The Editor's Wife

by Clare Chambers

  ‘I’m hoping to see Owen. Is he in?’

  ‘Nair. He’s been out of the office all morning. Is he expecting you?’

  ‘No. I just called by on the off-chance.’

  ‘Air. Shall I tell him you wanted to see him, Mr . . .?’

  ‘Flinders. If you like. It’s not important.’

  ‘Air care.’ I could almost hear the ratchets turning as she processed this information. Having satisfied herself that I was not a distinguished novelist, she returned to her telephone conversation. Her honks of laughter followed me down the stairs.

  Out on the pavement, I stood for a moment, at a loss, cursing myself for not taking the trouble to telephone in advance, and wondering how to spend the dwindling hours of a precious free afternoon. I decided to take a slow walk down to the National Gallery, avoiding Charing Cross Road and the demoralising effect of its many bookshops, and perhaps stopping for lunch at a café if funds permitted.

  As I walked past the entrance to the British Museum I became aware of a tall woman, dressed in wide jodhpurs (jodhoppers, as Dad called them), riding boots with spurs, and a frilly shirt, falling into step beside me. I didn’t notice her face: her costume, so out of place on a London street, had claimed all my attention, and it was only when she said ‘Christopher?’ that I realised it was Leila.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, thrown by my initial failure to recognise her. ‘Where’s your horse?’

  She faced down this infantile remark with a blank stare. I remembered now that she had no sense of humour. ‘I thought it was you. What are you doing in this part of the world?’ she asked. We had stopped walking as a concession to our undeclared destinations.

  ‘I called on Owen, but he wasn’t there, so I thought I’d go and waste an hour in the National Gallery,’ I replied.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother. It’s just tourists and school parties, and those endless water lilies,’ she said, dismissing six centuries of Western art with a flick of her skinny hand. ‘Why don’t you waste an hour having lunch with me instead?’ I noticed that her fingernails were bitten to stumps. This flaw in her grooming, with its intimations of nervousness, endeared her to me for some reason.

  ‘Er . . . well,’ I said, my hand drifting to my pocket.

  ‘I know. You haven’t got any money. Don’t worry – I’m paying,’ and she set off at a brisk pace across the road and down Museum Street, arms swinging like a sergeant major’s, without waiting to see whether I was following.

  I was, of course, not because I liked her especially, but because she represented a link with Owen and Diana, and I would have cultivated any friend of theirs. I was also puzzled and flattered by her unexpected invitation, and curious to see what would happen. Diana had said Leila found me ‘charming’, but now as then it struck me as false. The word itself was a Diana-ism: Leila was not, I felt, a woman who could be charmed.

  ‘Why do you want to have lunch with me?’ I asked as I caught up, taking care to dodge that swinging right arm.

  ‘Why not?’ she replied, squinting at me from under a slice of black fringe. Her eyes were almost on a level with mine.

  I thought a blunt approach was best. ‘I got the impression you thought I was a bit of a tosser.’

  ‘What made you think that?’ she asked, without any softening of tone or, for that matter, any denial. ‘Because I didn’t flirt with you or fawn all over you? I don’t do that with anyone. Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘I don’t expect women to fawn,’ I said. ‘Though it’s nice when it happens.’ She didn’t smile. We crossed over Shaftesbury Avenue and took another side road, emerging at the end of St Martin’s Lane.

  ‘I’ve never got the hang of buttering people up,’ she said. ‘And I don’t trust people who try it on me.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit of a handicap in the fashion industry?’ I replied, and for once she rewarded me with a twitch of the lips. She stopped at a green-painted door between two shops, and pressed the bell. A moment later we were buzzed into a narrow entrance hall leading to a steep staircase.

  ‘Is this a restaurant?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s a private dining club.’ She led the way upstairs to a reception area with couches and a small bar at which no one was serving. ‘The food’s a bit middling,’ she said, not troubling to lower her voice, ‘but I can whack it all on expenses, and gin’s gin, after all.’

