The Editor's Wife

by Clare Chambers

  ‘He was a lovely person, and all the time he was alive I never felt the lack of a father. But then when I got pregnant it set me thinking about my origins, and what sort of genes I’d be passing on.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just have asked your mother what he was like?’

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t tell me anything revealing about their marriage, would she? She never even mentioned you, for instance. Until now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So I had no idea your manuscript was going to contain anything . . . personal.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have shown it to you if I’d known your mother was still alive. I feel as though I’ve betrayed her privacy.’

  ‘It’s OK. She understands, now that she’s read it.’ Alex glanced at her watch. ‘In fact she’s coming to pick us up any minute now. I could tell her to come in and say hello.’

  I remembered Carol’s comments about my unsavoury smell and appearance, and shook my head. ‘I’d rather not meet her in my pyjamas.’

  ‘No. OK. Perhaps you’ll come to lunch with us when you’re out, instead. Mum’s going to be staying with us for a week or so to help me with Larry.’

  ‘Is your husband back from the States?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve sent him off to Mothercare to get supplies. He’s got a list as long as your arm. You wouldn’t think someone so tiny could need so much stuff.’

  For some reason I thought of Gerald and his rucksack of life’s essentials.

  ‘I’d better go. Mum will be waiting.’ Very carefully she picked up the trug. The baby gave a shiver of protest and opened his eyes. ‘Oh my God, he’s awake,’ Alex said, looking at him with a curious mixture of love and fear.

  I felt suddenly sorry for her in her newfound happiness, because she would never again have nothing to worry about.

  38

  ‘I’M SO GLAD to see you’ve recovered.’

  ‘I’m not sure I have.’

  ‘Well, you look a lot better than when I last saw you, upside down in a ditch.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean.’

  Diana and I sat facing each other across a coffee table littered with unopened post, childcare manuals and a dismantled breast pump. For someone who had been dead twenty years she looked remarkably well. Not so Alex, the host of this strange reunion, who had greasy, unbrushed hair, a complexion ravaged by lack of sleep, and two spreading milk stains on the front of her shirt.

  Her house was a Victorian terrace in York, similar in appearance and layout to the Goddards’ place in Dulwich. In fact, as I walked up the path, carrying champagne and flowers, and heard the gate clang behind me, I had a flashback to those earlier visits, and was momentarily drenched in nervous sweat.

  This uncomfortable sense of déjà vu was reinforced a second later when Alex opened the front door and I found myself confronted by Equus, the glowering wooden rocking horse. Now, as before, he obstructed the stairs and had been pressed into service as a coat rack.

  The rest of the ground floor was overwhelmed by the trappings of new parenthood. A large pram was parked in the middle of the sitting room, which also had to accommodate a rocking-seat, play mat, A-frame of dangling rattles, and an airer hung with tiny white vests. There were more of these steaming on the radiators. Every shelf and ledge was crowded with pastel blue cards of congratulation.

  Diana herself was in the sitting room when I arrived, bobbing up and down with a restless Larry in her arms, so the potentially hazardous moment of negotiating a kiss or handshake was averted. I wondered if she had planned it that way.

  ‘Hello, Chris, how nice of you to come,’ she said, as if I was just another old mate, dropping in to see the baby.

  Although her voice was absolutely, eerily unchanged, her blonde hair was now short and neatly styled, and there were deep smile lines around her eyes and mouth, even when she wasn’t smiling. She was wearing a linen suit and high heels – not to my mind the most suitable outfit for grandmotherly mucking-in, but then she had always tended to dress formally even on informal occasions. It only occurred to me later that it might possibly have been for my benefit.

  Alex brought us coffee and retrieved Larry, who had by now started to cry. It was a surprisingly penetrating sound to be produced by such little lungs, not unlike the bleating of a Swaledale in distress. Over Diana’s shoulder I could see her in the hallway, pacing to and fro with her precious burden, bent-backed with weariness.

