The Editor's Wife

by Clare Chambers

  ‘I shouldn’t complain,’ I said, not wanting to be too much an object of pity. ‘No one’s going to pay me to sit around and write, are they?’ I realised I had unwittingly echoed Mum’s sentiments, which had so riled me when I had first broached the subject at home. ‘Anyway, I know if I’m ever desperate I could always move back in with my parents.’ I didn’t add that this would involve the sort of climb-down from which my self-esteem might never recover, and was the very last resort before sleeping rough. In any case, it was hard to imagine how I would ever get any work done with Mum and Dad fluttering around me like moths, the whirring of parental solicitude forever in the background.

  ‘There are various organisations that give grants to writers in financial difficulties,’ Owen said. ‘The Society of Authors, and so on. But now I come to think about it, you may have to be already published, or have a contract. I’ll look up the details at the office tomorrow and let you know.’

  Once they had finished their drinks, Diana didn’t seem inclined to linger. She had left the twins with a baby-sitter – a local teenager of dubious character.

  ‘Have you?’ said Owen, with a trace of concern. ‘How dubious exactly?’

  ‘She’s a bit light-fingered. I thought we were ideally placed to rehabilitate her as we’ve nothing worth pinching.’

  They insisted on giving me a lift home. Diana had parked the car in a side street in a tight space behind a skip, one wheel up on the kerb. Miraculously it hadn’t been ticketed or clamped, a result which seemed to give her a gambler’s buzz.

  ‘I didn’t have time to hunt around for a proper spot, or I’d have been late.’ Owen raised an eyebrow. ‘Later,’ she conceded.

  Alma Road was blocked as usual, an empty car idling in the middle of the road while the driver conducted his business in a nearby house.

  Diana was admiring the houses’ brightly painted brickwork. ‘What a vibrant neighbourhood,’ she enthused, as we waited patiently behind the abandoned vehicle. ‘It makes Dulwich look so staid and drab.’ Presently the driver erupted from an open doorway, swearing vibrantly, and glared at us as though our presence had somehow inconvenienced him, and not the other way around, before jumping into his car and roaring off, music throbbing in his wake.

  Uniquely, in my experience, there was a space outside my building. ‘Why don’t you come in for a coffee?’ I said, impulsively. I felt to advance our friendship any further it was necessary for them to see how I lived – a gesture of self-revelation shamefully at odds with my failure to introduce Gerald only minutes before.

  Diana seemed to have forgotten her concerns about the delinquent babysitter, but Owen was more hesitant, and decided to call home from the communal payphone in the hall, to reassure himself that all was well.

  I noticed that the smell of dope in the hallway was even stronger than usual, and when I glanced up I could see wraiths of smoke hanging above our heads. There was the familiar collision of sounds from behind the closed doorways as we passed: a wailing baby, the rattle of an Arabic radio station, canned laughter from primetime TVs in full voice, and now, as Diana followed me up the wide, uncarpeted staircase, a new sound – a woman’s heels, ascending.

  I must have premeditated my invitation to an extent, because I had made some efforts to clear up before I left, dumping unwashed crockery in the shared kitchen, throwing clothes into drawers and twitching the covers back over the bed to hide my grey, crumpled sheets. It was, I realised, as I pushed open the door, excessively spartan when tidy; the room of someone just out of prison, perhaps. There was only one armchair – so deep and unstuffed that when Diana sat down the tops of the arms were level with her ears. Apart from this and my bed, the furniture consisted of a wardrobe, chest of drawers, bookshelf, washbasin and my writing desk and stool, on which Owen now perched. The yellow walls were pockmarked with the scars of generations of picture hooks, and scraps of brownish Sellotape remained in rectangular formations marking the sites of former posters. The room’s only ornamentation was a framed print of some leathery fishermen which Mum and Dad had brought back from St Ives and which was now propped against the wall, awaiting hanging.

  Owen and Diana, of course, professed to see nothing but charm in these surroundings, but I could tell that they were surprised.

  ‘It’s a proper garret,’ Owen remarked, his fingers idling over the keys of the typewriter.

  ‘I could be happy in a room like this,’ said Diana. ‘So free from clutter. Owen, we must have a clear-out.’

