A Ladder to the Sky

by John Boyne

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘That must have been very difficult.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She was my wife.’

  ‘And you loved her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have married her if I hadn’t loved her.’

  ‘She was black, wasn’t she?’ asked Theo, and I frowned, surprised by the question.

  ‘Is that relevant in some way?’ I asked. ‘To your thesis, I mean?’

  ‘Only that it must have been difficult back then. To be in a mixed-race relationship.’

  ‘Not especially, no,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘It wasn’t the 1950s, you know, it was the 1990s. That might seem a long time ago to someone your age but, really, it’s just the blink of an eye. And the circles we moved in would have been the least likely to hold any racist attitudes. Yes, once in a while someone might have given us a sideways glance on the street, and from time to time some uneducated prick might have made an offensive comment as we passed. But it was nothing compared to what previous generations went through.’

  ‘Can I ask, when her novel became such a success, did you feel any sort of … What’s the word …?’

  ‘Envy?’ I suggested, trying to keep the smile off my face. ‘A deep and embittered sense of resentment?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ I said. ‘Edith was a brilliant writer. She might have been one of the greats, had she lived. I was pleased for her.’

  ‘Still, for a time she must have taken some of the spotlight away from you.’

  ‘I’ve never been much interested in that,’ I lied. ‘And, as I said, I loved her. What kind of man would it make me if I had begrudged her her success?’

  He said nothing but scribbled a lot of things down in his notepad. Whenever he went to the bar, to the bathroom or outside for a smoke, he always took his notepad with him. Young Mr Field was diligent in that respect.

  ‘Your son must have missed her,’ he remarked eventually, looking up again.

  I shook my head. ‘No, Edith wasn’t Daniel’s mother. I conceived him with an Italian chambermaid who worked in a London hotel.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It was a business transaction. Nothing more, nothing less. She wanted money and I wanted a child. The arrangement was mutually beneficial.’

  ‘Isn’t that …?’ He hesitated for a moment and gave a half-laugh. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Why, are you going to report me to the police? I assure you, there are worse things that you could tell them.’

  ‘No, I just—’

  ‘The law is ridiculous on this point. Why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to sell nine months of her life if she wants to? And why shouldn’t I be able to buy them? We were both entirely happy with the choices we made and, ultimately, it was no one else’s business. I can’t even remember her name, to be honest, if I ever knew it. I expect she’s gone on to live a happy life and never thinks about her first baby.’

  ‘She probably does,’ he said, and I was surprised that he would contradict me, but perhaps he was right. Wherever she was, there was a good chance that she thought of him a hundred times a day. I know I did.

  ‘Anyway, it was just Daniel and me all those years,’ I continued. ‘We were a pair, you see. Rarely apart. He didn’t even have his own bedroom until he was three years old because he didn’t want to be separated from me. He never asked about a mother; the absence of a female presence in his life didn’t seem to be an issue for him. We were in New York then, of course. Daniel lived there all his life. You’re aware of Storī?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, I set that up when we first moved to Manhattan and then I edited it for several years. Before my son started school, he used to come into the office with me every day and sit in the corner at his own desk, colouring, reading or playing with his toys. I think people thought it was rather sweet, a father and a little boy so attached to each other, but it rather annoyed me when they did. I wasn’t doing it for appearances’ sake. We just enjoyed each other’s company.’

  ‘What was he like?’ asked Theo. ‘Personality-wise, I mean.’

  ‘He was quiet,’ I said, and I felt a deep pain at the pit of my stomach, remembering his good qualities, of which he had many. ‘Bookish, like me. Shy. Very loving. Very warm. A good cook for such a young boy. It’s something that he might have pursued as a career, had he been given a chance. He was interested in photography too and had started talking about taking dance classes, which I encouraged, as I thought he was rather too introverted.’

  ‘Did he have many friends?’

  I shook my head again. ‘Not many. At least, not many that I knew of.’