  It’s impossible to swap adequate résumés of twenty years, so we didn’t try. In fact we didn’t even approach the subject of ‘back then’ until much later on in the conversation. To begin with, we stuck to the more recent past: she lived in Wimbledon and worked for herself as a literary agent specialising in teenage fiction. Her other daughter, Justine (née Teeny), worked as her assistant and was currently holding the fort.

  ‘When I go home she’s coming here to see Larry,’ Diana explained.

  ‘Has she got any children of her own?’

  ‘Oh no. She’s defiantly free and single. I’m wondering what she’ll make of Alex becoming a mother.’

  ‘Are they very close?’

  ‘Yes. Even though their personalities are quite different, there’s that weird twin thing between them. You haven’t got any children yourself.’ This was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m surprised. I imagined you with a large family. Boys.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t really choose my life in every detail. It just sort of happened to me.’

  ‘I think that’s true of all of us.’

  This philosophical musing was cut short by the reappearance of Alex, minus Larry, who had been jigged to sleep and laid in his pram. A damp patch on her shoulder marked the recent site of his sweaty little head. She was carrying a plastic baby monitor, and gazing around helplessly for a clear surface to put it on.

  ‘You look like death,’ said Diana, with a mother’s bluntness. ‘Why don’t you have a lie-down, while I get lunch?’

  ‘No. I’ll get lunch. You talk to Chris.’

  ‘I can talk and cook at the same time,’ said Diana. ‘I’m versatile like that.’

  ‘I can do any cooking,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Alex remembered, smiling. ‘Your curry. I think that’s what sent me into labour.’

  ‘That was Gerald’s fault. He was on chillies.’

  ‘Dear old Gerald,’ said Diana, fondly. ‘Running over the moors in a hurricane to call an ambulance.’

  ‘The running was no problem,’ I assured her. ‘It was having to use a mobile phone that nearly killed him.’

  ‘Really? Is he still as . . . er . . . eccentric as ever?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. He’s getting worse if anything.’ I outlined some of his recent behaviour, including the incident with the tent, and Diana folded up, giggling. A laugh is as individual as a signature or a fingerprint: that sound, more than anything I’d seen or heard so far, brought before me the Diana of twenty years ago, and for a moment I was lost for words at the strangeness of it all.

  ‘Perhaps I will have a lie-down if you’re sure,’ Alex was saying.

  ‘Yes, do. Give me that,’ replied Diana, taking hold of the baby monitor. She brought it into the kitchen and parked it on the worktop where it fixed us with its green winking eye.

  ‘I think she’s finding it all a bit of a strain,’ she whispered, when Alex had settled herself on the couch, out of earshot. ‘She’s always been a very organised person, always in control. And she has very high standards. But babies are such little anarchists. They won’t be ruled.’ She began to assemble various foodstuffs on the table: smoked salmon, olive bread, and several waxed-paper packages of cheese.

  ‘Shall we drink your champagne?’ she asked, hesitating by the open fridge. ‘There’s no point in leaving it for Alex because she won’t drink it while she’s breastfeeding. She’s read somewhere that it makes the milk fizzy.’

  ‘Can that be true?’ I laughed.

  She shook he
r head. ‘I don’t interfere. I’m sure I had some barmy theories of my own when the twins were born. In fact I remember insisting we left a light on all night when they were only a few days old, in case they were afraid of the dark.’

  ‘Well let’s drink it then,’ I said decisively. ‘Any opportunities for celebration should be seized.’

  I’d just untwisted the wire cage from the cork when the baby monitor gave a cough and a row of lights began to jitter madly. Diana froze. There was another cough, and then some rustling and a series of squawks, building in intensity. ‘Damn,’ hissed Diana.

  Through the open door we watched Alex roll off the couch onto all fours and drag herself up to standing. She looked at her watch. ‘Five minutes,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘He might go off again,’ Diana suggested, without much conviction. She turned off the monitor: Larry’s reproachful cries were perfectly audible without amplification.