  At the sound of our voices a waitress came swishing through a swing door and showed us into a long dining room, in which one other couple sat, already eating. They gave Leila a nod as we passed: member acknowledging member.

  Leila chose the remotest table, folding herself into the corner seat and, without any consultation, ordered drinks.

  ‘Did you use to be a model?’ I asked, without thinking how it would be received.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh please.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said, impatiently, thinking how strange she was, a woman who laughed at slights and bridled at flattery. ‘It wasn’t a compliment. I just meant that you’re tall and skinny and wear weird clothes. I don’t find you particularly attractive, if it makes you feel any better.’

  I got a smile out of her at last. ‘I find I can live with it,’ she said.

  ‘You’re too spiky for me,’ I went on. ‘Too scary.’ I was getting the hang of this plain speaking. It was quite a liberating experience being with a woman and knowing you could say pretty much anything, provided you were honest, without giving offence.

  ‘Not too old, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t think age is . . .’ I stopped, suddenly suspicious. Leila’s smile was just a shade too knowing. I didn’t have a chance to pursue this, as the waitress reappeared with a gin and lime, a goblet of beer and a small dish of olives. Instead of offering us menus, she rattled off a list of main courses, of which calves’ liver was the only one that stuck in my mind. Probably because I don’t much like it. I ordered it anyway: after all, I had thought I didn’t like Leila, and yet here I was, enjoying myself.

  Once she was satisfied that I’d made my choice, Leila said, ‘I won’t have anything,’ brushing aside my protests as she dismissed the waitress. ‘I’ve already eaten,’ she explained. ‘But you haven’t. So I’ll just drink.’

  ‘What was the point of inviting me to lunch, then?’ I asked, feeling somehow tricked.

  ‘Just the sheer pleasure of your company,’ she replied, in the driest tone imaginable. ‘Or maybe there’s something about you that makes women of a certain age feel they have to feed you up . . .’

  So that was it. I decided to feign ignorance. If it was information she was after, she was going to have to dig for it. ‘Women?’

  ‘I hear you’ve been enjoying Diana’s hospitality quite a lot lately.’

  ‘It’s not a secret,’ I replied. ‘I go there for lunch now and then. It was Owen’s suggestion.’

  ‘Owen’s? I didn’t know that,’ she said.

  Why should you? I thought. Instead, I said, ‘They seem to have taken me under their wing.’

  Leila wasn’t having any of this ‘they’ business. ‘Mmm. You heard what happened to the last writer Diana took under her wing, I suppose?’

  ‘You mean Lawrence Canning? You’re not suggesting it was Diana’s cooking that drove him to suicide?’

  Leila laughed, but didn’t elaborate. ‘Everyone falls in love with Diana sooner or later,’ she said. ‘Even that grumpy old misogynist Herman was putty in her hands.’

  ‘I just like her company. There’s nothing more to it than that.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘God, you’re cynical. You’re worse than my mother,’ I said, and then laughed aloud at the idea that Mum and Leila might have anything in the universe in common. ‘Do you really think I’d be capable of screwing Owen’s wife behind his back? What sort of a nasty bastard do you think I am?’

  ‘An attractive nasty bastard,’ Leila suggested, spearing an olive. ‘To Diana, I mean.’

  ‘Did
she say that?’ I asked, a little too eagerly. Leila smirked at my ridiculous male vanity.

  ‘No.’ She blew an olive stone into her napkin. ‘“Dangerous”, I think she said.’

  The power of a reported compliment: for the rest of the day and most of the restless night that followed, my heart would kick at my ribs every time I replayed that word, spoken now, through the power of dreams, in Diana’s creamy voice.

  ‘She’s perfectly safe with me,’ I said, taking a swig from my already empty glass in my confusion.

  ‘She’s bored is what she is,’ said Leila. ‘Sitting at home all day playing the apple-pie mum, when really she’d love to be back at work. No wonder she looks forward to your visits. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’ From her tone I sensed reserves of bitterness. Perhaps she was jealous of Owen and Diana’s perfect marriage and ‘apple-pie’ home. It wasn’t too far-fetched an idea: I was a little envious of them myself.

