The Editor's Wife

by Clare Chambers

  Unusually I managed to catch her between meetings, and after preliminary civilities she was able to confirm that Gerald was pulling a fast one. On the question of his occupancy of the unsold house, the law was on my side, but evicting him would be complicated and possibly unpleasant.

  ‘It’s not his house,’ I spluttered. ‘He was just a sort of parasitic visitor who turned up and never left. You know what he’s like.’

  She’d never had much time for Gerald when they were in-laws, a stance which he reciprocated in full measure.

  ‘I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to see a client now,’ she was saying.

  ‘He knows he can’t just squat there indefinitely. We had all this out when Dad was still alive. Dad was just putting him up as a favour when his last woman booted him out.’

  ‘Gerald had a woman?’ Carol was sceptical.

  ‘I don’t know about had. This Irish woman put him up for a while. Took pity on him, you know, until she got fed up with him, like they all do. God, he’s got such a nerve. Listen to this –’ I started to reel off some of the more irritating phrases from his letter but Carol cut me off, her reserves of sympathy quickly depleted.

  ‘Yes, yes, save your indignation for Gerald. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Ring me at home. My office number’s no good any more.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I’ve lost my job.’

  ‘Euw. That’s bad luck. Or is it?’ I could tell she was wondering how many precious seconds this conversational turn was going to cost her.

  ‘I don’t know yet. It was voluntary, sort of. My department merged with another one, so it was a choice of reapplying for my own job in competition with a colleague who’s got a massive mortgage, a pregnant wife and two kids, or taking redundancy.’

  ‘That was noble of you. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is forty-five too old for a Gap Year?’

  ‘Ha ha. Look, keep your pecker up and we’ll talk about it when I come to dinner. You’re cooking for me next Thursday, don’t forget.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. You can do that Thai fish slop you did last time. Bye.’ And she hung up briskly before I could reply.

  I met Carol at a time in my life when I was vulnerable and disorientated. I’d moved up north to complete the degree that I’d abandoned years earlier and six months into my final year I still had no real friends. I was attracted by her energy and her outspokenness and flattered by her pursuit of me. And, of course, by a very physical promise that she seemed to exude around men. Subconsciously I must have decided that if I attached myself to Carol everything that was currently wrong with my life would be taken care of: her friends would become my friends; she would organise me and integrate me; I would be normal again.

  So it proved at first. We got married six months after our first meeting, at that peak of compatibility where we had had time to reveal only the best of ourselves to each other. She was a solicitor, already established in her career, well paid and successful. I had just started to work for the Inland Revenue, and was not yet any of those things, and although this imbalance meant little in those early, passionate months, it started to rankle once other, bigger differences came to light. If I dissect our life together, I suppose we had two very happy years, two average years with turbulent patches, and one rancorous, miserable year with frequent outbreaks of hostility.

  The problem was that we had both come to marriage with different, but equally unrealistic expectations. She wanted her life to carry on exactly as before, with me in attendance. I had a model of family life in my mind, based not on my own parents but on a couple I had known in London. It was a collage of hopelessly idealised images: the angelic curve of a sleeping child’s cheek on the pillow, the smell of home-made lemon meringue pie, a row of wellington boots by the back door, ranged in height order, the slenderness of a woman’s waist, nipped in by a cotton apron . . . Of course, none of this was applicable to our situation. Carol was the main breadwinner: she wasn’t going to be flitting around the house in a cotton pinny, whisking egg whites. She hated cooking and did it as seldom as possible, taking great pride in her incompetence. She preferred to eat out and, since it was her money, we ate out. Her social life was everything to her. If a weekend approached that wasn’t fully booked up with parties and dinners she would fly into a panic and ring round everyone she knew until all the gaps were plugged. When I suggested that it might be quite enjoyable, refreshingly different, at least, to stay in, she would say, ‘Fine. You stay in,’ and go without me. I tried to explain that what I wanted was to stay in with her, but that made me sound unreasonable and repressive, as she was quick to point out. We argued over it regularly, always failing to reach a compromise, and every argument seemed to erode a little more of our affection for each other.

  Then, overnight, the rows and silences stopped. Carol was happier, more attentive, more tolerant of my peevish moods and maddening habits. I knew she must be having an affair. And I knew who with, too: one of her colleagues – Jeremy Standish – because his name used to come up often in conversation, and then suddenly not at all. I carried this knowledge around with me like a bomb, which I never had the courage to detonate. On the surface we were, after all, getting on better than for a long time. The idea of revenge infidelity didn’t appeal either, even supposing a suitable candidate could be found. It wouldn’t have inflicted anything like equivalent suffering. On the contrary, she would have been relieved to have me out of the way. And the infuriating fact remained: I wanted only her. And even though I knew that fate had dealt me exactly the hand I deserved, at the back of my mind, too, lurked the ghastly hope: maybe I’m wrong.