  ‘How old was he when he died?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Too young to have a girlfriend, I suppose.’

  I smiled regretfully. Daniel had never introduced me to a girl, nor had he ever spoken about girls he liked, but I knew that he was beginning to get interested because he’d grown very self-conscious around an attractive young woman who was interning at Storī, and once, when she engaged him in a conversation about a movie she’d just seen, he’d turned bright red, startlingly so, and I’d felt embarrassed for him, being unable to control his emotions like that. I thought it rather sad that the boy had surely died with his innocence intact.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He kept that part of his life very quiet from me. I mean, he was thirteen years old, and boys that age don’t like to discuss such things with their fathers, do they?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t. Do you have a picture of him? Of Daniel?’

  ‘Not with me,’ I said.

  ‘So Edith and he weren’t related,’ he said quietly, more to himself than to me. He glanced out of the window for a moment, tapped his finger against his chin, then turned back, scribbled something down and turned his page.

  ‘There was something else I wanted to ask you about your wife,’ he said.

  ‘Feel free.’

  ‘I hope you won’t take it the wrong way. It might seem rather … audacious on my part.’

  ‘I’m intrigued now.’

  He nodded but took a long time to speak. I decided to do nothing to hurry him along. I was rather enjoying his discomfort.

  ‘As I mentioned,’ he said eventually, ‘I read Fury recently.’

  ‘And I’m glad you did. It’s actually rather hard to find a copy these days. It’s been out of print for years.’

  ‘I tracked it down in the British Library. It wasn’t very difficult.’

  I took a sip from my pint but avoided his eye.

  ‘There were a few stylistic points in it that intrigued me.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said.

  ‘She was very fond of the ellipsis, wasn’t she? Too fond, I would suggest. And she had a habit of introducing new characters by describing their eyes. I was surprised that an editor didn’t ask her to watch out for that. She does it with almost every character.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘It was a habit she fell back on time and again. We all have these little quirks, I suppose.’

  ‘Also, there was her fondness for giving characters alliterative names. Charles Chorley, for example. Elsie Engels. It’s very noticeable. It actually becomes a little annoying at one point.’

  ‘Did you think so?’ I asked, for I’d always rather enjoyed this conceit of Edith’s. ‘Well? What of it? Dickens did it all the time too. John Jarndyce in Bleak House. Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield. Nicholas Nickleby.’

  He rummaged through his notes again, this time pulling a separate folder from his bag and running his finger down the page. ‘It’s just that I noticed you do the same thing in The Tribesman,’ he said. ‘Six out of the eleven main characters are introduced with descriptions of their eyes, while the protagonist’s name is—’

  ‘William Walters, yes, I remember.’

  ‘And the woman he loves is—’

  ‘Sara Salt.’

&nb
sp; Theo gave a half-shrug and looked me in the eye. ‘Can I ask you a direct question?’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘Did Edith have anything to do with The Tribesman?’ he asked.

  I smiled at him, rather impressed. Maybe the boy wasn’t quite as much a fool as I’d thought. ‘Now why would you ask that,’ I queried, ‘instead of asking whether I had anything to do with Fury? Wouldn’t that be the more obvious conclusion, considering my previous successes?’

  ‘Because none of these traits is visible in either Two Germans or The Treehouse. Not a single time. But you do it compulsively in The Tribesman. Which, of course, was published the year after your wife died.’

  I glanced around to ensure that we couldn’t be overheard, but there was no one seated at any of the tables nearby. I could deny it, of course. Indeed, my first instinct was to deny it. But as I looked at him, the resemblance between my biographer and my son seemed so striking that I believed I might be able to make him understand what Daniel never had.

  ‘You’re very perceptive,’ I said. ‘Are we off the record now?’

  ‘I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘No, but are we off the record?’

  He stared at me, then put the top back on his pen and placed it on his closed notebook. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, feeling a delicious rush of excitement at what I was about to say, ‘I didn’t actually write The Tribesman. Edith did.’