  I left them discussing this while I went to make coffee in the kitchen next door. It was deserted at this hour and, for once, clean – the work of the deaf Polish lady with the loud TV, I surmised. I had passed her on the stairs on my way out. She was wearing rubber gloves and carrying a bucket of rags and detergent. PEOPLES CLEAN YOUR OWN MESS-UP! read a notice above the cooker.

  I only possessed two mugs. I found a third under the sink but it contained a rusty Brillo pad, so I decided to go without. The Nescafé had gone solid: I had to chisel out a couple of teaspoonfuls and hope no one took sugar. Tomorrow, I vowed, thinking of Gerald’s ten-pound note, I would buy some fresh provisions.

  Diana accepted her mug of instant coffee with rapture. No, she didn’t take sugar. Instead she produced a plastic tube from her handbag which dispensed a tiny white pellet of saccharine. Once she’d tasted the coffee, she surreptitiously fired in a couple more.

  ‘I’ll certainly look up details of those grants,’ Owen promised – the surroundings, I suppose, prompting thoughts of poverty. ‘I’ll be your referee if necessary. But in the meantime don’t starve. Just call round to us and Diana will feed you.’

  ‘I can hardly do that,’ I laughed.

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Diana. ‘You wouldn’t be the first. Lawrence Canning was always dropping in at mealtimes, in the early days, wasn’t he, Owen?’ This wasn’t a particularly comforting precedent. For a moment his spectre hovered between us.

  ‘How was the funeral?’ I asked. ‘As funerals go, I mean.’

  ‘Pretty harrowing,’ Owen said with a grimace.

  ‘Your eulogy was brilliant,’ Diana said stoutly. ‘I don’t know how you got through it without cracking. I was in ribbons.’

  ‘Well his eight-year-old son had just stood up and read a poem, so I thought, God, if he can do it . . .’

  A minute or so after their departure I noticed the parcel of military memoirs sitting beside the typewriter. Snatching it up, I bounded down the stairs and then, at the first landing, I stopped. No, I thought, turning back. I’ll take it round myself tomorrow. At lunchtime. No harm in that.

  17

  SO BEGAN MY habit, sanctioned by Owen, of dropping in on Diana every five or six weeks for lunch. I never gave her any warning, never gave her the opportunity of excusing herself, and if she happened to be out I tried again the next day, and the next, until she was in, without ever letting on about my failed attempts.

  The fact that I was falling in love with the wife of my mentor and friend, a man who had gone out of his way to help me, and shown me nothing but kindness, didn’t trouble my conscience in the slightest. The fact that I looked forward to seeing her for days beforehand, and felt that awful Boxing Day emptiness afterwards, and thought about her endlessly between visits, and yet kept it all to myself seemed to me the highest compliment I could pay him. I couldn’t help my feelings, went my reasoning, and as long as I didn’t act on them, I had nothing to feel guilty about. Quite the opposite: I walked around in a daze of self-righteousness at my own restraint.

  Diana always appeared happy to see me, and as I got to know her better I decided her pleasure was genuine, and not just practised politeness. Her other confidantes were all mothers of young children: their conversation, though reassuring, held few surprises. It was so interesting, she said, to talk to someone whose circumstances and outlook were so different. We fell into complementary roles, as new friends often do, seizing on a characteristic and exaggerating it. She was the s
ensible one; I was the feckless one. She was sophisticated and cultured; I was an ignoramus. Much of this was put on, for our own amusement, because it was pleasant to play up our differences when they were no barrier to friendship, and to pretend conflict when there was none.

  She was interested in my non-committal relationship with Zoe, and puzzled by its informality. I’d explained that we saw each other perhaps once a fortnight, but not as regularly as that implied, and had little contact between whiles.

  ‘Is she happy with that arrangement, or just making the best of it?’ Diana asked.

  ‘Happy, I think. She’s got this other bloke, called Nigel, who she sees anyway, on the same sort of basis.’ This suited me fine, as I didn’t want to take her on full-time myself.

  ‘That’s very modern,’ said Diana. ‘Neither of you minds sharing her?’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I don’t think he knows about me,’ I admitted.