  The waitress brought my meal – three thin slices of liver, lightly fried, with a swirl of swede purée and some peeled broad beans. Leila had finished her gin but didn’t order another. I wondered if she was tired of my company already and regretting her generous impulse. The interruption had ushered in a change of subject, but all my attempts to start fresh conversation foundered, her replies landing like boulders across my path.

  ‘Had you just come out of the British Museum when you bumped into me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is this where you bring people when you’re doing an interview?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not always.’

  ‘When you’re watching one of those fashion shows, and the models are all prancing about in, I don’t know, a pinstriped bikini and a bit of old bin bag, do you ever sit there thinking someone’s taking the piss?’

  ‘No. I’m generally thinking where’s the bar?’

  ‘I suppose designers send you a load of free clothes in the hope that you’ll give them a good write-up.’

  ‘Sadly, no.’

  ‘You mean you actually paid for that outfit?’

  Silence.

  ‘Have you read Ravi Amos’s book?’

  ‘No.’

  She had made no enquiry about my novel, which was, after all, the only thing that had brought me into her orbit, from which I inferred that she didn’t take the enterprise seriously. At one point I noticed her slip her watch off, shake it, and put it back on. Luckily I was a fast eater and the portions were small. Almost as soon as I laid down my fork, she opened her wallet.

  Out on the pavement, with the prospect of escape imminent, she relented and kissed my cheek. ‘Thank you for keeping me company. Sometimes it’s nice not to drink alone. Though I do it if I have to.’

  ‘Thank you for lunch.’ I still hadn’t asked her if she was a lesbian, but the time for confidences was now past.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she said, and I could see that for her the experience had amounted to just that. I felt a surge of artistic superiority. For me, nothing was wasted: even the dross of a disappointing afternoon might one day be spun into fictional gold.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘See you around.’

  ‘Yes, see you around.’ We accepted the likelihood of an indefinite parting without regret. Having ascertained that I was heading to Charing Cross, she strode off up St Martin’s Lane in the opposite direction, spurs clinking. Heads turned in amusement and admiration at her progress.

  19

  THE SUNDAY AFTER that meeting with Leila, I was woken by the doorbell. There was a hot slice of sunlight across my pillow and the clock confirmed that it was mid-afternoon. I had been at my desk all night, writing, in a trance of creative insomnia, and fallen into bed at dawn, fully clothed. I peered out of the window and saw Owen down on the pavement. He looked older from above – perhaps because his balding patch was more apparent. Wide awake now, I pressed the entryphone button to admit him, and spent the twenty seconds it took him to climb the stairs kicking debris under the bed. I wondered, fleetingly, if I had overstepped the mark with Diana and he was here to challenge me, but there wasn’t time for this thought to gather itself into a proper worry before he was there in the doorway, smiling, without a shadow of reproach on his face.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ he asked, glancing at the desk.

  ‘No. I wasn’t working.’ I drew a hand across my unshaven chin. ‘I’ve got my days and nights round the wrong way.’ I felt my crumpled appearance needed some explanation.

  ‘I won’t keep you. I’ve looked into the business of grants and writers’ bursaries and whatnot—’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  He cut me off mid-smile. ‘But unfortunately, as I suspected, they only apply to writers who are already published or under contract. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh well.’

  ‘But Diana and I have been talking, and we’re both agreed that you can’t go on like this, and you’ve got to get this book finished. So we want you to have this, as a gift.’ He passed me an envelope. Under his embarrassed eye I drew out a cheque for £2,000 made out in my name.

  ‘Owen,’ I said, handing it straight back. ‘You can’t give me this. You must be mad.’

  ‘No, no, we’ve talked it all through. Diana was against it at first . . .’

  ‘She was totally right to be!’ The cheque passed to and fro between us a few more times until Owen outwitted me by putting his hands behind his back.