  The manner of our separation was more of a farce than a tragedy. On the night in question I had arranged that I would be cooking, and Carol had seemed to be agreeable. I left the office promptly for once, as I wanted to stop off at a deli and pick up some wine and other ingredients for dinner. (I was in the habit of delaying my return home to avoid sitting too long in an empty house, but however late I left it, Carol contrived to be later.) I was halfway into the recipe, just chopping some fresh chillies and enjoying myself – a bottle of Barolo breathing on the side, Don Giovanni on the stereo – when she rang. There was a crisis at work; she had to stay. She didn’t know when she’d be back, but too late to eat. Her tone was brisk, remorseless.

  Deflated, I hung up and went back to the kitchen, in the process rubbing my face and transferring some chilli juice to the soft tissue of my eye, which didn’t improve my temper. The beef was already browning in the pan, so there was no alternative but to press on with the cooking, but I had lost all enthusiasm now. From being a pleasure it was all at once a chore, bitterly resented. I felt mocked by the bunch of fresh coriander which had taken so much tracking down, the effort of acquiring it out of all proportion to its influence on the meal, which would itself now go unappreciated. Nevertheless, I saved half the cooked chilli in a bowl, duly garnished, in case the great urgency of this legal ‘crisis’ had left Carol no time for eating, but I drank the wine myself and to hell with her.

  It was after midnight when she sauntered in, smelling of the pub. The house was in darkness. Dusk and then night had fallen around me as I sat at the kitchen table, the remains of the meal in front of me, the mountain of pans and utensils that I’d deployed in its preparation still unwashed. She snapped the light on and started violently when she saw me.

  ‘Oh my God. I thought you were in bed. Why are you sitting here in the dark?’ She helped herself to a drink of water, wrinkling her nose at the mess. There was so much crockery piled in the sink that she could hardly fit a glass under the tap. ‘It stinks of onions in here,’ she muttered.

  I ignored this remark, ‘Everything sorted out at the office?’ I said, with exaggerated cheerfulness. ‘Crisis averted?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’ She shook her head impatiently.

  ‘You must be exhausted. Work, work, work.
’

  She looked at me suspiciously. ‘I am quite tired, actually. I think I’ll go up.’

  ‘I saved you some chilli,’ I said, indicating the bowl. ‘I thought you might be too busy to eat. Too busy working.’

  ‘You needn’t have bothered. I’ve already eaten,’ she replied. She could tell from my tone that she wasn’t going to get off to bed without a row, so fake gratitude was pointless. She took her coat off and slung it over the back of a chair, then stood waiting for it to begin.

  ‘Jeremy all right?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jeremy. Standish. Your colleague. He was there, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was there as it happens. What’s your point?’

  ‘I bet he’s good in a crisis,’ I said. ‘Working away. Beavering away, I should say.’

  ‘Can I look forward to this sort of reception every time I work late?’ she enquired coldly.

  ‘Are you going to be making a habit of it, then?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You can see more of these crises looming up but you can’t do anything to prevent them?’

  Carol exhaled sharply and folded her arms, exposing the long, ringless fingers of her left hand, with their bronze-lacquered nails. It was a moment or two before the significance of their nakedness hit me.

  ‘You’ve taken off your wedding ring!’

  Carol looked at her hand as if for confirmation. ‘It was too tight,’ she said, blushing through the lie. ‘It was constricting.’

  ‘I bet it was!’ I retorted.

  ‘Oh go and fuck yourself.’

  ‘I don’t have much alternative, do I, since you’re out every night screwing your boyfriend.’

  ‘Don’t make me hate you more than I already do,’ she said.

  This exchange of civilities went on, at an increasing volume, and covering the usual range of accusations and counter-accusations, well rehearsed in previous rows: my lack of trust, her lack of trustworthiness, her selfishness, my control-freakery, inequalities in our contributions to household expenses and chores, and ever downward to the petty stuff of which divorces are made, until the neighbours could stand no more and called the police. Whether it was the shouting or the sound of the bowl of chilli being thrown through the (closed) kitchen window that had them reaching for the phone, I’m not sure. But our ranting was soon interrupted by the arrival of two uniformed officers. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ said Carol, attempting to lay claim to the role of victim. ‘He’s being ridiculous.’ She ushered them into the kitchen, as if they were prospective buyers, come to view the property.

  ‘We’ve had reports of a disturbance,’ said the taller of the two, glancing around.

  ‘Well, we’re in the middle of an argument,’ I explained. ‘That’s not illegal, surely?’

  With one movement their eyes swivelled to the broken windowpane, through which the cool night air, faintly scented with onions, now streamed. I suppose with the tomato sauce dripping down the jags of glass it did look rather gory.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ said the other one, surveying the damage.

  ‘Oh, she threw a bowl of chilli at me,’ I replied.

  ‘I didn’t throw it at you,’ Carol objected.

  ‘Look, we’re not interested in your domestics,’ said the tall policeman, over the chirping of his walkie-talkie. ‘It’s after midnight and people round here are trying to sleep. So are you going to keep it down or do we have to take this further?’

  ‘I don’t want him staying here,’ Carol said shrilly.

  ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ I retorted. ‘If I wasn’t over the limit I’d get in the car and go right now.’ I turned to the policemen. ‘I’ll just chuck some stuff in a bag and sleep in the back of the car if that’s allowed.’