  Diana considered this for a moment. ‘You don’t feel the least bit jealous of this Nigel character?’

  ‘No. Should I?’

  ‘You would if you loved her. You’d be jealous of the ground she walked on. You’d resent every moment you spent apart.’ She sounded deadly serious.

  ‘Surely you and Owen don’t feel like that.’ It was hard to imagine any such turbulent passions disturbing the peace in Aysgarth Terrace.

  ‘Not now, of course,’ she said, a trifle wistfully. ‘But once.’

  I remember one disagreement clearly. There was tennis on the television for some reason, and the camera lingered on Boris Becker’s stunning girlfriend in the crowd. ‘Look at her,’ I grumbled. ‘I bet she’s only interested in him for his money.’ It was a casual remark, not representing any deeply held convictions, but Diana flew at me.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, taken aback by her combative tone. ‘These tennis players always hang out with women who look like models. I bet she wouldn’t look twice at him if he was a bricklayer.’ (An unfortunate choice of occupation, as I was working on a building site myself, which brought an unintended flavour of personal bitterness into the matter.)

  ‘Of course she wouldn’t. You might just as well complain that he’s only interested in her for her looks. At least he’s got wealth and talent, which last longer.’

  ‘So you admit that women go for blokes for their money. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘It’s not just money. It’s the fact that he excels at something which is attractive. But a good provider is going to be more appealing than a poor provider. That’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘God, Diana. That’s such an old-fashioned view. It’s practically prehistoric. Where have you been?’ I spluttered.

  ‘It’s just biology,’ she retorted. ‘Nothing controversial about it.’ She still had one eye on the tennis, admiring the wealthy and talented Boris Becker no doubt, as if my argument was so elementary that it didn’t require her full attention.

  ‘But modern women don’t need “providers”. They’re quite capable of earning as much or more than men. That’s what you’ve all been fighting for all these years, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s only a relatively recent phenomenon, in evolutionary terms. It’s only the Pill that has freed women to compete in the workplace. But the function of all living things is to reproduce, however primitive that sounds. So men want women to be young and beautiful and healthy. Women want men to be strong, brave and successful. One century of social revolution isn’t going to change that.’

  ‘And rich.’

  ‘Only because modern society measures success by wealth rather than, say, how good you are at killing buffalo.’

  ‘Such a pessimistic view of human nature.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Bad news for me, anyway,’ I said gloomily. ‘I’m not exactly rich.’

  ‘Well I’m not exactly beautiful,’ Diana replied.

  ‘Yes you are,’ I said. I must have spoken more forcefully than I intended, as I sensed her hesitate, before she gave a little laugh of denial. Fortunately Pinky and Perky came tumbling into the room, shattering the silence with demands for milk and biscuits and cries of ‘Why is that man here again?’ which I took as my signal to leave.

  I made the mistake of mentioning these visits to Mum one day when I’d been summoned to Sunday dinner, and she was immediately on the offensive.

  ‘Where’s the husband while all this is going on?’ she wanted to know, ever vigilant for impropriety.

  ‘Out at work.’

  ‘What does he think about it?’

  ‘Nothing. It was his idea, actually.’

  Mum pulled a face. ‘It sounds a bit peculiar to me.’

  ‘There’s nothing peculiar about it,’ I protested. ‘I just have lunch and a chat and then I go home.’

  We were in the kitchen, dishing up. A no-strings dinner invitation was unusual: meals were more often tied to the provision of physical labour: shed clearance, tile stripping, flat-pack-furniture assembly.

  It was a while since I’d seen my parents; although they were reconciled to my ambitions and no longer referred to me as a dropout, they were still suspicious about my lack of progress and irregular lifestyle, and no longer came to the Brixton house. They had always thought it an insalubrious neighbourhood, and would take it in turns to keep watch over their car from my bedroom window, which made for rather unrelaxing conversation. During one lapse in surveillance the aerial was bent into a zigzag, and they refused to come any more.

  ‘What sort of husband would encourage another man to call on his wife while he was out?’ Mum mused, fishing some limp bundles of asparagus from a saucepan and depositing them on three plates.