  ‘I’ve only just fed him,’ Alex complained. ‘I can’t feed him again, can I?’

  ‘You can if you want to. Or Chris and I could take him out in the pram for a walk while you go on resting.’

  Alex looked torn. ‘What if he doesn’t stop crying?’

  ‘I’ll bring him back. I promise. But the motion will probably send him to sleep.’

  ‘What about your lunch? This is ruining your day.’

  ‘We won’t be long. Stop worrying.’

  Ten minutes later, preparations for this expedition were complete and Diana and I left the house pushing a pram containing a now red-faced and roaring Larry, while Alex watched, stricken, from the window. By the time we’d reached the end of the road he’d fallen into an attentive silence, his tiny features etched with a frown of the deepest suspicion. Halfway round the block he was asleep.

  ‘Let’s not go back yet,’ Diana said. ‘There’s a nice park on the corner.’

  A gusty wind was rattling the crocuses and buffeting the ducks on the corrugated surface of the pond as we made our way past the tennis courts, on which a few fanatics were knocking up. It was midweek and we almost had the place to ourselves. A pair of teenage truants were snogging in the bandstand. At the sound of our approach they broke apart, their eyes flickering over us without interest – What would you know about it? – and then resumed. Diana tacked off discreetly towards the swings, which were creaking backwards and forwards in the wind, as if peopled by phantoms. An elderly couple were sitting on the park’s only bench, holding hands with the placid affection that is the reward for half a century of marriage. In that journey from bandstand to bench I felt I had witnessed the whole trajectory of love.

  Diana spoke. ‘I read your novel. When it came out, I mean. I kept my eye open for other books by you, but I never found any. Did you not write any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘I never felt the urge to write another. It was a bit like jumping out of an aeroplane. I only needed to do it once. And it’s not as if there’s a shortage of books to read.’

  ‘You had a talent, though.’

  ‘If I did, I think I buried it with Owen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I would never have finished the book without his encouragement. He was the one I was trying to impress. His judgement was the only one that mattered, really.’ There was a silence as Owen’s name rose spectrally between us.

  ‘It must have been very hard for you, Diana,’ I said at last, feeling that the subject of back then could and must be broached.

  She didn’t deny it. ‘There were some grim times. The thing that surprised me most was how many of our friends stayed away. I thought at the time it was because they blamed me, but I realised later that it wasn’t the case at all. People just naturally shun tragedy. Once they’ve said sorry they don’t know what else to say, and people hate being embarrassed more than almost anything else. So you see your silence wasn’t unique.’

  ‘It was only the thought that you were dead that kept me silent. Nothing else would have done.’

  ‘I realise that now. The person who helped us most at the beginning was Susan Canning – Lawrence’s widow. She’d lost her husband in even worse circumstances, if that’s possible, and been left with two young children, like me. She knew better than anyone how I was feeling. We leant on each other a lot in those early years.’

  ‘So that’s how Alex met her future husband?’

  ‘Yes. The children practically grew up together. Like cousins, almost, until they were ten or eleven. But when Susan remarried, and then I did, our paths diverged, inevitably. Alex only remet Craig four years ago at my husband’s funeral.’

  ‘She told me. That he’d died, I mean. I’m so sorry. It doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘Yes, cancer’s spiteful like that. It doesn’t make any allowances for your previous suffering.’

  ‘You’ve had more than your share.’

  ‘When you put it like that it sounds as though I’ve done nothing in my life but bury husbands. But either side of those two deaths there were some happy years.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  We had almost reached the kiosk by now, at which a lone woman sat behind the counter, turning the pages of a magazine. ‘Shall we have an ice cream?’ I asked. It was a frivolous impulse, completely out of tune with our sombre conversation, but Diana wasn’t remotely offended. ‘Oh, yes, why not?’ she said. ‘We’re out of doors, and the sun is very nearly shining.’

