In a novel world of her own

ALEXANDRA Raife's heartfelt advice to anyone visiting her Perthshire lodge cottage is to wear something warm. Having dutifully put on an extra layer under my jacket I am obviously not looking bulky enough and find myself barred from the kitchen while she makes coffee, her breath, indeed, steaming in the air.

A short, whitewashed corridor studded with bookcases later, I am settled comfortably in the sitting room by the wood fire, in what is obviously her chair because it faces the window and the sweep of the Perthshire hills beyond and because beside it lies the book she is currently reading, a biography of Ring of Bright Water author Gavin Maxwell.

Everyone asks her why she doesn't put in central heating, why she endures the pelt along the narrow corridor to the loo or the kitchen, away from the warmth of the small front room, with its battered sofas and dark, old-fashioned furniture.

Even now, with her first book out, another on the way, and advances, one supposes, in the bank, the most she can imagine splashing out on is some gravel for the path, and perhaps a bit of fencing.

``Just to have a life, I worked part-time, just enough to keep me ticking along - no ambition for earning a great salary - so that I can have time to write, walk, read, garden, and that's what I love. It's really almost achieving a perfect life,'' she says.

``When all this began to happen I said to the agent, `Do I want this? It's pretty nice as it is.'.''

Here she stops, worried about the effect of words written down and served up cold. What saves her from sounding pious is a certain sharpness in her regard, a genuine astonishment that anyone would want to read her books, let alone publish them, and, possibly, the merest hint that other people's opinions do not, in any case, play a significant part in the scheme of things.

The perfect life does not fall into your lap, and you have to work at achieving it, especially if you intend to do it independently, in a world where so many of us compromise with partners and families.

Drumveyn, her first published novel (she has a bookshelf of folders containing other novels on sheets of type-written A4; publication was the last thing on her mind) reunites a family grown distant from each other and from the Scottish estate that is their home, telling the story of Madeleine, who discovers how to live only after the death of her forbidding husband.

Before learning that a 50-year-old woman can wear jeans, drive a car without fear, and fall in love, she suffers alienation akin to Dorothea's in Middlemarch, denied the possibility of expressing love or even of fulfilling a useful role. Throughout the book runs the difficulty of understanding other people, of communicating the love one feels for a daughter or a son whose lives touch so little of one's own.

Nevertheless, the various family members find happiness, and with an ideal partner at that. Raife looks up here and considers: ``I wonder if it will work out for them?'' She does not see the end of her books as the end of their lives; the characters crop up in her other novels and so is there never, really, any continuously happy ever after.

``My books are all slightly on the happy side. In all the places I have worked, all the countries, all the environments, there have been friendships and friendly people. I don't think there needs to be all this aggressive hostility and depression. Of course, it all ends rather happily, perhaps that's a fault.

``I never thought they'd be of the least interest to anyone. To me they're so ordinary, they are everyday life, just for my own amusement. I don't start out with a plot or a draft. I just write them, and when I finish I write another.''

Which seems to undermine the convention that writing is emotionally testing, or at the very least hard work - and experienced as such.

``But that's the point. It's an easy, natural pleasure, so I don't deserve to be published.

``I think I'm not so much pouring out my thoughts as enjoying a story, and almost most of the time I feel I haven't invented it. I go for long walks and the characters take shape. People here are quite used to me walking around talking to myself. They just shake their heads and carry on fencing, or whatever.

``It's pure pleasure when I'm writing, like the pleasure of reading, only you have to concentrate. I have to set an alarm clock to stop myself, because the clock just crashes round.

``I start at four in the morning, and I write for a long time - I thought I was writing seven hours, because I'd stop at one, but after a few years I realised it was nine hours, and it was quite a lot longer than an ordinary working day. And then I will go out for a long walk. But I have to start writing straight away. If I get up it's gone. I have to go out and saw logs, or something.''

