? Disappear.

Because that's not how it works in real life. Real people have real lives. They don't just disappear after their perfunctory three paragraph scenes. They go on, and they have feelings, and dammit but I'm irritated, Vicky. I put a lot of effort into coming all the way to Scotland to see you, and what do I get in return? Thirty minutes of giving you a bloody writing lesson and a "That's Teddy. He's nothing." as my reward.

Here. I'll even call you Victoire. Enjoy school, Victoire. Enjoy your writing. Real life is waiting when you get back.

Teddy Lupin.