  ‘First ones I’ve sold this season,’ said the kiosk attendant, snapping the lid off the tub of vanilla and gouging at the surface with a metal scoop. Rummaging under the counter she produced two chocolate flakes and forced one into each ice cream.

  We walked on, in case a change of rhythm disturbed Larry, both of us using our free hand to guide the pram.

  ‘I meant to ask,’ I said, remembering something that had been puzzling me. ‘In your letter, you said a reference in my manuscript made you think Leila and Owen were already having a relationship. I can’t think what it was I wrote that gave you that impression, because I never had any inkling of it. I always thought Leila was a lesbian.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head. ‘I’d never even met any lesbians. She was just my idea of what one ought to look like. Outrageous stereotyping, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How funny.’ Diana nibbled the edge of her cone delicately. ‘She wasn’t like that at all. She was always crashing in and out of bed with different men, but underneath, in love with Owen all along and biding her time.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me Ravi Amos was straight as well.’

  ‘Oh God, no, he was as gay as a coot. You were spot on there. He fancied you too.’

  ‘Oh Diana, that’s such bollocks,’ I protested. ‘He had no interest in me whatsoever.’

  We had reached the park gate now: there seemed no option but to head back home. This was disappointing – Diana spoke so much more freely in the open, away from the inhibiting consciousness of her role as mother and grandmother.

  ‘So what was it I wrote that made you wonder?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Diana discarded the dry wafer snout of her ice cream in a litter bin and licked her fingers. ‘That day Leila met you outside the British Museum and took you to lunch, she brought up the subject of your visiting me at Aysgarth Terrace – the implication being that I’d told her about it. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t even spoken to Leila since the morning after that dinner party with Ravi.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning that she must have heard it from Owen.’

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily prove . . .’

  ‘No, I know. It just made me wonder.’

  ‘But I got the impression she was warning me off you.’

  ‘Did you? I didn’t read it like that at all. It seemed to me she was promoting the idea. She encouraged you to think I was interested because she wanted you to take me off Owen’s hands, or off his
conscience at least.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I mean I don’t believe Owen was having an affair with Leila all along. He was far too honourable.’

  ‘But honourable people sometimes do dishonourable things. We know that.’

  ‘But there are some who don’t. Who are just good, through and through. Owen was one of those.’

  ‘We’ll never really know,’ said Diana. ‘And it hardly matters now. But, OK, let’s leave him on his pedestal.’ She gave me a quick, sidelong smile, which brought before me the mischievous quality that had first attracted me when I had sat beside her at the Powys Society. I realised that my earlier sense of surprise at her altered appearance had worn off already. Now she just looked herself: familiar, lovely. I felt a schoolboyish impulse to kiss her, but there was the pram (and its contents) to consider, and besides, we had reached the end of Alex’s road by now.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re a grandmother,’ I said. ‘When I was young grannies were small and barrel-shaped, with grey poodle perms and bunions. Now they’re blonde and they wear toenail varnish and foxy shoes and dress like their daughters.’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me in Alex’s clothes,’ Diana replied, horrified. ‘She dresses like a hobbit.’

  I couldn’t help laughing at the literary flavour of this insult. ‘Is grandparenthood as much fun as they say?’

  ‘Yes. You have the same overwhelming love you had for your own children, but you don’t worry so much. Poor Alex. She’s so exhausted and so anxious, she hardly has a chance to enjoy him at all.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I lived nearer.’

  ‘Literary agents don’t have to live in London, do they?’

  ‘No. But I’m rooted now. I’ve got Justine in Wandsworth, and lovely neighbours, and a friend who takes me to the theatre now and then.’

  ‘Alex wouldn’t mind you coming to visit often, surely?’

  ‘No, but I don’t want to be one of those awful mothers-in-law who descend for weeks at a time. It would be so much easier if I could just pop over when they need me.’