  ‘One who trusts his wife, I suppose. Honestly, when did you get so cynical?’

  Mum had turned her attention to the gravy pan, pulverising clods of flour with the end of a wooden spoon. ‘In my day, if a man came calling on a married woman, the neighbours would soon start talking,’ she said.

  ‘Either times have changed, or Owen and Diana live in a more enlightened neighbourhood,’ I said, loftily. Her insinuations were beginning to piss me off. ‘Are you really saying a man and woman can’t be friends?’

  Mum considered for a moment, still harrowing the gravy. ‘Only if they find each other repulsive.’

  ‘Oh, you are twisted, Mum, you really are. If Owen was at home and Diana was at work, I expect I’d be calling in on Owen. That would be all right by you, would it?’

  ‘Oh yes. That would be perfectly proper.’

  Dad came in to carve the joint – a huge piece of pork with a roof of blistered crackling. In my parents’ world, cutting meat was always A Man’s Job.

  ‘How’s the masterpiece coming on?’ was Dad’s opener, now as ever.

  ‘It’s not. I’m on the building site. Cash-flow problem.’

  ‘Oh yes, Gerald said a while back that you’d borrowed some money from him.’

  ‘Did he? Typical.’

  ‘Have you paid him back?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Not yet. I haven’t forgotten. It was only a tenner.’

  ‘Well don’t send it to his old address: he’s moved,’ said Dad.

  ‘As we only found out when we called round to see him and he’d gone.’ Mum gathered herself up against the remembered insult. Plates were laid down. I was given the biggest, crunchiest helping of pork. Now the lunch invitation made sense: according to the see-saw motion of parental favours, if Gerald was on the way down, then I, inevitably, was on the way up.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Luckily he’d left a forwarding address,’ said Mum. ‘He’s living in Purley with a divorced woman called Peggy who’s in her forties.’

  ‘You mean living with?’ I asked, incredulously.

  ‘We didn’t discuss their sleeping arrangements,’ said Mum tartly. ‘And Gerald wasn’t very forthcoming, when we’d finally run him to earth. He may just be her lodger.’

&nbs
p; ‘Perhaps they find each other repulsive?’ I suggested.

  Mum chose to ignore this remark. ‘Whatever she is, she’s turned him vegetarian already. You might make some discreet enquiries next time you see him. Find out if she’s got any children, for instance. I don’t like the thought of some unscrupulous woman using him as a meal ticket.’

  ‘She’d have to have a very small appetite to see Gerald as a meal ticket,’ I retorted. ‘He’s so tight it’s untrue.’

  ‘He’s not extravagant,’ Mum conceded, chewing valiantly at a piece of woody asparagus, before discarding a two-inch butt. ‘Although he does always bring me choccies when he comes to lunch.’

  The criticism fell cleanly, like the executioner’s axe.

  18

  IT’S HARD TO shake off two decades of conditioning in the suburban proprieties: in spite of my indignation at Mum’s suspicions, I kept away from Aysgarth Terrace for the next fortnight, a deprivation made easier by an increase in my working hours. I was now doing a six-day week on the site, and managing to put aside a little money from each week’s wages to see me through the next period of unemployment. In the meantime, my novel sat neglected on the desk, a sheet in the typewriter abandoned mid-sentence.

  One Friday in September building work came to a standstill because of the non-arrival of a lorryload of sand, and I was sent packing at midday. Since it was just a tube ride to Bloomsbury I decided to call on Owen at work, as if to prove to myself my scrupulous impartiality as a dropper-in.

  Just as I reached Kenway & Luff, the door opened and a motorcycle courier emerged, so I was able to duck in without having to announce my business to the intercom. I squeezed past boxes piled to shoulder height in the entrance hall, reacquainting myself as I climbed the stairs with that evocative smell of old carpet impregnated with cigar smoke. At the reception desk Bina had been replaced with a Putney blonde in upturned collar and pearls, who was chatting on the phone to one of her friends. ‘Hang on,’ she said into the receiver before covering it with one hand. ‘Hellair. Can I help?’ she enquired, with the tentative courtesy due to one who, though dressed like a labourer, might just be a distinguished novelist.