  ‘She was worried that if we gave you money you would feel obliged to let Kenway & Luff have your novel, whether or not it was in your best interest. And I can see her point. But that was never my intention. This has nothing to do with Kenway & Luff and it doesn’t place you under any obligation whatsoever. This is just a friendly gift from us, so that you can stop wasting time on these casual jobs and concentrate on writing. It’s not a loan, it’s one hundred per cent without strings, and we’ll never mention it again.’

  ‘But, Owen, you can’t. You hardly know me. Even my parents wouldn’t bail me out like this. That money should be for your own children.’

  ‘We’re very comfortably off, Christopher,’ he replied, almost as if it pained him. ‘My parents bought us our house as a wedding present. We’ve no mortgage.’

  A good provider, I thought. ‘But how do you know I won’t just blow it all on booze and tarts?’

  ‘It would be none of my business how you spent it.’

  To put up any sort of resistance to overwhelming generosity requires unwavering determination. If the giver is absolutely committed, an equal and opposite force is needed just to maintain the equilibrium. Somewhere in my weak, greedy, luxurious heart I hesitated, and was overpowered.

  Owen was exultant. I slumped back onto the arm of the uncomfortable chair, defeated, cheque in hand. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said, at a loss. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you and Diana. You’re like my guardian angels.’ At that moment I think I loved them more than my own parents, and no less innocently.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Owen said, and to save me further demonstrations of gratitude he left, with the buoyant stride of someone freshly unburdened.

  My life entered a new phase. I immediately gave up working on the building site. It wasn’t the sort of job where you gave notice: people just stopped turning up. As always, after exposure to Owen’s influence, I reapplied myself to writing with new energy and enthusiasm. I’d calculated that if I was thrifty the money would last me six months; five if I allowed myself a few little treats, and unless I suffered some sort of mental breakdown the book would be finished in four.

  I decided to get some of the treats out of the way early: I phoned Zoe and cajoled her into a proper date. She had grown weary of my mood swings and unreliability, my lack of money and generally playing second fiddle to my novel, and had not been returning my calls for a while. I took her to Melati’s and bought her a pair of strappy sandals and a garnet brooch. She seemed completely delighted with these gifts, even though she was generally a jeans-and-clumpy-boot
s sort of girl, and the only jewellery she ever wore was a piece of plaited leather around her wrist. It struck me that you could buy a woman almost anything, provided it had no taint of usefulness, and she would be flattered and happy and grateful, for a while at least.

  I had assumed that finishing the book would be accompanied by a tremendous feeling of relief and euphoria. I had been looking forward to it, the solemn typing of the final full stop, the crescendo, the fireworks, the joy. But in the event there was no moment of conclusion. I wrote and rewrote the last paragraph a dozen times, and then abandoned it, while I returned to tackle the various holes and dead ends that I had left along the way, and retype those pages that had become too untidy. This process went on for some weeks; once I had told myself that the job was over, it was almost impossible to summon up any urgency over these last details. I could suddenly understand why in all his DIY projects at Gleneldon Road, Dad had never quite finished a room.

  Eventually I decided that I couldn’t be trusted to make any further improvements without editorial advice, put the whole thing in a padded envelope and stapled it shut.

  There was another more pressing reason to stop my tampering. In a long overdue attempt to return a fraction of their hospitality I had invited Owen and Diana round for a meal, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to hand over the finished manuscript.

  I invited Zoe too, but not until the last minute, and when she turned out to be already booked up with Nigel I was oddly relieved. You don’t love her, then, a voice whispered.

  ‘Three days,’ she grumbled. ‘You could have given me a bit more notice.’ I felt guilty then: she had heard me talk about the Goddards plenty of times and hinted that she’d like to meet them.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It was all a bit spur of the moment. I did try you earlier, but you were out.’

  ‘When earlier?’

  ‘This morning,’ I conceded.

  She made impatient clicking noises down the phone. ‘What are you going to give them? Pot Noodles?’