  He stared at me for a long time, then burst out laughing. ‘Now you’re just making fun of me,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m being entirely serious,’ I replied with a shrug, my expression completely neutral. ‘Oh, she didn’t write every word in the book, don’t get me wrong. A lot of it is mine. In fact, I had to rewrite some sections substantially. The traits you’ve already listed were just some of her flaws as a writer and I was, shall we say, a more experienced hand.’

  ‘I don’t …’ He shook his head, looking at me as if I had started speaking in a foreign language. ‘I’m sorry, Maurice, I don’t quite understand what you’re telling me here.’

  ‘It’s quite simple. I’m saying that the original manuscript of the novel was written by Edith. Then Edith fell down the stairs and I took what she had written, worked pretty hard on it, I have to say, and turned it into a Maurice Swift novel. As a sort of … homage to her.’

  ‘But you’ve never mentioned this before,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t I?’

  ‘No. I’ve read every interview you gave regarding that book and you never said a word about your wife’s contribution.’

  ‘I suppose it didn’t seem that important at the time. It’s a bit like what happened with Erich, in a way. He told me a story and I adapted it for my own use. Edith had a novel, she died, and I adapted it for my own use too. There’s not a great deal of difference between the two scenarios. It was a perfectly legitimate endeavour.’

  As I heard myself say these words aloud, they didn’t sound as terrible to me as I had expected. In fact, my explanation sounded rather reasonable.

  ‘And you don’t think there’s something dishonest about that?’ asked Theo.

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ I said, feigning innocence. ‘Why, do you?’

  A scene from a novel flashed through my mind. The moment at the end of Howards End when Dolly, the silly girl, reveals that the house had been left to Margaret Schlegel in Ruth’s will but Henry had thrown the offending note in the fire. I didn’t do wrong, did I? he asks in all innocence.

  And Margaret, who has been through so much, shakes her head and says, You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.

  Theo, however, was no Margaret Schlegel.

  ‘I do, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh, then I think you’re just being a little uptight. Look, Edith was dead. Or she was in a coma, anyway. And a manuscript existed. It was obvious that it was going to be a major success if it was knocked into shape. So, of course, I used what she’d left behind. I owed that to her. If you’d been in my position, wouldn’t you have done the same thing? Out of love?’

  ‘No!’ he said, leaning forward, and the look of astonishment on his face rather frightened me. Had I underestimated how seriously he would take this? ‘It wouldn’t even have occurred to me!’

  ‘Hm,’ I said, considering this. ‘Then perhaps I do have an imagination after all.’

  ‘Maurice, I don’t know how—’

  ‘Look, I did what I did and I stand by it, all right? What else should I have done? Publish it posthumously under her name? What good would that have done? There would have been no writer to publicize it. No one to read from it at the festivals. The book probably would have died a death. No, it made far more sense to claim it as my own and accept the garlands that came in its wake. If anything, it was a tribute to Edith that it was so well received.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Theo quietly, shaking his head and burying himself in his pint for a few minutes. From time to time he scribbled a few notes on the pad which I couldn’t make out from where I was sitting, and I didn’t enquire as to what they were. I waited until he was ready, sitting quietly, enjoying my drink, until he finally looked up at me, and I smiled at him.

  ‘Another drink?’ I asked.

  While I was standing at the bar, I felt a curious mixture of relief and anxiety. I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway, and had done so in such a way that I’d made it clear I didn’t believe it was anything to get too worked up over. Theo might have been surprised by what I’d said, but it wasn’t as if he could hold me to account for it. Edith’s original manuscript had long since been shredded and, if he chose to write about this in his thesis, I could either deny it or stand by every word and say that yes, my late wife had been working on a vague idea, or we had been working on it together, but it was in its very early stages when she died. And I had simply continued with the book.