She got published almost by mistake. A friend of a friend, who works in publishing, heard she had a shelf packed with novels and suggested she write a few synopses for agents. Raife jotted down some plots, more to humour her than anything else, and was contacted almost immediately by an agent. ``He said they were rubbish, but could I send the first few chapters of Drumveyn, so I posted it second class, because I was living on pennies and I do things that way, and it took a fortnight,'' and within two weeks the agent had sold the novel.

And now she is a published author, and there is an author's mystique growing round her, in part because she worries about the distance to her house, and warns you about how cold it is; natural diffidence can be misconstrued as defiant eccentricity.

A moment's hesitation on the phone when her publishers suggested she travel to London to discuss business led them to the immediate conclusion that the only way they could meet her was to drive all the way to darkest Perthshire instead. So they did, getting stuck in snow on the way, which only added to the mystique (goodness, some of the roads up there are impassable).

She did put her foot down about public book signings, though; she recounts the story Monica Dickens told about signing books in a godforsaken town in the Australian outback with the manager of the deserted shop assuring her the public would be flooding in any moment now. Monica Dickens features in the library of English twentieth century authors she holds dear including, of course, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. ``It's a very good grounding, of course. They write extremely good English. Which is why I never wanted to be published.

``I have always written for pleasure. It was a childhood thing before I went to school. We were a great reading family.''

Now 58, she grew up in Shropshire and moved to Scotland as a teenager with her mother, always returning in between bouts of working abroad.

In her early 20s she was governess to a wealthy ranch owner's family in southern Brazil, and has tales and more to tell of riding to the rodeos on the plains, sitting in the firelight and hearing the gauchos tell stories or dance across the folded blankets on the ground.

It was an odd, lonely time, occupying the no-man's land between the servants and the masters and forbidden to talk in Portuguese (she was the English governess), cutting her off from most people on the ranch. And yet she stayed for a couple of years; being alone has never bothered her.

Before she leaves the pampas she tells one more story, almost laughing at herself. Not until she was about to leave the ranch did she learn that her faithful gaucho retainer Leopoldo, who had been attending her all this time, had turned up outside the gates shortly before she herself had arrived in Brazil. Leopoldo arrived on foot and carrying his saddle over one arm. ``Which is the symbol,'' she says, ``of the drop-out, be-cause he has no horse, and he was the one assigned to look after the English governess!''

After leaving she travelled Brazil and America, was married (and later divorced), taught in Finland and Portugal, and settled in Scotland to help run a hotel.

Twenty years ago there was a great fire. ``I lost everything I owned. I lost my books; that was a tremendous cut across one's reading life. I lost all those friends and companions. After the fire I tended to have nightmares and wake up, and the books weren't there, whereas if you wake normally you can read a book. But they weren't there.

``Friends began to send things they thought I'd most want, and the first things that arrived were the Oxford Book of Quotations and a Shakespeare, not clothes.

``I walked along the front of the house and, on the creeper there, I could pick off pages of, say, Love in a Cold Climate, or The Irish RM, and I had to accept that there were just these fluttering pages left, and that was it.''

Her business and her home gone, and touching 40, she enlisted in the WRAF, becoming an ADC within two years - very unusual, especially for a woman, but it heralded a ``wonderful'' six-year commission.

Returning to Scotland some 14 years ago, she rebuilt her library: ``I've replaced them. I have got enough books around me to feel comfortable now,'' and fashioned her still simple life.

``I find it very satisfying to live simply. I think losing everything you own teaches you that possessions don't matter at all. I haven't been in the least bit interested since then in owning anything at all.''

Now, of course, things have changed. Her front room contains neither television nor radio, yet a small fax cum telephone on the windowsill bears silent testimony to the presence of the publishers in London and, beyond them, the readers.

``I wanted to see if I could still write now that there was a `reader','' she says. ``The reader was a new step, but it vanishes ..... I could write three words and it was all forgotten.

``All I know is I shall just write, whether the agent wants them or not, or whether anyone wants them or not. It would be a terrible gap to stop writing. I would be losing the biggest pleasure of life.''

n.Drumveyn, Alexandra Raife, Michael Joseph, #15.99.