  This agreed upon, I snatched up an assortment of my belongings, dragged the duvet off the spare bed and went to doss down in the car, which was parked in the driveway facing the house. Then the policemen left, and from inside the house came the scrape and rattle of Carol locking me out for ever.

  Of course there was no prospect of sleep. However I tried to dispose myself I was cold and cramped, my marriage was over and to add to my pain I knew that Carol would be warm and comfortable in our king-size bed, and moreover sleeping peacefully, as she always seemed to after a row, her heart all the lighter for having evicted me.

  I had never realised, until forced to spend the night underneath it, how dazzling our halogen security light was, and how easily activated. It burst into life at irregular but frequent intervals, to defend the property from passing cats, moths, falling leaves and motes of dust. On and off it went, for hour after hour, not only keeping me awake, but illuminating my predicament for the benefit of the whole street. I had no alternative but to try and disable it.

  There was no lock on the side gate – a security lapse rather at odds with the unsparing vigilance of the arc lamp – so I was able to fetch a rake from the garden shed. Standing well back, I jabbed the wooden handle hard up into the glass. The halogen bulb exploded with a sound like gunshot, and I got back into the car, swathed myself in the duvet, and with that small victory under my belt, slept at last.

  I was still in that deep phase of early sleep from which even a gentle awakening is a trauma, when the car door was wrenched open and I felt rough hands seizing me. All around there was a commotion of lights and shouting and running feet, and before I was properly conscious I found myself face down in the flower bed, my arms pinned behind me, someone’s knee on my back, and my face pressed into a cold mulch of bark chippings and dead leaves. After a further mauling I was dragged to my feet and it was only then that I realised that my attackers were in fact policemen, kitted out in flak jackets and helmets as if for an armed siege, and with automatic rifles trained on me. This did nothing to subdue my sense of terror: one inadvertent twitch from me, a touch of the jitters from one of them and Carol would be on Breakfast News enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame as a grieving widow, the old hypocrite.

  It’s curious but, even years later, when we were divorced and back on friendly terms, and could laugh at our many differences and foibles, this was one incident I could never comfortably discuss. It was an indignity too far, to have had my antics with the garden rake mistaken by those same well-meaning neighbours for the work of a deranged gunman, and it certainly played its part in putting our marriage beyond retrieval. For one thing, I could never show my face in the street again.

  It was about ten years after our separation that I ran into Carol again. My department was investigating a local businessman for tax evasion, and Carol was the solicitor he’d appointed to stonewall us while he massaged his accounts. I recognised her name from the paperwork – Carol Standish – and she recognised mine, because she rang up and we arranged to meet for a drink after work. I no longer felt any bitterness or resentment towards her: we had by now been apart longer than we’d been together; she had remarried and I had had several relationships varying in intensity and duration. At that first meeting it came back to me what good company she could be. She had always been very sharp and funny, in a heartless, amoral kind of way – qualities much more entertaining in a friend than a wife. We began meeting every few months or so after that. Carol was living and working in Leeds and did not often need to come to York, but if for any reason work brought her that way she would call me, and I would buy her lunch or cook her dinner at Hartslip. Somehow, now that I wasn’t her husband, she didn’t find my exertions in the kitchen on her behalf nearly so oppressive. I didn’t ask her what Jeremy made of this unorthodox friendship, or if he even knew of it, and she never said.

  One evening, over a bottle of wine, the conversation turned to the subject of happiness. We agreed that we were neither more nor less happy than at any other stage of our lives, and concluded from this that an individual’s day-to-day levels of happiness are fairly constant, and unaffected by changes in circumstance.

  ‘But you must be happier now with
Jeremy than you were with me?’ I said. ‘Or what’s the point?’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Carol replied, sweeping her bushy, wheat-coloured hair back off her face and adjusting the clips that held it in place, checking the result in a pocket mirror. She had always been one for public grooming: she had once waxed her legs on a crowded InterCity train, oblivious to the glares of her fellow passengers. ‘It’s the living with that’s difficult. The give and take. You know what I’m like.’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘Why am I so crap at compromising?’ she asked, dividing the last of the wine between us and looking regretfully at the empty bottle.

  ‘I don’t know. Could just be plain old selfishness,’ I said cheerfully. She was looking very pretty, in a skirt and heels and a tight, stretchy shirt that strained across her chest, gaping between the buttons. She had even painted her nails, an adventurous shade of blue.

  She laughed, unoffended at this diagnosis. ‘You’re so easy to talk to, Chris, because you know me so well. Nothing I said or did would shock you, would it?’

  ‘Practically nothing,’ I said, thinking of the leg-waxing incident.

  She leant back, hands clasped behind her head, putting those shirt buttons under additional pressure. ‘I sometimes wonder if I’m cut out for monogamy,’ she sighed.

  It cost me a pang to turn her down: repaying Jeremy deed for deed would have been a pleasure, but I had learned a lesson about married women in my London life, and I would never cross that line again.

  She didn’t take my refusal to heart. In fact she seemed rather relieved, and admitted that she always felt rotten after her lapses, but couldn’t seem to help herself. ‘I must be such a terrible person,’ she lamented. ‘How can I be so awful? Poor Jeremy.’