  The barmaid poured the drinks and I happened to glance over to the other side of the pub and a familiar face – two familiar faces, in fact – caught my eye. I turned away quickly, hoping they hadn’t spotted me, but perhaps my sudden movement alerted them for they looked in my direction and recognized me immediately. An awkward moment followed before they raised their hands in greeting and I nodded in return, attempting a smile, before carrying the drinks back to our table. I wanted to sit down and see whether things felt different between Theo and me now, but there was simply no way around it. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate until I’d gone over.

  ‘Will you excuse me for a moment, Daniel?’ I asked him. ‘I just spotted a couple of old friends in the corner and I should probably go over and say hello.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And it’s Theo.’

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his coat for his phone as I walked across the room, hoping that I looked reasonably healthy and not too much like the tragic old drunk I had turned into.

  ‘Hello, Garrett. Hello, Rufus,’ I said, shaking their hands in turn. Garrett Colby, my late wife’s former student, and Rufus Shawcross, my erstwhile editor. The man who’d dropped me after the failure of The Treehouse and come to regret that when I was shortlisted for The Prize with The Tribesman a few years later.

  ‘Hello, Maurice,’ said Rufus, standing up and shaking my hand as if we were close friends. ‘It’s been such a long time! How are you keeping these days?’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You know Garrett Colby, don’t you?’ he asked, turning to his companion.

  ‘We were friends back in my UEA days,’ said Garrett, not standing but offering his hand too. ‘Hello, Maurice, it’s nice to see you again.’

  ‘Well, we were acquainted,’ I said, correcting him. ‘“Friends” might be pushing it a little. I almost didn’t recognize you. What happened to all that lovely blond hair of yours? It used to be rather a signature piece, didn’t it? Drove all the boys crazy, as I recall.’

  ‘I g
ot older,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And it fell out. Are you growing a beard? I didn’t realize they were back in vogue for men on the wrong side of fifty.’

  ‘No, I just haven’t shaved in a few days,’ I said.

  ‘Actually, we’re celebrating,’ said Rufus, and I noticed now that they had a bottle of champagne standing between them in a silver ice bucket. That wasn’t something you saw in the Lamb and Flag very often. ‘You’ve heard the wonderful news, I presume?’

  ‘No. Has Mr Trump died?’

  ‘Even better. The shortlist for The Prize came out this morning and Garrett is on it.’

  ‘Garrett who?’ I asked.

  ‘Garrett,’ repeated Rufus, looking a little baffled by my question. ‘This Garrett.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, turning back to the buffoon next to him, who was grinning like the cat that got the cream. Of course, I knew only too well that he’d made the shortlist. It had made me scream aloud in my flat earlier that day when the news was revealed. I had thrown four dinner plates, two cups and a vase at the wall and they had all smashed into pieces that I would have to clear up later. ‘I didn’t even know that you were still writing.’

  ‘Apparently, I am.’

  ‘Well, congratulations you.’

  ‘Thanks, but it’s not really all that important,’ he said with the insouciant air of a man who was beside himself with happiness but didn’t want to make it too obvious in case he came across as gauche. ‘Prizes are rather ridiculous, don’t you think? Writers of my generation make such a fuss about them. It’s an unedifying sight. I mean, you ask someone how their book is doing and they reply by telling you that it didn’t make this shortlist or that longlist and it just makes one roll one’s eyes in despair.’

  ‘So you won’t be going on the night then?’ I asked. ‘You’ll be making a stand, on principle?’

  ‘Oh, well, I have to go,’ he said, colouring slightly. ‘I mean, I owe it to Rufus and to everyone at the publishing house who’s put so much work into my book. But whether I win or not is neither here nor there. I’ll just get drunk and enjoy the silliness of it all. I daresay it will make for a good scene in a later novel.’

  ‘Of course you’re going to win,’ said Rufus, reaching across and gripping Garrett by his pathetic little biceps, around which a small child could have comfortably wrapped his thumb and middle finger. ‘It’s your year. It has to be.’